Post by Katrina "Black Rose" Richards on Oct 28, 2011 20:34:22 GMT -5
KATRINA ADELAIDE RICHARDS
BLACK ROSE
Name;; Katrina Richards
Alias;; Black Rose
Age;; 22
Race;; Mutant
Alignment;; good
Affiliation;; Xavier institute.
Gender;; Female
Height;; 5’8”
Weight;; 170
Eyes;; Black scleras, pale violet irises and pale pupils.
Hair;; Long, thick and wavy with random curls. Deep, dark blue/violet.
Skin;; Kind of pale
Personality;; Inside, Kat has always been a little violent. Okay, a lot violent. But she seems to counteract it with what her mother describes as an unshakeable moral center, that she’s always had a very solid idea of right and wrong in the broad sense. She reacted to her own violent insides at a very young age by deciding she would never hurt anyone. That may not always work out for her, but she tries exceedingly hard to keep herself from doing harm to those who she cares about or those who don’t deserve it. Of course, her desperate desire to be a good person doesn’t stop her from coming across as a total bitch. She has an air of strength and confidence that she inherited from her mother and in the past, people have depended very heavily on her to be that way. To her enemies she’s generally viewed as dangerous, bitchy, violent and full of rage. To her close friends she’s known as kind of wacky, kind, caring, a little damaged and a bit off. Everyone knows her as chatty. She’s always had trouble with the neurological disconnect between what she’s thinking and the words that come out of her mouth, so she tries to make up for it by being as thorough as she can to make sure that what she’s trying to say is what’s coming across. Also, she just sort of talks a lot. Most people seem to either view her as a wonderful person or a threat to their way of life or authority that she’s never fully understood. Because it doesn’t just happen with humans, but mutants too. (Except for Dr. McCoy who seems to see her as a puzzle to be solved or a lab rat to be experimented on) What everyone can probably agree on (for better or worse) is that she’s very passionate. She feels everything a little or a lot extra, she believes in what she believes in very strongly and is endlessly loyal to her friends. Of course, that also makes her a little defensive at times. Okay, a lot defensive. It also means that she’s learned to be careful of who she sees as her friends. Wanting everyone to be a good person doesn’t mean anything for reality. She doesn’t trust easily, though she gives others free reign to trust in her no matter what.
Deep down, Kat wants nothing more than for humans and mutants to live in harmony, but she can’t help but look at it realistically and know that that goal is all but unachievable. However, instead of deciding that that means that they have to be at war, she views it as her responsibility to be the best of her kind, prove to humans that they’re there to help. Protect humanity, even if they spurn her and her kind. Even if they never thank the X Men, even if they declare full out war against mutants. Hating them and acting on that hate will only prove them right. Again, ideals versus reality being what it is, despite her best intentions, her actions are sometimes hypocritical, and she has been known to mess with particularly cruel, belligerent or hateful humans for funsies.
Power(s);; Empathy, Personal Energy Manipulation
Hobbies;; Drawing, D&D/other tabletop RPG-preferably D20-games, horseback riding, grooming horses, swimming, training, accents, languages.
Goals;; To be an X Man, to make everyone proud, to get control of her powers, to lead her team effectively, to teach young mutants with physical mutations that they’re beautiful and there’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Fears;; Letting the people she cares about, her friends, her teammates or the Professor down, doing something stupid that gets someone else hurt, not being a good enough leader, never getting control of her powers, romantic relationships blowing up in her face, getting hurt by people she trusts, not being good enough to become an X Man, her anxiety taking control in a life or death situation, being alone, feeling useless.
Strengths;; Art, drama, organizing other people, creative stuff, designing things, empathy, gives good advice, speaks Japanese close to fluently and a little French.
