Post by Shadowcat on Sept 11, 2006 20:19:19 GMT -5
Name: Neena Thurman
Codename(s): Domino
Affiliation: X-Men
Age: 29
DOB: April 30
Height: 5'8''
Weight: 160 lbs
Hair Color: black
Eye Color: blue
Appearance: Neena stands out in a crowd. This is not because of her pretty, heart-shaped face, her small Cupidic mouth, her bright blue eyes, or even her shapely (though not slender, to her eternal sighs) legs; she stands out because of a round black splodge around her left eye, which many people mistake for an eyepatch at first sight before they notice the brilliant blue eye within it. Neena's skin is also chalk white - not just pale-person white, but totally white, without blush, except for a sort of dusty gray tint the rises to grace her high cheekbones if she's very embarrassed or overheated indeed. She can pass for normal in a pair of Aviator sunglasses, though she still ends up looking very, very pale. (Science dork note: this is because Neena breathes nitrogen, not oxygen, not that she knows about it. Her lungs are superefficient, neatly countering the fact that only about 5% of the air is nitrogen; but she's colored the way she is because her blood cells bond differently with the nitrogen than normal cells would with oxygen, turning black instead of red. Her skin itself has melanin, but this too is tinted only gray or white, except for the splodge, which is really nothing more than her version of a strawberry birthmark.) Her lips, while well-shaped, are black; most of the inside of her mouth is grayish, which surprisingly doesn't look nearly as gross as it sounds, since the tissue is healthy. She'll sometimes cover this up with a lot of red lipstick, especially if she has to emerge into the public eye for long periods, but just for school or for schlumping around home she doesn't bother.
Her straight black hair has been cut short for at least five years now, usually in a bob, around her face. She thinks it looks more professional than the long sheet she had in college (and it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with - there's actually a bit of wave in her hair, which is somewhat coarse, as most dark hair is). Her face itself points through the chin, with angled cheekbones ungraced by cosmetic blush, simply because it looks bizarre. Her ears aren't pierced and she generally doesn't wear jewelry; Daddy always said spare metal was just shrapnel waiting to happen. (However, she does have a pre-mid-life-crisis/divorce-insanity belly ring. Usually she keeps a simple steel stud in it. It hurt a lot and she'll be damned if she's letting that painful a piercing close.) She's short through the torso, with most of her length in her legs, with generous hips wider than her breasts - smaller, though definitely not small - and her waist comes to a point to form a traditional hourglass figure, though she has better abs than most Victorian women did, thanks mostly to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 crunches a day. Though she does actually work on her upper-body strength regularly, her arms seem unwilling to gain any actual definition, though she can lift quite a bit. She's not freakshow-strong, but when she needs help carrying her groceries, it's always a question of volume, not weight. The real danger in her as an opponent is her speed, agility, and uncanny ability to guess her opponent's next move half a second before the opponent thinks of it. She can also strike with incredible force - but just a strike. She can't keep it up in a hold.
Her body is toned and her skin is mostly flawless, except for her hands and the lower half of her forearms, which are crisscrossed with thin lines and small shiny burns from her explosions. Because of the color of her skin, these aren't visible from some angles and can go unnoticed for a while.
Her voice is dark, slightly deeper than average and strong-sounding; when she gets tired, angry, scared, too relaxed, or starts talking too fast, a southern accent will emerge. It's not the elegant Savannah slur, either; it's Texas twang, which essentially sounds like the entire state was one giant trailer park. The section of Austin suburb from which she came was one of those little accent pockets (any Texas resident could explain this) of the Panhandle, which creep down all the way to Brownsville if you really look. And the Panhandle, as any Texas resident could also tell you, is the single trashiest spit of land in the world as we know it.
Personality: Neena, though generally elegant and composed in appearance and manner, is not the most feminine of females, and her elegance and composure are most definitely trained in. She and those around her have put this tendency down to the fact that she grew up motherless, and that her father was one of the most frighteningly masculine fathers a girl could possibly have. Most little girls, it has to be said, do not spend their spare time building, dissecting, and disarming bombs. When she's not on Good Behavior - out with friends, working, or even just distracted - she can get a little tomboyish and countrified, and when she's had a drink or so and is feeling a little loose, everything she was in college snaps back: loud, brash, terrifically oversexualised Neena Thomas, whose only real problem is that she still had total motor control when blind drunk and could never tell when to stop.
