Bethan Costigan

Bethan is a tall, bony woman with long (rib-length) blonde hair, usually worn loose or in a ponytail. She does have a surprising amount of muscle, but it isn't immediately obvious, both because she's so thin and because she mostly dresses in very covering clothes. She has fairly delicate features, and unusually clear skin (especially for how gross she is). She perpetually looks exhausted, with heavy shadows under her eyes.

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Bethan has exactly a dozen scars. There are six on each side: they are circular marks, each about a half-inch wide, placed in a vertical line in the spaces between her ribs. She has no tattoos or piercings.

CLOTHING: She wears simple, dark-coloured clothes which show very little skin - high-necked, long-sleeved shirts; jeans or motorcycle leathers; heavy boots; that sort of thing. She is always, even in hot weather, wearing a leather jacket: it's visibly old and tatty, and has been mended and patched in several places. Her clothes are usually cheap (except the bike leathers) and it shows. She doesn't wear jewellery or make-up, and unless she's vigilante-ing, doesn't wear a helmet when she rides her motorcycle.

HYGIENE: Really bad. She showers very rarely (and usually to get the blood off), frequently sleeps in her clothes, and barely ever combs her hair. Deodorant? What's that? She smells strongly of BO, engine oil, and (for some reason) metal. She actually scrubs up pretty well - it just doesn't happen often.

VOICE: Surprisingly light, with a faded Queens accent with just a hint of Irish.

AS THE BANDIT: Her vigilante gear is mostly just plain black motorcycle leathers, but adjusted to help give the impression that the Bandit is a man. She has padded out the shoulders and chest of the leathers (which doubles as impromptu stabproofing) to make herself look broader at first sight. She wears a black motorcycle helmet with a tinted visor, with a voice-changer glued to the inside to make her voice sound deeper (and, incidentally, slightly robotic). These leathers are a different to the ones she wears by day, but in even worse nick: they have been inexpertly mended in several places, and there are even a couple of gunshot wounds.

The first thing you will notice about Bethan is that she's angry. Like, really angry. All the time. She gives off the impression that if you put a foot wrong, she'll put you through a wall, and... yeah. Yeah, she will. She has severe anger issues, and all the hurt, confusion, and self-hatred she has is turned outwards as well as inwards, making her a violent, rude, and generally unpleasant person to be around.

Which is how she likes it, because the last thing she wants is for people to get close to her. If people start liking her, they might start caring about her, and if they care about her, they'll only get hurt.

She's not an entirely terrible person. She has a strong - sometimes overly rigid - moral compass, and she does want to do the right thing. In fact, she believes she's morally obligated to, especially since she realised she essentially has superpowers. She doesn't particularly care about people (again, she does her absolute best not to), but she has an overarching sense of right and wrong. She doesn't kill people, for example. At least, not on purpose. If someone has a brain aneurysm after she slammed their head repeatedly into the concrete, that's not her problem, but she doesn't set out to kill people. She also tries to aim her violent tendencies in a socially helpful direction, which is to say, she's a vigilante.

She has a deep-seated mistrust of anyone with power, and anyone who wants it. Politically, she's a very vocal anarchist, and has every reason to hate and fear government authority. Despite this, she'll call the cops on her victims criminal targets once she's done beating them up, because if there's one person she trusts less than the government, it's herself.

See, Bethan is - by her own account - a crazy bitch. She'd like to blame the superpowers, but that's not the problem. Severe trauma, depression, anger issues, and psychotic breaks make for a bad cocktail, and due to her unnaturally fast metabolism (and her crippling fear of anything medical), she's essentially permanently unmedicated. She's self-destructive, impulsive, paranoid, and prone to dissociating. Sometimes, she hallucinates. She very rarely sleeps more than a couple of hours a night, and lives on a diet of strong coffee and stronger liquor, which doesn't help. This can mostly be explained by what is an undeniably severe case of PTSD, but Bethan refuses the diagnosis, along with every other diagnosis she's had: she finds it easier (and it suits her self-hatred) to just consider herself broken. She doesn't trust her emotions, her reactions, or her perception of reality. And maybe that means that she shouldn't trust her perception of who's a violent criminal who needs their bones broken, but on the other hand: she doesn't want to think about that.

