Cherish

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<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Cherish</default></title>

<image source="Image"></image> <image source="image"></image> <group><header>Basic Information</header> <label>Civilian Name</label> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Gender</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Death</label> <label>Age</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Post-timeskip</label> <label>Ward start</label> <label>Relations</label> <label>Family</label></group> <group><header>Professional Status</header> <label>Occupation</label> <label>Classification</label> <label>Unique Features</label> <label>Alignment</label>

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<label>Location</label> <label>Teams</label> <label>Previous Team(s)</label> <label>Base of Operations</label></group> <group><header>First Appearance</header> <label>Worm Debut</label> <label>Ward Debut</label></group> </infobox> Cherie Vasil, also known as Cherish, is a daughter of Nikos Vasil, the sister of Jean-Paul Vasil, and a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Appearance

Cherie has dark hair with a red streak through it, like her brother she was thin and rather attractive.<ref name="I11g">Interlude 11.g</ref>

During the Slaughterhouse Nine's tests, Mannequin had her tattoo her stomach and chest with gigantic, hideous raised tattoos that distorted her body and distracted from her natural beauty. When Jack Slash could think of nothing more to be done during his test he had her go through the other tests again leading her to getting a matching tattoo across her back.

Personality

Like her brother, Jean-Paul, Cherie is intelligent and lacks emotional capacity almost to the point of being a sociopath. Unlike her brother she revels in this and has descended into becoming a serial killer.

Abilities and Powers

Cherish has the ability to both detect and control emotions. She interprets emotions as a form of "music" that comes from the mind and body of her target with each different emotion having a different "sound",<ref name="I11g e1">He went for his gun, but he didn’t get that far. She closed her eyes for a moment, listened for the music that came from his mind and body. The jangling, dissonant noise of alarm, the throbbing percussion of mortal fear, every part of his body shifting into fight or flight mode. The underlying notes spoke to his personality. His love of his family, his fear that he was about to leave them behind, anger towards her, a momentary anxiety that he was overreacting. She grasped this in the fraction of a second.

Reaching for that mortal fear, she wrenched it. When that wasn’t quite enough, she pulled at it and twisted it until everything else was squeezed into the far edges.

[...]

Not much time to do it. She searched through the feelings of her passenger, found the networks of brotherly love, trust, camaraderie, and adjusted each until the music was one of tension, suspicion, paranoia. Then she set his fight or flight reflexes into high gear.

“Get the gun.”

He fished for it between the seats, picked it up.

Then he pointed the gun at her.

“No, stop,” she said. Too unspecific. Fuck. Still need to work on that. She hit him with as much doubt and indecision as she could manage to keep him from shooting her. Then she stalled all of the ‘music’ that flowed to and from that one point in the very front of his brain. She knew the music was her way of understanding and interpreting the biological processes that drove people’s emotions. By listening for it, she knew what they felt, knew what the emotions were tied to, vaguely. - Excerpt from Interlude 11.g</ref> this makes it easy for her to track her targets.<ref name="Cast2"/>

Her power did not have natural long term effects she could theoretically build up a dependency within a target.<ref name="I11g e3">What Alec didn’t know was that her power did have long-term effects. Subtle, but they were there. Emotions were like drugs. People formed dependencies and tendencies. If she hit someone with a minute amount of dopamine every time they saw her, it would condition them until she didn’t even need to use her power to do it.

Just a little while longer, she told herself, and I’ll have the Nine wrapped around my little finger. - Excerpt from Interlude 11.g</ref>

Cherish has displayed the ability to detect people's emotions from across the entire city, both allowing her to track them and allowing her to detect their relationships with each other. She can also deduce capes based on their greater emotional volatility. She is able to tell who people are based on the emotional signature she gets from her powers.<ref name="I11g e2">He nodded dumbly and climbed out of the jeep. She made her way over to the driver’s seat, then waited for him to climb in before she peeled out.

The jeep cut through the shallow water that covered the roads. Others had noticed her leaving, she knew, and were following in their own vehicle. She could sense them, each a fingerprint of emotions in deeply individual configurations. The mix of personal pride and confidence that she sensed in them suggested they were military. The soldiers that had been taking over for this guy?

[...]

She reached out and started feeling for the outliers. The emotional fingerprints that stood out from the rest.

