Registry of the Evolved Database
File #18 Dec 2008 21:55
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 Maggie Gyllenhaal |
A native of Montreal, Quebec, born to an architect and a kindergarten teacher, Charity Gosselin was raised in the shadow of Mount Royal along with her brother Jean — eighteen months her junior — by their Roman Catholic parents, though no amount of faith would save her from the cycle of dysfunction and despair that hung over her mother's side of the family like a dark cloud. Like most people, Charity grew up knowing very little about mental illness; no one she knew was sick, but she often heard her parents talk in whispers about the premature death of her grandmother when she was two and the hospitalizations of her two aunts, Adele and Jacqueline, when she was respectively four and five. At eight, her mother enrolled her in a local dance academy, believing that Charity would benefit from an extracurricular activity in addition to her classes at the private school she attended in what was once the nearby city of Roxboro. Over the next few years, as Charity became more and more immersed in her studies, her mother became more and more depressed, growing unhappy with her marriage to Jean and Charity's father and then with herself and her children. She began displaying the same erratic symptoms that had crippled her sisters and mother when Charity had been only a few years old — but rather than seek professional help to curb her self-destructive behavior, she sunk further into her rut until, in 1989, she took her life by consuming several glasses of alcohol and a bottle of pain medication the family doctor has prescribed her husband for his arthritis.
Although the loss of their mother deeply affected both the Gosselin children, they were back in school within two weeks of the funeral and gradually matured into happy, healthy young adults who had the full support of their surviving parent, local community and church; Jean enrolled in McGill University and began studying to become a journalist while Charity received an offer from a prestigious dance school in New York City thanks to her teachers at the academy where she'd spent the last ten years studying her craft. To help support herself and fund her tuition, she took a job teaching the basics of ballet to six and seven-year-olds at the same school she was attending, which is where she met Nicholas Thornton and his young daughter Erica. Even though Nicholas was married, Charity freely fought and flirted with him, and the two began a relationship that lasted for almost nine months before his wife hired a private investigator, curious about where Nicholas was spending his free time outside the office. Although initial investigations turned up very little to incriminate Nicholas, Charity eventually came forward and contacted his wife on her own accord, hoping to force her lover into choosing between them. Instead, Nicholas' wife made the decision for him and in the legal battle that followed she took custody of the house, Erica and even Nicholas' pet dog, Abner. Although Charity stood by Nicholas during the proceedings, he was initially furious at her for ruining his marriage, and the pair went for three months without speaking before Nicholas, having very little left except for the occasional visit with his daughter, came back to her and suggested that he and Charity move in together. They were married in 2000.
Charity's first year of marriage was a year of mixed blessings; she was offered a permanent teaching position at the dance school and Nicholas successfully filed for joint-custody of Erica, but in spite of these joyous milestones she also began noticing that not everything was quite right in her world. Several attempts to conceive a child of her own with Nicholas were met with failure, and although she and her husband and purchased an upscale townhome in New York City's Upper East Side, she never felt completely comfortable in it. She experienced feelings of heightened anxiety whenever she entered the guest bedroom, and on several occasions woke Nicholas up when she thought she heard voices coming from the adjacent hallway. Convinced she and her husband were being haunted by malevolent spirits, she hired a priest to exorcise every room of the house, and when that failed she begged Nicholas to put her up in a hotel for weeks at a time. In an attempt to put her at ease, Nicholas invited Jean down from Montreal to stay with them, and together the two men convinced Charity to come back home. During his stay, Jean confided in Nicholas and told him about the history of mental illness on his mother's side of the family — a fact that Charity had taken great pains to conceal from him during their relationship, fearing he might not want to be with her if he thought she might go crazy. In response, Nicholas took his wife to the doctor and had numerous tests performed to rule out a brain tumor as the source of her increasingly bizarre behavior. When Charity found out that Jean had told Nicholas about their mother's illness, the hospitalization of her aunts and the premature death of her grandmother, she became furious, demanded he return to Canada and stopped speaking to him entirely. It was around this time that history repeated itself — as it always does — and Nicholas, desperate for some sense of normalcy in his life, took a mistress.
The next few years saw Charity and Nicholas enter numerous periods of remission and relapse as Charity's "illness" became better and then worse; she confronted her husband about his affair and demanded that he end it, and their relationship improved for a brief time after he agreed to her wishes. Even though Charity was hospitalized several times between 2002 and 2003 for unsuccessful suicide attempts, she and Nicholas remained together — it wasn't until 2004 that she reached the breaking point and attempted to stab him to death with a pair of scissors during what her doctor later called a visual/tactile hallucination. Charity was diagnosed with a severe case of paranoid schizophrenia, and at her doctor's recommendation Nicholas had her committed to the McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where she would remain under lock and key for the next three years, her condition regulated by antipsychotic medications. In 2007, following Senator Petrelli's infamous announcement about the existence of the Evolved, the administration at McLean found itself forced to review the files it kept on its patients and discovered that several individuals in the hospital's care were displaying symptoms of latent psychic abilities rather than mental illness. The hospital turned these case files over to the Department of Homeland Security after the Linderman Act was passed and within weeks Charity found herself transferred to a secure government holding facility in another state. There, she met fellow detainee Julian Kuhr who explained the events that transpired after a sizable portion of New York City had been obliterated the previous year, helping Charity to better understand the nature of the way the viewed the world.
