Geneva Stevenson

Chesterfield Act Registry of the Expressive Database

File #29 Nov 2018 02:56

Summary

Name Geneva "Gene" Stevenson Aliases Status Registered Expressive (Class A/C Chemical) (COM) Ability Heat Generation Gender Female Birthdate September 5th, 1999 Age 21 Height 5'4" Build Stocky Eyes Dark Blue Hair Blonde Residence The Lanthorn Employment Agent Trainee at SESA Parents Dustin Neal (father) Doreen Stevenson (mother, deceased) Siblings Annette Stevenson (sister, presumed deceased) Marital Status Single Children N/A First Scene A Present for Everyone Last Scene Profile An angry, embittered young woman whose temper matches the nature of her ability a little too closely, Gene is trying to find a fresh foothold on life— now as an intern of SESA. Her Lighthouse family is far and away the main force in her life responsible for keeping her grounded.

portrayed by Chloe Booyens

Background

Born in inner city Philadelphia, Geneva was brought into a fragile family unit tenuously held together by individual women: first her mother, and then her older sister Annette. As Geneva's father demonstrated no interest in looking after his family, this was a job that fell squarely on the shoulders of her mother - until mom 'got sick' with what Geneva would only understand much, much later as being colorectal cancer. As a child, Geneva knew only that her regular schedule would include being bundled along to the corner store by Annette to shop for things like adult diapers, because her mother eventually became unable to leave the house. In 2006, when the explosion devasted nearby New York and the news was all abuzz, this only passingly registered for young Geneva: her own life was a shrinking world increasingly centered on her mother's little apartment where they all lived.

When their mother finally passed, Annette officially assumed the role she already had been performing all along- that of Geneva's caretaker and guardian. And so they got by, with Annette taking on an odd place in Geneva's life that lay somewhere between mother and sister. Geneva barely had time to adjust to the new family dynamic before another upheaval entered her whirlwind of a life: the passage of the Linderman Act, and following this, the disappearance of the newly-powered Annette into Company hands for possessing an ability deemed too dangerous for public existence. Geneva knew only that one day, Annette left home to buy groceries and never returned. After her sister vanished, Geneva was found and transported to the Lighthouse in New York, where an entirely new life began for her.

To say Geneva adjusted poorly at first would be an understatement. She had attitude problems from the beginning, unallayed by the fact that Annette had been the one presence in her life capable of calming her - and now Annette was gone. It was only slowly and grudgingly that she made friends with some of the other kids, and allowed the adults to get closer to her. As it turned out, she was a fairly bright kid who learned well and picked up quickly on things, but her anger often got in the way of her ability to want to learn anything.

One of the few things that helped during this period was her rediscovery of music: rock music from the 70's and 80's that her mother had loved, which she listened to on Annette's old Discman, one of the few possessions remaining from her early days. This small relief was fortunate, because it wasn't long until her own ability manifested in its own explosive fashion. One day, when Geneva was having an argument about some trivial issue with an older child, both her hands began to glow red-hot without her noticing. In a rage, she punched the item sitting closest to her- an ancient toaster on the counter, which promptly went up in flames as the crumbs inside were inundated by a blaze of heat. Luckily, nobody was harmed by this incident, but life became even more difficult for Geneva from this point on as she had to learn to deal with her own Evolved power in addition to her past issues.

As it turned out, her emotions were poorly channeled by being forced to sit in confinement for her own safety. When the chaos of the Civil War erupted, despite being barely a teenager, she clamored to go out and fight, inspired by the rumors and stories heard of 'freedom fighters' vying to take down an oppressive government. Kept under close watch along with the rest of the Lighthouse kids, she was obviously allowed to go nowhere, but she retained her mood through the years from that point onwards. Almost the moment she came of age, she left the Lighthouse to find her own purpose on the streets of New York, the heart of it all - to find something to do, to fight, to help rebuild perhaps.

Whether she finds that purpose or not remains to be seen.

Psych Profile

Geneva's personality has always run hot - there is more than one reason 'Hothead' was one of the nicknames given to her by the other Lighthouse kids. She is impatient, blunt, distrustful, anti-authority, condescending, and largely asocial. She is also in essence still a lost kid, struggling to find her place in a society that, with the sole exception of the Lighthouse, has not been kind to her.

Ever since she was old enough to understood the truth about what happened to Annette, Geneva has harbored a deep-seated hatred of any person or policy seeking to oppress the Evolved- a hatred strong enough to kill. There is a part of her that sorely wants to hunt down and murder every single member of the Company and other organisations who escaped justice after the trials, although she has no idea how she would even start going about doing that. There is another part of her that - completely irrationally, of course - feels guilty about what happened to her older sister. That perhaps had she been there (despite being only a child at the time), she could have somehow saved her or prevented events from transpiring the way they did. A wistful childhood fantasy, but one that recurrently haunts her.

