Team Eight: Origins Series

Venda was having a nice lunch with a friend when her life took a wrong turn. She and her friend were held hostage, and when the payoff didn't arrive in time, she put herself between her friend and harm. Dying wasn't pleasant, but waking up in a mainframe took some getting used to. Venda uses her connection to the data stream to learn how she died and who was responsible. Once that little task was accomplished, she set out to gain revenge on the ones who had killed her in such a vile and public manner. Her little revenge adventures gain attention, and soon, there are members of the cluster hero teams standing in front of her mainframe, asking if she would like a pardon in exchange for a little light espionage. How can she resist? She can have a body again if she joins Team Eight.

Maira had just gotten her first job, was getting ready to go to university, and was hoping for a bright future with a good job and a few kids. All of that crashed to a halt on the day her shop came under fire, and she was kidnapped to be tortured for months by a serial killer. Getting free of him was her first true accomplishment as a hero, and she nearly had to kill herself to save other lives. She survived, they survived, and she was given accelerated healing, which activated a gift that no one in her family had ever carried before. Listening to anyone, anywhere was a skill that got boring quickly. Talking into her target's limbic system and having it reply to her was far more interesting. The mind couldn't lie, and she used it to her advantage.

Lore began life on a restrictive world where her options for a future were rapidly running out. With the help of family, she escaped and started a new life with her son. Six years later, the world and organization that gave her sanctuary want something from her. They want her gift to work for them. Seeing the details of her entire future and history has always been something to adapt to. Using it for the greater good is something she does on the sly, and crafting suits for heroes is something she does for family. Her life is full, but it is about to become everything she ever imagined. She has seen it all happening, after all.

Duulahar grew up knowing that her adoptive mother had killed her birth mother, or at least, that is what was on the video that her father kept showing her. It was not the most pleasant of upbringings. Her father decides to break a lifetime of habits and send her shopping in his treasured sports car, and she knows that her dementia-laden mother is the target with her as the scapegoat. Her father is not particularly subtle. Kidnapping her mom is a reflex, but Duulahar knows that putting distance between her father's hypnotic talent and those in his way is all that she can do to keep them alive. Her talent for small holes in space will not help her here. Her stubbornness versus her father's evil.  Who will win?

Brneary lived a life of luxury in preparation for responsibility. One night that should have been a celebration turns into national horror, and she is the sole survivor. Waking in the hospital when no one else even left remains behind, she grieves her family and then finds out that there have been... changes. She is left with a huge corporation, a vast personal fortune, and a family of thieves and assassins who cling to her as the last of her line. They help her gain control over the gift that rises, and while learning, she finds out that her world is even more twisted than she had imagined. Generating armour from anything she touches is not a skill that helps when personal betrayal hurts her worse than any projectile.

Max was raised with a purpose, but her accelerated development had nothing to do with it. She was born to be a Demyani, a Girl Bringer. In a community full of men who could only generate boys, she produced a hormone via her passive presence that tipped the scales and made girl babies enter the families. Her extreme height and immense strength were secondary characteristics to her place in her adoptive family. She brought the girls. Life was routine, but she had a plan for her retirement when her family no longer needed her services. That plan was set on its edge when she meets an investigator from the Cluster Team Project. She is a candidate for Team Eight, but she has to strike a balance between being there for her family and going off-world to be there for everyone else.