Felicia McCready [Sidhe] (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
notsoheavenly) wrote2034-11-16 12:42 am
notsoheavenly) wrote2034-11-16 12:42 am
Entry tags:
[OOC] Character Background and Personality (WIP)
Codename: Sidhe
Real Name: Felicia McCready
Other Aliases: Cici Laramee, Licia, Angel, Saint Felicity, Dorothy
Age: 20
Birthdate: 04/03/1995
Birth Place: Paskatawan, Oklahoma
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 115lbs
Average Wingspan: 6’6”
Designation: Superhuman
Rank: Level B (potential Level A)
PB: Holland Roden
BASIC INFORMATION:
Superhuman whose powers--energy pulsing constructs that can be manipulated with the proper amount of control—have been with her since birth. They look like “traditional” angel wings, but the feathers can be used as energy projectiles so sharp they cut through steel or can explode on contact, depending on how stable the energy used. The feathers grow back within minutes. Unlike many superhumans who work for D.E.L.T.A., the government did not find Felicia, she came to them of her own free will after a brief run-in with another agent, Risk, aka Yul Walken, the previous leader of the Omega Squad. Felicia is pushy, domineering, flirtatious, but also easy-going and friendly. She likes to pull pranks, but isn’t rattled easily when people getting angry with her for them. She was formally a member of the Omega Squad, but after the mission that led to Yul being permanently injured and pulled from the team (or at least she thinks it's permanent), she requested and received reassignment to the Theta Squad, the public relations team meant to show humans that Supers are not as dangerous as some make them out to be.
ABILITIES:
Felicia’s wings are not real wings, although they do allow her flight capabilities. They are excess energy her body releases that takes the construct form of wings like that of an angel. That is why she is capable of using the energy in the wings and firing the feathers like projectiles. It is also why she can fly using them despite her muscles and skeletal structure not being strong enough to maintain flight on their own. The form of the energy is controlled by her mental state, but due to her upbringing they remain looking like angel wings. The most she has been able to do with them consistently so far is flatten them against her back when she wears long coats so they don’t appear as noticeable.
She has not yet been able to consciously alter their form beyond that (and any subconscious change is temporary), but it is something she is currently working on. Color on the other hand she has mastered and she can alter them to any shade or design that she can visualize. The energy in these wings has the ability to cut through steel and even bedrock, but only to a certain depth, and can also be used like miniature explosives. The energy regenerates after 10 minutes or so and the feathers “grow” back. If she uses too much energy, the wings can become more intangible, transparent, unable to keep her in the air, and she needs to consume more calories and protein to build her energy back up.
The wings feel to others in whatever way they feel to Felicia herself, and so the feathers feel like the softest down possible while the bones feel strangely fragile for being so large, but do not break no matter the pressure put on them. Because it is her own body’s energy, when someone is touching her wings, she is able to sense their intent and emotional state, like a very low grade touch empath. It makes it very uncomfortable for her, to the point she hates it when most people touch them. The energy is also disruptive to those with visual based abilities, like infrared or the ability to see auras, but only in regards to her and whoever may be standing in front of or behind her.
PERSONALITY:
Felicia does not consider herself a religious person, now, but her parents were fanatics living in a rural town in Oklahoma. Religion was very strong in the tiny, widespread community. She was raised being told she was an Angel of God and isolated for it, to the point that now she goes out of her way to talk around any kind of philosophical or religious topics. She lost her faith, but won’t judge others for having it…too much. Just keep it away from her and everything is good. She’s more than likely to make a joke or dismiss those topics and come up with something else to talk about, doing it in such a way that some find it funny, while others may feel easily ignored. She doesn’t care as long as she gets the result she wants. Even if she comes across melodramatic in the process. Given all the soap operas she watches, she kind of takes it as a compliment.
The irony of Cici’s rejection of faith is that is still plays a soul deep role in how she views the world. For all that she was disillusioned by her childhood and what she learned about Christianity’s less than clean history, she cannot give up that ingrained need and desire to believe in a higher calling, something beyond herself that she can give into and know it’s the right thing. She tells herself that it’s dumb and just residual thoughts or feelings from the “brainwashing” she went through as a child, but truly she wants to believe. It’s why Eva’s powers worked so well on her, because Cici, despite having some training against mind control after the Harvard Incident, still has that core part of her that the virtues connect with.
That’s why Felicia will insist she did not join D.E.L.T.A. for protection or even because she wants to do the “right thing” and protect humans from dangerous Supers. She’ll say that is a good thing, but not really her concern. She’ll swear it was because she wanted to control her own destiny and decided what to do with her own life. Yul Walken was one of the first people to show her that she was running away from life rather than taking control of it. In the week they spent together while he was on a mission in Illinois, he taught her a lot about what it meant to a person with free will, and she had been so sure she had proved she could be independent when she had run away from home six months before. And so a few months later, she used the card he had given her and walked right up to one of the regional DELTA offices and demanded to speak to him and only him. That’s how she had learned to handle things. Be upfront, don’t let anyone stop her from what she wanted and be willing to do what it took to get it.
After Yul was injured and pulled from the Omega Squad, Felicia was confused and felt adrift. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Because while she did believe in free will and making your own destiny, she had put Yul on a pedestal and used him as proof that this was the right way, this was the right road for her to walk. He had become her moral compass and evidence that “faith” in a higher power was pointless, never realizing how much of that same faith she had put in him. She had glorified him unintentionally in her own head and the Harvard Incident was proof enough of how fallible both of them were. Free will left Yul a cripple and their other teammate dead, so it obviously wasn’t as great as she’d been selling it for the last three years.
Now Felicia was faced yet again with having to make her own choices entirely of her own free will, but was filled with doubt about how right that was. So she requested a transfer to Theta Squad, and ran. Some of the others called her a traitor and she had felt a little bad about not even telling them about her transfer until the day she left, but Felicia doesn’t hold herself back because of guilt. She needed to leave if she was ever going to make sense of her own life and the reminders weren’t helping her at all.
