"Gun Bunny", wannabe 90's anti-hero gone very wrong

Laughable as it might sometimes seem to say that the League of Propriety is built on rules - and their claims that none of their members may do anything sexual without informed consent are blatantly full of holes - there are a few bright red lines in their code of conduct. No stealing. No directly profiting from acts of heroism or demanding payment for them. No refusal to make an attempt to aid someone in danger. And most importantly, no killing. Okay... perhaps that last one got a bit fuzzy at times when robots with simulated personalities or alien tentacle-beasts were involved. But any human being (or being who could be mistaken for the same) was off limits, with no latitude whatsoever granted for the greater good or necessity.

Of course, the bad guys didn't play by those rules... not by choice. Super-criminal society had a de-facto rule against killing, too (not, as was often theorized, because the heroes came down harder on the villians - more than a few villains wouldn't care about that - but because many decades ago, the henchmen got together, formed a union, and started boycotting murderous villains, not so much out of scruples as out of self-interest in their own life expectancy!) and almost all murders in Acropolis City in particular were committed by non-costumed baddies - and out of the ones that were supervillain-related, virtually all of them were police officers or security guards, who the league was ever-so-slightly less dedicated to avenging than "innocent bystanders". Supervillains generally weren't allowed to outright say that they would never kill a hero or hostage - threatening it was pretty much mandatory. Following through on it was privately recognized as folly. The most popular compromises were throwing heroes into a **** trap that wasn't usually all that deadly and left ample time for rescue to arrive.

And for those scumbags who didn't seek notoriety yet committed truly cold-blooded acts... for most of its history, the no-killing code of the League hadn't ever been seen as a problem. The truly heinous didn't need Maiden America to burn them to a crisp with her star-spangled heat vision when the bang of a judge's gavel and "Old Sparky" could take care of that once she handed the perpetrator over. But in the 1980s, with the Cold War and the city streets getting meaner, many people no longer found that satisfactory - a new, more uninhibited breed of criminal started finding ways to get away with their atrocious deeds, ordering enemies and their families executed and paying for high-powered lawyers to get them off scott-free. When the state voted to abolish the **** penalty in 1985 (in part on account of a freak accident resulting in a recently executed convict being reanimated as an electrokinetic super-zombie), the hands-off approach of the League was no longer enough.

Heroes began stepping over the lines, one by one - and when they did, the other heroes usually took them out and turned them in, immediately. By refusing to bend on their codes, the League might have made an end of the issue with that - but there were other interests at play. The modern U.S. government had never been very comfortable with the League - possibly because the League of Propriety preferred to work with corporations, wealthy benefactors, or the populace directly while ignoring the legitimate authorities whenever it suited them - but it was only in a new, more cynical age that they were willing to do something about it. And so, with tacit support from the CIA, NSA, DARPA and other agencies, a new breed of ruthless vigilante hero, often called "anti-heroes", was supported, encouraged, and eventually manufactured (especially once the Pentagon really got into the act). Some acted on their own to Punish anyone they thought deserved it enough, others were more like semi-independent black ops agents.

At first, the anti-heroes were wildly successful, driving the League itself into a crisis of confidence. But they wore out their welcome with the public and the media pretty quickly. By the time that the League finally worked up the courage to start taking down these outsider anti-heroes in the late 90s, few of them had many friends or admirers outside the demographic of edgy shock-jock radio. By the 2nd decade of the 21st century, even those types had found a better model to glomp onto in the form of the hero/ine who vocally held fringe political positions but otherwise played by the rules.

But even after few remained, the scars of the "anti-hero decade" remained... not the least of which was more than a few who decided to switch sides rather than give up the fight.

......................................

Your real name is Lena Pines - but ever since you volunteered for a certain fateful human enhancement research project, even your friends and co-workers have been calling you by your codename, "Gun Bunny". The last five years of your young life would've been enough for a lifetime, for most people - from when you first signed up in your school's ROTC program, to your exceptional performance and "other attributes" in basic training earning you the chance to volunteer for a revolutionary new trans-genetic enhancement program, followed by two years of training that got cut short in order to rush you to the front lines for a "field test" in the Gulf War.

Now, a few months after the last shot had been fired in Kuwait, you were back stateside on indefinite leave of absence after you misbehaved a teensy bit in the field. You really aren't sure what the big deal was. What they called disobeying orders, you called taking initiative and doing your best to show off just how well their enhancement program had worked. Truth be told, you'd never looked back on agreeing to let them splice you with DNA that the CIA had pulled out of a mutated rabbit stolen from a mysterious facility in Siberia. You could jump 30 feet high, deliver kicks strong enough to shatter brick (so long as you were wearing sturdy, protective footwear), the acuity to hear a pin drop from half a city block away... and on top of that, you can eat anything you want and never gain any weight! With an amused wrinkle of your nose, you think that that last one may not sound like much, but considering the "uniform" your pervy superiors had come up with for you to wear... purely for the purposes of distracting and demoralizing the enemy, of course! ... you'd be in trouble without it.