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"Greetings! How would you like me to service you today - gut you like a fish, or do you prefer the blood-eagle?" ~ Ippolyta, moments before battling a target (MC).
Introduction
Ippolyta the Manreaper is a Chthonian hypersoldier, one of the Final/Original Thirteen in the service of the Mecharussian Armed Forces. A military commander at heart, holding the equivalent rank of Colonel in the MAF (like all other Chthonians bar Elena Trotskaya and Drakolich), she is the commanding officer of one of the Eighth VDV Regiment's aerial infantry battalions.
Augmentations-wise, she possesses powerful leg augments that give her an edge in mobility and allow her to jump far higher and run orders of magnitude faster than a baseline human's legs would ever allow. Underneath the facemask that covers the bottom half of her face, she has replaced her broken jaw with a vicious, shark-like mouth augment – a cruder version of a similar augment possessed by Trotskaya – that can bite down with razor-sharp durasteel teeth and enough force to humiliate an industrial hydraulic press in a contest.
Bitterly-misanthropic and oftentimes wrathful, Ippolyta reserves an extreme hatred for criminals – Thieves in Law in particular – after she and her biological sister Antiopa were taken prisoner during the Salvagings and brutally gang-raped, with Antiopa being murdered in captivity. The experience left permanent scars on her mind, accompanied by a proclivity for excessive carnage and destruction. When she is deployed, frequently alongside her mentor Drakolich, hundreds of deaths are almost guaranteed, and at least thirty of them will be hideous and agonisingly painful. Her personal head-count is only second behind that of Trotskaya, standing at least 18,000 strong, and the two often compete with each other for kills when they fight together.
Ippolyta's namesake is Hippolyte, the queen of the Amazons in ancient Greco-Roman myth.
Personality
Like her mentor, Ippolyta possesses a callous disregard for humanity and lives by a sparse moral code that is defined only by her attachment to the Chthonians. However, unlike Drakolich, she has not yet realised the fundamental pointlessness of grand ambitions, personal desires and negative emotions. She holds every one of them, all while holding the same level of sociopathy as him. The end result is a hideously-immoral, extremely sadistic and savagely-cruel monster, an accusation that she wears almost as a badge of honour. She also shows admiration for similarly-minded people, attempting to imitate her mentor who does similarly - to the extent that she, when hearing about the brutalities of Halko for the first time, she (rather flippantly) states "He sounds like the kinda guy I'd take out for a hot-date".
Deep down, however, Ippolyta is a creature who carries the heavy burden of regret upon her shoulders. She is extraordinarily self-loathing, blaming her own weakness for not being able to prevent the hideous death of Antiopa. The prime motivation for her exceptional cruelty and sadism is to spite her enemies: she wants to erase her weakness from living memory by burying it under the bodies of millions. She has found a confidant in both Drakolich and Persey, the latter serving as something of a moral guide for her and the former being the closest living entity that she has to a father.
In combat, Ippolyta favours getting in close for the kill, both Grom-7 semiautomatic shotguns in her hands barking torrents of flesh-ripping carbon flechettes as she unleashes herself upon her foes. For melee combat, she brings a vicious, spiked flail; in addition to possessing deadly, retractable hooks on its carbon-nanotube rope capable of ripping off someone's head, the rope itself has strong electromagnets that, upon activation, allow her to tear an enemy's own weapon right out of their clutches. As a backup weapon, she keeps a 6Kh52 fusion sword in a belt-mounted scabbard. Her girdle is also capable of generating a powerful electromagnetic pulse in addition to an anti-psyker burst.
Notable appearances
- Ippolyta first appears in the Altcanon Tale from the Frencoverse The Manreaper.
- She receives a brief appearance at the very end of A Blood Debt and will play a more prominent role in Flight of the Polunochnaya.
- She is one of the Mecharussian commanders in the non-canonical Festival of Carnage.
Trivia
- Although she is (unintentionally) very, very similar to Imperium Sidhicum's character D'Anna van Halen, the main inspiration for Ippolyta is actually Halko. She also borrows from Jennifer Hills from the I Spit on Your Grave films.