For all that Cici will say she doesn’t believe in fear—that it’s for those too afraid to make their own destinies—the truth is, she fears being wrong more than anything. She fears making that one wrong choice that will damn her soul in a way she can never undo. She might say she doesn’t believe in God, but that niggling fear of Heaven and Hell being true and her spending eternity in damnation is one she just can’t shake. She wants to make her own destiny, but she also wants to know she’s not making the wrong destiny. She also doesn’t acknowledge the other things that she is truly afraid of, such as her feeling of losing people close to her and the fear of being alone. Instead she plays these off as being less than what they are, as if like is more of game and she still has a million lives to lose before Game Over, which is one of the ways she played off moving on when she left Omega Squad for Theta.
She’s not a bad person, but Felicia knows she also isn’t a selfless person. She spent most of her life being told that she was made by God to serve him and worship him and lead others to Him, to the point that now that she is in charge of her own life, that’s her number one priority. She only takes orders from people she trusts, only gives that trust to people she thinks worth her time. She throws herself into sex because it makes her feel free and forget a lot of the doubts in her own head (sex can’t be bad if it feels that great, right?), and feeds her need for attention better than anything else ever had.
Or so it was until Eva came into the picture. At first it was just her powers, as they played on that need in Cici to put her faith in something or someone, but by after a month or two, Cici had fallen so in love with Eva, in the way being with her made her feel, that her powers weren’t even needed anymore. She is one hundred percent committed to Eva and whatever cause Eva may have, to the point that even though she knew Eva wasn’t being honest with her about her identity, it didn’t rank high enough for her to argue about it. She’s aware that there is a chance Eva could still be using her powers on her, could be tampering with her and making Cici want to love her, but the truth is she doesn’t care. The feeling she has with her is the peace of mind and belonging--knowing you are on the right path in life--she’s been searching for ever since she ran away from home and she isn’t giving it up. In the end, it’s the blind faith of love that she has given into more than she ever could religion.
Not that loving Eva has stopped her from being the attention-seeking brat that she is. She has an obsessive need to have the latest hand-held technology. The newest iPhone? She had it pre-ordered six months in advance. Fanciest looking multi-media player? Got the Beta and then upgraded when the final version came out. Felicia has to stay connected. She needs access to the internet and Twitter and all the people following her blog. Internet has been important to her for so long that she doesn’t know what to do without it.
Even though she has to have access to the internet, Felicia loves talking to people face to face just as much. She may crave that attention, but she has to be in control of it. She doesn’t like people having the advantage in any situation, except for when it comes to Eva. She can’t even stand people touching her wings. It makes her feel like they are touching something deep inside her and she is more than likely to punch someone rather than just telling them to let go. Yul is one of the only people who gets away with it without bodily harm because he feels comfortable and safe. But other than that she is fairly affectionate and doesn’t mind hugging and kissing people, even just for the hell of it, as long as she is the one taking the lead. Flirting is a game to her and it’s only fun if everyone wins.
HISTORY:
Felicia McCready was born to an extremely religious, older couple in Paskatawan, Oklahoma. She believes herself to be their sole child because she is the only one she remembers they had, but what she does not know is that she has an older brother who was disowned for displaying Superhuman abilities, as her parents believed him to be a demon sent from Hell. They sent her brother to M.A.R.K.O. to be “cured” and then washed their hands of him, removing all proof of his existence from their household. Because she was born with “angel wings” her parents called on the Pastor Lucas Roman and he told them that she was a gift from God they would have to prepare to serve him when the time came, and this spared her from the same fate. Her brother was sent away when she was two, so she has no real memories of him.
She was made to read the Bible several times a day along with her homeschooling studies to “learn the word she was meant to teach” and never allowed to venture outside past the tall fence her father had built around the acre of their farm immediately around the house and barn. This left her feeling removed from the world outside and she learned quickly that if she wanted things, she had to play the role her parents expected of her. She did not do this because she believed in God as they did, but because it was what she was told to do.
Still, she never understood why they were so certain she could speak to God, when he had never once “called on her” in her life. If she was an Angel, should she not have been able to speak to him and have him talk back to her? This was her first sense of doubt. And then she learned about Supers and more doubt was sown. Her parents had spoken about the demons who were flaunting their sins all over the country and she wonders if she was truly an angel and not one of “the abominations.” It wasn't as if she had even met majority of the community that her parents were a part of, primarily because Pastor Roman said they were not ready to hear the Word from a true Messenger and encouraged her parents to keep her locked away until the right time. So the only confirmation she had that anything she knew was true was her parents and the pastor.
Around the time she turned ten years old, she discovered that her parents owned a computer. She would sneak into their room while they were away (as the house had deadbolts on the outside she could not unlock herself to keep her from leaving when her parents were not home) and found they had a small office attached to it that she could get into with a butter knife. So she taught herself how to use it, which was a very...different kind of intro into the outside world. Because of her parents’ behavior as she grew up, she learned how to play various roles as it suited her, being the perfect “angel” to get their attention and praise, and also to hide what her true motives were. More and more often she wanted them gone from the house so she could surf the net and go into chatrooms and meet people.
She had never been a shy child, so no matter how little she knew about the outside world, she found ways of playing off her insecurities and ignorance until she could find out more. Google and Wikipedia became her favorite websites. She learned about as many things as she could and would secretly print off papers from it and hide them in a cubby hole she had made in her closet under the floorboards so she could read them by candlelight after her parents had gone to bed. The more she used the computer, the more she began to fact check everything her parents said and everything she read in the Bible on Google. And then she found that the computer had a camera. She could finally see people and talk to them at the same time. Because her parents were so sure she would never enter their room, they never thought to question her about some of the things they had noticed, and eventually she had learned enough to hide things she didn’t want them to know about.
