Jane
September, 2009
CHARACTER'S FULL NAME: Kyoko Jane Takahashi

CODENAME: Cobweb

ALIASES/NICKNAMES: K.J., Jane, Kyo

SPECIES: Mutant

GENDER: Female

AGE: 25

ORIGIN: Brooklyn, New York

POWERS: Spiderbite

Jane has developed several physical mutations. First and most significantly, there is a small, hard gland at the roof of her mouth that she can use to excrete a poison. This poison is most effective when administered directly to the bloodstream through the application of her elongated canines. (She has fangs. Charming, feminine fangs.) She can control the effect of the poison on her victims by limiting its dosage. At its least effective and least intense dosage, it causes dizziness or light-headedness and vertigo (possibly nausea in the weak of stomach). At its most concentrated, it is strong enough to cause organ failure in human victims. A middling dose results in unconsciousness and a nasty headache on awakening. She also has small spidery hooks that have grown on each of her fingertips and also on the tips of her toes. They lend her the ability to hook in and grip onto things, giving her a climbing advantage, and also can potentially hook into other things and make it very hard to get her to let go.

She is limited in how much poison she can generate on a daily basis by the metabolic processes through which the poison is created. She /can/ generate poison and spit it out, for example to linger on physical objects in her vicinity in a sticky, slimy sort of mess. However, its effectiveness is drastically reduced, and unless it is ingested and actually ended up in someone's bloodstream, it would have no effect at all. She has an incidental immunity to her own poison, although if she ends up swallowing too much of it she will become ill and have to vomit -- probably psychosomatically as much as for any other reason.

HISTORY:

Jane grew up the second daughter of a particularly peculiar family. Her parents were both second-generation Japanese American. They spoke Japanese and English almost interchangeably at home while Jane was growing up. They were very closely knit together to the point of being kind of creepy to people outside the family -- so used to each other, so phenomenally in tune, that more often than not they would not only finish each other's sentences, but sometimes not even need to start them. With little more than a glance or a tip of the head, her father and mother could have entire conversations.

Jane's older brother Hideo Michael was the darling of his parents, in as much as such reserved and quiet people may have darlings. He was the center of their universe. He would grow up to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or the first Japanese-American president of the United States. He never made friends but that was perfectly all right by his parents, who never thought there was anything unusual about the way he watched social gatherings rather than participating in them.

Jane, in contrast, asked many questions all of the time. It was as though she could not help it. Her father was patient with her whenever he was at home; her mother grew less patient with Jane's incessant speech, short-tempered and readily frustrated. Michael was not interested in his little sister and pretended she did not exist even when she was in the room.

Her childhood was not happy. Her best and favorite companion was the neighbor's cat Pushkin, who often leapt from the neighbor's windowsill to the windowsill of the little room in Jane's parents' Brooklyn duplex apartment. Jane made friends readily enough when she went to school, but she could never go to any of their houses after school and always reported home to her parents as soon as school was out, and her young friends were not always understanding about Jane's parents never letting her do anything. Her connections grew attenuated, especially as they all grew older and the other girls grew more generally inclined to rebellion.

Jane rebelled in quiet ways. She continued to be talkative, she wore multicolored ribbons in her hair at every opportunity, and she stayed after school in the school library whenever she got the opportunity, reading all the adventure stories she could find. Jane loved adventure stories. Whenever they were about boys instead of girls, she rewrote them in her head to be about girls instead. Her imagination was always very active, so this was hardly any trouble.

The patterns of life split and shattered when she was about ten years old. At that time, her brother Hideo Michael was 15, and he manifested as a mutant. Subtle physical changes had been happening to him all through puberty, and he bit a boy at the private advanced school his parents had all but bankrupted themselves to put him into. The boy died in the hospital of ... something. No one was really sure what. Michael never said. He also did not come home after that.

