Amy Sykes

Daughter and Detonator

Amy was a normal young Kansas girl until the day her mommy blew up.

She remembers it more clearly than her parents. Mama was up ahead carrying a picnic basket and a pie hot from the oven. Dad saw them coming and stopped the tractor. Moving between the stems and roots at her feet, Amy spied the biggest, shiniest black beetle she’d ever seen. She knelt down to take a close look and the world shook and changed.

The sound was sudden and painful and it went on and on, a shriek that turned into a roar that, only later, she recognized as the ocean-surf noise of deafness. She looked up and felt her own scream, the scream she couldn’t hear. Her mother was coming apart.
Green fire and something black that sucked in the noontime Kansas light, and her mother was in the middle of it, torn apart, dissolving… and then her dad got close and somehow mom was back together.

A second later she heard birds and realized she was fine, she could hear and everything was back to normal. Except that her mother was sitting down in the field and every blade and stem and stalk was blown to the ground, all radiating out from the central point where her mother was stunned. Except that the headlights and windshield on the tractor were shattered, until Abe looked at them and said, “No, no!” in a tone of despair… and the shards flew back into place and became seamless.

She didn’t want to believe it, but nothing was back to normal. Her father could repair windows with a glance, her mother could fly, the impossible was becoming commonplace and none of them knew what to do about it.

Then came the Tet Offensive, about four months after The Event (as the Sykes family came to call it) and her mother said she had to go. Her mother went away with soldiers and politicians, and Amy followed Abe to D.C. where they were an afterthought, when anyone thought about them at all. It was confusing and upsetting and she cried a lot, wanting her mom back, but that was the worst of it that first year.
The second year, 1969, was when Jack Grimes (p. 213) and Alphonse “Zipperneck” Russo (p. 210) and some other men hit her dad with a car and tried to drag her off into a van and she said “No!” And then three of them were dead. She’d blown them to pieces, like a mortar round, but she was fine.

She knew she hadn’t gotten hurt since The Event, but she hadn’t really let herself think about it. After the kidnap attempt, after her father healed himself and got them out of there, she thought about it a lot. He said it looked like she’d exploded, and she figured she had.
She could explode, and nothing could hurt her, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with herself.
Grimes’ kidnapping attempt happened four days after her 13th birthday.

Lineage: Amanda Sykes
Power Level: Tier Two
Offspring: Alphonse Russo, Jack Grimes, Cole Laskin, Eloise Tyburn, and five others

Personality: At first, Amy Sykes is a scared and confused American teen, covering up her uncertainty with sarcasm and a snotty, put-upon attitude. But as she gets deeper into her teen years, Amy becomes more confident and less abrasive. She’s never the most empathetic person. With little pain in her life after 1968, it’s hard for her to identify with the fears of the fragile everyday person. But she’s not selfish, she’s not cruel and she’s not greedy. She wants to be good, just like her parents.

Values: Sykes Family, Stopping Bullies

Known Powers

  • Between her Regeneration, Heavy Armor, and Invulnerability, Amy is pretty nearly indestructible.
  • She also can produce explosions ranging from the devastating Big Boom to the more focused Minibooms.
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