As the years went by, Pastor Roman would visit more often, to the point that her parents would leave her alone with him for hours going over the Scripture. Felicia didn’t like him. He spent too much time fixated on her wings, asking her to show them off to him and to make them glow as they had learned she could do when she was eight. When she was 15, he went so far as to stroke her wings, holding her still for ten minutes even as she repeatedly asked him to let go. It was terrifying and the most uncomfortable, violating feeling she had ever had. She could feel his obsessive intent, the twisted way he was becoming fixated on her and she wanted him to get away from her. When she managed to gain enough leverage, she shoved him off, kneed him in the groin and smacked him in the face with the Bible in her hands, only to have her parents walk in to her repeatedly hitting him.
Felicia was surprised that instead of taking her side, her parents took the Pastor’s side. They told her she was mistaken, that the Pastor only gave in to temptation and she should forgive him to cleanse him of his sin. But she wouldn’t. She refused. She wanted him gone. But her parents kept insisting that she shouldn’t behave that way. And in her hurt and anger, she struck out at them, telling them that being a devil would be less hell than that. And it was in her anger that her wings altered for the first time, becoming dark, leathery, batlike with claws. Her parents were horrified and so was she. So she ran. She grabbed her bag of emergency clothes and nonperishable foods that was kept in her closet for the sake of tornados and ran. This was the first time she used her wings to fly, leaping over the tall fence around the yard. She flew for a good mile, unsteady and then crashed into the branch of a tree before falling to the ground. But she kept running.
It wasn’t until she had run away and found out just how rough it could be for a teenage girl with no understanding of how to find her way in the world, that Felicia fully realized how extreme her parents’ views were. She stole a coat from a dry cleaner’s in the next town over to hide her wings, leaving a note to bless the person who it belong to for their service to a servant of God and walked. She did not know where she was going or what she was going to do. She was terrified to be on her own. Not that she let this show as she hitchhiked and walked her way out of Oklahoma (she had spoken to a few girls who had done this to get to music concerts and it seemed like the best way to go) all the way to Illinois.
It was while she was hitchhiking that she discovered that the feathers of her wings could be used as a weapon. A trucker tried to push her for sex as payment for her ride (she had been offering blessings before that which had been enough for two truckers and an elderly couple on their way to visit family in South Dakota, and maybe flirted just a bit if she thought it would help) and she had reacted instinctively and her wings became more like daggers. The man’s arm was cut so deeply it wouldn’t stop bleeding and Felicia jumped out of the cab and ran. That was the second time she tried to fly and it worked out better than the first. She managed to stay in the air for fifty miles before the cool air and the weight of her bag tired her out and she landed. After that she would find places to hide out during the day and flew at night always trying to go in the same direction. But one night she got too tired and tried to land on the road where there were streetlights. And was almost hit by a car.
It was there that she met Yul Walken, whose SUV had almost hit her head on, but managed to stop within centimeters of her. Because of the way she had fallen from the sky, and her red hair, the first thing Yul said when he saw her was: “So did you just blow in from Kansas, Dorothy?” This is a nickname that would stick between them for as long as they knew each other.
He took her to eat, and offered to take her the rest of the way to Chicago. When they arrived, it turned out he was on a month leave from his job and since she didn’t have anywhere to go and he had nowhere particular to be…they stayed together. For a week. Yul was the first person Felicia met that didn’t see her wings as something wrong with her or a sign from God. They just were. He barely even commented on them. He showed her around the city, even took her to a museum because he found it “too sad to be true” that she had never visited one before. It was at the end of that week that she decided to run again because she didn’t know where all of this was leading or if she could trust this man that was giving her all these things and hadn’t asked for anything else in return. Yet.
Yul caught her as she was leaving—after having stolen two hundred dollars from his wallet. He told her that two hundred wouldn’t be enough and gave her his credit card and his business card. He didn’t try to recruit her for D.E.L.T.A., but did let her know that when she was ready to stop running away and start facing the new life she could have—DELTA is where the yellow brick road would take her. She did not know the reference, so he offered to show her The Wizard of Oz the next time they saw each other and then he let her go. She looked it up right after she used his credit card to buy herself a smartphone and still didn’t really quite understand.
It took another six months of living from motel to motel and running up a large tab on Yul’s credit card before she finally realized that she had no idea what she wanted in life or how to get it. The only person who had offered her a choice was the same man she had run out on. And she was tired of running. If God wasn’t going to give her a purpose, she needed to figure out one for herself. So she called the number on the card he had given her…only to find that it had been disconnected. She was hurt, thinking maybe her had tricked her. And so she got angry. The D.E.L.T.A logo was on the card he had given her, so she searching for the nearest regional office, marched right in, and demanded that someone get him or she would cause a scene (just like she had seen on a TV show). He was a bit surprised when he showed up as she responded by throwing his card at him and telling him it had been maxed out.
That was how Felicia came to work for D.E.L.T.A. and after tests were run, she was sent through six months of strict training and then placed on the Omega Squad—by Yul’s request. For most of her life, even months after she joined D.E.L.T.A. her wings were thought to be real physical wings. D.E.L.T.A. assumed she has multiple abilities, her wings being one, and the energy housed in them being another. Because of how sensitive she is about them, she had refused to allow them to be examined in detail until four months into her run with them, after a training accident left her with a broken rib. X-rays had to be taken and that is when they discovered that her wings were not real because they had no real bones and the energy from them caused the MRI to malfunction. They realized then that her wings were not just covered in a energy, they were pure energy.
She worked with Omega Squad for two years until the mission where a rogue Super (William Baker) who was planning to use his powers to manipulate his way into Harvard University (he didn’t have the academic brains to get there on his own, but telepathy and mind control sure do work to a guy’s advantage), went drastically wrong. They had just intended to bring the young man in for questioning, but not knowing he was a full on telepath, the team was slowly pitted against each other in the few days they spent around him, to the point they were at each other’s throats. If it wasn’t for Yul taking an attack from Felicia, their teammate Kali would have been decapitated. Instead, he was severely injured and temporarily paralyzed from the waist down and their other teammate John Archer was killed (Baker had made him believe there was no air around him and he suffocated). It took Yul off the team and Felicia was on mandatory leave for two weeks while they made sure there were no lasting traces of the Rogue’s influence in her mind.
