give me your hand and take what you will tonight.
Your name/crazy internet handle/whatever: Liz
Personal journal: ironfall
Email: thistornadoloves@gmail.com
AIM: thatlastlamb
Characters in Taxon (if applicable): Elena Gilbert, azurehalo, Judith, lanterncast.
Character name: Catherine 'Cat' Ruhamah Lachance
Genre (TV/books/etc): Short story
Fandom: Original
Original Verse Info: On the surface, Cat's world is modern day Earth, like the one we live in, early in the year 2010, with seemingly identical history, geography, demographics, politics, economics, legal systems, and cultures; you or I wouldn't notice the difference if we suddenly ended up there overnight, except for how we'd developed a long-lost twin...in our own houses/dorms/whatever.
The main difference is that in this world, psychic powers are definitively, measurably real, although rare and often underdeveloped. Psychokinesis, pyrokineses, precogition, telepathy, psychometry--all fact, along with a host of other, odder abilities. The capacity for these powers is genetic, but environmental triggers have to be present to cause them to emerge; since I'm not a geneticist, let's just say it's a complicated process involving a lot of polygenes and move on, because laypeople trying to explain science goes hideously wrong 99% of the time, no matter how much I may love biology, and we will put 'but how do they work in action' under the umbrella of 'if psychic powers ever get measured in a lab I'll come back and edit this'.
The rarity of these abilities is why they are received with some skepticism by the majority of the public, but certain federal and private agencies are aware of their possibility, at least. The serious consideration of psychic power as a scientific phenomenon only blossomed with modern psychiatry and neuroscience, and as such it's still in its infancy and kept very quiet by disinterest as much as actual efforts at secrecy. Psychic powers have had little influence on history for the same reason: the actions of one anonymous individual are rarely recorded, and due to the problems that develop along with most psychic powers psychics of any kind have trouble with the stability that leads to acquiring social prominence. Charlatans pretending at paranormal capabilities still existed (and exist) and in much greater numbers that the real deal, casting further doubt on the existence of such abilities.
Psychics are usually isolated, although some families end up with several members possessed of similar or identical talents--there are no Professor Xaviers in this world gathering up these extremely rare individuals, especially because psychics and their powers don't tend to play well together. It's not that it hasn't been tried, but putting an ad in the paper for 'Telepath wanted for light mental conversation and mind reading' or 'Psychokinetics Annual Reunion Picnic, Bring Your Own Levitating Beer' brings forth a wealth of crackpots and almost no hits, and if your new telepath friend's wavelength interferes with yours all you'll get out of it is still a headache.
The exception to this rule is a relatively newly prevalent breed of psychic, the vampire. Psychic vampirism, the draining of emotional energy, seems like a less than intrusive means of gathering power and retaining a mental high, but in this universe they are significantly more dangerous, and actively infectious: if a person has even a glimmer of psychic ability, the vampire can feed on it to fuel their own grab bag of talents (anything from garden variety receptive telepathy to vitakinesis, and always more than one knack at a time) and then often be the environmental factor that alters the expression of the psychic's genes to that of another vampire. This doesn't apply to all psychics, with some being immune while others lose their abilities entirely with no replacement, but it works for most, with some fairly unpleasant implications about the roots of all psychic ability. On top of this, psychic vampires can kill through prolonged contact, either directly (by draining someone completely; they can devour normal humans as easily as psychics, and usually moreso) or less so (losing all your will to live is what, generally, leads to suicide, or at least carelessness with your health). That this vampirism is spreading with virulence where it was once only the most common and subtle ability has gone unnoticed by the world community, including its psychic members, which means that over the past fifty years the problem has escalated exponentially with no one looking for a solution--even the psychic vampires themselves usually seem to believe they are each a single free agent, and often may not know why or how their abilities developed, depending on the subtlety of the vampire who altered them--if any vampire had to be involved in the first place. Most psychic vampires don't stay in any one place long enough to see their 'progeny' develop. They don't need psychics to fuel their abilities, but they are the most delicious, mentally speaking.
