Post by haxxor on Jul 3, 2006 17:48:06 GMT -5
(Note: Sam's extremely similar, I've noticed, to Conduit and, to some extent, Forge, but she wasn't intended that way; I've had her as an OC since I first started RPing years ago in much the same format, though it was on an original board, not an X-Men one. However, Forge's and Conduit's applications were her first, so I'll modify her if she's deemed too similar. Other than that, happy sporking. OH YEAH AND I play Kitty and Jane. I need to make a boy...)
Name: Sally-Ann (Sam) Meyers
Codename(s): none yet
Affiliation: X-men
Age: 15
DOB: December 22
Height: 4'11.5 (generally rounded up)
Weight: 104
Hair Color: dyed black
Eye Color: dark blue
Appearance: Sam dyed her hair black when she was twelve, and until now, it's remained that way since, except for a brief flirtation with maroon when she was about 14 and of course summers, when she dyes it back to its natural color to appease her parents. It's naturally a golden blonde, the color Barbie's hair would be if she was real, which is a family trait most of the Meyers girls are proud of, but blondeness represents too much to Sam for her to even wear it ironically. It's straightish with a body wave that turns to loose curls towards the ends if she doesn't blow it dry, but she's bobbed most of it off, so it's just sort of straight, though it sweeps off her face well enough. She does, yes, have Emo bangs. They suit her as well as they do anyone, meaning that they cover her eyes and make her look generally unsociable, but aren't ugly.
Her skin was fair when she was born, but after years of having the melanin bleached out from overexposure to the computer and TV, it's become almost pearlescent. In sunlight it no longer absorbs light, instead glowing an unhealthy blue - the sort of color most often favored by watered-down skim milk and/or the desperately unwell. In fluorescent light, she looks a little like the walking dead.
Her eyes are large and almond-shaped, of a dark blue she inherited from her father; they're ringed with stick-straight blonde lashes which she won't deign to curl (though she does wish such efforts weren't against her personal code) but which she coats liberally with mascara, as they generally disappear against her fair skin. Her nose is straight and smallish, her lips bow-shaped and pale pink; her face is heart-shaped, pointed a little harshly through the chin, like a pixie. She's a pretty girl when she chooses to be and when she doesn't cake on her usual six layers of black eyeliner and mascara and such things, but she doesn't really like it.
However, even more than her prettiness, Sam dislikes her size. 4'11 (though she rounds up), a half-inch above a legal midget and weighing in at a whopping 104 pounds, Sam couldn't hurt a fly if she tried, and even if she worked on her muscle tone at all she probably wouldn't be able to do more than tweak its wings a little. Her hands are small and childlike, with short fingers and broad palms; they're no larger than a seven-year-old's, and that's helpful sometimes, especially when she's mucking about with the mechanical things she loves so much, but people have always been entertained by Sam's tiny hands, and she doesn't particularly like that either. Come to think of it, there's not really anything she likes about her appearance.
She usually dresses punkishly, mostly because it annoys her family. When doing manual labor or when not wanting to put the thought into doing all-out punk, she'll wear boys' clothes, big flannel shirts over more feminine white tank tops and superhero t-shirts obviously from the clearance rack in the boys' section at Sears. She doesn't usually care enough to make an effort - or, rather, she makes a small effort to avoid looking like she's made a large one.
Personality: Sam is a bitch. That's her job. She has acknowledged this and accepts her role. She's a fun bitch to be around unless she's in a 'mood,' as she has a sense of humor and isn't too proud to direct her testicle-shriveling comments at herself - in fact, much of her humor is self-deprecating, and she tends to think in the same vein. She has no understanding of tact whatsoever, though she'll cushion, if vaguely, what she says for those she likes. If she doesn't like you, believe me, you'll know.
Sam, despite her bitchiness, does like people; she just doesn't like stupid people, or intolerant people, or ignorant people, or people who try to be too nice, or any combination of the above. However, despite her constant self-deprecation, she has a hard time discerning deep flaws in herself, one of them being her own intolerance and ignorance; she holds her opinions sacred and won't change them unless she is forcefully proven wrong with at least five respectable sources used as absolute proof. She'll also defend her friends' opinions if they match hers and, if said friend isn't present, even if they don't.
Another major unacknowledged character fault - she views herself as inadequate before her perfect family and, when at twelve she realized that she could never be one of them, she shot herself 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Her straightforwardness and sarcasm and sometimes downright meanness aren't who she really is, but she's become so deeply buried in this personality, the antithesis of what she should be, that she can't get out. She knows, deep down somewhere, that she's putting up a front, but can't think of a way to take it down and frankly doesn't want to. Her bitchy outside gives her protection from a real world she'd rather not face. She's deep-rooted in denial and doesn't want to come out.
