Mindwitch
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Rebecca, in her new armored costume | |
| Mindwitch | |
| Player: Primana | |
| Origin: | Mutant |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Defender |
| Security Level: | 35 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Rebecca Rousseau |
| Known Aliases: | Becca; Redeemed; Brain Freeze |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 28 |
| Height: | 5'8" |
| Weight: | 135 |
| Eye Color: | Black |
| Hair Color: | Black |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | US Citizen, Hawaiian/Chinese & French descent |
| Occupation: | Freelance mercenary |
| Place of Birth: | Santa Barbara, CA |
| Base of Operations: | Confidential |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Diego Cross (son); Rafael Cross (son); Thomas Cross (baby-daddy); Jacques Rousseau (father, deceased); Mia Chen (mother, deceased); Rene Laurent (a.k.a. Esprit de Lion, half-brother); Diego Morales (adopted father) |
| Known Powers | |
| Telepathy, telekinesis, empathy. | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Confidential | |
| Equipment | |
| Confidential | |
| No additional information available. | |
Mindwitch was created by Primana, who can be reached online via the global @Primana or on the CoX boards at the same name. Originally created as an RP partner for a specific person, the character was intriguing enough to persist on her own.
Contents |
Personality
Rebecca has no interest in being a hero. She just doesn’t have the urge to help people en masse. If confronted with one person who needs help, she’ll step in. She’s decent enough for that. In addition to her hero duties, she’s been known to redirect nightmares, stop arguments, and otherwise tamper with peoples’ minds and emotions when she regards them as negative or destructive. She’s got a sharp wit and a quick mind, and genuinely likes most people. She’s also a hedonist, taking delight in the pleasure of the moment whether it’s something delicious to drink, the feel of fabric on her skin, sunlight on her face, or just the fun of really stretching her powers. It’s all about the fun for Becca, and all about living in the moment. It would be easy to call her shallow, but that’s easy and not necessarily correct.
History
The Paragon City Wolf Pack
Twelve years ago, a fifteen-year-old Rebecca Rousseau came to Paragon City from California, with the blessings of her parents in the hopes that the demands of being a hero would ground some sense of ethics into their daughter’s head. She was born with her psychic abilities, grew up with them, and used them automatically. She never thought twice about speaking mentally rather than physically, and no one was ever mistaken about a thing she felt.
Rebecca joined the Paragon City Wolf Pack, taking on the name Brain Freeze (she claims now that sixteen-year-olds have no sense of cool names). The leader, Diego Morales, was the son of a friend of the family. Although he lacked any mental powers of his own, he had preternaturally sharp instincts that always caught her when she tried to use her abilities on him. His strong sense of honor and dignity also impressed themselves on the girl, and Diego was able to get her to toe the line where no one else had been at all successful. When Rebecca’s parents died in a car crash, Diego took steps to formally adopt her.
Later that same year, a member of the PCWP became the target of a Nictus. Ubergeek, as he was known, had always been one of the more withdrawn members of their group. Everyone sensed something had changed, but no one could pin it down. Diego asked Rebecca to keep a closer eye on him. She didn’t discover the Nictus until Ubergeek become open enough to its persuasion to be entirely possessed by the creature. Rather than seek help, Rebecca attempted to prevent the Nictus from taking over Brian. She failed.
Recovery
Five years later, she woke up in a long-term care facility with complete amnesia. She couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, could perform only the most basic of functions. Her recovery was slow, but steady. Five years after she woke up, she left the hospital for a halfway house in Atlas Park. By that time, she had recovered physically but had almost no memories of her past. She knew her name, she knew English, and a smattering of other languages though she didn’t remember how she knew them and often was surprised to find she did.
Additionally, her powers were fully functional but far weaker than they had been. Her security level was reduced back to Level 1, and she took the name “Redeemed” due to her new status. Becca also discovered a new ability; she was able to teleport people across great distances. Though she rarely speaks of this ability, it’s her belief that she somehow picked it up from the Nictus who attacked her.
Rebecca had daily psychological therapy at the hospital, and weekly visits after she entered the halfway house. During the early days of therapy, Becca learned to grapple with her total loss of identity. She had no past, no knowledge of who she was or how she came to be. In therapy, she developed something of a mantra to help her get through the moments of suicidal depression or blind rage: The past is set and cannot be changed. The future will never come. All that exists is this moment, right now. Although she grew to accept her state of mind, she had frequent nightmares about the Nictus, an incident she remembers with unforgiving clarity. She rarely slept, and avoided all contact with any Kheldian.
While she was living at the halfway house, Becca encountered the hero Deathspider. He was confused, lost, and dazed. She found his need impossible to ignore. She calmed him, helped him, and that kicked off the start of their relationship. Becca felt safe with him, despite how they met. She believed that he could always keep her safe. However, the two had a few major points of conflict: Miguel believed in helping people just because you could and they needed help and Becca couldn’t understand the mindset. To her, there would always be people who needed help and you could kill yourself trying without making a dent. Better to live your life to the fullest than spend it in a pointless struggle. The other problem was Becca’s restless nature. She didn’t like staying in one place for long, she liked to keep moving, to explore places and see new cities.
