Alexandria

"Eidolon, we possibly could have dealt with. Or Tattletale could have. Even Legend, possibly.  Alexandria was something else."

- Taylor, Cell 22.4

Alexandria is a member of the Triumvirate, the former second-in-command of the Protectorate and leader of the Los Angeles Protectorate team. She is also known in another identity as Rebecca Costa-Brown, the Chief Director of the PRT.

Personality
Alexandria has a perfect memory, and as such, she has a vast understanding of many concepts. Her indestructibility and high position give her an extremely strong sense of confidence. She has an "air" about her, causing people to get out of her way, treat her with respect and hush their speaking. Those who talked to her felt like they'd better shapeup or else, different from the aura other 'triumvirate' members gave off.

She was initially unsure of her power, but willing to risk getting in the way of Behemoth's attacks in the hope she could survive them.

She dislikes lying as a result of her experience in a hospital as a child - "She was being poisoned by people with smiles on their faces." - and, early in her career, she was uncomfortable with Legend allowing the Siberian to kill a civilian as bait. However, she grew increasingly comfortable with such tactics as her career progressed. Legend noted that since being injured by the Siberian, she was the most willing of the Triumvirate to "take the hard, ugly road." However, she refused to condone allowing the Siberian to go free in order to further Cauldron's goals. She claimed that all that she has done was to save lives.

Reputation
She was considered one of the top heroes in the Protectorate, and as the organization's enforcer. She headed a Critical Action Squad that deployed to trouble areas.

Appearance
As Alexandria = Alexandria is a tall, muscular woman with long, straight black hair. She is missing an eye, but it is replaced with an advanced prosthetic visually indistinguishable from a real one. She stopped aging shortly after adolescence. Rebecca was visibly hispanic, at least while out of costume.

She wore a black costume with a skirt, knee-high boots and elbow-length gloves. It was black and light gray, with an image of a tower in the center of her chest. The costume featured a wide, heavy cape that flowed over her shoulders and draped onto the ground beside and behind her. She designed the costume herself to be elegant without being attention-getting.

Her costume originally included a visor that covered the upper half of her face and held back her hair. Following her first encounter with the Siberian, which left her with one eye missing and a permanent scar, she began wearing a steel helmet whenever she went out in costume, closed and somewhat similar to an ancient Spartan helmet in design. Her hair spilled out of the back of the helmet, and her eyes were visible.

In her civilian identity as Rebecca Costa-Brown, she was the Chief Director of the Parahuman Response Team. There she often dressed in a suit and jacket. She wore makeup to give the appearance of aging. Taylor described her as "the sort who could be forty but looked like she was in her late twenties".
 * -|Her Secret Identity=

Abilities and Powers
Alexandria is considered the epitome of 'flying brick' capes. The triad of flight, strength, and invincibility reoccurs often enough, in enough variations, that it's frequently referred to as 'the Alexandria package' in honor of her. According to Doctor Mother, Alexandria is one of the strongest parahumans that Cauldron recorded as of 1988.

Invincibility
Alexandria's body is virtually invincible. She could endure flame hot enough to melt sand into glass. Alexandria's power didn't defend against abilities that made heavy use of inter-dimensional phenomena. Eidolon made use of this vulnerability to destroy her clones. She was, however, capable of being pushed around by external forces.

Alexandria's seeming invincibility derives from the hardening and strengthening of her tissues that places her body in a form of stasis. This manifested when she first gained her power and increased as she grew, eventually keeping her from aging. Thus despite being a 'perfect' example of parahuman potential, she is as warped as any deviant case. Her nails and hair stopping growing; her body is more like a statue than flesh. However, Alexandria was still capable of feeling pain when facing an opponent capable of injuring her.

Flight
Alexandria can fly at incredible speeds, fast enough to appear as a blur to viewers. She can fly so fast when zig-zagging between buildings that people couldn't follow her with their eyes, though Skitter could still sense her movements with her bugs. Even in Eidolon's time-distortion bubble that slows objects to a tenth of their speed, Alexandria could still fly as fast as a running person. She could also fly fast enough that when entering the PRT ENE Headquarters via the roof, photography or being spotted wasn't a risk for her.