She's an angry kid and fairly pessimistic, mostly because things at home never really seemed to go her way nearly as much as they did her the way of her sisters or the way of those like her sisters. This was mostly the fault of the location. Her sisters were all blonde cheerleaders and it was Ohio; what was to be done?
She loves all forms and facets of science, from biology to chemistry to metaphysics; luckily for her, she has a natural talent and an extremely quick mind, and puruses incredibly advanced study for fun, because she's strange. This love of science spills over into a love of computers, mechanics, and science fiction, all of which led her into her complete obsession with the Internet, hacking, video games, and large, complicated mechanical instruments. This obsession, which surfaced around eleven, has been pursued with a passion bordering on mania for the last four and a half years, giving her an extremely large bank of knowledge for what's a largish, if specialized, field. She knows a whole lot about medicine, having studied it for her power, and even more about computer systems and mechanics, having worked at various garages while still at home and having taken apart computers for fun at home when she wasn't playing video games, reading comic books, or watching Star Wars. She is the quintessential nerd. She's an up-and-coming hacker and has a lot of natural talent, but hasn't gone as far with it as she has with understanding actual systems.
Sam was raised and, somewhat against her will, remains intensely Catholic, believing in Confession, absolution, Communion - the whole shebang, including unction, at least to a point. She keeps a rosary with her at all times, one her sister Joy bought for her when they were both very young at a local religious fair and Sam had spent her money on cross-shaped cookies. She has a strong, thus far unswerving belief in God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, though she also assigns guilt to herself with abandon. Some things you just can't shake, and believe you me, Sam's tried.
She's terrified of drowning and of spiders.
Likes: Science, mechanics, Nerd Culture, loud music, coffee, being mean, off-color jokes, scrawny pale guys, cities
Dislikes: blondes, her family, her town, Ohio, the country, the suburbs, the high end of any city, large bodies of water.
Powers and Abilities:
1. The ability she has the most control over is the ability to control human cells. She can transform them, move them, replicate them, kill them, anything. This usually manifests as an ability to heal herself and others quickly or, at the beginning of every summer, to grow her hair out in about a minute and a half. She practices this one the most because she finds the most common use for it. This power is actually nothing more than her ability to control electricity - she technically directs the brain's electrical impulses to break down cells into proteins and rearrange them into something else or duplicate themselves more quickly - but it's a form of the power she has a lot of experience with, since she's always hurting herself taking apart cars and her friends at home all had carpal tunnel from World of Warcraft. She both uses the brain to direct healing and outside power sources to provide the energy and resources for the healing to take place; the more power there is in the vicinity, the better this power works, though she can heal without power. It just takes longer.
Being able to manipulate the brain would normally mean that she's a weird form of telepathic, but she can't read what she does in there and most thought is too delicate to control the way she does things - even more delicate than the thin tissues of the body, and since it's little understood, it's not something she can get out of one of her textbooks. She can, though, short out short-term memory, but it'll be a wholesale sweep of the last few hours (or days, if she's trying), not a wipe of certain things. She can also make it hard to retain information or think for a few hours, but she doesn't like doing that, because she's never sure she won't just totally fry someone, which would be a Bad Thing.
2. As previously mentioned, she has control over electricity, but it's extremely limited. It usually, as also stated previously, takes the form of small currents found inside human systems. Bioelectricity patterns itself differently than does "real" electricity; it's more delicate and of a different frequency. Though she probably could control "real" electricity, it would take a lot more power - it'd be like trying to understand Cantonese when you grew up with Mandarin. They came from the same basic language, but they're now so different that they don't mesh.
When emotionally stimulated beyond a certain point - too much annoyance, excitement, extreme disappointment - Sam can be seen to spark, her mind's bioelectrical (which are already several times the power and volume of most others') currents physically leaping from her to particles in the air, pollen or moisture or whatever, and exploding, becoming sparks. The area near her will also become warmer, a side effect of the excess energy converting itself to heat energy, and the air around her can be seen to shimmer from this heat or even glow if the energy converts to light. These blips of electricity are the same form as the electricity that runs everyone's brain; it's just that hers gives off excess power into outside conductors, because her circuits are extremely overloaded already.
