Curiosa

Curiosa is a superhero who has lived with a very public identity, ever since she foiled a bank robbery at the age of 5, though she is less well know in the USA than in her native Canada, and is more famous under her previous name, Lady Luck (or the one a tabloid cruelly dubbed her with, Dumb Luck). She uses freely use both her heroic name and her legal one, Amy McLaughlin, both in and out of costume.

Description
As Curiosa: Curiosa is in her mid-thirties, but with her cherubic face, the twinkle in her eye, her height of a mere 5'1" and her bubbly personality she comes across as younger. She wears her chestnut hair swept back behind her ears, where a tiara helps hold it in place. One ear sports a stud earring which glows when she is targeted with a mental power.

Her costume is a bodysuit which is deep purple on her arms and legs, as if she were wearing long gloves and boots, but the torso is silvered and reflective. The right "glove" extends onto the chest where it makes a half-star motif with the silver. Around her waist she wears a belt, in which are sheathed, to the left, two wands, one shorter and one longer, and a long knife. Fastened at the right side is a bag which bulges with several shapes. Around her hips is tied a broad, blue sash. She has a shield on her back - oddly without straps - unless it is deployed and flying about on its own to defend her. She wears no mask.

As Lady Luck: Standing only 5'1" tall, this young woman is seldom without a smile on her cherubic face, and her the twinkle in eyes is echoed in the the dancing light motes which always surround her, shifting colours with her mood. She wears her chestnut hair swept back behind her ears, but she is always pushing it back again as it falls forward.

She's wearing a bodysuit which is deep purple on her arms and legs as if wearing long gloves and boots, but the torso is silvered and reflects the lights dancing about her. The right "glove" extends onto the chest where it makes a half-star motif with the silver. She has no mask.

As Amy: Amy is in her mid-thirties, but with her cherubic face, the twinkle in her eye, her height of a mere 5'1" and her bubbly personality she comes across as younger. She wears her chestnut hair swept back behind her ears.

She normally dresses casually, in a T-shirt (often with a caption relating to superheroics or antiques, and often funny) and jeans, both tight, and comfortable, worn sneakers. She adds a jacket to this if it's cold or she wants to look slightly more formal. Despite the otherwise casual look, she typically wears one of her many hats, often old-fashioned and/or extravagant,.

Origin
Amy was born on June 2nd, 2035, in a suburb of Montreal, Canada. She was always a lucky girl, as long as she could remember, ever since when, as a child, she was caught in the middle of a bank robbery. Quite unaware of what was going on, she bent down to pick up a old coin that rolled out from where the safety deposit boxes were being looted. When she stood back up, her head accidentally bumped the hand of the second robber, causing his gun to discharge, the bullet of which ricocheted off the teller's nameplate, careened off the security camera (turning it to catch the robber's face after he tore off his mask to tend to the tongue he had just bitten), and glanced off the manager's pocket watch, squarely striking a light fixture which promptly dropped, knocking the miscreant loopy! The first robber slipped on the fragments of the fixture as he tried to escape, knocking himself out. The girl was hailed as a hero in the papers and, with her "lucky penny", continued to be one thereafter.

Over the years since she has twice lost her coin, the second time permanently, when the baby dragon Natasha swallowed and digested it. She is now much less lucky that she was, though the residual effects of her former terrific luck still positively affect her life. One curious effect of this is that she has, often unwittingly, managed to collect a large array of magic items through her antiques dealership. Just recently she has realised that, armed with these items, she can once again be a superhero!

Powers
Amy's only inherent power is that she is still lucky – the lingering effects of her previous much greater luck – which also provides her a measure of protection from injury. All her other powers derive from magic items she has acquired through her antiques business, with the aid of her luck. Most draw on the user's personal energy reserves for power. Among these are the following:


 * Flying Shield: Flies around, blocking all attacks flawlessly against Amy. It can, however, be seized and rendered ineffective.
 * Bubble Pipe: Clay pipe from which a large magical protective bubble may be blown.
 * Flying Carpet: Tiring to manoeuvre in combat, but not to go fast in a straight line.
 * Crystal Ball: Allow mental or visual contact over great distances.
 * Lightning Rod: Actually a long silver-tipped wand.
 * Ghost Blade: A thin, milky white short sword that can harm anything with a spirit, passing through anything without a spirit. It can also dispel any magic it touches.
 * Sash: A long, narrow strip of cloth which responds to its user's mental commands.
 * Mindtouch Tiara: Allows the reading and sending of thoughts, all without the target's awareness. Of course, a target needn't act on the thoughts that pop to mind.
 * Gremlin Figurines: Tiny statues that summon gremlins where thrown onto the ground.
 * Bandage of Resurrection: This can heal a target even from death, so long as the pieces can be collected to bandage. The winding of bandages is required for the healing.
 * Arcane Closet Doorknob: Can be placed against any door, which, when opened, briefly leads to the Arcane Closet, a pocket dimension. The knob may then be used to return to the same door.

