@PaulHaynek - That both sounds good. I'll see to getting both sheets written up when the CS is introduced and we can figure out how this accompanying character to the student character fits into this world.
This rp has caught my interest. I've got an idea for what I want to do for a character but I do have a couple questions first, just some matters to ascertain that apply to my concept.
#1: How many characters are we allowed to control? The concept I'm angling for calls for two, a student and his companion.
#2: How is necromancy seen in this kingdom? Is it super secret and forbidden? Accepted as a legitimate practice? Does it even exist?
@LordOfTheNight This could be quite interesting. I have at least two character concepts in the ole' closet that I could drag out for this particular rp, ones that haven't quite gotten the chance to make it past the introductions and still have plenty of potential for development left in them.
Just a question, what power level should we shoot to meet? My ideas range from more street level carnage to something of a city shaker. If you want I can describe them both and let you decide which one holds closest to your general preference.
Sorry for the wait on the stats, had a lot to do the last couple days. Hopefully this is all in line with the directions listed.
Brains: (2)
Understanding of Sound 3
Asylum Protocol 1
Brawn: (1)
High Pain Tolerance 2
Feeble -1
No Hands -1
Awareness: (3)
Sound Reception 3
Sound Perception 3
Agility: (2)
Flexible 3
Dextrous Feet 1
Personality: (1)
Poetry 2
Deep-Seated Psychological Trauma -2
Powers: (3)
Sound Control 3
Sound Generation 3
Vibration Control 2
Vibration Generation 2
Overall assessment
A young girl who's been both psychologically and physically damaged that has been born with an enormous degree of power over sound in all it's forms. She seems to have spent most her life learning to control this power at the exclusion of everything else. Luckily she does not seem like she means anyone harm, at least for now.
@Dark Light Excellent. I shall begin upon her attribute stat assessment. By the way, is that four points overall, four points between the talent category's themselves or four points per talent category?
@Dark LightPosted my CS here as well. In the meanwhile I'll start work on Babble's Attribute Assessment.
Edit: A quick question: In each talent bracket can there be negative attributes to subtract from positive ones? I feel a lot of Babble's attributes would be uncharacteristically high without taking her flaws into account which would make it hard to un-skew the evaluations towards the 2-1/2-2/2-3 format.
She's like a ghost you'd see out of a Japanese horror film. Unhealthily pale skin, Dark eyes and Long straight hair as black as jet all serve to paint an image of someone you would not want to see in the middle of a darkened corridor. This is of course a false first impression as despite her characteristics she's quite cheerful looking, often sporting a wide smile as she goes about her night.
Given how she's unwelcome in public she's been unable to diversify her collection of clothes, leaving her solely dressed in the straight jacket and hospital pants she was kept in when she escaped. Due to the fact she only eats foods that are quiet to eat since they cause her the least discomfort she's rather skinny as well, her form slight with just enough muscle to move herself and little else. Given how she's missing her hands it's no surprise that her legs are stronger than those handless arms of hers.
Generation: 3. Quirk: Sound.
Details
Babble controls sound. Every facet of sound, from wavelengths and amplitudes to vibrations and sonic pressure she is intrinsically tied to everything that is sound. She controls it not through any physical medium but through her will. When she hears sound it is not through her ears but rather it is her mind perceiving the waves directly and interpreting them. Because of this all her senses interact with sound, no longer just as an audible medium but a visual and textile experience as well. She feels sound like it's an extension of herself, an ethereal limb that's simultaneously attached and disconnected from her. Unlike her own limbs however there is no instinct for controlling sound. Understanding is something to be earned.
Her power is greater when she has louder sounds to work with but it is a double edged blade as louder sounds are more difficult to control and present risk to her as she's far more sensitive to sound than most. Performing precise tasks with highly energy dense sounds is a surgically precise task as even a minor slip up can wreak a fair deal of havok and throw the whole attempt off. In paricularly quiet areas her power is much weaker as generating sounds in empty space produces weaker effects than simply taking a sound and amplifying it.
Her limitations are the very limitations of sound itself. Much like the inverse-proportional law which dictates the strength of sound over distance the power she's able to generate deteriorates rapidly the further away from her the target location is. Just like sound itself the thinner the medium she's transmitting her sound through the weaker the effects become. The resistance of the material her sound is traveling through also effects the potency of the sound.
Naturally given the complexity of the field she controls it is fiendishly difficult to properly wield her power. Only after years of being victim to it's uncontrolled effects was she even able to stop it from prolonging her suffering. Her control is largely limited by her understanding of sound itself which while more indepth than most people's understanding of sound is still fathomless miles away from her true potential.
