“Hooahh!”

 

“Dreadnought means Dread-Not, as in I got nothing to fear!”

 

“Let’s break stuff!”

 

“Engage!”

 

–Various battle cries from Dreadnought (not a conclusive list)

 

Name:

 

Lilly Siegel 

 

Supername:

 

Dreadnought

 

Lilly’s supername represents her intent to follow in the footsteps of her father and surpass him just as the dreadnoughts followed and surpassed the ironclads.

 

Average Grade:

 

C+

 

Lilly is gung-ho when it comes to ERC…but not so much her other classes. She does, however, have straight A’s in all her history classes, even in Mr. Rich’s class, and he grades like a demon. You have no idea how loath he is to hand out A’s, yet in Lilly’s case even he couldn’t deny that she deserved it. Lilly knows her history, as can be expected of a girl that can tell the difference between an Essex class and Independence class carrier with a glance.

 

She doesn’t like to sit still, doesn’t like to read, and doesn’t like to research. Quite a few of her assignments aren’t turned in on time.

 

ERC

 

3

 

Lilly wants to follow her dad into superheroics and takes the same emergency response class all the kids that want to follow their parents into superheroics take.

 

Lilly loves ERC. She likes combat both in theory and in practice. She’s got a great head for strategy and tactics and will make a great superteam leader one day. I just hope all her teammates like being named after warships and military jargon.

 

Personalized Curriculum:

 

ERC with a focus on superhuman combat, ERC with a focus on support, Robot Armor Development (RAD)

 

ERC concentrations come in three forms–a focus on superhuman combat, which teaches how to neutralize threats and apply an appropriate amount of force for a given emergencies, a focus on rescue, which teaches how to mitigate the damage done by emergencies and remove victims from emergencies, and a focus on support which teaches

 

Typically, students are enrolled in just one concentration. Diabla is in ERC with a focus on superhuman combat because she’s very good at suplexing badguys into the ground. Flying Robert in is ERC with a focus on rescue because he’s very good at removing people from danger with his worldtunnel. Puppeteer is in ERC with a focus on support because he’s very good at transporting his teammates across an emergency zone.

 

But some students have powersets that work too well across concentrations for them to only take one concentration–case in point, Lilly. Her Dreadnought armor lets her switch in an instant between a combative role and a supportive role. She can go from being a 10 foot gunner to a 3,000 foot kybernetic generator that can empower and heal her teammates over miles.

 

It’s a challenge for Lilly to work across two concentrations, but she likes being challenged.

 

Hooahh, Dreadnought. 

 

And speaking of which, it comes as little surprise that she’s in robot armor development. The girl with the robot armor is in the class that teaches about robot armors. But the class has a purpose for Lilly beyond teaching her how to be a better operator. She’s the daughter of Colby Siegel, famed Argentinian robot armor designer and operator of the Ironclad armor. Lilly is a total daddy’s girl and wants to one day design her own armor to surpass the Dreadnought armor he made for her.

 

She’s pretty good at it, if she’d just remember to stick to the design she has to turn in for class and not leave work half-finished off a fit of inspiration. She wants her designs to be perfect, but you can’t learn unless you make mistakes.

 

Contact Education

 

The Piper Museum, Paladins de la Justicia, Ishikore-Dome Shrine

 

Lilly loves history. She is to robot armor and naval warfare history what Tanya Abelman is to aviation history. In fact, they both can often be found playing Hercs and Gabes together at lunch. The Piper Museum in Mainline City gives her the opportunity to see various history artifacts first-hand. The museum is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside owing to subdimension technology. It has a room that contains an entire Bozo armor carrier–complete with fully-stocked Bozo armors. Guess what her favorite room in the museum is?

 

Lilly’s father was a member of the Argentinian superteam Paladins de la Justicia. They’re Lilly’s contact educators not only because she’s planning on joining them as soon as she graduates but because they field a lot of robot armor operators and guardian giant pilots. 

 

Lilly won’t be able to follow them out on missions until she graduates, but functions as a reserve emergency member and a mechanic for their machines. She’s known the machines since she was a little girl. She could fix them up with her eyes closed.

