Elaine Darrow

Chesterfield Act Registry of the Expressive Database

File #12 Feb 2018 05:06

Summary

Name Elaine Adie Darrow Aliases Elaine Darrow-Varlane? Status Registered Expressive (Class A Mental) Ability Omnilinguistics Gender Female Birthdate April 3rd, 1992 Age 29 Height 5'11" Build Skinny Eyes Brown Hair Red Residence Cresting Wave Apartments, Yamagato Park Employment Head Curator, Yamagato Fellowship Center Parents Roselyn Darrow (Mother; deceased) David Darrow (Father; deceased) Siblings None Marital Status Single Children Adel Lane (Daughter from an Alternate Timeline) Odette Lang (Daughter) First Scene Timing is Everything Last Scene Profile A redheaded Scottish-rooted young woman, Elaine's ability in omnilinguistics puts her in a unique position to communicate with others on multiple levels. Her ability combined with her natural love of history and her dedication landed her the job of head curator at the Yamagato Fellowship. Having graduated from Brooklyn College with a Masters degree in History with an emphasis on Japanese history, she's well known in the Safe Zone for being the single-most well-versed linguist. Having an encounter with what was left of her from an alternate timeline, she now has the memories of a life she never physically experienced.

portrayed by Karen Gillan

Background

Elaine’s life has been a search for belonging. When she was fourteen she traveled to Scotland to research her family’s roots. Thanks to her love of history, she wasn’t in NYC when the bomb went off, but her parents were killed. Orphaned by the bomb, she was rounded up and shuffled around with the other orphans. Eventually she came to the Lighthouse for a few months before an explosion happened. She made her way on her own from there on out. Time passed, experiences happened, and she survived to 2011.

She spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of relationships after that, eventually ending up in a relationship with Robyn Quinn, a local musician. The two were engaged after a time. However Quinn was a part of the Ferry and involved in some dangerous work, work which finally took a toll on her. In December of 2011, Quinn left Elaine and New York City behind.

During the Second Civil War, Elaine barely escaped with her life. Despite being Tier-0, they had gone after everyone. She pulled on what few strings she had built up to ensure she had a safe hiding place. She headed to a city in the Midwest, slipping in as a grade school teacher. It wasn’t hard for her to blend in. However, it wasn’t long before blending in wasn’t enough. While Elaine had no combat abilities, she was still useful, and after pulling some more strings she was able to be in contact with freedom fighters who could use her unique skills.

Studying codes with limited materials was difficult, but both her Evolved ability and her own skill took over and she spent the war decoding and recoding messages to help as best as she could. At the same time, she picked up as many languages as she could through a small collection of books she had smuggled in. On top of using her ability, an old freedom fighter named Evgeni taught her the basics of self-defense and how to safely shoot a gun. Can’t be too careful during a war. Those skills came in handy, as there was at least one close call that almost blew Elaine’s cover, but she got through it with Evgeni’s help.

When it was safe to come out, Elaine was a bit stir crazy. Her first instinct was to fly to Scotland, which felt like a second home to her, but that was not the answer. It felt too much like running away again, and she had run away during the war. Enough running for her. Her second instinct was to go back to her “home”, New York City. So when the city established the Safe Zone, Elaine was one of the first to go back home.

When Brooklyn College was reopened, Elaine was eagerly one of the first applicants and one of the first accepted. She took on as many classes as she had time for, breezing through every language class offered and even working one-on-one with some of the Department Heads to learn more obscure languages. She also enrolled in computer classes, specifically coding languages to try and test her ability on them. She found success, having the knowledge of how to do the coding, if not the creativity to use it. Thanks to her prior credits and quick work of the language courses, she’s due to graduate at the end of the Spring 2018 semester. On top of her classwork, Elaine has balanced a career as a translator at Yamagato Industries.

Psych Profile

Elaine, while on all appearances is 'average', is a lover of all things not. She's fascinated by people and their unique differences on all levels. She's passionate, and while she was once a little hesitant to jump into things, is now very much a fan of carpe diem. She likes to take opportunities (ones she thinks are wise), and she'll do it with a smile, even if it goes wrong. When it comes down to it, she thrives off of connections and interactions with other people, and she's much more of a group person than a solo act. She is, for the most part, unafraid to get her hands dirty and jump into a conversation with someone she finds interesting, and even if she doesn't have a reason to talk to them, she'll improvise her way through the conversation if the whim strikes her.

