Roxxanne, also known as the Arsonist, has lived a long and harried life. Currently residing in Empire City, the demonic ocelot now lives out of wherever she can find. To say that she has a respect for the law is... optimistic, at best.

This is not to say that she is an anarchist, though many from the timeline she lived in labelled her as such. Where she grew up in, law no longer existed. Roxxanne was born seven-thousand years in the future, into a world scarred and pitted by two apocalypses and so dried up of resources and opportunity that the largest settlements on Earth were slave empires that numbered in the hundreds of individuals, built around the service of the Neoboyars' hedonistic whims. Roxxanne's mother, a prized slave-counter, escaped from one of these with her when she was a child, hunted across mountain ranges and blasted deserts for her intelligence and for the stack of sensor-novels and more mundane books she carried with her. For years, Roxxanne grew up in an abandoned military bunker, only accessible because one of her mother's ancestors was a esteemed general within the East Coast nation of Shining Empire and the buried fortification recognized that bit of DNA floating within her code, one more gift from a family she did not even know the last name of. They did not leave the bunker again until Roxxanne's mother died peacefully in her sleep. She had imparted a gift to Roxxanne by the time that she died. With her knowledge and the history in those books, she had given her a purpose.

She had spoken to her of amazing individuals with gifts and powers, able to help those who could not stop their oppressors. Roxxanne, barely a young woman, had no powers at that time, but she did have an armory filled with millions of rounds of ammunition, hundreds of weapons created to fight the war that ended the world a second time, and no ties to the past or future. It was as close as she could get to being heroic.

In the years that followed after she buried her mother, the Neoboyars were slowly whittled down, their guard "armies" crushed, scattered by one woman who could not be made to fear them. Roxxanne burned these "havens" to the ground. Her opponents labelled her a destroyer of the security they offered. The ocelot embraced the concept and twisted it to suit herself.

She began to branch out, hunting down the brain-hungry cerebrocysts and their "colonies", the mutates that poured out over the Great Plains, and single-handedly destroying the AI Wives of the Silicon Pyramids. She eventually found others like her, dedicated to protecting others who were powerless in the face of these threats. These newcomers all had warped abilities that were shadows of the forces wielded by the superheroes of the past, but it put them on a level above the threats of the destroyed world. The Arsonist joined with several others to form the first superhero team that the world had seen in hundreds of years: the Samaritans.

Despite what they wielded, despite the gear that they could bring to bear, despite everything... The world was too used up to change. No matter what good they did, Earth was already swallowed by destruction, greed, violence. These things were a way of life now. Nothing would stick. Nothing could stop the continued downfall of civilization past levels even the great downfall of Rome would be trivial compared to. Eventually, communes failed to prosper amidst the dust and ashes. To create a settlement of twelve or so people and eke out a living was a triumph that lasted less and less with each attempt, and there were so many attempts made... The Arsonist eventually began to burn for the sake of burning. Despair changed purpose into a mindless perseverance. The struggle, without meaning, was all that she lived for. When everything before her was in ruin, and all was meaningless, the Eternal Conflict came for her.

This pocket dimension, existing in connection to Empire-7, serves as a place where the greatest warriors in history may continue to fight each other without death or age stopping them. They are remade upon entering its realms, twisted by the fears of their peers to become nightmarish things.It takes only those for whom battle has become the only meaning or reason for life. It does not matter whether they embrace or resist this fact, only that they believed it. Roxxanne, who had overcome hundreds of men by this time, was a perfect candidate.

Time within the Eternal Conflict is a strange thing. Egress between Empire-7 and the pocket dimension is permitted for the Infernal Champions who live within it, but they find themselves thrown into a time period of strife and combat. Currently, the Eternal Conflict is linked to the superpower-rife times of present-day Empire City. Roxxanne herself went through this link in order to prevent the pocket dimension's destruction recently one Halloween.

Something curious happened when she did, something that's not common amongst Infernal Champions. It's normal to feel invigorated by the idea of taking apart things and seeing actual consequences from it. The Arsonist feels far more than that while living in Empire City. She looks around, and she sees these superheroes that she was raised to believe in... and they're even better than the stories her mother told her. Things stick here. Men and women fight for their beliefs without serving as assassins, spies, or soldiers for a monolithic government planning to bring the world to devastation once again. She can feel that purpose returning. Plus, everyone here is just so ready to fight on the slightest provocation... and it's fun testing her new super-strength on whoever's willing to "spar" with her.

The Arsonist doesn't have a respect for the law, but that doesn't mean that she can't tell good from bad. She's offered to take on the largest challenges Empire City could face to the city's government. They've yet to take on her offer, either because they don't want to risk finally going whole-hog and all-out endorsing the property damage that superheroes without "finesse" (which Roxxanne lacks completely) create on a regular basis, or because there's nothing that requires her particular blend of heroics yet.

Until she gets the call, though, Empire City's residents will still hear her work, confused as to whether the occasional nearby explosion, screams of thugs as they're pulled up into the air above, or the winged shadow passing over them is a good or bad omen. The Arsonist has always done things her own way, without regard to what others feel or believe about her. Her hopes and dreams are returning to her bit by bit as she continues to live in Empire City. Day by day, it has started to look like her vacation outside of the Eternal Conflict will be a permanent one.

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 furii did this picture for me, and he did a damn good job on it! I did the coloring, but I couldn't have done it if he hadn't given me some wonderful lineart to work with. Thanks, dude!

The Arsonist belongs to me. Really fucking proud of the color job I did on this one. l3

Empire City and all related shenanigans belongs to a panda, aka  blackjackaught. Thanks for letting me work with all this crazy stuff! <3