During a breakout staged by the terrorist organization PARIAH, Charity, Julian, Nina Norwich and several others escaped the holding facility — some were taken to New York City to meet with the faction's leader, Cameron Spalding, while the others were turned loose and left to their own ends. Spalding referred Charity to his friend Rupert Carmichael, who promised he would do everything in his power to help reunite her with Nicholas in exchange for her loyalty and cooperation. Charity readily agreed and assumed a new identity, posing as a stripper at club Exotica in Brooklyn where she acted as Carmichael's eyes and ears for that specific part of town when her unique talent wasn't being utilized by the Shedda Dinu in other, more useful capacities.
Although she is no longer associated with Shedda Dinu, following a mysterious following out with Carmichael, she continues to work at Exotica (now called Burlesque under the management of Lohn Logan), feeding information to interested parties for the right price.
Vain, possessive, imperious and fickle, Charity Thornton is many unflattering things but crazy isn't one of them. After being misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2004, she has spent the last four years of her life under lock and key while on antipsychotic medications to correct "biochemical imbalances" in her brain.
You'd be a little unstable and pissed off, too.
Because she is able to adjust the intensity of her powers, she functions just as well as anybody else about seventy percent of the time. Her affliction does not normally affect her lucidity or her ability to form coherent thoughts, but when she isn't functioning like other people during that remaining thirty percent, she reacts to external stimuli like someone experiencing a really bad trip on a psychedelic drug. Crippled by feelings of anxiety and alienation and profoundly disturbing states of unrelieved terror, Charity poses a danger to both herself and others, and at times needs to be physically restrained to prevent her from doing things like breaking windows, mirrors and other reflective surfaces, violently lashing out at the people around her, running out into traffic, or even trying to peel off her own skin.
When Nicholas used to tell his friends that his wife was "high-maintenance", he had no idea just how right he really was.
On good days — and there are many, many good days — Charity is a compassionate woman, if a little manipulative, conniving and clingy. Born in 1977, the Year of the Snake, she has been known to sting those close to her (oftentimes without truly meaning to) and then, in remorse, turn her venom on herself when the emotions in her heart outweigh the judgment in her head. She ignores what she knows is right in favour of what feels right; her affair with Nicholas while he was still married and her dogged determination to make their marriage work even after she discovered he was cheating on her with another woman the same way he'd cheated on his first wife with her are excellent examples of this selfish mindset in action, though it would be useless to point such a thing out to her. Charity is not the sort of person who acknowledges the things she doesn't want to hear — rather, she ignores them and chooses to focus on creating her own selective reality instead.
Like her mother and her mother before her, Charity is a clairvoyant — though perhaps not in the traditional sense. Her ability reveals truths about people, places and things that aren't evident to the naked eye. When she looks at someone, her ability shows her the core of who and what they are — there is nothing hidden, no possibility of deception, though what she sees is shaded by her dismal perception of the world. A man who stabbed his wife to death might appear soaked in blood with her name branded backwards across his forehead. If she were to spend the night in the room where the killing took place, she might see a ragdoll laid out in the same position the body was found by the police years prior, bulging at the seams with maggots. She could pick out the murder weapon from a lineup of seemingly identical knives — it would be the only one with his reflection in the blade.
The doctors working for Homeland Security who evaluated her theorized that Charity's ability allows her perceive the "residual psychic energy" retained by living things, objects and certain locations that is created by particularly traumatic or emotional events. Parapsychologists who have spent their entire adult lives researching paranormal phenomenon (including hauntings, extra sensory perception and psychokinesis) would likely agree, but there is no way to know for sure; Charity, along with Julian Kuhr and others, escaped the holding facility before the experts could perform further analysis.
Charity would probably be classified as a Tier 1 or 2 if it weren't for the fact that she cannot turn her ability off. She views the world around her in symbols and metaphors without exception (unless she crosses paths with a negator such as the Haitian) and is prone to psychotic episodes and unpredictable outbursts of violence when she becomes overwhelmed by visions of demons and angels, gods, monsters and avenging spirits.
Just ask her husband.
Although she can't turn off her ability, Charity has learned — over time — how to adjust its dial. Most of the time, she keeps it at a 'low' level and might not pick up certain details she otherwise would. The doctors at McClean described her symptoms as visual hallucinations, but under the right circumstances she may hear, smell and feel things as well — especially if her ability is operating at a more intense level. Very rarely does she crank it up as high as it will go, for reasons that are probably obvious, and while her ability can sometimes lend special insight into past and current events, it does not in any way, shape or form allow her to glimpse into the future.
Appendices
Charity Thornton is a staff-run NPC. Please contact Ellis for details.
Apperances
Coming soon.