Jane did not know what happened to him. Sometimes after that she thought she saw him out of the corner of her eye -- a lean shadow at this street corner, a short glimpse through the window of a delicatessen. But he didn't come home, and her parents were devastated, because their quiet son and all his earnest promise had so dramatically exited their lives.

At first they become obsessively protective of Jane. Her school results, before if not unregarded certainly not the focus of her parents' attention, became the be-all and end-all of her life. That's pretty rough, in fifth and sixth grade. Her attention tended to wander. She'd rather be daydreaming than studying. She never had Michael's discipline.

Puberty hit like a brick for Jane and her frustrated parents. She exerted her independence by getting a part-time job babysitting for a few couples in the neighborhood for spending money, but she was always home by nine o'clock. In these few intervening years, strange changes were happening in her body. She started avoiding smiling because her teeth looked strange -- her school pictures are all close-lipped smiles, strange from a girl who used to laugh as much as Kyoko Jane Takahashi. She grew shyer with her friends, and stopped babysitting, and her room filled with library books, and all her spending money went to overdrue fines. Her parents were concerned because she had always been such an obnoxiously outgoing child.

She tried out for girls' softball at the urging of a few friends. She was a fast runner, although she wasn't very good at catching or hitting. She made the team anyway. Her father said it was affirmative action. Jane didn't think there was affirmative action for high school girls' softball. But the tiny hooks that had grown in her fingers and toes made it extremely difficult to keep up with the team. Changing her socks in the locker room required locking herself in a toilet stall and raising her legs high. She had to work very hard to get her glove on and off while they were switching innings. And she grew deeply paranoid that something would happen with the bat. Maybe it would get stuck to her weird hooky hands.

She avoided touching people as much as she could. She avoided boys even though there were one or two who were interested and asked her to school dances. ("No, my parents won't let me!" was believable enough, especially since none of the boys in question were also Japanese.) She stayed as friendly as she could, but she had to fight her own smiles, and she always felt like she was hiding.

And ... there was the poison. The queer taste in her mouth sometimes, when she pressed her tongue to the strange, hard little spot on the roof of her mouth. The color and consistency of her spit when she brushed her teeth, a queer greenish black foam in the sink. She always scrubbed the sink afterwards, but it was worrying.

When she was sixteen, a man's hand fell on her shoulder in the subway. She thought she was about to be raped and murdered, or else spirited off on an adventure (more optimistically). But when she turned around, the slender Japanese man behind her smiled and showed her his fangs. It was Michael.

She started meeting her brother in secret after school. She quit the softball team and pretended she was going to practice. He had been stalking her and her family for literal years in his spare moments, which somehow didn't seem that strange when he told her about it, but later made her wonder what on earth he'd seen. He taught her, slowly, much of what he had learned about using his powers. How to smile to show your fangs to their best advantage; how to smile with partly parted lips, to minimize the effect. How much poison to use to knock out an assailant. How much would be just enough to let you run away. He warned her never to use too much. Never, ever, never.

Her parents discovered after a couple of months that she was not going to any softball games. The fight that resulted was brutal. She did not see her brother for an entire summer because she was so closely monitored, and when her senior year of high school began, she was denied access to any extracurricular activities at all. Her parents pushed her, despite middling performance at best in academic endeavours, to apply to ivy league schools. The rejection letters did not come as a surprise to Jane, as they came back. Even her "fall back" school, New York University, was not impressed with her lackluster performance. The disparity between her parents' expectations and her actual life could not have been sharper.

Finally, in the winter of her senior year, it was too late to get into any of the schools they wanted for her, and the fight they had over it was terrible. She showed them her teeth, and spat greenish black slime all over her mother's pristine kitchen floor. No school would want her anyway, when they knew what she was. She expected them to throw her out of the house, for this to be end of her familial relationships forever, as it had been for Hideo Michael, with whose life she had become partly obsessed ever since she had been denied access to it the second time.

They did not.

