Vardra

[Wyvern]

A (primarily) villain, depicted as a small (maybe 4'8" or so) reptilian humanoid with black scales and red markings (particularly around her hands and feet). She was often depicted "naked", but with barbie doll anatomy - just smooth scales everywhere. Several versions included a mane of white spines as a sort of surrogate for hair (and as a mood indicator). Her head was usually some variant on "generic reptile" (though, oddly, usually with almost cat-like external ears), but a few runs made her either more explicitly serpentine or crocodilian.


Real name: Eliza Taylors

Powers:

• Flaming Scimitar: Used in her original appearance and then quietly retconned out of existence; no other version of her has demonstrated any affinity for either swords or fire.
• Armored Scales: Almost all versions of Vardra have been depicted as being able to shrug off at least small-caliber gunfire without damage. Exactly how strong an attack is required to hurt her varies greatly depending on the writer, but she's generally depicted as tough enough to go toe-to-toe with whoever she's facing.
• Regeneration: Not fast regeneration, mind you, but enough to really frustrate heroes when they have a hard time dealing much damage in the first place. And major injuries never seemed to last from one appearance to the next - though whether that's regeneration or simply narrative convenience has never been explored.
• Flight: Her first two appearances showed her as a relatively acrobatic but ultimately groundbound opponent; every version after that has been capable of taking to the air, if not always with any great speed. Indeed, her preference for flight over walking eventually became one of her signature traits, to the point that she gets the occasional surprised comment when she actually bothers to touch the ground.
• Super Strength: This mostly manifests as a part of her flight power; she's rarely shown demonstrating explicit fling-enemies-around-like-ragdolls levels of physical prowess, but she does tend to shrug off brute impacts and just keep going. (In Champions terms, this is less high strength and more high knockback resistance.) A number of appearances show her ripping through armored doors, or crushing guns in her hands, abilities which were later explained as a function of entropic blood magics rather than brute strength.
• Blood Magic: Vardra uses blood drawn from her enemies to bolster her attacks with entropic energy, usually shown as a red glow around her hands. When fighting things that don't bleed (or targets tough enough she can't get an initial hit through their armor), she doesn't hesitate to turn her claws on herself (typically by just closing a hand into a fist and digging her claws into her palm), using her own blood to fuel her attacks and relying on her regeneration to deal with the resulting minor injuries. She doesn't like fighting robots, though, claiming it's less fun than living targets.
• Shadow Magic: Pretty generic shadow-y stuff - attacks that blind, or bind, or weaken, usually at range. A few versions of Vardra have used this as a more direct defense as well, wrapping herself in dark energy to shield herself from attacks or vanish from sight.
• Burglary & Hacking: Her backstory has her as a minor but competent cat burglar, with a bit of a specialty in high-tech electronic locks, before she gained her powers - skills she retained after her transformation, but only rarely puts to use.

Flaws / Weaknesses:

• Blood Knight: she's rarely shown as having the discipline to retreat from a fight she appears to be winning, and she'll almost always pick the direct straight through the heroes path of attack. Even when this leads to her defeat, she claims things were more fun that way.
• Will drop whatever she was doing to save innocent lives, but she tries very hard not to let people know about this (for example, her reaction to discovering a terrorist plot in some far away city would be an anonymous tip to the local heroes, not flying out herself to deal with it), seeing it as a major character flaw for a villain. When she can't hide it, she tries to play it off as just self-interest or a part of her larger plans - "I can't take over the world if there's no world left to take over" or "Well of course I disarmed the bomb; I was in the blast radius."
• Absolutely will not kill a noncombatant (but has no qualms about threatening or harming one if she thinks that's needed) - this includes anyone who surrenders... but they have to explicitly surrender; just running away doesn't count. Much like the above, she goes out of her way to avoid letting people know about this; for example, by demanding (as part of the terms of such a surrender) that the person claim they escaped when asked how they survived.
• Will go absolutely ballistic on her own allies if they deliberately kill innocents or noncombatants... while she's around or could be held directly responsible.
• Several versions showed her as needing to kill to sustain her powers, or as being addicted to the rush of magical power from doing so; some variant on this is what usually brings to an end her occasional attempts to act as a hero.
• Is vulnerable to light (especially sunlight) based powers, and especially anything tied to egyptian deities like Sobek-Ra or Bast.
• Single-target focus: Her blood magic in particular does not function well at range or against multiple targets; even if she's clearly winning a fight, simply throwing numbers of weak opponents (expendable drone robots for example) at her can easily buy enough time for the heroes to at least clear out, if not longer. (Of course, the converse is also true: if you're going up against her alone, you're probably in for a world of hurt.)