Weaknesses;; Math, romantic relationships, insecure, keeping herself organized, prioritizing for herself, myriad of neurological oddities, not knowing when to shut up, pisses people off without meaning to, still has a lot of work to do about controlling her powers,
Family;; Ariana Richards Wade (Mother), John Wade (step-father), Andrew Richards (Brother), Chase Richards (Father), Janine Shelby (Step-sister), Lana Shelby-Richards (Step-Mother), Jane Green, (Maternal grandmother), Matilda Mason (Maternal Aunt)
History;; Katrina Adelaide Richards was the first child born to young mutant woman Ariana and human man Chase Richards. Ariana was only twenty-two when her daughter was born, but Katrina was far from an accident. Ariana would later refer to her daughter as “possibly the most planned-for child ever born.” And a good thing. The chances of the children born to this couple being mutants were extremely high. Ariana’s family had been mutants for as far back as anyone could remember. (Mutant girls, for that matter. All of the men for at least four generations had had to marry in.) But Ariana and Chase wanted that little girl more than anything and decided that they would cross the mutant bridge when it manifested.
Katrina was born a healthy normal-looking baby girl with thick dark hair and big brown eyes. The young couple kept their eyes out for signs of mutation and little Katrina seemed determined to throw them for as many loops as possible. At first, they assumed that the baby girl’s mutation had something to do with the accelerated rate at which she seemed to develop; walking, running and speaking in full sentences before age 1. However, the doctors Ariana and Chase took their daughters to insisted there was no deviation in her genetic pattern to suggest that her learning was any kind of abnormal mutation, she was just quick to develop. Later, as an active young girl, Katrina seemed to end up in an awful lot of scrapes that left her skin torn, but she bled oddly little given the severity of her injuries and she wasn’t injured for long. She even burned her face on the stove at age five. (A second going on third degree burn!) She’d gotten too close to a cookie sheet on Christmas Eve but then was too afraid she’d get in trouble to tell anyone, wandering around the apartment with her skin blistering until her father tried to wipe the “dirt” from her face. She was rushed to the hospital but never scarred from the experience. That was the deciding factor for her parents. Clearly, she had a high healing factor. But it wasn’t so strong as to allow her instantaneous healing, just mildly accelerated. Of course, this was oddly counteracted by the frequency at which she twisted her ankles.
It was around this time that her little brother, Andrew was born, much to Katrina’s delight. She’d begged for a little brother to love and was not disappointed in the slightest by the reality of having one once she did. He was an oddly quiet baby, every bit the soothing Yin to Katrina’s boisterous Yang. Everything seemed to be going wonderfully for the family. Surely, they had their share of hardships, they weren’t very wealthy or well-off, even without having a mutant mother, they were an odd family, spending much of their time at Science Fiction conventions and in hobby shops, a strong emphasis on literature living in a less-than-ideal neighbourhood. But the children wanted for nothing, least of all normalcy.
Of course, it didn’t take long after the birth of little Andrew for things to start going wrong. Chase seemed to break. He’d always been a bit off but he couldn’t hide or control his mental illness anymore. Over the next three years, there was a lot of damage to be felt in that home. When Katrina was seven, her parents separated and by the time she was eight, they were in the process of going through a messy divorce that took a little over a full year to be over with and official. Young Kat took to caring for and protecting her little brother and trying to calm and soothe her father, whose mental wellbeing varied from day to day but seemed to get worse instead of better. Kat’s hair began to grown in a deep violet at the roots. Her father’s fits seemed to effect her more deeply when she was in the room for them. One day, her father began a shouting, angry confrontation about absolutely nothing on the doorstep of their apartment. Andy cured up under a chair and Kat was listening at the door. She became increasingly angry as she listened until she burst out from behind the door and shouted at the top of her lungs for them to stop fighting. When she opened her eyes, behind the tears, her scleras had turned black and her dark brown eyes had paled to a light lilac. Her parents stared as she regained control of her breathing slowly and her father, instead of listening, used this as ammunition, that she was “just like her mother” and called her a freak. Ariana had him forcefully removed from the premises at that point.
After that, Chase would go back and forth between telling Kat that he loved her no matter what she looked like or what she could do, and going off on how similar she was to her mother, whom he now blamed for every bad thing in his life. Unbeknownst to most for some time, young Andy began to develop his powers at the same time. His ability was to alter the perceptions of those around him to make it appear as if he were not there. Nobody could see him if he didn’t want them to.