 

Ishikore-Dome Shrine is a Japanese shrine dedicated to decommissioned guardian giants. While Lilly’s armor is commonly classified as robot armor, it can alter its size through subdimension technology to become a towering guardian giant, thus having her put hours in at the shrine maintaining the guardian giants is educational. It also gives her the chance to network with guardian giant pilots and robot armor operators around the world. Students of exoskeletal augmentation from around the world come to Ishikore-Dome to study its giants. No other place on Earth has as many well-preserved guardian giants, theri inner mechanisms unchanged since the day they were decommissioned. The shrine provides a way for students to not only learn about the cultural history of guardian giants (and Lilly loves history) but the developmental history as well.

 

Hyperstasis:

 

Energy Manipulation Enhanced by Robot Armor

 

Successor of Ironclad

 

Lilly’s father, Colby Siegel, is the designer and operator of the robot armor Ironclad, named so because his massive armor, which at fifty feet blurs the line between robot armor and guardian giant, looks similar to that of an old ironclad warship. The Ironclad armor prioritized overwhelming and accurate firepower with two massive force projectors mounted on the arms and several smaller projectors mounted on the body. It’s famous “broadside attack,” based on the Lifebeam attack commonly used by the Lifemen that patrol the universe, fires all its force projectors to catch and slow the opponent before concentrating them all to a single point.

 

If any of our blaster kids complain about drilling “large to catch, small to hit,” remind them that it’s a tried-and-tested strategy that goes back a long way.

 

Colby planned to upgrade his armor by incorporating a subdimensional mass-link–and as much as I want to take credit for inspiring him with my BLANKET system, he was actually inspired by mass-link pioneer Magic Hat. But he didn’t get the time. His wife Deborah became pregnant, and Colby retired from superheroics to be with his daughter. But he kept at it while raising Lilly. It became his hobby to fiddle with the blueprints in his spare time. One day, there would be an Ironclad mk 2. It would just have to be a day far into the future.

When five-year-old Lilly asked her dad why he kept playing with his funny-looking dollie on his computer, he told her that it was a special doll, one that people rode around in to protect good people from bad people. Lilly asked if she could play with it. It looked like a fun doll. Colby smiled and told her maybe she would, one day, but this doll wasn’t the kind of doll girls typically liked to play with.

 

But Lilly proved not to be the typical kind of girl. She quite liked to play with dolls that looked like the dreadnought armor–though she learned they were called “action figures.” Dolls were nice, but they couldn’t shoot stuff. She wanted toys that could shoot things–missiles, hands, their heads, anything so long as it fired.

 

She was daddy’s little girl. She loved learning about machines from him. She was incredibly intelligent and very precocious. She understood everything her father told her. When Colby ran out of things to teach her, she studied machines on her own. Her favorite machines were the ones that derived from hyperstasis. Hyperstasis was so random and confusing. One person got this power, another person got that power, and still another person got a metapathogen–and no one knew exactly why. But in machines derived from hyperstasis, “supertechnology,” there was sense. There was sense in a telekinetic generator that helped a quasimorph hold their body together. There was sense in robot armor powered by an electricity-controlling superhuman’s own energy. 

 

Superpowers didn’t make sense, but the things people built to harness and control superpowers–those things made sense, and Lilly loved them for it.

 

When Lilly was six, Colby began to wonder if he was making his Ironclad mk 2 for the wrong person. He started taking her to see his old teammates in the Paladins de la Justicia and their hangar. Her eyes lit up like Christmas lights to see all the machines.

 

Around the age of seven, Lilly started to become interested in military culture and history. After the Worlds War, Earth’s nations largely phased out militaries for superteams. Many superhumans felt they were mistreated by the military. They felt that they were treated by the military as living weapons, not as people. Several sued the US military while the war was going on for being asked “off the record” to drop bombs on civilian populations.

 

They compared how the military treated superhumans to how the private Skyman Air Force treated their superhumans and found they liked the latter far more than the former. Superhumans walked away from the military, and as they left the balance of martial power went with them.

 

Martial power became decentralized, localized, and individualized. Units were replaced by superhumans with unique powers and abilities. The chain of command was replaced by teamwork. Uniforms were replaced by costumes.

