Billy looks like he could be attractive if he put in the effort, but he never felt the need to really go out of his way to look good. He’s tall, with lanky limbs like a basketball player, but has the athletic build of someone who has never lifted a dumbbell in their life. His dark blonde hair is cut in a popular short on sides, long on top style and kept messy. Not in the “spent fifteen minutes trying to look like I got out of bed” messy, but the “yeah, I just actually got out of bed and thought this would work” messy. His eyes are blue and have the glossy look to them of someone who is perpetually having an allergic reaction, stoned, or both. His skin is lightly tanned and blemished with moles, but it is in good condition. He’s trying (and failing) to pull off a wispy beard. There’s a large tattoo that says “Shrug Life” in thick , cursive script spanning between his shoulder blades, and a little triforce on his left wrist.

His clothes fit him loosely, and he dresses almost exclusively in schlocky, ironic tees and khaki shorts or blue jeans. Tan, worn down work boots are his go to pair of kicks. When it gets colder he busts out the heavy flannels and the trapper hat, but to see him in an actual winter coat is a rarity. He wears a thick pair of black glasses that he’d be next to blind without—the idea of something going into his eyes spooks him, so contacts and lasik are a no-go. He’s the kind of guy that carries around a messenger bag. It’s made of blue canvas, littered with patches and stickers from bands he hasn’t seen live, and the butt of many jokes.

Billy’s tall but he slouches so much that nobody would ever describe him as such. He moves to the beat of his own drum, which happens to never be playing anything faster than a funeral dirge. His lack of a sense of urgency carries through to his deep voice. It is slow and clear, so he’s easy to understand, but it has that stereotypical stoner vibe to it as well, man.

Billy was born in Farmer Hill, and as far as he cares he’d be fine with dying in Farmer Hill as long as they have fast internet and access to a VPN. His dad runs Lawson’s Body Shop, a car repair place that was open by his grandfather decades ago, while his mom works at a flower shop to get away from the boys in the garage. Billy is the oldest of three. He has a sister, Penny, that is two years younger than him and a brother, Henry, that was five years younger than him. He fought a lot with Penny while they were growing up, and Henry was always the tagalong little brother.

Most of Billy’s youth was spent playing with friends and trying to avoid putting in any effort at school. He was a pretty normal, if geeky, kid, preferring video games and movies over hockey and tag. He didn’t get great grades, but he did good enough to fly under radar. He was one of the first boys to hit his growth spurt, so he was always too tall to be picked on. His love life was nonexistent, but then again so was the case for most of his friends so it was never really a point of concern. He smoked weed for the first time when he was fourteen and kept that shit hidden from his parents for an entire seventy-two hours. When he was sixteen he started helping his dad out at the shop, and when he was seventeen his brother disappeared.

Alright, that last one might be a bit atypical, if not for it being Farmer Hill. The last time anyone saw Henry he was walking home from school. Obviously, his family freaked out, as did he, and the police did their investigation. Henry was never found, and they ruled that he had runaway—the preteen had been getting bullied at school. The Lawson’s hired a private detective to try and find Henry, but all that came their way was zero leads and plenty of bills. Eventually they too, like the rest of the town, moved on. Billy’s mother and father got rid of any pictures of Henry and pretended like he never existed, while Billy, after a grieving period, came to the acceptance that his brother was most likely dead than in hiding. Only Penny was unable to move on, but even she knew not to mention her little brother around her parents.

Due to being tied up in the investigation, Billy entered Grand Ridge a year late to study film, but he quickly fell into the routine college experience of barely going to class, smoking weed, drinking warm PBR, and trying too hard to get laid. For all anyone can tell, he seemed as if the year off had been enough time for him to recuperate. Heavy self-medication helps, too, and Billy almost never starts a day off without a proper wake and bake. Now he’s got one more semester to go before he’s done with the academy, and he intends to go out having fun.

SIGIL & LOCATION ⫻ A spiral on his upper right arm.

ABSTRACTION ⫻ Daydream, the ability to to lull someone into a sleep-like state.

ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Billy’s abstraction allows him to finally get other people to stop stressing out so much and take a break. It just happens that his way of getting people to relax is by hypnotizing them and forcing them into a dreamstate while their body (literally) falls unconscious. Billy can cause a person to fall asleep within a 30 meter range, and he can keep them asleep for as long as he is actively focusing on them. If he leaves the range or loses focus his target will groggily wake up a few seconds later. He can only make one person fall asleep at a time, and an intense of enough pain will force them awake.

People trapped in the daydream actually do have dreams, although they are influenced by their emotions and state of mind—Billy has no control over them. People who are primarily experiencing a positive emotion, such as happy or peaceful, will have nice, pleasant dreams like spending time with loved ones, flying, going to places they’ve always wanted to visit, and so on. Neutral emotions, like boredom, tend to have mundane dreams, like going to school, work, or dreaming that you’re waking up. Negative emotions, like sadness or anger, tend towards more towards extreme dreams or even nightmares, often tortuous or violent in nature.

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE MOUNTAIN ⫻ As well as being able to keep one person asleep, Billy is able to channel a dreamscape around himself—anyone that comes within a 3 meter range of his physical body will immediately fall asleep. Once he is no longer in range, they will again awake a few seconds later.

AURA SENSING ⫻ Billy’s aura, true to his abstraction, allows for him to see if someone within the range of his ability is sleeping. His aura has to be activated, but it takes only a modicum of attention to channel.

LIMITS ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

Definitely not repressing anything in regards to his missing brother. Nope.

Penny’s actual appearance is hidden beneath a veil of makeups and creams. Her skin is made a light tan with spray and concealer. Her hair is dyed a lighter blond than her natural color, and waves are constructed with hot curlers and precious hours wasted in front of the mirror. Her eyebrows are meticulously plucked, her lashes are curled, and her blue eyes are lined. Her nose is small, and her lips, thinner than she would wish, are kept glossy and hide a big, Invisalign smile. Her chin is pointed, and her ears are pierced. Penny has a slender build; she’s more like the fields of Kansas than the hills of Montana. She doesn’t really work out much (and it shows). Seemingly her frame is kept small through cigarettes and diet soda serving as meal supplements. Her right arm is a colorful sleeve of flowery tattoos and a bright wand tattoo is on her inner left forearm.

Penny’s outfits varies—her closet is stuffed to the brim with clothing—but she favors colorful, bold dresses and skirts whenever she can get away with them, often paired with a leather or jean jacket weather permitting. She has another closet dedicated to knee-high boots that cover varies shades of brown, black, and gray. She’s particularly fond of a pair of knock-off Ray Ban aviators and almost never leaves home without them; even at night they can be seen pushed up to the top of her head like a makeshift headband.

She has a severe case of resting bitch face, and walks as if she is always in a rush. Her voice is high pitched, nearly grating, and somehow always manages to sound as if she is exasperated. She tends to stand askew with her hip jutted out and her arms crossed over her chest, perhaps in some subconscious way to make herself appear more curvy than she is.

Detentions and visits to the “Princi-PAL” were a daily routine for Penny in her formative years. The middle child of two working parents, she was the prototypical example of someone starved for attention, and she seeked it in the form of distracting her classmates and disrupting her teachers. In junior high she attached herself to the popular crowd yet never quite carved her way into the circle, becoming the girl who would hear about the parties they had over the weekend the following Monday while sitting with them at lunch. By high school she was determined to finally make her breakthrough, which she would succeed by using expensive clothing, fancy makeup, and acting with disdain towards everything. If experience taught her anything, people were desperate to be liked by those who hated them.

And it kind of worked for the first two years of high school. She went through all of the motions that she assumed made girls popular: cheerleader, drinking, senior boyfriend, bullying, general bitchiness, etc. She was even able to use her older brother Billy to win her brownie points with the older kids by stealing his actual pot brownies to give out. And then her little brother Henry disappeared, and with it so did the little delusion she was living. That was four years ago.

She was always close to her little brother, primarily because he was her only real friend pre-high school and she was stuck babysitting him post-ninth grade. They used to walk home together, but at her insistence they were exclusively to walk separate once she entered highschool cause no way could someone adult like her, like, be seen walking with a dweeby kid, gawd. And it was during one of Henry’s lonely walks home that he disappeared, and it was because of this that the police questioned her, and her family blamed her, and her friends whispered about her. What a shit sister, right? Got her own brother killed because she wanted to look cool.

