app for tushanshu

[bird_of_prey]

Player Information:
Name: El
Age: 33
Contact: thisisel on AIM or elium on plurk
Game Cast: NA

Character Information:
Name: Barbara Gordon
Canon: DC Comics
Canon Point: Birds of Prey Vol 2 Issue 15 (End of pre-boot canon)
Age: 28
Reference: Here

Setting: DC comics is a rather gritty universe similar to our own. Normal, every day people go about their lives while so-called superheroes battle villains, extraterrestrials and all sorts of other unpleasantness. The majority of Oracle’s history centers in or around Gotham city, an infamous cesspool of a city filled with rampant crime, hugely differencing class standards and poverty. It’s a city drowning in desperation and because of that, it seems to breed its own special brand of insane supervillains.

In comes Batman, otherwise known as the billionaire Bruce Wayne who wages his own private war on crime. He is surrounded by a close-knit, very dysfunctional group of like-minded superheros. Unlike Metropolis or Keystone City, the ‘Batfamily’ as they are colloquially known have no manner of super powers or ‘meta’ genes.

The ‘meta’ in meta genes is short for Metahuman. They are people that have seemingly superhuman powers through a variety of methods. Some might be aliens like Superman or the Martian Manhunter, others might have gotten their powers through a science experiment gone awry or a variety of methods.

People like the Flash, Superman and other super powered individuals might have certain advantages over the Batfamily but that doesn’t mean they aren’t incapable of kicking ass in their own rights. Because they don’t have the superhuman abilities, they have to rely upon their wits, physical attributes and fighting abilities. Each member was trained in a variety of fighting styles, taught tactics and even the methods of deduction to help further their quest for justice in Gotham City. Because when your so-called ‘Rogues’ are often meta-humans, criminally insane, you have to be smarter, quicker and more prepared for any eventuality.

To help combat the plague of those criminally insane supervillains and other disasters, meta humans and others have joined together into teams of so-called ‘superheroes’ to address the catastrophic issues and machinations that arise at times. This cabal of superheroes is known as the Justice League and they have saved the world countless times over the years. It goes without saying that most of the Justice League are meta humans for obvious reasons yet they do count the occasional baseline human in their numbers as well. People like the various Batfamily members and even the superhero Green Arrow and his ‘family.’ There is a somewhat understated rivalry between the Bats and the Arrows thanks to Bruce and Oliver’s radically different viewpoints and the fact that they are some of the most prominent baseline humans in the League.

And in the case of Barbara who is paralyzed and 'trapped' in a wheelchair, she takes her own innate cleverness and technological aptitude to the virtual world where she has crafted an expansive information network and online persona known as Oracle.

Only a small group of people actually know the truth about Oracle. Their cyberpresence is large on the net but is an utter mystery. Most people assume Oracle is a man, others some kind of advanced AI. It’s misinformation that suits Barbara’s needs perfectly and she goes to some length to constantly sew the seeds of misinformation in the rumor mills.

As Oracle, she is capable of hacking just about any computer and data system in the world. In doing so, she gains access to information no civilian or even military agent would be capable of garnering. And as Barbara has discovered, she can do far more good as Oracle than she ever could as Batgirl. The unforgiving life of a vigilante had already begun to lose some of it's luster even before Joker had crippled her and Babs had been on the verge of permanent retirement when the shooting happened. So it was easy enough to shift from being the young woman working at finishing her doctorate by day and running around the roofs of Gotham at night into the shadowy infojock known as Oracle.

She founded the Birds of Prey, a group of mostly female heroines who operate outside of the prevue of both the Justice League and the law. The very first member she recruited was Black Canary who was going through a rough patch as bad as Barbara was. What started out as a mission to help break Canary out of her depressive funk turned into be an effective partnership and a very deep friendship.

Dinah Lance was Barbara’s brawn to her brains and for a long time, it was just the two of them working as a very kickass duo. Oracle lined up the missions and Canary was her operative in the field. Oracle’s enemies finally tracked her down and without Dinah’s intervention, she would have died.