Why this Character?: Because I have enough tinies! No, really, that's one of the reasons - Elena and Judith are fun and appropriate for many things, but Cat is older (28, specifically) and more importantly, more mature. I like having an adult character or two in my cast because they deal with different issues than the younger ones, and tend to be less flaily. Flaily being the extremely technical term.
Cat is a very fun character, in my humble and hopefully correct opinion, and she's well-suited for both light and serious plotlines and threads. I think she'll fit in well at Taxon, since it's easy to get her involved in things using the hook of her extroversion and bleeding heart compassion - who doesn't like hugs? That's right, no one. My hope is actually that she can function (in some capacity) as a neat little rock of support for all kinds of people. Tying into this, her powers basically enable all kinds of sweet dream sequences, which I feel are great in fiction and can allow me and pretty much anyone else who's interested to exploit symbolism and psychology to our greatest advantage.
Programmed Possession: Cat has a photo album containing pictures dating from her infancy to the present. There's nothing particularly special about it, it just has great sentimental value.
Abilities/Weaknesses: I'm going to start with mundane abilities and weaknessess because knowing me, if I left them to the end I'd leave something out, so: Cat is a very talented waitress, for one thing, and this means she has excellent interpersonal skills, she's good with numbers, she has a great memory, and a high tolerance for total bullshit and disasters. She has a slightly substandard high school education and a familiarity with various kinds of theft that are, in fact, totally correlated, and she's a good shot with rifles and shotguns. She's mildly farsighted and wears glasses for reading small text, but in daily life this isn't an impediment or a thing she even notices. She's addicted to cigarettes, but not a heavy smoker, and being relatively new to the habit it hasn't taken a steep toll on her body yet; otherwise, physically she's in reasonable health for a woman her age and unremarkable in any way.
Totally out of left field, considering my world outline, Cat is psychic. Specifically, she's an astral projector with oneironautic capabilities, meaning she can travel outside of her body in the form of an energy pattern and then go diving into the minds of sleeping people, if she so chooses.
In order to astrally project in the first place, Cat has to lose consciousness; fortunately for her purposes, part of her talent is being able to put herself in the right frame of mind through quietly meditating--it's like falling asleep, and requires about ten to fifteen minutes and no interruptions, which aren't dangerous at that point but remain annoying. If she needs to do it faster than that, however, being forced into losing unconsciousness ejects her from her body instantly, a technique that works particularly well being...asphyxiation, although blunt force also works; drugs such as sleeping pills do not. Only focused effort or a trauma can trigger it, which is my accounting for the traditional link to meditation and near-death experiences.
Once projected successfully, Cat's consciousness occupies an astral body, which exists on a plane that intersects with the physical one; her physical body spends this time in a coma. Her ability to travel in the past has been limited by her nervousness to about a mile, and in Taxon will of course be limited by the city boundaries. When in this form, Cat can opt for intangibility or a limited amount of corporeality; in the latter case, she can basically pick up or manipulate small objects, and has about the consistency of foam, if you wanted to stick your hand through her--which you could do without hurting her, since the body is basically a mental construct. She appears slightly translucent and glowing in this state, so it'd be difficult to mistake her for a 'real' person. She can also choose to be visible or not, and combine these in various ways--visible but not tangible, invisible and tangible, any way she can conceive. Transitioning between states is instant. Additionally, she can interfere with the psychic states of other people in this form, with varying effect--she can give splitting headaches, create disorientation and vertigo, and sap people's emotional energy to the point of forcing apathy, though she avoids the latter because that's the 'psychic vampirism' discussed above! She can sustain this state as long as she wants, but she has to return to her body eventually or she'd...die of thirst/starvation. If her body is injured while she's absent from it she doesn't feel the effects until she returns, and she'd only notice an attack if it led to her death and the disruption of her anchor to her body--like most traditional astral projectionists, she experiences a 'cord' linking her bodies, and if she tugs on it it acts as an emergency return, yanking her from wherever she is back to the (hopeful) security of her body. Physically she's very, very vulnerable, in this position, and mentally she's also exposed; the trade-off for being able to project is that it makes her susceptible to psychic influence, where when she's not she had some limited ability to defend against attacks by reflex.
