Registry of the Evolved Database
File #12 Sep 2009 22:01
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 Leighton Meester |
Christina Hoffman's story starts out in Las Vegas. Sin City. Her mother, Stephanie, worked as a Vegas showgirl (with a little moonlighting in some seedier professions when money got a little tight). Christina herself was the result of a bit of that moonlighting along with some failed birth control, and it was a near thing as to her ending up before she even started in an abortion clinic. Thankfully, her mother decided that to have a family would give her something she lacked…Stephanie's parents died in a car crash when she was only nineteen. And so she decided to go through with the pregnancy. Nine months later, Stephanie came along…an inauspicious beginning, to put it mildly.
While her mother was unemployed when Christina was born, she went back to her prior jobs as soon as she lost the baby weight and got back in shape. It meant a lot of daycare and babysitting for Christina, who grew up never knowing who her father was, nor having any family beyond her mother…not that she saw her mother all that often. It made for a tense childhood; Stephanie really wasn't that good at being a mother, and didn't have a lot of time to be so. Christina was bounced around from daycare to babysitter to school, and felt rather cast-off…ironic given that her mother's purpose in keeping her was precisely the opposite.
Las Vegas isn't a bad place to grow up when you're a resident and not a tourist. The city has been in a long, perpetual wave of growth, and the facilities in the residential areas are quite nice. But when you're a teenager growing up and you're in the corruption capital of the United States, especially without a lot of active parenting, it's easy to get drawn into it. Christina was sexually active early on, and she'd also done a good deal of drinking and mild drugs by the time she was in high school (marijuana and mushrooms; she was smart enough to realize that the more hardcore drugs are too damaging to you). Fights with her mother became the order of the night, generally ended by her mother having to go off to work, at which point Christina would sneak out and go do what she wanted to in the first place.
By the time graduation was looming on the horizon, Christina knew that she didn't want to go to college. It sounded too boring. She lived in Las Vegas; she wanted to get out and see the world. That meant getting a job, and she wasn't qualified for much. She didn't want to go down the same road as her mother. So she ended up looking around for some kind of office work, and finally found it, in the Linderman Group. It certainly wasn't anything that involved the darker side of the company, nor certainly any contact with anyone so high up as Daniel Linderman. She was just one of many people employed at his company; a low-ranking secretary. But it paid the bills. She got her own apartment, and started to settle in to the kind of life she wanted…work in the day, leave and party till it was time to crash, rinse and repeat.
At least, that was life till the eclipse. When that came, she gave it no thought in and of itself, but shortly after, started to develop some nasty headaches. She went into the doctor, but they couldn't find anything wrong with her; her MRI came back clean, as did her CAT scan. Still, the headaches continued to persist. And then, one morning, walking from one room to the other, she hit an invisible wall. Investigation showed it wasn't a whole wall…just a floating barrier of some kind, a couple feet across. And after she investigated it a few moments, it vanished, just as suddenly as it had appeared.
A little after that, she actually got called upstairs, as it were…called in for a meeting with Mr. Linderman himself. And he began to lay things out for her. It turns out that the company doctor for the Linderman Group wasn't just a company doctor, he was a Company doctor. Or at least, aware enough of things to know to watch for unusual reports or tests. In the course of the meeting, it was made clear that she was someone special. He offered to pay for her to learn more about her special nature. All bills paid, and even a promotion offered, up to working for his personal staff.
After a good deal of experimentation and training with Mr. Linderman's people, Christina started to learn more about what she could do. Specifically, creating a sort of "force field". It wasn't big, but it could be used as a tiny portable wall, or a lifting surface…or a really nasty cutting surface. It was once that later application was discovered that Mr. Linderman decided to offer her a…different sort…of promotion. He leveled with her about some of the things the Linderman Group did off the books. (It goes without saying that had she balked at this point, she would have disappeared.) But he decided she could be very useful as one of his special operatives, like Candice Willmer. And so she started to get special training in things OTHER than her ability. Ways to make people disappear. Ways to cover things up. Needless to say, the money was quite a bit better.
When the Bomb went off in New York, Mr. Linderman moved his primary operation there full-time. And he brought Christina with her. She was moved up to being his personal assistant…basically his gofer. If he needed errands ran, help in the office, travel arrangements or reservations made, she was his Gal Friday. Of course, she was also his Gal Friday for kidnappings, cleanups, murders and more. There's basically nothing that she wouldn't do for him, and she's made it clear. It would extend to nocturnal relations, but he's never asked for that…maybe she's too young, or just not his type. Of course, as one of his special operatives, she's not registered. That would be…inconvenient.
