Post by Psivory on May 2, 2016 21:40:42 GMT -5
Name: Psivory /s’īv(ə)rē/
Secret Identity: Juliana May Hart
Age: 24
Affiliation: Unaffiliated
Base of Operations: New York Observer
Appearance:
Standing at an above-average 5’9”, Julia is a tall but lanky woman, though most of her weight is carried in her womanly curves. Her limbs are slender, though some would prefer the term “pencil-like.” She’s never been one to work out or play sports, but as of late she has taken to endurance running as a way of conditioning herself for her job and for life as a person with powers. This has started to add definition to her physical features, but not much.
Julia’s eyes are a deep emerald green, and her hair, while naturally brown, is dyed a deep hue of red - almost a burgundy-color. She usually has it back in a messy braid, and her protective goggles are always sitting atop her head, ready to be pulled down and use at a moment’s notice (though most people think they are just a fashion piece). Her clothing is usually light and close to her skin on her bottom half to allow her full range of motion and the ability to move fast. She always wears the same beat-up, brown leather coat, a solid-colored racerback tank top, and a bandana around her neck (which she’ll pull up over the bottom part of her face when she’s using her powers). She currently does not have a ‘super hero outfit,’ and she has no plans to get or make one.
Powers:
Superhuman mentality: Julia has an intelligence quotient far above that of a genius level. While this has been manifested all of her life, this most often shows through her ability to pick up new concepts and ideas very quickly, as well as understand very complex technology or machinery with no experience. However, while she has a near-photographic memory, she has little intuition, very little personal empathy, and a bit of a procrastination streak, all of which hinder her from reaching her potential.
Her superhuman mentality has manifested into three forms of power:
Personality: If there was one word Julia would use to describe herself, it would be bold. She loves pushing boundaries, discovering new things and new ideas, and using them as well - part of the reason why she does so well as a full-time hero “paparazzi.” She’s a very rational and practical person; she likes to find ideas she can act on, drill in the details, and then put them to use. She doesn’t like arbitrary discussion.
Julia also likes to experiment with new ideas and things, and she’s incredibly perceptive (though this only extends to the physical, not the emotional). She notices small shifts in habits, appearances, etc., and she can use those observations to create connections with others. But she doesn’t play mind games - she’s a very direct person, with her questions and answers being direct and factual. For Julia, things are exactly as they are - though she doesn’t mind spinning an innocent picture or telling a lie to sell her photos to the Observer.
Unfortunately, Julia is also fairly insensitive and impatient. She prefers the facts and “reality” to how someone feels, and she doesn’t like emotionally-charged affairs. Her blunt honesty has a tendency to get her into trouble, as it's hard for her to acknowledge others feelings, while being equally hard for her to express her own. She also doesn’t like to have to slow down her fast-paced, high-energy life for others, which leads to further conflict with her family and friends.
Her job as a paparazzi aside, Julia is very, very risk-prone, Being so impatient, Julia often jumps head-first into situations without really thinking about the long-term consequences, which often gets her into trouble. She also will often see an opportunity - to fix something, advance, get a good picture, have fun - and then seize the moment, often ignoring any laws or social rules in the process. Finally, she has a defiant-streak in her. While she’s a fast learner by nature, she hates repetition, hardline rules, and lectures - Julia is hands-on and action-oriented, and learns best by doing, especially when not being told.
Origin Story: Julia had a pretty average upbringing for a midwestern girl from Chicago. She didn’t seem to be anyone of note as a young child, besides being a very active, questioning young girl. In fact, her parents were convinced she had ADHD, putting her on Adderall for much of her young life in an attempt to focus her mind. Because of the meds, Julia was a very mellow and, well, dull person for the majority of her young life.
Once she started high school, though, Julia decided on her own to stop taking her medication. When she did, she started doing poorly in school, though not for lack of trying. Rather, she was bored out of her mind with the lessons, preferring to doodle on scantrons instead of actually answering the questions. She spent her spare time reading on topics that actually interested her - instead of history, she was mastering coding languages and the science of circuitry; instead of American literature, Julia was reading texts from seventeenth-century French philosophers.
It wasn’t until her junior year that she had the opportunity to expand her course load to two things that interested her: autoshop and computer programming. Something about machines always made more sense to Julia than her peers; her programming teacher, a man named Mr. Remy, certainly noticed how the young woman seemed to pick up things in a manner of minutes about the inner workings of computers and code that had taken him years to master. He suggested her for IQ testing, which was when Julia first discovered her intelligence was higher than usual: seventy-five points higher than usual, in fact.
