Barbara Gordon//Oracle

[Barbara Gordon]

Hero

I'm just a step away
I'm just a breath away
Losing my faith today

Name: Barbara Jean Gordon
Age: forty nine
Alias/Nickname: Oracle, formerly Batgirl, Babs, Barb, ghost, ghoul, O, spook, Big Sister, Red, and pretty much every curse word imaginable and some that aren’t.
Affiliation: Batfamily, Birds of Prey, runs info for most hero teams
Secret or Public Identity: secret
Occupation: Former college professor, freelance computer tech
Equipment: Barbara has one very important piece of equipment: The Delphi system, her computer that allows her to be Oracle in the first place. The system is the most advanced computer in the world, networked to nearly a dozen spots all over the States and across the world. A blend of high quality equipment, alien technology and other little goodies Barbara has acquired throughout her years, the Delphi system is piggy backed and hacked into hundreds and thousands of computer systems and satellites in the age of technology, including the GCPD, CIA, FBI, Interpol, Pentagon and other police, information databases and acronyms. She even tends to run the computer systems of other hero teams.

Barbara also has many pieces of leftover bat equipment from her days as batgirl and from the many members of the bat family leaving things behind with her. She has them stuffed all over the place, from her wheelchair and her purse to the false bottoms of barely used drawers and that doesn’t include the electronics she has developed herself. Some of it is left by her fellows, some of it she asked for or created, but the ones she uses most are the batarangs and her escrima sticks, her primary pieces are stored in the most accessible place she has with her.

Powers: Despite a brief brush with the Braniac virus that gave her cyberpathy, Barbara could be said to have no superhuman abilities. But what she does have is a photographic memory and a genius-level intellect, both of which she uses to her advantage to do what she was born to do: save people. Generally, she just has to see something once for her to remember it, hearing something is a bit harder to recall but it’s not terribly difficult. She is incredibly intelligent, not only does she remember everything, but she puts that knowledge to good use and can process problems in more than one way.

Formerly one of the Batgirls, she picked up a lot of her skills during the early days of her crime fighting. She’s a master detective, trained by both Batman and her father Commissioner James Gordon, though her father probably didn’t plan for her to use such methods under a cape and cowl. She is a highly trained martial arts master; she started taking lessons as soon as she came to live in Gotham, while she was also into gymnastics. But that wasn’t all, when she was forced to give up her cape because of a gunshot to her spine, she started to concentrate on her computer skills to keep her sanity, particularly her hacking. She’s one of the few people to ever hack the FBI and the CIA without getting caught.

Weakness: She is only human, so is still prone to other such things like being shot, stabbed, infected, maimed and sometimes she makes mistakes. Of course, she makes every effort not to make any, but it happens and she sometimes spends a lot of time correcting them. Her computer is also her lifeline, though there have been times she has been forced to pull the plug on it, she can’t do what she does without it.

Her biggest weakness is quite obvious, though it doesn’t bother her so much anymore: Barbara was confined to a wheelchair at the age of nineteen. Though it slowed her down, Babs has learned to work past such an obvious problem, even leading Blockbuster on a wild goose chase and destroying a boat without the use of her wheelchair.

Canon or Original: Canon

I am just a man
Not superhuman
I'm not superhuman

Hair Color: red
Eye Color: blue
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 126 lbs
Picture or Paragraph description here:

It is hard to miss Barbara Gordon in a crowd of people, she’s usually the one with the bubble of personal space due to her most defining feature, whether she wants it to be or not, her wheelchair. If she could stand she would hit about five feet, seven inches and she weighs about a hundred and twenty-six pounds, though she won’t admit to it. She has long, bright red hair that has gold highlights and scarlet low lights and varies between straight and soft waves, though most of the time she throws it back into a carless ponytail or bun just to get it out of the way. She also has blue eyes, pale skin and is very much still a world class athlete in terms of musculature and strength. Babs also has many nasty scars from the gunshot that paralyzed her and the surgeries she's been through since.

Oracle, however, is seen as a green head avatar when she’s seen at all. Her voice is almost always scrambled by a computer, other than the few people she trusts, though her computer program does a good job at scrambling, sometimes her curse words don’t compute, so instead it goes ‘beep.’ Barbara herself is usually just wearing her regular clothing and nothing special while being Oracle, except a microphone set of headphones.