As she begins upon this new adventure her understanding of her power will be quite low, knowing just enough to have survived this long with a little bit of potential for discovery of new sound techniques.
Background:
Quirk discovery:
At the early age of six it was a school day just like many others. She went to school, attended her classes, received her homework and tried to avoid the other students who picked on her often. This day however was not going to be just like every other day of hers.
Just as she was getting ready to head back home to her dreary household a couple of students were up to some horseplay. One of them ended up tossing a book over his shoulder which fell and hit her square in the head. It was at this moment that something in her head was shook loose. In that very instant it was as if the whole world was exploding.
Shoes stepping, phones ringing, people talking, chalk on chalk boards, lockers closing, cars driving, birds singing, hearts beating, she could hear it all. Every sound, even down to the most shallow of frequencies, could be heard at a volume beyond which any other human could ever conceive. Every foot fall was akin to the explosion of a thousand atom bombs, every voice a crashing cacophony of meteoric proportions. It all went well past the point where human ears would simply break as there was no limit imposed on the method she recieved each sound. If a sound so much as existed by the time it reached her it was heard at the loudest possible volume such a noise could possibly exist at. Of course there was no way to discern each sound from one another. The louder sounds overlapped the quieter ones and blended with each other until it formed an astronomically loud concert of discordant noises.
Of course nobody else could hear this. From the average spectator's point of view the girl was struck across the back of the head by a heavy book and then proceeded to collapse to the ground clutching her head and screaming in agony while writhing about.
Unfortunately for her this horrible awakening was only the beginning.
Family:
From birth to the moment they gave her up she was unliked, perhaps unlikeable.
As an only child at the time she found her mother and father were always fairly distant. It was if the very sound of her voice irritated them. Anytime she'd try to carry on any sort of conversation they'd dismiss her. "Please be quiet dear" They'd always say. She couldn't understand the reasons they always seemed cross with her almost all the time.
How was she supposed to know that her voice carried infrasonic waves?
Before the incident at school her home life seemed to cast a shadow over her self-confidence, undercutting her self worth for pretty much her whole life. What substituted that however was magnitudes worse.
Training/Occupation:
Her parents took her to every doctor they could find. Not a single one of them could identify what was wrong. It was hard to find something that wasn't there. In the end the most they could offer was that it might of been psychosomatic, a diagnosis which offered no satisfaction for neither her nor her parents.
It was only when a certain man had overheard of the incident and sought them out did something resembling an answer appear. Invited to his office he told them that the issue was a rare and complex psychological disorder, something which could only be remedied through years of treatment in a specially equipped asylum. He offered them a choice: Keep their daughter and let her suffer uselessly for the rest of her life or hand her over to him where she could be treated and perhaps eventually cured.
Olivia could offer no counsel to her parents on the matter. She had been screaming from the pain for so long her voice was gone. All she could do was shiver in pain. In the end they chose to surrender her to the doctor. While it was natural for most decent parents to feel at least some reluctance towards parting with their child in truth she was more burden than joy for them. While their suspicions warned against the choice they couldn't help but yield to the voice of authority in the subject before them.
And so she was taken...
To Redrum Asylum.
On the surface it appeared to be exactly what it says on the tin, a rehabilitation and/or containment center for the mentally ill. They had their fair share of mentally ill there two, being treated according to the standard for psychiatric care. What the public couldn't see was that the very same building was also designed to contain and study the recent superhuman anomalies that have been appearing within the country. Built on a grant from the government the asylum itself was simply a front for them, a means of isolating these strange new phenomenons from public view so they could exercise greater leeway in their pursuit for an answer to what makes these people tick. The less obvious superhumans were kept alongside the psychologically unstable while those who were more blatantly different were kept in the subterranian levels, barred from public access. For those stuck amongst the insane it didn't matter what they told others. Who would believe someone who's a patient in an asylum? Who would believe someone who claims to have special powers that the government wants to steal from them?
Nobody who didn't already know the truth.
The doctor ran tests on these individuals, tests designed to either bring out a power in those who had trouble manifesting theirs or to observe the power's effects on their biology. Full brain and body scans were common practice in the asylum. At her first test when she was brought in Olivia had no idea what was in store for her. Due to the purposefully sound proof design of the test chambers her pain had subsided for the most part, only flaring up at the occasional noise from the doctor himself.
