Codename: Gutter Frog
Real Name: Avery Kline
Day Job: Bartender / Stripper
Gender: Female
Age: 26
Height: 5'7
Weight: 123lbs
Build: Lean, Athletic, Busty
Hair Color and Style: Long, black, straight
Eye Color: Honey/Amber
Sexual Preference: Bisexual
Frequency/Writing Intensity: High, but only as proves narratively reasonable

Appearance

Civilian Description:
Avery Kline is slightly above average height for a woman at 5'7 with a lean and athletic build. Her straight black hair, luminous amber eyes, generous bust and powerful thighs make her natural eye-candy, accented all the more by tattoos and piercings including up and down her ears, her navel, her tongue and her nipples.

Avery's large honey-gold eyes and cold demeanor make her intimidating to some and entrancing to others. She dresses like the bar bunny that she pretty much pretends to be in torn low-rise jeans, tight shirts or low-cut tops and a fair bit of leather and chain. Her fuck-off attitude might be hiding a softer side, maybe, but if it's in there, no one's seen it yet.


Description in Costume:
Avery's costume isn't much to look at. She hasn't really formalized her place in the vigilante jungle of Gotham's streets. Not much more than a pair of dark green leather pants with black circles on the backs of the calves, fronts of the thighs and the ass. She wears a black short sleeved crop top under an open, fitted leather shrug with narrow sleeves in matching dark green. The jacket has a big black frog on the back with red eyes. And, of course, a self-affixing black domino mask.

Avery's costume has evolved slowly as she's fallen further and further into prowling the night, evolving from not much more than ripped denim jeans and a leather jacket.

Personality
Avery is... complicated. But who isn't in this city, right? Avery's all business and no fluff. All brass tacks. So much so that even her tacks have tacks of their own. Avery and more than a few therapists so far have failed to discern if this is some sort of defense mechanism for a rough life badly lived or just a flaw in her natural programming.

Despite her callous nature and her stomach for violence, Avery has a protective side; a vengeful one. A brutal nihilist seemingly convinced of life's short and savage nature, she's throwing her life away working in seedy strip houses and roughneck dive bars so she can gather intelligence on thugs to rough up and gangs to bust. The best place to hunt for vipers is in their nest after all.

It doesn't take a genius to see she's on a crash course with oblivion and that lends Avery a certain gallows humour. There's a rough charm about her but she's quick to spoil it with foul language and bawdy humour. And her fists.

Skills and Abilities
Avery is good at a lot of stuff and none of it is very nice. She's a talented dancer, a skilled card player and a menace in hand-to-hand combat.

Discreetly superhuman, she has highly enhanced agility and reflexes, slightly enhanced strength (allowing her to hit harder than her slender frame bellies), inhuman leaping abilities, the ability to stick to surfaces with her bare hands and feet and a startling lash-like tongue that deploys out to a disgusting range of 6ft. She can hold her breath for almost 12 minutes without strain and breath with her mouth and throat full. Frog powers, in essence, although she does her level best to conceal them whenever possible, ashamed by her own inhumanity though she's not want to admit it.

Avery's also a fully qualified former paramedic making her a decent back alley doctor although more and more of her experience seems to be stitching herself up instead of others as her vigilantism deepens and the stakes grow increasingly real.

Her fighting skills appear more sophisticated and graceful than they really are, however, leveraging her innate enhanced traits to make what is essentially a mixture of dance and brawling look skillful when she's really just improvising. At some point she'll surely meet opponents she can't outclass through physical supremacy alone. That'll be a bad day for the Gutter Frog for sure.

History

Avery Kline's had a hard life. Which is unfortunately true for so many Gothamites that it begs the question why any of them still live in that accursed city. Perhaps it is the same dogged resilience and unwillingness to yield that permeates her that suffuses them all. Or maybe they just don't have anywhere else to go.