Tatoos or Scars?: Barbara has the mother lode of all scars from knife fights, gun shot wounds and the various surgeries that her body has been forced to deal with through the years. The most noticeable ones radiate from a large circular scar near the center of her midsection, and from her spine at her midback. Most were a result of a surgery to remove a bullet delivered from the Joker from her spine and surrounding areas.

PB: Julianne Moore

I need a hero to save me now
I need a hero, save me now
I need a hero to save my life

Hometown: Troy, Ohio is where she was born, though she considers Gotham City to be her true home
Parents: Roger and Thelma Gordon (her birth parents), Former Police Commissioner James Gordon (adopted father), Barbara Kean-Gordon (ex-adoptive mother, divorced), Sarah Essen-Gordon (deceased, killed by the Joker, step-mother)
Other relatives: James Gordon Jr. (cousin/adopted brother)
How did your parents meet: high school sweethearts
What drove you to become a hero/villain?: Babs somewhat accidentally fell into the hero-villain business when she spoiled a Bruce Wayne kidnapping attempt by one Killer Moth. It was during the Million Dollar Masquerade Ball, which she had dressed up as a female Batman to piss off her father. Later that night she was dubbed ‘Batgirl’ and the name just stuck. So did the jumping and running, and eventually the hacking.
History On September twenty-third many long years ago Barbara Jean Gordon was born to Roger and Thelma Gordon in suburban Ohio. The area was rather quiet, a peaceful neighborhood for Barbara to grow up in and maybe someday build her own life in, if things worked out. She was a smart child, skipping several grades because academics always came easily to her though at some point being the youngest in a classroom wasn’t how she wanted to spend her time. She wasn’t too terribly worried though, she had a best friend named Marcy who shared in her favorite dreams and fantasies: to one day become superheros. They would spend hours designing and making costumes, creating secret identities and playacting at saving the world just like the heroes in the newspapers, and though he was mysterious and vaguely talked about, the Batman of Gotham City was her favorite because that was where her Uncle was.

No matter how perfect her life seemed on the outside, things weren’t great on the inside. Her father, a police officer by trade, was also a raging alcoholic and while he never hit either Barbara or her mother, things around the house could get a little hairy when he was drunk. Barbara loved her parents, very much, but as with many stories of heroes they died. It happened when Barbara was twelve, a tragic drunk driving accident killed two people, Barbara’s mother and father. In a way, Barbara was both in shock and relieved; her father was the drunk driver and everyone in the other car walked away but it still hurt a lot. The time after their death was hard, she stayed over at Marcy’s until a guardian was located, and after that her childhood home seemed too big and too empty. She adjusted as well as she could, but she was torn when her guardian, her uncle James Gordon, told her that she was going to be moved to Gotham City to live with him and her aunt and cousin. On one hand it was a fresh start, a busy city without an empty house and all the reminders, but she would also have to leave her parent’s grave and her best friend. In the end she decided that it was for the best, and that she would just have to keep in touch with Marcy as they got older. One day she would be back.

Barbara was star struck at the hustle and bustle of Gotham versus the relative quiet of her suburban Ohio upbringing, she immediately fell in love with it all. The day after she moved in she insisted that she take martial arts classes, and Jim Gordon was a little suspicious but eventually relented; after all it wasn’t a bad thing for a police officer’s daughter to be able to defend herself, but it came with a bit of a stipulation, or rather stipulations: Barbara was to keep her grades up and take on something a little less violent too, which was how she ended up in gymnastics. Little did Jim know that Barbara, who sometimes used the ruse of studying to get out of things, had a photographic memory: she didn’t need hours of studying to get ahead. Barbara received her first black belt in a short amount of time, and moved on to a different style, as she was a part of a gymnastics team she was also competing there. She put just as much into her athletics as her academics, but that didn’t stop her from graduating Gotham Heights High School at the age of sixteen, and moved on to Gotham State University on scholarship.