MOVING ON, FINALLY, to oneironautics: Cat can sink into the minds of dreaming people while projecting, which disspates her astral body and shields her inside their minds, useful for escaping attack or hiding from pursuers. This only works on people who are actively dreaming, but once she enters their minds this state persists until she leaves, and waking them up becomes extremely difficult. Any use this might have for 'mind reading' or 'totally stealing the secrets of other people' is limited by how symbolic dreams can be, and how Cat hasn't developed her ability to shape dreams from within. She can perceive and interact with the landscape and the person having the dream, and she has a very limited amount of influence over superficial details, but otherwise she has to abide by dream logic as long as she's inside the other person's consciousness--however, with effort she can usually cause the other person involved to become lucid within their dream, giving them control over it.
Cat is subject to frequent migraines that developed in concurrence with her powers, and she has trouble sleeping deeply or getting to sleep in the first place, again thanks to the reworking of her mind. Painkillers and sleeping pills work as well for her as anyone else, but she's sparing with the former and avoids the latter because she worries about forming a dependence.
Psychology/Personality: In the wide world of archetypes, the 'smiling, nurturing, no-nonsense waitress who provides a needed word of support and/or pie at exactly the right moment' is a trope recognizable in plenty of fiction, and like most tropes it has a glimmer of truth at the bottom: many people who end up in the service industry by choice are simply people persons, genuinely caring and interested in the lives of others around them, even if that interest has to be transitory. Cat is one of these people, and her first presentation is often just like this, down to one hand on her hips and a piece of gum in her mouth.
In this vein, Cat makes connections with people easily and honestly, and is often helpful above and beyond what any situation requires as a bare minimum, or even a reasonable standard, although she understands boundaries well and rarely crosses the line into pushiness. Doing this is a conscious effort on her part, and requires overcoming reluctance born out of her turbulent history--her life hasn't always been rewarding of putting herself out there so completely, for so many people, but with Cat's moral principles she doesn't see another way to live and sleep well at night. When she can help, she does, or at least she'll try, even if it can only be through small gestures or moral support. She also gets satisfaction out of being generous with her time and emotional energy, along with anything else she can give, precisely because of that checkered past--being able to give of herself is actually a luxury, and she's grateful when she has the chance to indulge in it.
However, Cat is not a martyr, and very carefully avoids becoming one. She won't kill herself trying to fix someone who refuses to allow themselves to be helped; although she won't abandon them, she withdraws, insulating herself and limiting what she'll give because being literally selfless is a) impractical, if not impossible and b) utterly crushing. There are things that people can do that will make her leave them entirely, all of which are things like 'murdering an innocent person for no reason' or 'punching a kitten and laughing'--unrepentant, inexcusable sins. Cat is deeply practical in conjunction with holding onto plenty of idealism; the two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, it just takes having a healthy sense of compromise and an understanding of her own limits and flaws when it comes to seeing her ideals put into action. Her self-awareness lends itself well to being conscious that other people are also falliable human (or close enough to it) beings, and understanding this makes her more empathetic, not less. Cat will forgive a lot if a person can explain themselves and seems genuinely sorry, or if they were just in a hard situation with no alternative, in which case she's acutely sensitive of the fact that she's not one to talk about objective moral standards. Some things are just wrong, but doing those things does not mean that a person is just evil, either. Even if she never gets close to someone again (knowing her limits) she can understand why people act the way they do, and temper her judgment with that. Holding onto self-righteous indignation is exhausting, and Cat has enough to deal with without it.
