Avery Fames

**Catherine Amy Vidicer** (born 15 January 1991), more commonly known by her alias **Avery Fames**, was a female metahuman, a resident of Albion, and a former citizen of the United States. Previously a member of the NAU's special forces, she later became an Abigail, and then an independent political assassin.

She eventually came into the employment of the politician Nicolas Fabian, who made use of her talents to kill off members of Magister William Eliwood Bartrich's cabinet, thereby removing anyone who might've had a stronger claim to succeed his position in the government.

## Appearance

Vidicer has been repeatedly described by both enemies and allies as having an incredibly generic appearance. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, an average height, a muscular physique and a warm, disarming voice. Later, after being blinded in her right eye and suffering severe damage to her left as a result of exposure to a laser wielded by Evelyn S. Retherford, her irises turned red.

Her forgettability is the result of a conscious effort on Vidicer's part to be as unremarkable as possible, thus making her impossible to pick out of a crowd, and allowing her to impersonate others extremely easily by simply emphasising certain vocal or muscular tics, or simply by wearing different clothes. This ability was so pronounced that with a simple change of clothes and mannerisms, Sophia Ashworth was able to meet Vidicer twice within the span of an hour without knowing that she'd seen the same person twice.

## Personality

Vidicer is a pragmatist who derives great pleasure from hunting the subjects of her contracts. To her, the act of killing someone is much less important than learning about them, playing a game of cat and mouse, and then finally closing in for the kill. In many ways, her personality reflects Evelyn S. Retherford's. Both of them are motivated by a desire to experience a "challenge", and completely disregard any moral, societal, or legal consequences unless they would directly interfere in their ability to pursue their quarry. They differ, however, in subtle ways.

Whereas Retherford wants to take on enemies which nobody else has found effective countermeasures against, and wants to fight entities that most would consider to be much more powerful than herself, Vidicer prefers to fight those that she considers to be her equals, intellectually and physically. She will gladly abandon a contract if it would presumably result in her death, whereas Retherford will be motivated by spite to keep trying, and to at least ensure mutual destruction.

Vidicer has an amiable personality and a frank attitude; most find her to be very likeable and trustworthy. She is an extremely good actor, able to completely revamp her personality on a whim. She lacks moral scruples, as evidenced by her explaining the presence of blood stains on her collar as being the result of domestic violence, in order to avoid admitting that she had been injured in a fight against Sophia Ashworth.

## Abilities

### Supernatural Abilities

Vidicer can cause objects to decay once they make skin contact with her. This ability can turn concrete to dust, inflict gangrene upon living organisms, et cetera. She can control the extent to which the targeted object breaks down, and can also control whether objects within the area of effect degrade or not. For example, she can remove a length of rebar from a building's wall by causing the stone around it to turn into dust without damaging the rebar itself.

Vidicer's ability has several creative applications. It allows her to walk through walls, drop through floors, and also walk "up" through solid objects by selectively breaking down everything except whatever material she is directly standing on top of. She can also break molecular bonds, transforming solid objects into hydrogen or calcium into carbon and helium.

When she inflicts her ability upon a living organism, the affected area suffers from severe gangrene, which increases in size and severity over time until the animal dies. Removing the affected flesh is an effective countermeasure, but her ability can metastasise throughout the body by travelling via the bloodstream. It takes several hours to several days for the victim to die, depending on the proximity of the original point of contact to their vital organs, the volume of decay affecting their body, and their general health.

Vidicer's ability is notably less powerful when used on living tissue and metahumans, though the more wounded and less healthy a person is, the more effective her ability is against them.

### Skills & Expertise

* **Close Quarters Combat:** Vidicer is an extremely skilled hand-to-hand combatant. She is adept with her fists, a knife, and a sword. Most unusually, she is an expert in mid-combat misdirection, subtly influencing the movement of her eyes, the tension of major muscle groups, and introducing bodily tics in such a way that opponents find it impossible to predict what she will do next, and constantly miss incoming attacks because their attention was drawn to some other part of her body that she deliberately activated in order to catch their eye.
* **Marksmanship:** Vidicer is a reasonably skilful marksman, though Retherford makes a point of saying that Vidicer has significantly worse hand-eye-coordination and reaction times than herself, albeit both of which are Retherford's specialties.
* **Acting:** Vidicer can easily change aspects of her personality, the way that she carries herself, and her appearance via makeup, lighting, and hair dye. She is careful to ensure that nobody that she meets ever manages to see her entire body, keeping certain angles foreign to them so that if they see her from that angle later, they will be less likely to recognise her. She can meet someone several times within the span of a few hours without that person ever realising that they saw her more than once, instead believing each encounter to be with a different person.
* **Stealth:** Vidicer's modus operandi when assassinating members of Bartrich's cabinet was to silently and inconspicuously kill all of their guards, and then stab them out in the open. She was able to evade detection in all of these cases right up until the death of her actual mark.

