Name: Candace McMorran
Gender: Female
Age: 22
Sexuality: Bisexual, but leans more towards women
Godly ancestor: Hephaestus
Son/daughter or further removed: daughter
Relationship with godly ancestor: Hephaestus has not fathered quite as many children as some of the more attractive Greek gods, so he is decidedly invested in the children that he does have. He intervened to help Candace and her mother when she was very young, and she has known about her parentage since her mid-teens. He admires her work from a distance.
Relationship with mortal family: after a period of pointed rebellion against her mother and stepfather, Candace has come to appreciate the loving and open minded upbringing that they provided her with. She hasn't lived at her parents' house since leaving for college in the US, but has always returned for major holidays and twice for summer vacation. She is six years older than her next-oldest half-sibling, and has never been especially close with any of them, though that's not to say that there are any issues between them. They're simply too far apart in age to share very much in terms of friends or common interests. She keeps in touch with her mother and her sister Virginia through various online means and, whenever she visits, likes to initiate lively discussions around the dinner table. She tries to influence her younger siblings (particularly her sister) where she can, and steer them in what she believes is the right direction.
Powers: Candace's powers reflect those of her father in almost every way.
- Candace can create and manipulate fire and is more or less immune to its effects.
- She has a talent for creating machines and gadgets to solve problems and serve specific purposes. These are often highly unconventional, idiosyncratic in design, and difficult to reproduce, but extremely effective.
- Candace can imbue things with force and motion that would otherwise remain static.
- She is able to make inanimate objects that have either a face or the form of a living thing come to life, in a sense. They will possess memories of what they have witnessed and will remain staunchly loyal to her.
Personality: Candace is strong willed, aggressively independent, and bullish when it comes to her sense of morality. Perhaps she just has stronger convictions than most people, and perhaps she's trying to bury some deeply held insecurities. In any event, as a visibly disabled person living in a world that is fundamentally at odds with her sense of agency, she feels as if she has no choice but to try harder, reach farther, and react with more force and fury than others do in order to be treated as an equal.
Beyond that, she is best described as conventionally unconventional, subscribing with zeal to the trends and belief systems that define modern left-wing campus culture. She smokes weed and has experimented with a handful of psychadelic drugs, but isn't what one would ever consider a 'stoner'. Candace enjoys gaming (though not the thinly-veiled misogyny that runs through much of gamer culture) and is reasonably good at it, but makes a point of being active and challenging herself physically. She regularly plays wheelchair rugby and basketball and tries to remember to spend some time outdoors away from her workshop. She has dabbled in slam poetry, was active in a number of student bodies while in university studying engineering (with a minor in women's studies) and regularly attends protests and rallies. When not out and about doing something, she can often be found tinkering in her shop or at least using a CAD app to render her future projects on her iPad.
Bio: Candace was born in Glasgow, Scotland and raised by a single mother who was working as a waitress at the time. She doesn't remember much about her early years, but now understands the severity of the poverty that she and her mother lived in. For the first couple of years, there was a seemingly endless carousel of surgeries to lessen the effects of a particularly serious arteriovenous malformation of the spinal cord that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Though children of Hephaestus have often exhibited ambulatory difficulties, hers were particularly severe. The medical costs above and beyond what the NHS covered must have been significant, but they were handled by a mysterious benefactor. For many years after, she had a vague memory of him as a huge man with a bushy auburn beard, receding hair, and a severe limp who leaned heavily on a cane. When she was three years old, the girl's mother was able to return to university and complete her degree in early childhood education thanks to a generous grant from the bearded man. While there, she met, fell in love with, and married the man who Candace would grow up with as her father: Shane Coburn. It was a rather whirlwind love affair, and within less than a year of their marriage, had produced a child: Candace's younger sister Virginia. Two more would follow: twin brothers Neil and Brandon.
Candace's way with mechanical things was plainly evident even during her childhood, as she would often complete Lego sets intended for much older children with perfunctory ease and enjoy them for a couple of weeks, before taking them apart and building entirely new creations of her own imagination. Indeed, the floor of her bedroom would often be a minefield of sharp Lego pieces that only she (not having to worry about stepping on any of them) could navigate with ease. She dabbled in minecraft and roblox, but was drawn more towards creating things in the real world with her own hands. Robot Wars was a near-obsession, and she still has some of her crayon drawings of her favourite competitors and orginal concepts. Trips to science fairs followed, as did subscriptions to magazines like Popular Mechanics (which soon turned into online subscriptions). She confounded many of her teachers because she didn't seem to have a particular aptitude for mathematics, being no more than slightly above average. It seemed as if her engineering abilities were intuitive in a way that other people couldn't understand.
While she featured in a number of human interest articles (often with a well-intentioned but somewhat condescending tone) as a young prodigy and an inspiration, Candace's teenaged years were particularly difficult. She struggled not only with her self-perception and confidence as somebody with a disability, but also with her budding sexuality. She found herself mostly, though not solely attracted to other girls. She tried to ignore these feelings for a few years, and her parents, thinking that her withdrawal stemmed from a lack of confidence, attempted to push her towards healthy heterosexual relationships. They also sent her to a summer camp for other disabled children and enrolled her in a wheelchair basketball program. Candace enjoyed the activity, and it provided an outlet for some of her energy, but she still wasn't all that comfortable with her feelings and was beginning to understand that she just wasn't going to fit the norm. Compounding these issues were the emergence of her latent powers. Candace found that sometimes, when she was working on an engineering project, the pieces would move as she visualized them. At first, she was afraid. She wondered if she was going crazy. Then, she studied the phenomenon and began using it to her benefit, though she became somewhat reclusive in her tinkering for fear of anybody finding out. Combined with her insecurities about her sexuality, Candace went through a year or two of being deeply reclusive.
Enter her father. It was a particularly cool April morning when Hephaestus appeared in front of her. She almost instantly recognized him as the bearded man from her infancy. The first thing that he said to her, with all of the tact and good grace in the world was "You're a lesbian, kiddo, or at least something close. Also, I'm your father." It wasn't the easiest of conversations. One party was confused and terrified and the other had never had much of a way with words nor much use for etiquette. However, her immortal father not only explained the extend of Candace's abilities, he also taught her how to control them, by demonstrating them himself. Further conversations followed, eventually involving her family. Disbelief turned into acceptance, and even into embrace. Candace, more sure of herself, reemerged from her shell and graduated with a scholarship that allowed her to attend MIT overseas.
In campus life, she found her calling, The stories of other people who had struggled growing up resonated with her, and she became strongly committed to setting the world right, aware that she had been gifted more power than most by the unique circumstances of her conception and birth. She was active in student groups, campus politics and social life, and int he social movements of the day. Her long red hair was cut to shoulder-length, the left side of it buzzed, and its tips died all colours of the rainbow. Following graduation, driven by curiosity, she decided to take a couple of years off before starting her Master's and visit the city of New Celestia that her father had told her about.