Coby Profile
COBY PARKER
Full Name: Coby Parker
Titles/Nicknames: Copie-doll, copy machine, Xerox
Age: 14
Gender: Female
Alignment: Neutral
Species: Superhuman
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Birth Date: 7/27/1996
Zodiac Sign(s): Leo
Blood Type: A+
Religion/Spiritual views: Agnostic
MBTI Personality Type: ISTJ
Physical Stature
Height: 4’11”
Weight: 80 lbs
Build: Tiny, pixie-ish, thin
Eye Color: Dark brown
Hair Color: Black
Hair Style: Long, straight, let loose
Skin Color: Pale
Tattoos or Markings: None
Other Discerning Traits: None
Description: Coby is tiny and waifish, standing at only four feet and eleven inches and weighing in at just over eighty pounds. She has dark hair and eyes, and her ears are rather larger than normal. Her face is round and small like the rest of her, but it is rarely seen. Coby wears sweaters long past the time most people have taken them off from the heat, and their primary use for her is in hiding her face and hands from the world. She mostly wears dresses and skirts with plain dark colored T-shirts, and frequently alternates between sneakers and dress shoes.
Persona
Personality: Coby is terrified-of her powers, of people, of herself, of her past, of basically everyone but her family. That fear rules her life, stemming from a source she doesn’t yet remember. She is shy to the point that it literally cripples her in her daily interactions and she has a stutter that’s really made up of having to try repeatedly to work up the courage to get words out of her mouth.
Coby is convinced she is a sociopath, because beneath the shyness she is practical to the point of being cold. She would (and could, were she to ever learn to control her abilities) destroy a city or an entire country to save the world, and would kill a person for a city in a heartbeat. There are no exceptions to this; if the entirety of her family was placed against a city, she would kill her family with her own hands, though she would be a wreck about it later. She is wrong about being a sociopath; practicality has no diagnosis. She loves her family with all her heart and wouldn’t give them up if she had a choice in the matter. But that practical side of her asserts itself at what she considers all the wrong times-mostly when death is involved and the people around her are grieving and being emotional.
Coby needs order in her life; despite the time she spends running around the country, she desperately needs to know that she is safe with her family, and the safest she feels is when she knows what’s coming next. She keeps her room neat no matter where they’re staying, and even when they’re living in a motel out of a duffel bag she keeps her own neatly organized. Her dress shoes are kept polished, her clothes washed often, her books ordered by author and never loaned in case the person drops them. A combination of remnants of her unremembered past and the unpredictability of her powers, Coby’s need for order has kept her paralyzed in times when she really should have made a decision to move. On the flip side, once she’s made a decision, she has to stick to it. She feels compelled to see any decision through to the end.
There is an iron core at Coby’s heart that she can’t stand to show. She’s afraid to be wrong, to have her ideas rejected, to be responsible for the deaths of her family; but at the same time, she knows for a fact that she’s right and that she has the right ideas most of the time. She knows that, and it’s only her shyness that keeps her quiet. If she were given command, she would be able to use her knowledge of future events and the instincts from her forgotten memories, as well as the irreversibly practical side of her, to lead and lead well-if she could get the words out.
Coby is both patient and observant, two things she’s had to learn as she doesn’t talk much. She doesn’t like listening to people, but more than one person has taken her silence to mean that she’s happy to listen to them talk instead, and prattled on for hours. Coby learned to wait, and to observe people during this time. She doesn’t draw conclusions from this observation; she just finds people fascinating. She doesn’t remember the time when observing was all she was expected to do, but it stuck. She isn’t curious enough to ask questions through the lump in her throat, but she is happy to gather information herself.
Likes
Color: Blue
Food: Macaroni and cheese, bread, sandwiches
Drink: Coke
Music: Country
Art: Pictures of people smiling
Hobby: Knitting, embroidery, singing, painting, people watching
Sport: Tennis
Animal: Anteater
Other: Her family
Dislikes
Color: Gray, Brown, Green
Food: Candy
Drink: Red cream soda
Music: Metal
Art: Abstract
Hobby: Yo-yo, cat’s cradle
Sport: Soccer
Animal: Tarantula
Other: People, taking charge
Current Standing
Education: She was educated in the lab and while in her foster home, but her home life has been so hectic since then that she hasn’t managed to finish a year of school.