Eventually, the divorce was over, things settled, Chase remarried and converted to Southern Baptism. Kat and Andy gained a human step sister, Janine. Their step mother, Lana put on a good face but never seemed to trust them. Kat began to realize that Lana was anti-mutant but put up with them for the sake of their father and at least Andy looked normal. Kat became pretty good friends with her step sister, Janine, who was three years her senior, popular and therefore cool.
As Kat got older, she began to feel like she didn’t fit. Not because she was a mutant, she didn’t mind that, but because she didn’t seem to have any powers to speak of. Her mother had introduced her to the energies people held within themselves and told her they could be manipulated, that all of the mutants in their family had an affinity for such things. But they also all had powerful gifts. Ariana’s mother was precognitive, her sister, Kat’s aunt, had some very frightening power involving the dead and had turned her back on it as best she could, trying to pretend to be normal. Ariana herself had a few decent mutant abilities, the most prominent of which being insight into and communication with the Astral Plane and limited telepathy/telekinesis. Kat felt left out, that she wasn’t special enough. What was her gift? What powers were unique to her? When would she get them?
When the family moved from the city to the suburbs, Kat made a number of new friends pretty quickly, but soon found that all of them seemed to be carrying a lot of emotional damage. That might not have been a problem except with all of the repressed emotions in such close range, Kat’s empathic abilities kicked into high gear. Everything her friends wouldn’t let themselves feel filled her very being. She didn’t know whose emotions she was feeling anymore, if anything she felt was really hers or just someone else’s projected emotions. It took her some time to realize the things she was feeling WERE being picked up from others. Her mother explained that this could be her mutation, her gift. Kat raged against the idea, saying that was a stupid power and that she didn’t want to FEEL these things any more. Some of it was ugly, twisted and dark. There was so much pain and sadness and petty jealousy. She eventually learned to feel the difference a little and started to separate. However, she didn’t get much of a chance before her powers flared to dangerous levels in the middle of what seemed to be a perfectly normal gathering of friends in her front yard. She was suddenly full to bursting with so much anger and pain that she literally thought she might die. She blacked out momentarily in an attempt to silence the pain she was feeling from one of her friends. She opened her eyes, sore and swollen and streaming tears, to her mother leaning over her and her friends standing back looking frightened and concerned. Kat shut down. Her mother pulled her out of school, she stopped talking to her friends. She lived in her room like a hermit and barely spoke except to thank her mother who brought her food and books. After a time, her mother couldn’t let her keep living that way, Ariana could only help her daughter so much. So, she contacted an old acquaintance of hers by the name of Charles Xavier. She got it through to Kat that he could help her, so she met with him and packed that night to move to New York to live at the Institute of Higher Learning full time. She arrived in the night and was kept isolated from the other students for a time. She was introduced to a few members of the staff and for the next year and a half she was kept mostly isolated. Dr. McCoy was endlessly fascinated by her strange neurology and it’s apparent lack of connection to her mutant abilities. She spent all of her time working on her power control with Professor X, having tests run on her in Dr. McCoy’s labs and reading in her room. She sometimes passed other members of the X Men and other staff in the sub levels of the mansion. When she had a little more control over her abilities, Xavier made a point to introduce her to Rogue, believing she and the girl would understand each other and each other’s situations aptly and hoped they would find a connection and that Rogue would give the girl hope. It worked.
After about a year and a half, Xavier decided that she had sufficient control of her powers to be allowed among the general public of the school. She was allowed to attend regular classes and was granted the same freedoms as other students her own age. She integrated well and very carefully, afraid of a repeat of the events that occurred before she joined the Institute. Things progressed normally from there; she made some good friends, was made co-leader of her squad when it came time for her to be assigned one and eventually got to live her life as an average young mutant from there on out. Except, of course, that Dr. McCCoy still ran regular testing and that she was not given a room mate like the other students. Ever. It was too difficult to control her powers in her sleep. If she had a nightmare, her roommate would be forced to live through all the terror she experienced in her subconscious. It was decided it was better for her to room alone.