Barbara was still finding her way out of her more awkward years; she had given up the dream of becoming a mask-wearing hero and wanted to become something more down-to-earth, like a police detective. She also took a job at the time as a research assistant at Gotham Public Library to supplement her income and give her a little bit more of the freedom she was starting to crave, and because she was stonewalled from the Police Academy and anything having to do with law enforcement in the city. She couldn’t even work as a receptionist, and she never would if James Gordon had anything to say about it. She even put feelers out at the local FBI field office, thinking that would be a possibility after she graduated college, but much to her annoyance they laughed her out of the office when they found out she wanted to be a field agent. Even her attempt to get into the hero business was denied, when her almost perfect infiltration into the local Justice Society building turned up nothing too.

It was out of frustration that she sewed her first batgirl costume, an outfit she was going to wear to the Gotham PD’s Million Dollar Masquerade to get on her father’s nerves for not letting her go to the police academy like she wanted to. Instead she found herself an unlikely distraction, stepping in to take on the party crashing Killer Moth so that Bruce Wayne (kidnapping target and Batman) had time to escape, change into Batman and collect his wayward sidekick Robin. Lecture after lecture followed, until finally Babs proved herself capable of being a member of the Batfamily. But as the years went on she began to find that being batgirl wasn’t as fulfilling as it had been when she first started, she had nearly retired by the time things went sideways.

It was a relatively quiet night when her world came crashing down, on a quiet suburban street as she got ready to go to a yoga class with a friend while chatting with her father. There was a knock at the door, and Barbara assumed it was her friend. She opened the door without looking, the biggest mistake of her life. Instead of her friend, the Joker was on the other side. One bullet to the stomach shattered her spine, and destroyed any chance of being Batgirl ever again. They took her father and left Barbara there. And to make things worse, they took lewd and provocative photos of Barbara lying their covered in a growing pool of her own blood to drive her father insane. Even though Batman foiled the Joker yet again, Barbara barely survived and would never walk again. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to live though it, or if she was supposed to die waiting for help, but somehow she found that death can be cheated by pure force of will if given a chance. She absolutely refused to die, even after telling Batman what happened and enduring 72 hours and countless surgeries, she wasn’t going to give in. After leaving the hospital however, she broke off her engagement to Jason and spent some time in a very deep depression, which she admits that somewhere in that time she went a little crazy herself. But what emerged from it all was something more lasting than Batgirl ever was: Oracle.

It started with a bunch of old computers that she gutted with her saving and set up as a ‘window to the outside world’ when she was only going out for her physical and emotional rehabilitation and to see the sunrise. But then an idea started to form: she couldn’t be the kind of hero that she had been before, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be something. And with all the wasted manpower when people showed up to the wrong places or time wasted on finding decent intel, which most heroes weren’t very good at locating, there was something there for her to fix. With a grant from the Wayne Foundation, which both Barbara and Bruce pretended he had nothing to do with, Barbara bought the old Gotham Clocktower and began refurbishing the building to house one of the world’s largest, most complex, and most powerful computer systems, all while she was starting to gather information and contacts on the street. She used everything she had learned and everything she had to become a force to be reckoned with, and to become invaluable to her former mentor and beyond, branching out to run intelligence and coordinating other teams. This was something she could do.

Her system is not only what she finds, she’s hacked into many different agencies, acronyms, law enforcement, newspapers networks, private investigation and almost all without having any sort of permission. Whatever she can hack she adds to her ever growing databases and sources. Few of her clients really know the name and face behind the floating green head. As Oracle she founded the Birds of Prey, first with help from Power Girl, and later with Black Canary, who became one of her best friends. Barbara gave up the mantle of Batgirl to Cassandra Cain, one of the world’s top martial artists who had helped Barbara out of a very tough spot. She became Cassandra’s mentor, then later Stephanie Brown’s when she took over batgirl from Cassandra, and she worked extra hard at keeping everyone from killing themselves, but eventually things changed.

