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52. White Lightning

Is White Lightning REALLY the 52nd best character out of EVERY NPC introduced in the campaign thus far? Probably not. She PROBABLY should be out before some of my honorable mentions, all things considered. But at the end of the day, this list is largely going to be populated by long-standing characters that we players interact with on a regular basis in our home base. Or major players who have multi-session appearances outside of Zonn Zorr. Or characters that might be coasting on their appearance in the first campaign. With that in mind, I feel like this placement is somewhat of an acknowledgement of all the quirky characters that got maybe one or two chances to shine, and deserve a chance to not be completely overshadowed by bigger personalities.

Why White Lightning specifically though? Well first off, I found her entertaining in our only encounter. We were on our second mission to Manchester, Alabama: the home of Kid Flash, and the city was all kinds of messed up. On our first mission, we found a school where most of the kids in town had been imprisoned and tortured to try and determine the identity/location of Bart Allen, aka Kid Flash. On this second mission, we got to explore the rest of the town, and witnessed the fascist regime that had taken control. Complete with book burnings. It was bad. And we were ALREADY tasked with tracking down an unfortunate young woman whod be captured by the Society forces in the town, so having seen the torture at the Manchester School, things were looking bad. In fact, you could argue that Manchester is almost entirely this bleak, concentration camp-esque setting with no levity to be had whatsoever.

Enter White Lightning. The first Manchester session offset some of the bleakness with the wacky return of Pinhead from Campaign 1, and the pretty fun introduction of Bagman. But this second trip through the town brought us into contact with White Lightning, who is practically the perfect in-session NPC for my character, specifically. See, I play Pepper Spray, who is an EXTREMELY rookie superheroine with chemistry-based superpowers and little in the way of combat ability. Im never big on the combat portions of our sessions, because Id much rather try to outsmart or outtalk an enemy than rely on my lacking brute strength. Furthermore, due to some issues in her past, Pepper has a feminist streak, or at the very least, she likes empowering other women.

White Lightnings whole deal is that she has this meta-human ability to manipulate men. And the party we had going into Manchester 2 consisted of myself, Minerva (Atlantean princess), and three boys: Artemis (a size-shifting dog), Brennus (a gay prince), and Spirit (an asexual doctor). Regardless of species differences, or the fact that Brennus and Spirit have no sexual attraction to women whatsoever, all three male party members wound up under White Lightnings spell (to an extent). So for me, it was kinda fun to be like one of the only sober people at a party, completely unaffected by White Lightning and helping to take her down. I should also point out that she was a fun enemy to interact with as well, because she spoke to the boys in this Betty Boop baby talk-style affect, which just gave a distinctive voice to her character.

Admittedly, the White Lightning sequence didnt go perfectly. The party was very spread out in terms of how we wanted to play the session, and we ended up knocking out unconscious twice, before I finally spoke with her and paid her off to develop an ally in the city. Thats kind of my characters thing: she believes in making in-roads with malleable Society member instead of just killing them outright. And White Lightning has a very interesting power, if we want to dethrone the NAZI ALLEGORIES THAT ARE CURRENTLY RUNNING MANCHESTER. Eventually, were going to head back to the town, and I think (or at least hope) that she will be a valuable ally to us moving forward.

Now, the other reason I rank White Lightning here, beyond just using her as the best of the best one-shot characters in the campaign thus far, is that I like Manchester. I feel like Im the only player in the entire campaign that has enjoyed it in either of the two sessions weve had there. Those sessions werent perfect, but I found them extremely fun, and Ill go to the mat to defend Manchester 1 and Manchester 2. Im probably the only person in the campaign that would even consider ranking a character from Manchester in their top 52 (and there are a couple other good ones that just didnt make my list), so yeah, Im going to give Manchester some love by highlighting my favorite character from the town.

Hint for #51: An ethnic minority.