LogFAQs > #968194044

All kidding aside, I wanna take a BRIEF aside to comment on the general atmosphere in the wake of this session. Ive said before that Lush is the most interesting PC in the campaign, and in the span of a few hours (for her), she witnessed her boyfriend cheating on her with Cheetah, returned to Zonn Zorr after a week and found that her role as head chef in the mess hall had been usurped, AND Pixie had been taken hostage by Madame Xanadu in Oblivion. Again, you could say that Lush was upset about this. Enough to go a rampage in the mess hall kitchen and stab Jaime, thus furthering the divide between Lush and Pepper that started very early on in the campaign. I bring all of this up because in those days, a lot of Peppers motivations were spite-driven against Lush, which helped to inform her early relationship with Cheetah.

Now, I crafted Pepper as a nerdy kind of character. Her whole origin story is relatively classic supervillain stuff: scientist experiments in a lab, gets too ambitious and runs afoul of their own experimentation. And given that she gained metahuman powers from her lab accident, it only made sense to me that she would look up other metahumans who experienced similar incidents. Victor Fries (aka Mr. Freeze), Pamela Isley (aka Poison Ivy), and important to THIS write-up, Barbara Ann Minerva. Now, Dr. Minerva was not a lab scientist, but still, she was an anthropologist whose devotion to her work led to some (to Pepper at least) murkily-documented events that transformed her into an anthropomorphic cheetah. Pepper knew this, and while this may have been a perfect excuse to give ME cause to pester Cheetah regularly, it also gave Pepper a reason to kind of hover around this woman who she knows and harbors an inherent respect for.

Fangirling aside, I enjoyed the early days of the campaign with Cheetah, if only because it felt like she had a lot more in common than initially anticipated. Cheetah had been rejected by Snapper at this point, and she blamed Lush for this, which meant Pepper was all-too-willing to join forces to get revenge on the woman whod tortured and harmed her on multiple occasions at that point. Given Peppers chemistry background, she plotted to make serums and pheromones and all that good stuff, to try and wrest Snapper away from Lush and back into Cheetahs warm embrace. This goes back, in a way, to Pepper feeling a big brother/little sister sort of connection with Snapper in the early campaign, so naturally shed want her big brother to be with a smart and driven scientist, rather than a violent psychopath.

It was during this plotting that Pepper did her best to get Cheetah to open up to her and share her experiences. Now, Cheetah isnt exactly the most open book, and she is still a supervillain, and everything that entails. Still, those conversations, especially with the mindset that Pepper is the greenest of greenhorns and has NO experience with ANY of the things Cheetah has experienced in her life, were really nice. There are events much later on that give complexity to Barbara Ann Minerva, but even in those conversations, when she was recounting her first love, or the events that led to her transformationit broke my heart a little bit. Pepper is very much about female empowerment, and hearing this story about a woman as strong as Cheetah (who once flipped off Superman and Flash excluding her from their big charity race), still feeling weak and abused in how she became the way she isit struck a very familiar chord.

It was also during this time that we got to see a cute side from Cheetah too, because in her plotting against Lush, she needed to be able to use her own desk for chemistry stuff, but her tail kept getting too excited and in the way. She wound up doing the whole villain seduces (but not in a sexual way) the hero thing with Spirit to get him to give her some muscle relaxers to keep her tail from being a problem. However, said muscle relaxers werent just limited to her tail, and the end result was Cheetah getting hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh as fuck. It was here that she talked with Pepper about her first time having sex, and she even let Pepper do a LITTLE bit of petting, which was much appreciated on my part.

Things went off the rails for a little bit after that for two reasons, because the field team went to Central City and discovered Wonder Woman, as one of that citys Furies. Naturally, revealing this information led Cheetah to drop her Lush vendetta and fixate on killing Diana ahead of all other goals. The problem with that was that Im a very emotional role-player, and I tend to like nice, pleasant situations where people are just friendly with one another and theres minimal. Not ZERO friction, but like, not the sort of violent screaming matches that can sometimes occur. And given that Pepper is very big on female empowerment, and she knows Wonder Woman is a strong female role model whos only evil because of brainwashing, she was always going to try and push against Cheetah with regards to her anti-Wonder Woman vendetta.