In Absentia
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| "When my work is done, mankind will no longer measure Intelligence in a point-by-point system; they will measure it in comparison to my own, and I will delight to always find theirs wanting." | |
| In Absentia | |
| Player: @Gimlet | |
| Origin: | Science |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Stalker |
| Threat Level: | 26 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Dr. Greta Tod |
| Known Aliases: | None known |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 27 |
| Height: | 5'6 |
| Weight: | 105 lbs |
| Eye Color: | Hazel |
| Hair Color: | Black |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | German |
| Occupation: | Professor, Visionary, Future of Mankind |
| Place of Birth: | Dresden, Saxony, Germany |
| Base of Operations: | Cap Au Diable |
| Marital Status: | Highly unlikely, at best. |
| Known Relatives: | Eva Tod (Mother), Hannelore Tod (Sister), Heinrich Himmler (Grandfather). |
| Known Powers | |
| Preternatural stealth, regenerative cellular tissue, hyper-enhanced response system. | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Doctorates in Biology, Biochemistry, Gene Theory, Quantum Evolutionary Theory and Mutagenic Flux Theory (Metahuman and Mundane), advanced medical knowledge (superscience and mundane), superhuman surgical precision. | |
| Equipment | |
| 'Field Surgery' tools (retractable Impervium blades stored in forearms), Geheimhaltung serum, retroregenerative bio-kevlar vest. | |
| No further information. | |
Doctor Greta Tod, 'In Absentia'.
Status: Still at large.
Suspected Crimes: Infiltration, assassination, kidnapping, torture.
Hazard Degree: High.
Standing Orders: Terminate on Sight.
Doctor Greta Tod, Alias 'In Absentia', is a serial killer and an assassin-for-hire, with suspected ties to the Fifth Column and a newly discovered organization calling itself Sigma Iota Nu (further information forthcoming; see file number XFD-4227). Her standard operating procedure is to decide upon a target, follow them undetected, and strike at the most opportune moment, attempting to isolate her target and oftentimes ignoring entire units or platoons of support and defense individuals. Utilizing a number of advanced chemical and biological compounds (to generate a personal 'cloaking' field), as well as what appear to be surgical-grade Impervium tools, Tod then inflicts a series of lacerations and deep-tissue wounds on the victim's body, apparently with extreme precision (very little blood or other bodily fluids have been discovered at suspected crime scenes), before absconding with the body or, according to medical examiners, dissolving it with a fast-acting organic compound of unknown origin. She is to be considered armed at all times, extremely dangerous and capable of eliminating several opponents at one time with minimal personal injury. Exercise extreme caution; do not attempt capture.
-Excerpt from Wyvern's "Hit List".
Contents |
[edit] Background
[edit] Humble Beginnings
There was once a little girl from Dresden, who dreamed of bigger things.
Greta Tod was born in Dresden (Free State of Saxony, Germany), in late 1979, the first, illegitimate daughter of Eva Tod, a well-to-do private school teacher. Conceived after an unfortunate encounter in the bathroom of a nightclub in Amsterdam, Greta nevertheless had a lively upbringing, schooled at home until she was old enough to enroll in the Jugend-Bereicherungs-Mitte School for Girls, under her mother's advisory. Even at a very young age, Greta displayed a penchant for sciences and an uncanny intellect (a cursory test on Greta's 12th birthday revealed an approximate I.Q. of 375; the administrator of the testing facility disputed this result vehemently), mastering human biology, anatomy, and advanced chemistry before her fifth birthday. She studied abroad in her youth, moving to America after learning of the budding field of Metahuman Science and receiving a 'young wonders' grant from S.E.R.A.P.H. in Galaxy City. Excelling in her field, Greta became one of the youngest leading members of the illustrious organization (age 20), and word spread quickly of the great strides her multitudinous theories and experiments presented. Delighted even to be acknowledged, much less honored, the young girl from Dresden made it her life's ambition to open the first Metahuman Medical Research Center, with the hopes of helping budding heroes to learn to control their abilities sooner than later, in a caring, devoted environment.
A noble theory. Unfortunately, the Fifth Column had different plans.