As you'd expect with anyone who can teach war theory, the finer points of weapon science and French and still find time to sponsor the Robot Team, Neena is one smart cookie. She picks apart situations and problems almost unconsciously, breaking them down to core values and objectives as an automatic reaction; then, of course, she builds them back up again, with a perfectly logical resolution waiting in hand. She can sometimes get stuck on stupid small things rather than focusing on the big picture, if only because, in France, if you make even the tiniest grammar error, you are about as socially dead as you are if you cross the tiniest wire attached to a pound of plastique.
Neena takes no crap. This comes from (a) about twelve years around her husband and (b) seven around high school students. The schoolkids, she always says, were a lot more bearable than Milo was. And there's another thing - after her treatment at the hands of her ex-husband, whom she tries, half-heartedly, to blow up every year on their anniversary, Neena is severely bitter and does not easily trust the opposite sex. While she's quite cavalier about sex, she's currently of the opinion that love sucks/doesn't exist. She'll be nice to guys, even friendly, but it's very difficult for her to trust them, especially if they show any sort of romantic or physical interest in her.
She feels drawn, often, to those she feels needs her. She's not sure whether this is because she's secretly a bleeding heart or because her power can sense where it's most needed. She'll find herself doing anything for some people, and believe you me, she's definitely not usually so unguarded.
She can be funny, in a quippy sort of way, and appreciates a vast variety of humor. And, as said before, under all her composure lies a very different woman: a wild party girl who married too early, turned into a teacher too fast and never got her partying done with. Also, as said before, she's been hypersexualized since about fifteen, with a drive bordering on nymphomania. For her boyfriends and her husband, this was not as fun as it sounds; it's more tiring than you would expect, and sometimes not as pleasantly as you would expect, to have a constantly-horny woman in peak condition demanding two orgasms a day minimum. However, contributing to her general somberness the last about year and half has been the dry spell since her marriage - longer than she's <i>ever</i> gone several times over. She's almost stopped thinking about sex, slipping completely into the role of a celibate. Aided by this is the idea that she now hates all men because of the problems with her ex-husband, but if she were ever to get over herself and get a taste of her favorite pastime again... well. There'd be a lot of catching up to do.
Powers and Abilities: Domino's only power, expressed physically by her appearance (which she explains to her students and questioners as a skin condition akin to albinism), is her subconscious improvement of her own luck and, to some extent, the luck of those around her - at least those she likes. She can decrease the luck of those she doesn't like, as can be seen in her ex-husband's inability to get a job or a break, but her control over luck is entirely unconscious: that is, she's conscious of it, but can't control it except through base emotion and reasoning. She has managed to actively control it in those weird dreams where you can decide what's going to happen, but those don't happen very often, so. Every time she attempts to force it in real life, what she intends to happen does happen - just not in a way she planned for, and sometimes the side effects can be disastrous. Touching something or someone will often direct the luck that transfers to others, but she can't control it finely. Also, the closer you are to her, the luckier you'll tend to be if you're in her good graces, and the unluckier you'll be if you're in her bad ones. Her power is somewhat local, except in extreme cases, like that of her father, who constantly has good luck.
Her luck does not save her as a telepath's power would; for instance, if rocks fell from the sky, they wouldn't deflect from her path. However, the wind currents surrounding their descent would shift them enough to keep them from falling directly on her. Her luck as she knows it now essentially creates a best-case scenario; if someone shoots at her and there's nothing in the way or that can be in the way and the gun is failsafe, that bullet's not going to stop, but her luck will force her to move in such a way as to get out of its path, or at least get her vital organs out of its path. A desire for something to change will, if the desire is strong enough, often be enough to trigger a reaction. Essentially, if she wishes hard enough, the universe will find a way around its own laws, but it'll do it its own way.