She also received a broken arm in the mission, but it was Yul’s injury that got to her the most. She realized then that she had been using him as a crutch. He had been the one guiding her because she had still been too afraid to completely embrace free will in her own life without running in fear of failure. And so she put in a request to reassign to a new Squad and left Omega for Theta, the Public Relations team. She was never a fighter to begin with and if Yul wasn’t going to be on the team anymore, she didn’t have a reason to stay—despite all the people she had come to care about while she was there. It was easier to cut ties with them now than to wait to get too attached.
Her new team was less drastic and more widespread. The Theta Squad works all over the country and has alliance teams with other groups in countries across the world. She got to be in the limelight and make nice with her new teammates. She even struck up a sexual relationship with Samuel Akens, who was pretty much the posterboy sweetheart of the team, because his visual empathy was disrupted by her energy constructs and he couldn’t read her as he did everyone else. For a while, they had been stationed in Los Angeles, California, working to promote the new Unity in Support Center opening there to promote the usefulness of Supers in society and how non-enhanced humans could relate to them.
It was during a promotional stop in California that Cici went out clubbing one night, alone, and crossed paths with Eva Maria. Eva (calling herself Mary) recognized Felicia as a Super, but had really been there to bring in the boy Cici just so happened to be dancing with, another Super with high connections. Eva used her powers to induce Cici into helping her get the boy out of the club and into the car waiting to take him away, then proceeded to bring Cici in, too.
What would follow was months of Felicia and Eva working together, much of them underwraps to avoid Cici being caught out by D.E.L.T.A., tracking down other Supers to bring in for use by the shady side of the Medical and Research Knowledge on Supernatural Abilities Organization (known as M.A.R.K.O.), that Eva worked for. Cici's disappearance was never fully disclosed to the media, although there was mention of a "family" emergency she was dealing with (a way to avoid saying she was missing, particularly since Felicia never spoke of her childhood on camera with any honesty for people to fact-check it). In the beginning it was Eva's powers that kept Cici loyal and willing to do nearly anything asked of her (by Eva), but after a while it wasn't even needed because Cici had fallen completely for Eva (although whether or not this is a lasting side effect of Eva's abilities being used on her for so long, Cici honestly would rather not know).
MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION:
THETA SQUAD:
Sidhe: Felicia McCready – wings and the ability to shoot out her feathers as energy shards. They grow back within minutes.
Indigo: Samuel Akens – visual empathy. The ability to read all living things in nature, essentially seeing the emotions of plants, animals, and humans based on the colors around them.
-- At first he comes across as too passive and genial, but to friends he is stubborn, opinionated and very big on clean energy and nature conservation. He’s very good-looking and his kind, shy demeanor around the cameras has given him quite the following.
Ash: Terrance Pullman (aka Terry) – fire/heat manipulation.
-- Very calm and controlled because the heat within a twenty foot radius of her can be easily affected if she becomes too agitated, doesn’t let things said or done upset her easily.
Rocket: Molly Brannigan – combustion. She can create minor explosions with her hands and feet, also uses it to propel herself into the air like her codename’s sake. The explosions look like fireworks of different colors depending on her mood.
-- She’s brash and reckless, but knows how to get crowds going.
Babylon: Joaquín Valencia – Telepath. Primarily focused through touch, he can read the mind of anyone he has skin-to-skin contact with. He is also able to automatically learn the language of anyone he speaks to just by borrowing the language from their minds while they are in the process of talking if they are in close proximity (due to their brains linguistic sector being active at that time and easier for him to connect with). He cannot teach the language to others and knowing how to speak it does not mean he can read it. | Field Leader of Theta Squad
-- He is suave, photogenic, and knows how to work the cameras, but also diplomatic and good at keeping people focused on the job at hand. Cool under pressure and knows how to throw a witty retort back at people.
Agent 3659: Lara Burgess – Normal Human agent working for D.E.L.T.A. Theta Squad liason in lieu of a team coordinator and essentially their commanding officer who reports directly to DELTA. Ex-military, and DELTA trained operative.
-- Easily annoyed, but never yells at the team in front of cameras. Extremely efficient and has a quirk about always being fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. She and Felicia have a love-hate-snark relationship.
REST TO COME
Real Name: Felicia McCready
Other Aliases: Cici Laramee, Licia, Angel, Saint Felicity, Dorothy
Age: 20
Birthdate: 04/03/1995
Birth Place: Paskatawan, Oklahoma
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 115lbs
Average Wingspan: 6’6”
Designation: Superhuman
Rank: Level B (potential Level A)
PB: Holland Roden
BASIC INFORMATION:
Superhuman whose powers--energy pulsing constructs that can be manipulated with the proper amount of control—have been with her since birth. They look like “traditional” angel wings, but the feathers can be used as energy projectiles so sharp they cut through steel or can explode on contact, depending on how stable the energy used. The feathers grow back within minutes. Unlike many superhumans who work for D.E.L.T.A., the government did not find Felicia, she came to them of her own free will after a brief run-in with another agent, Risk, aka Yul Walken, the previous leader of the Omega Squad. Felicia is pushy, domineering, flirtatious, but also easy-going and friendly. She likes to pull pranks, but isn’t rattled easily when people getting angry with her for them. She was formally a member of the Omega Squad, but after the mission that led to Yul being permanently injured and pulled from the team (or at least she thinks it's permanent), she requested and received reassignment to the Theta Squad, the public relations team meant to show humans that Supers are not as dangerous as some make them out to be.