 

The decline of traditional military structures was perhaps inevitable with the rise of superhumanity. It’s easy to convince, or coerce, a man to die for his country. It’s substantially harder to do the same to a superhuman. But some believed military uniformity had tactical benefits that superteams neglected in their fierce individualism. Uniformity brought redundancy, reliability, and predictability. Estimates could be made about unit performance. An X number of a certain kind of unit could be expected to perform a certain action in Y amount of time. 

 

Starting in the 1970’s, superteams began to adopt uniformity to enhance their tactics. The trend for “military superteams” would increase through the decades and peak in the early 1990’s. Lilly believes military superteams have the right idea. Her favorite superteam (next to her father’s Paladins de la Justicia, of course).is Uncle Sam’s Allies (USA), a team formed by Uncle Sam and led by Hydromen and Black Terror veterans of the Worlds War who found the tactics of the US military agreeable even if they disagreed with their methods.

 

When Lilly was eight years old, she underwent hyperstasis. One day, while watching a documentary on the battle of Hoshi island between the Hydroman Navy and a menagerie of aquatic based kami, she started to feel funny–but in a good way. She felt excited and full of energy as she watched giants made out of water slug it out with dragons. She leaned out of her chair…and then leaned a little more…and then a little more.

It wasn’t until after the narrator was wrapping up the surrender of Admiral Yamamoto that she realized she wasn’t in her chair anymore–she was floating.

 

And she was blue–completely blue from her hair to her toes.

 

Before then, Colby was uncertain whether the Ironclad mk 2 was going to be for him or his daughter, but he kept working on it because what worked for one would work for the other. Now that Lilly was what Statesmen doctors called “a graviton-based humanoid,” he knew that Ironclad mk 2 had to be scrapped entirely.

 

His next armor would be very different from the Ironclad. It would be completely customized to suit his daughters nascent powers. It would be powered by her, operated by her, and mastered by her.

 

His next armor wouldn’t be an Ironclad. He would go beyond what he had previously built–not just improve the Ironclad but reinvent it, revolutionize it. He would use mass-linked subdimensional technology. The armor would be able to grow, shrink, and repair itself by tapping into an armory tucked away in a subdimension.

 

The time for ironclads was over. Now was the time for dreadnoughts.

 

Excitable Energy Being

 

Lilly is made of energy–both literally and metaphorically. She’s a go-getter fireball and is physically made out of energy.

 

Energy, under conventional physics, is the ability to do work. It is not a substance but a quality a substance can potentially have. Under conventional physics, it is impossible for something to be “pure energy” as much as it is impossible for something to be “pure loud” or “pure weight.” But conventional physics only serves as a model for the conventional portion of reality most people interact with. Beyond that, different models are required to explain natural observations–such as 

 

Lilly is made of an energy field and clusters of gravitons within that field. Her energy is based in gravitation and, for some reason science cannot yet explain, appears blue. 

 

It has been noted that Blue Angel’s wings, which are made of gravitons, are the same shade of blue as Lilly’s body. The significance of this, if any, is unknown. It could just be that blue is the color of gravity. Why not?

 

Lilly is not a quasimorph, though she shares similarities with them. Her mind is imprinted on malleable energy, but she experiences none of the notorious moodiness quasimorphs are known for. She is able to alter her size and uses this in combination with the subdimensional mass-link feature of her armor to grow to titanic heights, but she cannot make her body flow. She cannot, for instance, stretch her arm across the room while keeping the rest of her body stable. She cannot absorb energy as an energy quasimorph would be able to. She cannot split her body apart.

 

To the touch, Lilly feels like warm glass. There’s no skin, therefore there’s nothing that gives to the touch–just a force preventing whatever is touching her from going further.

 

While it may seem Lilly is physically limited compared to a quasimorph, she has a few advantages. The biggest is that it’s comparatively easy to create an exoskeleton augment. Her stability vs that of a quasimorph allowed her father to build her the Dreadought armor. Lilly can also “ground” herself. For most of us, a force acting on us creates a reaction. It doesn’t matter how strong you are. Steel Dolly can lift a battleship over her head, but if you push her, she moves. If she gets in a car, she moves with the car. Lilly is different. She doesn’t –have– to move unless she wants to. If she’s in a car, she can choose not to move–and go right through the back of the car tearing a hole in it. If she’s pushed, the force pushing her doesn’t act against her. It acts against whatever is next to her–or even boomerangs back against whoever is pushing her. When in the Dreadnought armor, she can apply this property throughout the armor creating a warrior who really really can’t be budged.