When he brought her into the room he had her hooked up to a strange helmet and had several wires stuck onto with pads to measure her body's various responses to the stimuli. At first she was measured as resting rate and it was all normal. It was the only moment of peace she was granted. Then the helmet emitted a quiet tone, the tone growing louder after each phase was documented. Her pleas for them to stop fell on deaf ears as, due to her sensitivity towards sound, the test became utterly unbearable. Even the outdoors were nothing compared to the pain she suffered from the sounds being blasted into her head through the helmet. She couldn't even pass out to escape this suffering. The test only ended after the helmet had reached a volume just below the limit of what a human eardrum could take. She was dragged from her chair and back to her room, left to lay on her padded cell's floor, her eyes too dry from crying to cry anymore.
Every tear was a tear of pain.
This continued without end for the next eight years. Every three to four days she would be subjected to these horrible tests, all designed to bring out her gift so they could find it's roots. Outside of testing life was no less awful. The orderlies were largely men who would happily keep this all a secret for the power they had over the patients and a low hourly wage. There was no recourse for their actions so long as no one from the outside was watching so for a majority of the time they did whatever they felt like when they weren't actively working. Patients who were disruptive were no strangers to beatings. The doctor was fine with this since it afforded him useful blackmail material to ensure none of the staff involved would spill the truth of the asylum's real purpose to the public. Such amorality was a valuable tool in getting his men to help him subject the gifted patients to truly horrible experiments, up to and including live dissection. All the while Babble was a spectator to it all, forced to listen to every crime against morality carried out.
In the midst of all this horror and misery was an issue of a far less ethically dark nature but still awful nonetheless. Every night the orderly on night watch would always leave the radio on all throughout the night, blasting rock music until morning. No matter how much she begged them to not leave the radio on her words were ignored. While the music was disruptive to all the patient's sleep on that wing none were more disturbed by it than Olivia. While the padded cell afforded her some protection from the outdoor sounds it did little to abate the sound of the radio. She was all but incapable of falling asleep naturally, forced to stay awake for days at a time until she simply passed out from exhaustion.
Between the tests, the sounds of human suffering and the radio keeping her from sleeping it was impossible to remain wholly sane for long. It all took a toll on her mind, loosening her grip on sanity year after year. It was this slip into madness however that started to allow her to begin seeing sound in a new light, both figuratively and a bit literally. Out of a need to protect herself from the sounds around her she started to interact with the sound around her in an attempt to silence it. Her practice was met with mixed success. At first she'd fiddle with sound only for it to come out even louder or distorted like the sound of aluminum foil being chewed. After a couple tries however she was starting to grasp just how to shrink and grow wave amplitudes.
This was just the start to her awakening.
While Olivia was starting to succeed the doctor's own success was slipping. None of his gifted patients were showing any clear physical link with their gift that he could point to as a source for these new superhuman powers. Compared to the larger and better funded secret facilities his own operation was underperforming. He needed results and too many of his gifted subjects were dying before they could yield any telling physical developments. His frustration grew with each failure and it started to wear on his pride. He often took his frustrations out on the subjects, frequently berating Olivia, often calling her a "Babbling imbecile".
As for her she was understanding more and more the longer she had to test different ideas. She discovered that the element that was in her voice, the infrasound, was great for scaring the orderlies. Refining the sound so as to remove the audible aspects to the noise she was able to project a sound which was imperceptible as a sound but created the feeling of anxiety, irritation, nervousness and a subtle ghostly figure which was always just out of sight. The visual effect was a result of the infrasound causing the discs in the eyes to vibrate subtly causing such visual trickery. Between the air feeling colder, their minds becoming more agitated and their eyes perceiving things out of the corner of their vision the infrasonic waves created the very feeling of being haunted in all who heard it.
Night after night, day after day she filled the halls with infrasound. What was once an easy job had become a dread filled experience for the amoral employees of the asylum. The patients had become increasingly difficult to handle due to the fear which filled the hearts of everyone. The ghost sightings became a common rumor all across the hospital and soon hysteria was all too common amidst both patient and orderly.
The time was right.
That night when the lone watchman sat at his desk, the radio left off as he could no longer appreciate the music when the concern over the ghost which roamed the halls was ever present, she set her plan into motion. All around the night watchman the walls suddenly erupted with laughter. The phantasmal cackling filled the air sending the man into a panic. He ran, leaving his desk and fleeing from the asylum. Using her power over sound she sent vibrations through the lock of her metal cell door, wiggling the tumblers in the locking mechanism about until they finally clicked open. Pushing the door open, a greater effort for her than for others given how her body was weak from the stress and the pain she had endured, she stepped out into the hall and made her way to the orderly's desk. Taking his keys she proceeded to release all the patients from their cells, turning them loose within the asylum.
