Name: Mia Jones
Codename: Machete
Age: 26
Power: Mia possesses your typical super-strength and insane reflexes, as well as various other improvements upon her body. She can rip down your door with ease, turn over a car, and kick your head off your shoulders. Her strength is not derived from over-inflated muscles, but her dense muscle strands being capable of exerting a hundred times more force than the average man - enough to bench press at least 17,500 lbs (or African elephant - and then some). As for her reflexes, she is capable of reacting to events as soon as they come to her senses or sees it coming and so on. While she can't dodge bullets, she can retaliate against her assailants as soon as they come within arm's reach. As for her other traits, the endurance upgrade that comes with Quartz had issued her greater endurance than the standard. While not invulnerable and still very much prone to gun shots, she is capable of tanking a professional boxer's punch to her abdomen without flinching and shaking off bare knuckle punches - this applies to aerobic endurance, allowing her cardiovascular system to become less winded with greater physical exertion. And of course, whenever she hits her shin on something by accident and it hurts like hell, she can rest easy knowing that whatever she kicked was probably demolished.
Appearance: Mia, a 5'9" woman weighing 198 lbs, appears well built and physically toned. While not having a body builder form, her muscles are thick enough to accentuate and tone her modest curvature. She is strong without working out, and it shows through her physique (it ain't washboard, but the woman has got abs). As implied above, she is not impressively tall, though nor is she short enough to give a weak or vulnerable vibe. Much of her weight comes from her power, having dense muscles and bones. Her skin is mostly clear of blemishes, save for the obvious scar on her face - and speaking of her face, it is particularly pronounced and gives the impression of an independent woman. Her jawline is strong and symmetrical and meets up at a pointed, yet squared off chin. This feature is accentuated by thin cheeks and sharp cheek bones, and lips several shades lighter - a trait hidden by dark makeup that is applied to her lips, a gentle black that doesn't shine or gloss under light, nor sticks out like a sore thumb on her brown face. Her nose is also sharp. It's length isn't pronounced, and appears proportionate to her face and her bridge thick, though thin in width. Given these sharp features and fierce, striking appearance, her eyes are an alarming contrast. Her left eye is nearly stark white. With a milky cornea and cataract-afflicted pupil, her eye is totally blind. Her right eye is covered by a scar that goes down to the top of her cheek. The same ugly scar rips through the center of her eye, making her blind in that eye as well. Her face alone is an unnerving combination of beauty and danger, despite her disability.
Her black hair is usually well-managed and clean (meaning very little oil, if any), often done up in something like an updo of an undercut mohawk, generally done with very little product. Given how it's easy to do, where the hair doesn't bother her face, and supposedly looks good and isn't impractically long, Mia found it to be well suited for her. She has a soldierly posture: her head held high, firm soldiers, straight back, and a heavy footstep. It suggests she knows discipline, a factor that likely sculpted her in her early childhood. Her abdomen is ripe with muscle, she carries c-cup breasts that she does not flaunt, and her legs are strong and have only a few scars from minor injuries such as scraping a shin or knee by accident. Her feet can be considered large, and are fortunately not affected by dreaded bunions. She has a few piercings. One is a half-ring septum piercing and three small loops on her left ear's upper lobe. They are all made of brass.
Given her lack of sight, Mia has a pretty weak sense of fashion. Fortunately, she already had a wardrobe before she lost her sight. At the bare minimum of clothes, she always wears a sports bra and men's boxer briefs, thinking they're more comfortable than other under garments. Over that, a men's tank top is worn over her torso, and she dons a pair of Lee's boot-cut jeans. Over her white shirt, she tends to wear a fleece flannel shirt, due to the comfort and warmth it provides (she remembers her favorite one having a yellow and black color scheme but can't really tell which is which anymore). Should the weather get any worse than that, she has an old brown leather jacket she got from her husband when they were younger. She tends to wear this pair of light brown unstylish work boots because they're comfy and firm and she has no clue how ugly they actually are.
Personality: Spiteful, contemptuous, driven; strangers often characterize her as enigmatic and scornful. She reveals nothing and manages most people with disdain. This disdain, however, is mysteriously sourced and gives the impression it stands as preexisting stress and is redirected towards whomever spoke to her. Other times, she simply ignores them or gives them the silent treatment. On any other occasion, she simply shares short, brief words and returns to her thoughts. She lacks the arrogance or overconfidence some superpower test subjects may come to don, however, has the tendency to peg others as fools. She bides and listens, and she isn't one to put her trust into another very lightly. Morever, Mia is incredibly driven. She doesn't let on to others what her reasons might be, but she moves forward with such inspiring conviction despite the obstacles set before her.
