Player Name:Space
Your Age:21
Time Zone:GMT
How did you find us?:RPG-D, initially through forum of the fortnight
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Name: Lina Hampton
Codename: Feral
Aliases:Luna, Feral
Age:16
Occupation:none
Sexuality:unknown
Faction: Morlocks
Physical Description:At first glance, Lina could pass for human. She stands at almost 5’8”, a little on the tall side for her age, though her incredibly poor diet has left her underweight. Food has been hard to come by for quite a while now, and is only getting scarcer. Her brown hair is long, wild and unkempt, she makes no effort whatsoever to take any care of it at all, choosing instead to cover it with a headscarf, or a hood if she can find a real coat.
Her mutations only become obvious when one stops to take a closer look. Thin, spidery black lines extend up from the tips of her fingers, branching randomly and wildly as they cover most of her dark skinned body. Only her face is clear of them, for now. The lines appear to shift and branch further the more she uses her power, leaving her convinced it‘s only a matter of time before the lines reach her face and remove what little ability she had to walk among the surface dwellers.
Clothes wise, she tends to wear whatever she can steal. At present, that consists of a filthy and ragged summer dress that may once have been green, it’s shredded hemline reaching just past her knees, paired with an equally filthy shawl she’s using as both a headscarf and a blanket. The shawl started life as a curtain, but Lina is hardly in a position to waste anything she can use. At present time she lacks shoes, exposing the lines covering her feet and lower legs to the world, should anyone care enough to look. Thankfully most don’t, though she only goes to the surface at night. Somewhere along the line she’s scavenged a small military surplus backpack, now looking rather the worse for wear, in which she keeps her meagre possessions. She tends to conceal it beneath her shawl most of the time for fear of giving people something obvious to steal.
Likes: Cats
Origami
Fresh food
The feel of grass under her feet
Her control of paper and the things it allows her to create.
Dislikes: Rain
Rats, unless they’re cooked
Large crowds
Belts
Winter
Personality:Lina seems extremely cold at a first meeting. She rarely speaks, the extremely rare occasions a word or two escapes her lips seeming to surprise her as much as anyone else, the ability to speak having slipped her mind in the years the young girl has spent living alone. It takes a long time for her to warm up to anyone, the few she does get on with are the ones who can cope with her non verbal communication, mostly achieved through gestures and facial expressions. On occasion she can be heard seeming to sing, but the ‘words’ don’t appear to match any language.
Once she has warmed up to someone, she is extremely energetic and playful, often dashing around them with a flock of her latest creations in search of praise or even just wanting to play. Her actions are almost feline sometimes, especially around people she likes, for reasons unknown even to her. She is extremely loyal to her few friends, willing to stand with them against any threat, though how useful she may actually be is questionable at best.
She is a habitual scavenger, regardless of how much food, paper or clothes she possesses at the time, she will rarely pass up the chance to add more, not knowing when the next chance she will have of getting hold of anything useful will be. Though she will not steal from her friends, or anyone they seem to like, she will on occasion steal from strangers if she’s desperate, and as for those who try to hurt her, she will gladly take anything they own even if she has no idea what it is.
History:Lina’s early childhood is forgotten even by her. She was born on a small rural farm in Ontario, as the second of three children and the only girl. She and her siblings had a relatively good childhood, their parents were strict but not cruel and attempted to instil a decent set of values in their children. They were homeschooled, along with the children of several of the workers on their parents farm, and similar groups from other nearby farms, but received a fairly good standard of education in their early years.
Lina always had an interest in origami, the room she shared with her younger brother was decorated with all sorts of paper animals she’d folded, despite never once having even seen a book on the subject. Right up until she was ten it was assumed she had some kind of a natural talent for it, but as she began to show the first signs of puberty, her powers began to manifest.
It started small, over a period of several weeks Lina watched spidery black lines fade into view on her hands, something she was worried about but chose to hide with gloves rather than tell anyone. As it was winter at the time no-one thought it that odd, until one day she picked at the lines. A small piece appeared to come off in her fingers, and out of shock she flicked it away. It landed on one of her origami animals, and to her complete shock, the swan began to move on its own.
She spent the next few hours practicing this, attempting to control the creatures, investigating how many she could control and generally exploring the limits of her powers, not noticing the way the lines spread further and further up her arms as she did. By the time she realised what was going on, they were past her shoulders and essentially impossible for her to hide from her parents.
Her parents had largely ignored the media reports about mutants until Lina ran screaming to them, flanked by a pair of apparently sentient origami dogs. Once they were over the initial shock, her father shredded the creatures while her mother screamed at her for a while, demanding to know what was going on and not accepting Lina’s tears and denials as the truth. Her father soon took methods into his own hands and attempted to beat the truth out of her, using his belt, until Lina lost consciousness. That was only the beginning of what she would endure at their hands for daring to be a mutant.
For weeks she was beaten, starved and abused, her parents even chaining her up in one of the farm’s barns at night. The farm workers and her brothers either joined in with the abuse or simply walked away; there was never any effort to help her from anyone but her younger brother. He found her power fascinating, and snuck out to the barn to comfort her every night. He took her paper to craft into new animals, food, and even bandages for the multitude of wounds she was suffering from. After a month of hideous abuse the six year old even managed to find the keys and free his sister. Fearing for his safety, she left him behind with instructions never to tell anyone what happened, and so began her exile from humanity.
