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Basics
Character Name: Celia Chase
Fandom: Marvel OC
Played By: Charlyne Yi
Character Section
Physical Description: At sixteen, Celia believes herself to be, honestly, more awkward-looking than anything. She's on the short side, at 5'5" -- technically average, but she slouches, and it gives the impression that she's shorter than she is. She's not curvy so much as she is chunky, an impression furthered by the way she dresses, in layers of slouchy-looking clothes (sweatshirts or hoodies over t-shirts, jeans that never fit quite like they should, no-name-brand sneakers). Her hair is long, thick, and wavy, and in the absence of any interest in doing much to it she tends to pull it back in haphazard ponytails which are prone to loose strands, crookedness, and other acts of unruliness. She's round-faced, generally smiling, and her body language around other people is relaxed and open as a rule. She wears glasses with an extremely strong (currently expired) prescription due to severe nearsightedness. Her eyes are completely black with no visible line between pupil and iris, which can make it difficult to tell exactly where she's looking.
History: Celia's father was a Korean War orphan adopted by an unremarkably WASPy family, and her mother was the daughter of a pair of secular Jewish artists. The two married shortly after college and settled down to an unremarkable middle-class life on the Upper West Side. Celia, their only child, had a mostly happy and ordinary childhood; she went to public school, took art and swimming lessons during the summers, tried to decide if she wanted to be a doctor or an astronaut or a baker or any one of a number of ordinary things when she grew up. Her parents weren't particularly doting or demonstrative towards her, but that didn't stop Celia from becoming a friendly, expressive, and outgoing young woman.
She was fifteen and in her sophomore year of high school when her mutation manifested; first with a year-long, gradual tapering-off of her appetite and the occasional bout of fatigue which seemed strangely contagious (her father frequently complaining of exhaustion just as Celia was getting over hers). This was followed by a (literally) explosive moment when Celia, frustrated at her homework, struck her palms against the top of the kitchen table -- and promptly shattered it, and all the dishes on it, into fragments, knocking her father unconscious in the process. At the same time, her eyes turned entirely black.
Her parents, shaken and horrified, tried for a week or so afterwards to cope with the fact that their heretofore unremarkable child was a mutant. Ultimately, however, they sat her down, told her in the gentlest way possible that they needed "time to adjust". They'd arranged for her to stay with a friend from school. They'd call when they felt more able to deal with this. Until then, they'd like her to go. And Celia, broadsided . . . did, packing what she could carry into her school backpack and walking out into no certain future.
Since then, she has stayed with a rotating assortment of school friends, acquaintances, church and synagogue-sponsored shelters, and youth hostels. She's done her best to keep up with school -- not least of all because it gives her somewhere to be during the days. Her parents stay intermittently in touch, expressing regret over the situation (but not enough regret to let her move back home, although they do keep her things in storage and occasionally give her money), and inviting her over for infrequent and invariably awkward dinners, at which she (obviously) eats nothing.
In December, she found a bodega willing to pay her under the table to stock shelves and clean twice a week, which has given her enough cash to afford things like subway and bus rides, laundromats, and so on. It's not enough for a regular person to live on, and not enough to pay rent, but she gets by. The uncertain, rootless nature of her life right now worries her, but she does her best to stay positive and focus on making choices to eventually get her out of her current situation.
Powers: Celia can siphon small amounts of energy ("life force," if you're feeling fancy) from people in her immediate physical vicinity and use it to sustain herself. If she draws too much or too quickly, this can cause the person from whom she's feeding to experience headaches, fatigue, or temporary unconsciousness. While this was initially an unconscious action, she's since learned to control it and only feeds from groups of people in public situations in order to mitigate the impact to them.
Secondary to this power, and much less under her control, is the ability to release excess energy in bursts of concussive force (she's described it as being like the action of an invisible sledgehammer). Currently, she can only exercise this ability when she is in direct physical contact with the target and when she's carrying an excess "load" of energy. Even then, it's poorly controlled and does not always happen when she wants it to happen.