She's intelligent - ferociously so, really - and fascinated by politics, tactics, and philosophy. She reads a lot, when she can make herself stay still long enough, and (naturally) gets into arguments online a lot. She's been through several computers as a result, because fuck knows her violent tendencies aren't limited to people. That intelligence is tempered by an inability to sit with her thoughts for any length of time. She's almost always moving around and doing something, whether it's climbing on rooftops (it's not trespassing if nobody prosecutes you), tinkering with the engine of her cobbled-together motorcycle, or just punching things.

Underneath the anger, she's horribly afraid. Dig down a little - not very far - and you'll find that fear is what leads to most of her rage: fear of being vulnerable, of showing weakness, of being abandoned, of being as terrible a person as she believes she is. She tries desperately to come across as fearless and inhuman, because that's what she wishes she could be. It's true that she's not scared of some things that she really should be scared of, like pain or death or being hated. What scares her is being alive, continuing to stagger on in the state she's in, afraid of her own rage and hating herself for every mistake she ever makes.

Also the dark, closed spaces, strange places, doctors, institutions, being touched... She's scared of a lot of things.

Deep down, she isn't a bad person. She might dislike and mistrust everybody she meets, but she will still try to protect them where she can. She might be violent and angry, but she at least tries to direct it in a useful way. As her family will attest, underneath the armour of her defensiveness and rage, she has a lot of love to give, and can be surprisingly tender to the people she's close to. No matter how much she might deny it, or be irritated by people not doing enough for themselves, she fundamentally has a need to help others and to be needed. But some part of her is still a hurt child curled up and shivering in a shipping container, and around that small, vulnerable part, she's built up so many walls that even the people she loves can't break through all of them. Hell, even she can't.

Bethan was born in New York in 1996, along with her twin brother Dara, to a working-class Irish-American family. Her father Sean worked odd jobs, and was constantly in and out of work - sometimes in the city, mostly not. Her mother Sinead had been working retail, but left work rather than pay for daycare when the twins were born, as most of the extended family lived too far away to call on for help. Despite this, Bethan and Dara had a fairly stable start, a loving home, and never wanted for much.

This was possible because Sean Costigan, determined to give his children the best opportunities he could and not raise them in poverty, had started to take work that he really shouldn't have. He had always teetered on the edge of the criminal world, many of his jobs including smuggling or muscle work for syndicates; around the time Bethan and Dara were born, this started to escalate. He took bigger and bigger jobs, with greater risks and greater rewards. Huge, strong, and smarter than he looked, he quickly rose to a position of trust with a smuggling ring. As will happen with organised crime, he got pulled in more with every job - until, that is, he found out that it wasn't only goods that were being smuggled. Being part of human trafficking was too much for a man who, in his own way, held to a surprisingly strict moral code.

When Bethan and Dara were three, Sinead drove them off for a "holiday" with Sean's brother in Ohio, which lasted for a full year. Back in New York, a tip-off and a sting operation took out the smuggling ring. Sean pleaded guilty to minor offences in connection with the criminal group, hoping that it would keep suspicion off him, and served six months. It seemed to work; a year later, he cautiously sent word to Sinead that it was safe to come back, and the family were reunited in a two-bed apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Sean kept his head down from then on, working less profitable but more legitimate jobs. Sinead went back to work to make up the money that was lacking. Slowly, they started to move on.

In the summer of 2003, Bethan stayed the night with a friend two blocks over. She left the other girl's apartment on a Saturday morning, to take a walk she had made a hundred times, and never arrived home. Her distraught family searched high and low; Sean in particular was inconsolable, already suspecting that this was payback aimed at him, coming three years too late. He was right, and the people who had taken her knew what they were doing: despite the family's fairly quick reaction and the police being called in almost at once, there was no sign of the six-year-old anywhere.

She doesn't remember much of what came next. She was young, and she's spent most of twenty years blocking it out. She remembers being locked up for a very long time, not knowing where she was. She remembers operations, and injections, and men and women in masks and aprons. To this day, she doesn't know who they were, although she's pieced together most of the story: that they were some kind of experimental team, that they had gone to the smugglers for their lab rats, and that the remaining smugglers had seen this as an opportunity for revenge as well as a quick buck. All she knows is that they were trying to do something, to change her.

She doesn't know why they let her go, either. Perhaps they thought they had failed, or perhaps Sean - who was still hunting for her, dogged and unrelenting - had gotten too close to them for comfort. Perhaps they just ran out of funding. Either way, two years after she was kidnapped, she was sedated, bundled onto a truck, and taken away from whatever facility they were holding her in.

