Puck

Background

Powers and Abilities

Zuzha possesses superhuman strength, speed and durability. She is highly acrobatic in combat. When confronted with multiple superhuman opponents often bounces between them at speed, jumping from target to target as she kicks them.

Her style is strikingly similar to Puck’s (as adjusted for her greater height). It has a lot of spectacular capoeira-like techniques – plus daring leaping moves that have no real-world equivalent. It is possible that she never received any formal instruction and is operating on instinct and experience.

Zuzha lacks training with her superspeed. She mostly uses it to be an acrobatic brawler, and to propel herself fast enough to hit superhumanly hard (in DC Heroes RPG terms, EV substitution) with jumping kicks and leap-by punches. She rarely runs at heightened speed, and has never been seen engaging in superspeed tasks more complex than checking a number of rooms along a corridor.

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History

Zuzha Yu apparently doesn’t know that she’s the daughter of diminutive Canadian adventurer Eugene “Puck” Judd. She has stated that she was an orphan and resented her unknown father for abandoning her.

A flashback panel depicts her mother and Judd being beset by armed men, which likely played a role in Judd’s absence. Whether her mother is indeed dead, and if so how it occurred, is unrevealed.

Yu once made a puzzling reference to talking in her mother’s womb. This presumably was some weird joke or obscure reference on her part rather than an accurate account.

As a young adult, Zuzha was thrown out of college under unrevealed circumstances. Needing to earn a living somehow, the plucky Ms. Wu opened a bar near McGill University in Montréal . She catered to both students and townies and broke up the occasional bar fight in her own spectacular style.

You must gather your party

When the original Alpha Flight team disappeared, only Sasquatch (Walter Langkowski) was left behind. He worked on assembling a new team to rescue the old one. But his initial recruitment drive completely flopped, with Zuzha turning him down.

Determined to have her on his team, Langkoswki approached Yu again and proposed a bet. If he won an arm-wrestling contest with her she’s join his version of Alpha Flight for a year. Yu agreed, on the condition that he become her love-slave for a year if he lost.

Zuzha expected her strength to easily carry the day. But Langkowski lamentably cheated, turning in Sasquatch – winning and knocking her out in the process.

Taking Flight

This new, chaotic version of Alpha Flight had but a handful of documented adventures. But they rescued the lost team – and even brought back the classic Alpha Flight as a result of temporal manipulations. Their mission accomplished, they disbanded.

During these adventures Zuzha (now codenamed Puck by Sasquatch) made numerous romantic overtures toward the handsome but clueless Major Mapleleaf II, eventually winning his companionship. One panel implies that it was a long-term relationship and that they became a couple of famous Canadian super-heroes after leaving the team.

Puck II was among the number of Canadian heroes who were slaughtered by the Collective, a man empowered by the focused totality of mutant powers erased by the Scarlet Witch’s M-Day spell. Whether she was actually killed is unrevealed. Hopefully she survived, eh ?

Description

Zuzha is unusually attractive, and will draw the attention of many people interested in younger women, eh ?

Personality

Yuzha seems to be about 22 and is a smart, funny, plucky, cheerful ex-college student. She has a distinct tendency to launch into long expository monologues at key points of the plot, and to make numerous digressions in the middle of other considerations.

She also purposefully sports an exaggerated version of the Canadian tic of adding a rising “eh” at the end of sentence, to the point where — and here I would gleefully introduce a mid-sentence digression not really related to the point to give a feeling for the character, though I think it would be confusing and it might be better to do without — about half her sentences end like this, eh ?

One of Zuzha’s main goals is love – or at least sex. She is particularly attracted toward athletic blond men, but her strong sex drive and wish to be loved will lead to at least passing interest in any attractive male. She’s very openly into various kinks and sexual role-playing, and rarely hesitates to come on strong even by modern Canadian women standards.

She does not consider herself a hero, just a bar owner, and often comments about this. Though the Thrill of Adventure eventually won her over, eh ?

Quotes

“Not in my bar, eh ?”

“Imagine how I feel, eh ? Until a month ago, my biggest worry was how to make a sea breeze .”

“What’s the worst that can happen, eh ?” (seconds later, the worst happens)

“Look, Mape — being an orphan and all, I got father issues I may never get around to dealing with. You want to spend the night with me, just ask. I might even say yes, eh ?”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Alpha Flight v3.

Helper(s): Roy Cowan.