Toshiko McMurray

''Damatte shi ne. ''

Toshiko McMurray is a Japanese super and Rana's cousin. She's among the youngest practitioners of the Harmonic Fist, and while her size makes it difficult to physically damage opponents, her speed and aggression let her use the secret art with deadly aptitude. Toshiko always fights with a team, and disables foes with resonance waves and pressure-point strikes, leaving them wide open to heavier hitters.

Her ferocity has made it hard for her to make friends; one of the few she considers close is her tutor and physical trainer, the retired Japanese super Kurote ("Black Hand"), who has the distinction of being one of the few men trained directly by the legendary Yakuza hitman the Ronin. Kurote serves as her "agent" of sorts, meeting with potential contractors and trying to find teams that are a good match for Toshiko. It was one of these meetings that led her to work with Dr. William Newman to fight McMurray family rival Spellbinder, an assignment that unfortunately ended with her death, although Newman's time-looping powers ensured that never actually happened. She's actively searching now for another team to take another shot at Spellbinder and his allies, who has technically now beaten her twice.

Skills and Powers
As "Hannya," the "Girl Behind the Demon Mask," Toshiko is a feared master of the Harmonic Fist, one of the deadliest secret martial arts in the world. It is a chi-based martial art that converts spirtual energy into the resonance waves that course through all objects, living and nonliving; and restores or ruins their harmony and balance through direct physical contacts (often targeting the pressure points of living creatures). Normally non-homogenous objects are too disparite for a single resonance frequency to noticeably affect them, but the more a Harmonic Fist student masters their chi, the easier it becomes to transform it into exactly the energy needed.

Beyond resonance, the Harmonic Fist contains many pressure point strikes that weaken or paralyze foes, but which can also be used to heal them and alleviate certain conditions. Toshiko possesses the master-level ability to project her chi outwardly, into powerful force waves that have the same effect as her strikes, but remotely. She can use this same projection power more defensively and block incoming energy-based attacks. It's rumored that Harmonic Fist masters can control their own energy with a thought, making them immune to certain attacks... but if this control exists it's unknown what its effects truly are.

Toshiko is extremely agile, capable of moving at tremendous speeds with such lightness on her feet she makes no noise and can stop on nearly any surface. Witnesses claim to have seen her run on the air itself.

Backstory
She belongs to one of the "branch families," and is the grand-daughter of Duncan McMurray, a Scottish mercenary who left the European theater to fight alongside the Americans in World War 2. He married an Okinawan woman and settled there, and Toshiko's parents were one of their daughters and a Japanese man. As few members of the "branch family" possessed powers, Toshiko grew up jealous of her cousins and dedicated herself to learning how to fight on the level of other supers. It was slow going-- her slight frame was a physical disadvantage in learning martial arts, and her parents disapproved at every turn-- but eventually she met a monk during her training who empathized with her plight and offered to teach her chi control.

After spending some time together, the monk revealed himself to be Kurote, a legendary supervillain who had switched sides after a rival Yakuza group killed his family in an attempt to blackmail him into helping them. His youngest daughter was about Toshiko's age, 12, when she was killed; it didn't take much of the girl talking about her family to warm Kurote's heart and give her a chance. She proved more than capable, training in the martial arts daily and undergoing rigorous conditioning that calloused her young hands to the degree a friend of Kurote's tattooed dragons over them to hide the damage... as well as adding intimidation value to her close-range attacks, of course. In two short years Toshiko had begun to learn the Harmonic Fist, and in one more mastered it to a great enough degree Kurote felt it was time to unleash her on the world.

Toshiko has some tie to the main McMurray family, but is far more sympathetic to fellow members of branch families who lack bloodline powers. Her closest friend in the main family is her first cousin, Rana, who was also somewhat ostracized by relatives. Her dedication is seen as an inspiration by nearly all, however-- rather than a challenge by an "inferior" upstart-- and she would receive much more warmth from the main family if she was willing to accept it.

Miscellaneous Trivia

 * Toshiko stopped school at 6th grade, and despite being an intelligent girl with a wise tutor, lacks a great deal of "common knowledge." She's especially in over her head when it comes to higher math and history, and speaks relatively simple Japanese (and no other language).


 * She's extremely slender and tends to wear full, somewhat concealing clothes, making her gender hard to discern for some (like poor Exemplar).


 * She's obsessed with Japanese mythology and has nearly encyclopedic knowledge of every monster, spirit, and god of any significance. She wears the Hannya mask from Noh theater because of its symbolism: that of a jealous female demon who eventually achieves enlightenment. Her mask is blue to represent the opposite of the true demon mask, which is always red.


 * Despite being trained by an assassin's protegé and using brutal martial arts and threats, Toshiko has never killed anyone, although she has left several particularly vile foes permanently paralyzed.