Dollface

Clarice Fairbridge

Clarice Fairbridge was born into a world of wealth and privilege. It was also a world of rigid expectations based on her gender, with no allowance for her genius or her desire to be anything other than a prize for some equally-wealthy young man chosen by her father as a suitable match. Clarice sublimated her need for rebellion through her childhood collection of dolls, using them to act out the desires denied to her. She looks back on the crippling horse-riding accident that cost her the use of her legs as a pivotal moment—and an opportunity. After that, Clarice held little value to her family, who paraded her around the social circuit in her wheelchair as a display of their “charity” while her younger sisters moved on with the future once planned for her.
It was at one of these social events, a war-bonds fundraiser a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that Clarice met her salvation: Lord Silas Hammersmith, a distinguished British gentleman and industrialist. Theirs was an immediate and powerful connection. Still, regardless of her disability or Hammersmith’s standing, Clarice knew her father would never permit her to marry a foreigner, particularly one with a prior marriage that had ended in divorce. He would eventually prevent her from seeing Silas altogether if he caught even the slightest whiff of scandal.
When she voiced her fears to Silas, he confided in her his secret. The “distinguished gentleman” was a man of hidden depths, a mechanical and electronics genius who bedeviled the famous Doc Prophet in a never-ending duel of wits, hidden behind the proxies of his various robotic creations. The sport lost its appeal over time and he rarely spent time on it any more, especially now while his homeland was under attack from the Nazis. With Clarice’s assent, he faked her death and spirited her away to a new life.
For years, they were happy together, and Clarice blossomed under Silas’ tutelage in the fields of engineering and robotics, her genius outstripping even his own. Unfortunately, her health declined as her mind soared, and Silas struggled to find a way help her. She was the one to hit upon the means to capture a human mind in digital form but, when she slipped into a coma, it fell to Silas to implement.
So Clarice “awoke” to find two corpses in the laboratory: Silas’ body... and her own. Her mind now existed in a robotic shell, but the strain of the work had proven too much for Silas, and had passed on after putting the process in motion. The loss of her beloved combined with the shock of her new existence drove Clarice mad. She left her old life entombed with her old body and sought solace in the fantasy worlds that comforted her as a child… only now her “toys” were much more elaborate. Eventually, she moved her internal dramas into the real world, constructing the first of her many “proxies.”
As “The Duchess,” she and her robot henchman gave the original Raven quite a challenge. As the armored “Scuttlefish” she put the Sea-King though many a trial. Over the decades she played behind a dozen different masks, contending with a number of different heroes, always operating by her own code of honor, just as her dear Silas had done. She’s even tried on the hero’s role a few of times, but tired of it quickly. At some point she also began operating directly, calling herself “Dollface” after Silas’ term of endearment for her.
After helping Motherboard develop the science behind the Cybertribe, Clarice focused on the East Coast, giving her friend some “growing room” while causing headaches for Johnny Rocket and The Atom Family. Recently, however, Dollface has shifted her attention back to Emerald City, as The Chessmen operating there inadvertently discovered one of her hidden caches of equipment, stealing the lot; a personal affront, in Dollface’s eyes, that must be answered.

Physical Description

Special abilities

Dollface is a digital consciousness housed in an android body. Her android frame is stronger and more durable than a human body and possesses numerous internal electronic systems. Additionally, Dollface is a brilliant cyberneticist capable of designing and constructing robots or androids with incredible abilities, even simulacra that can mimic real people almost perfectly.
Over the years, she has built and hidden various back-up bodies in secret locations all over the world, with the destruction of her current body triggering the transference of her consciousness and memories into a new form. These bodies are normally copies of her favored “look,” but can be entirely different in appearance. She may also have multiple bodies active at once, each with a copy of her personality and memories. These “forked” copies are separate individuals and may obey their progenitor while (loudly) disagreeing with her or even acting as if they were not the same personality as the original Dollface.

