Boom-Boom Crash

The Mask

Boom-Boom Crash's Mask is a woman who looks somewhere in her late thirties and has clearly decided that's fine with her. Curly red hair that does whatever it wants — and has clearly won every argument about this — frames a pale, freckled face with light eyes that move a little too fast, cataloguing everything in the room before the conversation's even started. She's not tall. She dresses practically: worn jeans, layered tops, boots with good grip, and at least one pocket that has something in it she's not going to explain right now.

She carries herself like someone who has stopped apologizing for taking up space. Her smile is warm and a little sharp at the same time — the kind that makes you feel like she already knows the punchline and is genuinely curious whether you'll catch it.

She smells faintly of something chemical. She says it's her hand lotion. It is not her hand lotion.

The Mien

The Mask drops and what's underneath is small and delighted and slightly terrifying.

She's wiry in the way of things that move fast and don't stop — lean, restless, never quite still. Her skin goes pale as ash with dark smudged markings beneath her eyes like she's been leaning too close to something burning, which she probably has. Her hair, dark with threads of ember-orange running through it, is pulled into two loose, messy pigtails that do not stay where they're put and have stopped being asked to. Her ears come to soft points half-hidden by escaped curls.

Her eyes are the thing people remember. Wide. Burning red-orange, genuinely luminous, the color of something right before it goes critical. They move constantly — cataloguing, calculating, delighted — there is always something in there that has just had a very good idea and is deciding whether to share it yet.

And then the smile. Too wide. Too many teeth. Arranged in an expression of absolute unhinged glee that should probably alarm you more than it does, because the warmth behind it is completely real.

She practically vibrates. Her hands don't stop moving — tapping, measuring invisible distances, folding and unfolding like they're working out a problem her mouth hasn't gotten to yet. She bounces slightly on her heels when she's thinking, which is always.

The crucial thing, the thing that separates her from something broken: she looks like she's having the time of her life. Not spiraling — arrived. Like the chaos isn't happening to her, she's the one causing it, on purpose, because she has done the math and this is the correct answer.

She smells like ozone and something faintly sweet underneath, like a match just struck.

Mantle

Boomie's mantle smells like gunpowder and fireworks, but she's dimmer than she had been last week.

I need someone who can make something:

• Boom-Boom is available for hire in the loosest possible sense — she'll build, repair, jury-rig, or creatively dismantle things for people she trusts or finds interesting. But she has opinions about how and why, and if she thinks a job is going wrong she will tell you. Loudly. 

You remind me of someone I used to be:

• Boom-Boom has a soft spot — carefully hidden under approximately forty layers of brass and smoke — for people who are performing calm they don't feel. She recognizes it. She was it for decades. Characters who are suppressing something, playing a role that doesn't fit, or holding themselves together with both hands may find her unexpectedly perceptive, or unexpectedly invasive, depending on how they feel about being seen.

Something from before:

• Her Fetch lived a quiet, small life in the years she was gone — no scientific career, no waves made, no one particularly remarkable. But Boom-Boom's pre-Durance life wasn't quiet, and the people and places from her 1980s STEM career didn't all disappear. Old colleagues, old enemies, old work — some of it might surface in ways that need handling. And some of what she was building, back before she was taken, she never finished. Whether that's literal or metaphorical is still being determined.