Babs was juggling running the Birds, and running info to the JLA and the rest of the hero community when the seven disappeared, including her own mentor. Babs handled it better than most, while she was panicked and worried about the new development, she buried her emotions, pulled the birds back to Gotham and started making more and more connections with other heroes, trying to keep the world’s villains from overrunning everything they built. It’s been a hard twenty three years, while she’s held things together as much as she could, most of her team of Birds have retired, including Babs though that’s really a technicality. She also trained Elena Wayne in the last couple of years, while her father mentored the girl on the police force. While she gave most of her system over to Elena when she handed the current Batwoman the Birds of Prey, there is still a lot of her system she kept secret and to herself. She has bases hidden all over the country that she rotates through due to a fear that she became too public and if a villain tried after her she would be a sitting duck. Babs currently resides in a downtown apartment in Gotham for the time being, but her true system is hidden in the base of Kord tower, a lovely building on the wharf with an upscale Italian restaurant and an observation deck under her third floor center of operations, and her mainframes and rolling stock in the second basement behind the best security ever created. She spends more time there than she does at her apartment now.



Personality:
Barbara is a very stubborn and driven individual, even as a child she was always pushing herself to be better. That mentality got her through high school at sixteen, college at eighteen, and brought her to be a Batman sidekick despite being told ‘no’ repeatedly. If you know Batman, you know how difficult it is to work in his city, let alone get him to train people. It also got her though the first days after the gunshot that took her legs, one of the roughest periods of her life. But she doesn’t rely solely on her drive; Barbara has always been extremely intelligent, with her eidetic memory and talent with computers. After the accident she started using her mind as a weapon instead of something she just happened to posses. She’s very good at problem solving and creative solutions, no matter what the issue. Babs is a naturally good-humored person, with a sarcastic and dry sense of humor and an easy laugh once she gets to know a person. In her more creative moments she’ll call herself ‘On-star for heroes’ and has always been good at one-liners and making up nicknames for others. But lately it’s been getting harder and harder to find that laugh, and that humor since everything that’s happened.

Unfortunately, she is also very temperamental, more so now that she has sudden mood swings that have been coming on more and more since she was sidelined from the game. She hates putting others in danger, especially since she hasn’t been going into the field, but given her disability she has had to stay behind. Her disability plays a lot into some of her personality, especially her moods and her behavior. She has withdrawn into herself a lot since she had to give up Batgirl, what originally gave her confidence and made her feel more alive was almost broke her when she didn’t have the choice to wear the mask anymore. Babs is an incredibly difficult person to get close to normally, she has cut so many ties she’s had to other people that it’s been considered that she hates people. She doesn’t hate all people, she doesn’t want others to get hurt by being around her and she doesn’t want herself to get hurt because some innocent got stuck in the crossfire because of her.

Barbara also has a single-minded focus that can take over all parts of her life when she makes something her goal or target. It can sometimes border on obsession, though it hasn’t gotten that far in a while. She is very good at hiding her feelings, keeping a blank face to all but those who know her best when she’s hurt or doesn’t want her emotions flaunted. This has also added to the impression people get of her as Oracle; more than once she has actually been mistaken as a computer program or Artificial Intelligence, which she just lets carry on because it’s easier and a good shield to hide behind. If there is one thing Barbara is absolutely fanatical over, it’s her computer system. Though she has given Elena free reign over many of her databases, it usually takes a very rare emergency for Barbara to even allow someone to touch something, she’s always afraid someone if going to push the wrong button or key and fry the entire system to the point where she has to start from scratch rebuilding it. Babs can’t afford that kind of mistake in time or cash. She prefers to pull information from it herself and pass it off than let anyone even think about mucking about in her ultra-encrypted databases and hacked systems.

As a person, Barbara is extraordinarily kind, though she doesn’t often show her softer side to anyone but her family, true or bat-related. She might not be outwardly obvious about it either; her kindness is often in the small things, the details that she is so good at remembering. She loves kids and dogs, and has a plan to get a dog sometime soon. She’s one of the most trustworthy people one could meet; she would die to protect many of the secrets she keeps. And yes, she is a bit of a gossip around a couple people; usually she steers clear of subjects that veer towards her carefully organized secrets. Though Barbara often feels isolated in her constant moving and towers with few visitors, she’s actually very friendly and outgoing outside her walls. She also happens to be a decent, if a little strict, teacher who is always willing to help any of her students who ask for it. The same goes for any hero that comes across her radar, she’s always around to help.

A hero's not afraid to give his life
A hero's gonna save me just in time

Contact Info: PM, others on request
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[Jake Grayson]

My favorite Batgirl!