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Abigail Cho [+]

Character you have created: Abigail Cho
Alias: None
Speech Color:
Character Alignment: Walking-the-line
Identity: Public

Character Personality: Abigail is a loner by necessity. Being around too many people can easily drive her mind to the brink, so she must frequently take breaks from social activity. Most people think of this as her being either depressed or introverted, and they're not entirely wrong. The lack of solid social contact has caused her some depression, but she tries to be as open as possible. After all, it's only fair. If she gets to know a little too much about other people,they should know as much about her. Then again, the people she sticks around with long enough to do so are few and far between.

Given her occupation, she has to deal with a lot of very strange people, and her encounters with otherworldly things have further opened her mind. She is broadly accepting of just about anyone, though she tends to stay away from people who feel too strongly about anything. As for herself, she tries to feel as little as possible when on the job, which has deadened her emotions a little even when she's living normally. This does let her open up more to receiving from others, which is the point, but it means her mood tends to be whatever everyone else is feeling.

She tries to do good, but in the city, good doesn't pay the bills, so she's had to stoop to less-than-legal acts occasionally to make ends meet. She also never works for lower than her normal rate, no matter the situation, though she does accept payment plans. Charity doesn't put food in her mouth. She is very honest, with no softening of blows. “If you can't handle the truth, then why did you call me?”

Uniform/costume: Although she tends to wear a lot of black, Abigail doesn't actually have a “costume”, just normal clothes. She doesn't fly and has no secret identity, and her job doesn't generally get her involved with anything she'd need armour or tools for. That said, she does always have a taser, pepper spray, a Swiss army knife, and a set of lockpicks.

Origin Info/Details:Abigail was born in New York City to a pair of Korean immigrants. The Chos now had a third child, the other two being boys, but they loved all of them equally. Unfortunately, life wasn't going to be easy for any of them. Jung-Hee Cho, the patriarch of the family, died during the 9/11 attacks, Abigail only being five at the time. Without their father, both of her brothers began acting out, though their mother Min-So could reign them in at home. Min-So, however, was not home very often, having to work several jobs to keep the family afloat. When they became of age, her eldest brother Shane got a job to help out, but David did not. He had already joined up with a gang, and ran off, not to be heard of for quite some time.

Abigail first began to notice something wrong when she was just a child. Like many horror movie children, she could see ghosts, but they didn't really bother her. None of them seemed to be malevolent, thankfully, so her parents had chalked it up to imaginary friends. When she was ten, she began to feel the moods of others around her, in a way that she knew they were not her emotions. She also developed the ability to handle an object and see into its past. As she grew older both of these grew stronger. By fifteen, she could idly sift through the surface thoughts of other people, and, if she concentrated, could even send her own thoughts to them, though this has always given her a migraine.

She worked for a year after high school at a 7-11, hated every moment of it, and finally quit to pursue an actual career. Her best friend from high school suggested, having learned about her powers, that she could easily make money by using them as a ghost hunter. She looked into it, and hit upon being a complete Paranormal Investigator. Lots of people make fun of her when she tells them what she does for a living, but it's enabled her to bounce around New England and make a fairly decent living. Recently, a job took her to Lost Haven, Maine, and while she didn't really want to stick around, the place was definitely full of weird things.

Abigail is currently based out of Boston, but makes frequent trips to everywhere on the Atlantic coast. Her website tends to be one of the more popular traffic stops for the business, and James Randi has issued her a challenge, though she's disregarded him up to this point because she doesn't feel she needs to prove anything. She's markedly more successful than most in her field, and only at the age of twenty-two.

Hero Type: Psychic
Power Level: Street

Powers:

Sensitivity: By handling an object with her bare hands, she can get a sense of who has touched it in the last few weeks. Anything that might be worn every day, or has sentimental value to someone, she can get much more information out of, essentially “seeing” the past from the objects point of view, and can go back to when the person in question first got it. Family heirlooms are a bit much for her. She can read them, but they hurt if she goes too far back.

Through the Veil: Abigail can see, hear, speak to, and physically interact with any ghosts, or anything on the Astral Plane. Only by extreme concentration can she suppress this ability, which means that most of the time, she is seeing and hearing quite a few things others can't. This tends to make her look slightly dazed or tired, and occasionally it's necessary to poke her to bring her back into the physical world.