While friendly, talkative, and open, Elaine tends to value the judgments of others a bit too highly. She often finds herself a little on the hurt side by rejections from others of any sort. She's very reluctant to show any weakness or sadness on her part in front of others, and she's built up a hard exterior of strength and friendliness, that it's often hard to see how alone she tends to be on the inside. While she takes most things in stride, if something's said to her that she takes personally, it'll hit good and hard, she'll likely be able to hide it, and then will entirely break down later while alone.

Time has hardened Elaine a touch. While she still approaches others and jumps into things, she’s more cautious with who she lets particularly close. She may be a friendly face, but she gets a little gunshy once someone tries to get to know her on a deeper level. She’s slow to anger except in very, very specific circumstances. Other than that, she’s the same old Elaine that she was before.

Evolved Ability

Elaine's Evolved ability is omnilinguistics. This is the ability to rapidly comprehend and learn any spoken or written language. To learn a language, Elaine has to be exposed to it in the medium in which she wants to learn it (i.e. hearing the language to be able to speak it, reading the language to be able to write or read it). The more exposed Elaine is to the language, the faster she learns it.

The effects of the ability are immediate. While she does not learn the entire language all at once, an exposure to a five minute conversation between two people in a language she doesn't know teaches her the basics, while studying a few pages of a children's book would allow her to start reading and writing at a basic level as well.

The effects reach exponentially as well. The more conversation she hears, the faster and more she learns. Several hours of conversation can give her mastery, and a day of exposure can grant her fluency. The same goes for written comprehension: the more she reads, the faster she learns. A full day of reading can have her writing languages like an expert. Combining this with a natural knack for accents, with a little practice, after having had exposure and communication in the language for a few days, she could easily fool even native speakers into thinking it was a native language for her.

(Please note that the accents do not come from this ability, but from her own natural ear for hearing/understanding accents.)

Anything considered a language can be potentially learned given enough exposure, and these languages can include man-made languages, so long as they have sufficient language rules to truly classify it as a language, even if it does not have an extensive vocabulary. Some examples of this may include Tolkien's various fantasy-based languages, Klingon, and other fantasy and sci-fi based languages.

As of late, Elaine’s powers have grown to include more “languages” that she can understand. Besides traditional languages, she’s learned two types of coding: cryptography and computer code. Cryptography is simple: once exposed to the code, Elaine is able to crack the cypher and read the encoded message as well as use the cypher to recode a message. This only works on codes that have a language of some sort, such as an alphanumerical translation. When it comes to computer code, Elaine can learn a code and “translate” by knowing what the code will do when ran, as well as go in to change a code in a specific place, but she doesn’t have the knowledge or the creativity of a coder to really do much. With instruction, though, she could do more.

Appendices

Volume 1's Elaine

Elaine of the Virus Timeline

Aftermath Logs

Log Icons

Perfect	Sunshine	Mirror	Mama Bear
elaine	elaine2	elaine3	elaine4

Languages

With her Evolved ability, Elaine can learn languages rapidly. This is a list of some of the languages she knows. Since it only takes a couple of days for her to learn, feel free to suggest languages to add especially if you need her for translation work.

• Afrikaans
• American Sign Language
• Arabic
• Aramaic
• Assyrian (Akkadian)
• Babylonian
• Basque
• Binary (and other coding languages)
• Chinese
• Czech
• Dhivehi
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• Gaelic (inc. Old Irish, Middle Irish, Irish, Scottish, Manx)
• German
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Khoekhoe
• Korean
• Latin
• Lighthouse Cant (signed by former Lighthouse Kids)
• Magyar
• Modern Created Languages (Klingon, Quenya, Dothraki)
• Native American languages (multiple)
• Persian (Farsi)
• Russian
• Spanish
• Sumerian
• Turkish
• Welsh
• Xhosa
• Zulu

Alts

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