After that, an even deeper friendship blossomed between them and they became the closest of friends. For the longest time, it was just the two of them for the most part but when the master Blackmailer known as Savant kidnapped Black Canary, Oracle had to reach out to the most unlikely of allies in Huntress.

Helena Bertinelli didn’t fit the Birds M.O. in the least. She was violent, prone to not only stepping off page but also ripping it apart. Her and Oracle’s alliance was shaky at best but in order to save Dinah from Savant’s clutches, Barbara was willing to make a deal with the devil himself.

Recruiting Huntress turned out to be a better idea than any of them realized however. She and Dinah worked together seamlessly and she brought a gritty determination to the team that suited some of the truly hard decisions all of them were forced to make in the field.

Even more surprising, it was Oracle herself who championed Savant and his associate Creote in an attempt to convince the blackmailer to turn over a new leaf. With Savant’s hacking abilities being nearly as good as her own, it was the most logical conclusion to make.

It was also one that was vocally protested by the likes of Black Canary and even Huntress. Barbara was not unsympathetic to Dinah’s plight and even shared her feelings but it was business and there was no way she could let a predator like Savant out unchecked. For a short time, she even ‘fired’ Black Canary out of concern for Dinah’s mental and physical safety.

The roster for the Birds of Pray enlarged significantly from there as they went on an active recruiting campaign. The displaced WWII fighter pilot Zinda Blake, aka Lady Blackhawk joined their ranks and began to cover transport for their rapidly inflating numbers. Others such as Big Barda, Dove and even Hawk, the only male member of the Birds to date came later.

Aside from the Birds of Prey, Barbara shares pretty strong ties with the superhero community through Batman and his clan of course.

She is closest to Dick Grayson, the original Robin and now the vigilante known as Nightwing. Their relationship is a complicated one spanning over a decade. They’ve dated on and off for years and even came close to getting married before

Personality: In a word, Oracle is a very determined person; or ‘stubborn’ if you’re feeling uncharitable. She has never liked when people telling her what she can and cannot do and will often do the opposite just out of spite. When her father somewhat callously dismissed the idea of Barbara joining the police force, she decided then and there that she was going to operate outside the law like Batman and the other members of the Justice League.

After Batman told her she wasn’t allowed to wear the Bat symbol and carry on the Batgirl mantle, she stubbornly ignored his proclamation and it was only after she nearly got herself killed trying to learn how to swing much like Batman and Robin did that Bruce seemed to realize he couldn’t dissuade Barbara from risking her life.

She's also not the type to allow herself or anyone to drown in self pity. Even after being crippled, she refuses to let that define just who she is. Babs is a very capable woman who just happens to be confined to a wheelchair.

Being of genius level intelligence, Barbara does occasionally have the bad habit of thinking she might know better than those around her. It all stems from her control issues. Maybe it was because of the way she was dismissed when younger or even the violating manner in which Joker attacked her but Oracle is a control freak of the highest order. She doesn't like to admit to weakness or even needing the help of others on occasion.

Some might accuse her of being too far removed from the everyday workings because she often remains closed up within her tower for hours and even days on end but Barbara doesn’t think of it like that. She’s always been a somewhat introverted personality and her role as Oracle allows her to indulge in her solitary nature.

Unlike Batman, though, she doesn’t need to have time away from other people in order to gather her thoughts. She enjoys spending time with her friends in both the physical and digital realms. The Birds of Prey have become her sort of secondary family and she’s especially close to Black Canary thanks to their having worked together for so long. Dinah was actually the first person outside of her family and the Bats that Barbara reached out to.

But in some ways, becoming so close to Dinah and the other Birds is also a huge vulnerability for Barbara. After Dinah was captured and tortured by the professional blackmailer known as Savant, Babs initial, knee-jerk reactions was the pull away and get Dinah out of danger. The thought of losing her best friend in the line of duty was a terrifying one and in the grand tradition of Bats she completely overreacted and ended up screwing things up further by ‘firing’ Black Canary.