First appeared as an (at the time) un-named one-off minor opponent for [insert hero name here], where she murdered a number of museum guards, starting from an exhibit on ancient egypt before moving on to menace innocent civilians when the museum opened in the morning. She spoke in egyptian hieroglyphics and didn't appear to understand english; a few dedicated fans attempted to translate these speeches and found them to be just random gibberish, the symbols chosen for apparently purely artistic reasons.

Her second appearance was in the background of two pages during a [major villain organization]'s mass break out of powered villains at [famous prison with power damper technology in use]; one frame showed her as part of a group of villains rushing through gunfire towards the prison's guards, and the other showed her fighting at close range with bloodied claws.

After that she was used as filler on several villain teams fielded by [major villain organization], generally taking the role of frontline combatant; these appearances gave her a name and started to flesh out her backstory, especially once a group of vaguely Yuan-ti-like monsters (referred to as Vipers) started turning up. Despite initial appearances, it turned out that the Vipers weren't coordinating with [major villain organization], but were instead attacking them - specifically, seeking to capture Vardra. [Hero team of some sort] ended up rescuing her from the Vipers, where she revealed that she'd been a thief, hired (indirectly - she wouldn't have taken the job if she'd known it involved magic) by the Vipers to steal a small crocodile figurine from a museum. Unfortunately for her, the Vipers were actually after the fragment of Apep that had been sealed in the figurine - and that fragment had possessed her, leading to the rampage of her initial appearance; only her time in the power dampers of [prison name] had allowed her original personality to re-assert control, albeit not entirely unchanged.

...Plenty more stuff to add (I ended up with three different versions of this character), but going to go ahead and post this now.

[Joshua]

Sounds like we need a Suicide Squad. Will have to think up something interesting to do as a variant.

[Wyvern]

Edited in an extra weakness (single target focus).

Various interesting things from her career:

She spent a lot of her time in "The Rogue Isles" - we don't want to use that name directly, but in City of Villains, that was the area controlled by Arachnos (the [major villain organization] referred to above). What was neat about it was that it was a place where there really weren't any innocents or noncombatants to be found. (A more real variation of a villanous country would have some innocents - children if nothing else - but for reasons of ratings, kids just didn't appear in the game.) Which gave her an area where she could more or less run wild without violating her rules.

Once she got her own feet under her, so to speak, she spent some of her time mentoring other villains. A good set of stories might be centered around an undercover agent going into the rogue isles - and getting 'adopted' by Vardra. "Hi! Got anything interesting for me to kill today?" (Footnote: Vardra does not respond well to being called 'cute' - you can expect growling at a minimum. She responds even less well to attempts to tie pink ribbons around her tail. On the other hand, if she likes you, you probably won't get mauled too badly...)

There was a set of stories focused around a heroic version of her using the name "Kyndragos", supposedly from an alternate universe (though there were subtle hints that it might just be the real Vardra deciding to get in some practice at self-control); this version refused to use her claws or blood magic, absolutely refused to kill (not out of any moral high ground, just out of "If I kill... I'm not sure I could stop."), and was shown to be significantly less durable than most versions of Vardra. As in, a thug with a gun was a serious threat to her if she got ambushed. If, on the other hand, she didn't get ambushed... well, Kyndragos was very much a support type, using shadow magic to bind and blind entire groups of mooks at once, or to sap strength from her enemies and use it to bolster her allies. Unfortunately, a minor case of publisher existence failure resulted in this version never getting a proper finish to her story - or even verification if she was actually a separate person or just Vardra having hacked the database of a dimensional exploration company to invent a non-existent alternate universe.