Abandoned at a young age at an orphanage in South Point, Avery grew up lonely and neglected. From a young age she was forced to hone her intellect into a canny weapon by which to survive. There was always something about her people shied away from even as they felt drawn in. Her strange, entrancing eyes, her brooding stare, her dark hair, her natural beauty. Even when she was little, those touches were upon her. But there was something else there too. A quiet danger. An unsettling calm. As if she were always watching and waiting.

Which was not to say she was devoid of joy. Avery's smile and laughter could be infectious to those she was fond of. And she made fast friends with Stephanie Maron, an orphan who arrived a few years into Avery's first stay. The pair were similar in age, both sharp of mind, and made fast friends. They became inseparable.

The pair bounced in and out of families, ultimately aging out of the orphanage and into foster care. Sometimes they'd run away, taking to the streets to live by their wits until, of all things, Stephanie's estranged uncle tracked them down and took them in.

Life was good. And Avery felt relief that someone had saved Stephanie from the complicated path Avery's oddities and indifferences managed to carve for them both. Truth be told, she was grateful. Life in the family was nuanced and strange to her but comfortable, stable. It was good. The girls blossomed under a kindly hand, thriving like wild roses finally given fertile soil in which to bloom. After high school Stephanie wanted to become a paramedic. Avery followed her right down that path. She'd have followed Stephanie anywhere.

And that's what the girls did. They became paramedics. Independent by nature they scraped together what they could to rent a rundown two-bedroom in the West Village. With a helpful little hand from a friend of their Uncle's the two were riding ambulance together in no time. And that's what they were doing when the Event happened. Avery wanted to hunker down and take cover but Stephanie refused. They could help people. They could save lives. And they did. At least 15 people owe them their survival. But Stephanie's wouldn't be one of them.

The pair got caught in the crossfire of a shootout in the streets by the Maroni and Falcone families and the Joker Gang while attempting to evacuate a pair of wounded cops that were pinned down. After successfully stabalizing the officer's injuries the duo moved to extract them to the ambulance and Stephanie caught a bullet in the back. She bled out in Avery's arms. In the aftermath of a such a night of chaos and brutality there just wasn't the manpower or resources to even try and figure out who pulled the trigger. And that's where everything changed for Avery.

Overcome with grief and wracked by the guilt of not forcing her best friend, her lifelong sister, to safety, knowing full well that she could have if she'd wanted to, Avery folded in on herself. She stopped showing up for work. Just walked away. She cut ties with her family, correction, Stephanie's family. Abandoned their lease. Just disappeared. At first she returned to the ruin of South Point for want of something that hurt. It was a seedy den of crime and desperation caught in the chaos of a brutal tragedy. A perfect place to disappear into her own sadness. It wasn't hard to eschew all the pretty things that reminded her of Steph: connection, comfort, friendship, support.

Stripping came first. She was graceful and beautiful with a body that men would pay for. Bartender came later. A maturing of her tastes. It came with age and time and resentment as the leering eyes and groping hands festered in her mind. Because men who watch drink, and men who drink, talk. They talk about their fears, and their accomplishments, their desires, and most importantly, their sins. Avery realized there was a better place to put her pain. She didn't have to swallow it like so many shots of vodka to punish her failures. She could feed it to the men and women who walked the night, taking what wasn't theirs, preying on the Stephanies of the city like hyenas in the dark. She only turned back to dancing part time as a way to get closer to her prey.

Avery's first outings into vigilantism were rough and amateur and painful. A lot of broken bones and black eyes and bruises explained away by a string of loser boyfriends. A shitty man to hurt her and a shitty man to explain away those wounds: it was urban camouflage. She outgrew the boyfriends pretty quickly though; she was a quick study. Slowly, steadily, Gutter Frog emerged.

Now Avery spends her nights working at the club in one form or another and her small hours prowling the streets, exacting vengeance on anyone she knows to be guilty. And Avery is pretty loose on her definition of knowing. Inadvertently her hunting ground and her prey profile continues to expand, bringing it further and further into the orbit of other vigilantes and heroes.