Dark Shore Rhea: Phoena Richards

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ermagersh FINALLY. That's 3 days of photoshop and like, and weeks of planning and drawing on the back of restaurant tabs at work to develop this character! Time to give extended details!

Real Name: Phoena Richards.
Nickname: P.R. - really only used by her cameraman, Nick.
Title: TrapTide.
Age: 24.
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Blue
Height: 5' 7''
Distinguishing Marks: Phoena almost always has her hair back to give a more professional look, and lets her hair down and crazy when she becomes TrapTide. She's also VERY very conscious about her smaller-than-mom's chest, and WILL react violently to a man if he mentions them.
Gender: Female.
Ability: Water Entrapment (see explanation below).
Team: Themis.
Outfit: Her outfit is put together mostly from a costume that was used in a Bahamas cruise-ship underwater performance. The skirt can detach to allow greater mobility - especially underwater. The mask is specially made to extend over the nose slightly which gives her facial structure a different appearance, making it harder to determine her identity.

Personality:
Phoena was raised to have manners, but she's got a short fuse. She gets angry quickly, but she doesn't normally explode when she's mad. Instead she gets overly polite and very fake. She knows how to put on a show to keep people entertained and is training to make any story she tells sound exciting. She does not like to hear biased opinions when she wants facts. It's because of this that she has consecutively voted for 3rd parties in almost any election of any kind, political or not; as the two dominating groups in any debate do everything and anything to demonize the other.
Phoena's a nice enough girl. She's outgoing and pretty pushy as most journalists tend to be. She's bright, in shape, holds her job well. Her issues in life are with keeping up with the rent and running a slowly decaying social life outside of Facebook.

Simple Background:
An intern journalist/reporter at a small station. Phoena was out walking home from a shoot on July 25th at 2:59 A.M. A truck drove by her and splashed her and her work suit with water from the street. True to her snappy nature, she scooped up some water in her water bottle and chucked it after the truck in retaliation as the rain began falling.

Explanation of Abilities: _{My personal goal was to have a water-attack-based super character, but her powers couldn't be like water bending~ and I think I did a good job!}
Water Encasement is good word choice for what Phoena can do. At 2:55 AM July 25th, she finished recording a story with her cameraman, Nick, in front of an old store 3 blocks from home. Nick offered her a ride home and she declined, saying she could just walk. At 2:59 a passing truck drove over a gutter puddle on the road, sending a wave of water into Phoena and soaking her work suit. As the rain began to fall at 3:00, she filled her water bottle with puddle water and chucked it after a truck that had previously splashed her and her good suit. Because of this, her powers are water-based.
To illustrate why her powers are what the are, here's a breakdown of what she can do:
Like she did with the water bottle and the puddle, she can trap water in its liquified state and make it into a solid state without freezing it by touching it. Throwing the bottle also gives her limited manipulation of trapped water- not like whipping around or anything. What she will do is create a small floating blob/cloud of trapped water that floats above her, which she uses as her source for water. If she needs to use it, she reaches into the cloud and removes her hands. One of two things can happen: 1) her hands will be wet, and she will flick her hands in a direction she wants the water on her hand to go, and as the water flies off, it becomes solid and works as a shotgun-style projectile; not as strong as a bullet, but it still has force to it and could knock a gun out of an enemy's hand~ not to mention it'll leave a welt that stings MUCH worse than a paintball. 2) She will pull her hand out of the mass with an object, usually a solid blunt tool, that is formed of water. She has difficulty forming sharp shapes with water, and these shapes aren't indestructible, plus they only last 8 hours in their 'solid' state before reverting back to liquid. Harsh trauma, whether it is physically hit several times or crushed, will make a shape break back into water. If electricity is shot through the water it will contain it in the water and electrocute anything that touches it. Extreme heat will evaporate the water slowly and leave Phoena useless since she can't control water in frozen or gas form yet. Fire rarely gets hot enough to evaporate large sums of water, so she could fix a house fire easy.
Her limited manipulation of her 'water cloud' and shapes extends to a 10-foot radius around her. If it moves beyond that point it will splash onto the ground or land as a bubble (think 'A Bug's Life) and hold itself together for the next 8 hours.
[link] EXAMPLE OF SOLID WATER FORMS.
Her powers are still very new to her and thus, she is still adapting to fighting with them: since gaining her powers, she has experimented greatly during her free time at home and while taking walks in stream-filled parks. She first began noticing her powers two days after the rain fell. Suddenly she could detect humidity in the air much better, and overall became much more sensitive to water, and as the days went by she could almost feelits presence. Then one morning in her office- if you could call that teeny cubicle an office- she spilled her water onto the carpet. Annoyed at herself for being careless, she went to touch the carpet to see how far the water had spilled. When she touched the surface of the wet carpet, she thought: This would be so much easier to dry if I could just pick up the water and toss it back in my cup... as if God was answering a prayer she had made, the water changed to a solid state underneath her fingers. Shock and disbelief had her stare at the ground for the next several seconds before she touched the water again. It wasn't frozen, but it was definitely holding a solid physical surface. It felt like smooth glass or plastic! She tried picking it up off the ground, but close inspection showed her that ALL the water had become solid, which meant it had also stuck itself around all the tendrils of cloth in the carpet, like cement! Her new worry was that of removing the water spill from her carpet! She tried pulling at it, sticking a pen under it, and even using scissors to try and chop it up; but nothing she did would make it budge. Disturbed, she had to focus her attention on work the rest of the day, the spot still reflecting the daylight outside. She tentatively left, imagining what kind of scolding the janitors were going to give her for ruining their carpet. Upon coming home, she turned her thoughts back to what took place when the water had changed. Did I do that? Or did something else? She asked herself. If I did do it, then can I do it twice? Her hypothesis tested true, as she poured herself a glass of water, put a little dab of it on a plate, and touched it, thinking she wanted it solid. Sure enough, the dab became a solid, the size of a coin. Picking it up, she examined it: it had the same texture as the plate below it. Weird! Excited, she dipped her hand into the water and with her finger just playing at the top of the water, turned it solid. She removed the tip of her finger from the small indent that had formed around it, showing a small fingerprint-shaped embossed section in the solidified water.
Later the next day when she returned to her office after many more experiments, she slowly approached her 'work-box' expecting her supervisor to be there with a stern lecture. To her happy surprise, no one awaited her, and the spot had disappeared from her cubicle! Inspecting the carpet again, she realized it was damp! The water had gone back to a liquid while she was gone!