She had a good deal of morals before, and though her attitude and outlook took a major turn for the worse, they still stick with her to some degree. While no longer being interested in politics, she'd still be more prone to vote liberal. While no longer concerned about most peoples' welfare, she'd beat the crap out of a rapist. And while hurt feelings no longer bother her, she'd still make a sexist or racist person buckle over and plant her foot on them. She has morals - they've just become become much looser than they were before. She thinks little of Obsidian, and will carry out orders not out of faith or loyalty, but because it is a job. She also hates the chip coursing through her blood stream, as she feels it makes her unable to walk out should she no longer be interested in remaining acquainted with Obsidian - it removes any freedom or ultimatum of leaving, and taking away options makes her rather bitter.
Despite her feelings for most other people, she actually treats them with apathy more than she does in deliberately rude gestures or words. This gives her an unmatched degree of bluntness and ability to speak her mind without caring who is listening or how they may react or feel according to her words. Before the accident, she was deeply in love and was incredibly faithful and protective of her spouse. To some extent, this may hold true even now should she ever find a sense of belonging. Even if she does though, she reassures herself that there isn't any point in trusting anybody with her story. Her story is no one's business and she does not intend on "opening up" or getting "touchy feely" with anybody. However, her energy is drained and she finds herself in an incredibly vulnerable position, despite her greatest efforts to appear strong. While Mia still able to maintain the facade of strength and durability, there's little she can do to escape the sense of a downward spiral towards an emotional breakdown.
Strengths and Weaknesses: Aside from the powers the Quartz serum provided her with, she has additional physical strengths, having taken a martial arts course in krav maga. But Mia is also pretty intelligent, though it doesn't often show through her silence and bitter comments. She's clever enough to make her own plans and to make short-term strategies, as well as to banter with the best of them. She is also very suspicious by default, skeptical of most people she comes across and has something of a bullshit sensor, though not quite as finely tuned as Leila's. She has a very strong sense of realism (border-lining pessimism by how she states her stance) that can be very grounding to those who might get their hopes up. She has enough mental endurance to withstand torture or resist persuasion. She is very in tune with the rest of her senses - hearing, smell, sense of touch, sense of location and body, and adjusted to rely on these senses to try and observe the world around her without her sight. As a result, sneaking up on her might be more difficult, as she is more in tune with her instincts and sense of hearing than most people.
As for her weaknesses, her blindness goes without saying. A blanket of darkness acts as a permanent veil to the world outside her eyes. Mia is also a pretty bitter woman, and this makes diplomatic missions more difficult for her. While she can cooperate, she won't hide her disdain from the people she is working with. She also is not a very good shoulder to cry on should any of her team mates be experiencing any difficulties or stress - most of her motherly instincts have been forsaken. But when it comes to small children who might be in danger, she gets a twinge of frustration with herself until she brings herself to protect them. Senseless crying, though? Rolling her eyes or perhaps snapping at them. She also is not fit for a leadership role. She prefers to cut the garbage and get straight to the point and isn't interested in uplifting speeches or being bothered with telling everyone what they have to do. It just isn't in her. She is rather outspoken in her lack of love for authority figures, namely police forces. Her bitterness and disregard can be used against her, since when she becomes especially pissed off, she has a pretty "straight-line" train of thought.
History: The layout is simple: Mia had a pretty good life until her twenties. She was happy as a little girl. Got attention from her parents, and was pushed into more boyish activities by her father, who had wanted a boy. As naive as Mia was, this didn't really bother her very much and led a pretty normal life. She had a fair amount of friends from elementary and throughout high, was adept at taking apart her dad's truck and putting it back together, was persuaded by her mother to take up painting (and much to Mia's surprise, she enjoyed it). When she got into high school, Mia was fairly pretty enough to grab the attention of a couple boys and tough enough to keep them in line. At sixteen, she met a white boy named Roy,and started off as friends before she discovered she liked him halfway through the year. A lot. Taking him to meet the folks was a bit odd, since interracial relationships was a bit iffy to her parents, but she went ahead and scoffed at their conservative beliefs. It turns out that the two fit together like puzzle pieces. The two crucial pieces of a complex game where each individual piece of the map had to be worked around the two.
