Death Battle Analysis: Ms. Fortune

Back to the old grind, bringing you another Skullgirls, today we’ll be analyzing the only character in the game that can compete with Peacock in Meme status. Ms. Fortune is my 3rd favorite character in the original rooster as well as the first Skullgirls blog I’m doing for a character that isn’t a Scorpio...though she is within 3 days of being one….I don’t have a problem. Anyway, punny neko time.

Warning: This blog contains ample puns

Background

Nadia Fortune started life most Un-Fortunate indeed, left a poor street orphan in the rough neighborhood of Little Innsmouth, a seaside town primarily populated by Dagonians, a species of Fish-Human Hybrids. However Nadia’s fun spunky purr-sonality and cute appearance worked out for her, as she was soon found and adopted by the town's local heros, The Fishbone Gang.

The Fishbone Gang is a bunch of local Dagonian street toughs who banded together to keep the people of Little Innsmouth safe from the Medici Mob, Casino trash and the extremely corrupt police force. It’s a rough job, but somebody has to stand up and do it.

Nadia is a Feral, a species of cat people that exist naturally in the Skullgirls universe, and thus she has feline like cat-tributes giving her useful skills and abilities particularly in areas like parkour and stealth. It wasn’t long before The Fishbone Gang decided to bring her on as an official member of the team, specifically as their resident thief, a regular Cat-Burglar if you will, and she would do this under her awesome new nickname, Ms. Fortune.

Ms. Fortune became a master of her craft, robbing the oppressive forces of the Medici’s, who if you recall are the guys responsible for Peacock’s mutilation and Squigly’s family being massacred, and giving what she stole to the poorer townsfolk of Little Innsmouth. So the Fishbone Gang is basically animal hybrid Robin Hood.

Anyway, the Fishbone Gang’s regular hangout was Yu Wan’s, the best restaurant in the whole city of New Meridian, where Nadia met and became close friends with the adorable waitress, Minette.

Ms. Fortune is very protective of Minette and Minette seriously looks up to Nadia for being such a selfless hero, the two really do represent hope for one another. Feline pretty great after many years of robbing mobsters and being heros, The Fishbone Gang decided to pull off their biggest heist yet, something that would really, truly hurt the Medici’s, they were going to steal their leader Lorenzo's prized possession, The Life Gem.

The Life Gem is an ancient and priceless orb, which unbenounced to the Fishbone Gang or general public, creates an aura of continuous life energy to those around it. Lorenzo Medici had been using this to keep himself young and strong for decades so he can rule his crime empire forever.

1. B.

When Nadia stole The Life Gem, Lorenzo rapidly deteriorated into a sickly old man, prompting him to desperately send his top enforcer, Black Dahlia, after the thieving gang.

Dahlia quickly found The Fishbone Gang, and she had them too, they didn't stand a chance against her. In a desperate act to hide their crime and save themselves, Nadia swallowed the Life Gem mere moments before her and her whole gang were caught. But Dahlia isn’t exactly one for pussyfooting around, when she saw that this gang did not have the Gem, nor would they disclose its location, Dahlia decided this could not go unpunished. She had the five of them including Nadia, brutally chopped up into tiny little pieces, bound up in a heap of body parts and sunk to the bottom of the ocean! Thus the Fishbone gang were forever silenced… or rather they would have been, but one of them was still Alive.

Fortunately for Nadia, when she ate the Life Gem, it dissolved in her stomach and purr-manently fused with her blood stream, making her body “Undying”.

Ms. Fortune woke up in pieces at the bottom of the sea and saw what happened to her family. With the power of the Life Gem, she managed to pull herself together and walk back to land trying to think of any way she could to save her poor deceased teammates.

Soon after, Ms. Fortune stopped two Medici goons from hassling Minette, and learned that a new Skullgirl had risen and was attacking the Medici mob as the two fled.

Knowing that the Skull Heart can grant any wish, Ms. Fortune decided to purr-sue them to get to the Skullgirl so she could take her heart and save her dead teammates. Upon learning she survived, The Medici's placed a bounty on Ms. Fortune's now detachable head.

They even sent one of their top assassins, Cerebella, to bring her in, but Nadia would not quit until she faced the Skullgirl herself, Marie Korbel. Upon meeting Marie the two talk and Marie comments to her on the futility of her hiss-guided wish, as she herself wished for something similar. But Ms. Fortune wasn’t ready to hear that yet, The Fishbone Gang were her family, so she had to try.