Weaknesses: Domino has all the weaknesses of a normal human woman of her age, weight, height, and peak physical condition, except of course that she's freakishly lucky. Anything that can induce self-hatred can remove a lot of her strength, since it'll turn her own power against her; she'll tend to contract the first bug that's going around, and if there's nothing in the air she'll obtain hundreds of tiny injuries over a tiny amount of time. Both will leave her hospitalized, the first with zero immune response and the second with infections in each injury. She has to be very, very careful about her mental health.
History: When Neena's mother died in childbirth, her father, Jonathon "Wolf" Thomas, swore he would never love another woman, even his own daughter, whom he would bring up solely for the respect of his wife's memory.
Wolf was wrong.
From the first time Neena opened her eyes, a few minutes after her mother's death, she had her daddy wrapped around her finger. But unlike other girls whose fathers worshipped the very ground they walked on, Neena's daddy was not out to provide every one of Neena's whims - oh, no. Neena's daddy was out to make Neena the best woman she could possibly become, stronger and smarter than her competition, and to make sure no filthy male ever touched his darling baby girl. So he gave her the best self-defense advice he could think of: blow the other dude up before he blows you up.
Wolf was a weapons specialist; more specifically, a connoisseur of explosive devices. He was legendary in his profession. Wolf Thomas, came the whispers, could disarm any bomb by any maker in under thirty minutes. Any bomb, anywhere. Even nuclear warheads. He was the best, and he taught Neena everything he knew. She sucked it up like a sponge, but, unfortunately, like her mother before her, showed an alarming grasp of foreign languages, especially French, which she spoke with a nearly perfect accent - even Parisians were convinced she had to be a Parisienne, though the Mexican migrant workers were not convinced of her Spanish (too Castilian) and the German bakers around the corner smiled encouragingly at her soft-edged pronunciation. Her Farsi, though excellent written and read, was not even to be mentioned. However, she retained her father's talent, and while she was called the Wolf Cub after him until nearly twenty, she finally managed to carve out a niche for herself in the weapons world under the pseudonym Domino. It was her best friend Carter's name for her, because of her patch. She considered using Beatrice, her boyfriend's nickname (after Dante's Inferno), but she decided it was "too private." Carter thought it was idiotic, because if Domino was anything she wasn't an angelic tour guide.
Her dad, though, taught her more than bombs: after all, she might not have access to equipment. He taught her to fight and he taught her how to beat him, a man twice her size, and after she could match him evenly he hired her senseis and trainers where he could find them. Not many were initially willing to visit a goat ranch outside of Austin where things routinely exploded, but the few that were were brave, and Neena's one hell of a fighter. She's never killed anyone, but feels confident she could if she had to.
In high school, she was relatively popular; she went into cheerleading her freshman year but quit her sophomore year, which was also the year she met Milo, who had moved from Washington. Her dad knew Milo's dad and offered Milo a job carting stuff around after school, and while Milo approved wholeheartedly of Neena's cheerleading uniform, even she knew that she was in the wrong sport. She moved to volleyball, elected captain halfway through her junior year after the real captain graduated a semester early, and led the team to State two years running.
College was wild for her; Neena is not naturally calm at all, and though she always did well enough in classes, the bars and city atmosphere of real Austin were eye-opening and incredible. She quickly rose to notoriety both good and bad, vaunted as both the coolest girl on campus and the craziest one. Her insane flirting with everyone who got within five feet eventually drove Milo to break up with her in a fit of pique, and to show him just what was up she dated everyone she could lure out to a bar, though she still cared deeply about him, they were both too stubborn to get back together until halfway through her senior year. Though Milo had been her first, she was much more experienced when she came back to him, and he... wasn't. The seeds of discontent were subtly planted, tiny and infintesimal in nature, and neither really noticed.
She grew up to become teacher after double-majoring in War Theory, part of the design-your-major program, and French, with a teacher's certification for the state of Texas. She went to work at President Lyndon B. Johnson High School, where the last class that remembered her run on varsity volleyball had just left. She was 22.