Sean and his brother Eoin found her in a shipping container in New Jersey a week later. She was emaciated, dehydrated, and hypothermic, unconscious and barely breathing, but she was alive. In fact, she made a truly miraculous recovery - once she was in the hospital and properly cared-for, she was almost entirely healed in just a few days. The only sign that anything had happened to her at all were the scars along her ribs, which never healed entirely, no matter what other injuries she might recover from. And recover she did, preternaturally quickly. After her rescue, she never got ill, not even a cold; never seemed to scrape her knee or split her lip; when she did injure herself, even badly, it would heal in a fraction of the time you would expect.

Those were the only outward signs, at least. Inwardly, the girl who had gone missing was nothing like the girl who was found. Unsurprisingly, Bethan took a long time to even start to recover from the trauma. For almost two years after her ordeal, she didn't speak to anyone outside the family. She refused to go back to school, or to see her old friends. She had nightmares, sleepwalked, often found herself on the roof of their high-rise or out on the fire escape. Being in closed rooms made her panic. Being touched made her panic. She became by turns withdrawn and almost feral, her always-quick temper now a hair-trigger berserker rage.

The family was struggling with their own trauma, too. Dara wasn't allowed outside, and Sean had started to drink heavily, while Sinead was struggling with her own nightmares and panic attacks when she lost sight of either child for more than a few minutes. In the end, Sean and Sinead spoke to their children, and they agreed that the best thing was to leave New York. Again, they went to stay with Eoin in Ohio, this time on a permanent basis. The children were home-schooled for the next few years, during which time they gained a little brother, Ciaran. In many ways, he was the best therapy Bethan could have had - certainly better than the psychotherapy she kept refusing to go to - because he gave her something to focus on and be strong for. She was ferociously protective of Ciaran, and in being protective of him, started to learn to control her temper, to not be violent around him, to withdraw from situations instead of exploding into them.

That wasn't to say she was okay. As she started to hold herself back from lashing out at her family, the anger turned inwards. She took more and more risks, and as she increasingly saw how resilient and quick-healing she had become, the risks became more and more unreasonable - jumping off the roof of her house or getting into fights with people much bigger and stronger than her. She started to test her power, to see how long she could starve herself without anyone noticing, or to try and make a scar that would stay. It wasn't just about testing her boundaries, either: her body no longer felt like her own, and she just wanted to be able to change it, to make it into something that was hers.

At thirteen, Dara went back to mainstream school. That was a catalyst for Bethan to start building a mask, to at least pretend that she was recovering. She went back to therapy, reluctantly, and even let her parents take her to the doctor and the dentist for the first time in six years. She still had flashes of uncontrollable rage, and despite her intelligence, wasn't able to get back into mainstream schooling, but she did slowly begin to persuade her family, her therapist, and her community that she was recovering. Aged sixteen, she even managed to persuade Sean that she should be able to drive; she and her uncle Eoin cobbled together an old Ford from parts, and she found that there was one thing in the world that could relax her. Engineering became a passion - first cars, and then, working alongside her uncle in his garage, motorbikes as well.

She worked in the garage for a couple years after graduating from homeschool, but she was restless. She hated how weak and broken she felt, still, and wanted more than anything to take back what she felt had been stolen from her - her life, her body, her autonomy. In the end, it was that which drew her back to New York, where she got a job in a chop shop in 2017. And it was that, once she was no longer concerned with her family finding out how broken she was, which created the Bandit.

The first time she went vigilante was an accident. She had been coming home from work when she witnessed a mugging, and without thinking, she intervened, beating the assailant to within an inch of his life before she even thought to call 911. It was a rush, and for the first time in years, she felt like she'd done something. The world was shitty and unjust, and she'd made it a little less shitty and unjust. It was only a week later, once she'd given some thought to disguising herself - after what had happened with her father, she wasn't about to put her family at risk by getting found out - that she went out the second time, this time with a purpose.

The Bandit was a name the newspapers gave her, after a few months. She hadn't thought as far ahead as picking out a name, but she couldn't be happier with the name they chose, or with what it signifies. She finally feels like she's making a difference, doing what's right, and most importantly, she finally has a vent for some of the anger she's been carrying so long.

It doesn't hurt, either, that while she never aims to kill anyone or to do anything that's not totally justified (to her), it feels pretty justified to take any cash the perps were carrying as payment for her labour. After all, a girl's gotta eat.