March

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

March, real name May, is a villain who operated out of New York, she has moved on since.

Personality

March is persistent and focused, willing to clash continually with Flechette while they were both in New York.<ref name="9.3">“Another pattern we will be exploring is the apparent effect of multiple trigger events occurring in the same time and place. There is a very strong correlation between coinciding trigger events and individuals displaying three or more powers rather than one or two predominant ones.”

“Hey, Flechette,” Kid Win called across the room, “You’ve got a bunch of powers, right?”

She turned in her seat, “Sure.”

“Anyone else get powers at the same time you did?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Could someone nearby have gotten their powers, without you knowing? Way things played out? Did any capes show up around the same time as you?”

Flechette frowned, “Yeah. A rather persistent villain.”

“Worth thinking about.” - Excerpt from Sentinel 9.3</ref> Has a bit of an off kilter of beat personality putting others on the wrong foot.

March does not treat cape-business as a career, but as a whimsical game.<ref name="11.10game"/>

Is comfortable with killing people and has a showmen's flair to what she does.<ref name="5.12 e4">March joined us. She put out a hand for me to shake. I hesitated a moment, paranoid, then shook it.

“We have things to talk about,” she said. “People we both know. Power things.”

I nodded.

“I’ll go in to get her,” she said. “I’m immune.”

“So am I,” Rain said.

“This is personal for you,” she said. She put a gloved hand on his shoulder. “It’s the objectivity that makes us valuable to each other.”

She winked at me, then sauntered indoors.

She bothered me. I didn’t like whimsical and show-off in someone that could easily kill. The mask and the marching band outfit only marked out the contrast. - Excerpt from Shadow 5.12</ref> She is the type to walk away and let people blow up behind her.<ref>Wildbow's comment in subreddit, verbatim.</ref>

Has an interest in studying multitriggers,<ref name="5.12 e5">“All multi-triggers?” I asked.

“She… collects them. I guess. She studies them. It’s supposed to be important.” - Excerpt from Shadow 5.12</ref> and powers in general.

Relationships

In a romantic relationship with Tori Heflin from the Smugglers cluster.

Intentionally surrounded herself with multitriggers<ref name="5.12 e5"/> Was willing to work with Rain partially because he could look at her vendetta with Foil with fresh eyes.<ref name="5.12 e4" /> It was noted that having her interest was not a good thing.<ref> - Excerpt from Pitch 6.6</ref>

Appearance

March is a small Japanese-American woman who wears a military-style uniform and feathered cap, with a rabbit mask<ref name="5.11 II e1">A woman with a bunny mask and marching band outfit, ears poking up through the brim of the flat-top, feathered cap. There were three people in costumes that I didn’t recognize, and there was Rain, with the metal mask, gloves, and dark hood. - Excerpt from Shadow 5.11</ref> that leave her eyes open.<ref name="5.12 e4" /> She also carries a rapier<ref name="5dII">The woman who faced him was petite, and wore a rabbit mask with a uniform that looked like a soldier from the 1800s. A rapier dangled from her waist.

“March,” he said.

Wordless, she invited him to come in. - Excerpt from Interlude 5d II</ref> with sheath.

Abilities and Powers

March is a grab-bag cape, and has access to a weaker version of Flechette's power to infuse objects with an effect that would sever their attachment to most physical laws.<ref>S/he did get Sting lite. Remember, Sting is a 'shark' of a shard. Can't really do much to improve or vary it. - Spacebattles post by Wildbow.</ref> For March it lets her cut through foes' defences and imbue then with a timed explosion effect that can damage breaker effects<ref name="5.12 e2">March continued pacing around the group. Her rapier’s tip dragged along the ground. It left a trail behind it, like the water rippling in the wake of a stick being moved in it, and that water had hues of blue, purple, and black running through it for a second or two after the contact.
[...]
The large thing had fallen over, one hand planted on the ground near some of the civilians. March ran up its arm, ducking and using momentum to slide up the slope of the arm as a bony claw reached for her.

She ran along the shoulders, cutting as she went, leaped as the head sank into the morass of the body and became two avian skulls that pecked at the air, and then came down, stabbing her rapier into the chest and dragging the point against the giant thing’s torso, cutting as she went down. The blue-purple-black watercolor spread in the wake of the blade’s tip.

