Another quick sketch commission from  rjbartrop, this one of another character I created years ago as part of gaming and such with  newtypex. Meet Jacqueline McKinsley, also the superheroine known as 'Video'. (And yes, 'Video Jack(ie)' was deliberate.) Her primary superpower is the ability to use any sort of display screen as a transport mechanism, for herself and anything else she can fit through the opening.

Wrote a little story bit for her introduction:
The young jaguar girl sat down in the chair. The room was pretty much bare, a bland room with a metal table in the middle, chairs on both sides, and mirrors in place of windows all along three of the walls aside from the one behind her. Across the table from her, a male base human and a fairly tall female rabbit sat down as well.

The human pressed a button to turn on the recorder, and said, "FBT interview, record five thirty-one aitch, May twenty-sixth, two thousand and eight." He then looked over at the jaguar, his expression a little less formal. " All right. For the record, could you explain what happened last night and some of the events leading up to it? Start at
the beginning, with your name."

She sits back. "Okay. My name is Jacqueline McKinsley, and I've just recently finished a media studies degree. As for what happened last night... well, let's start with a bit more background.

"My mother's older brother is Jack Kinnison. And no, I wasn't named after him, I was named after one of my father's grandmothers. Anyhow, Uncle Jack was the requisite 'crazy uncle' in my family, a designer at an electrical power company who liked cobbling together odd things, from tiny joy buzzers to the one time he put together a Van de Graaf generator and used it as part of the Christmas lights.

"I was about ten when we finally found out how crazy my crazy uncle really was.

"Apparently he'd been passed over for a promotion or something like that, and decided to get his revenge. He stole a fair bit of power equipment from where he worked, tinkered with it, and started his brief supervillain career as 'Cathode', with a pair of weapons that fired off 'Cathode rays'... in other words, electron guns. He caught people off-balance at first, and got away with a few heists, added this weird TV screen to his armour which he used to blind people, but that didn't last long."

The rabbit groaned a bit. "Yes, we're familiar with Cathode."

Jacqueline smirked. "Well, that puts you ahead of ninety percent of the population, but obviously you guys have dealt with him before. Anyhow, eventually he ran into someone who could put up more resistance than a rent-a-cop, got knocked out, and hauled off to jail. Since he hadn't done a whole lot of damage, and hadn't hurt anybody yet, he only got a couple of years before he was let out again.

"Anyhow, as far as we can tell, while he was in prison, he got met by some people from the Consortium. Or at least people that claimed to be from the Consortium. Some of this involves reading between the lines of his rants, so we weren't exactly sure.

"They got him to support them on another raid for high-tech equipment, in which he used some weird induction device to make the security screens show that nobody was there. Which worked just fine... until one of the people he was working with got cocky and set off an alarm from breaking down one of the internal doors. When that happened, the two other thieves decided to knock my uncle out and leave him behind to take the fall for the job.

"Well, this left Uncle Jack so pissed that when he woke up he tried to beat up the officers arresting him, which didn't go over so well. Fortunately for him, whatever he did with the security systems seemed to only affect the displays, it didn't affect the tapes; and while the police didn't exactly trust the tapes after he'd been messing with the security systems, they did do some other forensics tests to verify what he said actually happened.

"After they eventually caught the other two guys involved from the security tapes of the van outside, Uncle Jack got a certain amount of pity from the courts. But it was still his second conviction, and he had resisted arrest, so he got ten years. Of which he served five before being released for good behaviour."

After kicking back in the chair, and sighing, Jacqueline said, "As you can probably guess, the good behaviour didn't last long after he got out of prison. While he'd been odd before, now he was scaring mom with the level of focus and obsession he was showing. And by the time we decided it was time to get somebody more professional to look at him, he'd decided to go off on his next jaunt.

"This time he was out for revenge, and decided to go after the two guys who had left him behind. Seemingly they did have Consortium contacts, as they had managed to get fairly good lawyers and had been released recently from prison as well. We don't know exactly how he tracked them down; he likely tapped into their security systems somehow. By this point getting a rational explanation from him was getting difficult.

