Marcie grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. She had the classic white picket fence. Tree-lined street, low crime rate, kids actually playing with their neighbors. Her father was a lawyer and her mother owned a bakery. Both commuted to The City for work. Marcie graduated high school with a low C average, and subsequently lived at home while attending a local community college. She never really expected to continue on to a four-year institution.
Marcie got along pretty well with her parents for the first part of her life. The first major fight they had was when Marcie took up smoking, just after starting at the college. In March 2005, however, just after her 19th birthday, she began feeling a sense of paranoia. Like people were watching her. Specific people. But when she turned around everything would appear normal. And her parents wouldn't believe her. They took her to see a shrink, who prescribed anti-anxiety meds. These helped a little, but made Marcie feel awful and disconnected. She soon stopped taking them, and resolved to simply lie to her parents and tell them everything was better. During this time, Marcie took the semester off from school, quoting health reasons.
She returned to school at the beginning of the next semester, but her relationship with her parents would never be the same. Marcie was feeling cut off and wanting to rebel. She began buying pot from a guy at the college, which helped with the paranoia, and had the added benefit of pissing off her parents. One day she was idly mentioning to the dealer that she'd love to have the money to get out of her parents' house and live on her own. He said he knew a guy who'd give her a couple hundred bucks, just for making a delivery for him. All she had to do was take a package from Jersey to Queens. The only trick was, she couldn't ask what was in the package. Marcie had him make the introduction.
She found that the same skills she used to lie to her parents about her paranoia came in handy on these deliveries. All she had to do was stay calm and not act suspicious. It was easy money. And the guy who gave her the packages and addresses saw that she did a good job, which led to more work. In a few months, she had a nice savings built up. She moved away from home and got a small efficiency in another part of New Jersey.
When the bomb went off, her parents were at work. Both were killed instantly. The home Marcie grew up in was in the fallout zone, and uninhabitable. Marcie's apartment was untouched. She dropped out of school. She had many regrets about the way she had left things with her parents, but by that time it was too late. She continued running packages, getting more work now that public transportation was down due to the bomb. She bought a gun and learned the basics of how to use it, for protection from the looters and others who might accost her.
A couple months later, the man Marcie worked for was killed in a disagreement with the Linderman group. They took over his operations. The packages Marcie carried became more varied, including not only the ones she strongly suspected to be drugs, but also some that seemed to contain papers of some sort. She didn't ask questions. She didn't get killed.
On February 18, 2007, just a few days before Marcie's 21st birthday, Senator Nathan Petrelli announced the existence of the Evolved to the world. And finally things started to make sense to Marcie. The people she had sensed for the past few years were Evolved, and so was she. They were different. She had been right. Were they really watching her? She didn't know. But she soon discovered that if she was close enough, and if she focused on the feeling of the Evolved being there, she could get a sense of what they could do. And if she touched them, she could tell even more. She also saw news of the beatings, the killings, of people even suspected to be Evolved. She kept her mouth shut. No one could be allowed to know what she could do. If she was lucky, they'd use her to help the witch hunt. If she was unlucky, they'd simply kill her. Neither option appealed to her.
When the Linderman Act passed, Marcie failed to turn up and register her powers. She wasn't stupid. A lull in the violence didn't mean it was done, and she didn't want to be on a list for the mobs to track down and kill. She continued to live her life. She didn't ask questions, she stayed calm, and she didn't volunteer anything. That was the way to stay alive.
