Victoria was born in your average middle class household in Queens New York. Her father worked for Local 1 as a stage hand on broadway and her mother was an Actress who never made it far past the chorus, but loved her work. At school Victoria was a strong student in things like math and physics but struggled in areas of abstract concepts and creativity. She loved numbers and how they interacted and the constants of the universe, often shunning the activities of other children her age in favor of studying or “playing” with computers.
Her skewed education became a problem in high school where she simply could not come up with the grades in most of her courses to be considered a passing student. Tutors and counselers were stumped, and even went so far as to suggest she was Autistic. Disturbed and worried by these ideas her parents decided to take her out of the school system and home school her them selves, letting her play to her advantages in math and science. By the time she was 17 Victoria had a grasp of math and physics that would make a college graduate blush. She found her favorite field of study was number theory and probability.
After a few tries and intense study and memorization she was finally able to pass her GED tests and apply for college. It was during her application process that a professor at MIT noticed her incredible grasp for math and worked his connections to get her a scholarship to the school. It was in Boston that she really shone worked on the science of quantum theory and probability. Accelerating through the courses and absorbing information like a sponge Victoria was soon teaching at the school and working on her PHD.
It was her 6th year at MIT and Victoria was turning 25 in a few weeks when something began to go horribly wrong. While conducting experiments with electron prediction she could not get an accurate result that had been almost 100 accurate before. When she left the experiment or stopped observing it, the results would revert to the expected behavior. Strange events continued to occur after this, things that would normally be very random occurring in her favor. She began to do experiments in her home, staying away from the labs not wanting to raise unwanted questions. Starting simply she flipped coins in the air, and was able to nudge the probability of the coins landing just enough to produce heads nearly every time.
With an answering machine full of worried messages, Victoria had become a recluse and turned her apartment into a probability lab, with experiments ranging from simple things such as dice, to a ball bearing landing on a perfect wedge and controlling which way the ball bearing would fall. By pushing the experiments to finer and finer scales she was able to find the boundaries of what she could effect, and discovered the higher the probability of something happening was the easier it was to effect.
It didn’t take her long to get on to a plane for Las Vegas to do more “experiments”. With a degree in quantum theory and probability she was Las Vegas’s worst nightmare, even without her new abilities. Some games were easy to manipulate such as dice, though her control was not perfect she won a good deal more than she lost. Other games like Roulette and cards had to many uncontrollable variables that she could only semi successfully effect the outcomes of these games.
It was while she sat at a slot machine that she discovered one of the larger drawbacks of her abilities, if she could not see or specifically understand the points of probability she could not touch them. Modern slot machines were computer controlled and had nothing to do with momentum or random mechanics, the point of effect was to far removed for her to touch.
After a month in Las Vegas Victoria returned to Boston a good deal wealthier and more curious than ever about her new abilities. She began to play with more complex objects develop a sense for probabilities. Much like a watch maker may look at a time piece and understand the intracacies of each gear and movement, Victoria developed a sense where she could feel the different probabilities about an object, and find the weaknesses where the odds of failure were high, like on a worn spring or fatiuged piece of metal, and with enough effort push the probability of failure to higher and higher points until it finally gave. This sort of intricate work put an incredible drain on her though, so she became less and less inclined to try to effect fine things.
Victoria had just turned 28 when she heard news of the Bomb in New York. With desperate hope she began to make her way to her home town. Unable to reach her parents she tried to find any mode of fast transportation but everything was quickly shut down by the government. It took her 3 days to fight through traffic and barricades to finally reach the city and get any news of her Parents. Both had been working on a show in the Theater District when the Bomb went off, a special childrens matinee.
Stunned by the loss of her parents and the realization that nothing would be the same again, Victoria drew even further into herself. Living out of her parents home in Queens she only left long enough to make trips to Atlantic City of Las Vegas to earn money to live off, but she found no pleasure in anything she did, it was simply a means to survive. When the world learned of the Evolved and Victoria realised she was now a violently hated minority she found it harder and harder to make her money. Casinos began to grow suspicious of anyone doing well and she had to start using disguises to even get close enough to a casino earn enough to eat.
After a while this was simply not enough to live so she went in search of work in New York and luckily found a job with the City doing statistical and prediction research for what areas of reconstruction to concentrate on to best effect the populous and provide the best returns in the short run.