But...she could deal with that. It wasn’t until the police had declared Henry missing with no leads and they, and the town, and her friends, and her family, stopped talking about her missing brother and pretended like everything was hunky dory that things were flipped on their head. Penny couldn’t possibly understand how anyone could be satisfied with the results of the investigation, and the more people told her that she just let it go and move on the more bitter and jaded she grew. By junior year she stopped trying to fit in, becoming too outspoken and volatile to sit with the cool kids anymore, who had grown tired of her one-woman crusade against the incompetence of Henry’s investigation.

Billy told her one day that she had become an asshole. And she was okay with it. If being one meant that the lazy police in Farmer Hill got put on blast and actually did their job, then good. If being one meant that her parents open their damn eyes, then good. If being one meant that her dumbass brother Billy stopped doing drugs and started asking questions with her, then good. And if being an asshole meant that she alienated everyone in this garbage little town and made them hate her, then great—because she had been wrong. People didn’t give a shit about those that hated them. No, people gave a shit about those that they hated. And if they thought of her, her little brother wouldn’t be too far from their mind.

But she’s still going to school because once she cracks this thing open, she’s getting the hell outta town.

SIGIL & LOCATION ⫻ Penny has a symbol appearing to be a pair of handcuffs just beneath where her neck meets her collarbones.

ABSTRACTION ⫻ Repulsion, the ability to telekinetically force people and things away from her body.

ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Penny can force almost anything that enters a five foot radius around her to rapidly move away from her. Thing reflect back in a straight line from her until the effects of gravity or other interference stops them. This means that if she repulses something that is on the ground, it will only hit things that are level with the ground and the moment it hits something with enough force it will stop. She’s only capable of forcing objects that have a weight equal to or less than twice her weight away from her, so she’ll lose any match of chicken that she plays against a speeding car.

The velocity and distance at which an object blasts away from her is dependent upon its size; the lighter an object is, the further and faster it travels. Small objects (less than a pound) likes coins, paper clips, pens, and etcetera, act almost like a weak 9mm bullet, traveling fast enough to penetrate skin, clothing, thin walls, doors, and glass. Medium objects (more than a pound, but less than fifty) like computer monitors, baseballs, bricks, and so on only go about 30 meters before quickly succumbing to gravity, and tend to only have enough force to dent metal, knock the wind out of someone, and possibly fracture or break bones. Large objects (more than fifty, less than her peak) like desks, bags of cement, and some people can be sent back 3 meters. The force is about as strong as an incredibly fit person’s push, so it’s largely only effective at moving large things out of her way, bracing doors, or keeping people forced against walls.

There isn’t a limit to how many objects she can force away from her at once, but she does have to direct the repulsions. This means that she has to know an object is coming at her or within her range for her to repulse it, and she actively has to focus her mind to push it away. Therefore, she isn’t constantly blowing the dirt and trash at her feet away (unless she consciously decides to), nor is she able to push away an incoming projectile if she doesn’t know that it was fired at her in the first place.

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE MOUNTAIN ⫻ Penny is able to assign an attraction to any object that is also within the presence of the mountain, meaning that objects she repulses will no longer travel in a straight line but instead change their trajectory towards an item or person of her choosing (again, she has to be aware of their presence). The basic limits of her range still apply, and her “heatseekers” are rather dumb—they will try to take the most direct path to the target, regardless of objects in its way.

AURA SENSING ⫻ Tied directly to her abstraction, Penny’s aura allows her to sense the mass, velocity, and trajectory of any moving object that enters her field of view, even if it were moving faster than her naked eye could see. This gives her enough time to react to incoming objects and determine if her ability can affect it. In a way, it acts as a limited danger sense, however the aura is an information overload that can be detrimental to her mental and physical health. After using it for five minutes she starts to experience splitting migraines, nosebleeds, and vision loss, and if she goes with it on for longer than ten she will start to experience blackouts. If she toggles it off before the five minute mark she can recuperate fairly well, but there is a cool down that is directly correspondent to how long she used it for, meaning that if she was channeling her aura for three minutes she would have to wait three minutes before using it again. Once she goes beyond the five minute mark the cool down greatly compounds, tripling once it hits five and doubling itself every minute after that.

LIMITS ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

She still goes out at least once a week looking for any clues in regards to her missing brother.