She pulled it free, stabbed at a reaching hand, and used it to reorient her fall. She landed hard, her feet planted on either side of a screaming teenage girls’ head. A slight misstep, and she would have caved in the poor girl’s face.

March snapped her fingers and flicked with her blade.

At the shoulder, where the long cut had started, there was a flare of the watercolor spray. Purple and blue, with deep shadow in the midst of it. [...] The flare was tracing along the line she’d cut like a flame down a cartoon bomb’s fuse. [...] The ‘fuse’ reached its terminus. What had been a flare became a fierce explosion, right down at the base of the breaker.

I flew toward it, bringing out the Wretch, so I could catch it if it toppled onto March and the civilians. It didn’t, falling backward and dissolving as it did. - Excerpt from Shadow 5.12</ref> and kill people.<ref name="5.12 e2.5">The breaker form dissipated, and there was only the Fallen with the demon themed skull mask, tipping backward to land on his ass. March plunged her rapier into his chest, then flicked it up, toward his throat.
[...]
The Fallen was patting his chest where he’d been stabbed. He touched his throat. Intact, but the line of watercolor marked him.
[...]
Still floating in the air, I could see the flare appear at the breaker Fallen’s chest. He brought his hands to it, quick, frantic, then tried to pat it out.

“Hey!” the Fallen cried out. He lurched to his feet. “Stop!”

March was walking away.

“Hey! Fuck! Help me!”

She flourished with her blade and sheathed it, in the very same moment the fuse reached its terminus. The explosion was smaller, but it was sufficient to take out the front of the Fallen’s throat. He dropped to his knees, still moving inarticulately, eyes wide and stunned, and then collapsed to the ground. - Excerpt from Shadow 5.12</ref> Her power has a watermark effect that spreads out from the contact point, it also lets her stab people with the rapier and only apply the explosion effect, with no other damage.

March's primary power is enhanced timing.<ref>“[...] Different. Timing is her main power. Situational, big-picture. Operation-level.”
“She was good on the small scale too,” I said, following Faultline. “Is that stronger because she used what she told us about? The thing that let Goddess take all the power?”
“No comment, not on that,” Faultline said. - Polarize 10.5</ref> March's timing ability allows her to organise groups very efficiently, to the point where she can give the exact amount of time they need to do something in order to defeat an enemy.<ref> With only sound cues and awareness of where they had been before, March could visualize their locations. She knew how fast they moved from how fast they had moved before, she knew how long it would take to get where she wanted them to go, and she knew them well enough that she knew their behaviors and they knew what she wanted of them. Interlude 12.z II</ref> When boosted, time appears to slow for March, allowing her to make decisions on the fly. Her thinker aspect is strong enough to make her unreadable to other Thinkers, such as Tattletale.<ref> - Excerpt from Pitch 6.6</ref>

She also has some sort of accuracy power, which was Homers primary ability.

March belongs to Alexandria-counter club.<ref>Wildbow's comment on Reddit</ref>

Equipment

As she carries a rapier she likely imbues it with her "sting' effect.

History

Background

May and her mother are refugees from Japan.

May was part of the same group trigger as Flechette, taking place three year prior story start in New York.<ref name="nemesis">Foil is 17 and a senior. She triggered 3 years prior to her appearance, as part of a group trigger in New York. One of her old nemeses, March, was another part of that group trigger. - Private message by Wildbow, posted on Spacebattles.</ref> May and her mothers got accidentally dragged on the rails by Lily's friends. May instinctively hide in the alcove, confusing her dazed mother, moment later train arrived and May triggered after realising results of her actions. Then she proceeded to the scheduled audition.

Later, she was contacted by Homer, the third cluster-mate, he provided some insight into their situation.

March became a bodyguard for a independent parahuman investigator. Together they tried to assist remains of smugglers cluster, and were captured by the most aggressive member alongside other clustermates. Suffering from bloodloss, March experiences near-death visions, that reveal to her artificial afterlife and upturn her world-view. She gets resuscitated by Cauldron rescue team.