She married Milo at the end of her first year teaching (French, since of course high schoolers didn't need to know war theory and she refused to teach history). Milo majored in electronic engineering. He worked with her dad and had in fact taught her much of what she knew about the finer points of programming and construction, not just demolition, which is what has made her so versatile. Wolf still wasn't happy about their union, but Milo looked like the best option, all things considered. He only wished the kid had a bit more of a spine, especially where Neena was concerned. A girl like that needed to be stopped in her tracks every once in a while, and Milo just kind of let her walk all over him, terrified she'd leave for good this time.
But Neena's work became somewhat consuming, and some habits remained from college. She still hung out with her friends more than she spent time with him, and her work took up a lot of time; when she saw Milo it seemed like all she wanted was sex and then to get back to work. He became unhappy, but lacked the strength to demand more time. He loved her very, very deeply (as she did him, though she was never good at showing it any way other than sexually), and he was still scared she'd leave him. So he did the logical thing: he started cheated on her.
About five years later, the last day of school in her 28th year, Neena came home early (the new calendar had instituted a half-day) to find an extremely dishevelled Milo and another woman fast asleep in her bed. Suppressing her instinct to shoot them both (she'd have to go all the way to the basement to get her Sig, anyway), she left the house and got as drunk as possible before returning with every inebriated intention of killing at least her husband to find both of them gone; Milo had woken up when the door had slammed on her way out and found her briefcase on the floor in the doorway of the bedroom, and being an intelligent enough fellow, had put two and two together and wisely sent his girlfriend home and slept on the floor of his best friend's kitchen.
Neena was extremely bitter about the whole thing. Cheating, in her opinion, is the worst thing you can do to someone. Not only was she not good enough for her husband, apparently, but she also wasn't important enough for him to break it off clean. Stupid evil male scum.
Obviously, it was more complicated than Milo Is Evil. Neena had always been slightly domineering, catalyzed by her husband's natural reserve; she was also obsessive, violently reactive, and had a self-obsessed tendency to disappear into her work for weeks. While it wasn't right for Milo to cheat, Neena had driven the wedge a lot by herself, which she still won't admit unless today extremely out of it.
After the split, though, Neena became very ill. She loved Milo as deeply as he did her, and his loss was more than a blow. It felt like part of herself was gone. To tell the truth, if felt like all of herself was gone. Her immediate reaction of hating Milo in full swing for several hours, she began to wonder what she'd done wrong, if anything, which deteriorated into a session of the usual self-loathing that follows any nasty breakup. But Neena can't and shouldn't hate herself. Her luck depends entirely on how she feels about people, herself included; and in fits of depression, she'll catch the first bug that goes around and won't be able to shake it until she shakes her funk. She was hospitalized for two months with a stomach flu that threatened to kill her. Her doctors said it was like watching a chemotherapy patient die - like she had no immune system. The few times she woke up, she raved about Milo, demanding her gun - half the time so she could kill him, and the other half so she could kill herself. She doesn't remember this, but Carter does. He has no intention of telling her. She's always looked at suicide as a coward's way out, and he doesn't want her to know too much about herself. Her ignorance tends to keep her safe.
Her basic survival instincts, though, kicked in at long last, and those combined with some forced self-respect instilled by the loyal Carter, who spoke to her when she woke up delirious and eventually resorted to playing a positive self-image tape on repeat in her hostpial room. She was on her feet within two weeks and preparing extremely rapidly for the encroaching school year. Milo, again exercising his intellect, had filed for and obtained divorce with near-equal division, offering her the lion's share, including the house and the few acres on which it was situated. He'd moved out while she was in the hospital; Neena returned to find her home half-empty. Luckily, she had plenty to do to keep her mind off it, though she still hasn't bought more furniture.
After he left, her little town in Texas became increasingly unsatisfying; she made it through about a year and a half with him gone, but everything reminded her of him, even LBJ. So one day in about April, just after she'd turned 29 and was feeling as though she'd be shackled in Texas forever (her dad distrusted airplanes and airports but wouldn't drive for more than eight hours at a stretch, which limited their vacations to state lines), she found an ad online. A school for mutants in the North was hiring teachers, and they had only one language teacher, for German. Who took German anymore?
So she applied, and she was accepted. And she has no idea what she's doing and no idea what life outside of Austin is like, but she'll be damned if she's going to screw it up like she did the last time around.