She left without telling him that she was going, and went to California to search for anything related to her parents or her past. She wasn’t desperate, just curious. It was a new place to her, and it would be neat to see where she grew up. While there, she encountered an Indian shaman who, upon hearing her story, offered to help her recover her memories. The effort took days, but failed. There are almost no memories to recover. They are simply gone.
When she returned to Paragon City, the two managed to mend their relationship but things were strained. She followed him to the Rogue Isles where he was working undercover, and took a job at the Golden Giza as a cocktail waitress for a short time. However, she found the mental pressure of living in the unrelentingly hostile atmosphere impossible to bear for long periods. The relationship didn’t stand the pressure, and the two parted ways when Becca once again simply left.
She traveled again, this time making contact with the surviving former members of the PCWP. Eventually, she ended up with Diego, back in their mutual home state of California. She didn’t stay long (Diego’s new wife was positive Becca was looking to seduce the man). When she left, Diego told her that her problem wasn’t geographical, it was spiritual. He suggested she return to Paragon City and become a hero. “It’s the one thing you haven’t tried yet,” he said.
The Present
Around Valentine’s Day of 2007, she reapplied for hero status. She met up with Thomas Cross, also a psychic. His powers mirror hers in some ways, though they each have areas in which they are stronger than the other. Her empathy is what he calls “physio-empathy”, strong enough to affect the body. His telekinesis is much more effective than hers, and he additionally has powers of precognition that she lacks entirely. She lived for a short time at his penthouse in Founders Falls, but now has her own place in Galaxy City. She has been photographed with Cross numerous times, and has kept one photo of the two at a gallery opening where his paintings were on display. The caption of the photo reads, “Villain turned philanthropist painter, Thomas Cross and known Paragon party girl, Rebecca Rousseau”. She has had it framed and has it on her bedside table.
Becca gave birth to twin sons, Diego and Raphael, on Valentine's Day 2008. She lives with their father, Thomas Cross, though the two have not married and have no plans to do so. Currently, Rebecca gains some work as a freelance mercenary, selling her psychic talents mostly to clients who want protection from other psychics. She does not belong to any hero group, but has been involved in a great deal of heroic work usually assisting family members in their heroic endeavours.
Her latest change has been to revamp her look and to take a new hero name. Becca began to feel her 'redeemed' status was holding her to a past of regret and sadness. In order to be redeemed, after all, one has to have been redeemed from something. She began to feel the name itself was holding her back, and when the opportunity arose to claim the name "Mindwitch", she took it.
Powers
Rebecca remains a strong telepath and empath. She combines her empathy with a fine control of telekinesis to manipulate the bodies of people she touches. She can heal wounds, affect the balance of neurotransmitters in the body, calm a racing heart, or put someone to sleep. Her telekinesis is somewhat less effective in big effects. She can either do very small things or very big things and not much in between. She can, for instance, fling a person away from her, but she cannot close a door with TK. She has learned how to pick herself up, and is aware that some TKs can use their abilities to fly, but has so far been hesitant to make the attempt.
She can also open a dimensional doorway and pull people through from distant locations. This is not a facet of her psychic powers and was not an ability she had before the Nictus. She uses the power so that she knows how to control it, knows its limits, but she doesn’t like to think about where it came from or why she has it.
During her pregnancy, Becca focused almost entirely on her empathic abilities, using them to ensure her pregnancy would persist until Valentine's Day, 2008. With this extended focus on one facet of her talent, her empathic powers have become far dominant to her telepathy or telekinesis to the extent that her hero status has been changed.
Ethics
Expecting Becca not to use her psychic abilities is, to her, tantamount to asking her to cripple herself. As she put it in a recent discussion, “If I had arms and no one around me did, would people ask me to stop reaching for things?”
She ‘hears’ thoughts like people hear voices. She doesn’t reach out unless necessary, and thus she typically only hears those closest to her, but even that level of babble can get annoying. She finds that if she just lets it go in one ear and out the other, it doesn’t bother her. You hear more people in a restaurant than Becca ‘hears’ walking down the street.
Of more use to her is her empathy. She knows people, she ‘gets’ them. She uses her empathy effortlessly, thoughtlessly, at least when it comes to sensing what other people feel. She can project her feelings, but refrains from doing so casually. She does use it (and advocates its use by other empaths) to “fix” misunderstandings. When Diego’s wife mistook Becca’s feelings for Diego and became jealous, Becca showed her the truth of Becca’s feelings. Which, of course, sparked a whole other fight but at least the woman wasn’t jealous anymore. To Becca, there’s a vast difference between that and actually changing someone’s mind. The latter she wouldn’t do except in emergencies, the former is fair game. It’s no different than explaining yourself, except this is better because there’s no possibility of misunderstanding.
She thinks her abilities have given her insight into the human condition, and yet she still likes people. She knows they’re usually thinking selfish, nasty things that they wouldn’t dream of saying aloud. They’re often violent and cruel or just disgusting. People think about how their balls itch, or how that woman’s breasts move under her shirt. They think about killing their bosses or not going home to their houses and kids. They think about picking their noses and wondering if anyone’s seeing. But she grew up knowing that. That’s just the definition of ‘humanity’, to her. Still, it may be no surprise that she has few inhibitions about using her abilities on people who don’t have them. She likes people, but she doesn’t respect many of them at all.