Driven by her newfound obsession with Flechette March returned to New York. She repeatedly joined minor villain groups that were targeted by the wards. But her habit of escalation and brutal efficiency forced her to move on, as those groups quickly deemed "unsafe" to engage for the wards<ref name ="11.10game">She joined a villain group my Wards team was already dealing with. Low-level, nonviolent, safe enough that our bosses were okay letting us try. She made them more effective and she blew up enough things that our bosses withdrew that permission. We moved on to another sanctioned target, and March joined them. [...] She would disappear for months at a time, then show up with friends. What got me was that I was trying to treat the cape stuff like a career, right from the start. Getting away from… from whatever pulled my sister down. For March, it was always a game. Not the usual way, where it’s a specific meta-approach to crime and criminality. Like an actual game.” - Excerpt from Blinding 11.10</ref> She gained an eclectic criminal record, unattached to any particular operation.<ref name="5.12 e1">The woman with the bunny mask walked, almost strutted around the periphery of things, her rapier in hand. The capes with Valefor kept their attention on her, while Valefor was oblivous{sic} or uncaring.

Rain was- he’d contacted people I barely recognized. I’d seen March’s mask before, but it had been in passing. An article about one of the big cities. There’d been a weird dynamic there, but I couldn’t afford to dwell on it. My mind went to a bizarre combination of upper-class and low-class crimes, like corporate espionage and petty vandalism, but I knew almost right away that I was thinking of the wrong person.

It had been something offbeat like that, though. If the people hadn’t been screaming, and if I wasn’t focused on Valefor’s body language and Mama being somewhere nearby, I wanted to think I could’ve placed it. - Excerpt from Shadow 5.12</ref>

Timeskip

March visited Brockton Bay when the portal went up, twice. The second time she kidnapped Parian. All to get at the newly renamed Foil.<ref>Interlude 5y II</ref>

At the same time she had run-ins with local heroes.

Post-Gold Morning

March was able to survive Gold Morning and started seeking out other cluster capes. They were able to reach out to recently triggered of5 and offered information and assistance with their unfortunate group trigger dynamic.<ref>Glow-worm P.4</ref><ref name="R1.4">Private Message Exchanges: Coded Name, Of5, the group chat

of5 is reached out to by someone with a long, coded name, with a coded message. of5 asks the people from the larger group convo about it: their female friend suggested it's a bot. After briefly wondering if it's 'S' (dismissed as S "Isn't that bad with computers") they're told to ignore it and move on.

But the person from the coded message starts speaking in plain english. of5's searches & comments on the broken multi-trigger articles have been noticed. Coded-name goes through all the instances of multi-triggers they've heard of, working out who of5 could be, and decides that of5 is the 'runt' from 'the mall'.

• Coded-name already talked to someone else from the mall and was turned down. Lucky for of5, coded-name says, because of5 will need all the help they can get, and coded-name is offering that help.
• The mall group has a woman, a man, and two boys, four individuals. Three members of the group are coordinating to go after one of the two boys, the runt. The woman is hiring mercenary help for the deed, and the man is talking to an information broker named Tattletale to find the runt.
• Coded-name remarks 'a case of Kiss/Kill like I never saw and I don’t think they’re reaching for the chapstick.' - and the response from of5 is 'You’re wrong / It isn’t Kiss/Kill.'
• But, of5 says, they're open to assistance. - Synopsis by Wildbow</ref>

Early-Ward

Rain finally reached out to March when he had nowhere else to go. He met her and her team at her hideout in the city.<ref>Interlude 5d II</ref>

Later they deployed against the Fallen, separate from the Hollow Pointers and Wardens.<ref name="5.11 II e1"/>

Post-Goddess' Takeover

March hired some powered mercenaries from Deader and Goner and visited with her army the ruins of Brockton Bay. She recovered Ixnay's clustermate - Jotun, casually killed several defending heroes, and unleashed three broken triggers, including Dauntless.<ref>Heavens 12.all</ref>

The next morning, she was tracked down and eventually killed by Foil, Vista and Imp.<ref>Heavens 12.x</ref>

Trivia

• Her name and costume suggest the March Hare from Alice in Wonderland.

Fanart Gallery

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  Art by Uberpigeon
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  Art by Uberpigeon
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  Art by Scarfgirl
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  Art by ughzubat on Reddit

References

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