For years she wandered the countryside, living off of what she could steal from farms or scavenge from bins on the rare occasions she went near a residential area. It had been humans who hurt her so badly; she feared the same would happen wherever she went after that. If her own family could turn on her, what chance did she have of ever making contact with anyone else who wouldn’t despise her on sight?
She took to hiding as much of her body as she could to conceal the ever expanding web of black lines spreading relentlessly across her increasingly frail body, even as her humanity slipped away. As time passed she became increasingly withdrawn, at first talking to the creatures she animated, but soon stopping. It was easier for her to live her life in silence, people tended to assume it was just a cat raiding their bins if she didn’t speak, which seemed to make them less likely to come out and investigate.
Six years had passed by the time her wandering brought her to the ruins of the Xavier Institute, and by now she was more animal than girl. Accompanied by a small cat she’d made out of an old newspaper she poked and prowled through the ruins, until she was grabbed and dragged off. Fearing the worst she fought back hard against her captor, completely unaware it was friendly. The mutant who’d grabbed her went to great lengths to explain what was going on and why it was a terrible idea for her to be wandering the ruins with the paper cat on show, and even offered her a place to stay with the Morlocks. She accepted, though she found herself barely able to cope with the size of the group living in the sewers.
She exists on the edge of the organisation, preferring to scavenge her own food and clothes from the surface at night than to take up any of their supplies, though she relies on them for a place to sleep. Her paper creatures may be able to guard her while she sleeps, but as they are unable to do a great deal of damage to any attacker, she needs the extra protection the Morlocks provide. They always have a fire somewhere for any rats she and her constructs manage to capture, which is a very good thing as far as she is concerned.
Power:Lina has a strange control over paper. She can fold almost any animal she cares to think of with seemingly little effort, a process even she doesn’t understand. On its own this would be worthless, but, if she pulls at the spidery lines on her fingers, pieces come away. When these pieces are placed on the animals she has folded, they come to life, either under her control or with a form of intelligence of their own if she uses more than one piece of the strange lines. As yet she is unable to control anything larger than a housecat, or more than two creatures at once, but she hopes to increase her skill with her power one day.
Every time she peels away a piece of the lines, they spread farther over her body. Everything below her neck is covered in a web of interweaving lines that seem to move on their own if the eye is left on them too long. These lines hide the scars inflicted on her during her time with her family and out in the wilderness, but they are slowly spreading up her neck, and she fears she may soon lose the ability to pretend to simply be an insane human if she is captured on the surface. This has done little to dent her enthusiasm at playing with her power though, as she assumes getting captured on the surface by the groups she hears so much about will end in her death regardless of the presence of lines on her face.
Place of Birth: Ontario, Canada
Place of Residence: Tunnels under New York City
Nationality: Pakistani Canadian
Relatives: Parents and older brother’s names are all forgotten or repressed. The only relative she remembers is her younger brother Nasir
RP Sample:The early hours were her playtime. The humans were safely locked up in their homes, for the most part, and in the darkness there was little way for them to tell she was anything but another one of them. She still avoided them at all costs though, the scars covering her body were enough of a reminder of just what humans could do to someone in any way different.
With a smile on her face, she sat in an otherwise empty tunnel, a part of the storm drains which was thankfully dry in the absence of raid, and looked over last night’s haul of paper. She’d found an old financial times, always a good pick given what she wanted to do, and by the light of a wind up torch she’d stolen a few months ago, she set to work folding the paper to the form she wanted it in.
After half an hour or so, she’d folded the old newspaper into the form of a cat, taking special effort with the teeth and the claws. They wouldn’t do too much to a determined attacker, but that was never the intention. The cat would just be a distraction while she escaped, should she have to. With a look of intense concentration on her face, she pinched a finger of her left hand and pulled, gaining a piece of an inky black substance about an inch long, and giggling silently as it wriggled. Carefully, she placed it on the back of the cat she’d just folded, and waited for it to take effect.
As always, it only took a few seconds before the paper animal began to move, a strange rustling sound accompanying everything it did, though the paper had taken on a strange, almost leathery texture. The inky substance she’d placed on its back pulsed a little, as if it were alive, and the cat opened its mouth as though silently meowing at her. She smiled and reached out to pet it, before carefully picking it up, turning off the torch and stashing it in her backpack, and heading out of the tunnel. There was a way to the surface not too far from here, and she needed to find something to eat.
After only a few minutes walk through the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the city streets, Lina found herself breathing in the comparatively fresher air of the surface. She took a deep breath and set the cat down, before pulling her shawl in a little tighter and shivering at the cold. Clothes and food, those were the priorities, not screwing around.
After taking a look around her, she nodded and scurried towards the nearest building, followed closely by her origami feline. There were dumpsters around here somewhere, she’d seen them before, she just need to find and raid them and she’d be all set, or so she hoped. The surface was a dangerous place, even at night she needed to be on her guard.
As she reached the dumpsters, she froze solid, hearing footsteps nearby. Silently, she slipped into the shadows between them and crouched down, covering herself with her shawl and peeking out to try and see who it was, while her cat hid under one of the bins. This had worked for her before, people just assumed she was nothing bit a pile of rubbish and walked on by; she could only hope it would work again.
Lina Hampton [Feral], Morlock