[edit] Sins of the (Grand)father
It was in her third year with S.E.R.A.P.H. that Greta ran afoul of the Fifth Column. Although the superhuman Nazi regime had since been crushed by the fascist Council, pockets of reservists and 'true believers' in the Column's agenda still remained, hidden in plain sight, lurking amongst the population of Paragon City under false identites, spanning in rank from housewife to Hero. It was the latter, a faux-Hero calling himself Hinterland, who, under the guise of working as a volunteer test subject for a regenerative tissue serum, unearthed the hidden element of Greta's bloodline that she herself was unaware of.
Greta had never known her father, and for good reason; the man who accosted her mother had been a member of a splinter cell of Column reservists known as the Kinder-Gesellschaft, the 'Society of Children', men and women dedicated to reviving Hitler's fallen regime by tracking the bloodlines of (in)famous Nazi figures and capturing their descendants, for 'reeducation' under quasi-mystic rituals supplied by the dreaded and mysterious Thule Society. Mixing the occult with modern superscience, the Society of Children hoped to resurrect the lost souls of their former icons in their offspring. Oftentimes, members of this society maintain direct genetic links to members of Hitler's regime, and Greta's father was no exception, being an illegitimate child of Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, head of the S.S. and overseer of the Gestapo.
With full knowledge of this unwholesome background in mind, Hinterland worked with Greta for months, gaining her trust and studying her outstanding scientific acumen, and it was on the eve of a major breakthrough in the regenerative tissue project that he struck. Taking the young superscientist out for drinks to celebrate their celeritous progress in the program, Hinterland spiked her drink with a powerful tranquilizer, loaded her into a cryogenic storage unit and took her to an offshore base outside the Nerva Archepalego, where the rest of the Society of Children were waiting.
As one could imagine, things did not go well from there.
[edit] Samsara
The Society of Children made no attempt to hide their intent for Greta (as well as the half-dozen other men and women of varying ages they'd captured); the program was a complex and delicate procedure, and while the organization was eager to achieve their goals, they had little problem openly executing stragglers or escapees. Terrified and without alternative, Greta went along with the program, under the sickening assurances of yesteryear, that 'work would set her free'. The crux of the program in question was a high-tech device known as the Demoralization Processor, constructed by an ex-Council traitor named Vito Ludovico. Possessed by a malicious spirit from the vaults of the Thule Society, the Processor locked its victim in an iron maiden of sorts, bombarding them with a four-dimensional array of sights, sounds, smells and stimuli from the worst moments in history, both human and otherwise, for hours at a time. Combined with systematic physical and emotional abuse, the program 'muted' the victim's morals, emotions and feelings, the intent being to put them to work for the Column in a 'Tabula Rasa' state; unfeeling, uncaring and nigh-sociopathic, the victims were the Column's ideal braintrust.
Greta was the first of her clutch of prisoners to break; wholly idealistic before the program, it took very little to decimate her innocence and joire de vivre to a mottled lump of slag, and even less to put her to work in the superscience labs in a secret Fifth Column base far beneath the streets of Mercy Island. Greta Tod was assigned to the 'Elfenbeinaufsatz' project, a genetics-based program with the intended result of modifying the blood cells of select soldiers to allow for 'perfect infiltration' using the soldier's own body to generate and emit a pheremone that made them effectively invisible, as well as amping their synaptic relay system to metahuman speed. Greta worked tirelessly on the program, though she also tinkered in her 'free time' with her regenerative tissue serum, unwilling to let something she had devoted her life to, to perish.
[edit] Role Call
It was a cold, rainy morning in Mercy when Greta Tod went missing from her bunk. The Society of Children were understandably panicked, and searched her personal laboratory to find her notes on both of her pet projects shredded, burnt and utterly useless, the German abductee having committed them to memory moments after receiving them. The sole prototypes of both compounds had also gone missing, and in their place, Tod had left an unpleasant surprise. Had anybody known about the underground bunker-base, they would have needed a bucket and a strong stomach to recover traces of the hapless guard who stumbled across Greta's handmade 'Salvation Engine'.
Panic spread like wildfire through the facility as the power generators malfunctioned, the air recyclers failed and the doors sealed. One by one, the Society members therein began to discover bodies, colleague and captive alike, dismantled like old Buicks and expertly stitched back together by Impervium surgical tools, with choking gas grenades in their chest cavities. Greta made her way from room to room in the sprawling subterranian stronghold, executing soldier and scientist alike, rendered effectively invisible by the very serum she had been instructed to create. Hinterland was the last to go, suffocated to death after being strapped into the destroyed Demoralization Processor and force-fed the combined remainder of his fellow Society-goers' corpses. His last, gagging words fell on ears safely deafened behind Greta's gas mask.