There was little to stop the two young and starstruck lovers from planning out their future. As fate would have it though, the James Grey factory explosion irreparably damaged a section of Aurum City and harmful radiation flooded her and her parents' townhouse in uptown Aurum. Roy was "lucky" enough to live in the downtown section, further away from the blast. Mia's parents worked nearby, leaving Mia alone when she had to be rushed to a hospital. When Roy checked on her, there it was discovered that while she didn't suffer immediate damage from the blast, the radiation had brought damage to her ovaries and one of her kidneys. She would be able to live happily with only one kidney as long as she didn't drink, but any chance of bearing a child was gone. Having kids was never really something they thought about anyways, and that news wouldn't bother them until their later years when they realized what it actually meant. Her parents were permanently hospitalized - her father was put into a coma, and her mother suffered so much radiation she was forced to stay on life support to survive. Roy and his family offered to help Mia and by allowing her to live with them in LA. It was only when Mia and Roy were nineteen did they decide to move out. They were done with school and they rented out a small apartment on the border of downtown for just the two of them. Mia worked at a garage and Roy worked kitchen jobs. Even with their small incomes together, they couldn't afford college for even one of them, but they decided to just save their money and be happy with what they had. They finally married when they were twenty years old.
The following two years were fine. They excelled at their jobs, they got hobbies, they biked around town (Mia always being a couple lengths in front of Roy), and all seemed fine. At some point during the second year though, normal life seemed to fall apart. There had been increased gang activity further down town, and Mia must have made a wrong stop or bought groceries at the wrong store - something must have been a front or connection that made a branch of the LAPD crack down and target Mia, who believed her to have ties with the Bloods - she figured they either had to have been pretty scared or itching to exercise their authority to target someone without any solid ground (she always said it was because she was WWB; walking while black). Regardless of their reasons, they interrogated Mia. They asked her all sorts of questions - about the Bloods, about her ties - having no connection with the Skulls, she denied any knowledge of them or their intents. They didn't believe her. They suspected her of lying and deceit and was promptly subjected her to torture. Most of their methods had limited or brought no scarring, but another over-enthusiastic cop brought up the method was laser-eye torture. This is how she lost sight in her left eye.
Roy finally discovered she had been arrested due to allegations of association with the Bloods. Along with vouching for her, he provided her medical records and legal records where there were no signs or ties with the local Bloods. She was released and subsequently promised insurance benefits in the form of large sums of monthly payments as long as she remained quiet about the misunderstanding. Mia was by no means willing to satisfy the police department, and neither was Roy. However, they decided that they were best off to accept the compensation and avoid further trouble with the department, despite the couple's seething rage for the new-found police force - they also needed the money. The next four years went somewhat smoothly, despite the burning hot bouts of rage she felt each time she looked in the mirror and saw her blind eye. She was forced to keep a cap on it lest she do something stupid and create more problems for herself and the LAPD.
But the four years were smooth, aside from that. She learned how to move around and grab things without her left eye, she became a little more reliant on other senses - most notably her hearing - and she found an outlet for her aggression in a martial arts class. Her and her husband both that that signing up for a krav maga course was a good idea, but that she should be careful with letting off too much steam. Mia agreed and so the twenty-five year old went on to visit the dojo every Tuesday and Thursday. Hearing about some charity advocating the aid of victims from gang fights and police brutality, hearing and what they stood for, she and Roy immediately supported them, and while Mia wasn't active in their cause, she was still eager to help them out in some way. For instance, fixing some of their vehicles. The work was hard, their vehicles were different and required a little bit of learning, but she still felt pretty honored to help them out.
It was at the end of the four years, six months before now, Roy was out shopping and doing errands for a couple of friends in the neighborhood. Upon coming back, he found himself in the middle of a firefight that seemed to have spontaneously broke out downtown. Gang members were holing up in their apartment disguised hideouts and the police forces stormed through in what seemed like seconds. Caught in the crossfire, Roy was killed, shredded by bullets from one direction and bullets from the other.
The firefight lasted a grueling three hours before it calmed down, too long for a wounded man like Roy to endure. Mia received a call from the hospital to give her the grim news. Heartbroken, Mia trashed the house and, in a fit of rage and grief and guilt, she grabbed one of the apartment's kitchen knives and carved her remaining eye. She stayed there, laying on carpet weeping and bleeding for a solid hour, pale faced. A solid hour before a neighbor decided to find out what was the ruckus was about. A solid hour before an ambulance was called for her.