They became cold, and afraid, and no longer attempted to exert any influence over her life. Barren courtesy was the most she got from either of her parents. But they kept putting food on her plate and providing her with spending money -- they simply no longer spoke with her, or looked at her directly, or treated her as her daughter in anything other than form. It was the most miserable span of months of Jane's life.

After she graduated high school, she packed up her things -- a few bags and boxes, for although she had lacked for nothing specific, her principal interest as a student had been with the fiction section of the New York Public Library -- and left home. She surfed from sofa to sofa until her meager savings had run out, looking for work through local temp agencies and securing brief assignments here or there doing what she would later describe as "office monkey" work or in bleaker moods, "nothing in particular."

One of these temporary assignments was at a local automotive garage. Jane arrived the morning of expecting nothing in particular, and spent several days there working as a receptionist and staying with one of her few remaining true friends. (It's amazing how quickly these human connections fade when you need a place to stay.) On the day she thought was to be her last day, she was informed that the owner wanted to see her. So she went to his office, and was shocked to discover that the owner was a young, up-and-coming Japanese American who showed her his fangs when he smiled.

Michael gave her a job as a receptionist, found her an apartment a few blocks away from his Bronx operation, and essentially browbeat and manipulated her until she joined a local judo club in an operation he knew about from a friend of his and started taking lessons about using the strength and aggression of an attacker against them. "It is dangerous for mutants," Michael said, "and for girls. You are /both/." Jane thought a few of the other students might also have been mutants, or at least, very accepting. In that context, it was very difficult to hide the hooks on her fingers and toes. Although they would lie flat and not interfere with most of the things she did with her hands and feet, they did provide strange texture for anyone who she touched in the course of training.

Jane was not permitted to speak with any of Michael's friends, and as far as she could tell his worst nightmare was anyone he knew discovering he even /had/ a little sister. She met one of them, once, a really good-looking young man who had stopped by the garage looking for him, and Michael chased him off with zealous vehemence before she even found out what his name was.

When she was about twenty, at the encouragement of several of her coworkers and of her brother, she put her job and her tiny glimmerings of a social life on hold and enrolled in the New York Automotive & Diesel Institute, in Jamaica, New York. She worked very hard and with great enthusiasm at their technical program for a full two years -- although it was technically possible to complete the program in much less time, Jane applied herself here as she had at nothing else in life, and sought to be thorough. The feeling that working with her hands gave her, of actually doing something real, taking something broken and fixing it, was like nothing she had ever experienced at any point in her lackluster academic career.

While she was educating herself in the world of automotive repair, the Mandatory Mutant Registration Act passed and became law. Being naturally law-abiding, she chose to register herself over her brother's strong objections. He did not speak to her for weeks after that. It did not have any other notable effect on her life, since a student at a mechanics' college is not a particularly sensitive position. When the law was overturned and repealed, Jane went back to the same center where she had registered herself and informed the employees working there that since it was no longer required for mutants to be registered, she wished to be removed from the database, please. She was told to leave. She tried several more times to get her name removed from the database, but these requests all fell on increasingly deaf administrative ears. Eventually, she gave up.

Once she had completed the program at New York Automotive & Diesel and earned her certification as an automotive repair technician, she returned to her brother's garage and obtained a job as a junior mechanic. She worked there for several years that were the happiest of her life. The dampenings to her spirit came mostly in her ritual telephone call to her parents, once every two weeks, to let them know what was going on in her life. The conversation on both sides was never more than cool and informative, and no reference was ever made to mutant affairs, or to Hideo Michael, in any respect.

Jane's world was expanding to include nights out with the other mechanics -- although she could never bring herself to drink much beer -- and the office staff, to include nights out dancing with the friends she had made at her judo group, and bimonthly meetings with a book group that met at the New York Public Library. She took classes in rock climbing at a local climbers' club and made plans with several of her friends to go climbing and spelunking together -- although they made plans to do this several times, they only actually did it the once, no matter how many times Jane tried to push the others into doing it with her.