Telepathy: Abigail is constantly receiving the surface thoughts of everyone within a few hundred feet of her. She cannot shut this off at all, but has learned how to ignore it or sift through the noise for a specific type of thought. This is what gives her a faster reaction time then most people, at least in a fight, as she's already picked up on the intent to hurt her. If she pushes hard enough at one person, she can actually send her own thoughts to them, making her capable of communication silently. Doing this, however, gives her a migraine after even a brief exchange.

Empathy: Abigail is constantly receiving the emotions of of people as well as their surface thoughts. Unlike the telepathy, though, this doesn't create “noise”. Instead, she feels the “average” of the area. In a crowded nightclub, this can get really intense, and not only from the emotion. She can also feel a small portion of any drugs in someone's system this way, as though she had taken them herself, though physically there's nothing in her blood and it goes away as soon as they get out of her range. It's great in a bar, but she flatly refuses to enter hospitals.

Telekinesis: Abigail can only effect tiny objects like coins and pens, or very light things like a piece of paper or a Styrofoam block, but those objects she can move, lift, and otherwise interact with using only her mind. She doesn't do it often as a rule, but she actually does use it casually in her day. Occasionally one can spot her spinning a pen in the air while she's thinking about something, as if there was an invisible hand twirling it. Her coffee stirs itself, hair never gets in her face, etc

On the Astral Plane, however, this is much more powerful. She can easily throw several tons of “material” around, and can deal damage to anything within her range.

Mind over Matter: Almost more of a subset of telekinesis than its own power, Abigail can concentrate to rapidly heal damage to her body. While not instant, she heals at more than four times as fast as normal people without concentration, and over twenty-times as fast while concentrating. Doing this too much, however, can cause her powers to shut down until she has sufficient rest, usually a few days, during which she basically only eats and sleeps.

Attributes (Select one at each category):

Height: 5' 1”/155 cm
Weight: 110 lbs/ 50 kg
Strength Level: Normal
Speed/Reaction Timing Level: Normal speed, slightly faster reaction time
Endurance at MAXIMUM Effort: Normal
Agility: Normal
Intelligence: Genius
Fighting Skill: Untrained

Resources:

Average. She has a decent apartment in Boston, and makes enough money that she might even be able to take a vacation in a few years.

Weaknesses: No special defenses against physical attacks. Guns, knives, blunt objects, and energy all effect her like they should.

Spending too much time in crowded places gives her a sort of “tinnitus of the brain”, and makes hearing individual thoughts much more difficult.

Her empathy in a hospital, drug den, or anywhere else can mean she suffers the effects of several drugs at once. Even though it's impossible to overdose this way, it can incapacitate her completely.

Literally anything on the Astral Plane can interact with her, as can the dead. While she can defend herself with telekinesis, she is always vulnerable to this.

Supporting Characters:

Min-So Cho, mother. Calls frequently.

Shane Cho. Still lives with their mother, supporting her. Also a good confidant for his sister.

David Cho. Lives in Boston. Abigail is trying to get him to go to rehab with limited success.

Constance Young, Abigail's business partner, who typically runs the business side and lets Abigail get on with the actual work.

Brett Parker, Sam Newman, Theresa Little, and Wendy Smith: The technical crew who tries to keep up with Abigail's exploits. While they all live in Boston and fly with her, they tend to try and stay out of her way. They each get ten percent of any job, which means they also have other jobs to do.

Haven't apologized yet, but today I found out that by "We'll turn it on whenever you need to do homework" they meant "Your mother will use her shitty samsung hotspot for all of your school assignments, also we don't want you staying after school to finish your work because we're impatient assholes", so guess who just sent a long ass email to her HCC teacher that she may not be able to finish any of her fucking essays because her parents don't wanna wait for her outside the school parking lot for 20 goddamn minutes?



I know every teenager says this, but I legitimately can't wait when I can move away to college and only have to deal with asshole freshman and cynical seniors, at least I'd get shit done around them, here I'm re working my schedule because neither of my parents have ever written a college essay in their life, let alone one every week like I'm doing now. I'm just glad I have something like In Stereo to keep me busy a little, because if I was just dealing with their tantrums 24/7, I'd have run away or some shit years ago.

in better news, my grandparents are here to look at our new house, and I guess the only plus side to living in these new digs is that my room has a lock on it, so now I can ignore my parenta peacefully without fear of them barging in, and beating the shit out of me whenever we argue.