"Anyhow, he stomped down there with a new set of armour that looked like it had been made from scrapyard parts, and activated a weapon that caused most of the display screens in the building to explode, as well as a few others nearby. The only thing that kept it from being more of a mess was that plastic LCD screens don't shatter into sharp pieces the same way glass CRT screens to. As it was, there were several serious injuries, including several people partially blinded. Then he stalked into the building and went in to trash the people who had him put away.

"The spillover from his initial attack caused the FBT to be called in; I'm sure you have records of what happened next."

The human nodded. "Yes, but we'd like your take on it, for the sake of this interview."

"Well, most of what I have for the rest of this is hearsay anyway. Cathode stalked inside, using the confusion caused by his taking out of the building security, and worked his way upstairs. Unfortunately he'd blinded himself with the same stunt, and when he got up to where his targets had been, they were already leaving for another floor. Not only that, but some of the more serious guards had been called in. It turned out the building was an undercover Consortium operation, though a small one, used mostly for contracting work. That way, captured people couldn't give away any of the major secrets stored in the more secure locations.

"Given my uncle's technical work so far, though, it was a mistake from somebody in the decision-making process to send in people with powered armour that had heads-up displays in them. Cathode started messing with their displays, getting them to target each other rather than him, and using them to track down his original targets. The fact he could play them off against each other was probably the only thing that kept him alive after the armoured troops arrived, as they weren't interested in taking prisoners. They were also evacuating the files and people in the building, knowing that someone was likely to show up.

"Which leads us to the scene when the FBT people did show up, to find a lone ranting madman in junky armour mostly holding his own against a small group of Consortium shock troops. Between Cathode trying to find his original targets, the Consortium folks trying to get away, and the FBT trying to take everybody down so they could figure out what was going on, the fight ended fairly quickly after that.

"Well, this time things didn't go so well for Uncle Jack. While he had some approval from the fact that it was a Consortium base he'd helped take out, his previous record and his ranting made it difficult to pass him off as a vigilante hero or something like that. Instead, this time the court correctly assessed that he'd been losing his grip on reality, and assigned him to a psychiatric facility where they could keep him safely away from any technology more advanced than a knife and fork.

"That was about four years ago. And, honestly, for what happens next, all I have is what my parents said about his rants. He talked a lot, but you have to be careful how you interpret it. So take this all with a grain of salt.

"In any case, one of the problems with doing psychotherapy on someone who's fairly intelligent is that once they realize what you're doing, they can figure out how to cheat the system and play to what the doctor expects. The first doctor he had knew better after several months with him. Unfortunately, that doctor apparently got transferred elsewhere and the new guy didn't know all of the tricks my uncle had built up over the previous years. He got taken in.

"Over time, my uncle slowly convinced his new therapist that he was actually recovering, and got granted a few new privileges. Eventually he was let relatively free to roam the facility. Which, of course, included television sets as well as other equipment. He didn't do anything at first, just getting the lay of the land and figuring out what was there.

"Eventually, he made his move. Using one of the shift changes as cover, he cannibalized one of the computers and used it to send some sort of hypnotic signal into the security station, rendering them practically comatose. Once that was done, he boosted the power of the system so he could do the same to anybody in the building who was looking at a display screen, giving him pretty much free run of the place, at least until anybody outside the building noticed.

"And so he basically loaded up everything up to and including an MRI machine onto a pickup truck and drove off before the off-site security could show up. Then headed back to my mother's place to get some of the things he'd left in storage there."

Jacqueline sighed, leaning onto the table. "This, needless to say, is where I came in. My graduation party had finished, after a three year media studies degree, and I was heading back to my parents' place to get some sleep before going back to job searching. I got there to discover that my parents were both tied up, and my uncle was in the living room building this enormous contraption that seemed to involve the core tube of the MRI machine with lots of weird electronics mounted around it, and a display screen showing lots of designs and waveforms I couldn't figure out. Oh, and the far end was pressed up against my parents' big screen TV. Not to mention that my uncle was laughing maniacally.