Mia is now totally blind. She stayed in the hospital for about a month, being treated for her eye, as well as undergoing mental recuperation to recover from the shock of suddenly losing her only loved one. After her month was over, she was issued a cane and she stayed in her old, trashed apartment for another month, doing just the bare minimum to survive - and struggling to do even that now that she was blind. On her second month staying at home, she finally began to try mimicking daily life, despite the struggle to figure out what was around her. It took a while for her to walk comfortably whilst blind, and for her to remember how the house felt through her cane. It was by the end of that second month was she able to regain control of herself and understand the situation in full: the LAPD - they killed him. It was their fault. Their fault for her husband, their fault for her eyes - all of it! Whatever rage or contempt she had before was dwarfed by the pit of burning coals that sat in her chest every day. By the fourth month she went back to the dojo (albeit with some struggle - she would later acquire a device that would help her navigate the city, like a hand held GPS). With some effort, the instructor was able to help her work around her blindness.
The dojo became a regular outlet for her. She took out her aggression there (on punching bags, of course), honed her other senses through sparring sessions (sense of hearing, place, and the length of her body), and learned how to control her strength and how to make the most of it. She invested so much time into that dojo, she became capable of reacting as swiftly to the movements she hears from the other students as they could by sight, and she learned maneuvers to help her work around the possibility of an assailant holding a weapon to her. While the dojo helped her live with her blindness, it did little to satiate her anger. The blind woman saw opportunity with the Bloods, and while she cared very little for them, she wanted some way to get back at the police department and through the Bloods, that was possible. So she sought to waltz right into their base and demand a place. Which sounds arrogant, but her demands stem from anger and desperation, as opposed to arrogance - before that could happen, she was found by an Obsidian representative. Given how she had so little to lose at this point, she figured why the hell not and went ahead.
Other: Despite being blind, her sparring matches has helped to give her a "battle-sense". Much of this has to do with sense of hearing (their footsteps and breath), and feeling and hearing the subtle differences in the air, but it is something more innate than just that. Much of her fights run off instinct, and she describes it as having something like a flow.
Codename: Machete
Age: 26
Power: Mia possesses your typical super-strength and insane reflexes, as well as various other improvements upon her body. She can rip down your door with ease, turn over a car, and kick your head off your shoulders. Her strength is not derived from over-inflated muscles, but her dense muscle strands being capable of exerting a hundred times more force than the average man - enough to bench press at least 17,500 lbs (or African elephant - and then some). As for her reflexes, she is capable of reacting to events as soon as they come to her senses or sees it coming and so on. While she can't dodge bullets, she can retaliate against her assailants as soon as they come within arm's reach. As for her other traits, the endurance upgrade that comes with Quartz had issued her greater endurance than the standard. While not invulnerable and still very much prone to gun shots, she is capable of tanking a professional boxer's punch to her abdomen without flinching and shaking off bare knuckle punches - this applies to aerobic endurance, allowing her cardiovascular system to become less winded with greater physical exertion. And of course, whenever she hits her shin on something by accident and it hurts like hell, she can rest easy knowing that whatever she kicked was probably demolished.
Appearance: Mia, a 5'9" woman weighing 198 lbs, appears well built and physically toned. While not having a body builder form, her muscles are thick enough to accentuate and tone her modest curvature. She is strong without working out, and it shows through her physique (it ain't washboard, but the woman has got abs). As implied above, she is not impressively tall, though nor is she short enough to give a weak or vulnerable vibe. Much of her weight comes from her power, having dense muscles and bones. Her skin is mostly clear of blemishes, save for the obvious scar on her face - and speaking of her face, it is particularly pronounced and gives the impression of an independent woman. Her jawline is strong and symmetrical and meets up at a pointed, yet squared off chin. This feature is accentuated by thin cheeks and sharp cheek bones, and lips several shades lighter - a trait hidden by dark makeup that is applied to her lips, a gentle black that doesn't shine or gloss under light, nor sticks out like a sore thumb on her brown face. Her nose is also sharp. It's length isn't pronounced, and appears proportionate to her face and her bridge thick, though thin in width. Given these sharp features and fierce, striking appearance, her eyes are an alarming contrast. Her left eye is nearly stark white. With a milky cornea and cataract-afflicted pupil, her eye is totally blind. Her right eye is covered by a scar that goes down to the top of her cheek. The same ugly scar rips through the center of her eye, making her blind in that eye as well. Her face alone is an unnerving combination of beauty and danger, despite her disability.
