Madame Guillotine

Jeannette Maveal seemed doomed to underachieve and disappoint, growing up the forgotten middle child of re­nowned physicians. While her brothers basked in their parents adulation for athletics and her sisters outshone her academically, Jeanette found herself absorbed in her family’s ignored legacy: the Golden Age French antihero, Guillotine, who helped free France during World War II. She found her great-grandfather’s philosophies empowering: the notion that all inequality was economic at its base, and the rich were parasites feeding off the body politic—a cancer eating away at society. By the time she joined up with more radical groups in college who shared this philosophy, Jeanette had resolved to become the scalpel that removed that cancerous injustice.
Quitting college, she followed the footsteps of Etienne Robespierre—the original Guillotine—from France to Poland and back again, finally reclaiming his magic blades. Adopting her great-grandfather’s name and motif, Jeanette became a no­torious international political assassin. For years, she left a trail of decapitated victims, shattered lives, and civil disor­der around the globe, making no dis­tinction between cruel despots and guardians of public trust—any who lorded wealth or power over others could become a target for her warped, inflexible sense of justice.
Jeanette was apparently des­tined to remain a bloody but otherwise second-string villain—repeating her childhood experi­ence—until her path crossed with an unlikely champion. On the parallel world known as Anti-Earth, the villainous Lady Anarchy learned of Lady Liberty III's retire­ment and leaped to Earth-Prime to hunt her now de-powered rival for fun. But the friends and family of Beth Walton-Wright gathered around to protect the former heroine, and the show of support and love drove the Spirit of Anarchy from Anti-Earth Beth, ac­cidentally causing her to fall to her death. Untethered from its host and stranded on a strange world, the Spirit sought a new host—one that embodied all the wanton horrors of unchecked freedom, without empathy or consideration for others—and it found Jeanette.
Madame Guillotine believes the true Spirit of Liberty has chosen her as its new champion, having grown tired of its former hosts’ tendency to coddle or ignore the true vil­lains of the modern world. Empowered as she is, she feels an even greater duty to visit retribution on anyone and everyone who fits her warped sense of criminality—be­ginning with the “imposter” to her Lady Liberty legacy.

Physical Description

Special abilities

Madame Guillotine is an Olympic-level athlete, skilled infiltrator, and talented murderess wielding her grandfather’s supernaturally sharp knives. Already a deadly opponent, her bonding with the Spirit of Anarchy also granted her superhuman strength, resilience, flight, and the ability to wield the chaotic energies of anarchy to bring out the worst in others, crush the human spirit, turn enemies’ attacks against them (or against bystand­ers) and cloak the world around her in shadows.

Mental characteristics

Intellectual Characteristics

Madame Guillotine is detached, condescending, and supremely confident. She is absolutely convinced of her own righteousness and the necessity of her violence—even as the victims she sup­posedly saves beg her to stop. Shorn of all compassion and coldly sure in her as­sumptions, Madame Guillotine is a social chameleon who blends easily into any situ­ation, discussing the weather and behead­ings she’s remorselessly carried out with the same dull certainty. She never doubts the morality of her own bloody means and anarchist ends.

Social

Contacts & Relations

Madame Guillotine enjoys a complex relationship with many like-minded an­archist groups and villains—she often works with others, but just as quickly abandons her commitments when her partners fail to recognize her natural leadership, power, experience, or other features that should make her first among equals.
Many of Jeanette’s victims have powerful friends seeking revenge.