Not strictly powers, but more like side effects, are the appearance of her eyes (they're solid black), and the fact that she can no longer consume food of any kind, or anything other than water, without becoming immediately and violently ill. She misses fries.
Talents/Abilities: Celia's never found anything at which she particularly excels, but she compensates by being relatively good at a lot of things. She knows her way around computers well enough to troubleshoot most of what can go wrong with the average user's laptop, can cook well with very few ingredients at hand (not that she uses this much), and is a decent artist. She's in very good shape for her age and weight, and can run or walk for quite some time without tiring. Over the past year she's also amassed a lot of useful street knowledge, like which shelters will let you stay and for how long, which "clinics" are actually government-backed and dangerous for mutant patients, and how to exploit broken turnstiles and the like to get into places without paying.
Personality: Somewhere along the way, and long before she blew up a kitchen table on accident, Celia made a commitment to stay optimistic in every possible circumstance. This was probably originally influenced by her upbringing, which was big on appearances and not causing a fuss, but she's developed it into a broader philosophy than just "put on a happy face and ignore what's around you". She's cheerful, outgoing, helpful, and friendly because she likes people, but also because she knows that people like (and will help out) a cheerful and outgoing person. A desire to be liked, cared about, and important to people is a big part of what motivates her and is a driving force behind the sunny, lighthearted, occasionally silly personality she cultivates. Her optimism also feeds into a pragmatic approach to problems; she does her best in every situation to examine what's going wrong, look for the positives and the best solutions, and then tackle making those solutions happen.
The commitment to optimism does mean that she tends towards denial and repression of her negative feelings (again, largely influenced by an emotionally distant upbringing that required her to not rock the boat). Like most teenagers, she's prone to mood swings, but in her case the opposite end of the spectrum from optimism and cheerfulness tends to be an almost aggressive level of withdrawal. She keeps most of her moments of teenaged angst to herself, believing that nobody else wants to put up with them, and occasionally lapses into obsessive private worrying about the problems that her optimistic philosophy has failed to fix. She doesn't cry easily, and while she's eager to offer other people a listening ear or crying shoulder, there's an emotional distance that she unconsciously maintains between her own problems and the people she gets close to.
She's secretly much, much more hurt by her family's actions than she lets on, although she does her best to shrug it off and, when people ask, to explain it away as an understandable reaction. Subconsciously, she does this partly to hear other people say that it isn't okay, looking for validation of her feelings (something which is, in general, strongly important to her). But in a broader sense, the element of distance in her upbringing has led her to relate to her parents in the way most people would to unrelated adults -- because of that, she contextualizes their actions and feelings as she would those of strangers, attempting to see their side. Even so, there's a deep-buried part of her -- the part that relates to her parents as her parents -- that's hurt, scared, and angry at the rejection.
Celia is motivated in general by a deep-seated and easily aggrieved sense of justice. She believes strongly in fair play and the equality of all people, and can become quietly but dangerously furious when she sees injustice in action. This sense of fairness also motivates her to try and see the other side in any argument, although she's quick to reject that side if she finds it exploits or harms other people. Celia's sense of justice has grown even more pronounced since her mutation manifested and she's gotten a glimpse of life from the underdog's perspective. She recognizes that she's got it better than a lot of her fellow mutants and believes deeply in mutant solidarity, although she still sees mutation as a facet of the broad spectrum of human experience rather than thinking of mutants as separate from humankind. Her pragmatic streak makes her want to do something about the treatment that mutants suffer, although she's not sure what that would involve or how to go about doing anything more than speaking her mind, tearing down anti-mutant fliers, and trying to look out for the other mutants she knows.
