Persuasion

Persuasion is the first character I created for Darkwing Duck. (Disclaimer: Yes, I know that there's a Marvel character called Persuasion, who may have similar powers--but as far as I knew at the time she was still going by The Purple Girl, and I didn't even know how her powers worked, so I'm not changing anything (so there)). I wish I could show you her origin episode, which was the first fanfic I ever actually wrote down and kept in my life; but unfortunately all I have is an old dot-matrix printout and there's a couple pages missing now.

Anyways, Persuasion's real name is Lauren Faraday (any of you catch the electrical reference..? I'm such a crazed Megavolt fan). She's a raccoon, in perhaps her late twenties, a very sweet-natured person--but with a disturbing tendancy to lose her temper at certain moments and at certain people. At first, she works at the St. Canard Penitentiary, in the Disturbed Inmate Ward, as an "assessory psychologist" (that's right, she has like the lowest-ranking position in the whole building; the vending-machine guy gets more paid weekends than she does). She gets assigned to Bushroot. [Just a note, while Harley Quinn may have been around at that time, I had not heard of her; I know this sounds similar, but Lauren is not in love with Bushy.] Anyways, in a maybe-not-so-creative way, she winds up with supernatural mental powers, which enable her to implant "suggestions" in other people's minds: how it works is, she can look at you, and say "trip yourself" or "you are a taxicab driver," and you would, without thinking, trip yourself or go around wondering who in the heck drove off with your cab. As soon as your "task" is completed, you would snap out of it and wonder why you did it (that is, they're always very simple commands, and there's no loss of memory). To make things a bit easier, I've gone ahead and said that there's like this beam or something that she actually shoots at you when she makes the suggestions, and if you dodge it, the command will have no effect. I guess it's a kind of cheesy superpower but it makes for some interesting situations.

Being a pretty female supervillain, Persuasion is a bit in a class by herself in St. Canard (were there any other attractive female villains in Darkwing Duck? Well, besides Splatter, I mean, and I don't count Morgana as a villain). Anyways, the Fearsome Four like her, but the only two people she absolutely cannot stand to be in the same room with are Darkwing and Negaduck, so she never works with the whole Fearsome Five at any point. As a general rule, she works alone. Her tastes run towards glittering status-symbols, and, being quite athletic (she and Quackerjack often take trips to the gym together), she makes an effective cat-burglar.

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