## Biography

Vidicer was born in the United States before the outset of the metahuman revolution. Her powers manifested after the establishment of the NAU, whereupon she enlisted in the military. She became a member of the special forces and an agent of military intelligence, assigned to information gathering and assassination details within Australia. The Abigail Institute eventually recruited her in 2016, and she spent two years with them killing politically significant and well protected metahumans. In 2018, she broke loose and became a private contractor, expanding the range of contracts that she could take on by no longer being beholden to the regulations of the Institute.

In early 2020, she was hired by Kimolia to perform a series of assassinations within Albion, after which she was transferred into Fabian's control, who overzealously used her to kill off all of his political rivals. She was specifically told to make each killing highly visible, so as to generate a media sensation that Fabian would 'solve' by betraying Vidicer and handing her over to the police, thus bolstering the public's confidence in his leadership. This plan, obviously, was not communicated to her.

On the 28th of May, a day after killing a prominent member of Bartrich's cabinet and hours before Bartrich's own death, Vidicer was tasked with killing the leaders of the investigation into the Fames Case, which was the name that the media had given to the killings that she'd committed. She was successful in dispatching Detective Laberche of the Albionite police force, but was unable to immediately finish off Abigail Sophia Ashworth, in spite of tracking the woman down a second time later that night and poisoning her, only to be chased off by Evelyn S. Retherford.

On the 29th of May, she arrived at the newly appointed Magister Fabian's manor in the middle of a party, with the intention of 'enjoying herself'. Her intentions were actually pure: she had no intention of killing anyone or acting in the interests of Fabian's protection. However, before noon, she found Retherford standing in Fabian's gallery. There, she cornered the Abigail and made light conversation, which Retherford interpreted as a series of clandestine threats. Vidicer then attempted to leave, choosing not to harm Retherford, only to be attacked by the Abigail, who was entirely motivated by boredom and dissatisfaction with the progress of her investigation.

The fight was interrupted by Kelli Ivananko, a temporary member of Fabian's security detail, after Retherford had been severely injured and inflicted with colossal amounts of Vidicer's supernatural ability. Retherford stole Ivananko's sidearm and used it to shoot Vidicer through the palm of the hand, after which the assassin chose to flee by melting through the floor and navigating off the premises via the catacombs beneath Fabian's house. She chose to do so, knowing that Retherford would waste away as a result of the wounds that she'd suffered during her fight against Vidicer.

Vidicer's identity was uncovered through the combined efforts of Magister Magdalene Clower of the Oversight Sequence, Chief Secretary Kyle Hearse of the Abigail Institute's Albion Major Branch, and Doctor Rain Casey Florette. Afterwards, through various means, Evelyn and Sophia Ashworth - who had been incapacitated by Vidicer's ability - regained their strength and decided to pursue her.

Vidicer, in the meantime, had booked a suite on the A.C.F. Viola, a luxury liner set to depart from Albion, with which she intended to leave Albion and go beyond the reach of Kimolia, who had previously been forcing her to work for them via blackmail material connecting her to the first few killings that she had conducted in Fabian's name, and which had been taken earlier that day by Ryuju Saeki and Christopher Morgan. Realising that the jig was up, she planned on escaping to the NAU or Reich in as timely a manner as possible.

A raid led by Vidicer's former squadmates (who called themselves The Avigilons) in the Abigail Institute - Reagan Ivers, Akio Ishikawa, and Violet Addaway - alongside Sophia Ashworth, Ryuju Saeki, Evelyn S. Retherford, and Police Captain Epley Ledeshire, stormed the A.C.F. Viola and cornered Vidicer in her room. She was shot in the chest by Captain Ledeshire, who had been sent by Fabian to kill her in order to cover up his involvement in the Fames Murders. She survived, albeit in a coma, while the Abigails aboard the ship managed to subdue the police.

The Abigails came to blows over what to do with the now unconscious Vidicer. The Avigilons wanted to help Vidicer get away from Albion, out of a mixture of personal loyalty, the knowledge that she had committed the bulk of her crimes under duress, and knowledge of what Albionite authorities would do to her if she was remanded into their custody, while Retherford's party (Retherford, Ashworth, Saeki) wanted to kill Vidicer immediately, knowing that doing so would cure the decay that they and Ryuju Saeki were suffering. Ishikawa passed out from exhaustion, Ivers was shot in the chest, and Addaway surrendered. Afterwards, Retherford's party shot Vidicer in the head while she was still unconscious, killing her.

## Trivia

* Vidicer borrows traits from several characters from an RP known as Voyage Through the Multiverse, of which Fames' author is a member. Her name and appearance are identical to those of a character known as Avarice, her supernatural abilities mirror those of the character Felicity, and her personality closely resembles that of Polly K. Delilah.