Origin of the Character - DC Heroes

To fully understand the character and what he's been through, I feel like I should step all the way back. If you only want to know E's in-character backstory, then you might want to skip this post and any others with similar titles, but I feel like this is important to understanding the complexity of the backstory, so I include it for completeness.

As a few of you know, the character pre-dates City of Heroes. She (yes, "she", stay with me here) was first created for my DC Heroes RPG (Mayfair, 2nd ed.). A table-top, pen-and-paper game. The game was first started with a few friends back in 1992.

The first "big bad" I created for that game was David Styrm aka "The Night Lord". Cheesy name, I know, but trust me, it was appropriate cheese. :) He was a legitimate business man by day (CEO of Styrm Enterprises) with a secret identity as the leader of an underground criminal organization he called "The Nights". Any business problems he couldn't solve in the boardroom were taken care of in the back room. I based much of the character on David Xanatos ("Gargoyles"), Lex Luthor ("Superman"), and just a little bit of Doctor Octopus ("Spider-Man") and Frankenstein (the scientist, not the monster). As the Night Lord, Styrm appeared only on T.V. and such, wearing a black fedora, dark wrap-around goggles, and a mask across his lower face that featured a voice-changer. His grunts did all the face-to-face work with Styrm pulling the strings, supplying the funding, and creating the gadgets the Nights used to pull off their schemes. The hero group (back then called "The Shadow Squadron") quickly got the Nights' number and defeated Styrm's schemes handily. Okay. So Styrm needs powered flunkies. But Styrm's a creator and a manipulator, schemes within schemes, so what does he do?

Clones.

Well... sorta. See, the heroes were given quite a beating by Styrm's men, enough that they left blood and what have you. So Styrm collected DNA samples. But he needed flunkies *now*. So he looked for people that already had similar powers to the heroes, but at levels too low to make them heroes or villains in their own right. He sought out these people and made them an offer: join me, and I'll give you real powers.

Mutagenic radiation, gene-splicing, plastic surgery, genetic manipulation, and other torturous experiments produced copies of the heroes, each with similar enough powers to pass for the heroes, but each having some "freak" power that made them different. These became the "Night Captains", leaders of the rank-and-file Nights, answering directly to Styrm.

One of these, as you may have already guessed (or known) came to bear the code-name EVAC. She had Damage Transference (a "healing" power that takes damage from someone else and transfers it to the power-wielder), Warp (a form of teleportation where one opens a tunnel from one point to another and then steps through for instantaneous transportation), and Projectile Weapons (she could fling pieces of herself at targets to cause physical damage). At first blush, the heroes took her to be the weakest of the lot, but she became and has remained a huge thorn in their side.