Of course, IQ isn’t everything, but it was the first tip to the then-16-year-old that she was different. Suddenly, Julia began testing the limits of what she could learn, retain, and understand. She started reading everything she could get her hands on, tinkering with any machine, computer, program she could find. With minimal experience, she was mastering concepts of mechanical engineering and complex numbers, and could recant full chapters from memory after only reading them once.
The most useful thing she discovered, though, was the strange relationship she had with technology. Sure, Julia knew code, and she knew how to take things apart, put them back together, the works. But after fixing a clock just by placing her hand on it and imagining herself fixing the thing, hearing the tick as it worked - she started to figure out that she wasn’t just really smart.
After a while, Julia had her technopathy figured out, and used it to get her shining marks through a double major in mechanical engineering and photography - a hobby she’d picked up after discovering she had an eye for picking out the unusual in her surroundings. Graduating from college at 20, Julia abruptly decided to pick up and move to New York, wanting to put distance between herself and her parents.
Once she was in the Big Apple, Julia began working as a mechanical engineer for a computer hardware company. But when she discovered she was simply to become a functioning cog in the great corporate machine, Julia started moonlighting as a freelance photographer. She had incredible luck with her first few photos, catching a few local superheroes in less than savory situations. As she sold her pictures to small-time gossip mags, Julia slowly started building a reputation for herself, somehow always able to find leads on the juiciest stories (when in truth she was finding information through hotel computers, credit card records, etc.).
It was around this time that the New York Observer approached her. Being one of the top tabloids (and therefore very interested in the photos Julia produced), they offered her a contract with the paper, in exchange for exclusive rights to the photos she produced while under the contract and on an assignment from the paper. While the money wasn’t great, Julia took the job and quit her mechanical engineering job, loving the thrill that taking the scandalous pictures gave her.
Now a staff photographer for a sensationalist magazine, Julia also began to garner negative attention from more than one super person. One in particular was a mob boss named Dan Moriarty, who happened to be the head of the only remaining Irish Mafia. Julia ended up finding out a restaurant he would be at one night after technopathically searching deleted search history on a public library computer, and snapped him on a date with a woman who was not his wife of ten years. As soon as the picture hit the stands, it was a full front-page cover, with the headline: “MORIARTY MUCKS UP MARRIAGE?”
The mafia boss was furious, and before long Julia found herself cornered in a dark alley by two of Moriarty’s men. Having nothing to protect herself besides her camera, Julia was ready for the worst as the men closed in on her. But as soon as one grabbed her, she thrust her hands out at his chest to try and push him away. A pop followed by a hum sounded, followed by excruciating cries from the man. Julia opened her eyes to see her hands engulfed in a purplish-pink glow, and the man’s chest having been made concave by whatever had manifested on her hands. Wide-eyed and terrified, Moriarty’s other man simply yelled ‘freak’ as he scrambled to get away.
After this Julia took a brief hiatus from photojournalism, moving out to her grandparent’s farm in Northeast New York for a year to lie low from Moriarty and his mafia. She spent her sabbatical learning how her powers worked and how she could control them, thought she didn’t dare tell her nana and papa what she was doing, or why she was really there. Her parents and grandparents all believed she just needed time off from school and the city, but in all honesty, Julia was dying to go back.
When she finally decided it was time to return to Manhattan, Julia came up with her ‘hero’ name, Psivory, though she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it quite yet considering she didn’t see herself as a hero yet. It was also from the farm that Julia got her protective goggles, after retro-fitting a pair of her grandfather’s old air force goggles with new lenses and a good scrub-down. She’s restarted her contract with the Observer, but she’s recently been suffering from constant headaches and a nasty case of what she thinks is tinnitus. She’s been seeing doctors for it, but to no avail as of yet.
Secret Identity: Juliana May Hart
Age: 24
Affiliation: Unaffiliated
Base of Operations: New York Observer
Appearance:
Standing at an above-average 5’9”, Julia is a tall but lanky woman, though most of her weight is carried in her womanly curves. Her limbs are slender, though some would prefer the term “pencil-like.” She’s never been one to work out or play sports, but as of late she has taken to endurance running as a way of conditioning herself for her job and for life as a person with powers. This has started to add definition to her physical features, but not much.
