Name: Cadence E. Halstead a/k/a Cadie (pronounced like Katie)
Age: 20
Species: Human Mutant (Extremely powerful Beta Level)
Gender: Female
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual and panicky about it.
Capabilites:Cadie is an exceptionally strong telekinetic. In an unrestricted state, she is capable of producing forces up to 40,000 PSI. Her mind can crush bone, concrete, glass, steel… basically everything on her home Earth. She can throw busses, trains, airplanes, elephants, and can propel smaller objects at incredible speeds.
There is a price to pay for Cadie’s incredible mental gift. Her body needs huge energy reserves to power this high-level mutation, and so no matter how much she eats Cadie remains painfully thin. (Patients who have never asked about her illness tend to assume she’s in the eating disordered category.) Large displays of power require Cadie to have a third-party energy channeler involved, as she will literally deplete herself and die if she does too much. She is not capable of drawing ambient power from her surroundings or from beings close to her.
...at least, she’s not capable of it yet.
Cadie’s telekinetic talent is linked directly to her mental illness.
Mental Illness: Conversion Disorder: Due to some of the traumatic events of Cadie’s past, she has developed a fairly severe form of this disorder. She has a fear of strong emotions and her body will attempt to physically prevent her from feeling such things. She may suffer a seizure when the patient in front of her takes the last piece of cherry pie. This happens to allow Cadie to avoid becoming angry at the loss of her pie, so that her second mental illness will not take over.
Impulse Control Disorder: Thanks to her ICD, Cadie is unable to control when her telekinesis will lash out violently on its own. The patient who took the last piece of cherry pie might suddenly find his or her throat crushed and Cadie would find herself surprised with the last piece of pie in her hand while a corpse lay cooling at her feet. (She blacks out when she loses control of her impulses.) This is largely offset by the Conversion Disorder (which likely developed as a result of the ICD), but Cadie has a limiter in place for safety’s sake. A small microchip implanted at the base of her skull disallows most of the neural impulses needed for her telekinesis to function completely. So long as the chip is functioning properly, Cadie is limited to displays of 100 PSI or less.
Fears: Hedonophobia (fear of pleasure) and philophobia (fear of being in love).
History:Cadence was born a mutant, which technically makes her a changeling. Her parents and siblings are all standard-issue human, so why Cadie is what she is, no one really knows. Luckily for her, the girl’s mom and dad were quite open to one of their children being gifted. They weren’t at all creeped out by the way their daughter’s bottles floated over to the counter and fed themselves to the hungry infant. It made their lives easier.
Initially, Cadie’s telekinetic talent seemed weak and well under her control. She was classified as Delta Level and not required to disclose her mutation or enroll in a special school. So when she accidentally killed a bully who tried to steal her lunch money at the age of eight, she kept it to herself. The girl liked her school… and her life. The child’s death was never solved, but due to his internal injuries it was deemed a probable hit-and-run car accident.
For many years after that, Cadie’s talent grew in secret. At the age of thirteen she became aware that she was much stronger than a run-of-the-mill Delta. Her powers grew as she did, and during her freshman year of high school she could have easily stood her ground against Beta Levels. Doctors would later speculate that Cadence’s changing hormones coupled with her growing powers were to blame for the tragedy that happened at Pine Crest High School that fateful day in October.
Cadence’s best friend was a beautiful brunette named Rayanne. They’d been friends since third grade, and Raya was one of the few normal girls who had no problem dealing with Cadie’s mutant nature. They got along just fine until the end of their middle school years. Thanks to Cadence’s mutant powers, she never really developed breasts or hips or an ass. Raya did… in fact, her body filled out the way a body ideally should. All the boys Cadie was ever interested in liked Raya in ‘that way’, but never waifish blonde Cadie.