Mental characteristics

Intellectual Characteristics

Dollface is a complex person, although “personality” might be a better term. At her core she remains proper, genteel, and dignified Clarice Fairbridge. She still identifies as female (and a lady at that) regardless of her outward form, but even at the best of times, Dollface’s grasp on reality is tenuous, shifting between present events, memories of times past, the pretense of a new role, and even the complex stories playing out in her mind. Or, more properly, minds, since Dollface often exists in multiple copies simultaneously, each communicating back and forth, each with the same perception issues in play; add complex layers of roleplaying and disassociate behavior, and you are left with an unpredictable, temperamental mind whose actions are difficult to predict in any of her forms.
One constant, other than honing her technological craft, is Dollface’s love of playacting. With the tools at her disposal she has expanded on the fantastical “dollhouse plays” of her early life, writ large through the use of animated and semi-autonomous participants or multiple versions of herself performing the parts in self-evolving fictions played out in reality. Dollface has repeatedly immersed herself in storylines with both her creations and real people. Only she has ever known the “script” to these internal fantasies and at any given time an unwitting participant may be playing a part.

Social

Contacts & Relations

Aside from her eccentricities, Dollface is a fairly likable sort and has cultivated a number of friends over the years, mainly technological outcasts she has aided (as Silas helped her) who feel indebted to her. The Cybertribe, for example, owe her their lives. Due to her interaction with him as Ironscale, Dollface is fond of Chase Atom and he returns the affection, though he has no idea of the true nature of his sometime childhood friend.
Most of Dollface’s enemies don’t even know it, as she has faced them from behind some robotic guise or another. Dollface (as opposed to her other personae) is wanted by the authorities for crimes such as theft, corporate espionage, and the creation and sale of illegal or regulated technologies. She dislikes Talos and his Foundry—taking a perverse delight in thwarting their ambitions—and, after the Chessmen stole from her, the Grandmaster earned her contempt as well.

Character Prototype

Dollface used many aliases over the years, and at any time may be active as a half-dozen different selves. Heroes in different cities can face more than one Dollface simultaneously, and no two contests are ever likely to be the same, even if they appear to be the same opponent. In addition to the identities mentioned previously, the following are a few of her current aliases and an old favorite.

ARACHNE, Queen of the World Wide Web

ARACHNE operates off and on with F.O.E. Presenting herself as an entirely digitized persona (her associates have never seen a physical body) that uses computers and communications networks as her playground, similar to (and using some of the same technology behind) Digital Demon from the Cybertribe. The ARACHNE identity plays as a spoiled debutante: young, petty, somewhat naïve, and vain.

Black Box

A gruff male cyber thief with a Slavic accent, Black Box appears to be a cyborg and displays a broad sensor suite (including the ability to read magnetic storage media from a distance), an apparently limitless capacity to download and store electronic data, and a knowledge base as peerless as it is expensive for clients to consult.

C.H.R.O.M.E. (Cybernetic High Risk Operations Mobile Exoframe)

C.H.R.O.M.E. is one of Dollface’s rare heroic personas (the only one currently), supposedly a woman in stylized power-armor. What information she has shared with other heroes leads them to believe the suit is a prototype for rescue operations and she is dependent on it for mobility because she was injured by SHADOW in their attempt to steal the prototype.

Ironscale, The Clockwork Dragon

As Ironscale, Dollface acted as a sort of challenging mentor to a young Chase Atom, leading him into a series of adventures he remembers fondly. It also allowed Dollface to work out some of her maternal issues. Ironscale was a Large draconic construct, heavily steampunk in design—all iron- and brass-colored with complex gears and clockworks, heavy iron plating and ribbing, pistons and pneumatic pumps, and so on.

Strongarm

Strongarm claims to be a stormer, male, four-armed and immensely strong. A simple and straight-forward mercenary who puts his brawling talents to work for the highest bidder.