However, as in Cantonese and Mandarin, a few words remain so similar that they're understandable. When emotionally stimulated beyond a second threshold, this power becomes much more dangerous. If she experiences intense rage, extreme terror, or any other truly violent, base emotion, the sparks will be too large to diffuse harmlessly into heat or light and will build up within her, making her into a conduit for extreme power. They'll also attract their distant cousins, "true" electricity, which will also build up in her. She has to release this power quickly, however; unlike other mutants with power over electricity, Sam doesn't have much tolerance for this kind of power, and if it sticks around longer than about twenty seconds she'll fry herself. Power is usually released through her hands, or rather through wounds which will open in her palms to give the power release, or, if there's too much, through preexisting orafices on her face, since the energy originates in and leaps to her brain - her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
Every use of her power stronger than sparks or healing will leave her with mild tissue scarring from the electricity's passage, but thankfully, she can heal it - as long as she's at least semi-conscious or dreaming. If she's just knocked out, with nothing going on upstairs, nothing will happen. She'll be sick for a while after she heals the tissue, because damaged tissue is change chemically, not physically, and can't really be turned back into viable body parts. This sickness usually passes within 24 hours and is similar to food poisoning.
She can create small bursts of power without harming herself, though, and she can do it intentionally. This is a relatively new development, and Sam isn't sure if she'll ever be able to expand it - the biggest thing she's ever done is jump-start a car by herself, and it made her woozy afterwards. These can manifest either as a suddenly-working electrical device, a suddenly-overloaded electrical device, or little spheric bursts of light and heat, centering around a particle of a conductive element floating in the air. They look like boom balls, but don't explode the same way - there's nothing really physical to them; they're just photonic light and heat, not plasmic energy the way a boom ball is. However, they can shock a victim if they're close enough for the energy to diffuse into a person, but it'll only be a little stunner - nothing to truly incapacitate anyone. They work better as distractions than weapons, since they can grow very bright, having the same effect as a few seconds of high beams in the face.
Weaknesses: Obviously, she cooks herself every once in a while. Less obviously, she has trouble bonding with people and with any form of authority. She's a rebel. Also, her power over cells can sometimes react to emotion as her power over electricity does, though this one usually manifests in those around her falling over unconscious in the middle of sentences. She never really means to do it; it just happens sometimes. This is always caused at the first emotional threshold, if the person bugging her doesn't notice the sparks.
History: Sam's parents, Mary and Bill, are very, very normal. They are basically the Cleavers, minus Beaver's hijinx. Instead of a couple of perfect sons, they got six perfect daughters - Mary, Hope, Faith, Grace, Love, and Joy - and then, of course, Sam, whose father named her, thus the lack of Biblical reference; Sally-Ann was Bill's favorite aunt, and Sam was one of twins with Joy, so her mom didn't have another virtue ready for her, not expecting another set of twins after the first two sets. It runs in the family; only Mary, the eldest girl, was a non-twin.
Sam lived in suburban Ohio for the first eleven years of her life, getting up every morning for church and going every Saturday evening to Confession, just like a good girl. Until she was nine, her parents were convinced that she was perfectly normal. Then they discovered that, in the little playhouse behind the house that no one ever actually went into anymore, Sam had been performing very haphazard vasectomies on rats.
Her parents were shocked and appalled and signed her up for counseling immediately. However, after Sam had gleefully messed with various counselors for a good year and a half, they decided to let well enough alone and let Sam run wild. The insurance company's remaining psychiatrists breathed a sigh of relief.
At eleven, Sam's world came crashing down around her. She was still her natural hair color at this point (blonde, which she doesn't tell anyone) and was quite pretty - she had been one of the more popular girls at elementary school, but in middle school... things changed. After a knock-down, drag-out fight with her mother over wanting to take an after-school Science workshop, her mother eventually told her that she'd never be like her sisters, never be wanted. Though her mother later took it back, the use of the word never has stuck with Sam and she spun as far as possible away from the blonde perfection of her family, probably at least partially because Sam's mother is terrified of her. You would be, too, if your youngest daughter started sparking when you yelled at her and if you couldn't wake up her sisters for a few hours afterwards.
Sam quicky discovered punk and nerd culture and fell in love with their various nuances, though she didn't herself subscribe to the actual beliefs of punkdom so much as she did the beliefs of the proprietor of the local comic book store. No matter how sarcastic and bitchy she gets, she can't subscribe to wallowing in total anger and self-pity the way many punks do. She liked the clothing, however, and still wears it.
