In 1985, Marlowe was born in Okinawa, Japan to Private First Class Curtis Terrell and Kazue Takada. Curtis was part of the US Army Corps of Engineering. Kazue was a waitress of a local izakaya. The two met years before, and didn't fall in love for a very long time, but he eventually won her and her skeptical family over. An unconventional family, the Terrell-Takada household was generally more Americanized than Japanese, but Marlowe's mother kept her native language alive at home and practiced some still long-standing traditions while her father played jazz and rock tunes of his time while he worked.
While Marlowe's formal schooling took place in an English setting, at Kazue's insistence she also attended private classes taught by civilian Japanese in a variety of subjects both academic and extracurricular. Marlowe was an intelligent if overactively imaginative child, and picked up each subject with initial fervor. She was a mirror of her mother's wit and her father's insight. But the fact that she faced bullying because of her mixed heritage meant that many a night was spent dealing with her turbulent behavior. Especially in Marlowe's later teen years, she argued with authority figures and would either face discipline post truancy or more often would be found in the escape of the athletics, in the workshop, or other independent activities away from the stares and whispers in or around the classroom. There is a saying in Japan, that the nail that sticks up with be hammered down.
Things came to a head when Marlowe announced she intended not to take university entrance exams nor attend any college cram schools. She was instead going to move to the United States to apprentice under a machinist in Los Angeles. The family was not torn apart, persay, though for several weeks the atmosphere in the household oscillated between depressed and livid as arguments broke out. Everyone had their input for what Marlowe should do. She even got a stern lecture from her grandfather. Then after negotiations with her parents, the patriarch relented for reasons unknown and allowed her to pursue her goal, such as it was. Her father was understanding and thought the moving to America was a good life experience. Her mother protested still, and the differing opinions caused a rift between mother and daughter for years.
That changed in 2006. On the day the bomb struck New York, the world watched in horror and Marlowe with them. In the wake of the disaster and talking to her family overseas, Marlowe was inspired to join the Army and help in the rebuilding efforts. The all hands on deck situation shipped her from Los Angeles to New York for the first time, and as her father had noted before, the life experience was real. The culture shock of moving to the States was nothing compared to stepping into the New York social climate post-Midtown bomb.
To say the work changed her is an understatement. Marlowe and her squad had been working on emptying out an abandoned apartment complex when the building started to collapse in upon its damaged shell. The squad retreated ASAP but the building still came down while Marlowe and a few squadmates were in it. Trapped within the rubble, she tried to dig herself out of it to no avail until her Evolved ability molded, warped, and bent the steel beam she was trying to push into a neat arch off of her legs. The feat was impossible to explain. Others attributed it to luck that she escaped with her life, and to shock that Marlowe didn't speak of the experience afterwards.
Instead, she called her mother. And for the first time in a long time, mother and daughter spoke frankly and without ire, revealing secrets to each other that few or none others knew of. Marlowe's mother was also Evolved, and her ability to manipulate plant matter went far beyond just having a "green thumb". After the heart-to-heart that mended strained relations, Marlowe researched more about her own power and to learn about her limits and capabilities. Her shop hours became times when she practiced in secret and made discoveries about her ability while the news in the background reported the release of the Tokyo Three.
Upon the passing of the Linderman Act, Marlowe was forced to register to keep her status and benefits. Her mother's quiet words in the back of her mind, Marlowe reserved her power to the concept of the restoration of inorganic matter. The Mr. Clean's Magic Eraser in her fingertips rubbed off permanent marker of home drywalls, or repaired the keyed up paint on a dingy car. Her Tier 0 status still earned her some dirty, fearful, or suspicious looks from a few associates and people she thought were her friends.
She managed to avoid being in the worst of the anti-Evolved terrorism attacks that shook the nation, she watched with the rest of America as history revealed the darkest times for the nation. Marlowe was shocked at the revelation of President Petrelli's Evolved status, horrified at the live television coverage of the Cambridge massacre and the sinking of MIT, and terrified of the following hostile takeover under President Mitchell. And then came the kill squads. A friend came to warn her to run shortly before the military's bullets turned on their own and peppered her small one-bedroom apartment.
She fell in with ex-Ferrymen, joining the civil war. While she mostly wasn't a direct combatant, when she could help it, she took on a supportive role where her manipulation of matter and her experience with military structures proved useful in determining tactics, turning the tides of skirmishes, and disabling the defenses of the Mitchell's military. She was told she was a hero more than once. She was told she saved lives. She was just doing what she was trained to do.
In the post-war period when SESA formed the Reclamation Committee, Marlowe's entry in the Chesterfield Act's version of the SLC-Expressive registry caught the eyes of the rebuilding effort personnel. An agent of Yamagato Industries approached her to join their team, assuring her that they would even help take care of her family overseas. Marlowe mustered out of the military, and once the paperwork was settled, she resides now in Yamagato Park. And heck, they pay her well, which is all the more incentive for her to aid the company.
