Cherry Bomb

This is now more or less complete and is open to anyone within the Angel Falls community to use for stories within Angel Falls.

Name: Cherry Sanders
Callsign: Cherry Bomb
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 165 lbs
Hair: Auburn
Eyes: Dark blue
Skin: Caucasian

Official Angel Falls designation: Wildcard

Background: Cherry was born as the only daughter to James and Renee Randolf in a quiet North Georgia town. Her parents never cared for her tomboyish youth or her rough-and-tumble perspective on life. As she grew older, this clash of personality grew more intense. At the age of 15, she started taking martial arts classes, using the school gym after school. At first her parents thought that refusing to pick her up after school would curb this behavior, but when she just started jogging home every day, they tried grounding her. When that didn't work, they tried to force her to take piano lessons, then ballet, then signed her up for ettiquette courses. They might as well have been trying to make a mule drink from a poisoned well.

At the age of 18, Cherry took off on her own. She didn't know what she was going to do, but she was sure she wasn't staying at home. She'd had enough of that crap. She even had her name legally changed from Randolf to Sanders as soon as she could afford the court costs.

Over the next few years, she worked odd jobs in odd little towns but never stayed at any one place for very long. For extra cash, she'd often fight in arena bouts. Sometimes these were sanctioned events and sometimes they were illegal events staged in underground dives. She won most of these fights, but she lost a few along the way as well. The defeats only drove her to train harder.

There was an itch inside her to keep moving, and that itch was never settled until she made her way into Alaska. For a time, she had tried living in Canada, but there was just something about being in the US that she loved, and Alaska was about as far away from Georgia as she could get and still be in the US.

For the next few years, this would be her home. It was a tough living. She didn't much care for the cold especially in winter and scraping together enough money for a decent weight room wasn't easy, but she managed. She just had to cut out things like cable TV, the internet, cell phone service, but she made do. Training was more important than those things anyway.

At the age of 23, things started to change for her a bit. She had worked the minor local sanctioned fighting circuit enough to get the attention of a national organization. In six months they were holding a small event in Ankorage and had invited her to an open bout in the women's heavyweight division. A good showing there, could be the springboard she needed for bigger things. She could join a fight team and get some quality training from seasoned professionals.

In the summer, she was out pushing a threshold run--pushing too hard for her own good--when the sky was suddenly filled with a blinding light. She awoke later, how much later she didn't know. It was the time of near perpetual daylight. What she did know, was that she felt completely exhausted, like she had just been through a really hard fight and her body was letting her know about it. It was all she could do to get home and collapse on the bed. She lay there for hours or day, she couldn't tell which later. All she knew was that she woke up famished and in desperate need of a shower.

For days later, she could barely move. At last, she had had enough and got up to do a light bag workout. What happens next she still remembers to this day. It was like she could see herself from outside her own body. She saw her left foot brace behind her, her right move forward. She saw her powerful shoulder begin to push as her arm accelerated her black-gloved fist towards the bag. She felt her fist connect hard with the small bag and then there was an explosion of light and heat, sound and concussion, as the bag was ripped apart, scattered across the room. She remembered standing there in shock, then the mad run to the mirror to make sure she was OK. She didn't find a scratch on herself, not a thing seemed wrong except for the missing glove on her right hand. It was almost as if nothing had happened until she walked back into her makeshift gym room and found the tattered remains of the bag.

She wondered if it was just old, if maybe she had just hit it perfectly and it couldn't handle the strain. Maybe that was it. She gave a few light taps to the heavy bag a few yards away. Nothing happened and she somehow was a little saddened. She shrugged, leaned in, and hammered the bag hard with her left hand. Again, there was an explosion as sand and leather sprayed across the room. For long hours she sat and thought about what she would do next. She couldn't go back to the fight circuit. One blow like that and she'd be banned anyway. Somehow she didn't seem to care. This opened up new doors, there were bigger fights out there for her. There were super-heroes and super-villians and she wanted a taste of how they fought.

A few days later she sold everything she had and hopped on an airplane headed to the biggest super-city in the US. She went to Angel Falls. There was adventure to be had there for someone like her, and she intended to test every hero and villain in that damn city before her time was done. When she stepped off the plane, she hadn't smiled like that since she'd left home.

Personality: A woman who loves the thrill of combat. She speaks with a distinguished southern drawl. (Think modern day "Gone With the Wind" and you'll have a good idea.) She destests the more rural southern dialects and will always voice her opinion on it if heard. I suppose this is the one holdover, the one personality quirk she retains from her parents. Her one desire is to fight every super in Angel Falls. Defeat only seems to drive her to train harder. She might not come back for a rematch right away, but she will come back eventually. Perhaps strangely, there is no real malice in her heart when she fights, she just loves the thrill of the fight. Typically, she monitors the police channels for criminal reports and activities and if it's close by, she makes her best speed to that location. All she's after is a scrap with someone in a costume, someone who can put up a fight. She doesn't care about criminal activity or justice. She will just as readily jump a super trying to stop the crime as she will a villain trying to make a get-away. It's all about the fight to her.

Powers:

Unstable cellular Structure: Cherry's cellular structure seems to have been altered in her strange encounter. For whatever reason, her dead skin cells seem charged, primed to explode violently with forceful impacts. It doesn't seem to matter whether she's the one doing the hitting or whether she's the one being hit, hard impacts cause her to go boom. The source of the instability is, as yet, unknown. Some have theorized that it's not just her dead cells that are unstable, that her living cells could be slightly ustable as well, that with a strong enough impact a chain reaction might reverberate through her entire body. It could be, this is just a nasty rumor.

The bulk of the explosion seems to be in the form of heat and radiation. The resulting noise and concussive impact are the result of the air in the local area rapidly expanding. At any rate, she seems to be largely immune to the heat and radiation. It is unclear the extent of her resistance to radiatin but it does seem to expand to the full spectrum of wavelengths: radio, visible light, infrared, untraviolet, and even into the x-ray and gamma ray spectrums.

Enhanced Strength, toughness, and reflexes: The accident has made her already strong physique even more powerful pushing her into the realm of the metahuman. It would be a good guess to assume the accident has made her close to 25 times as strong as she was as a normal human and her endurance has improved in a like fashion. Bullets do not seem able to penetrate her flesh, but the impact does cause an explosion and definitely leaves a nasty bruise. Her skin would appear to be about as resistant to physical impacts as if she were wearing a threat level 3 security vest. It still hurts and slows her down, but a few shots are by no means deadly.