Her black hair is usually well-managed and clean (meaning very little oil, if any), often done up in something like an updo of an undercut mohawk, generally done with very little product. Given how it's easy to do, where the hair doesn't bother her face, and supposedly looks good and isn't impractically long, Mia found it to be well suited for her. She has a soldierly posture: her head held high, firm soldiers, straight back, and a heavy footstep. It suggests she knows discipline, a factor that likely sculpted her in her early childhood. Her abdomen is ripe with muscle, she carries c-cup breasts that she does not flaunt, and her legs are strong and have only a few scars from minor injuries such as scraping a shin or knee by accident. Her feet can be considered large, and are fortunately not affected by dreaded bunions. She has a few piercings. One is a half-ring septum piercing and three small loops on her left ear's upper lobe. They are all made of brass.
Given her lack of sight, Mia has a pretty weak sense of fashion. Fortunately, she already had a wardrobe before she lost her sight. At the bare minimum of clothes, she always wears a sports bra and men's boxer briefs, thinking they're more comfortable than other under garments. Over that, a men's tank top is worn over her torso, and she dons a pair of Lee's boot-cut jeans. Over her white shirt, she tends to wear a fleece flannel shirt, due to the comfort and warmth it provides (she remembers her favorite one having a yellow and black color scheme but can't really tell which is which anymore). Should the weather get any worse than that, she has an old brown leather jacket she got from her husband when they were younger. She tends to wear this pair of light brown unstylish work boots because they're comfy and firm and she has no clue how ugly they actually are.
Personality: Spiteful, contemptuous, driven; strangers often characterize her as enigmatic and scornful. She reveals nothing and manages most people with disdain. This disdain, however, is mysteriously sourced and gives the impression it stands as preexisting stress and is redirected towards whomever spoke to her. Other times, she simply ignores them or gives them the silent treatment. On any other occasion, she simply shares short, brief words and returns to her thoughts. She lacks the arrogance or overconfidence some superpower test subjects may come to don, however, has the tendency to peg others as fools. She bides and listens, and she isn't one to put her trust into another very lightly. Morever, Mia is incredibly driven. She doesn't let on to others what her reasons might be, but she moves forward with such inspiring conviction despite the obstacles set before her.
She had a good deal of morals before, and though her attitude and outlook took a major turn for the worse, they still stick with her to some degree. While no longer being interested in politics, she'd still be more prone to vote liberal. While no longer concerned about most peoples' welfare, she'd beat the crap out of a rapist. And while hurt feelings no longer bother her, she'd still make a sexist or racist person buckle over and plant her foot on them. She has morals - they've just become become much looser than they were before. She thinks little of Obsidian, and will carry out orders not out of faith or loyalty, but because it is a job. She also hates the chip coursing through her blood stream, as she feels it makes her unable to walk out should she no longer be interested in remaining acquainted with Obsidian - it removes any freedom or ultimatum of leaving, and taking away options makes her rather bitter.
Despite her feelings for most other people, she actually treats them with apathy more than she does in deliberately rude gestures or words. This gives her an unmatched degree of bluntness and ability to speak her mind without caring who is listening or how they may react or feel according to her words. Before the accident, she was deeply in love and was incredibly faithful and protective of her spouse. To some extent, this may hold true even now should she ever find a sense of belonging. Even if she does though, she reassures herself that there isn't any point in trusting anybody with her story. Her story is no one's business and she does not intend on "opening up" or getting "touchy feely" with anybody. However, her energy is drained and she finds herself in an incredibly vulnerable position, despite her greatest efforts to appear strong. While Mia still able to maintain the facade of strength and durability, there's little she can do to escape the sense of a downward spiral towards an emotional breakdown.
Strengths and Weaknesses: Aside from the powers the Quartz serum provided her with, she has additional physical strengths, having taken a martial arts course in krav maga. But Mia is also pretty intelligent, though it doesn't often show through her silence and bitter comments. She's clever enough to make her own plans and to make short-term strategies, as well as to banter with the best of them. She is also very suspicious by default, skeptical of most people she comes across and has something of a bullshit sensor, though not quite as finely tuned as Leila's. She has a very strong sense of realism (border-lining pessimism by how she states her stance) that can be very grounding to those who might get their hopes up. She has enough mental endurance to withstand torture or resist persuasion. She is very in tune with the rest of her senses - hearing, smell, sense of touch, sense of location and body, and adjusted to rely on these senses to try and observe the world around her without her sight. As a result, sneaking up on her might be more difficult, as she is more in tune with her instincts and sense of hearing than most people.