Codename(s): Domino
Affiliation: X-Men
Age: 29
DOB: April 30
Height: 5'8''
Weight: 160 lbs
Hair Color: black
Eye Color: blue
Appearance: Neena stands out in a crowd. This is not because of her pretty, heart-shaped face, her small Cupidic mouth, her bright blue eyes, or even her shapely (though not slender, to her eternal sighs) legs; she stands out because of a round black splodge around her left eye, which many people mistake for an eyepatch at first sight before they notice the brilliant blue eye within it. Neena's skin is also chalk white - not just pale-person white, but totally white, without blush, except for a sort of dusty gray tint the rises to grace her high cheekbones if she's very embarrassed or overheated indeed. She can pass for normal in a pair of Aviator sunglasses, though she still ends up looking very, very pale. (Science dork note: this is because Neena breathes nitrogen, not oxygen, not that she knows about it. Her lungs are superefficient, neatly countering the fact that only about 5% of the air is nitrogen; but she's colored the way she is because her blood cells bond differently with the nitrogen than normal cells would with oxygen, turning black instead of red. Her skin itself has melanin, but this too is tinted only gray or white, except for the splodge, which is really nothing more than her version of a strawberry birthmark.) Her lips, while well-shaped, are black; most of the inside of her mouth is grayish, which surprisingly doesn't look nearly as gross as it sounds, since the tissue is healthy. She'll sometimes cover this up with a lot of red lipstick, especially if she has to emerge into the public eye for long periods, but just for school or for schlumping around home she doesn't bother.
Her straight black hair has been cut short for at least five years now, usually in a bob, around her face. She thinks it looks more professional than the long sheet she had in college (and it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with - there's actually a bit of wave in her hair, which is somewhat coarse, as most dark hair is). Her face itself points through the chin, with angled cheekbones ungraced by cosmetic blush, simply because it looks bizarre. Her ears aren't pierced and she generally doesn't wear jewelry; Daddy always said spare metal was just shrapnel waiting to happen. (However, she does have a pre-mid-life-crisis/divorce-insanity belly ring. Usually she keeps a simple steel stud in it. It hurt a lot and she'll be damned if she's letting that painful a piercing close.) She's short through the torso, with most of her length in her legs, with generous hips wider than her breasts - smaller, though definitely not small - and her waist comes to a point to form a traditional hourglass figure, though she has better abs than most Victorian women did, thanks mostly to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 crunches a day. Though she does actually work on her upper-body strength regularly, her arms seem unwilling to gain any actual definition, though she can lift quite a bit. She's not freakshow-strong, but when she needs help carrying her groceries, it's always a question of volume, not weight. The real danger in her as an opponent is her speed, agility, and uncanny ability to guess her opponent's next move half a second before the opponent thinks of it. She can also strike with incredible force - but just a strike. She can't keep it up in a hold.
Her body is toned and her skin is mostly flawless, except for her hands and the lower half of her forearms, which are crisscrossed with thin lines and small shiny burns from her explosions. Because of the color of her skin, these aren't visible from some angles and can go unnoticed for a while.
Her voice is dark, slightly deeper than average and strong-sounding; when she gets tired, angry, scared, too relaxed, or starts talking too fast, a southern accent will emerge. It's not the elegant Savannah slur, either; it's Texas twang, which essentially sounds like the entire state was one giant trailer park. The section of Austin suburb from which she came was one of those little accent pockets (any Texas resident could explain this) of the Panhandle, which creep down all the way to Brownsville if you really look. And the Panhandle, as any Texas resident could also tell you, is the single trashiest spit of land in the world as we know it.
Personality: Neena, though generally elegant and composed in appearance and manner, is not the most feminine of females, and her elegance and composure are most definitely trained in. She and those around her have put this tendency down to the fact that she grew up motherless, and that her father was one of the most frighteningly masculine fathers a girl could possibly have. Most little girls, it has to be said, do not spend their spare time building, dissecting, and disarming bombs. When she's not on Good Behavior - out with friends, working, or even just distracted - she can get a little tomboyish and countrified, and when she's had a drink or so and is feeling a little loose, everything she was in college snaps back: loud, brash, terrifically oversexualised Neena Thomas, whose only real problem is that she still had total motor control when blind drunk and could never tell when to stop.