What followed was a riot as lunatics and superhumans alike fought their way to the exit, smashing at the gates to make their way to freedom. As she released the last of the patients in her wing of the asylum however a hand grabbed her by the hair. The doctor had been watching her this entire time, secretly observing her progress. With people running about all over she had mistaken his footsteps for that of one of the patients.
He dragged her behind him down the halls until they reached the operation room. He strapped her arms down and picked up the buzz saw. Having a gifted patient who had manifested her powers there was only one step left: To remove her brain and study it to find the neural branches developed from learning her power. He was certain that he could find the break through he needed there.
Focusing on the bolts holding the straps in place she sent vibrations through the straps into the metal, wiggling the bolts free as quickly as she could. Just as the doctor was about to cut open her head her straps came free and she reflexively reached up to block the roaring blade. Instead of her cranium the saw chewed into hands, the metal rending through them. Seeing as she had suffered for so long and so much the pain was little more than a distraction, especially now as fresh adrenaline enriched her blood. Luckily for her the straps around her wrists had slowed the saw down enough that it didn't cleanly cut through her arms and into her head, allowing her the time she needed to bolt from her chair.
She ran from that room, from the doctor, down the halls and out the front doors which swung open now. The rest of the patients had made their escape, lunatics and superhumans alike flooding down into the city nearby. As she stepped out, looking up at the outside world for the first time in eight years, she could see smoke in the distance. No doubt the others were wreaking havoc upon the town amidst the chaos that their escape brought. She would not return to the city, at least not where she could be caught. She instead fled to the forest flanking the asylum, running past trees and over brush. Branches caught her clothes like so many tiny hands, tearing here and there at the fabric. Burs clung to the cuffs of her pant legs and thorns cut at her feet. She was hurt, she was bleeding, she was tired and her lungs burned from the effort of running for so long but she dared not stop, not until she was free from the doctor's reach once and for all.
At last freedom was hers.
She continued to walk when she could no longer run, staggering on for quite some time. She passed out only to awaken a short while later in the care of a couple hikers who had found her not far off the trail. They had done what they could, luckily for her one of them had a limited medical kit on him. Her arms were bandaged at the stumps and she had been given some water whilst she was out. She could hear the one hiker talking on the phone. He was speaking to police, calling for an ambulance.
She was not about to be taken in again, not by more doctors, not where he could find her. When the two weren't looking she cancelled out the sound of her moving with waves of equal amplitude and length, getting up in total silence and running off into the woods. By the time the two noticed she was gone it was too late for them to chase her. They couldn't see which direction she had fled.
Since then she had taken shelter in an abandoned warehouse out at the edge of another city that was not too far from the one she had fled. This is where she resides, for now at least.
Prior reputation:
She has garnered a negative reputation from the nearby neighborhood as that strange spooky girl people occasionally encounter. She only really comes out to steal food from the local convenience store, food largely in the form of peanut butter, marshmallows and plain white bread. None have been able to catch her thanks to her power over sound. The shop keeper has offered a sum for her capture and arrest but almost no one's taken him up on it due to the paltry sum of the reward money. Otherwise she's largely known only in urban myth, the phantasmal song that children often hear when playing in the woods. None of them have ever spotted her but many children have been audience to her songs.
Personality:
She's a bag of nuts.
But perhaps that's an oversimplification. To best address what constitutes Babble's personality we'll break it down aspect by aspect.
To start, her power has had an enormous impact on how she interacts with the world. Sound comprises a majority of how she perceives the world and also how she interacts with it. She's pretty much never not using her power over sound in any form of interaction, social or otherwise. This often makes her harder to engage as she often is more interested in sound itself over the content of the messages other people are trying to relay. It's probably much easier to try and converse with her using non-verbal mediums of communication amusingly enough.
Her disinterest in taking conversations seriously is also in part due to her childishness. Having had easily more than half of her childhood taken from her while she languished in a padded cell she has a powerful longing to essentially seize back what was stolen from her. Having earned her freedom for now she's largely absorbed with having fun whenever she's not simply trying to survive. Serious matters often devolve into silliness as she has very little interest in embracing negativity. While this might make her seem more optimistic there's no mistaking the scars that her life as the doctor's subject of study has left, both figuratively and literally.
Her humor can range anywhere between lighthearted fun to downright gallows humor but no matter what it is it's bound to be at least a bit surreal. While she's determined to cast off the shackles of concern for her future she's very well aware that what little freedom she holds is paid for in vigilance. Knowing that there are people looking to return her to the living hell that was the facility, her doctor included, she is quite wary and loath to draw the public's eye upon herself. While she might play at innocence her self imposed lifestyle of homelessness is just as much a defense mechanism as it is a desire to embrace the freedom she's lacked for so long.