As for her weaknesses, her blindness goes without saying. A blanket of darkness acts as a permanent veil to the world outside her eyes. Mia is also a pretty bitter woman, and this makes diplomatic missions more difficult for her. While she can cooperate, she won't hide her disdain from the people she is working with. She also is not a very good shoulder to cry on should any of her team mates be experiencing any difficulties or stress - most of her motherly instincts have been forsaken. But when it comes to small children who might be in danger, she gets a twinge of frustration with herself until she brings herself to protect them. Senseless crying, though? Rolling her eyes or perhaps snapping at them. She also is not fit for a leadership role. She prefers to cut the garbage and get straight to the point and isn't interested in uplifting speeches or being bothered with telling everyone what they have to do. It just isn't in her. She is rather outspoken in her lack of love for authority figures, namely police forces. Her bitterness and disregard can be used against her, since when she becomes especially pissed off, she has a pretty "straight-line" train of thought.
History: The layout is simple: Mia had a pretty good life until her twenties. She was happy as a little girl. Got attention from her parents, and was pushed into more boyish activities by her father, who had wanted a boy. As naive as Mia was, this didn't really bother her very much and led a pretty normal life. She had a fair amount of friends from elementary and throughout high, was adept at taking apart her dad's truck and putting it back together, was persuaded by her mother to take up painting (and much to Mia's surprise, she enjoyed it). When she got into high school, Mia was fairly pretty enough to grab the attention of a couple boys and tough enough to keep them in line. At sixteen, she met a white boy named Roy,and started off as friends before she discovered she liked him halfway through the year. A lot. Taking him to meet the folks was a bit odd, since interracial relationships was a bit iffy to her parents, but she went ahead and scoffed at their conservative beliefs. It turns out that the two fit together like puzzle pieces. The two crucial pieces of a complex game where each individual piece of the map had to be worked around the two.
There was little to stop the two young and starstruck lovers from planning out their future. As fate would have it though, the James Grey factory explosion irreparably damaged a section of Aurum City and harmful radiation flooded her and her parents' townhouse in uptown Aurum. Roy was "lucky" enough to live in the downtown section, further away from the blast. Mia's parents worked nearby, leaving Mia alone when she had to be rushed to a hospital. When Roy checked on her, there it was discovered that while she didn't suffer immediate damage from the blast, the radiation had brought damage to her ovaries and one of her kidneys. She would be able to live happily with only one kidney as long as she didn't drink, but any chance of bearing a child was gone. Having kids was never really something they thought about anyways, and that news wouldn't bother them until their later years when they realized what it actually meant. Her parents were permanently hospitalized - her father was put into a coma, and her mother suffered so much radiation she was forced to stay on life support to survive. Roy and his family offered to help Mia and by allowing her to live with them in LA. It was only when Mia and Roy were nineteen did they decide to move out. They were done with school and they rented out a small apartment on the border of downtown for just the two of them. Mia worked at a garage and Roy worked kitchen jobs. Even with their small incomes together, they couldn't afford college for even one of them, but they decided to just save their money and be happy with what they had. They finally married when they were twenty years old.
The following two years were fine. They excelled at their jobs, they got hobbies, they biked around town (Mia always being a couple lengths in front of Roy), and all seemed fine. At some point during the second year though, normal life seemed to fall apart. There had been increased gang activity further down town, and Mia must have made a wrong stop or bought groceries at the wrong store - something must have been a front or connection that made a branch of the LAPD crack down and target Mia, who believed her to have ties with the Bloods - she figured they either had to have been pretty scared or itching to exercise their authority to target someone without any solid ground (she always said it was because she was WWB; walking while black). Regardless of their reasons, they interrogated Mia. They asked her all sorts of questions - about the Bloods, about her ties - having no connection with the Skulls, she denied any knowledge of them or their intents. They didn't believe her. They suspected her of lying and deceit and was promptly subjected her to torture. Most of their methods had limited or brought no scarring, but another over-enthusiastic cop brought up the method was laser-eye torture. This is how she lost sight in her left eye.