She tried to go out on a few dates, mostly setups made by her friends, but these never went well. She was too weird about touching people, and she never wanted to let anyone kiss her for reasons that, to herself, were completely obvious. Fangs. Poison gland in mouth. Who even needs an et cetera past those two?

Michael died when Jane was 24. She was never sure what happened, although apparently it was while on duty working his part-time gig as personal security with a local bodyguard firm. But she did take some of his ashes to her parents' apartment in Brooklyn, and plant them in her mother's flower beds. He had no will, and had never asked her to, but it seemed right, to Jane, that some part of him eventually got to come home.

X-FACTOR: Jane's record as a qualified mechanic for the last few years has been a matter of record. She does very good work and her reputation in the automotive community would be as an enthusiastic and engaged young mechanic. Her mutation has some cool applications in and out of combat and is detailed in the MRA database. She has no criminal record and she's too young to be jaded and horrible about helping the Man. Although Jane has a lot of friends and connections in New York, her strongest was deceased last year, and the great physical distance from her parents, as well as the grand adventure of it all, would make X-Factor's offer extremely appealing to her.

CERTIFICATIONS:

Basic Fitness
Basic Driving
Self-Defense
Language: Japanese
Auto Repair
Licensed Professional (ASE Automobile)


PERSONALITY: Jane is, on one level, a very social person. She enjoys doing things with other people. She is a big talker and has been since she was very little. Some of her childlike bluntness never completely wore off -- she tends to be direct. Although not afraid to be a little crude, her understanding of romance and sexuality is skewed by the fact that she has never seen it in anything other than storybook form. There are ways, thus, that she is a little bit immature, as well as being brash, opinionated, and good-humored. Her sense of the ridiculous is a guiding force in her life and she relies on it as a balancing force, to keep her mellow. She is a high-energy person, vivacious and ready to give most things a shot.

The largest source of internal struggle for Jane is intimacy. Jane does not like to be touched. She does not like to touch other people. She is highly conscious of her physical mutation and it has shaped this aspect of her life in many ways. She does not like to get too close. She has never been free and easy with her mutant status -- although many have come to the conclusion on their own, and she has dealt with and struggled against the prejudice that has accompanied that, but only with extreme rarity has she come clean to anyone about who she is and what she can do. Being in an all-mutants all-the-time environment will be a life-changing and life-shaping experience for Jane.

The all-consuming need for secrecy and privacy in these limited but very important aspects of her life is set against her driving need to draw attention to herself. The worst times of Jane's life were times when she was all alone -- or worse, when she was not completely alone, but where she was utterly ignored by the people who should have been closest to her.

She isolates herself but fights against isolation, striving to draw people in even while another part of her requires that she push them back.

Jane can be acerbic, and her internal fears drive her outlook to a cynical edge, but in her heart she has an adventurer's spirit locked in by all this personal constraint. She wants thrills and wildness and adventure in her life, and in her inner core, she believes that she'll get them and it will all turn out right in the end.

MISCELLANEOUS: Jane keeps a private journal of her thoughts and experiences intermittently and under lock and key. Hopefully, I will be de-lazy enough to write some of it. She still reads fiction regardless of its actual quality. She loves to sing although she is not actually that great at it. And she will be bringing with her a large female tarantula named Lady, which used to belong to her big brother.


Terry
February,  2009

---------------- IC Information ------------------
CHARACTER'S FULL NAME: Theresa Rourke Cassidy

CODENAME: Siryn

ALIASES/NICKNAMES: Terry

SPECIES: Mutant

GENDER: Female

AGE: 24

ORIGIN: Cassidy Keep, County Mayo, Ireland

POWERS: Siryn can manipulate her vocal chords beyond human limits, effectively mastering sound vibrations. She can generate hypersonic frequencies that act as a sonic scream to shatter solid matter. She can use her voice as a sonar device to map out her surroundings, and can increase or decrease the range and power of her voice. She also has enhanced hearing and a resistance to sound-wave based damage. She is vulnerable to losing the ability to use her power effectively by overstraining and overusing her sonic screams or injury to her throat and vocal chords, and lacks fine control of her abilities when in distress.

