Brynn Ferguson

Chesterfield Act Registry of the Expressive Database

File #15 Feb 2018 15:45

Summary

Name Brynn Kathleen Ferguson Aliases Status Registered Expressive (Class A/B/C Chemical) (COM) Ability Chromakinesis Gender Female Birthdate 03/17/99 Age 20 Height 5'3" Build Slender Eyes Grey Hair Brown Residence Employment Parents None Siblings The Lighthouse Marital Status Single Children None First Scene Last Scene Profile Brynn is an art student who also does street art and tattoos. She is a former Lighthouse Kid who spent the war years in the Lighthouse/Ferry safehouses in Canada and is just now returning to NYC to meet up with the others. She is deaf and communicates though ASL or using her phone screen as a text editor (or a notebook she also keeps for emergencies).

portrayed by Ryan Newman

Background

Brynn Ferguson was born March 17, 1999, to high school sweethearts who were in no way ready for a baby. Especially not a special needs one - Brynn was born profoundly deaf. Although her birth mother tried to keep her, she came from a very blue-collar family and they were not equipped to help her either. And so Brynn wound up in the foster care system. In the early years, she didn't bounce too much from home to home because despite her handicap, she was a sweet, easygoing baby. New York City had a number of resources to help a hearing-impaired child, and she was taught American Sign Language as a matter of course.

In 2006, when the Bomb went off in Midtown, Brynn was living in a foster home on the outskirts of the blast radius. The concussion wave collapsed the structure around her and those in the house. Two days later, when she was pulled from the rubble, she was injured badly enough to require hospitalization for some time, finally able to write her name for the nurses when she woke up. When it the nurse realized that in her sleep when she was having nightmares the sheets on the bed would have splotches of colors — reds, oranges, blacks, greys — she quietly made arrangements for the little girl to be sent 'away.'

She moved around a lot for the first couple of years, culminating in the most terrifying night of her life in 2009 — she was at Beach Street when it was raided by Humanis First. This was the first time that her power kicked in fully. She was loaded into the truck, things were exploding all around, the chaos was confusing, everything was moving too fast and she couldn't understand what anyone was shouting, so she crouched down in the truck and essentially hid in the shadows like a chameleon. One of the older children literally tripped over her, kept close to her and made sure she wasn't left behind anywhere, and once they were clear of the chaos, Brynn was taken to the Lighthouse. Here, life finally settled into SOMETHING of a routine, some kind of normal, where she was getting as much teaching as could be obtained for her in ASL, reading, writing, math. In addition to 'proper' sign language, the Lighthouse Kids, over time, developed their own 'cant' to signing — a private language all their own. Later, Adel would add to this cant with Wasteland Cant as well.

Brynn was very much an observer of people. Somehow in the midst of all of the terror, she managed to keep that sweet demeanor about her that had marked her as a young child too. But she's also figured out that the appearance of being sweet and innocent and helpless was a very very good defense against other kids because there was always someone, wherever she went who would step up and 'take care' of her, make sure no one harassed her. This behavior persisted to the Lighthouse, but several of them picked up on the fact pretty early that although she was a quiet girl/young woman, there were plenty of thoughts going on behind those eyes. She just kept most of them to herself, much of the time. And would occasionally pop out with doozies.

Often she would play small pranks — turn someone's hair blue while they slept, make the babies green with pink polka dots. Images decorated walls and cabinets EVERYWHERE all the time. At least it wasn't crayons, right? Though the smaller kids would often copy her when they did have crayons.

She was one of the luckier victims of the 2011 Evo flu. Her small group of sick children had been moved from the Lighthouse to Pollepel. It took a long time, but she finally recovered from that, and she was among the children evacuated from Pollepel before it was attacked. She was just 12 years old, and heading once again out into a world that seemed a never-ending round of fighting.

