Hazel Beauvais is a second-year student at the University of Pittsburgh Jonestown, majoring in investigative journalism with an emphasis on music theory. Hazel spends her days around the Burgh’s music scene and in her downtime creates works of art in textiles and costuming. Her music review blog “Echo Chamber” remains her top priority outside of school and her day job working alongside the Burgh's music community in various roles.
Name: Hazel Simone Beauvois
Age: 19 y/o [11.12.2004]
Height: 5’4”
Weight: 130 lbs
Skin Tone: Honey
Hair color: Purple [Naturally brunette]
Hair type: 1b (Straight, medium)
Eye color: Green
Diagnoses: Hazel suffers from various forms of anxiety related to overstimulation. She is typically seen in a pair of noise-canceling headphones, which are a prescribed disability aid. These do not inhibit her ability to function in a classroom setting, nor in social interactions. She is also diagnosed with forms of attention deficit, which seems unusual, given her ability to focus on multiple tasks simultaneously without external distraction.
Personality: Hazel is a strongly extroverted young woman, eager to make friends, ask questions, and engage in social activities both on campus and in the Pittsburgh music scene, where she acts as resident student, long-term costumer for small-time garage bands, and known affiliate of PREMORTEM drummer Beck. She can usually be found around VULTURE Records and other local music studios engaged with customers or engrossed in her latest personal project.
Distinguishing Features: Hazel keeps her naturally brown hair dyed perpetually purple. She dresses mostly in pastels and bright colors, and her ears are double-pierced. In addition, the inside of her elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles are tattooed with small minimalist eyes, as are the palms of both hands and the sides of her neck under her ears. The last are usually hidden by her long hair when worn down.
Arcane Eye is the lead writer, team manager, and researcher for “Panopticon,” a Vigilante-Watch affiliated blog dedicated to the metahuman heroes that seem to congregate in the City of Steel. Being a meta herself, Arcane Eye looks to show the people of Pittsburgh that they have nothing to fear as long as our heroes keep up their watchful vigil. Unlike most Vigilante Watchers, who keep an eye from the safety of their own homes doing diligent research, Arcane Eye has recently taken to the streets herself. In mask and cape to protect her identity, she approaches the subjects of her writing from the street-level.
Anyone who wants to report vigilante activity or sightings can reach her at: polyphemus@panopticon.me
Alias: Arcane Eye
Abilities: Arcane’s metahuman abilities are not publicly known beyond the fact that she is a technopath. They do, however, lend themselves to her work as an investigative writer in both her personal life and Vigilante Watch persona. To a radius of 10 yards in all directions, Hazel can see through any operational camera and hear through any operational speaker or microphone within range simultaneously. She has no control over this ability beyond where she puts her focus; all signals related to this are transferred directly to her mind like any natural sense, and compound if she is receiving several signals at once. She has a lifetime of practice in sorting through which signals are important and which are not, but she often experiences overstimulation and anxiety related to the constant influx of information. In a controlled environment, or with appropriate preparation, Hazel can use this as a tactic for collecting information for her personal investigations.
Equipment: On the field, Arcane sports an elegant costume in the light browns of the silk moth Antheraea polyphemus, with some artistic liberties taken. Her mask has additional red accents, and her entire costume is decked out with golden eyespots focused in every direction. She carries no weapons, and is usually seen with a backpack in a similar theme to the rest of her costume. Inside are her spare laptop, several notebooks full of shorthand and artistic felt-tip pens, a few pieces of low-grade recording equipment including four clip-on microphones, and two cameras with decent recording quality. Underneath the hood of her cloak, she sports a pair of green noise-cancelling headphones that help her hone her focus. Her vehicle of choice is a 2018 Kawasaki Ninja 400 motorcycle, black with yellow highlights.
Affiliates: Arcane Eye is known to work with another metahuman known only on her blog as “Poltergeist,” credited as her cameraman and assistant investigative team lead. Unlike most subjects, she speaks about him very little in the context of her writing, keeping him out of the spotlight and away from her current subject of investigation.
The concert was for MYTHOMANE, but Hazel had been here since seven. By extension, her best friend, Isaiah Walker, had been here that long, too. She’d told him he didn’t have to come. Obviously, he didn’t have to. PREMORTEM’s garage rock wasn’t his style by any means, but he wanted to come, so she’d dragged him along early, talking all the while about the exclusives she’d gotten from Beck, the drummer, over the last several months of rehearsal and recording. Beck was here by her recommendation. She’d overheard and VULTURE records that Kosuke had been looking for a singer and drummer; and Hazel, knowing his standards, had mentioned her friend who she’d been helping with costuming for his own, smaller band. And apparently, Kosuke – Vanity – had liked the kid so much, he’d taken him on full time.