ABILITIES:
Felicia’s wings are not real wings, although they do allow her flight capabilities. They are excess energy her body releases that takes the construct form of wings like that of an angel. That is why she is capable of using the energy in the wings and firing the feathers like projectiles. It is also why she can fly using them despite her muscles and skeletal structure not being strong enough to maintain flight on their own. The form of the energy is controlled by her mental state, but due to her upbringing they remain looking like angel wings. The most she has been able to do with them consistently so far is flatten them against her back when she wears long coats so they don’t appear as noticeable.
She has not yet been able to consciously alter their form beyond that (and any subconscious change is temporary), but it is something she is currently working on. Color on the other hand she has mastered and she can alter them to any shade or design that she can visualize. The energy in these wings has the ability to cut through steel and even bedrock, but only to a certain depth, and can also be used like miniature explosives. The energy regenerates after 10 minutes or so and the feathers “grow” back. If she uses too much energy, the wings can become more intangible, transparent, unable to keep her in the air, and she needs to consume more calories and protein to build her energy back up.
The wings feel to others in whatever way they feel to Felicia herself, and so the feathers feel like the softest down possible while the bones feel strangely fragile for being so large, but do not break no matter the pressure put on them. Because it is her own body’s energy, when someone is touching her wings, she is able to sense their intent and emotional state, like a very low grade touch empath. It makes it very uncomfortable for her, to the point she hates it when most people touch them. The energy is also disruptive to those with visual based abilities, like infrared or the ability to see auras, but only in regards to her and whoever may be standing in front of or behind her.
PERSONALITY:
Felicia does not consider herself a religious person, now, but her parents were fanatics living in a rural town in Oklahoma. Religion was very strong in the tiny, widespread community. She was raised being told she was an Angel of God and isolated for it, to the point that now she goes out of her way to talk around any kind of philosophical or religious topics. She lost her faith, but won’t judge others for having it…too much. Just keep it away from her and everything is good. She’s more than likely to make a joke or dismiss those topics and come up with something else to talk about, doing it in such a way that some find it funny, while others may feel easily ignored. She doesn’t care as long as she gets the result she wants. Even if she comes across melodramatic in the process. Given all the soap operas she watches, she kind of takes it as a compliment.
The irony of Cici’s rejection of faith is that is still plays a soul deep role in how she views the world. For all that she was disillusioned by her childhood and what she learned about Christianity’s less than clean history, she cannot give up that ingrained need and desire to believe in a higher calling, something beyond herself that she can give into and know it’s the right thing. She tells herself that it’s dumb and just residual thoughts or feelings from the “brainwashing” she went through as a child, but truly she wants to believe. It’s why Eva’s powers worked so well on her, because Cici, despite having some training against mind control after the Harvard Incident, still has that core part of her that the virtues connect with.
That’s why Felicia will insist she did not join D.E.L.T.A. for protection or even because she wants to do the “right thing” and protect humans from dangerous Supers. She’ll say that is a good thing, but not really her concern. She’ll swear it was because she wanted to control her own destiny and decided what to do with her own life. Yul Walken was one of the first people to show her that she was running away from life rather than taking control of it. In the week they spent together while he was on a mission in Illinois, he taught her a lot about what it meant to a person with free will, and she had been so sure she had proved she could be independent when she had run away from home six months before. And so a few months later, she used the card he had given her and walked right up to one of the regional DELTA offices and demanded to speak to him and only him. That’s how she had learned to handle things. Be upfront, don’t let anyone stop her from what she wanted and be willing to do what it took to get it.
After Yul was injured and pulled from the Omega Squad, Felicia was confused and felt adrift. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Because while she did believe in free will and making your own destiny, she had put Yul on a pedestal and used him as proof that this was the right way, this was the right road for her to walk. He had become her moral compass and evidence that “faith” in a higher power was pointless, never realizing how much of that same faith she had put in him. She had glorified him unintentionally in her own head and the Harvard Incident was proof enough of how fallible both of them were. Free will left Yul a cripple and their other teammate dead, so it obviously wasn’t as great as she’d been selling it for the last three years.
Now Felicia was faced yet again with having to make her own choices entirely of her own free will, but was filled with doubt about how right that was. So she requested a transfer to Theta Squad, and ran. Some of the others called her a traitor and she had felt a little bad about not even telling them about her transfer until the day she left, but Felicia doesn’t hold herself back because of guilt. She needed to leave if she was ever going to make sense of her own life and the reminders weren’t helping her at all.
For all that Cici will say she doesn’t believe in fear—that it’s for those too afraid to make their own destinies—the truth is, she fears being wrong more than anything. She fears making that one wrong choice that will damn her soul in a way she can never undo. She might say she doesn’t believe in God, but that niggling fear of Heaven and Hell being true and her spending eternity in damnation is one she just can’t shake. She wants to make her own destiny, but she also wants to know she’s not making the wrong destiny. She also doesn’t acknowledge the other things that she is truly afraid of, such as her feeling of losing people close to her and the fear of being alone. Instead she plays these off as being less than what they are, as if like is more of game and she still has a million lives to lose before Game Over, which is one of the ways she played off moving on when she left Omega Squad for Theta.
She’s not a bad person, but Felicia knows she also isn’t a selfless person. She spent most of her life being told that she was made by God to serve him and worship him and lead others to Him, to the point that now that she is in charge of her own life, that’s her number one priority. She only takes orders from people she trusts, only gives that trust to people she thinks worth her time. She throws herself into sex because it makes her feel free and forget a lot of the doubts in her own head (sex can’t be bad if it feels that great, right?), and feeds her need for attention better than anything else ever had.
Or so it was until Eva came into the picture. At first it was just her powers, as they played on that need in Cici to put her faith in something or someone, but by after a month or two, Cici had fallen so in love with Eva, in the way being with her made her feel, that her powers weren’t even needed anymore. She is one hundred percent committed to Eva and whatever cause Eva may have, to the point that even though she knew Eva wasn’t being honest with her about her identity, it didn’t rank high enough for her to argue about it. She’s aware that there is a chance Eva could still be using her powers on her, could be tampering with her and making Cici want to love her, but the truth is she doesn’t care. The feeling she has with her is the peace of mind and belonging--knowing you are on the right path in life--she’s been searching for ever since she ran away from home and she isn’t giving it up. In the end, it’s the blind faith of love that she has given into more than she ever could religion.