For example, she is used to having to work, and work very hard, to get anything in life, because this is a fact of being financially insecure in North America: it's almost impossible to rise out of that situation with any burden on your back, and Cat has her transient lifestyle to fund. Travelling is not cheap or easy, and not knowing when she'll have to put up stakes and move on makes it even harder, but Cat was already dealing with economic realities as a child. She's made a point of becoming as self-sufficient as possible - for example, she can fix her own car, most major appliances, and deal with a host of minor electrical and plumbing problems around a house, just because hiring someone else to do these things would be prohibitively draining of resources. She keeps everything she owns going until it literally falls apart, and then sees what she can make out of the pieces - she also does this with herself, which sometimes works and sometimes drives her to exhaustion. For all her knowledge of her limits, Cat still demands that she push beyond them, occasionally, because for a long time she's been the only person she could count on. She doesn't reject help out of hand as charity/a future obligation to repay the favor, not being subject to that particularly consequence of being poor - everyone she was close to in her youth was barely better off, and neighbourliness was a virtue that most people actually did practice, forming a tentative support network for everyone involved - but she does try to avoid it, usually without thinking it over too deeply. It's comparable to having blinkers; she just doesn't see help unless it's shoved right under her nose, and then she's surprised but willing to take it, with profuse gratitude. Cat never forgets kindness shown to her, and usually works to repay it even when it's not expected she do so, because it's the decent thing to do.
While on the subject of class, tangentially: working class women in North America have different standards of gender roles, for the most part, than middle class women - where middle class women are often still expected to be polite, gentle, and largely passive, working class women are expected to...work, essentially, whether inside the home or out of it. Ironically, because sexism is nothing if not ironic (and terrible!) this means working class are in the position of having to fight to be considered feminine, a lot of the time, because the dominant cultural dictates of 'be good, quiet, and demure' are ones they can't follow without starving. This manifests in a number of different ways; in Cat, it's shown through her very evident and active heterosexuality, and how she puts on the 'costume' of woman, i.e. make-up, clothing, speech patterns - she is very girly, to put it one way, while still being assertive. In relationships she doesn't defer to her male partner often, because she sees that as dangerous, but she enjoys being taken care of and treated as something fragile and precious because that just doesn't happen to her often. No matter how ruffled her dresses can get, Cat still behaves and carries herself in certain ways that are never going to conform to the stereotypical fifties housewife model that haunts the collective consciousness. Dealing with the genders, Cat tends to be more herself around women right off the bat, where with men she works harder to present her feminine qualities, usually though...casual flirting.
Continuing on in this vein ('flirting', yes) Cat's sexuality is a significant factor in her life: like most people, she likes sex, and seeks it out, but her overall approach to sex is coded somewhat masculine. She doesn't seek to get attached to her sexual partners if all she's looking for is a hook up, and actually avoids committment, for the most part - a lot of this is practical, since she never knows when a relationship will have to suddenly end. Cat is the kind of woman who ends up labelled as 'trashy', by more people than would admit to it out loud. She's outspoken, unashamed, and competitive - about most things besides sex, but it's sex that these traits end up being linked to, and where the stigma of 'trashiness' comes from. The word itself is something Cat actively reclaims, since she can't seem to get away from it, but the root of it speaks to how her attitudes are seen as without value, and somehow contaminated, or even actively contaminating. She's promiscuous without the right sense of style, essentially, and playing the game on her own terms makes people slightly uncomfortable.