As you'd expect with anyone who can teach war theory, the finer points of weapon science and French and still find time to sponsor the Robot Team, Neena is one smart cookie. She picks apart situations and problems almost unconsciously, breaking them down to core values and objectives as an automatic reaction; then, of course, she builds them back up again, with a perfectly logical resolution waiting in hand. She can sometimes get stuck on stupid small things rather than focusing on the big picture, if only because, in France, if you make even the tiniest grammar error, you are about as socially dead as you are if you cross the tiniest wire attached to a pound of plastique.
Neena takes no crap. This comes from (a) about twelve years around her husband and (b) seven around high school students. The schoolkids, she always says, were a lot more bearable than Milo was. And there's another thing - after her treatment at the hands of her ex-husband, whom she tries, half-heartedly, to blow up every year on their anniversary, Neena is severely bitter and does not easily trust the opposite sex. While she's quite cavalier about sex, she's currently of the opinion that love sucks/doesn't exist. She'll be nice to guys, even friendly, but it's very difficult for her to trust them, especially if they show any sort of romantic or physical interest in her.
She feels drawn, often, to those she feels needs her. She's not sure whether this is because she's secretly a bleeding heart or because her power can sense where it's most needed. She'll find herself doing anything for some people, and believe you me, she's definitely not usually so unguarded.
She can be funny, in a quippy sort of way, and appreciates a vast variety of humor. And, as said before, under all her composure lies a very different woman: a wild party girl who married too early, turned into a teacher too fast and never got her partying done with. Also, as said before, she's been hypersexualized since about fifteen, with a drive bordering on nymphomania. For her boyfriends and her husband, this was not as fun as it sounds; it's more tiring than you would expect, and sometimes not as pleasantly as you would expect, to have a constantly-horny woman in peak condition demanding two orgasms a day minimum. However, contributing to her general somberness the last about year and half has been the dry spell since her marriage - longer than she's <i>ever</i> gone several times over. She's almost stopped thinking about sex, slipping completely into the role of a celibate. Aided by this is the idea that she now hates all men because of the problems with her ex-husband, but if she were ever to get over herself and get a taste of her favorite pastime again... well. There'd be a lot of catching up to do.
Powers and Abilities: Domino's only power, expressed physically by her appearance (which she explains to her students and questioners as a skin condition akin to albinism), is her subconscious improvement of her own luck and, to some extent, the luck of those around her - at least those she likes. She can decrease the luck of those she doesn't like, as can be seen in her ex-husband's inability to get a job or a break, but her control over luck is entirely unconscious: that is, she's conscious of it, but can't control it except through base emotion and reasoning. She has managed to actively control it in those weird dreams where you can decide what's going to happen, but those don't happen very often, so. Every time she attempts to force it in real life, what she intends to happen does happen - just not in a way she planned for, and sometimes the side effects can be disastrous. Touching something or someone will often direct the luck that transfers to others, but she can't control it finely. Also, the closer you are to her, the luckier you'll tend to be if you're in her good graces, and the unluckier you'll be if you're in her bad ones. Her power is somewhat local, except in extreme cases, like that of her father, who constantly has good luck.
Her luck does not save her as a telepath's power would; for instance, if rocks fell from the sky, they wouldn't deflect from her path. However, the wind currents surrounding their descent would shift them enough to keep them from falling directly on her. Her luck as she knows it now essentially creates a best-case scenario; if someone shoots at her and there's nothing in the way or that can be in the way and the gun is failsafe, that bullet's not going to stop, but her luck will force her to move in such a way as to get out of its path, or at least get her vital organs out of its path. A desire for something to change will, if the desire is strong enough, often be enough to trigger a reaction. Essentially, if she wishes hard enough, the universe will find a way around its own laws, but it'll do it its own way.