 

Another application of this power is that Lilly can travel about 1000 miles (the exact number varies by latitude) per hour without moving at all. This is how she does it–she cancels the effect of Earth’s gravity acting upon her. She thus, relative to the planet, is perfectly still while everything else moves 460 meters per second in the direction of the Earth’s rotation. But relative to everyone weighed down by gravity, Lilly shoots off in the other direction while everything else remains “still.”

 

She can also do this to other people. Burning Bright was subjected to this during a sparring session and described it as feeling similar to Martina’s ippon seoi nage.

 

The Dreadnought Armor

 

Designed by Lilly’s father, the Dreadnought armor is mass-linked to a subdimension using principles similar to that of my BLANKET system. Lilly can summon it to her with a thought, though she prefers to summon it with a finger snap and battle cry, usually DREADNOUGHT ACTIVATE! It alters its size to match Lilly’s. She grows, it grows. She shrinks, it shrinks. It can also use its mass-link to repair itself and adapt to whatever situation is at hand. There are always more weapons in the subdimension. If Lily doesn’t have the right weapon on hand, she soon will.

 

The Dreadnought armor is entirely powered by Lilly’s energy. There’s no engine, not in the armor, and not in the subdimension. This allows the entire armor to be one big weapons system without any room having to be taken up wiring or power sources. In this way, it’s more like the plate armor knights used to wear in the middle ages than a suit of robot armor. It’s a hunk of metal, just with a bunch of potentially moving parts. This gives the Dreadnought armor an interesting property–it can’t be stolen or hacked. A person without Lilly’s power trying to operate the Dreadnought armor can’t so much as make the lights come on.

 

The Dreadnought armor has seven modes, each designed to give Lilly a different role in combat. The ultimate strength of the Dreadnought armor is that it’s modes let Lilly synergize with the different powers and tactics of her teammates. Lilly can make great superteams even better. 

 

Armor Modes

 

Corvette

 

This is the Dreadnought armor’s default mode–a robot armor filled with enough weapons and tools to make the 4 foot 11 Lilly (she swears on a stack of Bibles that she’s 5 foot–amusing since she’s a practicing Jew) tower at 10 feet. It is essentially a smaller, more mobile version of her dad’s Ironclad armor. Since Lilly powers the armor, it doesn’t require an engine which means it can be smaller and lighter than the Ironclad while providing the same performance.

 

Corvette mode is for quick attacks and feints. Lilly hits and moves, hooks and releases. 

 

Submarine

 

This mode suspends the armor within a subdimension–not the same subdimension that houses the armor’s shunted mass and extra weapons, because if Lilly was ever targeted the armory could be damaged.

 

Lilly appears as an ethereal “ghost” while in the subdimension. In this state, she is invulnerable to conventional physical attacks but can strike through extradimensional “torpedoes.” Lilly’s energy powers are derived from gravity, which operates on the bulk across dimensions, meaning she can snipe the third dimension while sitting in the sixth or what have you.

 

If the standard subdimension doesn’t provide enough “cover,” Lilly can “dive” to reach subdimensions more distant from our reality. This makes Lilly perfectly invisible without so much as a trace within our reality but at the cost ofcreating lag between this reality and the one she inhabits. Extradimensional communications will only reach her minutes after they’ve been sent. Torpedoes can only be aimed at where she thinks a target will be.

 

Compared to the other modes, submarine dramatically cuts Lilly’s offense. In terms of energy output, it is the weakest mode as Lily’s energy is tapped to power the extradimensional systems. It’s torpedoes are nowhere near as powerful as her standard force projectors. But its ability to dive through dimensions makes it useful for sneak attacks and quick escapes. It is easily the best mode for defense. It can also be used for reconnaissance, but the lag caused by diving means there is a better mode…

 

Patrol

 

Patrol mode is for what you think–patrolling. In this mode, Lilly shrinks herself down to the size of a Knights of the Kingdom action figure, 5.5 inches.

 

Matthew Roy calls this mode “fairy mode.” Lilly calls him “Idiot.”