The other seven members of the Nine were out there. Not hard to find. One or two were interacting with some other outliers. The most fucked up people in this fucked up city. She’d studied each of these unknown outliers over the course of a week, watching their emotions shift as they went out about their lives, sometimes visiting the areas they tended to hang around, to get a sense of their environments. Slowly, she’d pieced them together, created profiles, discerned which ones had powers and described them to the other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Each had made their picks:

The buried girl. The arrogant geek. The dog lover. The daydreamer. The warlord. The scaredy cat. The broken assassin. The crusader.

And all she wanted was a few minutes to pay a visit to hers. She didn’t have to name that one. He was familiar enough. She smiled. - Excerpt from Interlude 11.g</ref> When close enough, she can induce emotional states in her targets at will.<ref name="I11g"/><ref name="14.3 c1">Cherish pointed out in the Regent/Cherish interlude that her advantage over her dad is a huge detection range and the ability to use her power if she can’t see her target. The drawback being that the effects are short lived (and even shorter lived as her targets build up an immunity).

Then again, she could be lying about it. 😉 - Comment by Wildbow on Prey 14.3</ref>

Power interactions

As a human based Master she was resistant to, and interfered with, similar Masters. Regents control over people kept her from forcing his puppets to hurt themselves, while her ability to emotionally over load people effectively made them useless to him. He himself was highly resistant, if not out right immune to her, given a lifetime of exposure.<ref name="I11g"/> on a similar level a Master like Gallant would confuse her emotional topology. She would be immune to the emotional aspect of his blasts but not the concussive aspect of them, further his blasts could dispel her emotional manipulation, one way or the other.<ref name="R5">Having emotion manipulation usually appends a degree of emotion manipulation resistance. They'd probably both be pretty darn resistant to one another. That would include Gallant fuzzing Cherish's emotion map. His blast could theoretically knock her on her ass but wouldn't do much more than that (and against those she was controlling, would probably dash whatever effects were present to the winds, or sufficiently confuse/paralyze them to stop whatever Cherish had them doing).

When I say 'pretty darn resistant', I'd really say that the 80-100% resistance they had would veer one way or the other depending on how in concert they were with their passenger at the time of the encounter. - Comment by WildBow on Reddit</ref> Glory Girl's aura might have a similar effect on her Cherish's Thinker senses.<ref>Maybe he's interested in her because he can't get a perfect read on her - comment on the IRC Archived on Spacebattles</ref><ref>Darchiasq:
It's not breaking SoD that Gallant is a bud off Glory Girl, but it seems very unlikely. I think Gallant has been a cape too long for that to be possible. Another big argument for Aegis being a Cauldron cape is that his powers majorly changed his physiology, which is a telltale sign of being one. However, I don't think it's unlikely that he could be an Eden natural trigger, like Leet and String Theory.

Andrew Greaves:
It occurred to me, belatedly, that something like the reverse might be possible.

We know that Glory Girl is a second generation Cape, and the origins of her force field power are rather obvious. But what about her empathic aura? Where did that come from?

It's well known that second Triggers involve polling any other Shards within range and such, but does this also happen with first Triggers? Could Gallant have already been a cape and nearby when she Triggered?

Of course, she could have also second Triggered with him nearby at some point. Incidentally, as a second gen, I'd surmise that her second Trigger would be psychologically comparable to a first gen's first Trigger.

Wildbow:
You're thinking along the right lines, re: the source of her aura, Andrew. - Comment by Wildbow</ref> Interestingly her powers make her an effective counter to Master type infiltrators like Satyr, who is able to change his form but not his mind.

History

Background

Cherie Vasil was born in Montreal, Canada to Nikos Vasil and one of his "wives". At some point, she triggered and then decided to run away in order to escape her father. Her father sent two of her brothers after her who chased her,<ref name="I11g"/> until she decided to join the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Rather than waiting for a position to open up, Cherish ambushed Hatchet Face, killing him. After this, Cherish had to go through eight tests from the remaining members to join the Slaughterhouse Nine. Mannequin ordered her to get a massive tattoo that would degrade her in other's eyes. Burnscar ordered her to kill a loved one. Siberian presumably did her usual test and chased her for three days, biting off a finger each time she was caught until time was up. Shatterbird stuck her in a blacked out room with a shard of glass following her for an undisclosed period of time. It is unknown what Bonesaw, Crawler or the eighth member's tests were, though it was likely Cherish was forced to attack Crawler with her powers.