Not that loving Eva has stopped her from being the attention-seeking brat that she is. She has an obsessive need to have the latest hand-held technology. The newest iPhone? She had it pre-ordered six months in advance. Fanciest looking multi-media player? Got the Beta and then upgraded when the final version came out. Felicia has to stay connected. She needs access to the internet and Twitter and all the people following her blog. Internet has been important to her for so long that she doesn’t know what to do without it.
Even though she has to have access to the internet, Felicia loves talking to people face to face just as much. She may crave that attention, but she has to be in control of it. She doesn’t like people having the advantage in any situation, except for when it comes to Eva. She can’t even stand people touching her wings. It makes her feel like they are touching something deep inside her and she is more than likely to punch someone rather than just telling them to let go. Yul is one of the only people who gets away with it without bodily harm because he feels comfortable and safe. But other than that she is fairly affectionate and doesn’t mind hugging and kissing people, even just for the hell of it, as long as she is the one taking the lead. Flirting is a game to her and it’s only fun if everyone wins.
HISTORY:
Felicia McCready was born to an extremely religious, older couple in Paskatawan, Oklahoma. She believes herself to be their sole child because she is the only one she remembers they had, but what she does not know is that she has an older brother who was disowned for displaying Superhuman abilities, as her parents believed him to be a demon sent from Hell. They sent her brother to M.A.R.K.O. to be “cured” and then washed their hands of him, removing all proof of his existence from their household. Because she was born with “angel wings” her parents called on the Pastor Lucas Roman and he told them that she was a gift from God they would have to prepare to serve him when the time came, and this spared her from the same fate. Her brother was sent away when she was two, so she has no real memories of him.
She was made to read the Bible several times a day along with her homeschooling studies to “learn the word she was meant to teach” and never allowed to venture outside past the tall fence her father had built around the acre of their farm immediately around the house and barn. This left her feeling removed from the world outside and she learned quickly that if she wanted things, she had to play the role her parents expected of her. She did not do this because she believed in God as they did, but because it was what she was told to do.
Still, she never understood why they were so certain she could speak to God, when he had never once “called on her” in her life. If she was an Angel, should she not have been able to speak to him and have him talk back to her? This was her first sense of doubt. And then she learned about Supers and more doubt was sown. Her parents had spoken about the demons who were flaunting their sins all over the country and she wonders if she was truly an angel and not one of “the abominations.” It wasn't as if she had even met majority of the community that her parents were a part of, primarily because Pastor Roman said they were not ready to hear the Word from a true Messenger and encouraged her parents to keep her locked away until the right time. So the only confirmation she had that anything she knew was true was her parents and the pastor.
Around the time she turned ten years old, she discovered that her parents owned a computer. She would sneak into their room while they were away (as the house had deadbolts on the outside she could not unlock herself to keep her from leaving when her parents were not home) and found they had a small office attached to it that she could get into with a butter knife. So she taught herself how to use it, which was a very...different kind of intro into the outside world. Because of her parents’ behavior as she grew up, she learned how to play various roles as it suited her, being the perfect “angel” to get their attention and praise, and also to hide what her true motives were. More and more often she wanted them gone from the house so she could surf the net and go into chatrooms and meet people.
She had never been a shy child, so no matter how little she knew about the outside world, she found ways of playing off her insecurities and ignorance until she could find out more. Google and Wikipedia became her favorite websites. She learned about as many things as she could and would secretly print off papers from it and hide them in a cubby hole she had made in her closet under the floorboards so she could read them by candlelight after her parents had gone to bed. The more she used the computer, the more she began to fact check everything her parents said and everything she read in the Bible on Google. And then she found that the computer had a camera. She could finally see people and talk to them at the same time. Because her parents were so sure she would never enter their room, they never thought to question her about some of the things they had noticed, and eventually she had learned enough to hide things she didn’t want them to know about.
As the years went by, Pastor Roman would visit more often, to the point that her parents would leave her alone with him for hours going over the Scripture. Felicia didn’t like him. He spent too much time fixated on her wings, asking her to show them off to him and to make them glow as they had learned she could do when she was eight. When she was 15, he went so far as to stroke her wings, holding her still for ten minutes even as she repeatedly asked him to let go. It was terrifying and the most uncomfortable, violating feeling she had ever had. She could feel his obsessive intent, the twisted way he was becoming fixated on her and she wanted him to get away from her. When she managed to gain enough leverage, she shoved him off, kneed him in the groin and smacked him in the face with the Bible in her hands, only to have her parents walk in to her repeatedly hitting him.
Felicia was surprised that instead of taking her side, her parents took the Pastor’s side. They told her she was mistaken, that the Pastor only gave in to temptation and she should forgive him to cleanse him of his sin. But she wouldn’t. She refused. She wanted him gone. But her parents kept insisting that she shouldn’t behave that way. And in her hurt and anger, she struck out at them, telling them that being a devil would be less hell than that. And it was in her anger that her wings altered for the first time, becoming dark, leathery, batlike with claws. Her parents were horrified and so was she. So she ran. She grabbed her bag of emergency clothes and nonperishable foods that was kept in her closet for the sake of tornados and ran. This was the first time she used her wings to fly, leaping over the tall fence around the yard. She flew for a good mile, unsteady and then crashed into the branch of a tree before falling to the ground. But she kept running.
It wasn’t until she had run away and found out just how rough it could be for a teenage girl with no understanding of how to find her way in the world, that Felicia fully realized how extreme her parents’ views were. She stole a coat from a dry cleaner’s in the next town over to hide her wings, leaving a note to bless the person who it belong to for their service to a servant of God and walked. She did not know where she was going or what she was going to do. She was terrified to be on her own. Not that she let this show as she hitchhiked and walked her way out of Oklahoma (she had spoken to a few girls who had done this to get to music concerts and it seemed like the best way to go) all the way to Illinois.
