Adeline Pomeroy
Name Adeline Pomeroy
Role Teacher: Maths
Character Information
| Gender | Female | |
| Powers | Thematically-delimited Environmental Reality Layering with Secondary Psychosomatic Illusions | |
| Powers Description | Between these two aspects of her powers, the spectacle can manifest merely as creepy sensory input and distortion, or full on haunted house. Through indeterminate means she can turn manmade structures and enclosed spaces into eerie, macabre variants of themselves; transforming them into uneasy haunted arenas rife for fear-inducement. Reality Layering: With conscious intent she physically alters the corporeal world around her. These are quantifiable changes to the building materials, furnishings and props. The area of effect impact of these changes are centred on Adeline and most pronounced near her person. They are limited to a central theme of horror and unnatural trepidation. Minimal foreboding effects can bleed through to a building’s immediate grounds, but the size of the effect is more or less restrained to the size of the structure which cannot be naturally occurring, and must consist of at least three walls or two walls and a ceiling. These changes are temporary, but can be renewed. Ill-advised replacement of modern building materials can catastrophically compromise structural integrity; this does not result in an instant failure, but tremors and worsening deterioration until collapse or reversion, which if done in time restores the structure to its original condition. Prominently displaying a specific set of geometric designs layered upon one another can lock the structure in Its current state and prevent Adeline's power from taking affect. Psychosomatic Illusions: The subconscious minds of those in the affected zone populate the more interactive, frightening components, which while only illusions, can result in nonlethal bodily harm. Adeline serves as the conduit for this effect so her own psyche can influence styling of the resulting apparitions, phantoms, pawns & components, but she does not do this consciously nor is she privy to the thoughts and fears of others beyond what she and they all see and experience. She is as much a victim of this spook show as everyone else. |
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| Alias | Poe, Veil | |
| Age | 42 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 170 cm (5 feet 7 inches) | |
| Hair Color | Black | |
| Eye Color | Blueish Green | |
| Physical Description | She is no longer a young woman and not yet an old woman, but whatever you do don't call her a middle aged woman. Adeline is entirely aware that the assets of her youth went undiscovered by any whose discovery she would appreciate, but vanity can be essential and beneficial to a woman's wellbeing and best left unremarked upon. She weighs 53 kg or 117 pounds across the pond. Her hair is dyed black from its naturally dark blonde. With rich in B5 cucumbers and daily rubs of lemon juice, time in front of her sitting mirror helps hide the dawning crowfoots roosting at the corners of her eyes. Her wardrobe is simultaneously vintage and timeless, with lots of dark silk and heavy brocade. |
Family
| Parents | Father: William Pomeroy (Deceased) Mother: Audrey Jobert (Deceased) |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | While grateful for the opportunity to teach and impact young minds, Adeline herself missed out on a normal childhood and even beyond the differences thirty years can make, finds it difficult to connect with today's youth of Avalon. There is an innocence and gullibility to Adeline that can easily be exploited. She is clearly disturbed by her past and her powers, yet she is sophisticated and stern in many ways. She endured twenty years of wrongful incarceration and solitary confinement resulting in more trauma than her powers alone would have caused. She is not anti-social or particularly difficult to get along with, but still - and likely always will be - working through the impact of long term institutional captivity. | |
| Strengths & Weaknesses | + Intuitive conceptual mathematician; quickly identifies spatial patterns + Gifted interrogator, resilient to interrogation + Fluent in English & French - Paces a lot; focuses too much on irrelevant things - Clear aversion to technology and no inclination towards learning computer systems or their operations - Monophobia; doesn’t do well when she is alone |
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| Ambitions | She does not believe Normals will ever fully accept or respect Mutants, and idealistically hopes for separate, isolate communities where likeminded Mutants can live and thrive among their own kind. She is not an advocate of 'interspecies breeding' but what she wants more than anything is the means to identify and eliminate the erroneous genetic code responsible for debilitating and divisive mutations. Specifically she wants to benefit from such procedures that abolish her own horrors. | |
| Hobbies & Interests | Croquet, Astronomy, Gardens, Needlepoint, Sketching, Cryptography |
| Personal History | There undoubtedly exists somewhere a definitive, factual account of Adeline’s history; buried in archival records referencing secret projects hidden deep in the vaults of the well-funded and many-cogged machine that is *Name of Government Organisation Here.* You'll not likely have access to those files or have any way to verify their validity, so instead we are left with the most commonly shared version of her story; her own accounting of her own past as relayed afterwards to numerous institutions and individuals on numerous occasions with adamance and consistency. Which is to say, it is probably true. Her father was British born of Breton heritage and using his down time after the 2nd World War to retrace his lineage. He had been no great soldier or hero of renown, but he had survived a war that had taken greater men and for that he was regarded with some level of respect. Imagine it - being honoured merely for being alive. Adeline's mother on the other hand was French-Romani and of a more or less itinerant people, with whom the local populace found no delight and very little tolerance. Being despised merely for being Bohemian in nature if not blood - that took less imagination for a Mutant to understand. How these two met or came to know one another so well as to fall in love or bring new life into this world...who is to say. Adeline does not recall hearing any such stories as a girl. By the time she came into this world, tales of romance and young love were lost on her parents who spent their waking hours fighting with one another, finding food for themselves or pilfering - though that last was primarily in the wheelhouse of her mother. What Adeline knows is that she was born in Perpignan, France to William Pomeroy and Audrey Jobert; that the two were unwed, and would be dead by her own doing before she was ten. But we're getting too far ahead of ourselves and what set this all off in the