Rove
Rove in Atlas Park
Rove in Atlas Park
Rove
Player: @Fox Lee
Origin: Natural
Archetype: Tanker
Security Level: 37
Personal Data
Real Name: Valentina Wade Rowe (will not be disclosed even upon pain of death)
Known Aliases: None
Species: Human
Gender: Female
Age: 27
Height: 7'0" (213.5cm)
Weight: 408lb (185kg)
Hair Colour: Dark red
Eye Colour: Reddish brown
Biographical Data
Nationality: Australian
Occupation: Unemployed vigilante
Place of Birth: Rowville (Melbourne, Victoria)
Base of Operations: Kings Row
Marital Status: Attached to "Her Squishy"
Known Relatives: None
Known Powers
None
Known Abilities
Extremely tough and powerful, and highly practiced with archaic weaponry (mace, axe). Natural instinct for combat. Extremely bull-headed.
Equipment
None of note.
Notes: Has acromegaly.

Once a rebellious teenage runaway who fell in with the Warriors, the Australian woman known as Rove (Veronica Wade Rowe, which will not be admitted even under pain of death) is not one of your picture-perfect heroes. Laidback and easygoing, she spends more time poking fun at spandex and capes than being a paragon of virtue and justice - mostly out of the philosophy that a hero who takes himself too seriously is only one step removed from a villain. She has a good sense of morality, though - and more importantly, freedom - and is always happy to run a rescue or stop a mugging.

Rove is openly disgusted with Longbow and the Freedom Phalanx, one of the few things she's serious about - she knows that, if things had gone a little differently, their self-righteousness and short-sightedness could have driven her to be a villain. In the interest of helping novice heroes who refuse to align themselves with the Phalanx, Rove founded the Supergroup Second Solution, for "Heroing without the Wank".

Rove was originally an Invulnerability/Super Strength character on Freedom, with whom her player later became unhappy - she loves Super Strength, but on a Tanker it's tediously slow in getting any decent attacks. She was having way more fun with it on her Brute, Red Barren. She still wanted Rove to be Natural-origin, though, since the whole concept was that she was just a very powerful thug (if a good-natured one); so, in the end, she went for one of the Tanker weapon sets, and found she loved how War Mace looked and played.

Rove was also Fox's early attempt to play someone close to herself, because she wanted one character she could relax while roleplaying; someone who could make all the stupid jokes she wanted, and yell comic book memes as she runs into battle, and such. And pick on American English, and look at people densely when they talk about "soda" and "flip-flops" and "candy". Hence, she became an Australian.

Personality

I will not go quietly
I will not accept your rules
gonna live with myself
before I live with any of you
- The Whitlams, I Will Not Go Quietly (Duffy's Song)

Rove is very laid-back. Oh, she's loyal and protective and all that, but she also spends a lot of time poking fun at stereotypical cape-and-tights type heroes - as she sees it, a hero who takes heroing too seriously is only one step from a villain. Part of the reason for this is that she used to be extremely dumb - a runaway child who fell in with superpowered-ly bad company, she was a real rebel-without-a-cause through her teenage years. Indeed, she first came to Paragon City in order to join the Warriors. Fortunately she woke up at a certain point, probably after realising that carving an anarchy symbol into your chest is a really bloody stupid thing to do.

She's still extremely anti-authoritarian, however - she's just more sensible about it now. For all her light-heartedness, she has a deep concern about the way things are done in Paragon City, feeling Freedom Corp and the Freedom Phalanx have an incredibly naive view on right and wrong. Protecting your home ground is one thing, but staging invasions into independent nations because you have a grudge against the leader there? That's not cool. And has a particular scorn for the Freedom Phalanx's whitebread, squeaky-clean image, and for the fact that Ms. Liberty - supposedly a martial artist - wears a miniskirt and heels in combat.

Rove also has a distinctly dorky side, particularly when it comes to her crew of "squishies" (that is, people who are fragile rather than mountainous and tanky). She just can't help but find them adorable. The more she players protector to her "family" of outcasts, the more she becomes a kindly, slightly goofy big-brother figure - more often than not, it's actually the perpetually sensible Aymie who keeps Second Solution ticking the way it ought to.