However after managing to defeat Marie, Nadia realised that she was wrong, that as tragic as the death of the Fishbone Gang was it is a part of who she is now, that Marie became a monster with a similar wish and she couldn’t risk the friendships she still had, that no good can come from changing the past and she needs to move on to the future.

So she went through all of that for a life lesson, how annoying. Anyway, afterwards Ms. Fortune went back to Little Innsmouth to disclawver that Minette and several other local Dagonian women had been fishnapped, presumably by the Medici’s.

Extremely determined not to let these creeps take a second family away for her, Ms. Fortune teamed up with Irvin, a private detective the River King hired to get his daughters back, in order to save everyone.

Together they plan to take the Medicis down once and for all using law, violence and many MANY terrible puns.

“Curiosity Can’t Kill Me”
- Ms. Fortune

Personality

Ms. Fortune is a cheery, wisecracking, smartalec troublemaker who enjoys making new friends. She loves helping people and dropping puns everywhere she goes. In her friendships she is incredibly protective and loyal and has little patience for rudeness and rough types. Though she doesn’t take herself seriously often, when she does she is a very competent and respected fighter and thief. Nadia’s likes include small doggies, sunlit naps, sports: particularly volleyball, bowling, golf, & parkour, food: particularly dim sum, potato chips and things from Yu-Wan, her friends, making new friends, robbing the rich, giving to the poor and subjecting others to terrible puns. She really doesn’t like the mob, sushi, bullies, marsupials, loud noises and lemonade.

Intelligence

Nadia may be a bit of a goofball, but she is also an innovative thief and fighter who uses her head (in more ways than one) and should absolutely be taken seriously. Ms. Fortune has nearly a decade of experience with the Fishbone Gang and has proven to be extremely street smart, tracking people, identifying foes based on context clues and pulling off covert missions. She also is super creative, especially when it came to incorporating her new abilities into her fighting style.

The Life Gem

The Life Gem is an ancient and powerful magical relic that contains and generates large sums of life energy. Continual exposure to this Gem is enough to keep a person young and strong at their physical prime. Additionally it makes them virtually immune to disease, poison, exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, asphyxiation and even soul hitting attacks from an early stage Skullgirl. As The Life Gem flows through Ms. Fortune’s veins, she gains all these benefits and more! See Powers

Powers

In combination, The Life Gem and her natural Feral traits have granted Ms. Fortune a handful of handy abilities that lend a helping hand in her hand to hand combat.

• Death Proof Body:

The Life Gem gave Ms. Fortune immortality, and it meant it. In addition to not being able to die from natural causes and resistance to aging and soul hax, serious injuries do nothing to kill her either. Cut her in half, blow her up, put her head in a blender, light it on fire and mail half the pieces to Norway and she’ll still be coming for you. As long as the life gem flows through her veins she will continue to live. This means the only way to kill Ms. Fortune with a normal attack is if it can damage her at or beyond the cellular level, which is hard to achieve.

• Universal Animacy:

Now the whole immortality thing wouldn’t be very broken if she didn’t have a way to prevent getting trapped or restrained once she's in pieces. Thankfully she does, Ms. Fortune is able to control and move any piece of body even if it is severed. Her pieces can elastically stretch and move independently to both attack her enemy from multiple angles and return to her body to reform

• Hemokinesis:

Ms. Fortune has the ability to telekinetically control her own blood to use in a variety of ways to assist her in combat and perform incredibly powerful attacks. She can blast blood out of her stitch’s to create lift allowing both her and her severed parts limited flight,

use it to extend her limbs forward similar to elasticity and constantly uses it to hold her body together.

In combat Nadia can use this to launch herself into her foes at tremendous speed, trap them in ensnaring blood traps and blow them up by blasting apart in a huge self destructing explosion only to pull herself back together

• Body-Hardness Manipulation:

Ms. Fortune can also drastically increase the hardness of her own body to several times harder than even diamond increasing her durability and making her whole body effectively a weapon. She uses this to perform several attacks including using her head as a cannonball, her ears as stabbing daggers and most famously, Harding her narrow tail, pulling it off her back and using it as a katana.