Julia’s eyes are a deep emerald green, and her hair, while naturally brown, is dyed a deep hue of red - almost a burgundy-color. She usually has it back in a messy braid, and her protective goggles are always sitting atop her head, ready to be pulled down and use at a moment’s notice (though most people think they are just a fashion piece). Her clothing is usually light and close to her skin on her bottom half to allow her full range of motion and the ability to move fast. She always wears the same beat-up, brown leather coat, a solid-colored racerback tank top, and a bandana around her neck (which she’ll pull up over the bottom part of her face when she’s using her powers). She currently does not have a ‘super hero outfit,’ and she has no plans to get or make one.
Powers:
Superhuman mentality: Julia has an intelligence quotient far above that of a genius level. While this has been manifested all of her life, this most often shows through her ability to pick up new concepts and ideas very quickly, as well as understand very complex technology or machinery with no experience. However, while she has a near-photographic memory, she has little intuition, very little personal empathy, and a bit of a procrastination streak, all of which hinder her from reaching her potential.
Her superhuman mentality has manifested into three forms of power:
- Technopathy: The strongest of her powers from her superhuman mind, Julia has the ability to control the flow of intricate machinery, allowing her to assemble or disengage their programming at will. She can operate most technology just by touching, essentially by “communicating” with the technology or machinery in their own “language” (i.e. programming). The drawback is that she must be able to touch some component of the machinery or tech she is looking to communicate with and manipulate.
- Energy Manipulation: From the same vein as her Technopathy, Julia can also draw from energy and power sources, defying physics laws and manipulating either telepathic or electric energy into the form of “psi-orbs,” which she can use as projectiles. She has experimented with making them solid forms (i.e. blades or knives), but has had little success to date. Once manipulated by Julia, the energy takes a purple-and-magenta hue. She has the ability to manipulate massive amounts of energy at one time (i.e., larger psi-orbs, arms coated in the energy, etc.), but due to the brightness of the energy when it “pops” into existence,” Julia needs to wear protective goggles while manipulating energy to prevent from going temporarily (or potentially permanently) blind.
- Telepathy: The newest ability to manifest from her mutated mind, Julia has the ability to read and hear the thoughts of humans and other organic lifeforms, though right now she is not fully aware of this. This has only been a hinderance as of late, hearing all thoughts in the near vicinity as a constant tinnitus. As she doesn’t yet realized the ‘tinnitus’ is actually an amalgamation and overlap of other people’s thoughts, Julia cannot focus well on one mind or thought in any sense. It’s become so bad that she usually has to avoid loud crowds (i.e. malls, concerts, festivals). If she must attend a large event from work, she will usually hum or focus on one thing in particular in an attempt to drown out the noise pollution.
Personality: If there was one word Julia would use to describe herself, it would be bold. She loves pushing boundaries, discovering new things and new ideas, and using them as well - part of the reason why she does so well as a full-time hero “paparazzi.” She’s a very rational and practical person; she likes to find ideas she can act on, drill in the details, and then put them to use. She doesn’t like arbitrary discussion.
Julia also likes to experiment with new ideas and things, and she’s incredibly perceptive (though this only extends to the physical, not the emotional). She notices small shifts in habits, appearances, etc., and she can use those observations to create connections with others. But she doesn’t play mind games - she’s a very direct person, with her questions and answers being direct and factual. For Julia, things are exactly as they are - though she doesn’t mind spinning an innocent picture or telling a lie to sell her photos to the Observer.
Unfortunately, Julia is also fairly insensitive and impatient. She prefers the facts and “reality” to how someone feels, and she doesn’t like emotionally-charged affairs. Her blunt honesty has a tendency to get her into trouble, as it's hard for her to acknowledge others feelings, while being equally hard for her to express her own. She also doesn’t like to have to slow down her fast-paced, high-energy life for others, which leads to further conflict with her family and friends.
Her job as a paparazzi aside, Julia is very, very risk-prone, Being so impatient, Julia often jumps head-first into situations without really thinking about the long-term consequences, which often gets her into trouble. She also will often see an opportunity - to fix something, advance, get a good picture, have fun - and then seize the moment, often ignoring any laws or social rules in the process. Finally, she has a defiant-streak in her. While she’s a fast learner by nature, she hates repetition, hardline rules, and lectures - Julia is hands-on and action-oriented, and learns best by doing, especially when not being told.
Origin Story: Julia had a pretty average upbringing for a midwestern girl from Chicago. She didn’t seem to be anyone of note as a young child, besides being a very active, questioning young girl. In fact, her parents were convinced she had ADHD, putting her on Adderall for much of her young life in an attempt to focus her mind. Because of the meds, Julia was a very mellow and, well, dull person for the majority of her young life.
