CoX: Boss Rush

Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose.  This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.


All the power in the world doesn’t matter if your mind can’t bring it to bear. There’s this whole study of the way brains ‘chunk’ information, neuroheuristics, the way the brain sets up tools for learning and managing what it’s learning about.

Rush was able to make the system containing the hardlight point nanites – but she needed a heuristic to manage the information. The result is her immensely powerful, immensely flexible tech rig, a kind of super suit made to be lightweight, transportable, and heavily adaptable, as long as the wearer can manage to explain to the device what she needs.

The gamer nerd and the tech geek collided, and thus, the hero identity Boss Rush was born.

Boss Rush is a free agent, tech-suit hero. With dyed pink hair and a complex seeming armour suit – which she would indicate is technically, an armour platform – that she uses coordinates a variety of seeming light-based constructs to shield her allies, obscure them from enemy movements, and also, uh, project intense blasts at people.

When probed about it, Rush will explain that all of what she’s doing is with a cloud of nanobots that create tiny microprojectors when they act – the result being illusions that can look like, well

Her.

She’s very vain.

Anyway, she uses these projectors in the space around her – up to several meters away – to make targeted wireframe defense matrices, to make sensory assault systems, and to even make a full remote assault platform that can blast people with energy blasts. In the context of most superhero stuff, she’d stand out as one of those characters who does lots of utility stuff, but doesn’t do much direct physical confrontation. She is ultimately, when you talk to her on the ground, a short-ish young woman who doesn’t make a lot of eye contact and tends to think your ideas are stupid, but she isn’t physically forceful, doesn’t have the ability to punch walls and leave dents (unless she’s using a device to do that).

Also of note is that Boss Rush (Rush to her friends) doesn’t seem to talk. Any time people talk to her, she types out her answer on her phone, and holds it up for them to read. There is no current explanation for this.

Mechanics

Boss Rush is extravagently powerful for what she is. She’s an Illusion/Cold controller, and both of those sets are heavy outliers at what they do. Illusion/Radiation used to be the ‘Gm Soloist’ controller structure, and then when they got Cold, it was better. She even started out as a mechanical consideration: Hey, what does a illusion controller built for team and solo support look like? I’d seen builds that didn’t care about their team support powers, and so, I was curious.

Rush’s build is:

  • Soft-capped against Smashing and Lethal damage
  • Soft-capped against Ranged damage
  • Has permanent Heat Loss, Benumb, and Phantom Army
  • Has her defensive shields she can use to support the team; allies buffed with her shields in her fog get 21% defense
  • Had a functional endurance-compatible single target attack pattern that did meaningful damage

This is all very satisfying, though the build is undeniably expensive. It has PVP Set IOs, purples, and Archetype IOs.

If you want to look at the build, which has not been updated for the travel power updates in the current page, click here.

History

Boss Rush is a bit of an orphan child in my lineup. There’s no real history of her, no experience of playing her. She’s shown up to some team events and hung out, but aside from her specific affect, I don’t have a lot to her.

I like her a lot, she’s powerful, and that power brings with it a sort of casual swagger for social events. She definitely can make it clear that in the contexts she moves in, she’s got that Big Stats Energy. As far as her story goes…?

Don’t know. Don’t know much.

She’s got to be financed, somehow – maybe even with homemade stuff. I think for myself, I’d much rather her being someone using a limited reserve of extremely high-value machinery, like she has a cache of the nanoplex stuff, and it is mostly dedicated to being used to sustain itself. That explains why her illusions and stuff are wireframes, rather than ‘fleshed out.’ You know, reduce, reuse, recycle.

One thing about her I do know for a fact is that she’s got her own little SG, so I didn’t get bothered by other people, and so I could put a badge under her name. I’ve since used it to keep other characters tidy. She’s the SG leader and founder of Says Trans Rights.