And now we have the second member of the Checkmate Gang!
The Queen
“I’m the biggest piece on the board, kid. There’s nowhere you can run from me.”
Alias: Jenn Victors
Approach: Overpowered
Archetype: Guerrilla
Health: 55 + (
× 5)
Powers
Fire 
Invisibility
Speed 
Qualities
Criminal Underworld Info 
Imposing 
Quick Queen
Status: Engaged Opponents
4+ Engaged opponents
2-3 Engaged opponents
0-1 Engaged opponents
Abilities
- Deft Manoeuvring (I): If you are outnumbered by nearby opponents, reduce all damage dealt to you by 2.
Destructive Dash (A): Attack multiple targets using Speed and use your Max die. Hinder each target using your Mid die.- Royal Burn (A): Attack using Fire. Use your Max+Mid+Min dice. Hinder yourself using your Max die. Take damage equal to your Mid+Min dice.
- Smouldering Outrage (I): At the start of your turn, gain a bonus equal to the number of opponents that Attacked you since your last turn.
- (U) Unstoppable Acceleration (I): When you take an action that lets you make an Attack, also make an Attack using your Mid die. (When using this upgrade, the Queen has 20 additional Health.)
(M) Master of Superiority (I): As long as you are manifesting effects related to a power you have at , automatically succeed at an Overcome involving usage of those powers.
The Queen
Alias: Jenn Victors
Gender: Female
Age: 30s
Height: 5’7”
Eyes: Grey
Hair: Red
Skin: Light
Build: Athletic
Costume/Equipment: A white jacket over a form-fitting, black full-body costume with a white chess queen symbol on the chest.
Approach: Overpowered
Archetype: Guerrilla
Biography
Jenn Victors grew up in poverty in a crime-filled city. When she was a teenager, she fell in with a local street gang despite her parents’ wishes. Sure, she could’ve eked out a living in some low-paying job, but Jenn didn’t have the patience for that. She wanted to be at the top of the food chain, and crime seemed the most expeditious root to that end. In her neighbourhood, you either became a crook or a victim, and Jenn surely wasn’t planning on being the latter.
Unfortunately, Jenn’s gang would not last as long as she would’ve liked. A mole had infiltrated their ranks and revealed the location of their hideout to the authorities. A police raid a few nights later managed to round up all the members of the gang, save Jenn. She was cornered by half a dozen cops, and had nowhere to run. Then, suddenly, when she was at her most desperate, something inside of Jenn Victors changed. She raced past the cops. She didn’t know how, but somehow, she had managed to dash away from them without them loosing a single shot. Then she realised that she had run across town in an instant.
With her newfound power of superspeed, Jenn Victors became an even more prolific criminal. Now, she no longer needed a gang, and could commit any number of audacious heists all on her own. During one particularly daring break-in at a cutting-edge weapon manufacturing plant, Jenn Victors came across a man in a black long-coat with some kind of funny crown symbol on his shirt. Jenn soon learned that this man was also breaking into the same building on the exact same night. By then, the plant’s security had caught wind of foul play, and Jenn and the other guy—who introduced himself as Vasiliy Gasparov—realised that their only way out of the situation was to work together. Vasiliy provided tactical insights to Jenn, and she used her powers of swiftness to greater effect because of them, getting the two safely out of the facility.
Once out of danger, Vasiliy Gasparov told Jenn that he was a newly-minted supervillain calling himself the King, and that he wanted Jenn Victors to be the first member to join his new crew, the Checkmate Gang. Jenn thought that Vasiliy’s tactical aid could be useful, so she obliged, and he dubbed her the Queen.
Capabilities and Motivations
The Queen can move and act at a much higher rate than any normal human, which allows her to run great distances in the blink of an eye and dodge and strike with unprecedented accuracy and precision. In addition, the Queen’s superspeed allows her to attune her vibrations to the same wavelength as light, thus rending her invisible to all observers and visual sensors. She can also use her enormous velocity to generate copious amounts of friction, which she can then direct at her opponents in the form of blasts of heat and flame.
The relationship betwixt the Queen and the King began as a purely professional one, as they both saw the benefits to be gained from working together. However, over time, the two did begin a romance, which continues to the present.
Upgrades
At times, the Queen is able to accelerate herself quite a bit faster if she pushes herself hard enough, which enables her to land more and more blows in the amount of time it would take a normal fighter to throw even one.
Editor’s Notes
Of course the Queen has the Overpowered Approach—the queen’s the most powerful piece in chess. (Ditto for Master of Superiority.)
I chose the Queen’s surname because it is a form of the name Victoria—the name of a famous queen. And I chose her given name because it’s a diminutive of Jennifer, which is a cognate of the name of another famous queen—Guinevere.
I chose to make Jenn a speedster because, in chess, the queen piece has the option to move to more squares than any other piece—it can move about to the highest degree.
When selecting her other Powers, I wanted to give her something other than Speed that was still related to that central Power. I landed on Fire because I thought it was something that superspeed could logically create (well, logical for comics), and is in contrast to the fact that most of DC’s speedsters have Electricity instead. As for Invisibility, I got that from an old Jay Garrick comic in a Flash anthology I bought. I thought it was an interesting, alternate use of “vibrations” besides the more usual Intangibility—plus it fits the whole “crook” vibe nicely.
I intentionally left the source of the Queen’s powers ambiguous. In the Sentinel Comics Universe, she’s an Omega. If you’re not playing there, then her powers can come from whatever the most common source of superpowers in your campaign world is, be that a metagene, mutations, dark matter, space rocks, cosmic rays, or whatever. The point is that the source of her powers isn’t super important to her character, so it doesn’t matter much.
Chomp! (A): Attack using Close Combat. Use your Max die. Recover Health equal to your Min die.
Destructive Parry (R): Defend against an Attack by rolling your single status die. Deal that much damage to a different nearby target.