She largely means well even in times when she's a nuisance. She holds little malice towards others though the prospect of returning to the life which broke her mind scares her which often makes her more dangerous than normal. Given her lack of self-esteem she's disassociated herself from her previous identity, only ever going by the alias Babble as though it were the only name she was given. She's gone so far in removing herself from her past self she no longer even refers to the living body that is herself in first person. She identifies herself as the very sound she controls, only really referring to her actual body as a separate person even though she's willing to admit that Babble the sound and Babble the person are linked both mentally and physically. As a result of this she has also vowed never to speak with her natural voice ever again. She wants to be pleasant for people to want to be her friend and her true voice has never done anything but drive others away from her so she only communicates by generating the sounds of voices to communicate with others. Thus, whenever she is speaking it is never her voice and her mouth almost never moves since she has no need for vocal cords to convey her message.
She's like a ghost you'd see out of a Japanese horror film. Unhealthily pale skin, Dark eyes and Long straight hair as black as jet all serve to paint an image of someone you would not want to see in the middle of a darkened corridor. This is of course a false first impression as despite her characteristics she's quite cheerful looking, often sporting a wide smile as she goes about her night.
Given how she's unwelcome in public she's been unable to diversify her collection of clothes, leaving her solely dressed in the straight jacket and hospital pants she was kept in when she escaped. Due to the fact she only eats foods that are quiet to eat since they cause her the least discomfort she's rather skinny as well, her form slight with just enough muscle to move herself and little else. Given how she's missing her hands it's no surprise that her legs are stronger than those handless arms of hers.
Generation: 3. Quirk: Sound.
Details
Babble controls sound. Every facet of sound, from wavelengths and amplitudes to vibrations and sonic pressure she is intrinsically tied to everything that is sound. She controls it not through any physical medium but through her will. When she hears sound it is not through her ears but rather it is her mind perceiving the waves directly and interpreting them. Because of this all her senses interact with sound, no longer just as an audible medium but a visual and textile experience as well. She feels sound like it's an extension of herself, an ethereal limb that's simultaneously attached and disconnected from her. Unlike her own limbs however there is no instinct for controlling sound. Understanding is something to be earned.
Her power is greater when she has louder sounds to work with but it is a double edged blade as louder sounds are more difficult to control and present risk to her as she's far more sensitive to sound than most. Performing precise tasks with highly energy dense sounds is a surgically precise task as even a minor slip up can wreak a fair deal of havok and throw the whole attempt off. In paricularly quiet areas her power is much weaker as generating sounds in empty space produces weaker effects than simply taking a sound and amplifying it.
Her limitations are the very limitations of sound itself. Much like the inverse-proportional law which dictates the strength of sound over distance the power she's able to generate deteriorates rapidly the further away from her the target location is. Just like sound itself the thinner the medium she's transmitting her sound through the weaker the effects become. The resistance of the material her sound is traveling through also effects the potency of the sound.
Naturally given the complexity of the field she controls it is fiendishly difficult to properly wield her power. Only after years of being victim to it's uncontrolled effects was she even able to stop it from prolonging her suffering. Her control is largely limited by her understanding of sound itself which while more indepth than most people's understanding of sound is still fathomless miles away from her true potential.
As she begins upon this new adventure her understanding of her power will be quite low, knowing just enough to have survived this long with a little bit of potential for discovery of new sound techniques.
Background:
Quirk discovery:
At the early age of six it was a school day just like many others. She went to school, attended her classes, received her homework and tried to avoid the other students who picked on her often. This day however was not going to be just like every other day of hers.
Just as she was getting ready to head back home to her dreary household a couple of students were up to some horseplay. One of them ended up tossing a book over his shoulder which fell and hit her square in the head. It was at this moment that something in her head was shook loose. In that very instant it was as if the whole world was exploding.
Shoes stepping, phones ringing, people talking, chalk on chalk boards, lockers closing, cars driving, birds singing, hearts beating, she could hear it all. Every sound, even down to the most shallow of frequencies, could be heard at a volume beyond which any other human could ever conceive. Every foot fall was akin to the explosion of a thousand atom bombs, every voice a crashing cacophony of meteoric proportions. It all went well past the point where human ears would simply break as there was no limit imposed on the method she recieved each sound. If a sound so much as existed by the time it reached her it was heard at the loudest possible volume such a noise could possibly exist at. Of course there was no way to discern each sound from one another. The louder sounds overlapped the quieter ones and blended with each other until it formed an astronomically loud concert of discordant noises.
Of course nobody else could hear this. From the average spectator's point of view the girl was struck across the back of the head by a heavy book and then proceeded to collapse to the ground clutching her head and screaming in agony while writhing about.