It’s a delicate balance she has to strike between Oracle and Barbara and the near miss with Dinah brought that point home. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and Barbara seemed to realize that sometimes…you just can’t control every variable around you and that trying to force people to do things you think is right just ends up making things ten times more difficult.

Sufficing to say, it was not an easy lesson to earn, especially for a control freak like Oracle but she’s trying to get better which is leaps and bounds ahead of someone like Bruce or some of the other Bats.

Still, for all of her many faults, there is no denying Babs brings a lot to the table. Her cool head under fire, pragmatism and scary level of competence makes Oracle a force to be reckoned with.

It goes without saying that she’s not exactly the most cheerful and optimistic individual ever but really, can you blame her? Being the pragmatist that she is, Barbara can't blindly subscribe to rainbows and cheerful optimism; that’s more Dinah’s bag. Instead, Oracle tries to focus on the harsh facts and reality and goes from there. Hope and optimism are all well and good but she’d much rather have three plans cooking and seven contingency plans waiting in the wings instead. Because you can’t just wait for fate to lend a hand; you have to help yourself.

You have to accept the hand you are dealt and find a way to weather through the storm. Babs is a master of self-deprecating humor and possesses a surprisingly wicked humor at times. Maybe it’s just a bad habit she’s picked up from hanging around Dick for so long but she can have a very saucy mouth on her and is quick on the draw when it comes to making quips in the face of dire reality.

Ever since she was a kid, sitting by and watching the injustices of the world march by without doing anything had been the most terrible torture. That had been her whole reason for initially picking up the cowl; because she wanted to make a difference. Now, she might not be able to patrol the streets as Batgirl but that doesn’t stop her from trying to do what she can as Oracle.

In being Oracle, Barbara rediscovered a purpose for her life, something she’d desperately needed after waking up in the hospital to find she was both crippled and that her vigilante career had been effectively ended forever.

Forming the Birds of Prey gave her life new meaning and in doing so, she met a lot of new people who helped teach Barbara there was more to life than working. Things like friendship and trust that had gone out the window when she’d been shot entered her life once again.

It is ironic perhaps that in forming her own band of superheros that Barbara would rediscover people from her past; some of which were unpleasant memories such as coming across her ex-fiance Jason Bard. There had been a time when she’d been so achingly young that she’d fancied herself in love with the detective turned PI. But when Jason intimated he was interested in starting things up with Barbara yet again, she politely refused.

The ship had long since sailed for her. Truth be told, aside from the mild flirtations she had going on with Ted Kord, Babs never seems to have eyes for anyone but Dick Grayson.

Which isn’t so surprising when you think about the fact that they’d dated on and off again for over a decade. At one point, they were even engaged to be married until their respective jobs pulled them apart yet again. That seems to be the constant in the superhero business unfortunately.

Even Dinah, who finally decided to throw caution into the wind, married Oliver Queen only for things to go horrifically wrong. It was one hell of an object lesson.

But, there are some constants in life, such as her close relationship through her father that has weathered the test of time. He figured out years ago that Barbara had been Batgirl but he let his daughter operate under the illusion that she’d successfully managed to pull off her ruse. Jim Gordon is the rock in the center of Barbara’s universe and she idolizes the man.

Though technically her uncle, Gordon was under no obligation to take in the grieving Barbara after her biological parents were killed and in many ways he’s the only real father figure she’s ever known. Jim has supported her through some of the hardest
times in her life.

Not many people in her line of work can boast having such an amazing parent either; something Dinah is quick to remind her about constantly. Not that she could ever take her father’s love for granted. Even though they don’t always see eye to eye with one another, there is always love between them.

