Officer Sean O’Donoghue

Okay, since Brian did such an insane backstory to the Blue Streak, I figured I’d put in a few details of my char’s background.

The name’s O’Donoghue. Officer Sean O’Donoghue with Philadelphia’s finest, Superhero Matters Division.

Some people have family businesses, the O’Donoghue’s have the Police force. I’m a cop. Collin, Chris, Joe and even Emerald are cops. Dad was a cop. Grandad was a cop. Great-granddad became a cop after getting of the boat. I’m sure great-great must have been a constable or whatever they have over there. Being a cop’s in our blood. Homicide, Robbery, Vice, they’ve all got O’Donoghue’s in them. So how’d I end up in freak show division?

You don’t find many “normals” here. Flamers, Sparkers, Icers, Spoon-Benders, Greek Gods we got plenty of. It’s about 1/2 our procurement budget just to buy clothing that can stand up to the people who are wearing them. But that’s what it takes to keep the latest bloomer from getting delusions of grandeur. But as for me, even in the O’Donoghue family, Collin’s stronger, Chris is smarter, Emerald could stop a clock, what do I got? I’ve got the ability to have my insides become my outsides and still wake up the next morning. Honestly, if you ever decide you want to be a superhero, “Being Very Very hard to kill” seems like a good idea until you actually find out how painful still being alive can be.

So how do you determine that you’re actually a super-hero when you have no outward signs of it? In my case, I was undercover for vice. I’d been working a major drug deal for a few months when someone tipped off the bad guys that I was working for the other side. They thought they’d send a message to the force by working me over pretty messily with a shotgun. It might have sent a better message if I hadn’t woken up the next morning in the hospital still alive.

The doctors’ first guess that something was different about me was that even after I’d lost about 40 lbs of soft tissue and had a hole in my chest the size of your fist that you could see daylight through, I didn’t seem to be dead, nor even in any real danger of becoming dead. Over the course of several days with some helpful patching and scaffolding added by the docs, I was able to walk out of the hospital. I was there when the force arrested all the jokers who tried rubbing me out. But that’s when things became tricky.

First, supers aren’t supposed to work normal crimes, at least officially. After the right to privacy was extended to people’s brains in ’64, in order to “give confidence” to the public, supers were limited to investigating super-involved crimes. Of course, there are cops who have their own “helpers” but nothing above board.

The lawyers argued that evidence I could give was tainted and that since I was a super-regenerator, that it was obvious that I was never in any real danger of being killed. Did I mention I’m not a big fan of lawyers? We did manage to get them put away on “Assaulting an Officer” and weapons charges, but I was then officially transferred over to the freakshow division. I guess nature abhors a police division without an O’Donoghue.

My luck still wasn’t finished dealing with me, however. Internal Affairs has difficulty with supers in general and especially regenerators when trying to determine “Was it OK for this person to draw their weapon?” If someone’s shooting at Tog, and I know bullets bounce off him, or shooting at me who can take an awful lot of bullets, am I justified shooting back because I was “Afraid for my life or the life of a fellow officer?” So IA finally decided to get around the problem altogether. Super-division cops are issued non-lethal “neural disruptors” which act like the blue sparky things they shoot at ships in Star Wars (even the same visual effect, R+D needs to watch less movies), except with people. I kind of like them to be honest. Less mess, less paperwork.

So now I’ve been working supers for a year, I’ve been blasted, burned, frozen, kicked, thrown into numerous walls (Note: unless you’re Tog, the wall generally does not give way when you hit it), electrocuted, cleaved, crushed and stabbed.

Did I mention is still hurts? I need another line of work.