Family: She travels with Fletcher, her foster father; Mickey, her older brother figure; Temp, her older sister figure; and Des, her mother figure.
Friends: Coby has no friends outside her family.
Occupation: Coby is a student.
Affiliations: None.
Social Status: She doesn’t stay anywhere long and hasn’t since she was released from federal prison.
Grand Scheme
The Past: Coby was born as the result of a cloning experiment. Her DNA is made up of a combination of many supers, far beyond what her caretakers considered the sustainable limit. They hoped that at this point, rather than try to accommodate all the powers she was asked to have on her own, her body would use the dominant trait-a computer-like mind-and copy the rest from outside sources. They succeeded, though in addition Coby had precognitive dreams, which was not prepared for. Coby was intended as the first in a line of supers like her, who would all have her abilities and be trained as super-soldiers. But by her raising, this wasn’t at all clear.
Coby was raised in a lab that resembled a combination of a hospital, a mansion and a school, depending where you looked. Most of it looked like a hospital, barring the lower levels, which were all prison. More supers were down there, and Coby was frequently taken down there to observe them.
Most of Coby’s caretakers-and there were many, from military men to teachers to scientists-called her “their little copy machine”. From the time Coby was very small she would ask why they called her that, and they explained that when she learned that, she would be able to use all her powers, not just her dreams.
Coby was a bright student, but a quiet one. In the lab, she never had the same problem with shyness she would have outside it, but she never spoke up until someone asked her a direct question. She felt safer in the lab than she ever would again.
Coby had a dream once, when she was five, about herself with a family, outside of the lab, and happy. She didn’t tell anyone about it. She didn’t want to tell anyone about it.
Parallel to Coby’s project, the scientists were running experiments on the power of a young man named Mickey, with his help. Mickey’s power was two-way telepathy, which he had gotten so skilled using that with enough time he could even rewrite a person’s memories to suit what he wanted them to believe. The scientists on this project were computerizing this power, with the incentive of money and the promise it would be used for purposes such as therapy for Mickey to cooperate.
Predictably, the group turned the machine against Mickey at the end, to wipe his memory of the events. They didn’t bother rewriting them, and simply turned him loose into the world knowing that he had done something in those years that he didn’t remember.
At this point Coby was seven. The scientists brought her to the machine immediately and sedated her for the procedure. They rewrote her life so that she believed wholeheartedly that she had been born normally and raised by two loving parents, who had recently died in a car accident. Coby had been at school waiting for them to pick her up; eventually she had been brought to the police station and told what had happened. She was distraught, of course. She would stay in the orphanage until someone took her home.
With this false memory in place, Coby went to the orphanage to stay.
The orphanage wasn’t a good place to get a seven-year-old mousey child a home-Coby suddenly felt out of place, afraid of all the things that had been so desired of her in the lab, and she couldn’t grieve for her parents the way she was clearly expected to. She stayed in the orphanage for three years before one of her dreams got her in trouble with the police.
In the dream, she watched the bridge nearby explode and crumble into the ocean. The next time Coby saw this bridge, she felt strongly as though she knew exactly how long before it happened. She stood on the sidewalk, holding a lamppost and staring at the bridge, counting down to the explosion. When she mouthed the word “zero”, the bridge exploded, killing ten people and injuring twenty-three more. They were lucky it was a small bridge in a small city. If it hadn’t been, it could have been much worse.
Someone heard Coby’s mutterings, and Coby was arrested along with a young man named Fletcher, who had been seen near the bridge at the time, doing something that a witness claimed “was either setting off a trigger or applauding the motherfucking bridge exploding.” Either way, the two were arrested, and tried together for conspiracy to commit arson.
Coby, at only ten years old, was eventually tried in family court, and eventually found not guilty. Fletcher, in normal court, was similarly found not guilty, as he had neither powder burns nor a trigger device anywhere on him. During the initial stages of the trial, when they thought they’d be tried together and were forced together repeatedly, they somehow managed to bond over their mutual conviction that the charges made no sense. Coby cried often, but more because no one would listen to reason than from fear that she would be locked away. At the end of the ordeal, Fletcher adopted the then-eleven Coby.
When Coby was eleven, they were pursued some distance by someone of name and intent they couldn’t decipher. Finally, they were trapped in a dreamscape for what felt like months but was really hours while Mickey tried, through various illusions, to convince them to do what his employers wanted. Coby eventually got enough of a handle on Mickey’s power to break them out of Mickey’s dreamscape and hold him off long enough for Fletcher to track him down and get him to stop. Mickey, himself with more than a little self-loathing for the things he’d been using his power for, became a part of their family rather than continue.