Somewhere beneath that angry, tangled mess lies an intelligent, resourceful young woman with a soft spot for cats, 70's/80's rock, and the extra spicy sauce from halal carts.

Somewhere deep beneath even that, is someone who is fiercely sympathetic to the plight of those in similar situations to her, such as the other Lighthouse kids.

Evolved Ability

Original ability description

Geneva has the ability to generate intense amounts of heat from her hands. When this happens, one or both of her hands literally glow red-hot, emitting waves of heat that can near-instantly reach 400°F+ in temperature near the epicenter. Her hands serve as the central focal point for her ability: the heat radiates outwards from them, normally in an unfocused tapering radius of a couple feet, but if she specifically concentrates she can 'push' a rough wave of heat in a direction of her choice. This is much more exhausting than simply letting the heat emanate freely in all directions. She has not found, yet, that she can generate heat from any other part of her body.

This ability is strongly tied to her emotional state. It used to be that any time she became agitated enough, her ability would begin to trigger; she is in far better control of it now as compared to when it first manifested, but this is still somewhat of a danger in highly intense situations. Duration and temperature are the chief limiting factors in the use of her ability. Her hands can comfortably emit constant heat at a temperature of about 400°F for several minutes (enough time to thoroughly cook, say, a waffle or two) before she begins to tire. Much higher temperatures than this are certainly possible - up to a current maximum range of ~2500°F, the approximate temperature of a butane blowtorch - but generally only for fleeting intervals, and at the physical expense of Gene who can end up with nosebleeds or worse if this is dragged out. She can also emit very low amounts of heat, if she chooses to, for long periods of time; she just has to stay conscious.

She is immune to the effects of damage from her own heat, and resistant to the detrimental effects of high heat in general, though she still gets cold as any normal person does.

Status as of May 2019:

In many ways, Geneva has made since considerable progress with her power in the realms of strength, finesse, and control (situationally: see below) since beginning formal powers training with Raytech in December of 2018. Her new maximum is somewhere around 3100°C degrees, which roughly matches the flame temperature for an oxyacetylene blowtorch, but as with before she can only hold this upper limit shortly. She can tolerate giving off heat at much higher average temperatures for a much longer period of time without getting tired, however, having become able to sustain her old ballpark of 400°C for somewhere around 20 minutes at a time now. On the other end of the scale, the 2500°F of a butane blowtorch can now be held for a decent few minutes before she starts rapidly suffering the usual crippling effects of exertion.

It is also now possible for her to exude heat in a wider range of shapes and sizes than the blunt, simple faceful of wall it would come out as before: for example, she can now spread a cone of heat from her hands if she wishes while controlling its approximate trajectory and width. Other options include a line, a cube around her, etc. In all these things, she is still limited to using just her hands to generate heat.

Funnily enough, while her control of her ability while she is actually concentrating on using it has appreciably improved, the involuntary triggering of it that is prone to happening when she is incredibly angry or stressed has taken a sharp face heel turn for the worse. Her ability now appears to be more closely bonded to her emotional state than ever, a predicament that likely arose as a side effect of the psyche-related trauma of her consciousness spending near a month imprisoned in a foreign body (a hummingbird). It is thereotically a self-protective measure that ironically protects exactly no one, because it has been doing nothing but making things worse for her.

After being responsible for her first workplace-related accident at Raytech in this manner, where there were luckily no injuries except to all of a coworker's toupee and some equipment, she has been ordered to take mandatory meditation/anger management classes on her off time and learn breathing control exercises. Her saving grace is that is the trigger occurs when she is very very angry, which is actually quite rare, as opposed to just plain old angry, which she is a lot of the time.

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!"

― Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic

Appendices

Log Icons

Default	Dream	Hummingbird

Number One

Idiot

Idiot is a large, well-proportioned, very derpy grey Burmese cat. His appellation comes from his cross-eyed nature, and the fact that the poor thing suffers from tunnel vision — his bottom half was stuck inside a dumpster the first time Geneva came across him. He was probably somebody's pampered housepet at some point before the war. Don't be fooled by the name, though. Gene likes this cat more than she likes you.

Trivia and Notes

• Geneva, younger than her missing sister by nearly a decade, was an unwelcome surprise baby. This didn't give her a great start on life, as it promptly caused her father to walk out.
• Her most prized possession is a 80's Sony Walkman brick: a cherished pass-me-down from her mother that has been to hell and back in terms of damage and miraculously still works.

Gallery