It was while she was hitchhiking that she discovered that the feathers of her wings could be used as a weapon. A trucker tried to push her for sex as payment for her ride (she had been offering blessings before that which had been enough for two truckers and an elderly couple on their way to visit family in South Dakota, and maybe flirted just a bit if she thought it would help) and she had reacted instinctively and her wings became more like daggers. The man’s arm was cut so deeply it wouldn’t stop bleeding and Felicia jumped out of the cab and ran. That was the second time she tried to fly and it worked out better than the first. She managed to stay in the air for fifty miles before the cool air and the weight of her bag tired her out and she landed. After that she would find places to hide out during the day and flew at night always trying to go in the same direction. But one night she got too tired and tried to land on the road where there were streetlights. And was almost hit by a car.
It was there that she met Yul Walken, whose SUV had almost hit her head on, but managed to stop within centimeters of her. Because of the way she had fallen from the sky, and her red hair, the first thing Yul said when he saw her was: “So did you just blow in from Kansas, Dorothy?” This is a nickname that would stick between them for as long as they knew each other.
He took her to eat, and offered to take her the rest of the way to Chicago. When they arrived, it turned out he was on a month leave from his job and since she didn’t have anywhere to go and he had nowhere particular to be…they stayed together. For a week. Yul was the first person Felicia met that didn’t see her wings as something wrong with her or a sign from God. They just were. He barely even commented on them. He showed her around the city, even took her to a museum because he found it “too sad to be true” that she had never visited one before. It was at the end of that week that she decided to run again because she didn’t know where all of this was leading or if she could trust this man that was giving her all these things and hadn’t asked for anything else in return. Yet.
Yul caught her as she was leaving—after having stolen two hundred dollars from his wallet. He told her that two hundred wouldn’t be enough and gave her his credit card and his business card. He didn’t try to recruit her for D.E.L.T.A., but did let her know that when she was ready to stop running away and start facing the new life she could have—DELTA is where the yellow brick road would take her. She did not know the reference, so he offered to show her The Wizard of Oz the next time they saw each other and then he let her go. She looked it up right after she used his credit card to buy herself a smartphone and still didn’t really quite understand.
It took another six months of living from motel to motel and running up a large tab on Yul’s credit card before she finally realized that she had no idea what she wanted in life or how to get it. The only person who had offered her a choice was the same man she had run out on. And she was tired of running. If God wasn’t going to give her a purpose, she needed to figure out one for herself. So she called the number on the card he had given her…only to find that it had been disconnected. She was hurt, thinking maybe her had tricked her. And so she got angry. The D.E.L.T.A logo was on the card he had given her, so she searching for the nearest regional office, marched right in, and demanded that someone get him or she would cause a scene (just like she had seen on a TV show). He was a bit surprised when he showed up as she responded by throwing his card at him and telling him it had been maxed out.
That was how Felicia came to work for D.E.L.T.A. and after tests were run, she was sent through six months of strict training and then placed on the Omega Squad—by Yul’s request. For most of her life, even months after she joined D.E.L.T.A. her wings were thought to be real physical wings. D.E.L.T.A. assumed she has multiple abilities, her wings being one, and the energy housed in them being another. Because of how sensitive she is about them, she had refused to allow them to be examined in detail until four months into her run with them, after a training accident left her with a broken rib. X-rays had to be taken and that is when they discovered that her wings were not real because they had no real bones and the energy from them caused the MRI to malfunction. They realized then that her wings were not just covered in a energy, they were pure energy.
She worked with Omega Squad for two years until the mission where a rogue Super (William Baker) who was planning to use his powers to manipulate his way into Harvard University (he didn’t have the academic brains to get there on his own, but telepathy and mind control sure do work to a guy’s advantage), went drastically wrong. They had just intended to bring the young man in for questioning, but not knowing he was a full on telepath, the team was slowly pitted against each other in the few days they spent around him, to the point they were at each other’s throats. If it wasn’t for Yul taking an attack from Felicia, their teammate Kali would have been decapitated. Instead, he was severely injured and temporarily paralyzed from the waist down and their other teammate John Archer was killed (Baker had made him believe there was no air around him and he suffocated). It took Yul off the team and Felicia was on mandatory leave for two weeks while they made sure there were no lasting traces of the Rogue’s influence in her mind.
She also received a broken arm in the mission, but it was Yul’s injury that got to her the most. She realized then that she had been using him as a crutch. He had been the one guiding her because she had still been too afraid to completely embrace free will in her own life without running in fear of failure. And so she put in a request to reassign to a new Squad and left Omega for Theta, the Public Relations team. She was never a fighter to begin with and if Yul wasn’t going to be on the team anymore, she didn’t have a reason to stay—despite all the people she had come to care about while she was there. It was easier to cut ties with them now than to wait to get too attached.
Her new team was less drastic and more widespread. The Theta Squad works all over the country and has alliance teams with other groups in countries across the world. She got to be in the limelight and make nice with her new teammates. She even struck up a sexual relationship with Samuel Akens, who was pretty much the posterboy sweetheart of the team, because his visual empathy was disrupted by her energy constructs and he couldn’t read her as he did everyone else. For a while, they had been stationed in Los Angeles, California, working to promote the new Unity in Support Center opening there to promote the usefulness of Supers in society and how non-enhanced humans could relate to them.
It was during a promotional stop in California that Cici went out clubbing one night, alone, and crossed paths with Eva Maria. Eva (calling herself Mary) recognized Felicia as a Super, but had really been there to bring in the boy Cici just so happened to be dancing with, another Super with high connections. Eva used her powers to induce Cici into helping her get the boy out of the club and into the car waiting to take him away, then proceeded to bring Cici in, too.