Weaknesses: Domino has all the weaknesses of a normal human woman of her age, weight, height, and peak physical condition, except of course that she's freakishly lucky. Anything that can induce self-hatred can remove a lot of her strength, since it'll turn her own power against her; she'll tend to contract the first bug that's going around, and if there's nothing in the air she'll obtain hundreds of tiny injuries over a tiny amount of time. Both will leave her hospitalized, the first with zero immune response and the second with infections in each injury. She has to be very, very careful about her mental health.
History: When Neena's mother died in childbirth, her father, Jonathon "Wolf" Thomas, swore he would never love another woman, even his own daughter, whom he would bring up solely for the respect of his wife's memory.
Wolf was wrong.
From the first time Neena opened her eyes, a few minutes after her mother's death, she had her daddy wrapped around her finger. But unlike other girls whose fathers worshipped the very ground they walked on, Neena's daddy was not out to provide every one of Neena's whims - oh, no. Neena's daddy was out to make Neena the best woman she could possibly become, stronger and smarter than her competition, and to make sure no filthy male ever touched his darling baby girl. So he gave her the best self-defense advice he could think of: blow the other dude up before he blows you up.
Wolf was a weapons specialist; more specifically, a connoisseur of explosive devices. He was legendary in his profession. Wolf Thomas, came the whispers, could disarm any bomb by any maker in under thirty minutes. Any bomb, anywhere. Even nuclear warheads. He was the best, and he taught Neena everything he knew. She sucked it up like a sponge, but, unfortunately, like her mother before her, showed an alarming grasp of foreign languages, especially French, which she spoke with a nearly perfect accent - even Parisians were convinced she had to be a Parisienne, though the Mexican migrant workers were not convinced of her Spanish (too Castilian) and the German bakers around the corner smiled encouragingly at her soft-edged pronunciation. Her Farsi, though excellent written and read, was not even to be mentioned. However, she retained her father's talent, and while she was called the Wolf Cub after him until nearly twenty, she finally managed to carve out a niche for herself in the weapons world under the pseudonym Domino. It was her best friend Carter's name for her, because of her patch. She considered using Beatrice, her boyfriend's nickname (after Dante's Inferno), but she decided it was "too private." Carter thought it was idiotic, because if Domino was anything she wasn't an angelic tour guide.
Her dad, though, taught her more than bombs: after all, she might not have access to equipment. He taught her to fight and he taught her how to beat him, a man twice her size, and after she could match him evenly he hired her senseis and trainers where he could find them. Not many were initially willing to visit a goat ranch outside of Austin where things routinely exploded, but the few that were were brave, and Neena's one hell of a fighter. She's never killed anyone, but feels confident she could if she had to.
In high school, she was relatively popular; she went into cheerleading her freshman year but quit her sophomore year, which was also the year she met Milo, who had moved from Washington. Her dad knew Milo's dad and offered Milo a job carting stuff around after school, and while Milo approved wholeheartedly of Neena's cheerleading uniform, even she knew that she was in the wrong sport. She moved to volleyball, elected captain halfway through her junior year after the real captain graduated a semester early, and led the team to State two years running.
College was wild for her; Neena is not naturally calm at all, and though she always did well enough in classes, the bars and city atmosphere of real Austin were eye-opening and incredible. She quickly rose to notoriety both good and bad, vaunted as both the coolest girl on campus and the craziest one. Her insane flirting with everyone who got within five feet eventually drove Milo to break up with her in a fit of pique, and to show him just what was up she dated everyone she could lure out to a bar, though she still cared deeply about him, they were both too stubborn to get back together until halfway through her senior year. Though Milo had been her first, she was much more experienced when she came back to him, and he... wasn't. The seeds of discontent were subtly planted, tiny and infintesimal in nature, and neither really noticed.
She grew up to become teacher after double-majoring in War Theory, part of the design-your-major program, and French, with a teacher's certification for the state of Texas. She went to work at President Lyndon B. Johnson High School, where the last class that remembered her run on varsity volleyball had just left. She was 22.