She's stubborn, quick to make friends but slow to let anyone in on her struggles, eager to help, occasionally childish, and has a teenager's mixed feelings towards authority figures. Celia's also a bit of a goofball, and not a social outcast so much as one of those slightly odd girls who's acquainted with and friendly to everyone without having any particular niche. She's a science fiction junkie, an avid reader of terrible mass market paperbacks, likes upbeat pop music, and is more or less lost without the internet.
She's sixteen, with a sixteen-year-old's wide-ranging and often indiscriminate tastes and a sixteen-year-old's developing personality and worldview. She still doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up, except (at this point) employed, alive, and enjoying equal rights with the rest of the world. Whatever she's got to do to get there? She's willing to give it her best try.
Reason for playing: Honestly? I rolled up Celia because I wanted to see an X-OC whose life isn't a tragedy, who responds to hard knocks with something more complex than angst, who isn't a haunted badass but a regular girl who just happens to have superpowers. I'm way more interested in exploring her personality and her reactions to people than I am in glorifying her awesome kickassery (of which she has none) or lamenting how hard her life is. I'd love to see her put in situations she doesn't feel equipped for, because I think that makes for the most interesting reactions from characters, but she's also not meant to be an exercise in Break The Cutie. She's just this girl, you know?
Writing Samples
General Writing Sample:
There were advantages to being her, Celia would be the last person to argue that. Not having to keep herself fed or wonder where her next meal was coming from? Totally an advantage, in the long run, because it meant her extremely limited budget could go to things like washing her clothes regularly and replacing her broken shoelaces. But there were disadvantages, too -- like the fact that she kept having lovingly detailed, incredibly vivid dreams about food, glorious food, waking up craving things she knew she had no business eating.
And, okay. No matter how delicious Dream Fries had tasted, logically she still knew what a bad idea it was to do anything but ignore the craving until it went away after she woke up. It wasn't like she had any lack of experience to tell her what the alternative was. But, well . . . fries, though. And she had the $0.99, it wasn't like she couldn't justify the cost. And she really, really, really intended to just smell them after she bought them.
Except that was the thing, wasn't it? No normal, honest, red-blooded American could just sit there and smell hot french fries without doing something about it. It was practically unpatriotic, she thought, staring down at the greasy little cardboard shell with her nemeses/long-lost friends inside. Just one bite. She could deal with the consequences, right?
Because being violently ill in the middle of a public park was really a good way to start the day.
But fries, though.
She sighed and closed her eyes. Inhaling the aroma. Savoring it, remembering it. Hadn't she read somewhere that tastes were really mostly made up of smells? She hoped it was true, because this? Was as close as she was getting to taste.
Once the last little spark of warmth had faded out of the greasy cardboard, she finally opened her eyes and looked around. Hey, nobody was staring at the crazy person huffing french fry fumes on the park bench. Score.
She sighed, tossed the fries out for the pigeons to argue over, and got to her feet, crumpling up the box and shoving it into a bin on her way out of the park.
Celia really missed fries.
Third-Person Arrival Post:
Celia had been a public school kid her whole life. Middle-class family, middle-class life. This place? Was blowing her mind a little bit. She'd heard "school for mutants" and thought well, all right, probably a blocky institutional-looking building like a hospital or something. Not . . . this. This was a mansion for mutants. Someone had neglected to mention that. She stood gaping up at the building for a long few minutes, just . . . taking it in. Processing the notion of actually living here, if it turned out to be everything she'd heard it was. Which, well. She'd never find out if she stood on the front lawn all day, right?
There was a doorbell -- luckily, because somehow, a house this big gave her the impression that knocking would just be swallowed up in the enormousness, never to be heard -- and she pressed her thumb into it and waited until the heavy oak door cracked open and a tall, dark-skinned woman with stark white hair and piercing blue eyes looked down at her.
Celia grinned -- her best bright, sunny, I am awesome and you totally want to be friends with me and let me into your house smile. "Hi. Uh. I heard this was a place for mutants." She paused, wondering whether And I'm a mutant was necessary (considering the state of her eyes) and finally deciding it wasn't.
". . . can I come in?"