What would follow was months of Felicia and Eva working together, much of them underwraps to avoid Cici being caught out by D.E.L.T.A., tracking down other Supers to bring in for use by the shady side of the Medical and Research Knowledge on Supernatural Abilities Organization (known as M.A.R.K.O.), that Eva worked for. Cici's disappearance was never fully disclosed to the media, although there was mention of a "family" emergency she was dealing with (a way to avoid saying she was missing, particularly since Felicia never spoke of her childhood on camera with any honesty for people to fact-check it). In the beginning it was Eva's powers that kept Cici loyal and willing to do nearly anything asked of her (by Eva), but after a while it wasn't even needed because Cici had fallen completely for Eva (although whether or not this is a lasting side effect of Eva's abilities being used on her for so long, Cici honestly would rather not know).
MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION:
- Felicia is a prankster, but never pulls pranks on April Fool’s Day because she expects people to think she will. Instead she always does something within the week before or the week after.
- Felicia is extremely jealous of any woman Yul becomes involved with romantically. Not because she’s in love with him, but because she doesn’t like him having divided attention.
- A year or so after Felicia fled the cult-like town in Oklahoma there was a huge raid by the FBI on the entire area, and many of the Church officials were arrested for illegal stockpiling of weapons, inappropriate behavior with minors, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and various other offenses. Her parents managed to get out of raid unscathed by signing away their parental rights to her. Felicia isn't even aware of everything that transpired, just that D.E.L.T.A. managed to get them to agree to never attempt to contact her.
- The one time Voltage (aka Max Carson) called her Dorothy, after hearing Yul use it, she didn’t react at the time, but two nights later glued broom bristles to his face while he was sleeping and drew on him so he looked like the Cowardly Lion. Because she used industrial glue used in the DELTA labs it took hours to get it off without tearing off his skin.
- Felicia has never been or wanted in a serious, committed relationship, although she enjoys casual sex and flirtation. She rarely has the same partner more than twice. The only exception has been Samuel Akens, aka Indigo, who she’s had an on and off relationship with since she joined Theta. This changed after she met Eva, but their relationship is still not official or committed.
- With money she originally used from Yul’s $5,000 limit credit card that he gave her, Felicia set up a monthly anonymous donation to the Zodiac Shelter for Homeless Teens and Battered Women in Toledo, Ohio, because it was the only one that took in Superhuman teenagers in the area at the time when she was passing through during her six months she spent homeless. After joining DELTA, she raised it to a $500-a-month donation. No one knows about this and she doesn’t see a reason to ever bring it up.
- Felicia’s favorite color is lavender, her favorite type of music is jazz, but she does enjoy herself some punk rock and hip-hop if the song is good for dancing.
- Besides technology, pranks, and her near addiction to sex, Cici's other hobbies are movies, amateur drawing (she's good at sketching but nothing too fancy or detailed), dancing, and avoiding reading books (she doesn't mind audiobook though).
- Of the nicknames she has, Cici is the one she is called most often, but it was originally a false name she gave herself when she was hitchhiking so that her parents would have a harder time finding her. “Cici Laramee from Nowheresville, Utah.” Yul didn’t know her real name was Felicia until she tracked him down at DELTA.
- Felicia had trained herself out the strong regional accent she used to have, but it still comes up when she’s angry or trying to hide that she’s upset.
- Her most elaborate prank to date was convincing Yul that she had set her entire kitchen on fire and had him rush over. Only for him to meet the "fireman" who was actually a stripper she had bought for his birthday.
- Sex is a big part of Cici's life and she can get really creative with it. She likes orgies, making out with strangers, and once had a threesome in the Statue of Liberty.
- Felicia's excess energy disrupts Sam's visual empathy, which makes it easy for her to have a sexual relationship with him.
- Felicia chose her own codename Sidhe (pronouned "Shee"), and knows it means "fairy-folk". It is not actually based on her wings, but on the tattoo of a fairy she has on her ankle. She is not that considerate about the cultural significance of the word.
THETA SQUAD:
Sidhe: Felicia McCready – wings and the ability to shoot out her feathers as energy shards. They grow back within minutes.
Indigo: Samuel Akens – visual empathy. The ability to read all living things in nature, essentially seeing the emotions of plants, animals, and humans based on the colors around them.
-- At first he comes across as too passive and genial, but to friends he is stubborn, opinionated and very big on clean energy and nature conservation. He’s very good-looking and his kind, shy demeanor around the cameras has given him quite the following.
Ash: Terrance Pullman (aka Terry) – fire/heat manipulation.
-- Very calm and controlled because the heat within a twenty foot radius of her can be easily affected if she becomes too agitated, doesn’t let things said or done upset her easily.
Rocket: Molly Brannigan – combustion. She can create minor explosions with her hands and feet, also uses it to propel herself into the air like her codename’s sake. The explosions look like fireworks of different colors depending on her mood.
-- She’s brash and reckless, but knows how to get crowds going.
Babylon: Joaquín Valencia – Telepath. Primarily focused through touch, he can read the mind of anyone he has skin-to-skin contact with. He is also able to automatically learn the language of anyone he speaks to just by borrowing the language from their minds while they are in the process of talking if they are in close proximity (due to their brains linguistic sector being active at that time and easier for him to connect with). He cannot teach the language to others and knowing how to speak it does not mean he can read it. | Field Leader of Theta Squad
-- He is suave, photogenic, and knows how to work the cameras, but also diplomatic and good at keeping people focused on the job at hand. Cool under pressure and knows how to throw a witty retort back at people.
Agent 3659: Lara Burgess – Normal Human agent working for D.E.L.T.A. Theta Squad liason in lieu of a team coordinator and essentially their commanding officer who reports directly to DELTA. Ex-military, and DELTA trained operative.
-- Easily annoyed, but never yells at the team in front of cameras. Extremely efficient and has a quirk about always being fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. She and Felicia have a love-hate-snark relationship.
REST TO COME