 

This mode channels Lilly’s energy into a jammer field which distorts light to make it seem like Lilly is flying in a swarm of clones and a powerful force field that surrounds Lilly’s body. Lilly can attack like a living bullet, colliding through obstacles with even greater force than that produced by corvette mode’s force projectors, but combat is not the primary purpose of this mode. This mode is designed to confuse opponents by quickly replacing an armored giant with a swarm of tiny warriors and to spy.

 

Patrol mode comes with a photite field that can make Lilly look exactly like a teddy bear or an action figure. You’d be amazed how many supercriminals let their guards down to pick up a random teddy bear on the ground. You’d think with Steiff, god of teddy bears out there foiling supercriminals that they’d be on their guard, but no…

 

Frigate

 

In this mode, Lilly and her armor grow to a height of 50 feet matching the size of her dad’s Ironclad armor. Though the greater mass and weight makes frigate mode slower than corvette mode, this comes with the advantage of stronger weapons systems. Powerful close-range variparticle generators in her palms activate and add to the firepower of her force projectors.

 

Frigate mode is designed to rush-down and neutralize single targets with a close bombardment of overwhelming firepower. It’s the brawler of the Dreadnought modes. A point-blank barrage of variparticle generators and force projectors can blast the quarks out of pretty much anything.

 

Destroyer

 

The jump from corvette mode to frigate mode quintuples Lily’s height. The jump from frigate mode to destroyer mode decuples her height making her 500 feet tall (technically, 502 feet, and Lilly’s very insistent about those two feet). In destroyer mode, Lilly is 100 feet taller than the infamous giant monster God King (well, 102 feet taller).

 

Destroyer mode turns Lilly into “the lovechild of a mountain and a tank,” as Matthew Roy puts it. Mobility is minimal, but the idea isn’t for destroyer mode to move, the idea is for it to fire, and fire, and fire. As frigate mode is for close combat, so is destroyer mode for range combat.

 

Destroyer mode activates twin dimension rippers placed in the eyes of the armor. These rippers use Lilly’s gravity-based energy to destroy objects by splintering them across dimensions. Higher dimensions have lower levels of energy–some have energy levels so low that being stretched across them is akin to being a candle flame placed in an ocean. The very energy of an object’s atoms is pulled away.

 

Supporting fire is what destroyer mode gives, and it gives like it’s Christmas morning. Advance targeting computers fused with Lilly’s nervous system allows her to aim her shots even when her teammates are in pitched melee. Dimension rippers, variparticle generators, force projectors–very few things in the multiverse can withstand concentrated fire from all three of these weapons acting together.

 

Cruiser

 

Cruiser mode doubles the height of destroyer mode to bring Lilly to 1000 feet–and it’s 1000 feet right on the dot. Lilly doesn’t bother trying to fudge the number. She knows 1000 feet sounds nice as a simple, rounded number. You can’t just put down “K” for your height when you’re 1001 feet.

 

Cruiser mode is nearly immobile, but it’s not supposed to move around, it’s supposed to park itself in an area and control it. Cruiser mode is designed for Lilly to use it to defend teammates and fortify their positions. All the impressive weapons in destroyer mode are shut off and energy diverted to one massive weapon–a telekinetic generator. Lilly uses this generator to create forcefields and move allies around a battlefield similar to Adam Brigham’s tactics. If her teammates are in danger, they can turn a fight around by huddling around Lilly in cruiser mode and using her forcefield to buy time to recover and come up with a plan.

 

This isn’t to say that cruiser mode doesn’t have any offensive options. A forcefield is essentially a very concentrated force projector, and previous modes show how effective force projectors are as offensive weapons. Supervillains are a lot less threatening when they’re pinned to the ground by an invisible wall.

 

Carrier

 

Carrier mode is when Lilly feeds as much of her energy as can be safely allowed into her armor, ballooning it to an impressive 3,115 feet. That’s only two feet shorter than the peak of Mt. Chimneytop (Though Lilly swears on a stack of Bibles that she’s actually 3,117 feet in carrier mode).

 

Carrier mode is about throwing all of Lilly’s energy around supporting her teammates. Matthew Roy once asked her “Why is this mode called carrier mode? I don’t see any planes or giant robot birds taking off from your shoulders.” Lilly answered him “Idiot! You’re the plane!”