She made friends with the local kids than hung around outside the comic book stores and the Hot Topic at the mall; she learned to skateboard, and though she'd never been the best at it, she can hold her own as long as she doesn't try to get too tricky. The basic aim of her life after the fight with her mom was to avoid coming home for as long as possible each day and to leave as early as possible each morning. Her parents, with seven girls to bring up and only a father working, were never wealthy, though they were comfortable, but Sam's allowance was inconstant and mostly nonexistent. She did as much as she could from as young as she could to do for herself, so she's sort of grown up half-impoverished. Many times, she even avoided sleeping at her own house, staying with one of her friends instead. Her parents didn't beat her, rarely yelled with anything like the viciousness required for real verbal abuse, but the house was stifling, and Sam has never really felt at home there.
At the end of her freshman year, she learned of Xavier's Institute and decided that she would be going, whether or not her parents actually agreed to it; they'd made her promise not to expose herself, though she'd told a bare few friends, who thought it was awesome, mostly because they were all comic/video game/that kind of thing addicts the way she was and were convinced she'd grow up a super hero. After a summer of coercion and promises to her parents that yes, it was a perfectly normal and respectable school and yes, she'd do her absolute best and yes, even in History and English, and no, there wouldn't be any hanky-panky with boys and yes, she understood that her body was changing and no, she wouldn't do anything she'd regret because, yes, she knew that virginity was for your husband and any decent girl wouldn't even kiss 'till she was engaged.
However, even Sam couldn't keep her parents in the dark when Alcatraz happened and the Institute became openly mutant following the death of the Headmaster. The Cure had been the Meyers' last hope for their daughter, though, and when they realized they'd never manage to convince her to take it, especially now that she actually couldn't, she really didn't have much other hope for control of her powers than to attend the Institute. The story they're selling to their friends is that she's at a convent school.
Sam plans to cure cancer, AIDS, the common cold and allergies with the unlimited resources at Xavier's school, where she will shortly arrive. She also has completely the wrong idea about the school and is about to get the shock, eh heh, of her life when she realizes that they don't really plan to thwart any sort of authority and are basically going to let the mutant population deal with the abuse.
Sample post: Despite Sam's mother's disregard for the Greyhound bus line, it was a hell of a lot less expensive than a cab or a plane. Sam stepped off the sleek silver bus at the station in New York, looking around her with intense interest at the bad end of town. Sure, it wasn't exactly Times Square, but it was New York - and if she found a rooftop, she bet she could find the skyline.
Thank God she was here. She was out of Ohio, out of public high school, out of everything. She was in New fucking York, she was going to learn how to fry people, and she was actually going to make a difference in the world. Finally, finally, she wasn't just another Meyers in Sweet Apple, Ohio - here she was Sam, just Sam, not IthoughtitwasSallyAnn. She could be whoever she wanted, do whatever she wanted. Anything.
Sam picked up her suitcase and started walking up the street, towards a taxi stop that evidently lived off the business from the buses. She didn't know how much a ride to Westchester would cost, which was why she was taking the train, though the taxi would probably have been more comfortable. Besides, she'd never been in a Gypsy cab before. Even the unpleasant experiences were new and enthralling - it spoke so much of the city, of life, of urbanity.
God, she sounded like a tourist. Sam reformed her face into a bored, vaguely pissed-off expression, and hoped she looked like she was coming home.
She certainly felt like it.
Screenname(s): just click under the name!
Email: again...
IMs: under the name.
RP Experience: I have so done this before.
Answers to junk since I can't reply in this forum and WHY DO YOU PEOPLE ACCEPT THINGS IF THEY'RE NOT PERFECT? *is obsessive*:
Actually, the stigmata reference was unintentional! I didn't even notice that. And, technically, if it was a real stigmata, it would be puncture wounds in her forearms, not really awful burns in her hands, but if we get into theology I'll be here all day.
And, actually, the power does go through her skin. It just blasts the crap out of her palms on its way out. "Open" there is more like the way skin opens if you burn a hole through it than the way a door opens. I had it go through her arms because there are huge gooey nerves that connect through the spinal column and begin branching off in the arms, and electricity usually takes the path of least, i.e. gooiest, resistance. There are also huge gooey nerves through the legs, but it takes longer to get there, of course. That's in essence the same reason it had to get out an orifice. It's easier than passing through a nonconductive skull and skin thing when there's damper, thinner tissue or no tissue at all it could just as easily take.
ON HER PERSONALITY: I need to edit that, actually, she's meant to be pretty angry. But you can be a bitch without being incredibly angry. I do it all the time! In the same vein, you can be a sarcastic optimist; it's a way of speech and an outlook, not two conflicting personality traits, though they aren't usually found prevalently in the same person. However, I forgot to take out the optimism too, so it's a moot point.