At twelve, Coby had a dream about a bird being shot and tumbling to the ground as a woman. The next day she saw a man with a gun aiming at a bird in the sky, and tackled him to the ground. She yelled at the bird to get away. Temp found her later to ask why she’d worried so much. Coby mumbled something about the bird being a person inside. Temp ended up joining their family.
Des was the last to join their family. Destiny was running from people who wanted to weaponize her power of telekinesis and give it to people she considered totally irresponsible and with no regard for human life. She met Mickey and could tell he was different; he could tell at a glance what she wanted and needed. He and Coby managed a telepathic conversation about Des before Mickey told Fletcher Des needed to join their family. Fletcher and Coby went to get her and invite her the next day.
Coby’s creators were scheduled to retrieve her when her database had acquired one thousand power-imprints, or on her eighteenth birthday, whichever came first. Sharper, Coby’s crush and Fletcher’s swimming rival, was that thousandth, and was also assigned to bring her in. Now the fourteen-year-old and her family are running again.
The Present: Coby and her family continue traveling. They never stop. Every one of them has a reason to travel-Fletcher is still suspected of arson in three states that never had a case; Coby’s creators want to bring her back to them; Mickey has old employers who want him back or dead; Temp has the most visible power and likes traveling for new forms; and Des’s power is easily seen as a weapon. They frequently stay in motels, sometimes in apartments for months at a time. When they stay anywhere long enough to get a job, Coby goes back to school, Mickey scams people as a fortune-teller, Des as a magician, and Temp and Fletcher find some more peaceful work somewhere-Temp is an excellent vet or zookeeper if she can find such work.
The Future: Coby’s power and creation has gotten them in trouble, and now there’s no going back. They’ll continue running until they either take down the people after them or until the people after them take them down.
Character's Dreams/Goals: Coby wants to be safe. She wants to feel safe. She’s certain she’s felt this way before, but she can’t remember it, and she wants to feel that way again.
Skills/Abilities
Physical: Coby has good coordination but very little strength or stamina.
Mental: Coby is intelligent and practical, but her empathy is stunted and her social skills are nil.
Spiritual: (optional--only if God/s exist in the novel and their powers are used)
Other: When Coby looks at a person, her power automatically scans them for any natural abilities “superior” to her own. If it finds any, it adds that ability to the database in her head. Her creators called her a copy machine because she can access these scans with key phrases reminiscent of a machine-“access database”, “access scan [name]”, “utilize”, etc. She has no idea how to use this power. In addition, she has prophetic dreams. These dreams are not occasional or random-she has never had a normal dream in her life.
Overall
Strengths: Coby has learned to be patient to counteract her shyness, and she uses the time she has because of that patience to observe and gather information. She is practical, which is both a strength and a weakness as it prevents some level of empathy. She loves her family, and barring that practical side of her taking over would protect them to the end. Were she able to overcome her shyness, she could put all of these together with her power and lead a group someday, as her ‘fathers’ hoped. Her powers are incredible, and her intelligence and coordination good enough to use them in a battle.
Weaknesses: Coby craves order and structure in her life, neither of which are readily available while “traveling” with her family. When the structure of her life is thrown off, she is thrown off entirely, and can’t quite wrap her head around it for a while, during which time she is indecisive to a paralyzing extent. Coby has a distinctly unhealthy amount of self-loathing because she believes she is a sociopath, and because she cannot stand her inability to get words out. Paradoxically, this contributes to her shyness, which is mainly caused by her terror of people in general. In her day-to-day life, Coby finds herself crippled by this shyness when talking to anyone, especially strangers. Though her copy ability is incredible, Coby has absolutely no idea how to use it, and it’s only by chance if it happens at all.
A Monologue By the Character:
(Coby is very nearly physically incapable of talking long enough to be considered a monologue. This is written in her journal.)
We’re being followed. I know we are. I saw them in a dream last night, a soon-time dream. It’s not going to be good. Mickey doesn’t believe me. He heard me, I heard him. But it’s true, and it’s soon. They’re coming. I don’t know how. I think he’s just tired of running. So am I, but it doesn’t matter. We have to run farther.
I need to tell Fletcher.