Name: Amanda d'Selvaryn
Alias: Trouble
Race: Human...-ish.
Age: 17
Occupation: First-class pilot, revolutionary
Appearance: Looking her age and then some, Amanda stands about 5'8" and weighs 125 lbs. She's a mixture between slim and athletic, muscled enough to take on someone fairly larger than she is, but leaning towards the slim side all the same. With dark blonde hair reaching below her shoulder blades and a sun-kissed tan, she usually wears denim jeans, some kind of shirt - most often white - and a black leather jacket she is particularly partial to. She has three earrings in the right ear and four in the left, including a cartilege cuff, a tongue ring, and a gold-linked necklace. There is a tattoo of some oriental looking symbols in her right shoulderblade.
Abilities: A crack shot and an expert pilot, Amanda has customized herself through severe training into a jack of all trades. Hand to hand combat, knives of varying kinds and lengths, and handguns are her choice weapons. Aside from her ability with those, she is very fast, faster than most humans. The product of a highly advanced genetic experiement that endeavored to combine the strongest attributes of humans and the other great races, most specifically the Freyans, she possesses a unique genetic heritage, though the majority of those foreign genes turned out being recessive, it did give her a faint but blossoming ability at telepathy, and a dearth of strong emotions. She can remain very calm in situations, and does not act based on her emotions, though she can be rambunctious and troublesome at times, she goes on calculated rationale when she can, instincts when she can't, but emotions usually don't play a part for her.
She can suddenly teleport when she channels her telepathy talent together with a customized warp device. She wears it on her left wrist, almost like a wristband with a very small, flexible computer screen built into it. Rather than going through the entire process of warping, or, jumping into hyperspace with a ship, it hones on Amanda's telepathic ability and opens up a different kind of "space" and allows her to move through it instantly. The device only works for her, as it is linked to an implant in her para cortex, and operates on her individual wavelength only. She can, however, teleport people with her, to an extent.
Background: Amanda was created by a group of Collective scientists and geneticists, biologists and chemists, each the best of the best in their field. Even before conception, Amanda was a multi-billion credit project. The genetic manipulation before her birth was merely a precursor of what was to come. For the first eight years of her life, she knew nothing but the inside of a laboratory, white walls and people in white uniforms. For the next four she was kept in seclusion, training and learning to operate her given abilities. She had access to immeasurable resources, and took up a hobby in piloting, though mostly in a simulator because of the Collective's unwillingness to let her free in a real ship. Eventually, though, they did, and after a couple years of loyal flying around and returning as asked, Amanda fled, and has been causing havoc for the Collective ever since. She doesn't remember much of her first ten years or so, unfortunately.
Other: Her ship is also customized, a sleek hybrid that she practically built. She knows it inside and out, and recently perfected the hyperspace jumper. It's technologically advanced, even for the time, as far as many ships and their computer control systems go. She loaded it with an arsenal of plasma cannons and short-guided missiles.
Telepathy Explanation: Now seems like a good time to draw out the distinction between Amanda's telepathy and Freyan telepathy.
If you were to refer back to the description as to how Amanda's telepathy and other such "powers" bestowed upon her by genetic enhancements works, you'll first see that her telepathy is just as much as a hybrid of technological genius and genetic gift as she is. Since it's quite obviously impossible to "fake" a Freyan telepathic signal, and therefore, equally impossible to artificially create the talent, she is forced to enhance her own ability, though with a few twists. If she didn't enhance it, her telepathy would abviously be much weaker, and tentative. She would only have a 35-50% of picking up someone's thoughts, even when consciously searching for them.
In order to explain how the enhancements were made, one must first understand how telepathy itself works. We are all aware of the five main senses - touch, smell, hearing, sight, and taste - operate through the sensory cortex. The gift of telepathy however, operates through a section of the brain that is so underdeveloped in humans that plasticity of the human mind has lent that particular section to other mind processes; namely, emotion, which explains why humans have such an excess of emotions in comparison to the very monotonous Freyans. Whereas this section of the brain, which contends with the various inborn mutations and genetic throwbacks and "supernatural powers", which will be referred to as the para cortex, is approximately 35% operational in even the most talented of Freyan telepathics, in Amanda, as she was born - or rather, as she was created - it operated at something closer to 80%. Even so, it did not necessarily lend all that strength to telepathy, and rather dappled in various other areas of the supernatural. And, despite all the potential she does have, her control over it is very weak, which is why she still requires the assistance of the device she wears on her arm, the Pegasus. Though it is best suited for her teleportation, it also controls the ebb and flow of another device, microscopic to say the least, that was implanted in her para cortex. The reason for this was, as the geneticists and scientists responsible for creating her had hoped, to enhance the potential to 100% and give her control over it. While it did little to enhance potential, it did successfully give Amanda nearly complete control over her abilities, and as she gains more experience and strength, she will have less and less of a reliance on the device, till eventually she will not need it at all.
While that day is a fair time off, it still exists.
In the meantime, to be brief, the distinguishment between Amanda's telepathy is that hers carries a different signal than the Freyan's, because a telepathic signal is impossible to fake, so Amanda's is partially inborn, and partially substituted by the device. Because the signal is different, it works differently. Amanda does not simply read people, she gets into their mind by establishing a weak link, meaning as opposed to the Freyan ability of reading things in the conscious, she could extract information from the subconscious, preconscious, perhaps even the unconscious, though this is something she has never tried. It is through this link that she can also use her compulsion, similar to the way she compelled the thugs to fall asleep.
The downfall is if she cannot establish a link, she can neither read nor compel the person at hand. While many devices and techniques have been devised to block against telepathy, Amanda was created for the purpose of evading them. Devices do little to stand in her way, it is more often a matter of will, and exceptional will, which humans do not even possess and even most Freyans lack, that can dissuade her use of telepathy. One method, however, the only thing that as of yet she has been unable to overcome, is the Hindsberg Technique. And she has tried, and failed, many times. This makes her a little wary of Madadric.
_________________ <center><i>Don't touch the pretty, fucker.</i></center>
Last edited by Angel On Crack on Sun May 25, 2003 12:51 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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