Aliases : Barbara Gordon, Amy Beddoes
Base of Operations : Blüdhaven, NJ
Tags : oracle, batgirl i, barbara gordon
Important Plots : None
Journal(s) : themightyoracle
Status : Played

Powers and Abilities : Barbara possesses a photographic memory, and formidable detective skills. She is also one of the foremost computer hackers in the world. She's a highly trained martial artist and gymnast as well, and has studied escrima to compensate for her spinal cord injury.

Weaknesses : Barbara is a paraplegic, due to a spinal cord injury suffered at the hands of the Joker. This limits her mobility and somewhat hampers her combat ability, but she remains a formidable hand to hand opponent.

History : Years ago, Barbara Gordon was seeking a new direction in her life. While an excellent librarian, she craved action unrelated to banned books and other attempts at censorship. She tried but was unable to become a police officer or an FBI agent. When her father, then-Captain Jim Gordon, suggested she attend a costume charity ball as a distraction, she decided to go as Gotham's mysterious Caped Crusader, Batman. But the costume became more than a way to tease her father about his association with an urban legend when Killer Moth crashed the party and tried to kidnap billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. In thwarting Killer Moth, Barbara found the direction she was looking for, and after initial resistance from Batman, became his second protege. For years she fought side-by-side with Batman and Robin (Dick Grayson) on the streets and rooftops of Gotham City.

Eventually Barbara put the cape and cowl behind her, and decided to lead a more ordinary life. But her dream was shattered the day she opened her apartment door and was brutally shot and violated by the Joker as part of a plan to drive her father mad. Barbara spent a long and angry rehabilitation struggling to deal with the knowledge that she would never walk again, as well as the additional insult that she had been nothing more than a pawn to the Joker. She also resented that the men in her life--her father, Batman, and Dick Grayson (now calling himself Nightwing)--blamed themselves for her crippling injury, feeling that they were treating her as nothing more than a helpless innocent bystander, rather than an experienced vigilante who should've known to look through the peephole before answering her door.

Determined to create a new role for herself, she adopted the online persona of Oracle, information broker, and as "Amy Beddoes" worked initially with the Suicide Squad and later the JLA and other superhero organizations. As dispatcher, mission coordinator, sysadmin, and electronic librarian, she is the Athena of the Vigilante community. Wanting to do still more, she recruited first Power Girl (an attempt which unfortunately failed with their disastrous first mission), and then Black Canary II (Dinah Laurel Lance) and later the Huntress (Helena Bertinelli) to form her own crime-fighting organization, the Birds of Prey.

Other Sources :

• CanaryNoir
• DCComics.com
• Oracle at the DC Database Project
• Oracle at Wikipedia

Divergences : Until a recent change in history precipitated by Lex Luthor, Barbara was married to Dick Grayson, AKA Nightwing. Here is the original text describing that :

" In the jla_watchtower universe, she reconciled with Dick Grayson, and agreed to marry him. Despite her private fears about his stability after the fires at Haly's Circus and on Parkthorne, they were married July 14, 2004. Together the couple have struggled with Babs' move to Blüdhaven, the devastating news that she could not have children, Nightwing's long absence due to a rescue mission that led him to the latest Tamaranean homeworld, trying to balance the demands of their personal and professional relationships, and most recently dealing with their impending parenthood (a miracle courtesy of a visit to Themyscira, sponsored by Wonder Woman). Their daughter Mary Donna Barbara Anne Grayson (a name her father takes all the credit for) was born on September 17, 2005."

The marriage and their daughter have been retroactively erased from history, and Barbara and Dick remain occasionally romantically involved.

Disclaimer - unless otherwise noted, all characters are property of DC Comics, used here only for roleplaying purposes.