Roy finally discovered she had been arrested due to allegations of association with the Bloods. Along with vouching for her, he provided her medical records and legal records where there were no signs or ties with the local Bloods. She was released and subsequently promised insurance benefits in the form of large sums of monthly payments as long as she remained quiet about the misunderstanding. Mia was by no means willing to satisfy the police department, and neither was Roy. However, they decided that they were best off to accept the compensation and avoid further trouble with the department, despite the couple's seething rage for the new-found police force - they also needed the money. The next four years went somewhat smoothly, despite the burning hot bouts of rage she felt each time she looked in the mirror and saw her blind eye. She was forced to keep a cap on it lest she do something stupid and create more problems for herself and the LAPD.
But the four years were smooth, aside from that. She learned how to move around and grab things without her left eye, she became a little more reliant on other senses - most notably her hearing - and she found an outlet for her aggression in a martial arts class. Her and her husband both that that signing up for a krav maga course was a good idea, but that she should be careful with letting off too much steam. Mia agreed and so the twenty-five year old went on to visit the dojo every Tuesday and Thursday. Hearing about some charity advocating the aid of victims from gang fights and police brutality, hearing and what they stood for, she and Roy immediately supported them, and while Mia wasn't active in their cause, she was still eager to help them out in some way. For instance, fixing some of their vehicles. The work was hard, their vehicles were different and required a little bit of learning, but she still felt pretty honored to help them out.
It was at the end of the four years, six months before now, Roy was out shopping and doing errands for a couple of friends in the neighborhood. Upon coming back, he found himself in the middle of a firefight that seemed to have spontaneously broke out downtown. Gang members were holing up in their apartment disguised hideouts and the police forces stormed through in what seemed like seconds. Caught in the crossfire, Roy was killed, shredded by bullets from one direction and bullets from the other.
The firefight lasted a grueling three hours before it calmed down, too long for a wounded man like Roy to endure. Mia received a call from the hospital to give her the grim news. Heartbroken, Mia trashed the house and, in a fit of rage and grief and guilt, she grabbed one of the apartment's kitchen knives and carved her remaining eye. She stayed there, laying on carpet weeping and bleeding for a solid hour, pale faced. A solid hour before a neighbor decided to find out what was the ruckus was about. A solid hour before an ambulance was called for her.
Mia is now totally blind. She stayed in the hospital for about a month, being treated for her eye, as well as undergoing mental recuperation to recover from the shock of suddenly losing her only loved one. After her month was over, she was issued a cane and she stayed in her old, trashed apartment for another month, doing just the bare minimum to survive - and struggling to do even that now that she was blind. On her second month staying at home, she finally began to try mimicking daily life, despite the struggle to figure out what was around her. It took a while for her to walk comfortably whilst blind, and for her to remember how the house felt through her cane. It was by the end of that second month was she able to regain control of herself and understand the situation in full: the LAPD - they killed him. It was their fault. Their fault for her husband, their fault for her eyes - all of it! Whatever rage or contempt she had before was dwarfed by the pit of burning coals that sat in her chest every day. By the fourth month she went back to the dojo (albeit with some struggle - she would later acquire a device that would help her navigate the city, like a hand held GPS). With some effort, the instructor was able to help her work around her blindness.
The dojo became a regular outlet for her. She took out her aggression there (on punching bags, of course), honed her other senses through sparring sessions (sense of hearing, place, and the length of her body), and learned how to control her strength and how to make the most of it. She invested so much time into that dojo, she became capable of reacting as swiftly to the movements she hears from the other students as they could by sight, and she learned maneuvers to help her work around the possibility of an assailant holding a weapon to her. While the dojo helped her live with her blindness, it did little to satiate her anger. The blind woman saw opportunity with the Bloods, and while she cared very little for them, she wanted some way to get back at the police department and through the Bloods, that was possible. So she sought to waltz right into their base and demand a place. Which sounds arrogant, but her demands stem from anger and desperation, as opposed to arrogance - before that could happen, she was found by an Obsidian representative. Given how she had so little to lose at this point, she figured why the hell not and went ahead.
Other: Despite being blind, her sparring matches has helped to give her a "battle-sense". Much of this has to do with sense of hearing (their footsteps and breath), and feeling and hearing the subtle differences in the air, but it is something more innate than just that. Much of her fights run off instinct, and she describes it as having something like a flow.