History

Rove has had an eventful history, though more in the living than in the telling. What's truly remarkable is that she's very much a river which rose above its source, as evidenced by her hometown. Rove began life as the child of two very unremarkable parents living in a very low-end socio/economic situation, who fought constantly and split up before she was ten. Possibly because she was clearly more intelligent than her parents, she quickly became an angry, embittered child; she blamed all of her problems on her parents, the government, the world at large… anybody who annoyed her, really.

Rove's rebellion came to a head when, as a teenager, she ran away from home and joined a motorcycle gang - at first being laughed at, but accepted with surprise when she proved herself to be strong, nearly impossible to kill, and too stubborn to know the meaning of fear. It also helped that she was a huge child - she was over six feet tall at fourteen - who kept growing well past adulthood, when it became evident she had acromegaly.

After a history of drinking, fighting, trashing herself and her bike, being at odds with the law and generally causing trouble for herself and everybody around her, Rove eventually ditched her gang when she heard of "bigger things" taking place in America, specifically involving superpowers and mutants and all. It would be a better place to test how tough she really was, she reasoned. Arranging some entirely illegal transportation, she hopped ship to Paragon City, where she almost immediately fell in with The Warriors. Respected for her combative nature, her determination and her skill with blunt trauma weapons, Rove acquired herself a superbly-crafted mace and dived head-first into the Warrior lifestyle.

Her history is a little vague beyond this point, and she hasn't exactly explicated what made her ditch the Warriors and turn (anti)hero. She simply says that she realised she was being a god damned idiot, but there might be some particular catalyst that she keeps private.

Affiliations

Rove is the founder of a Supergroup named "Second Solution", which isn't actually registered with Freedom Corp as much as it is noted by them in case it becomes a problem. It's essentially a vigilante-powered group which takes in young orphans and runaways - particularly metahumans who can't control their powers - and shelters them whilst showing that there is a way to work for justice and liberty without buying into all the Freedom Corp bulltwang. She's particularly closely affiliated with Dragon 5, aka Aymie, aka "My Squishy", to the point of being more or less infatuated.

She also, despite her hatred for Freedom Corp and the Freedom Phalanx, has a pretty good relationship with the Paragon Police department. She came to find a lot of normal humans within its ranks who feel that super-powered folk look down on them, or don't have time for everyday crime in their pursuit of big, glorious victories. Rove has worked closely with the PPD in the past, preferring to aid them rather than spend her time making contacts or dealing with Hero Corp, and feels a certain kinship with many of them - indeed, this closeness is responsible for many an instance of her vigilantism "escaping" their notice.

Powers and Abilities

Rove has no superpowers, the most natural of natural characters. She's an incredibly tough warrior, born of experience and built-up resistance, who uses a large slab of metal to inflict blunt force trauma until whatever she's fighting is dead. That's the long and short of it. In addition, she has what might be called "tactical knowledge", but is more accurately street smarts, instinct and a certain bastardly cunning.

Equipment

Due to her lack of a real "super" power, Rove utilises various devices pilfered from Paragon's police, Pocket D or miscellaneous contacts to aid her in travelling long distances. Because these are limited resources, she also prefers to use trains and the teleportation system wherever practical.

Weaknesses and Limitations

Stubbornness, short-sightedness and and the tendency to worry about the details after the fact.

Rove also experiences some symptoms associated with acromegaly - mainly headaches, muscle aches hypertension - which might be indicative of larger problems down the track. She refuses to be overly concerned with this, however, nor to change her lifestyle because of it. Mostly she uses it as an excuse to make Aymie give her back-rubs.

Other Notes

Trivia

  • To Fox's absolute joy, a brief interview with Rove was featured in the official Warriors Backgrounder. This makes her particularly happy because it effectively canonises the existence of female warriors.
  • Her pants and gauntlets aren't mechanical bits - they're the remains of her beloved old motorbike that bit the dust years ago. She liked it too much to just throw it out, so she pulled it apart and made it into armour.
  • Yes, her name is a pun. I'll let you figure it out.
  • Due to the tremendous gap between Rove and her parents, and the fact that her acromegaly is not evident in either of her parents' family histories, some have speculated that Rove was likely adopted.
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License