How cruel then was it that when Jim needed her, Oracle found herself drawing up short. It was the loss of her father’s second wife and Barbara’s stepmother Sarah Essen-Gordon that threatened to shake her seemingly unshakable father down to the very foundations. There wasn’t anything Barbara could have done but it didn’t mitigate the guilt or pain of watching her father grieve for his wife. One of Barbara’s biggest regrets is that she never truly let Sarah know how much she truly cared for her and that she never told the woman that she did think of her as a mother and not just as a replacement.

Such losses are sadly commonplace in their lives unfortunately.

Aside from the death of her parents, the first real loss Barbara remembered was that of Jason Todd; the young man who wore the Robin mantle after Dick retired. Jason had been a mouthy little shit but she’d enjoyed spending time with the young man and had even tutored him at one point. The sudden death of Robin coupled with her own recent paralysis had brought home to Barbara just how precarious their lives were.L like acrobats trying to keep all the plates spinning while balancing on razor blades, eventually you’re going to get cut, or something is going to drop.

When the criminal known as Bane broke Bruce’s back and forcibly brought his career as Batman to an end for a time, it was Azreal who stepped in to temporarily become Batman. Oracle found herself attracted to Azreal and harbored a fairly sizable crush on the man but his own insanity and unstableness made it impossible for any kind of relationship to work out between them. Eventually even Azreal was killed by two of his own Rogues. Life just seems to stalk superheroes but it’s perhaps an expected end to their short, violent lives and no one seems to be immune. After having discovered that her close friend and so-called ‘internet buddy’ Ted Kord had died, it just drove home the fact that none of them were immortal and that eventually, the job will catch up with you and more than likely be the death of you.

Yet despite the loss and violence to be found in her chosen line or work, Babs does try avoiding dwelling on the dark aspects of life because in the end, it does not good. If suffering the loss of so many people has taught her one thing, it’s that you can’t live your life surrounding yourself with what-ifs and negativity. Of course, that is easier said than done. But at least she has people in her life that are more than willing to set her back on her heels if she gets too far out of line or too mired down in depression and negativity.

And there are people like Cassandra Cain who Oracle took under her wing and subsequently became an almost maternal figure to. Cass couldn’t even speak before she came to Babs but with lots of patience and support, she helped Cassandra learn to verbalize herself. Barbara has never felt the overpowering urge for children but Cass fulfills a part of Babs that she didn’t even realize she possessed.

Maybe it’s a ‘Batgirl’ thing but Babs is especially fond of the two women who eventually took up her mantle. First Cassandra became Batgirl and Babs supported her in it but when Bruce died, Cassandra surrendered the mantle and Stephanie Brown of all people decided to become Batgirl. At first, Oracle was uncertain about letting Brown carry on as Batgirl. After all, she’d died once and had been ‘fired’ from being Robin by Batman himself.

Which might have been part of why she finally supported Stephanie in being Batman. Because there had been a time years ago when people had told her that she was not fit to wear the Bat symbol.

Loyalty is an integral part of Barbara’s personality. It’s not something easily bartered but when given, it is very hard to break. Blame it on her upbringing in a cop’s household and seeing how important the bonds of trust are in the police force or perhaps it’s because of her time as a Bat but such things are not so easily trifled with for her. Which is why she will bleed and die for her team members and do the truly unenviable things if that’s what is required to keep them safe; evne if it’s against their own will.

The fact that so many people kowtow to Bruce is also a major source of frustration for Oracle. Even when she was ‘just’ Batgirl, she’d never blindly followed Batman’s orders without question. And now that she’s matured into her own superheroine, she’s even less likely to let Bruce skate on just his say-so and intimidation tactics.

She’s gone to the line before with superheroes and if she believes enough in her side of the argument, she’ll go again.

Yes, it’s created strains between people at times, Bruce and her team included, but it’s never gotten to such a place that irrevocable differences have been reached.

When she turns up in Keeliai to find she’s been absconded to some exotic world, she’s not going to be the happiest of campers of course. But she’s been in far stranger positions and isn’t the type to lose her cool in an intense situation. The lack of realizable technology will be worrisome to say the least since she’s most comfortable sitting in the middle of her information network trying to gather every bit of information she can on a situation but that will be only a momentary roadblock in her way. Oracle is nothing if not resourceful and will find a safe position to situation herself in until she can begin to figure out just what her next plan will be.