Unfortunately for her this horrible awakening was only the beginning.
Family:
From birth to the moment they gave her up she was unliked, perhaps unlikeable.
As an only child at the time she found her mother and father were always fairly distant. It was if the very sound of her voice irritated them. Anytime she'd try to carry on any sort of conversation they'd dismiss her. "Please be quiet dear" They'd always say. She couldn't understand the reasons they always seemed cross with her almost all the time.
How was she supposed to know that her voice carried infrasonic waves?
Before the incident at school her home life seemed to cast a shadow over her self-confidence, undercutting her self worth for pretty much her whole life. What substituted that however was magnitudes worse.
Training/Occupation:
Her parents took her to every doctor they could find. Not a single one of them could identify what was wrong. It was hard to find something that wasn't there. In the end the most they could offer was that it might of been psychosomatic, a diagnosis which offered no satisfaction for neither her nor her parents.
It was only when a certain man had overheard of the incident and sought them out did something resembling an answer appear. Invited to his office he told them that the issue was a rare and complex psychological disorder, something which could only be remedied through years of treatment in a specially equipped asylum. He offered them a choice: Keep their daughter and let her suffer uselessly for the rest of her life or hand her over to him where she could be treated and perhaps eventually cured.
Olivia could offer no counsel to her parents on the matter. She had been screaming from the pain for so long her voice was gone. All she could do was shiver in pain. In the end they chose to surrender her to the doctor. While it was natural for most decent parents to feel at least some reluctance towards parting with their child in truth she was more burden than joy for them. While their suspicions warned against the choice they couldn't help but yield to the voice of authority in the subject before them.
And so she was taken...
To Redrum Asylum.
On the surface it appeared to be exactly what it says on the tin, a rehabilitation and/or containment center for the mentally ill. They had their fair share of mentally ill there two, being treated according to the standard for psychiatric care. What the public couldn't see was that the very same building was also designed to contain and study the recent superhuman anomalies that have been appearing within the country. Built on a grant from the government the asylum itself was simply a front for them, a means of isolating these strange new phenomenons from public view so they could exercise greater leeway in their pursuit for an answer to what makes these people tick. The less obvious superhumans were kept alongside the psychologically unstable while those who were more blatantly different were kept in the subterranian levels, barred from public access. For those stuck amongst the insane it didn't matter what they told others. Who would believe someone who's a patient in an asylum? Who would believe someone who claims to have special powers that the government wants to steal from them?
Nobody who didn't already know the truth.
The doctor ran tests on these individuals, tests designed to either bring out a power in those who had trouble manifesting theirs or to observe the power's effects on their biology. Full brain and body scans were common practice in the asylum. At her first test when she was brought in Olivia had no idea what was in store for her. Due to the purposefully sound proof design of the test chambers her pain had subsided for the most part, only flaring up at the occasional noise from the doctor himself.
When he brought her into the room he had her hooked up to a strange helmet and had several wires stuck onto with pads to measure her body's various responses to the stimuli. At first she was measured as resting rate and it was all normal. It was the only moment of peace she was granted. Then the helmet emitted a quiet tone, the tone growing louder after each phase was documented. Her pleas for them to stop fell on deaf ears as, due to her sensitivity towards sound, the test became utterly unbearable. Even the outdoors were nothing compared to the pain she suffered from the sounds being blasted into her head through the helmet. She couldn't even pass out to escape this suffering. The test only ended after the helmet had reached a volume just below the limit of what a human eardrum could take. She was dragged from her chair and back to her room, left to lay on her padded cell's floor, her eyes too dry from crying to cry anymore.
Every tear was a tear of pain.
This continued without end for the next eight years. Every three to four days she would be subjected to these horrible tests, all designed to bring out her gift so they could find it's roots. Outside of testing life was no less awful. The orderlies were largely men who would happily keep this all a secret for the power they had over the patients and a low hourly wage. There was no recourse for their actions so long as no one from the outside was watching so for a majority of the time they did whatever they felt like when they weren't actively working. Patients who were disruptive were no strangers to beatings. The doctor was fine with this since it afforded him useful blackmail material to ensure none of the staff involved would spill the truth of the asylum's real purpose to the public. Such amorality was a valuable tool in getting his men to help him subject the gifted patients to truly horrible experiments, up to and including live dissection. All the while Babble was a spectator to it all, forced to listen to every crime against morality carried out.