As a side affect of her vocal control, she can also use her voice to create a hypnotic-like state in others wherein they are susceptible to suggestions, like mythical Sirens. This ability requires a great deal of focus and depends greatly upon the person being targeted, working best with those already inclined to suggestibility. Ie, it doesn’t work often and is of little more influence than a trained stage performer.


HISTORY: At the time of his marriage, Sean Cassidy worked as an Interpol agent, and not long after was sent on an undercover mission which kept him out of touch with his family for about a year and a half. Neither Sean nor Maeve knew at the time he left that she was pregnant. Maeve remained at Cassidy Keep, the family estate, during her pregnancy and the time immediately following Theresa's birth and so relatively few people knew of Theresa's existence. Sometime later Maeve was killed in an IRA bombing along with a number of other people. Those who knew of Theresa's existence assumed that she too had been killed in the explosion, which had left the corpses of its many victims unrecognizable, and decided not to tell Sean Cassidy that Maeve had had a daughter in order to spare him additional grief. His mutant status was discovered some time later, and he was forced to resign from Interpol. He moved to New York City to start fresh.

Unbeknownst to everyone, though, Teresa had been found in the rubble by Sean’s brother, Tom, who was a life-long criminal and opportunist. He had a grudge against Sean, and therefore didn’t tell him of Teresa’s existence. He used the girl as an accomplice to his crimes, taking her with him when he moved to San Francisco after her powers manifested. He was arrested while there, and Teresa was taken into child services. While in custody, Tom revealed her parentage, and Sean was contacted to be reunited with a fourteen year old daughter he didn’t know he had.

The life Terry had led with Tom had left a mark on her, though, and Sean was ill-equipped to be a father, so he contacted Xavier’s School and enrolled her there. Terry’s delinquent habits and occasional under-aged drinking weren’t bad enough to get her expelled, but she was never the model student. She did make friends though, and more or less ended up straightened out by the time she graduated.

She has traveled since graduation, mainly throughout Europe, staying in one place long enough to get a semester or two of university studies under her belt (supplemented by the occasional correspondence course). She has also used father’s connections with his former Interpol friends to occasionally find work as a consultant on mutant crimes, utilizing her own shady background and mutant status as a sort of profiler. It’s not steady work, though, and she is met with a lot of justified scorn from people who think she's capitalizing on her father’s connections and her own mutant status. They might be right, but she likes being able to eat, ya know?

X-FACTOR: Terry’s connections and abilities are kind of the elephant in the room. While more generally known among European police and governments, it is not common knowledge by a long shot. About nine months ago, American operatives contacted her about a possible steady job drawing on the experience and skills she had accumulated. She has served as an able and competent member of the experimental X-Force in intelligence and powers training (because of her time at Xavier’s, she’s used to seeing how different powers can be trained) particularly, but her powers are formidable in their own right.

CERTIFICATIONS:

PERSONALITY: Terry is a redhead, and has the stereotypical red-haired irish temper. Brusque and competent, she doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but she’ll watch your back if you’re her teammate. Her temper flares hot and fast, but usually burns out just as quickly, unless you’ve hurt her or someone she cares about. /Then/ she’ll carry a grudge the size of the Blarney Stone, and it’s probably a lost cause to get back on her good side at that point. She’s not on the best of terms with her father because of that characteristic, and she loathes her Uncle Tom.
She’s known to be impulsive, but she usually tries to follow the rules. Usually. Sometimes. If the rules aren’t idiotic. She enjoys quick-witted banter which can come across as flirting, but she rarely follows up.

MISCELLANEOUS: Terry still has a fondness for the drink—not enough to be an issue, but it sometimes is a coping mechanism. Her accent is usually fairly light and diluted by her years in the US, but when she’s not concentrating, it can thicken considerably—usually when mad, or sleepy, or drunk.