 

Lilly essentially becomes a giant power battery. The telekinetic generator from cruiser mode is modified to project a kybernetic field. The brute power of cruiser mode’s forcefields is replaced with finesse. Carrier mode doesn’t create fields, it creates auras, each aura designed to meet the needs of Lilly’s teammates and compliment their abilities. The strong become stronger. The fast become faster. Wounds close. Teammates in the grip of telepathic attack are guided back to clarity.

 

If Lilly’s team is under bombardment, she uses cruiser mode to shield them. Then she uses carrier mode to empower them for the counterattack.

 

Carrier mode doesn’t move–like at all. The leg joints are locked. But Lilly isn’t a sitting duck. She can, for a fraction of a second, tap into the dimensional diving ability of submarine mode without breaking the kybernetic field. This allows Lilly to quickly teleport and reposition the bulky (to put it mildly) carrier mode.

 

Behavior:

 

Exemplary 

 

Lilly is a font of enthusiasm and optimism. She doesn’t sleep at all now that she’s made out of energy, but her father says she barely slept even when she was a basic. She hates being still. She always has to be doing something. File her under “kinesthetic learner.”

 

Though you might think such a strong type-A personality would have some behavior problems, Lilly has been perfectly fine at Martin’s. This might be due to her father. They’re both very similar in temperament, and in him Lilly probably found a model for how to constructively apply her personality.

 

She’s great in ERC. Everyone wants her on her team not just because her powers are great for team tactics but because she’s very encouraging. She cares about everyone in her “fleet.” Making friends comes easy to Lilly. Her closest friend is probably Tanya Abelman–both tomboys, both Jewish, both history nerds. But Lilly is far more exuberant than Tanya. Kalani likes Tanya but can’t stand Lilly. She finds her annoying.

 

Lilly is somewhat of a sore loser. This ship does not like getting sunk. She sometimes gets sulky after losing in ERC. She’s the type to always request a print-out from Thespian after a sparring session to find out where exactly she went wrong. This can sometimes lead her to overcorrect in tuning her armor–for instance, after losing a sparring match against Burning Bright, she tuned her force projectors to better target small, fast-moving targets at the expense of long-range accuracy. She then tuned her force projectors to the other extreme after losing to Adam Brigham.

 

Lilly is a very organized person. She loves order, hates chaos. Her least favorite part of ERC are the little twists Thespian puts into the programs–a “stop the pickpocket” program suddenly being interrupted by an attack from the giant monster Ufola. Lilly feels cheated every time Thespian springs a surprise on her. She wonders why she goes through so much trouble to plan for ERC programs in the first place.

 

Lilly hates ERC surprises, but she knows that deep down they’re important–no plan survives contact with the enemy, and there’s not a single side in any war that acts with perfect information.

 

Appearance:

 

Lilly has been made out of energy since she achieved hyperstasis as an eight year old. As blue as one of Blue Angel’s feathers, she’s sometimes mistaken for a Thule and for that reason tries not to wear any black or yellow as those are colors strongly associated with the Fishermen and thus with Thule. Her eyes and hair are as naturally blue as every other part of her body, but she uses photite to dye them red.

 

Lilly likes to dress like a WAVE from the 1950’s–short sleeved white dress with a long white skirt. No cap though–she wears a headband instead. She thinks they’re neat. She probably picked it up from Vapor Riser. As one of her history teachers, Vapor Riser is one of her favorite teachers.

 

The Dreadnought armor retains its general appearance regardless of mode. The size and internal systems change dramatically, but the look is conserved. The Dreadnought’s appearance lives up to its name. The armor’s legs are sloped and hatchet-shaped like the prow of a battleship. The body is angular and square like a battleship’s hull. On each forearm is a massive rotating force projector with an appearance like that of ancient 12-pounders. Smaller force projectors are arranged like gunports on the body and legs. Power-condensers on the shoulders have the appearance of smokestacks. The eyes, which are Lilly-blue, look to most people like insect eyes or golf balls. What they’re supposed to look like though, are old radomes.

 

On its back is a “spinal column” which serves to distribute power throughout the armor and regulate its mass-link. This column looks like a mast–one bar is seen across the legs,  a longer one across the torso, and a small one behind the head. 

 

Lilly flies a flag at the top of the mast. It’s-what else?–the Martin’s logo. That’s our Dreadnought!