Drunken Monkey
Five years ago, Nadine Wetzel was a student at Empire City University. Hoping to earn a little extra money, she signed up to be an experimental subject for the experimental physics department: point-to-point teleportation of a human being. Seeing no reason to turn up for such a thing *sober*, Nadine treated the previous night's hangover with the hair of the dog that bit her and turned up for the experiment, a bit more wobbly than would generally have been recommended.
The idea, it was explained to her, was to show that it was perfectly safe by sending a capuchin monkey through the teleporter. Of course, it was entirely safe, it had in fact been tested on humans before, but a pretty coed volunteer made a better press opportunity than a condemned prisoner volunteer. Nadine would later describe herself as being "pretty sure" she actually heard all that, upon reflection. At the time, however, it either didn't register, possibly due to a simple case OMG A MONKEY HOW KYOOT. Later viewings of the press footage reveal Nadine simply opening the telepod door, climbing in with the monkey, and the teleporter activating. It is unclear from the footage whether it was Nadine or the monkey who pushed the activator button, but what happened next was very clear, and became a worldwide phenomenon for almost half of a news cycle:
Nadine stepped out of the receiving pod, a perfect and biologically valid synthesis of human and Capuchin monkey. Once the media frenzy (a generous description) died down, Nadine went about the workaday tasks of coping with a vastly increased amount of unwanted hair, figuring out where to shop for shoes when you have hands for feet, suing the university, and modifying all her clothes to accommodate her new tail. She also found numerous ways to make use of her new-found agility and incredible climbing ability in her everyday life, but once the initial excitement waned, she found herself sinking deeper into despondency. She spent her time and her settlement from the university keeping to herself in her apartment, and drinking probably too much. (Okay, definitely too much). Also, during this time she realized that the monkey who was the source of all her woe didn't just disappear. He was still around, and just like she had become more monkey, he had become more human. He appears in the form of a talking, spectral monkey that only Nadine can see and hear. He says his name is Weatherby and he's pretty smart, and very sarcastic. Fortunately, he and Nadine generally like the same TV shows so that covered pretty much all the activity in Nadine's life for a while there and they got along about as well as you could expect two people in that situation to do.
One day, an unexpected knock at her door revealed a wizened old Chinese gentleman in a Shaolin monk's regalia. His name was Xian Ken-rui, and he was more excited to meet Nadine than anyone in her life had probably ever been. She simply had to learn kung-fu from him, you see. No one, in all the history of the world, he explained, had ever so clearly been meant to exemplify his preferred style of kung-fu.
You see where this is going, right? Moving into Nadine's apartment, Ken-rui spent most of the next five years learning Drunken Monkey style kung-fu and watching reports of superhero activity on TV. Sadly, Sifu Xian quietly died in his sleep one night. As it turns out, he was 117 years old (he didn't look a day over 94). After returning with his body to his homeland for burial, Nadine came home with a new purpose: to turn her misfortune in having become a humanoid monkey (monkeyoid human?) and her kung-fu skill to the benefit of others by becoming a superhero.