And now I can't find mention of either one, so I'll just put something extra up there.
I think that's everything.
Name: Sally-Ann (Sam) Meyers
Codename(s): none yet
Affiliation: X-men
Age: 15
DOB: December 22
Height: 4'11.5 (generally rounded up)
Weight: 104
Hair Color: dyed black
Eye Color: dark blue
Appearance: Sam dyed her hair black when she was twelve, and until now, it's remained that way since, except for a brief flirtation with maroon when she was about 14 and of course summers, when she dyes it back to its natural color to appease her parents. It's naturally a golden blonde, the color Barbie's hair would be if she was real, which is a family trait most of the Meyers girls are proud of, but blondeness represents too much to Sam for her to even wear it ironically. It's straightish with a body wave that turns to loose curls towards the ends if she doesn't blow it dry, but she's bobbed most of it off, so it's just sort of straight, though it sweeps off her face well enough. She does, yes, have Emo bangs. They suit her as well as they do anyone, meaning that they cover her eyes and make her look generally unsociable, but aren't ugly.
Her skin was fair when she was born, but after years of having the melanin bleached out from overexposure to the computer and TV, it's become almost pearlescent. In sunlight it no longer absorbs light, instead glowing an unhealthy blue - the sort of color most often favored by watered-down skim milk and/or the desperately unwell. In fluorescent light, she looks a little like the walking dead.
Her eyes are large and almond-shaped, of a dark blue she inherited from her father; they're ringed with stick-straight blonde lashes which she won't deign to curl (though she does wish such efforts weren't against her personal code) but which she coats liberally with mascara, as they generally disappear against her fair skin. Her nose is straight and smallish, her lips bow-shaped and pale pink; her face is heart-shaped, pointed a little harshly through the chin, like a pixie. She's a pretty girl when she chooses to be and when she doesn't cake on her usual six layers of black eyeliner and mascara and such things, but she doesn't really like it.
However, even more than her prettiness, Sam dislikes her size. 4'11 (though she rounds up), a half-inch above a legal midget and weighing in at a whopping 104 pounds, Sam couldn't hurt a fly if she tried, and even if she worked on her muscle tone at all she probably wouldn't be able to do more than tweak its wings a little. Her hands are small and childlike, with short fingers and broad palms; they're no larger than a seven-year-old's, and that's helpful sometimes, especially when she's mucking about with the mechanical things she loves so much, but people have always been entertained by Sam's tiny hands, and she doesn't particularly like that either. Come to think of it, there's not really anything she likes about her appearance.
She usually dresses punkishly, mostly because it annoys her family. When doing manual labor or when not wanting to put the thought into doing all-out punk, she'll wear boys' clothes, big flannel shirts over more feminine white tank tops and superhero t-shirts obviously from the clearance rack in the boys' section at Sears. She doesn't usually care enough to make an effort - or, rather, she makes a small effort to avoid looking like she's made a large one.
Personality: Sam is a bitch. That's her job. She has acknowledged this and accepts her role. She's a fun bitch to be around unless she's in a 'mood,' as she has a sense of humor and isn't too proud to direct her testicle-shriveling comments at herself - in fact, much of her humor is self-deprecating, and she tends to think in the same vein. She has no understanding of tact whatsoever, though she'll cushion, if vaguely, what she says for those she likes. If she doesn't like you, believe me, you'll know.
Sam, despite her bitchiness, does like people; she just doesn't like stupid people, or intolerant people, or ignorant people, or people who try to be too nice, or any combination of the above. However, despite her constant self-deprecation, she has a hard time discerning deep flaws in herself, one of them being her own intolerance and ignorance; she holds her opinions sacred and won't change them unless she is forcefully proven wrong with at least five respectable sources used as absolute proof. She'll also defend her friends' opinions if they match hers and, if said friend isn't present, even if they don't.
Another major unacknowledged character fault - she views herself as inadequate before her perfect family and, when at twelve she realized that she could never be one of them, she shot herself 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Her straightforwardness and sarcasm and sometimes downright meanness aren't who she really is, but she's become so deeply buried in this personality, the antithesis of what she should be, that she can't get out. She knows, deep down somewhere, that she's putting up a front, but can't think of a way to take it down and frankly doesn't want to. Her bitchy outside gives her protection from a real world she'd rather not face. She's deep-rooted in denial and doesn't want to come out.