Once she started high school, though, Julia decided on her own to stop taking her medication. When she did, she started doing poorly in school, though not for lack of trying. Rather, she was bored out of her mind with the lessons, preferring to doodle on scantrons instead of actually answering the questions. She spent her spare time reading on topics that actually interested her - instead of history, she was mastering coding languages and the science of circuitry; instead of American literature, Julia was reading texts from seventeenth-century French philosophers.
It wasn’t until her junior year that she had the opportunity to expand her course load to two things that interested her: autoshop and computer programming. Something about machines always made more sense to Julia than her peers; her programming teacher, a man named Mr. Remy, certainly noticed how the young woman seemed to pick up things in a manner of minutes about the inner workings of computers and code that had taken him years to master. He suggested her for IQ testing, which was when Julia first discovered her intelligence was higher than usual: seventy-five points higher than usual, in fact.
Of course, IQ isn’t everything, but it was the first tip to the then-16-year-old that she was different. Suddenly, Julia began testing the limits of what she could learn, retain, and understand. She started reading everything she could get her hands on, tinkering with any machine, computer, program she could find. With minimal experience, she was mastering concepts of mechanical engineering and complex numbers, and could recant full chapters from memory after only reading them once.
The most useful thing she discovered, though, was the strange relationship she had with technology. Sure, Julia knew code, and she knew how to take things apart, put them back together, the works. But after fixing a clock just by placing her hand on it and imagining herself fixing the thing, hearing the tick as it worked - she started to figure out that she wasn’t just really smart.
After a while, Julia had her technopathy figured out, and used it to get her shining marks through a double major in mechanical engineering and photography - a hobby she’d picked up after discovering she had an eye for picking out the unusual in her surroundings. Graduating from college at 20, Julia abruptly decided to pick up and move to New York, wanting to put distance between herself and her parents.
Once she was in the Big Apple, Julia began working as a mechanical engineer for a computer hardware company. But when she discovered she was simply to become a functioning cog in the great corporate machine, Julia started moonlighting as a freelance photographer. She had incredible luck with her first few photos, catching a few local superheroes in less than savory situations. As she sold her pictures to small-time gossip mags, Julia slowly started building a reputation for herself, somehow always able to find leads on the juiciest stories (when in truth she was finding information through hotel computers, credit card records, etc.).
It was around this time that the New York Observer approached her. Being one of the top tabloids (and therefore very interested in the photos Julia produced), they offered her a contract with the paper, in exchange for exclusive rights to the photos she produced while under the contract and on an assignment from the paper. While the money wasn’t great, Julia took the job and quit her mechanical engineering job, loving the thrill that taking the scandalous pictures gave her.
Now a staff photographer for a sensationalist magazine, Julia also began to garner negative attention from more than one super person. One in particular was a mob boss named Dan Moriarty, who happened to be the head of the only remaining Irish Mafia. Julia ended up finding out a restaurant he would be at one night after technopathically searching deleted search history on a public library computer, and snapped him on a date with a woman who was not his wife of ten years. As soon as the picture hit the stands, it was a full front-page cover, with the headline: “MORIARTY MUCKS UP MARRIAGE?”
The mafia boss was furious, and before long Julia found herself cornered in a dark alley by two of Moriarty’s men. Having nothing to protect herself besides her camera, Julia was ready for the worst as the men closed in on her. But as soon as one grabbed her, she thrust her hands out at his chest to try and push him away. A pop followed by a hum sounded, followed by excruciating cries from the man. Julia opened her eyes to see her hands engulfed in a purplish-pink glow, and the man’s chest having been made concave by whatever had manifested on her hands. Wide-eyed and terrified, Moriarty’s other man simply yelled ‘freak’ as he scrambled to get away.
After this Julia took a brief hiatus from photojournalism, moving out to her grandparent’s farm in Northeast New York for a year to lie low from Moriarty and his mafia. She spent her sabbatical learning how her powers worked and how she could control them, thought she didn’t dare tell her nana and papa what she was doing, or why she was really there. Her parents and grandparents all believed she just needed time off from school and the city, but in all honesty, Julia was dying to go back.
When she finally decided it was time to return to Manhattan, Julia came up with her ‘hero’ name, Psivory, though she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it quite yet considering she didn’t see herself as a hero yet. It was also from the farm that Julia got her protective goggles, after retro-fitting a pair of her grandfather’s old air force goggles with new lenses and a good scrub-down. She’s restarted her contract with the Observer, but she’s recently been suffering from constant headaches and a nasty case of what she thinks is tinnitus. She’s been seeing doctors for it, but to no avail as of yet.