Golden Age Charlie Cage

## Personality

Charlie is introverted, and tends to keep to themself. They struggle to open up to people due to their past and tend to act like they don’t care. This is in many ways true, as they are more or less amoral, and wouldn’t mind stealing a few hundred bucks from a bank if it helped them to pay the rent. However, they do in fact also care for people in their own way - they would not want to ruin somebody’s life or cause them extreme harm. For example, they would give money to a homeless person, or refuse to rob a small business who would be jeopardised by them doing so. They care deeply about their family, although they are not on great terms with their parents currently, as well as for animals, going so far as to take care of stray cats and dogs.

## Backstory

Charlie grew up in a nuclear family where they were an only child. They were never ‘popular’ as such, but they had several friends they were close to through middle and high school, and lived, for the most part, a happy childhood, using their quirk to play pranks and sneak into adult movies. They tended to fly under the radar for the most part, until they came out as trans. Whilst the pupils around them were for the most part accepting, they often felt excluded in school events that called for separation between ‘boys and girls’.

In their junior year, they began dating a girl called Selene. The two of them were very happy together for a while, going nearly everywhere together and texting late into the night. However, as time went on, Selene began to lie to Charlie, first about small things such as stories about her day. This slowly escalated into lying about what Charlie’s friends had said about them, causing them to withdraw from their friends and become extremely reliant on Selene. Selene’s manipulations continued to grow steadily worse, until it reached the point where Charlie begun to question if the world around them was real - if they were real. This went on until the end of their junior year, when Charlie stumbled across an article online about gaslighting. They begun to realise that they were a victim of emotional abuse, and broke up with Selene. The two did not speak again after that point, but Charlie as never forgotten the experience, and because of it, they struggle to trust other people, and tend to act distant and cynical.

It did not help that they did not feel particularly close to their parents, who they loved deeply, but who they felt distant from after they initially came out. In the years since, they have slowly worked on improving their relationship with their parents, who often struggled to understand Charlie’s experiences as a trans person, but also their cynical nature, as Charlie did not tell them about what happened between themself and Selene.

After leaving home, Charlie moved from the suburbs into the inner city to study Fashion and Textile Design at Colbridge Academy. They still find it hard to trust other people, but have made friends with some of the other students there and they are currently trying to open up to them more. They spend most of their free time working on coursework, doing odd jobs or just hanging out with friends. They are, for the most part, a normal student - with one clear exception.

They rent a studio apartment within walking distance of the university. In their first few months there, they struggled to balance their studies, spending far too many hours working at a local bar and also working at a coffee shop on weekends. When this all became too much, they remembered that when they were young, they would use their quirk to play pranks and go to places they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to go. They decided they would use their quirk to their advantage. They began making minor robberies here and there - only taking a couple of hundred dollars at each stop. They have continued this up until present day, often performing them when a larger, much more conspicuous battles are occuring. They don’t particularly care about good and evil, and just want to get on with their degree and pay the rent. If a hero or villain was to offer them a job with good pay, they would probably take it, whether that be collecting information, designing a costume, or simply cleaning up around the lair.

## Resources

### Specializations

Sewing, playing the air guitar, nearly being being late but just making it in time.

## Quirk

### Self-illusion

User can “disguise” themself by changing the way other people see them - however this does not alter their actual physical body at all.

### Versatility

- full body illusions are 10 turns

- partial illusions are 20

- both's cooldown is half of the usage time

- to copy you need to make eye contact, and you copy what they currently look like when eye contact is made
- you need to take more than 10kN of force to be forcefully changed back

- it DOES work on mirrors, reflections, scanners, and human eyes, but not on cameras

### Example

They make a shop employee and two other customers see them as a balding 56 year old man, and quietly steal some cans of soup, being disguised just in case they get caught. When they exit the building, they walk one block away.