She's an angry kid and fairly pessimistic, mostly because things at home never really seemed to go her way nearly as much as they did her the way of her sisters or the way of those like her sisters. This was mostly the fault of the location. Her sisters were all blonde cheerleaders and it was Ohio; what was to be done?
She loves all forms and facets of science, from biology to chemistry to metaphysics; luckily for her, she has a natural talent and an extremely quick mind, and puruses incredibly advanced study for fun, because she's strange. This love of science spills over into a love of computers, mechanics, and science fiction, all of which led her into her complete obsession with the Internet, hacking, video games, and large, complicated mechanical instruments. This obsession, which surfaced around eleven, has been pursued with a passion bordering on mania for the last four and a half years, giving her an extremely large bank of knowledge for what's a largish, if specialized, field. She knows a whole lot about medicine, having studied it for her power, and even more about computer systems and mechanics, having worked at various garages while still at home and having taken apart computers for fun at home when she wasn't playing video games, reading comic books, or watching Star Wars. She is the quintessential nerd. She's an up-and-coming hacker and has a lot of natural talent, but hasn't gone as far with it as she has with understanding actual systems.
Sam was raised and, somewhat against her will, remains intensely Catholic, believing in Confession, absolution, Communion - the whole shebang, including unction, at least to a point. She keeps a rosary with her at all times, one her sister Joy bought for her when they were both very young at a local religious fair and Sam had spent her money on cross-shaped cookies. She has a strong, thus far unswerving belief in God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, though she also assigns guilt to herself with abandon. Some things you just can't shake, and believe you me, Sam's tried.
She's terrified of drowning and of spiders.
Likes: Science, mechanics, Nerd Culture, loud music, coffee, being mean, off-color jokes, scrawny pale guys, cities
Dislikes: blondes, her family, her town, Ohio, the country, the suburbs, the high end of any city, large bodies of water.
Powers and Abilities:
1. The ability she has the most control over is the ability to control human cells. She can transform them, move them, replicate them, kill them, anything. This usually manifests as an ability to heal herself and others quickly or, at the beginning of every summer, to grow her hair out in about a minute and a half. She practices this one the most because she finds the most common use for it. This power is actually nothing more than her ability to control electricity - she technically directs the brain's electrical impulses to break down cells into proteins and rearrange them into something else or duplicate themselves more quickly - but it's a form of the power she has a lot of experience with, since she's always hurting herself taking apart cars and her friends at home all had carpal tunnel from World of Warcraft. She both uses the brain to direct healing and outside power sources to provide the energy and resources for the healing to take place; the more power there is in the vicinity, the better this power works, though she can heal without power. It just takes longer.
Being able to manipulate the brain would normally mean that she's a weird form of telepathic, but she can't read what she does in there and most thought is too delicate to control the way she does things - even more delicate than the thin tissues of the body, and since it's little understood, it's not something she can get out of one of her textbooks. She can, though, short out short-term memory, but it'll be a wholesale sweep of the last few hours (or days, if she's trying), not a wipe of certain things. She can also make it hard to retain information or think for a few hours, but she doesn't like doing that, because she's never sure she won't just totally fry someone, which would be a Bad Thing.
2. As previously mentioned, she has control over electricity, but it's extremely limited. It usually, as also stated previously, takes the form of small currents found inside human systems. Bioelectricity patterns itself differently than does "real" electricity; it's more delicate and of a different frequency. Though she probably could control "real" electricity, it would take a lot more power - it'd be like trying to understand Cantonese when you grew up with Mandarin. They came from the same basic language, but they're now so different that they don't mesh.
When emotionally stimulated beyond a certain point - too much annoyance, excitement, extreme disappointment - Sam can be seen to spark, her mind's bioelectrical (which are already several times the power and volume of most others') currents physically leaping from her to particles in the air, pollen or moisture or whatever, and exploding, becoming sparks. The area near her will also become warmer, a side effect of the excess energy converting itself to heat energy, and the air around her can be seen to shimmer from this heat or even glow if the energy converts to light. These blips of electricity are the same form as the electricity that runs everyone's brain; it's just that hers gives off excess power into outside conductors, because her circuits are extremely overloaded already.
