Basic Information
Name: January Sawyer
Nickname/Alias/Etc: Jan, Ligeia
Gender: Female
Age: 26
Height: 5’ 4”
Weight: 125 lbs
Home District: Knightdale Rows
AppearanceHair Color: Dark brown to black
Eye Color: Hazel with brown flecks
Ethnicity: Black (African American) and White (English, German)
Physical Appearance: Jan always felt a bit self-conscious about her appearance. As a mixed race person, she shares features with both Black mother and her White father, and this has made her feel a bit out of place in most communities. Her hair is thick, coarse and curly with some sheen to it. Although she is not in the habit of straightening it, she often wears it pulled back when in the field. Untied, it falls to her shoulders. Her complexion is medium brown, and she has a few freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. Her eyebrows are somewhat sparse, but expressive and prone to raising quizzically. She has hazel eyes that are framed with relatively long eyelashes. Her face is angular and long with high cheekbones. Jan’s nose is broad and somewhat flat, and she has full lips that hide straight teeth. Her build is relatively proportional, though she carries more weight on her lower body and has a fairly thin waist. Her figure is slightly pear-shaped though the time she spends training is evident from her defined muscles, especially in her legs. She doesn’t consider herself to be exceptionally pretty, at least by conventional standards. However, she is often called ‘exotic’, a word that she has grown to loathe.
Attire: Jan dislikes dressing up and tends to pay little attention to the latest trends. She is partial to a casual look and tends to favor vivid colors, especially greens and blues. As she is often cold, she wears colorful scarves for most of the year. She usually prefers pants, especially jeans, to skirts and dresses. She often wears a bit of light makeup. There are a few pieces of jewelry she wears semi-regularly, though they aren’t especially bold or expensive.
PersonalityInnate & Outward Personality:At first encounter, Jan is often friendly but a bit distant. She places a fair amount of emphasis on first interactions rather than first impressions. Although she can be a bit reticent, those most familiar with her know that her facial expressions often betray what she’s actually thinking or feeling. Her close friends describe her as being thoughtful, loyal, and having a warm sense of humor. In the workplace, Jan is known for being professional and detail-oriented. She is quiet, but generally well respected by her coworkers and supervisors. She doesn’t like office gossip and has no problem informing people of this fact, given her own preference for privacy. She can appear to be a bit tightly wound and unadventurous to those who don’t know her.
Although her reserve can come across as annoyance or antisociality, she is actually fairly easygoing. Upsetting her is difficult, but certainly not impossible. She may be patient, but she does not suffer fools or their folly. Her family and friends are important to her, and she is protective of them (often up to a fault).
Similarly, she does not have strong tastes in most things. Her movie and music collections tend to be eclectic. However, there are a few things that she is very passionate about.
Jan is somewhat insecure, and often feels a bit out of place partially due to being a mixed race woman. That being said, she gives off an air of quiet confidence that most people don’t see through. Having just recently moved to the area, she doesn’t have many friends and is fairly lonely. However, she finds it difficult to be outgoing and doesn’t enjoy going to bars by herself. She tends to work out at NEST facilities and then go home to an empty apartment.
Hobbies/Interests:Jen still maintains her lifelong passions for martial arts. She also reads quite a bit. Her favorites include Poe, Virginia Woolf, and Dostoyevsky. Poetry is also something she enjoys, though her tastes here tend to be fairly eclectic. She also listens to a wide variety of music, everything from Hip Hop to Big Band to Classical. She enjoys birdwatching and has recently taken up watercolor painting.
Skills/Talents: Jen is a decent martial artist, after having spent years training. She also has a natural ability for learning languages, given her powers.
Prized Possession:Her grandmother’s locket
History/Bio:Jan was born, somewhat unsurprisingly, on New Years of 1989 in Seattle. Her parents initially thought that they were unable to have children, so her arrival was an unexpected blessing. Her father, Trent was actually a poet of some status, and he taught English Literature at the University of Washington. He and Jan’s mother Patricia met in college at Berkeley, and married shortly after graduation. Although Patricia had a Masters degree, she ultimately decided that the life of an academic wasn’t for her and she opened up an ‘alternative’ bookstore near the UW campus. Much of Jan’s early formative years were spent in this store, ensuring an enduring love of reading. When Jan was five, her younger brother Kamar was born. Given the age difference, they were never especially close. However, Jan has always been protective of him. Currently, he is finishing up his final year of college.
Growing up, Jan was a clumsy and slightly awkward child. Her parents enrolled her in marital arts and ballet classes in an attempt to help with this problem. She immediately loved taekwondo and began practicing three days a week. Although she stuck with it into her late teens, it wasn’t until she stopped growing and figured out her center of gravity that she became a truly good fighter.