The years from 2011 to 2013 were hard. News would come from the US to the Canadian safehouses about friends lost in the Second Civil War. The news was often fragmented, distorted. No one really knew what was going on — and although the adults knew the kids had seen plenty, they still tried to keep some of the worst horrors from especially the smaller children. The older kids, though, were determined to know what was happening and would eavesdrop relentlessly, asking her to try to read lips. In addition, when the kids would want to go hunting out in the woods or the fields, she would practice her ability on them, creating stunning camouflage patterns for the woods or grass hiding. Brynn didn't really know that they were also training lessons. There were also lessons in self-defense and in firearms, because they could then help hunt food when it was needed but also so that if push came to shove for them, they wouldn't be helpless. Brynn did not like those lessons. Though she couldn't hear the report of the weapon, she'd already seen what they could do and she held a healthy respect for the guns. She learned enough to at least hit what she was aiming at if she had to, but it was only for necessity.

Brynn tended to fall into the middle of the kids — some would totally blame things on her (snd get in trouble with Brian for blaming her), others just stayed out of the heckling. She never really stood out; she didn't overly excel at any one thing, she just kind of went along to get along. Brynn always covered for people when they blamed her for stuff, and took the lumps when no one figured out she was lying. And then she'd take subtle revenge later on in a variety of ways. But the one thing the Lighthouse Kids were was close to one another. No matter what was going on, they understood very very young who the real enemy was. Although she was trained to defend herself, Brynn generally stayed out of the combat zones, her disability making her a significant liability in the field unless they needed her ability to camouflage.

When the War finally ended, the oldest kids — some who had already left the Lighthouse and some who were just about to do so — talked a lot about going back to New York. Recovery efforts there were beginning, and many of them seemed to want to get out there. For a long time, Brynn had no interest in being part of all of that, just surviving and trying to put behind her the things that she remembered seeing. She spent the years from 2013 to 2018 basically doing the things that one does when they are one of the older children in an orphanage — helping with the younger kids, doing school work, taking her turn in the massive garden that helped feed them all, doing her artwork. She was content for the most part, but as she reached the end of her school years, she too started to look toward the city. They'd all come from that place. And there were plenty of horrors in the world; she'd seen and lived through a lot of mayhem and gore. She wanted the chance to spread beauty into the world with her art. So New York City was the place to go — there were friends there.

Psych Profile

Brynn is a quiet young woman in more ways than one — she is a Watcher, her eyes always taking in what is going on around her in both spoken word (which she follows by reading lips) and body language, and she has a gentle soul. Art is her refuge from the ugliness of the world, color is where she creates beauty. She likes to see people smile and despite the harshness of her childhood with the other Ferry orphans, she has not lost the capacity to take pleasure in the simplest of things — an unusual cloud formation, a flower on the side of the road, the way sunlight dapples through tree branches. Her world is silent, but it is not empty. She is not as naive as people might believe, either. She has learned that people often want to tell the deaf girl one thing to her face and then say something different when they turn their face away, so she has learned to interpret those micro-movements that indicate when someone is lying to her simply in self-defense. She is not confrontational when it happens, she merely quietly goes about her own way — why fight when silence is always mistaken for acquiescence? And then she's neither lied NOR agreed to whatever was said, free to simply walk around the topic, whatever it was.

She goes out of her way to be kind to everyone, but there is a core of strength to her — the Lighthouse Kids and Keepers are her FAMILY. And they are everything to her. They are the reason she has survived to become an adult, they have looked out for her, taught her to survive. And in the midst of war, she has somehow continued to manage to mostly see the best in people.

Evolved Ability

Chromakinesis is defined as the ability to create and manipulate colors. To change the color of an object is, at core, changing how light is absorbed, reflected, and transmitted by materials. Any color in the visible spectrum can be replicated with her ability, and this includes effects such as iridescence, truly metallic-looking tones, and even reflective or sparkling colors.