However, as in Cantonese and Mandarin, a few words remain so similar that they're understandable. When emotionally stimulated beyond a second threshold, this power becomes much more dangerous. If she experiences intense rage, extreme terror, or any other truly violent, base emotion, the sparks will be too large to diffuse harmlessly into heat or light and will build up within her, making her into a conduit for extreme power. They'll also attract their distant cousins, "true" electricity, which will also build up in her. She has to release this power quickly, however; unlike other mutants with power over electricity, Sam doesn't have much tolerance for this kind of power, and if it sticks around longer than about twenty seconds she'll fry herself. Power is usually released through her hands, or rather through wounds which will open in her palms to give the power release, or, if there's too much, through preexisting orafices on her face, since the energy originates in and leaps to her brain - her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
Every use of her power stronger than sparks or healing will leave her with mild tissue scarring from the electricity's passage, but thankfully, she can heal it - as long as she's at least semi-conscious or dreaming. If she's just knocked out, with nothing going on upstairs, nothing will happen. She'll be sick for a while after she heals the tissue, because damaged tissue is change chemically, not physically, and can't really be turned back into viable body parts. This sickness usually passes within 24 hours and is similar to food poisoning.
She can create small bursts of power without harming herself, though, and she can do it intentionally. This is a relatively new development, and Sam isn't sure if she'll ever be able to expand it - the biggest thing she's ever done is jump-start a car by herself, and it made her woozy afterwards. These can manifest either as a suddenly-working electrical device, a suddenly-overloaded electrical device, or little spheric bursts of light and heat, centering around a particle of a conductive element floating in the air. They look like boom balls, but don't explode the same way - there's nothing really physical to them; they're just photonic light and heat, not plasmic energy the way a boom ball is. However, they can shock a victim if they're close enough for the energy to diffuse into a person, but it'll only be a little stunner - nothing to truly incapacitate anyone. They work better as distractions than weapons, since they can grow very bright, having the same effect as a few seconds of high beams in the face.
Weaknesses: Obviously, she cooks herself every once in a while. Less obviously, she has trouble bonding with people and with any form of authority. She's a rebel. Also, her power over cells can sometimes react to emotion as her power over electricity does, though this one usually manifests in those around her falling over unconscious in the middle of sentences. She never really means to do it; it just happens sometimes. This is always caused at the first emotional threshold, if the person bugging her doesn't notice the sparks.
History: Sam's parents, Mary and Bill, are very, very normal. They are basically the Cleavers, minus Beaver's hijinx. Instead of a couple of perfect sons, they got six perfect daughters - Mary, Hope, Faith, Grace, Love, and Joy - and then, of course, Sam, whose father named her, thus the lack of Biblical reference; Sally-Ann was Bill's favorite aunt, and Sam was one of twins with Joy, so her mom didn't have another virtue ready for her, not expecting another set of twins after the first two sets. It runs in the family; only Mary, the eldest girl, was a non-twin.
Sam lived in suburban Ohio for the first eleven years of her life, getting up every morning for church and going every Saturday evening to Confession, just like a good girl. Until she was nine, her parents were convinced that she was perfectly normal. Then they discovered that, in the little playhouse behind the house that no one ever actually went into anymore, Sam had been performing very haphazard vasectomies on rats.
Her parents were shocked and appalled and signed her up for counseling immediately. However, after Sam had gleefully messed with various counselors for a good year and a half, they decided to let well enough alone and let Sam run wild. The insurance company's remaining psychiatrists breathed a sigh of relief.
At eleven, Sam's world came crashing down around her. She was still her natural hair color at this point (blonde, which she doesn't tell anyone) and was quite pretty - she had been one of the more popular girls at elementary school, but in middle school... things changed. After a knock-down, drag-out fight with her mother over wanting to take an after-school Science workshop, her mother eventually told her that she'd never be like her sisters, never be wanted. Though her mother later took it back, the use of the word never has stuck with Sam and she spun as far as possible away from the blonde perfection of her family, probably at least partially because Sam's mother is terrified of her. You would be, too, if your youngest daughter started sparking when you yelled at her and if you couldn't wake up her sisters for a few hours afterwards.
Sam quicky discovered punk and nerd culture and fell in love with their various nuances, though she didn't herself subscribe to the actual beliefs of punkdom so much as she did the beliefs of the proprietor of the local comic book store. No matter how sarcastic and bitchy she gets, she can't subscribe to wallowing in total anger and self-pity the way many punks do. She liked the clothing, however, and still wears it.