That was how Hazel had really gotten in with PREMORTEM. She’d been helping with some Vanity Project costumes for the last few years, talked about music theory and the latest gossip with Kosuke at VULTURE, but only when Beck was in had she actually gotten up close and personal with PREMORTEM. And now here she was, her and Isaac, as Vanity stepped on stage for the first set.
Taxi was the album’s first track, a heavily instrumental piece despite its vocal writer. Axel rose to the challenge Vanity had written for him, but Hazel couldn’t help but notice that Beck counted in just a little… off. Not wrong. Fast, though. A little faster than she’d expected from the fleeting moments she’d caught here and there from the last few months around the band. Beck was good, though. He didn’t miss a note or a beat, and Hazel couldn’t help feeling proud. He hadn’t been under nearly as much pressure from Vanity as Axel – not from this song, anyway. And Vanity himself managed to keep so calm, so soft, under the overwhelming noise he’d cooked up for his bandmates, and still be heard. It was an impressive act on everyone’s parts, even if Carmilla’s bass faded into the background as a result of the other parts. She’d be happy to ask Carmilla later how she felt about it.
Hazel noticed the pause. The pause between the first and second tracks. There wasn’t supposed to be a pause. Nobody else knew – and maybe Vanity had just decided to change it last-minute? He did that now and again. She heard about it from the whole band. He liked to keep them on their toes, they said.
There couldn’t be anything wrong, because Vanity snatched up his microphone, and screamed:
A spike of blind fury stabbed through Hazel. And another, and another, and another, and another, and another, until she felt like a pincushion loaded to the brim with anger. An anger that rose up between the two words, not just from the sound itself, but from everywhere the sound came from. From the speaker above her, and the one to the left, and the one beneath the seat two rows ahead, and then picked up on the mics of half a dozen phones set to record; and the camera a few yards to her left, positioned to catch the stage for commercial use; and on the video camera a few yards back and up; and just echoing back and forth and resonating around like her own Echo Chamber inside her head and in her ears and behind her eyes, demanding over and over again rage, rage, rage, rage, rage, rage, rage, rage, RAGE, RAGE—
Her eyes closed, and she screamed, but her scream was nothing under the other woman whose voice caught on the microphones on stage. Guttural, unholy, fierce and feral. Hazel’s voice and anger matched the sound as that, too, resonated, as it was followed by other screams, other voices that echoed back and forth across camera to camera and microphone to microphone and microphone to speaker to speaker to microphone to Hazel–
Who opened her eyes, but she couldn’t see.
Oh, God, she couldn’t see.
She couldn’t see. She couldn’t see what was going on down on the stage after that first scream, after those two words. She couldn’t see who’d screamed first, screamed with her. She couldn’t see the rest of the audience, or why they started screaming, except she could see them, could see all of them at once, and some of them sometimes. She couldn’t focus on everything, couldn’t focus on anything, it was too much. Everything was too much, her whole world was just sound after sound after sound with blurry motion nearby.
There was another sound nearby, one that wasn’t an echo of a scream, but a harsh buzz, scratch, and snap as the speaker nearest her blew out in a spectacular shower of sparks. Hazel didn’t see. Hazel couldn’t see. She couldn't hear. She was– she could feel, she could feel the ground under her shoulder, could feel the bodies moving around her, could feel her limbs pulled tight against each other, could feel Isaiah’s hands on her. His hands on her sides, under her arms, picking her up. Her head raged, the sounds and the screams and the panic, but as they moved away from the noise, suddenly the exhaustion washed through her. The pure rage, followed by that much excitement…
Hazel’s eyes closed, and that was it, until the investigation.
Hazel Beauvais is a second-year student at the University of Pittsburgh Jonestown, majoring in investigative journalism with an emphasis on music theory. Hazel spends her days around the Burgh’s music scene and in her downtime creates works of art in textiles and costuming. Her music review blog “Echo Chamber” remains her top priority outside of school and her day job working alongside the Burgh's music community in various roles.
Arcane Eye is the lead writer, team manager, and researcher for “Panopticon,” a Vigilante-Watch affiliated blog dedicated to the metahuman heroes that seem to congregate in the City of Steel. Being a meta herself, Arcane Eye looks to show the people of Pittsburgh that they have nothing to fear as long as our heroes keep up their watchful vigil. Unlike most Vigilante Watchers, who keep an eye from the safety of their own homes doing diligent research, Arcane Eye has recently taken to the streets herself. In mask and cape to protect her identity, she approaches the subjects of her writing from the street-level. 