This ability is limited to solids and liquids, though the possibility exists that if she knew enough about how a gas reacts with light, she might be able to learn to manipulate the color of it as well — she just has never attempted to even wrap her head around that concept because her scale is limited by the fact that she has to touch it and the largest distance around that touch that she's ever colored is about a 5-foot radius from herself. Small objects of single colors may be nearly instant to change while larger objects and liquids may take up to a full 3-4 minutes, depending on the density of the object being changed and whether it's merely a surface change or she's changing the color all the way through. A coat turning from tan to black might only take 3 seconds, while a wrecking ball surface change might take more like 30 seconds and if she needs the entire ball to change all the way through, it would be more like the 3-minute mark. She has created intricate patterns and designs with this ability, and with enough planning ahead of time (intricate, well-done patterns might even take as much as an hour just to cover face and hands fully), she can create realistic camouflage patterns for hiding in the woods or in the grass or such things. The color change is a permanent one, although he can restore anything that she's changed back to its former appearance.

Because she also happens to be an artist, Brynn experimented a lot with fine-tuning her ability so that it could be used for that artwork. She uses the ability in much the same way one might a pencil or a brush when she's doing her art, tracing the lines and visualizing them as she draws with a fingertip, coloring in whole regions with a simple touch and then using her finger to brush subtle gradations of color onto the medium. This works beautifully on canvas, drywall, and paper but not so well on fabrics or human skin. For things that have a more malleable surface, she uses a broader visualization technique — picturing the final product and simply letting that mental image dictate to her power what needs to be present. Doing art in this way takes a significant amount of time and attention to detail, just as any form of painting and drawing does.

Appendices

Skills

Sign Languages: American Sign Language was taught to her from the time she was an infant. The Ferry had several children who needed it, and it became a common thing to see all the kids chattering away silently. In addition to being fluent in this language, the children began — as children will — to make up their OWN sign language. Lighthouse Cant is something known literally only to the children who were raised within the Ferry's embrace during a certain period of years under Brian's watchful eye. The Cant is further modified by the addition of Wasteland Cant, which was brought back from the future by Adel, a time-displaced Lighthouse Kid herself.

Lip-reading: This skill is highly useful, but it's also limited. Brynn is adept enough to catch the general jist of what someone is saying if they speak clearly (and don't try to over-enunciate), but people with heavy accents or those to frame their words differently than usual (speech impediments, Brits, people who think that because she's deaf she's somehow stupid and needs them to speak really slowly, etc) she has trouble with. She can usually decipher, but it may take a couple of attempts. She carries a small notebook and pen in her pocket for the times when she just can't figure it out, so that people (and she) can write down what needs to be said.

Art: Brynn is an incredible sketch artist and painter. This is not actually an effect of her powers — she merely has a talent for it. She has made money on the streets doing sketches, caricatures, and sidewalk art once in a while, but the Keepers have encouraged her to attend college for an art degree. In the meantime, she does tattoos for money now, using her sketching ability to create them and her Evo ability to bring them to life without requiring needles.

Firearms: Although nowhere near expert at such things, a great many of the kids who grew up in the Lighthouse have at least a passing familiarity with firearms. She's not a great shot, but she definitely knows which end is which, how to break it down and care for it, and can most of the time hit what she aims at. She prefers not to handle weapons, however, given that she can never be certain of not accidentally shooting someone who surprises her.

People-watcher: Not being able to hear tends to mean that Brynn pays very close attention to the people around her. Generally, it's just watching for mannerisms and reactions — cues for what's happening when she doesn't catch the entirety of a conversation. But because she has an artist's eye for detail, she has also learned along the way the value of people-watching for her own self-protection — namely, the microexpressions that indicate when someone is making fun of her while trying to look like they're not, or lying to her face about something. She's by no stretch an expert at it, but she has a good eye for when people are acting a little 'off' even when she can't pinpoint what exactly that 'off' thing is about. She will tend to assume the best in the people she meets, though, and give the benefit of the doubt.

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