"I guess my arrival startled him, as he stumbled a bit as he turned to look at me. Some part of me decided I wasn't going to get a better chance than this, so I tried jumping at him to try and get him away from the device, hoping I could hold him down before he could finish and activate whatever the thing was.

"Bad move. He stumbled further back, hitting the machine, and whatever he did turned the thing on just as I was passing across in front of it. I got caught in this beam of light which seemed to suck me in, and I was pulled through into the big screen TV. But instead of crashing into it, I somehow went through the screen and got dumped on the other side."

Jacqueline sat up, pausing to collect her thoughts. "The 'other side' was what looked like a featureless expanse that faded off into the distance in all directions. Only two things broke that expanse: one was the large rectangular panel that I'd just fallen through, hanging in mid-air behind me. The other was a smaller panel with rounded edges, hovering a bit higher up and off to one side. On it I could see several diagrams, with words written backwards, and past that I could see my uncle's face. Not to mention hear his screaming, either at me or the machine, I wasn't sure which.

"I reached up and grabbed the sides of the panel, pulling it down more within reach. As I grabbed it, the words on it seemed to fade out, with the picture of my uncle becoming clearer... and he stopped screaming as well, looking straight back at me. He blinked a couple of times, then said, 'Jackie?'

"I just nodded, and felt the panel a bit... it seemed to be just an open window, like the one I'd come here through. So, being a bit pissed off at uncle Jack, I punched straight through it and decked him. He wasn't expecting that, and just kind of fell over.

"Anyhow, I climbed back out through the big screen TV and the MRI chamber, untied my parents, then got dad to tie my uncle up while I called nine one one. The police arrived first, followed by you guys; uncle Jack was hauled away to a somewhat more secure location, and most of the equipment was hauled away by the FBT.

"In the mean time, while waiting for people to show up, I discovered that I could 'feel' any computer or TV screen near me that was on. And I could reach through them as well. If it was big enough, I could climb through and be back in that weird plane... with the screens I'd poked through recently showing up there as well, though I appear to have to actually go at least partway through it before it shows up. Not to mention that I could adjust the position or size of any of the panels in there."

One of the rabbit's ears perked up a bit. "Size?"

Jackie hmmmd. "Mind if I do a demo?"

The human tapped something on the recorder, then said, "Sure."

Jackie pulled out her cell phone, turned it on, and laid it out on the table. "Okay, perfectly ordinary cell phone..." She then set a laptop on the table and opened it up, pulling it out of hibernation. "Now, this should work because I already set the two windows up near each other on the other side..." And with that, she slid her hand into the display on the laptop. Almost immediately, her fingers stuck out of the cell phone, much smaller. She wriggled her fingers about and waved at the two officers.

Then she pulled it out, turned the laptop to face them, and with a bit of a grin she pushed one finger down into the cell phone display... with a much larger finger pointing out of the laptop. After a quick wave of that, she pulled it back out and closed the laptop.

The human nodded, making a couple of notes on a pad in front of him, then picked up the recorder. "I think that's all we need to know for now."

Jacqueline smiled. "So, I'm free to go?"

The rabbit grinned. "Sure, but keep in touch. With what you can do here, we might be able to help with the job search you were mentioning earlier..."
(For reference, the FBT is a group focused on handling super-tech, but which also acts as a liaison to a number of other supers, making them sort of like S.H.I.E.L.D., while the Consortium is a villain group run like a business alliance, so imagine half a dozen Lex Luthor types with reciprocal agreements. The motto of the Consortium is an old Cicero quote: "Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecuna possit'. Which roughly translates to 'There is no fortress so strong that it cannot be taken by money'.

FBT and the Consortium both created by  newtypex, Video by me.)

Artist's posting at /view/40379982/