Doctor Tod escaped the deep-cover base via a two mile long air-chute, emerging in the sewers near the Mercy Island cesspool, but not before calmly finding the daily role roster and neatly making note of her status: In Absentia.
[edit] Gainful Employment
After acquiring a change of clothing and a hot meal, Greta began to seek a means to make a living. While her talents transcended the meaning of 'adequate', there is very little call for superscientists in Mercy. Thanks to the Demoralization Processor, Greta had also been left with little of her old mentality, and her lack of humanity and habit of mercilessly butchering her opposition made her an unpleasant prospect for gang recruitment. Without a field to practice her art in, she fell back on her secondary skills, made doubly effective when she discovered that both her cloaking compound and regenerative tissue serum had taken permanent hold in her bodily makeup. Desperate, sadistic, nigh-sociopathic and superpowered, she made an ideal recruit for Arachnos, via Kalinda, the Fortunata.
It didn't take long for the warped sense of pride in Greta's mutilated mind to convince her that she was meant for grander things than running errands for Lord Recluse's castoffs, and she broke with the Fortunata, organizing a strategic relocation to Port Oakes (where she met Mike the Ear, and quickly discovered the beauty of returning, briefly, to Paragon City, to generate funding and make a name for herself), then onto Cap Au Diable. It was here that Greta's keen grasp of superscience brought her some notoriety, securing her a place in Aeon University's laboratory, albeit with exceedingly strict rules on her work. Unacceptably strict.
At her wits' end, with her work slowly stagnating in the University's laboratory and her criminal career at a standstill, Greta began making regular trips to the interdimensional nightclub, Pocket D. While the music bothered her, the human interaction was vital; not to her, per se, but to her research. The Rogue Isles, despite being the veritable hatchery of evil, was an uncomfortably social place for Greta, and she was observing a particularly heated argument between two patrons when Nadja Bathory, the Crimson Conjuress, headmistress of the Sigma Iota Nu sorority at Aeon, approached her with an interesting proposition.
[edit] Queenmaker to the Queen
The Headmistress of the Sorority of S.I.N. had a unique idea, as far as Greta was concerned; construct a 'school for amoral entrepeneurs', under the guise of a highly-elitest sorority, and educated the youth of the Rogue Isles in the methods and mannerisms necessary to becoming a proper criminal mastermind. While Nadja saw a potential ally, Greta was deeply intrigued by the concept of putting her talents to use warping and shaping the minds of youthful up-and-comers, analyzing them for flaws, and correcting said flaws before they could come to light. An agreement was reached, and Greta eagerly signed on as one of the first Faculty at the budding organization, working hand-in-hand with Nadja and her subserviant, sentient murder-doll-slash-maniac, Kelli.
As the Sorority expands, so do Greta's aspirations. Content at first to offer medical assistance (both legal and otherwise) to Sigma's Sisters, the rapid growth of both the student body and the faculty, as well as a few outstanding alliances with likeminded organizations, push Tod into new fields of interest. She has recently begun work on a (painful, airborne and utterly debilitating) cure for the Council's Vampyri process (having abandoned her plans for a less agonizing version for another of the school's proctors after a mild personal infraction), as well as having taken Terraitor, a convert from Paragon City, under her wing, in a (failed) attempt to mend the girl's shattered psyche and piece her mind back together in the Good Doktor's own image.
Greta Tod has taken the role of the Chair of Wrath in the Sorority's seven-throne faculty system. While this may seem an oxymoron, considering Dr. Tod's extreme levels of self-control and almost robotic mannerisms, both the doctor herself and the Headmistress of Sigma Iota Nu are well aware of Tod's inherent disdain, abhorrance and contempt for what makes up ninety-five percent of all life. Her willingness - eagerness, even - to conduct twisted, sadistic experiments on still-concious test subjects coupled with her absolute adoration of inflicting pain and sorrow on those not openly allied with her goals makes her an ideal subject for the position. The post-script of her business cards sums it up ideally; "Ihr Elend ist mein Vergnügen." Your misery is my pleasure.