There are many people who work for the Linderman Group, but Christina is definitely one of the most "full time". She generally puts in a full day working at the office, and overtime is a matter of fact; when Mr. Linderman is working, she's usually working. And of course, some of her jobs tend to run late into the evening. The not-so-official ones. But the pay is astronomical, as are the perks. Essentially anything that she wants, Mr. Linderman makes sure she gets, just like she makes sure that anything Mr. Linderman wants, she takes care of. It's not a bad life.
Christina is one of those people they tend to call "morally deficient", and really, is almost completely egocentric. She really doesn't care about how anything is going to affect anyone other than herself. As she sees it, life is a struggle to get what you can for yourself while everyone else is trying to get what they can for themselves. One giant rat race. As a result, she's very greedy, and she wants everything out of life. Anything she can get, the more shinies. She's one of those who would espouse that whole "she who dies with the most toys, wins" philosophy.
She's also really got nothing in the way of a conscience. Sure, she felt bad the first time that she killed someone. But the number of zeroes on the paycheck assuages a whole lot of guilt. She didn't exactly start off with a strong moral compass, and since she's been tied in with the Linderman Group, that's pretty much dwindled to almost zero. She'd hesitate before doing some of the REALLY amoral stuff…for example, she doesn't really have the stomach for torture, and she wouldn't want to kill kids. But aside from a protest to Mr. Linderman, if it still came down to him telling her to do it, she would.
She's also more than a little bit of a hedonist. She likes pretty things. She likes expensive clothes and expensive jewelry. She likes parties, and famous people. She likes to drink, and she likes to do drugs, and she likes to have sex. Restraint and temperance really aren't two words much in her vocabulary. She's very good about turning that side off when she's on the clock, but on her own time, she lets her wild side out.
Christina possesses the ability to create an invisible field of force. This field covers an area of two square feet, and most commonly manifests as a rectangle two feet by one foot. She can manipulate the shape of it to a limited degree with concentration…for example, she could make something that was more a circle, or make something smaller than her maximum size. However, she cannot change it TOO far from its base state; she can't make intricate shapes with it, for example, nor can she change it too far from the base rectangle. (She couldn't make it, for example, an inch wide and put all the rest into length. If she wanted an inch-wide field, she'd have to get it by making it much smaller overall.)
The field is mobile by concentration, at speeds roughly up to a maximum of fifteen miles per hour…enough to be a fast sprint, but it's not a bullet and it's never going to be. It's also essentially nigh-infinitely thin on the "thickness" plane, being as close to a true two-dimensional construct as one could probably get without expensive physics experiments or Evolved abilities. However, along the "facing" side, it's almost indestructable (within certain limits to be detailed herein). The true versatility of the power comes in her ability to change its orientation. Thus far, Christina has developed three primary applications for it.
Basically, by orienting the field vertically in front of her, Christina can protect herself with a limited force field. Obviously, given the size and shape of it, while she can protect her head and torso, she can't protect her limbs at the same time, so it's far from a full protection. However, given that's what most people would be attacking, it tends to keep her safe, especially since it doesn't block her limbs. Therefore, shots fired at her bounce off the field, while her shots are unhindered. In shield mode, the field can stop bullets easily. However, anything that would "splash around" it (explosives, etc) would still hurt Christina. Further, there's a limit to how much force it can absorb without collapsing, causing it to vanish and probably knocking her out. Bullets are fine, but it couldn't stop a speeding car from hitting her, for example.
By orienting the field horizontally and putting things on it, Christina can use the field as a platform to carry things. Usually she uses this to carry corpses out, but she could use it to lift anything she wanted…carry her groceries, lift furniture, et cetera. The field can lift about three hundred pounds in this capacity, and can move at up to the full speed, in theory. In practice, she tends to restrict it to a lot slower, so that things don't fall off it. It would be POSSIBLE to use this to "levitate" herself, except that she'd worry about falling off it, and thus, she wouldn't do this except in an emergency, and even then, she'd be going damn slow.
The last aspect is to use the field as a weapon. She can use it non-lethally by orienting it vertically, and "pushing" it into people. Essentially, it's like getting hit with a 2' x 1' box moving at 15 MPH. However, since there's not much mass to the field, there's not a ton of force. This carries a little more force than Christina hitting someone with her bare hands, but not a lot. It mostly lets her intimidate people or rough them out without getting her hands dirty. But, orient it the other way and it's a whole different story. The nearly-infinitely-thin edge can slice right through most solid matter…she can even cut steel with it, allowing her to use it to cut through deadbolts or hinges. And of course, she can neatly chop up a corpse with it…or a living body. She tends to reduce the overall size when using it as a weapon, so as to reduce collateral damage, but it's still nasty by anyone's standards; it's basically a forcefield-based lightsaber.