first place. Adeline Pomeroy had been a creepy child from the very beginning. You were unlikely to find more than a handful of people who understood the notion of gene mutations back then - certainly you would not find them in Perpignan - but everyone could and did agree that Adeline was disturbing. Her presence made everyone uneasy and stories circulated declaring her cursed or the curse itself. Her parents were denied work for fear of transmissible tribulations and time and again evicted from housing due to strange occurrences and a general sense of disaster surrounding them and their child. There was talk of ghosts visiting the living; past pains preying upon the neighbours; inexplicable transformations to the lodgings' physical structures and an ill-defined violation of the natural order of things. Everyone was afraid of Adeline and the way she made them feel; the impact her vicinity had on their wellbeing - their sanity. On the eve of what was to be their final night on this earth, and fighting once more over where they would go following the next day's forced vacate from the small room they rented, William & Audrey unceremoniously put their daughter to bed - without putting a meal in her belly - and rudely went on to berate one another as the cause of all their woes. There's had been a young love, but not a cordial love. Adeline had grown use to this routine, but something on this night was different. Perhaps she had overheard gruesome portions of a war story shared among the local veterans earlier in the day. But her dreams were troubled and oddly exact as she tossed and turned. Nightmares really; she dreamt of undead Axis troopers returning from beyond their battlefield graves to exact revenge upon their conquering Allied soldiers. The macabre depictions of revenge waged on for what felt like an entire night, but when she woke it was still the middle of the night, though they were not still hours as should have been. Death in the tenement slums was nothing new; the cramped and often unsafe quarters left many vulnerable to rapidly spreading illness and disasters like fires. But on this night, it was nothing natural that swept across the building. No less than six people had died that night, among them Adeline's parents, and each found with a look of horror locked upon their lifeless faces. And for each dead there were twice as many surviving witnesses to describe and swear to unnatural sights and occurrences throughout the night; occurrences and manifestations that they swore to be directly responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. And directly answerable to all of these terrorisms - Adeline Pomeroy. She did not set out to kill her parents. It was not murder in that sense. It was not murder in any sense other than those perhaps recorded by the annals of history and if we're being quite frank, no one cared enough to take much notice of these deaths beyond the fact that it left behind a young girl with a hungry mouth to feed in a time when no one was looking for an extra mouth to feed. Her parents had owed everyone money and everyone was willing to cash in on whatever value that poor orphan girl had in her. So when a dodgy man came to town representing a disreputable orphanage offering coin enough for two months of coal in exchange for custody of Adeline Pomeroy….she could not be liquidated fast enough. She didn't even know who stepped forward first or last to claim that authority; who claimed her and sold her for a few lumps of coal. And at the time she thought that a far more generous price than she deserved. She'd known rightly so that she'd been somehow responsible for her parents' demise. She felt just awful for all of it and dreaded the idea of being left alone in this world and so she went quietly and willing to a terrible orphanage where she learned how truly wicked children could be to one another. She did not fit in. She was not well liked. She received poor nutrition and the basest of educations. She struggled with everything, and found no comfort even in her sleep. None in the orphanage found their comfort when Adeline slept. A doctor or man of science may have found some arena of learning in which to hunt and discern among the details some clue to what lay at the root of Adeline's troubles. But doctors were expensive and priests were paid by god and prayer and a few coins in the Sunday service coffers. So it was a priest to whom the boarding master called and it was a nun who came calling. Not a kindly nun, not even a particularly devout nun; but a nun came calling and was quick to declare Adeline in need of a home with walls more spiritual than state-owned and none resisted an opportunity to be rid of Adeline Pomeroy. Young Addy went quiet and willing with this nun and so her threadbare connection to any ancestral assertions were abandoned and she became less than a ward of the state; she ceased to be registered with any institution. She never saw a legitimate hospital or seminary and was disappeared into a life of deeper neglect; an unsanctioned detainee within the walls and structure of some clandestine operation whose agenda she would only piece together after many, many years of incarceration. What followed was, not strictly speaking, torture or abuse. She saw exploitation and misuse of whatever authority her captors enjoyed, but it was never sexual or intimate in nature. Indeed she rarely experienced any personal interaction with others at all - setting up conditions ripe for the maturation of her already existing fear of being alone. She’d spend the next twenty years in various degrees of solitary confinement, forced to undergo experimental adaptive training in what was not quite prison, not entirely rehabilitated mental asylums and completely involuntary captivity. She was isolated in harshly-lit, cold-walled rooms, subjected to sensory experiments and hypnosis near daily, placed under round-the-clock observation, and coercively prompted to manifest her mutant abilities. As her fractured selfdom proved more and more malleable, her powers swelled out of control - much to the approval of her nameless observers though she received no favour or relent for her efforts. In time she gathered that the point of it all was to determine the range and magnitude of her abilities, establish conscious control of their activation as well as infuse her subconscious mind with deep-seated triggers for inducement of those abilities, but critical above all other aims was that to implant some means of control, deactivation, protection against these powers. And though she would ultimately benefit from these endeavours, it was not for her benefit these ordeals were enacted and endured, and her comfort or well-being were never of high concern. (I'm still writing the portions of her history that describe her incarceration and later educated prior to joining the team at Avalon.) |
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| Mutant Registration Status | Known Threat | |
| Assigned House | None |