Former powers (as Lady Luck)
Amy was quite simply immensely lucky. She could to some extent concentrate luck, good or bad, and apply it with a certain intent in mind, but ultimately she never has exact control of the outcome, nor was the luck functioning ever a certainty.

The light motes which surrounded Amy were clearly connected to her power in some way – when she concentrated her luck they swarmed at the target and sometimes changed colour. It's been suggested that they are the effect of some very unlikely things happening at subatomic level, and thus a side effect of her power not a manifestation of a luck-control power or the like.

Personality
Amy was always cheerful, friendly, outgoing, and eternally optimistic, quite childlike both in her trusting nature and in her typically short attention span. She was honestly puzzled why people don't get along, and tried to fix that problem. Her faith that everything would work out could help her see things through despite her flightiness. She was also a scatterbrained ditz: her good fortune had given her little cause to overcome that flaw.

Her time without her powers has changed that. She learned what a hard and cruel place the world can be. But she also learned that she had a greater strength of will than she knew, and that she wasn't the idiot that everyone, herself included, had always thought. She has found greater depths, though she still prefers to act the part of the scatterbrained ditz: it's a role she's comfortable with, and it can give her an advantage if people underestimate her.

Amy has always enjoyed helping people and making the world a better place, not to mention the fellowship of the hero community, so she is delighted to have powers again, even if they are completely different. She remains cheerful and optimistically overconfident, despite the fact that the universe does not reward her optimism as much as it used to.

Being "mother" to Natasha has made Amy a more responsible person as well. The two are very fond of each other, though each finds the other exasperating at times. As superheroes, they prefer to act separately, partly because their concern for each other can cause poor judgement calls, and partly because they prefer one of them to be watching the store.

Relations
Amy has an elder brother, a younger brother at university and sister. Though her siblings are rather jealous of her fame and good luck, the family gets on with her improbably well.

She is still close with les Champions du Québec, a superhero group based Montreal of which she has been an on-and-off member for years..

She was friendly with most heroes in Colonial Bay – indeed with most people generally! – but many of the disappeared during her two years without powers. She used to be in a surprising relationship with Eleven, but that ended at some point during her time of powerlessness. Yutaka has also shown an interest in her, and it was all over the Canadian papers that she and Flambeau were a thing a couple of years back. The boyfriend who brought her to Colonial Bay, however, seems to have faded out of the picture.

Her pet rabbit Bullwinkle – pulled for her out of a hat by Fate – has passed on, but she has a young dragon, Natasha. Natasha regards Amy as a mother figure, but the relationship is much more complicated than that: they are also friends, and Natasha takes care of Amy as much as the other way around: she's much younger but much brighter!

History
Amy's life turned happy once she had the coin: her father's failing business turned around, and she had an almost ideal childhood, not counting her superheroic exploits: she kept happening upon "misunderstandings" which she tried to help resolve. The media, unsurprisingly, took a particular interest in the photogenic child hero. In 2055 she moved to Colonial Bay, following her boyfriend, who was starting university here. Though that relationship ended (amicably), she trusted that the universe had some point in bringing her here, and so remained.

Over the summer of 2055 Amy set up an antiques store, Lucky Finds, in Pennyroyal Lane. Thereafter she divided her time between running her increasingly prosperous business and helping fight crime (she never went on patrol or such though - she just trused she'd be where she was needed). She entered a relationship with Eleven and was, as ever, happy with her life.

In the summer of 2057 Chalk and Cheese, acting for the Collector, stole the coin that gave Amy her powers, and a few weeks later her powers (and her distinctive lights) vanished. She and Eleven moved to Montreal, in an effort to recover her powers, but were unsuccessful, and their relationship ended. Not until 2059, with the help of heroes from Colonial Bay, did she get her powers back.

Thereafter she lived sometimes in Colonial Bay and sometimes with her teammates in Montreal. During an extradimensional adventure with them in 2065 she was present at the hatching of the orphaned Natasha, and became a sort of mother to the young dragon. About a year later, back in Colonial Bay, her life took another twist, when Natasha swallowed her magic coin and absorbed its magic. Amy was once again left powerless, and had to content herself with running her store and raising Natasha.

In 2069, a theft of a number of magic items from Lucky Finds revealed just how many powerful objects she had, presumably through her luck, accumulated. Following some training in their use, Amy has been able to return to the life of a superhero, taking on the name Curiosa, to reflect that her new powers derive from an eclectic collection of curiosities.