Getting home of course is that plan but she is not so foolish as to offend their ‘hosts’ by stating that to anyone’s face. Better to move quietly and by creating as small a disturbance as possible, which is her primary form of tactics and one that has served her well over the years.


Appearance: Babs is a woman of about five feet and seven inches when standing. She has medium length bright red hair and green eyes. She generally dresses casual when in her off hours and business casual at times. Despite having been confined to a wheelchair for years, Barbara is extremely fit. She constantly works at physical therapy to keep her muscles from atrophying and pushes herself just as hard as her fellow compatriots if not more.

Reference picture: Here

Abilities:
Oracle is one of the most elite hackers in the world. Barbara has yet to find a system she cannot crack and over the years has made plenty of enemies breaking into some of the most elite systems in the world including both criminal organizations and even the US government. She’s been known to crack the most ‘impregnable’ systems and funnel away funds from criminals without compunction and at least at one point in the past use them as a smokescreen to hide her own identity when she fooled the US government into tracking down the position of the infamous criminal Blockbuster while they were searching for ‘Oracle’

She is a genius who possesses a near perfect eidetic memory. What does this mean exactly? It means she can remember every detail of every day in vivid detail. Sufficing to say it’s nowhere near as cool as they make it out in the movies. She remembers every horrible thing that’s happened to her and those around her. The soul-crushing sights she’s seen are etched in her mind forever and can never ‘be unseen’. Yes, it does give her an edge but when you’re sifting through minutia, it can get tiresome after a while.

Having been trained by Batman himself, Barbara is a proficient in both investigation methods and stealth. This means she has much more situational awareness than the average citizen and with the aid of her eidetic memory, can quickly scan and process a situation in order get a read on things all the more quicker. One might think it an oxymoron to think of a someone in a wheelchair as being overly ‘stealthy’ but there are many kinds of stealth including those in both the physical and digital realms.

Even before she took up the Batgir mantle, Barbara was training in martial arts. She’s always excelled at them and considering it made sense for his daughter to be able to protect herself, Jim never made any bones about trying to stop her when she went about her martial arts practices.

Bruce took the foundation she had and built upon it by teaching her things like street fighting and boxing to go with the judo fighting style she already knew. When she was put into her wheelchair, Barbara had to learn a whole new way of fighting and learned at the hands of one of the best: Richard Dragon who himself had been confined to a wheelchair. It was there that she learned the so-called ‘Dragon Style kung-fu’. Being confined in a wheelchair definitely alters just how one can fight and she’s altered her fighting style to match. Filipino stick fighting or ‘Escrima’ is a centuries old martial art that uses reinforced sticks of bamboo or even composite materials in a bludgeoning method. It’s similar to other stick fighting techniques and can be seen everywhere in combat ranging from the bully clubs police offices use to being seen even in wartime situations to this day.

Because her escrima sticks are compact and easily stowed away, not to mention innocuous looking, people automatically dismiss it and the so-called ‘cripple’ in a wheelchair which suits Barbara very well.

Inventory: She will have arrived in her customized wheelchair which has uplinks for her various tech and an technologically advanced interface. It also has compartments on it for the escrima sticks she carries with her.

Escrima sticks: Reinforced sticks used in the Filipino fighting style known as Escrima
Laptop: Top of the line laptop running an OS Oracle wrote herself.

Suite: Metal sector: The reason she would be most comfortable in metal sector is both because it most closely resembled her own urbanite home but also because it is the most technologically advanced and Barbara is always happiest when she's surrounded by tech. She would also get along best with the inhabitants of this sector over some of the others because she too prefers to keep to herself and is mistrustful of unknown people. There is also the fact that she is used to dealing with difficult personalities and because of that has learned how to handle interpersonal relationships with politic ease that would be the envy of many politicians. The fact that she is wheelchair bound would obviously make quarters on the first floor the most practical and easy for her to get in and out of.