She married Milo at the end of her first year teaching (French, since of course high schoolers didn't need to know war theory and she refused to teach history). Milo majored in electronic engineering. He worked with her dad and had in fact taught her much of what she knew about the finer points of programming and construction, not just demolition, which is what has made her so versatile. Wolf still wasn't happy about their union, but Milo looked like the best option, all things considered. He only wished the kid had a bit more of a spine, especially where Neena was concerned. A girl like that needed to be stopped in her tracks every once in a while, and Milo just kind of let her walk all over him, terrified she'd leave for good this time.
But Neena's work became somewhat consuming, and some habits remained from college. She still hung out with her friends more than she spent time with him, and her work took up a lot of time; when she saw Milo it seemed like all she wanted was sex and then to get back to work. He became unhappy, but lacked the strength to demand more time. He loved her very, very deeply (as she did him, though she was never good at showing it any way other than sexually), and he was still scared she'd leave him. So he did the logical thing: he started cheated on her.
About five years later, the last day of school in her 28th year, Neena came home early (the new calendar had instituted a half-day) to find an extremely dishevelled Milo and another woman fast asleep in her bed. Suppressing her instinct to shoot them both (she'd have to go all the way to the basement to get her Sig, anyway), she left the house and got as drunk as possible before returning with every inebriated intention of killing at least her husband to find both of them gone; Milo had woken up when the door had slammed on her way out and found her briefcase on the floor in the doorway of the bedroom, and being an intelligent enough fellow, had put two and two together and wisely sent his girlfriend home and slept on the floor of his best friend's kitchen.
Neena was extremely bitter about the whole thing. Cheating, in her opinion, is the worst thing you can do to someone. Not only was she not good enough for her husband, apparently, but she also wasn't important enough for him to break it off clean. Stupid evil male scum.
Obviously, it was more complicated than Milo Is Evil. Neena had always been slightly domineering, catalyzed by her husband's natural reserve; she was also obsessive, violently reactive, and had a self-obsessed tendency to disappear into her work for weeks. While it wasn't right for Milo to cheat, Neena had driven the wedge a lot by herself, which she still won't admit unless today extremely out of it.
After the split, though, Neena became very ill. She loved Milo as deeply as he did her, and his loss was more than a blow. It felt like part of herself was gone. To tell the truth, if felt like all of herself was gone. Her immediate reaction of hating Milo in full swing for several hours, she began to wonder what she'd done wrong, if anything, which deteriorated into a session of the usual self-loathing that follows any nasty breakup. But Neena can't and shouldn't hate herself. Her luck depends entirely on how she feels about people, herself included; and in fits of depression, she'll catch the first bug that goes around and won't be able to shake it until she shakes her funk. She was hospitalized for two months with a stomach flu that threatened to kill her. Her doctors said it was like watching a chemotherapy patient die - like she had no immune system. The few times she woke up, she raved about Milo, demanding her gun - half the time so she could kill him, and the other half so she could kill herself. She doesn't remember this, but Carter does. He has no intention of telling her. She's always looked at suicide as a coward's way out, and he doesn't want her to know too much about herself. Her ignorance tends to keep her safe.
Her basic survival instincts, though, kicked in at long last, and those combined with some forced self-respect instilled by the loyal Carter, who spoke to her when she woke up delirious and eventually resorted to playing a positive self-image tape on repeat in her hostpial room. She was on her feet within two weeks and preparing extremely rapidly for the encroaching school year. Milo, again exercising his intellect, had filed for and obtained divorce with near-equal division, offering her the lion's share, including the house and the few acres on which it was situated. He'd moved out while she was in the hospital; Neena returned to find her home half-empty. Luckily, she had plenty to do to keep her mind off it, though she still hasn't bought more furniture.
After he left, her little town in Texas became increasingly unsatisfying; she made it through about a year and a half with him gone, but everything reminded her of him, even LBJ. So one day in about April, just after she'd turned 29 and was feeling as though she'd be shackled in Texas forever (her dad distrusted airplanes and airports but wouldn't drive for more than eight hours at a stretch, which limited their vacations to state lines), she found an ad online. A school for mutants in the North was hiring teachers, and they had only one language teacher, for German. Who took German anymore?
So she applied, and she was accepted. And she has no idea what she's doing and no idea what life outside of Austin is like, but she'll be damned if she's going to screw it up like she did the last time around.