• Razor Sharp claws and fangs:

Probably the first thing you’d notice when fighting her is the razor sharp claws she has on her large hands and feet and the fangs in her mouth, these are sharp enough to pierce nearly anything in the SG universe. Nadia uses these aggressively to make anyone her personal scratching post

Skills

Height: 5’8

Weight: 127 lbs

Age: 20

Ms. Fortune is a master thief and a purrrceptive and creative fighter, she is also a highly functioning athlete and is particularly great at parkour and that in particular heavily influences her fighting style, ducking and weaving around her foes strikes with ease and attacking her foes from multiple angles with incredibly fast close range strikes. Notable moves include:

• Wheel of Fortune

Nadia stabs hardened ears into the ground and twists her body all the way around, slashing with her toe-claws and hardened tail

• Facepalm

She tears her own head off and drills it into her foe by spinning her palm via hemokinesis

• Footloose

Nadia stabs with her toe claws and knees the foe in the stomach, using her hemokineses to launch the attacking parts forward with extreme force.

• Ears Pierced

She tears her own head off and stabs forward with her hardened ears extending her arms forward hemokinetically

• OMNOMNOM

Her severed head launches forward and repeatedly bites the opponent all over with blinding speed

• Cat Scratch Fever

A literal rip off of Wolverine’s Berserker Barrage

• Feral Edge

Nadia launches from the sky and slashes her foe with her tail katana

• Fifth of Dismember

She launches all her limbs forward like rockets grabbing her foe then calls them all back with such force it makes a terrifying blood explosion.

Feats

Strength:

• Defeated Valentine, who managed to physically damage Marie in her origin story. Marie can lift and throw skyscrapers at hypersonic speeds and in one timeline managed to defeat Peacock, who has town level bombs
• Defeated Val and Double at the same time
• Her hits can create shockwaves that cause earthquakes that span multiple city blocks

Speed:

• She defeated Valentine, who at close range dodged machinegun bullets and then made fun of the shooter for even using a gun
• Is one of the verses most agile fighters, for reference on that Peacock can outrun an explosive blast

Durability:

• Tanked the crushing force of the ocean floor
• Can endure hits from Valentine and Double
• Instantly got up after a pounding from Big Band

General:

• Has over a decade of experience as a thief and a fighter
• Managed to steal the Life Gem
• Is not immune to pain but is tough enough to power through all the damage with a goofy grin
• Is the most pettable Skullgirl

Summary

Advantages

• Is almost impossible to kill for most foes at her level unless they have certain hax
• Small City level DC/Dura
• Hypersonic speed
• Hemokinesis
• Resistance to Aging, Soul hax and Poison
• Hardness manipulation
• Claws, Fangs and other potentially bladed bodyparts
• Can Attack From Multiple Angles
• Her pun make for good distraction
• Has only one set of ears...unlike certain RWBY characters

Disadvantages

• Ms. Fortune near inability to be killed has made her cat-astrophic at actually defending herself, she has almost no defence options in combat apart from the standard block, and she’s more than willing to make reckless moves.
• Nadia is not invincible and if she is hit by something capable of separating her from the life Gem she will instantly die as the life gem does not actually heal damage, just keeps the parts alive and under her control, without the gem she isn’t a normal feral, she's a mutilated feral corpse. Cerebella is shown capable of killing her due to Vice Versa hitting on a molecular level

• This is made worse by the fact that she can still feel pain and be knocked out cold, and she is still able to feel damage on body parts when severed meaning the more angles she tries to attack from, the more places she can be hit
• Pretty Spotty win/loss record, she's been defeated by Cerebella, Valentine, Big Band, Eliza and Robo-Fortune
• Is STILL not in the Skullgirls App

Recommended Opponent

Neferpitou:

Hailing from the Hunter x Hunter series, Neferpitou is the best catgirl (Er boy?, IDFK) that I could find to fight Nadia. Judging by both OBD and VS Wiki their stat trio is very similar and she also has some great powers, like trouble dying (Though not nearly to the same degree) and bodily control. They are also both playful pun machines, the designated master thief of their teams and extremely loyal. The coolest thing about this match is that, like Wolverine VS Raiden, it comes down to just one question, ‘Could Neferpitou’s bodily control allow her to separate Ms. Fortune from the Life Gem?’ Which is actually quite debatable.

Next Time