In the midst of all this horror and misery was an issue of a far less ethically dark nature but still awful nonetheless. Every night the orderly on night watch would always leave the radio on all throughout the night, blasting rock music until morning. No matter how much she begged them to not leave the radio on her words were ignored. While the music was disruptive to all the patient's sleep on that wing none were more disturbed by it than Olivia. While the padded cell afforded her some protection from the outdoor sounds it did little to abate the sound of the radio. She was all but incapable of falling asleep naturally, forced to stay awake for days at a time until she simply passed out from exhaustion.
Between the tests, the sounds of human suffering and the radio keeping her from sleeping it was impossible to remain wholly sane for long. It all took a toll on her mind, loosening her grip on sanity year after year. It was this slip into madness however that started to allow her to begin seeing sound in a new light, both figuratively and a bit literally. Out of a need to protect herself from the sounds around her she started to interact with the sound around her in an attempt to silence it. Her practice was met with mixed success. At first she'd fiddle with sound only for it to come out even louder or distorted like the sound of aluminum foil being chewed. After a couple tries however she was starting to grasp just how to shrink and grow wave amplitudes.
This was just the start to her awakening.
While Olivia was starting to succeed the doctor's own success was slipping. None of his gifted patients were showing any clear physical link with their gift that he could point to as a source for these new superhuman powers. Compared to the larger and better funded secret facilities his own operation was underperforming. He needed results and too many of his gifted subjects were dying before they could yield any telling physical developments. His frustration grew with each failure and it started to wear on his pride. He often took his frustrations out on the subjects, frequently berating Olivia, often calling her a "Babbling imbecile".
As for her she was understanding more and more the longer she had to test different ideas. She discovered that the element that was in her voice, the infrasound, was great for scaring the orderlies. Refining the sound so as to remove the audible aspects to the noise she was able to project a sound which was imperceptible as a sound but created the feeling of anxiety, irritation, nervousness and a subtle ghostly figure which was always just out of sight. The visual effect was a result of the infrasound causing the discs in the eyes to vibrate subtly causing such visual trickery. Between the air feeling colder, their minds becoming more agitated and their eyes perceiving things out of the corner of their vision the infrasonic waves created the very feeling of being haunted in all who heard it.
Night after night, day after day she filled the halls with infrasound. What was once an easy job had become a dread filled experience for the amoral employees of the asylum. The patients had become increasingly difficult to handle due to the fear which filled the hearts of everyone. The ghost sightings became a common rumor all across the hospital and soon hysteria was all too common amidst both patient and orderly.
The time was right.
That night when the lone watchman sat at his desk, the radio left off as he could no longer appreciate the music when the concern over the ghost which roamed the halls was ever present, she set her plan into motion. All around the night watchman the walls suddenly erupted with laughter. The phantasmal cackling filled the air sending the man into a panic. He ran, leaving his desk and fleeing from the asylum. Using her power over sound she sent vibrations through the lock of her metal cell door, wiggling the tumblers in the locking mechanism about until they finally clicked open. Pushing the door open, a greater effort for her than for others given how her body was weak from the stress and the pain she had endured, she stepped out into the hall and made her way to the orderly's desk. Taking his keys she proceeded to release all the patients from their cells, turning them loose within the asylum.
What followed was a riot as lunatics and superhumans alike fought their way to the exit, smashing at the gates to make their way to freedom. As she released the last of the patients in her wing of the asylum however a hand grabbed her by the hair. The doctor had been watching her this entire time, secretly observing her progress. With people running about all over she had mistaken his footsteps for that of one of the patients.
He dragged her behind him down the halls until they reached the operation room. He strapped her arms down and picked up the buzz saw. Having a gifted patient who had manifested her powers there was only one step left: To remove her brain and study it to find the neural branches developed from learning her power. He was certain that he could find the break through he needed there.
Focusing on the bolts holding the straps in place she sent vibrations through the straps into the metal, wiggling the bolts free as quickly as she could. Just as the doctor was about to cut open her head her straps came free and she reflexively reached up to block the roaring blade. Instead of her cranium the saw chewed into hands, the metal rending through them. Seeing as she had suffered for so long and so much the pain was little more than a distraction, especially now as fresh adrenaline enriched her blood. Luckily for her the straps around her wrists had slowed the saw down enough that it didn't cleanly cut through her arms and into her head, allowing her the time she needed to bolt from her chair.
She ran from that room, from the doctor, down the halls and out the front doors which swung open now. The rest of the patients had made their escape, lunatics and superhumans alike flooding down into the city nearby. As she stepped out, looking up at the outside world for the first time in eight years, she could see smoke in the distance. No doubt the others were wreaking havoc upon the town amidst the chaos that their escape brought. She would not return to the city, at least not where she could be caught. She instead fled to the forest flanking the asylum, running past trees and over brush. Branches caught her clothes like so many tiny hands, tearing here and there at the fabric. Burs clung to the cuffs of her pant legs and thorns cut at her feet. She was hurt, she was bleeding, she was tired and her lungs burned from the effort of running for so long but she dared not stop, not until she was free from the doctor's reach once and for all.