Doctor Mother claimed in 1988 that Alexandria could fly at speeds that matched Legend. However, Legend in 1988 has not yet tapped his full speed, developed his powers, or tested his limits. During the Battle against Echidna, Alexandria's clones could not catch up to Legend when he purposefully flew in loops and circles to find opportunities for taking aim and firing at Echidna's clones.

During the Battle against Khonsu, Pretender in Alexandria's body, as well as other capes, managed to get from Japan to Cape Verde in under ten minutes. However, Pretender (and possibly these other capes) specifically required the help of Doormaker. Wildbow confirmed that Doormaker cut the distance down significantly without dropping Pretender directly at Khonsu; he did not specify the portal's location.

Enhanced Strength
Alexandria has vastly enhanced strength; only a few capes such as Chort could surpass her in strength. She is strong enough to crush concrete in her hands and lift the 9-ton Leviathan into the air. Alexandria in Brockton Bay slammed Leviathan hard enough onto the ground to cause an earthshaking crash.

Using Alexandria's body, Pretender toppled Behemoth hard enough in New Delhi to tilt the nearby lightning rod created by the  Chicago Wards. At the Cauldron Compound, he also held up a full third of a ceiling made out of steel, concrete, and granite over a single room; this ceiling section that looked ready to collapse was part of a 1.73 million-ton structure currently being held up by walls and a column. Pretender could only buy time for Golem to build the necessary supports for this ceiling section because the ceiling slab continued to crack and break down due to its own weight and lack of support in other spaces.

Other Abilities
Alexandria has near-perfect memory retention, and accelerated processing and learning. As a result, she has the ability to sense emotions based on body language. However, those who could hide their emotions through expert training or the use of abilities of their own could still fool her. She could also disbelieve the evidence of her own senses as any human could. She never forgot a detail, absorbed information quickly, reading two pages of a book with a glance, and she learned quickly, retaining everything she picked up. She knew most commonly spoken languages, no less than ten styles of martial arts, and she could match some of the best non-tinkers in the world when it came to computers. This gave her a high rating in the Thinker category.

Her mental faculties were offloaded to her Passenger; this rendered her immune to the effects of those such as the Simurgh, and were the source of her Thinker abilities.

Background
Rebecca contracted cancer in her teens and grew increasingly disaffected as a result of her perception that people were lying to her about her chances of survival. She was approached by Doctor Mother as an early test subject for Cauldron in exchange for service.

After gaining her powers, she spent two years guarding her doctor while earning a reputation as a superheroine. Alexandria first appeared in Los Angeles.

Eventually, Alexandria would be introduced to the other members of Cauldron. She presented a proposal she had come up with: that they form a team that followed the regulations and stipulations of the United States government, led by Hero or Legend. She told them that it was part of an eight-stage plan to incorporate parahumans into society before telling them how they could set up the organization she was proposing. Her civilian identity would take a position in the government to quietly steer things.

She lost an eye to the Siberian during the same fight that led to Hero's death, and required Eidolon's powers to heal her enough to use a glass eye to maintain a normal appearance. Even he was unable to reattach the lost eye.

Shortly after this Alexandria had an incident where she publicly killed a villain during a desperate situation, setting a precedent. She also settled as the leader of a smaller team based in Los Angeles.

Story Start
Alexandria was an internationally recognized cape.

Post-Leviathan
Met at the oil-rig to discuss the situation of the world.

Post-Slaughterhouse Nine
Alexandria participated in the Battle against Echidna. She was duplicated, creating Apocrypha, whose appearance revealed her secret identity. Ignis Fatuus revealed her and her colleague's secret membership of Cauldron.

She made a plea with her fellow heroes and heroines not to reveal the information. Surprisingly she was backed up by the warlord Skitter.

Post-Echidna
After Tagg unsuccessfully tried to have Skitter captured by outing her secret identity, Director Costa-brown threatened to go to Saint to get the access to Dragon's technology just as Dragon and Defiant were threatening to withhold the same from the PRT.

Following the revelation that she was a parahuman, she was demoted to deputy director while she trained her replacement. She had no authority, but rather obeyed the new Chief Director's instructions. Alexandria gave her notice that she intended to resign, but continued with the Protectorate until that time.