Her parents always encouraged Jan and Kamar to develop their own interests. In high school, Jan discovered that she had a natural aptitude for languages. She excelled in her Spanish and Computer classes, and began teaching herself French. It was during this time period that Jan’s power first awoke.
She was at her mother’s store one Saturday morning, restocking. It was a well-known fact that Jan and Kamar were expected to help out when they didn’t have any extracurricular activities. Since Kamar was at a track meet, Jan was alone that morning. She had just finished rearranging the complete works of Silvia Plath when she heard a bird whistling outside the open window. Since she was both alone and bored out of her skull, she decided to try and mimic its call. Several hours and many confused birds later, she discovered that she had perfect pitch.
Graduation came quickly, and Jan still had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. She enrolled at UC-Berkeley and began taking Arabic and Chinese classes in addition to her Gen Ed requirements. Several of her instructors insisted that her pronunciation was far too skilled for her to be a novice language learner. It was shortly after that that the rest of her powers began to manifest. At the end of four years, she graduated with a double major in Arabic and Computer Science, and a minor in Chinese.
Facing an uncertain job market and a mountain of student loan debt, she joined the military and worked as a Cryptologic Language Analyst for the Air Force. She worked there for three years before she realized that her powers could also be used effectively in espionage and combat situations. She signed up for NEST and just recently finished their training and was assigned to Verthaven.
RelationshipsFamily: Trenton Sawyer—Father
Patricia Sawyer—Mother
Kamar Sawyer—Younger Brother (Has Telepathy and some degree of mind-reading)
Dynamics:TBD
AbilitiesPower Class:Elemental/Super-System
Power: Jan’s powers stem from her ability to control and manipulate sound.
Mimicry: At their most basic level, this means that she can mimic tones almost immediately upon hearing them, which gives her a hug advantage when learning new languages. She can easily mimic people and animals whose vocalizations fall within her normal range of speech. If she wants to mimic someone whose voice is outside her typical range, it is possible but takes significantly longer.
Echolocation: Similar to a bat, Jan can use a form of echolocation to “see”, even in entirely dark locations. The major downside to this power is that she has to make a rather loud clicking noise that is both mildly irritating and too loud to go undetected by anyone or anything with normal hearing.
Sonic Boom: Jan can occasionally use her powers to create a blast of sonic energy. The ‘boom’ itself is enough to cause substantial hearing loss, but the shockwaves that cause the boom are more of the problem. They’ve been known to shatter glass and make stronger materials crack. They can knock most people backwards and create varying amounts of blast trauma. Unlike the sonic boom created by an aircraft, for example, Jan’s powers have a much smaller area of effect. Increasing the area of impact is possible, but requires substantial energy expenditure.
Limits:Mimicry: Mimicry is essentially limited by her vocal chords. She can perfectly mimic tones and sounds within a ‘normal’ human range instantaneously. However, more difficult tones will take a few tries.
Echolocation: Despite its usefulness, echolocation isn’t especially stealthy. While Jan might be able to navigate in the dark, the noise of her echolocation is fairly audible.
Sonic Boom: The newest and most volatile of Jan’s powers. She hasn’t quite mastered her control of this yet, and has been known to unintentionally break a window here and there. At its current level, it’s not particularly dangerous unless someone is standing directly in front of her (within about 10 feet). This also means that in order to do any kind of deliberate damage, she needs to be within ten feet of her intended target. Obviously, this puts her at a greater risk of injury since she needs to be right in the action for her powers to be truly useful.
Weaknesses/Drawbacks: One of Jan's biggest weaknesses is how difficult it is for her to control her Sonic Boom. Whenever she gets upset or raises her voice, there's a very good chance that she will break something or injure someone unintentionally. This also means that she must, almost exclusively, speak in a calm, low voice. This may not seem like too much of a problem, but trying to communicate anyone in the field is almost impossible without the use of hand signs. Even deliberate use of the Sonic Boom is dangerous as it is easy to damage her vocal chords. Each time she uses it, she requires significant periods of rest (usually at least 3 days) before she can use any of her powers. There's also a very real danger of ashing, especially given her inability to control its volume.
On a more personal level, Jan has been known to suffer from vertigo and anxiety in some high places. Buildings above six stories trigger these responses. Jan is also extremely protective of her family and friends. Messing with them is about the only way to make her lose her cool. But when she does, she's a nervous wreck.
Other: She speaks in a low, even tone. While it’s not quite monotonous, it doesn’t quite seem to fit her. This is mostly because she is concerned about her sonic boom power; she still doesn’t have it totally under control. Jan recently rescued an orange and black calico cat named Mugsy.