Luke was one of the most beautiful boys at Cadie’s school, at least in her evaluation. Of course, he wanted to date Raya. Cadie begged Raya to let her have just this one, to leave him alone, but Raya refused. The first time Cadie saw Raya kissing Luke in the hallways… something inside her changed. Jealousy, desire, pain, rejection, and furious anger formed a tight ball in her chest before the emotions became more than Cadence could handle. Everything exploded into a thousand fragments of light. Cadie hoped she’d just fainted… but it was a psychotic break.
Eighty students, four teachers and one janitor died instantaneously. Raya and Luke were, of course, among those students. 113 more people suffered injuries of varying degrees. The school building was damaged so badly that it had to be demolished and rebuilt. Firefighters who responded to the scene were certain at first that a bomb had gone off… except that there, sanding unharmed at ground zero, was Beta Level Mutant. Cadence was sixteen.
That was when Cadie was diagnosed with Impulse Control Disorder. Her anger at being cast aside by both Luke and Raya had resulted in in the Pine Crest disaster, but similar events of increasing severity would follow at all the mental hospitals that attempted to house Cadie. She developed Conversion Disorder after all the times she’d come to surrounded by dead bodies. It was her physical form’s attempt to control the mental beast it housed. It wasn’t enough, and her kill count only continued to rise. She became a dark spot on the name of mutant kind everywhere. Finally, on her eighteenth birthday, Cadence was sent to Osmond’s.
Appearance:Cadie is five feet, four inches tall. Her body is painfully thin, with only the barest hint of breasts or hips. Her white-blonde hair is shoulder length and straight as a board. (Its length is the only thing that keeps her from being mistaken for a boy.) Her facial features would be strikingly beautiful if not for the overall gaunt quality she has to her: pale green eyes, full lips, a straight, small nose, perfectly arched brows, clear skin. Yet her lips are cracked from her nervous twitch of licking them frequently, and there are usually dark hollows beneath her eyes. She looks like she'd blow away in the slightest wind.
In public, the mutant tends to draw in on herself physically. She often 'hugs' herself, gripping her own elbows, or pulls her knees in to her chest when she's seated on a couch or large enough chair. She generally shies away from physical contact except from an extremely select group of individuals.
Personality:Cadie is deliberately shy and very soft-spoken. It can be quite difficult to have a conversation with her in a crowded room, and she has a tough time not getting frustrated when people repeatedly ask her to speak up. As strong emotions like desire, jealousy and anger can trigger an episode for her, Cadie finds it is easier to keep herself disconnected from as many of the Institute’s inhabitants as possible.
She also wishes that she could just be normal: that her body and mind would stop fighting one another for control. The young woman likes to laugh, but can't remember the last time she found herself lighthearted enough to make such a sound. With such other serious diagnosis floating around, something like depression hardly seems worth mentioning, but of course there are times when Cadie loses hope. These are the times when she is most prone to violent outbursts... which still frighten her.
Miscellany:Cadence and Jaxilian have a unique, and uniquely fucked up relationship. Jax is really intelligent, but quite a bit sicker than Cadie. She realizes that he’s transferred some of his delusions onto her, and does what she can to help him see she’s not in any danger… at least, not the sort of danger he expects. Cadie is not afraid of men, she is heterosexual and thus, naturally drawn to a few of them… but after what happened to Raya and Luke, she avoids romantic relationships like the plague. Jax is as devoted to Cadie as any boyfriend ever could be, but without the slightest hint of any sort of romantic intentions. It’s been drilled into his head since birth that he can not see his charges that way, and on top of that Cadence hardly registers as a female to… well, anyone, really. Though she still does her best not to get attached (even someone she loved like a brother would be dangerous), Cadie can’t help but feel better when he’s around.
Cadie has been in Osmond’s for a little over two years now. In all that time, they’ve never removed her limiter chip. Although her body seems to have stopped growing several years ago, her mind and her gifts most certainly have not. Considering that she’s moved through several mutant levels in her short eighteen years before coming to Osmond’s, with another three or four, there’s no telling how strong she could become. The only thing keeping her feet firmly planted in Beta Level is her inability to outsource the cost of this energy. Should she ever develop the trick, she would likely pass instantly into Alpha Level.