Registry of the Evolved Database
File #28 Dec 2008 06:43
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 Lisa Edelstein |
Leah was a charming little girl with an indelible and undying sense of boredom with the structured rigors of her drab school life in Salem. She made decent grades despite the niggling certainty of her parents that she would have made better ones if she only applied herself; she generally knew the answers when called on even though her teachers had the constant suspicion that she wasn't really paying attention. Physically active, she ran for fun — which eventually blossomed into an interest in later extrascholastic activities like cross-country, track and field.
Manipulative and clever, Leah usually managed to get out of the worst trouble she got into, and watched with a faint smirk as her brother struggled and floundered through his own attitude and attention deficits — or with helpless anger as they grew ever more frustratedly, uselessly firm with him. Her own acting out grew quietly worse as they continued to flail through the failure of parenting that was Flint. She snuck out with boys and learned to be a horrendous tease; she snuck out with other, older boys and learned about other things. And she went out with still different boys and learned about drugs. Marijuana eased her frustrations and helped her keep her mellow in an increasingly idiotic world — she lost her virginity while high and 16. Throughout this, her parents were mostly distracted by Flint's screwups. Dumb luck saved her from sexually transmitted diseases, and her popularity at school dwindled but never completely faded, rallied under her excellence at track and field, and the sheer force of personality she applied to its retention.
Her sexual experimentation ended swiftly and suddenly when she found herself stuck with an extremely unwelcome pregnancy partway through her junior year of high school. Despite the bizarre notion of the erstwhile father to do the honorable thing and get married and take care of the brat, Leah knew exactly what to do with it. She obtained an abortion at the close of the summer and spent most of it locked in her room. While Flint attended New York University, Leah flattened herself to the bed and missed the first two months of her senior year of high school laid out by a blend of depression and some strange post-abortion complication. That fall, she vomited a lot. When she returned to school, it was with a fire in her belly. She had missed the cross country season, crashing and burning her hopes of earning a sports scholarship; while most seniors in high school suffered from senioritis and watched their grades sink, Leah went from a drab 2.9 her junior year and blazed to a 3.9 with a score on the SATs to rival that of her brother. She blasted into New York at full speed as a freshman at Columbia University and a premed major. Doctor Leah, yessirree.
Her college grades crashed and burned quickly. Bored by sexist professors and snooty fellow students, she spent most of her time drifting instead of heeding her studies. She found more drug circles. Staying away from most casual sex after the tremendous screwup it had made of her eighteenth year, she found a fresh new way to alleviate the disaffection she felt with her humdrum life. Her student loan money was funneled blithely between alcohol, marijuana, and her newfound LSD habit. Hallucinogens brought her to a whole new world of wild delights. Her grades were mediocre, but she did not fall to such pathetic lows that she was not invited back to school; she fumbled along through biology, anatomy, chemistry, and absorbed as much as was necessary to survive a final exam before moving on to the next course.
Her pretensions to classy looks and her ability to utilize charm and a blithe vocabulary got her a sweet gig waitressing at a wine bar in Greenwich Village when she was 21. This supplemented her income nicely; she raked up money in tips and pickpocketing the drunk and overmoneyed. She stopped borrowing money for school and paid her way clear based on the results of tips and minor thefts and the very occasional hand job in the wine bar's bathroom (WHAT, she was always good with her hands). The income was heady, and got her drunker than the wine (which she learned all kinds of pretensious things about during the course of the year). Unfortunately, one of these offered hand jobs in the wine bar eventually resulted in a solicitation bust. First offense, suspended sentence on a guilty plea, and she was done with that — but she was also fired from her job at the wine bar, and her limited income was completely cut off. Tremendously frustrated by this, she blew most of her stockpiled money on LSD, marijuana, and bottles of whiskey.
She found out her brother had ended up in prison while she was in the middle of an acid trip, and spent almost five minutes trying to explain to her father that she would go see Flint as soon as she finished experiencing the color yellow. Her parents did not speak to her after that occasion for almost a year. In any event, she lacked the funding to help him; she lacked the funding to help herself much, either. She dropped out of school only a few semesters shy of earning her degree because she could no longer pay tuition. Her next few jobs lasted a few weeks apiece and left her in a downward spiral of misery that eventually resulted in giving hand jobs to her landlord to stay in her rat-infested and badly-watered apartment in the lower east side of Manhattan.
She picked up spare cash selling her stockpiled acid and marijuana, and eventually set herself up with a minor drug trafficking organization, selling marijuana first and then harder drugs, heroin and cocaine, which she never developed a taste for largely out of personal vanity rather than any particular moral or judgmental imperative. She stopped communicating with her parents entirely, and prison freaked her out, so although she tried to make time to slink in and have visitation with Flint, she was mostly out of contact with him, too. She was alone in the world and hated pretty much everything and everyone in it. Probably the darkest point of her life, maybe not including the months she spent in bed after her abortion. She tried to leave the organization, which did not end with great results.