Since...no person on Earth I know of is completely immune to external judgment, and Cat doesn't even come close, a lot of this has been internalized over the years. Cat sometimes thinks she actually is trash, in one way or another, and it's part of why she doesn't always take as much care of herself as she should. She has given up on achieving a lot of standards, like 'keeping a neat house constantly', and when she abandons them she settles into a quiet, angstless apathy about them; they become things that are just not for her, as out of reach as the sun. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since plenty of the things she's given up on are overwhelmingly difficult to achieve (no house is always clean), but some of them aren't, like 'a stable, lasting relationship'. Having powers doesn't have to translate into being empowered, per se, and while Cat is working on her issues in this area - going so far as to tentatively identify as a feminist (anti-racist, as a note, is something she picked up almost immediately after leaving her nearly all-white town, thanks to one of her roommates' refusal to take any well-meaning bullshit from her; she was never actively hateful, but she was ignorant, and knowing better than that now is important to her because it's the right thing to do) - she still has a long way to go and a lot of self-educating to do before she has a grip on all the factors that have shaped her this way. Knowing something and feeling it are also distinctly different things, and whatever she knows, whatever she's capable of, she still feels like a less-than: less than smart, less than valuable, less than pretty, less than talented, less than complete. It's not hard to make her feel uncomfortable about any of this, though if it's unintentionally she masks it and moves on for the sake of politeness, and if it's done on purpose she's just hurt and left at a loss. Cat doesn't really understand cruelty, at the end of the day, not on the gut level where she does most of her emotional navigation, because it's not something she has a lot of in her.
That, however, is mostly because Cat doesn't do her anger subtly. If she has a problem with someone, they usually hear about it quickly and in full, and if they don't it's because they have some kind of power advantage over her (in the past, this has mostly been customers, i.e. people with money) that makes it unwise. She is expressive in general and prone to sweeping gestures in everything, but when she's upset it all kicks into a new high gear. Her temper is difficult to provoke, because she is very accepting, but when it is she flares up instantly and lets people have it. This can go from getting mouthy with a person all the way up to breaking dishes just to signal that a conversation has started (when it doesn't go to even greater, more insane heights), and she means it all sincerely. This is not always, and in fact is rarely, the best solution to a problem, but Cat responds this way both because it comes naturally to her through temperament and upbringing and because the period in her life where she couldn't get angry without severe consequences left her determined to never mask that again. Being able to get angry and survive it is a luxury, just like being able to be kind is, and she clings to both with equal and uncontradictory fierceness. Cat doesn't hold grudges, since she forces every problem to a confrontation or simply lets it go, depending on how vital it is that she see it solved, but once she gets an idea in her head like 'I'm not going to be afraid anymore'...well. She sticks to it. She is too old and too scarred to not fight for the things she feels she has to have in her life to keep going, and all in all it's not a bad summary of Cat: she's flawed, and she knows it, but she's also a good person in many ways who deserves, like people arguably do by virtue of existing, to be able to achieve and sustain happiness, and she knows that too.
History:
Before I begin, I should warn you: Cat's life is basically country music inspired modern fantasy/horror, like some blenderized version of Dolly Parton and Stephen King, and as such I'm going to feel free to reference things like 'and then my truck ran off with my dog and my woman after it turned into a sewer clown'.
Beginning logically at the beginning: Cat was born in Brilliant, Alabama, a moderately sized and economically depressed town, and her name was almost immediately cut from 'Catherine' to 'Cat' for convenience. She was the third child her parents had, and the first girl--by the time her parents (Jeriah and Ruth) were done, the family consisted of Clay, Perry, Cat, Alma, Josiah, and Verity. Cat's father spent most of his time unemployed, and her mother was weighed down by children and housework, so money was usually less 'tight' than simply 'nonexistent'; it's possible to raise a family of this size below the poverty line, but it's never comfortable or easy. In spite of this, Cat chooses to remember her childhood and preteens as good years. Her family never made any pretensions above their class, to put it in...one particular way, and so the lack they faced could be dealt with through deflection, humor, and even a certain amount of pride. After all, compared to some people they were doing well: their parents were married, never of them drank to particular excess, no one in the family was hospitalized for 'home injuries', and everyone tended to get along as much as a bunch of exuberant, loud-talking people can. Cat's arguments with her siblings were frequent, brief, and easily forgotten, and she enjoyed the status of 'daddy's little girl' well after her sisters were born, which they fairly identified as favoritism. Jeriah liked Cat because she reminded him of himself, with her independence and constant questions, and she gravitated to him more than her mother, although their relationship wasn't cold by any means; just less close. One of the family traditions that actually carried on was concocted by Cat and Jeriah when Cat was four, a familial book club with the rules of 'whatever it is, we all read it, even if it requires help'.