In-Character Samples:
Third Person:

The clock on her computer mockingly told her it was 4:36 in the morning and the only light in her apartment was the gleam of the monitors bathing her workstation. A cup of half-drunken and now thoroughly cold tea sat beside Barbara but she didn't notice it. The mug's entire existence had been forgotten as had most everything else because Oracle was on a roll.

She'd been attempting to hack the foreign bank where half of Gotham's crimelords kept their money in an undisclosed off-shore accounts for hours now. Dinah wasn't there to scold her and bully her into doing things like eating regularly or cutting off on the caffeine by a decent time either which was probably why it was almost five and she'd been up hacking non-stop for six hours.

It was only when the alert for her email chimed that she looked away from the computer screen.

I know you're still awake, go to SLEEP, BABS!

The fact that Canary was emailing her just to nag her about sleeping probably said a lot.

YOU'RE emailing me to order me to go to bed? Is this opposite day now? When did you learn how to sent emails, huh?

Dinah's illogical mistrust of computers was legendary. When they'd first started to work together, Black Canary hadn't even been able to turn the damned thing on.

Some pushy woman kept insisting I learn :) Now go to sleep, Barbara! Don't make me fly out there and put you to sleep

Holy crap! Emoticons and everything! Oracle found herself smiling at the screen.

Nag, nag, nag. How you can harangue me from across the country, I'll never know. I'll be a good girl and go to sleep, *MOM*! Wouldn't want you to miss your beauty sleep by coming out here to put me in a headlock.

She quickly typed in her reply and sent it off into cyberspace. Still, there was no denying the logic in Dinah's nagging however so with some reluctance, she started to withdraw from the banking system and covered her tracks after inserting a line of code that would run undetected until she used it as a backdoor to get back into the system.

The computers would remain online and running throughout the night to keep track of her security network even while Barbara went to bed. She wheeled her way into her bedroom and engaged the breaks so she could push over into her bed. Then began her night time ritual of searching her legs for signs of injury or ulcers. One thing you never thought of when you had use of your legs; pressure ulcers. They were the bane of any paraplegic's life and though Barbara was fastidious in her hygiene and care, sometimes they just happened. Thankfully, tonight she could find no sign of the nuisances and was able to crawl into bed guilt free.

She'd just closed her eyes and gotten comfortable when she heard the unmistakable ping from the living room informing her that she'd gotten another alert. It was probably Dinah, right? Surely if it was important they would have tried to contact her on the comms, right?

....what would it hurt to check? Better safe than sorry, right? Sighing, Barbara used the rings that hung over her bed as leverage to sit up so she could transfer herself back into her chair. She'd just check to make sure everything was okay and then she'd go back to bed.

Network:

[When the camera feed came on, Barbara was completely out of the field of vision. Her voice came off to the right and was somewhat tinny thanks to the fact that she was so far away from the mic. Call it force of habit but Oracle did not just go flashing about her real identity to be seen, even in some strange place people kept telling her shouldn't even EXIST.

All of her tech had gotten thoroughly wet in her 'dip' in the ocean so she didn't have access to her voice modulation software or even her video equipment. She was obviously female but that was the only clue she was willing to offer up just yet. In the darkened room, even the color of her hair and skin tone would be hidden.]

So, would anyone like to tell me the truth? You'll forgive me if I find the concept of being told I'm on top of some turtle swimming in the ocean just a bit hard to swallow? The...creatures who dragged me from the ocean said this city is called Keeliai? It sounds almost Hawaiian in origin, are we perhaps on some Pacific island?

[Oh, Babs, wait until night falls and the shell starts to glow noticeably. That would certainly help put to rest a lot of her suspicions.] If anyone could give me some viable information, I would appreciate it.

[With that, the feed would go dark as she turned off the camera and shut down the system.]