She made friends with the local kids than hung around outside the comic book stores and the Hot Topic at the mall; she learned to skateboard, and though she'd never been the best at it, she can hold her own as long as she doesn't try to get too tricky. The basic aim of her life after the fight with her mom was to avoid coming home for as long as possible each day and to leave as early as possible each morning. Her parents, with seven girls to bring up and only a father working, were never wealthy, though they were comfortable, but Sam's allowance was inconstant and mostly nonexistent. She did as much as she could from as young as she could to do for herself, so she's sort of grown up half-impoverished. Many times, she even avoided sleeping at her own house, staying with one of her friends instead. Her parents didn't beat her, rarely yelled with anything like the viciousness required for real verbal abuse, but the house was stifling, and Sam has never really felt at home there.
At the end of her freshman year, she learned of Xavier's Institute and decided that she would be going, whether or not her parents actually agreed to it; they'd made her promise not to expose herself, though she'd told a bare few friends, who thought it was awesome, mostly because they were all comic/video game/that kind of thing addicts the way she was and were convinced she'd grow up a super hero. After a summer of coercion and promises to her parents that yes, it was a perfectly normal and respectable school and yes, she'd do her absolute best and yes, even in History and English, and no, there wouldn't be any hanky-panky with boys and yes, she understood that her body was changing and no, she wouldn't do anything she'd regret because, yes, she knew that virginity was for your husband and any decent girl wouldn't even kiss 'till she was engaged.
However, even Sam couldn't keep her parents in the dark when Alcatraz happened and the Institute became openly mutant following the death of the Headmaster. The Cure had been the Meyers' last hope for their daughter, though, and when they realized they'd never manage to convince her to take it, especially now that she actually couldn't, she really didn't have much other hope for control of her powers than to attend the Institute. The story they're selling to their friends is that she's at a convent school.
Sam plans to cure cancer, AIDS, the common cold and allergies with the unlimited resources at Xavier's school, where she will shortly arrive. She also has completely the wrong idea about the school and is about to get the shock, eh heh, of her life when she realizes that they don't really plan to thwart any sort of authority and are basically going to let the mutant population deal with the abuse.
Sample post: Despite Sam's mother's disregard for the Greyhound bus line, it was a hell of a lot less expensive than a cab or a plane. Sam stepped off the sleek silver bus at the station in New York, looking around her with intense interest at the bad end of town. Sure, it wasn't exactly Times Square, but it was New York - and if she found a rooftop, she bet she could find the skyline.
Thank God she was here. She was out of Ohio, out of public high school, out of everything. She was in New fucking York, she was going to learn how to fry people, and she was actually going to make a difference in the world. Finally, finally, she wasn't just another Meyers in Sweet Apple, Ohio - here she was Sam, just Sam, not IthoughtitwasSallyAnn. She could be whoever she wanted, do whatever she wanted. Anything.
Sam picked up her suitcase and started walking up the street, towards a taxi stop that evidently lived off the business from the buses. She didn't know how much a ride to Westchester would cost, which was why she was taking the train, though the taxi would probably have been more comfortable. Besides, she'd never been in a Gypsy cab before. Even the unpleasant experiences were new and enthralling - it spoke so much of the city, of life, of urbanity.
God, she sounded like a tourist. Sam reformed her face into a bored, vaguely pissed-off expression, and hoped she looked like she was coming home.
She certainly felt like it.
Screenname(s): just click under the name!
Email: again...
IMs: under the name.
RP Experience: I have so done this before.
Answers to junk since I can't reply in this forum and WHY DO YOU PEOPLE ACCEPT THINGS IF THEY'RE NOT PERFECT? *is obsessive*:
Actually, the stigmata reference was unintentional! I didn't even notice that. And, technically, if it was a real stigmata, it would be puncture wounds in her forearms, not really awful burns in her hands, but if we get into theology I'll be here all day.
And, actually, the power does go through her skin. It just blasts the crap out of her palms on its way out. "Open" there is more like the way skin opens if you burn a hole through it than the way a door opens. I had it go through her arms because there are huge gooey nerves that connect through the spinal column and begin branching off in the arms, and electricity usually takes the path of least, i.e. gooiest, resistance. There are also huge gooey nerves through the legs, but it takes longer to get there, of course. That's in essence the same reason it had to get out an orifice. It's easier than passing through a nonconductive skull and skin thing when there's damper, thinner tissue or no tissue at all it could just as easily take.
ON HER PERSONALITY: I need to edit that, actually, she's meant to be pretty angry. But you can be a bitch without being incredibly angry. I do it all the time! In the same vein, you can be a sarcastic optimist; it's a way of speech and an outlook, not two conflicting personality traits, though they aren't usually found prevalently in the same person. However, I forgot to take out the optimism too, so it's a moot point.
And now I can't find mention of either one, so I'll just put something extra up there.
I think that's everything.