When she finally got to Jack Slash's test, he was slightly upset that she was already broken, so his test was to go through the other tests all over again. Bonesaw even revived Hatchet Face for it, and Cherish was forced to kill him again, this time without the advantage of surprise.<ref>Plague 12.4</ref>

Post-Leviathan

Cherish was used by the Nine to locate potential members upon arriving at Brockton Bay. After a less then cordial reunion with her brother she accompanied Jack when they had an impromptu meeting with the Undersiders and the Travelers. Her machinations to subvert and control the Nine were revealed by Tattletale and leaving Cherish fearful for her life. When the Slaughterhouse Nine disposed of the Merchants, Jack did nothing to assuage her of her fears, though he implied that she could earn a reprieve. When Cherish discovered an anonymous stranger amongst the Nine she tried to cut a deal.

After she was captured by The Undersiders, Cherish was held by Coil on an abandoned boat in the Boat Graveyard and interrogated. She later got in touch with Jack, telling him her location and that he was destined to destroy the world.

As they left, the remaining members of the Nine visited her prison, taking their revenge for her treachery. Bonesaw modified her to only sense negative emotions and removed her filters. They then placed her in a prison of Mannequin's design, throwing her into the bay.<ref>Prey 14.11</ref>

Post-Slaughterhouse Nine

Being locked into a state she felt and could influence negative emotions she caused havoc in a small area around the docks. This was brought up in the mayoral debates.<ref name="16.8 e1">That’s not getting into the cost of actually refurbishing the area and updating it to modern standards. Or the fact that anyone approaching within a mile and a half of the area is subjected to uncontrollable, suicidal despair. - Excerpt from Monarch 16.8</ref> Danny told Taylor that the zone she was creating was getting in the way of the Dock workers' projects.<ref name="20.3 e1">“Taylor,” my dad spoke.

“Hi dad,” I said.

“How’s the work?”

“It’s not,” I said. “I got a call from someone I’ve been working with on and off, and stopped by the school. Where are you?”

“The boat graveyard. We’re trying to do some problem solving, and it’s slowing us down. Which school?” - Excerpt from Chrysalis 20.3</ref><ref name="20.3 c1">This is Cherish. - Comment by Wildbow on Chrysalis 20.3</ref>

Cherish was later used in the battle against Butcher.<ref name="Re2">Cherish was placed in a perpetual-life sarcophagus and dropped to the bottom of the bay, in the boat graveyard. In the mayoral debates, they remark on the ambient aura of suicidal depression that was hitting anyone who ventured into that area - Cherish's power working without targets or limiters.
Butcher was lured into that area. - Comment by Wildbow on reddit</ref> The villain was lured into her range, and thanks to the multiple voices inside his head, Butcher was more influenced by her power, committing suicide. Butcher's powers then presumably transferred to her. She was then transported deeper in the ocean where she could contemplate her predicament,<ref name="Re1">Cherish was dragged away from the harbor and let to sink to a point that was pretty deep in, in partial hopes that she would be far enough away from any living beings that the Butcher wouldn't jump to a new host. - Comment by Wildbow on reddit</ref> likely for a very long time.<ref name="20.3 c2">She’s hooked up to the same systems that keep Mannequin going. Chances are strong she’ll live for a few thousand years. Maybe ten or twenty thousand, depending on the degree of wear from tides. - Comment by Wildbow on Chrysalis 20.3</ref><ref name="Cast2">Cherish (Imprisoned) – Regent’s sister, has the ability to manipulate emotions and sense emotions in a distinct enough way to track and identify individuals at a distance. Attempted to use her power in a subtle fashion on the rest of the group, only to find that they knew what she was planning. Following the escapades in Brockton Bay, she was trapped in an impervious, life-sustaining shell of Mannequin’s design and sunk to the bottom of the derelict Boat Graveyard, where she is expected to live for several thousand (or tens of thousands of) years. - Cast Page (In-Depth)</ref>

Post-Timeskip

Nine Cherish clones were created as a part of the Slaughterhouse 9000. Eight are killed by Dragon,<ref>Sting 26.x (Donation Interlude; Saint)</ref> and the ninth by Weaver.<ref>Sting 26.6</ref>

Gold Morning

Cherish may have died when the Eastern Seaboard on North America was destroyed.<ref>Interlude 26</ref> However, no nearby capes are recorded as inheriting Butcher's powers, so she could have survived. On the other hand, she is not mentioned later in the Gold Morning, despite having an extremely useful power.

Fanart Gallery

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• File:Slaughterhouse9 by scarfgirl-d5yi6xx.jpg
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  Image by Abyranss on Reddit

References

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