It was events like that which drove the next few weeks for her, and each day after work she would experiment with her powers, eventually developing a semi-levitation ability, and the control that let her make objects. She learned her limits with how much in one body of water she could solidify and how long it would stay that way, and learned she could revert the water back into its liquid state.

Now, she is fascinated by Rheas and wants to meet others with powers, but because of her busy job and the government's abducting of other Rheas, it's been difficult to do so. To try and meet Rhea, she has begun learning as much as possible about all the notorious Rhea personas in the city, becoming the Beat Reporter (a reporter that specializes with a certain subject) on Rhea and Rhea activity. Because she knows the government could eventually track her, she's been learning how to fight with her powers as well- she might gain greater power as time goes on _{(and as she ranks up in DSR)}. When she's in a fight, her first reaction is flight.
Objective 1: Find a water source; evade her enemy until doing so.
Objective 2: Like a prey tries to scare off a predator by appearing bigger than they are, she'll do something impressive and intimidating in an attempt to deter off an attacker.
Objective 3: If the enemy hasn't run, she will begin fighting non-lethally until her opponent throws a lethal blow.
Objective 4: While fighting, she must avoid getting hurt where it will be seen: specifically her face and hands.
Special: While working, if she sees a member of Themis in trouble and her cameraman is present, she will use her influence as a reporter (cameras have great crowd-control powers, afterall) to keep that member safe/out of trouble.

How she joined Themis:
During a jaunt in the park, Phoena was contemplating aloud to herself about Rheas. Specifically how there seemed to be two factions growing of Rheas. Like gangs, but with super powers. One of them were a class of vigilantes and the other a group of ne'er-do-wells. Both had goals and disliked each other, but if Phoena were to seek out a team and meet other Rhea, she'd be putting herself in danger; not to mention her career. If only there was somewhere to go where she could meet people learning to cope with new powers without getting involved in a future power-struggle... Ironically enough, she had been talking to her reflection in the stream, but when someone answered, her powers rippled the surface of the water in shock, and she nearly fell into the stream out of surprise. Behind the bench she was on stood a young high-school-age teen girl with bright hair and lots of punk clothing. The girl introduced an option that Phoena hadn't known about: Team Themis. Folks that watch out for each other sounded alluring. Left with instructions to a meeting point, Phoena heeded the call to Neutrality and joined with Themis.

Detailed Background:

Childhood:
Phoena grew up playing with barbies and dressing up to play house like most girls. She was one of those talk-your-ear-off know-it-all girls that demanded attention and threw many a temper tantrum when she didn't get her way. As a way of disciplining her and giving her a way to vent her anger, her parents introduced her to a Tae-Kwon-Do program, something she continued through til the end of high school.

Jr. High and High School:
Always the hothead and very active, Phoena joined the track and basketball teams of her youth. She discovered her desire to be a reporter during an interview with the school newspaper staff. She liked the attention, but also the challenge of putting on an entertaining display of the information while not batting an eye regardless of the information: it was like the ultimate poker face.

College and Current:
Phoena kept her passion for her career alive by working with her college's news staff, and now is an intern for a local station. Because she's so new and compared to everyone else: inexperienced, it's not surprising that Phoena gets stuck with all the "3AM jobs." She currently lives alone in a small apartment above an All-American diner.
She dumped her ex boyfriend when he began heavy drinking and smoking, and she realized he was going downhill fast. Although having severed her relationship with him, he keeps calling her while drunk, asking her to forgive him and come back to him. He does this once or twice a month.

I'll provide a better detailed story of how the night of July 25th went later on; it's all thumb-nailed on the back of an order for Muffins and Sausages XD


Phoena Richards/TrapTide (c) Joe Spangler 2012

Crossing my fingers to hope I'm accepted~<3
Edit: ACCEPTED! Was there EVER any doubt? lol