Most recently, Greta has experienced a jarring lesson in mentorship from her previously failed attempt at mentoring (her ward having had a stark and unpleasant change of heart, returning to the Heroic fold) and undertaken the task again, adopting a budding mutant named Helen Horowitz, or Screamadelica, a recent entrant into the Sorority with the ability to blast bones and shudder structures with potent sonic vibrations. In addition to her new ward, the insidious Doctor Tod has begun offering her services as a private surgeon to one Alex Lowry, a well-known member of the notoriously destructive Skulls, in exchange for copious amounts of Superadine, evidently using the ill-omened street drug as a catalystic agent in her Vampyri 'Cure'.
...there was once a little girl from Dresden, but she doesn't live here anymore.
[edit] Abilities
- Doctor Tod is an expert surgeon and a functional supergenius, able to rapidly memorize and formulate information that would give most people nosebleeds. She has an advanced grasp of both conventional and cutting-edge biology, biochemisty, anatomy, and the majority of the 'living' sciences.
- Having injected herself with the Column's stealth serum, as well as her own regenerative tissue compound, Greta's chief appreciable ability is to become 'hidden in plain sight'; it only takes a moment of focus for her to expel a thin cloud of pheremones from her pores that instill a deep desire in those around her to simply overlook her presence, allowing her to move detected-but-not even in the most crowded areas. Strangely, this ability does seem to function on recording devices as well; a fact that Greta enjoys greatly, but is deeply puzzled by.
- In addition to her natural cloaking abilities, Greta's cells reproduce at a truly astounding rate, allowing her to heal injuries in record time. A cursory investigation of the process shows that exposure to the regenerative tissue compound has warped her DNA into a spiraled triple-helix, the third protein chain devoted purely to allowing her control over her metahuman abilities.
- Through advanced chemical and surgical treatments, Greta has modified the tensile strength of her hip, knee and ankle joints, allowing her to move with preternatural speed, far beyond even those of Olympic world-records.
- Greta Tod is never without her tools; a simple surgical procedure has allowed her to store her Impervium blades in her forearms in smooth plastic sheathes, intertwining a deployment mechanism with the tendons of her elbow and wrist. She enjoys retrofitting her 'field surgery kit' with new and obscenely sharp blades from her laboratory, cut from raw Impervium and refined to surgical sharpness by way of a diamond-lensed Irridium Laser Array, stolen piece by piece from the Crey Corporation labs over a series of weeks.
- The Demoralization Process has left Greta cold, distant, and unfeeling, and has likewise done significant damage to her pain receptors. Like emotion, Greta does not experience pain in the traditional sense, registering it less as agony and more as annoyance; a sucking gunshot wound to the lungs could be likened to a swift strike in the sternum to Doctor Tod.
[edit] Additional Skills, Quirks and Miscellanea
- Has a truly astonishing grasp of modern science, and this oftentimes makes her skeptical of anything not fitting perfectly into her world paradigm, despite being involved in an organization founded on a backbone of the occult.
- Speaks English and German fluently, and appears to be learning 'Freakspeak' and Rikti, albeit slowly in the condition of the latter.
- Displays an almost alien set of mannerisms; polite, but cold, and utterly amoral, she can be particularly disquieting when she attempts to be cordial.
- Seems to disdain physical contact, save for in a laboratory setting. Likewise, is unfond of displaying emotion outside of the most subtle shifts in mood.
- Is known to carry a small array of personal pharmaceuticals on her, utilizing these compounds to great effect, both in and out of combat.
[edit] Doctor Tod's Laboratory
Nestled in the basement of the Sigma Iota Nu sorority house, Greta has established a meager (but functional) laboratory in which to run tests. Despite looking like little more than a combat E.R., the lab is rife with technology the doctor has stolen, built or otherwise acquired and modified to fit her needs. In addition to basic medical equipment, the lab contains advanced gene-engineering equipment, biosignal scanners, a small pharmacy (under lock and key, and stocked mostly with Greta's own concoctions) and soon, a complete emergency recompilation chamber for the Sorority's less successful endeavors.
(More on this later, once I can mess around in GIMP a little bit to make it look pretty.)
[edit] Author's Note
I'm aware of the touchy subject matter involved in playing anything linked to Adolph Hitler, much less playing the bastard grandaughter of his right-hand man. However, the atrocities of the Nazi Party have little to no role in Greta's characterization, and indeed, in-character, she is happy to show open disdain for them. Considering her backstory, this makes sense, don't you think?
Categories: Female | Science | Stalker | Villain | Sigma Iota Nu | Character