At last freedom was hers.
She continued to walk when she could no longer run, staggering on for quite some time. She passed out only to awaken a short while later in the care of a couple hikers who had found her not far off the trail. They had done what they could, luckily for her one of them had a limited medical kit on him. Her arms were bandaged at the stumps and she had been given some water whilst she was out. She could hear the one hiker talking on the phone. He was speaking to police, calling for an ambulance.
She was not about to be taken in again, not by more doctors, not where he could find her. When the two weren't looking she cancelled out the sound of her moving with waves of equal amplitude and length, getting up in total silence and running off into the woods. By the time the two noticed she was gone it was too late for them to chase her. They couldn't see which direction she had fled.
Since then she had taken shelter in an abandoned warehouse out at the edge of another city that was not too far from the one she had fled. This is where she resides, for now at least.
Prior reputation:
She has garnered a negative reputation from the nearby neighborhood as that strange spooky girl people occasionally encounter. She only really comes out to steal food from the local convenience store, food largely in the form of peanut butter, marshmallows and plain white bread. None have been able to catch her thanks to her power over sound. The shop keeper has offered a sum for her capture and arrest but almost no one's taken him up on it due to the paltry sum of the reward money. Otherwise she's largely known only in urban myth, the phantasmal song that children often hear when playing in the woods. None of them have ever spotted her but many children have been audience to her songs.
Personality:
She's a bag of nuts.
But perhaps that's an oversimplification. To best address what constitutes Babble's personality we'll break it down aspect by aspect.
To start, her power has had an enormous impact on how she interacts with the world. Sound comprises a majority of how she perceives the world and also how she interacts with it. She's pretty much never not using her power over sound in any form of interaction, social or otherwise. This often makes her harder to engage as she often is more interested in sound itself over the content of the messages other people are trying to relay. It's probably much easier to try and converse with her using non-verbal mediums of communication amusingly enough.
Her disinterest in taking conversations seriously is also in part due to her childishness. Having had easily more than half of her childhood taken from her while she languished in a padded cell she has a powerful longing to essentially seize back what was stolen from her. Having earned her freedom for now she's largely absorbed with having fun whenever she's not simply trying to survive. Serious matters often devolve into silliness as she has very little interest in embracing negativity. While this might make her seem more optimistic there's no mistaking the scars that her life as the doctor's subject of study has left, both figuratively and literally.
Her humor can range anywhere between lighthearted fun to downright gallows humor but no matter what it is it's bound to be at least a bit surreal. While she's determined to cast off the shackles of concern for her future she's very well aware that what little freedom she holds is paid for in vigilance. Knowing that there are people looking to return her to the living hell that was the facility, her doctor included, she is quite wary and loath to draw the public's eye upon herself. While she might play at innocence her self imposed lifestyle of homelessness is just as much a defense mechanism as it is a desire to embrace the freedom she's lacked for so long.
She largely means well even in times when she's a nuisance. She holds little malice towards others though the prospect of returning to the life which broke her mind scares her which often makes her more dangerous than normal. Given her lack of self-esteem she's disassociated herself from her previous identity, only ever going by the alias Babble as though it were the only name she was given. She's gone so far in removing herself from her past self she no longer even refers to the living body that is herself in first person. She identifies herself as the very sound she controls, only really referring to her actual body as a separate person even though she's willing to admit that Babble the sound and Babble the person are linked both mentally and physically. As a result of this she has also vowed never to speak with her natural voice ever again. She wants to be pleasant for people to want to be her friend and her true voice has never done anything but drive others away from her so she only communicates by generating the sounds of voices to communicate with others. Thus, whenever she is speaking it is never her voice and her mouth almost never moves since she has no need for vocal cords to convey her message.
@Dark Light - Well the doctor involved had taken her in largely because he recognized the fact she was gifted. His efforts were to try and figure out how it worked, using her as a test subject.
If you want I can change the location from an asylum to a testing facility. In condensed summary after she learns to cope with her quirk's unfortunate side effects she uses it to scare everyone out of the asylum, which works on all except the doctor who instead chooses to try and remove her brain to figure out how it works. As long as the site itself isn't required by plot to remain inhabited it's not a hard change.
Also, a slight alteration, she loses her hands after shattering a window with them as opposed to my earlier statement. It will all make more sense when I get the background written up of course.
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