She confronted Skitter after she turned herself in to the PRT. In order to properly control the teenage villain, Alexandria tried to engineer a situation that would make Skitter try to attack her. This would then allow her to arrest Skitter and shore up her standing in the PRT.'''Wildbow: Alexandria set up a perfectly arranged situation, aimed at cornering Taylor and effectively gaining control over her as a playing piece. It had nothing to do with moral event horizons. Her psychoanalysis and read of Taylor was perfect, but she wasn't dealing with just Taylor. Wildbow: This is explicitly stated in story.''' Logos01: I... can't agree with that tbqh. Wildbow: This is explicitly stated in story. chc4: Are you talking about the bug emotion offloading, or just not being able to anticipate her reaction to her friends "death"? Logos01:I get that, and I recall reading it. Logos01:But it doesn't *fit*. Wildbow: Taylor defies being read, and actively fools powers and senses, because of the way her mind works.Logos01: It's not about being *Read*. Logos01:I'm talking about profiling. In the forensics sense. '''Wildbow: It fits fine, Log. Had it not been for this, Alexandria would have won with her approach. Wildbow: 100%. Wildbow: Nah. See, look at it from Alexandria's perspective. She wants to provoke a reaction, push Taylor to the state she was in pre-undersider, where Taylor is withdrawn, beaten down, and desperate. She wants a degree of lashing out, but in the ineffectual 'Carrie school shooting' sense that Taylor was approaching in chapter one. Alexandria and the tools were in place to deal with that. Wildbow: Had taylor broken, raged out, in the sense of chapter one, they would have had a scapegoat for everything that happened in Brockton Bay. She could have tapped Cauldron resources and been on the alert. But Taylor offloaded all cues to her shard. She appeared far calmer and more subdued than she was, Alexandria calibrated her approach with this in mind, and things tilted off differently Wildbow: Taylor was absolutely not a killer at that stage, unless she had a reasonable target, and Alexandria presented herself as that target. Alexandria looked at Taylor, talked to her, and saw someone different. All of the profiling and information worked -against- her. Wildbow: Much like Contessa stumbling when her path to victory fails her. Marcy: basically although alexandria is a powerful thinker, she wasn't the right thinker for the job Wildbow: Well, she was, but leaning too heavily on a thinker power can screw one up when the thinker power isn't equipped to analyze a problem. Wildbow: (See basically every thinker in story) Wildbow: By presenting herself as a target, knowing who Taylor was [note: broken knowledge], gauging Taylor's state [note: broken gauge] and being able to anticipate the attack as it came [note; broken thinker power/read, again] she would have turned the situation around into a massive victory. Wildbow: There was no Imp-like read on Taylor where "The bugs act funny around you while your emotions are riled up" came up and the PRT took particular note of it and put it in the files.''' Marcy: yeah it's pretty subtle chc4: So if Taylor actually had a swarm with her in the room, Alexandria wouldn't have died. That's...ironic - Conversation with Wildbow archived on Spacebattles What the heroine failed to account for was Skitter's ability to offload her emotional responses to her swarm, much as Alexandria did with her own mental abilities. This caused a severe miscalculation when Skitter snapped after thinking that Alexandria had butchered one of her friends and suffocated the fallen heroine with bugs, leaving her brain-dead. She was widely reported to be truly dead.

She later seemingly returned from the dead in the Battle against Behemoth, where it turned out that her invulnerable body was possessed by Pretender. She also participated in the battle against Khonsu.

Gold Morning
Her body was finally destroyed during Gold Morning.

Quotes

 * "Threats is the wrong word … But English is a limited language in some ways. There's really no word to articulate what I mean. A threat with a measure of inevitability to it. A promise? Too feeble. People break promises too often. A curse? A malediction? Too... magical. An oath? The connotations are wrong. When I say I'll do something, I make it happen." ~ Alexandria to Skitter

Trivia

 * The etymology of Alexandria effectively means 'Defender of Man'.
 * Humans generally stop growing around the age of 25 when the final stages of bone development end with the clavicle fusing into a solid piece. People continue to have some bone development after this as a natural process of upkeep and adaptation.

Fanart Gallery
Visor (Early)=