Trapped in the basement of an apartment building, walled up next to a furnace and awaiting possible beating or execution, Leah stared at the ceiling and contemplated her existence. She closed her eyes and felt a little like she was flashbacking to an old trip, where sensation was heightened, where color had meaning and smell had taste. The world tasted strange, and she felt completely disconnected from it. She slipped through her bonds as though they were nothing more than air, and stood up. Without opening her eyes, she walked through the stairs, through the wall, and then … swam, against the weird air resistance of the intangible matter around her, until she felt freedom of movement again. When she opened her eyes, she was standing on the street. Her feet were planted firmly on the sidewalk, and she was jostled by a random passerby. Floating in surreality and still feeling a little high, Leah flashbacked to earlier in her life, and bolted. She ran five, ten blocks, weaving through people, bolting down another street and down into the subway and down into a car. She leaned against the subway pole as the car moved away, and panted, gasping for breath, and wondered how the hell she had actually gotten out since LSD does not usually work like that.
She went underground for awhile. She did not trust what had happened to her, although when it happened a few more times — on one memorable occasion, when she was sitting on the toilet — it became pretty clear that whatever was happening to her it probably was not anything related to the drug use. In the meantime, she got the hell out of New York and away from the mistakes she had made there. She had made a few contacts with the organization and its competitors during her time working for them, and she picked up a hit leaving the city from one of the competitors, seeking to prove herself and maybe earn a little protection from someone not her old boss.
She followed the fleeing criminal all the way to Las Vegas. She killed him in complete silence, walking smoothly through the walls of his hotel and strangling him with her strong, leather-gloved hands. Then she went and found a different hotel room, all the way across the city, where she spent the night in front of the toilet, alternately vomiting and cradling her head in her hands. It was the first time she killed a man; it would not be the last, but it would be the worst.
Rather than immediately head back to New York, she adopted an alias in Las Vegas — adding 'a.k.a. Cynthia Caruthers' to her short list of aliases — and attended dealer's school. She learned to deal baccarat, blackjack, craps. As a buxom young(ish) woman with a wide, welcoming smile, she proved a casino asset, and spent about a year in a city almost wild enough for her restless heart. Her luck held up for about that long, before she was discovered by a couple of guys from her old organization. Their bullets went through her and buried themselves in the wall of her hotel room. She killed them both, stole their car, and fled Las Vegas. Then she ditched that car and stole another, which she eventually sold for less than it was worth to a guy in Missouri. She worked for him for a few months, basically performing the function of the eye candy to sit on the hood of the used jalopy with her legs crossed and distract the attention of those he was trying to sucker into buying the damn thing. When their casual sexual relationship became something more, or rather, when the dolt attempted to turn it into something more, Leah (then known as Sally Darling) ditched again.
She was drawn toward New York, but ended up falling short, committing minor and incomplete robberies in Trenton, New Jersey. Then someone blew up New York.
She was sitting in her apartment on the edge of her bed, high on marijuana and halfway through an entire storebought pumpkin pie, when the news came alive with the big boom in New York. Her response at the time was basically "Whoa," which turned into a paranoid attack of the kind that occasionally attack the high on marijuana. Shaking and quivering in a puddle of her own vomit (vomit features more often than is sanitary in this character history), Leah developed a deep aversion to pumpkin pie.
Eventually, as Evolved turned up all over the news, Leah determined that she was not the only person in the world who has cool powers that turn up in an inexplicable way and which sometime result in falling through toilets (probably). She developed a plan to return to New York, find Flint, and set herself up there, somewhere in the wreckage. It would be a good place for scavengers, and since she had completely dropped off her parents' radar, he was about the only person left in the world she could trust with her wacky secret.
Maybe.
Probably.
She made it back to New York and staked out a small role for herself, looting, stealing, and occasional drug sales. This is where she has been since, in a small apartment, adopting a scattered series of aliases for the preservation of her skin.
Grounded intelligence and cynicism are the strongest pinnacles of Leah's personality. She looks out for number one, opportunitistic and clever. She has little shame anywhere within herself, although she is not without fear; paranoia lingers in the back of her mind, granting her the wisdom of caution. She wears ego like a cloak, self-containment a shield of privacy over deeper neuroses and frustrations. She is restless, restless, restless. Her sense of humor is, occasionally, really unfortunate. She has a difficult time with commitment, with intimacy, with anything emotional and gushy; maybe even a little emotionally stunted, she covers with sarcasm, distance, and sometimes violence. Although she is not generally averse to casual relationships where she is interested, she thinks love is a dirty word. Intensely pragmatic and practical, higher concerns of morality or spirituality are not important to her. She is keyed to her physicality and highly in tune with her body.
Leah has the ability to phase herself intangible; shortly and simply, she can walk through walls. She can use the ability selectively, phasing all or part of her body through solid objects. While she is intangible, nothing can touch her or harm her, but she cannot sustain this for longer than five minutes or so at a time, because it becomes difficult for her to breathe, or because as her concentration and exertion continue, she is more likely to sink through the floor or become stuck in something. With more training and practice, she might be able to extend this phased time further, but probably not by all that much. There is no alteration to the matter she is passing through, only to herself. She can bring objects with her when she phases, such as something she is holding, or the clothing she is wearing at the time (luckily!). There are limits to how much mass and volume she can phase with her — nothing larger than another single human being.
While phased, there is a feeling of disconnect from surroundings. Passing through solid matter is a little like moving through air resistance or water resistance; on those occasions when Leah must move through something solid, for example, solid ground, it is a feeling not unlike swimming or pushing against an intangible weight. Turning intangible under Leah's touch feels like an odd prickling sensation, a little like goosebumps all over. She could potentially cause considerable damage by turning part of her solid inside a person's body while phasing through them, although this has yet to occur to her. An intangible hand passing through your body is a really disconcerting sensation, anyway!