On occasion, Jeriah would also knock his family around, and Clay followed his example when he was older. This never reached a point beyond one or two bruises, and it was accepted as normal household discipline, just as the periodic theft and drug dealing was accepted as part of normal earning options. This wasn't atypical of her community as a whole, either, so Cat never had much to compare her living situation to and find it wanting, which is in some ways a blessing and in others a lot less so, as wil become clear later on.
In her teens, Cat (unlike any teenager before her) became a bit of a handful, and acquired a reputation for being 'easy' at high school that wasn't strictly true and led her brothers to get into a lot of fights on her behalf. Cat wasn't a gifted student, but she did all right, and she and her other less popular/trashy friends managed to stay out of legal trouble for the most part--she even graduated from high school on time, although her name was announced with 'entering the workforce' which she was already a part of, as a waitress at the town's most popular restaurant, also known as 'the one not in the bar'. Cat moved in with a friend of hers and worked for a year, with no particular aims or ambitions, assuming life would present itself to her when she was ready.
What ended up presenting itself was Beauregard Allier, or Bo, who was twenty-nine when she started dating him as an eighteen-year-old; the age difference wasn't as drastic as it might have been elsewhere, but some of her friends and family still protested, especially her younger sister Alma, who claimed to just intuit something 'off' about him. Cat, however, thought Bo represented an opportunity she couldn't let slip by her, and when he proposed six months into their courtship she accepted immediately. They were married five months later, in the summer, and Cat Lachance became Cat Allier and moved in with her new husband.
Some people recommend cohabitation before marriage, but Cat had avoided it because the idea distressed her mother, and in meta aside none of what followed could, in any conceivable way, be Cat's responsibility, but she came to wish she'd lived with Bo before she agreed to get married. His deceased parents' house was outside of town, and since they only had one car Cat was immediately cut off from the world; Bo had asked her to stop working, and since he had a steady and well-paying job as the general store manager she had agreed, but it meant she couldn't go anywhere without a ride from him or someone else. Still, the first few months were good, and when Bo hit her for the first time she just assumed it meant the honeymoon blush had worn off and they'd be settling into what she thought was a normal routine. By the time things had escalated to the point that Cat had to admit to herself that none of this was normal, she avoided seeking out help out of a combination of factors--first, and most simply, she was afraid of what he'd do to her, but she also was buoyed up by pride. She'd married him in spite of several warnings not to, and she didn't want to prove people right about her and her bad decisionmaking, so she kept trying to make him happy.
When she walked herself into town in the middle of winter with a broken arm (among other injuries, visible and not) a year and a half into their marriage she had decided that she couldn't do it alone, so she contacted a lawyer from the hospital and started figuring out what her options were for divorce. Bo was arrested, then released, but she filed a restraining order against him and hid at the house of a family friend. Bo tried to contact her any way he could, and eventually had enough success to convince her to meet him in a public place to discuss legal proceedings. Cat went, and when he asked her to come back to the house with him so he could give her back her things as a sign of good faith she called her sister, left a message saying she'd be back, and went off with him. The next day her sister showed up with her boyfriend and a shotgun, assuming Bo had Done Something, and Cat answered the door and told her to go home. The ensuing fight involved Alma ordering Cat to get in the car at gunpoint, because...that's actually how we roll in farmtownland, but Cat continued to refuse and Bo stayed in the house, so Alma eventually had to give up and leave.
Cat spent another two months living with Bo, after all talk of charges or divorce was dropped, before she stabbed him to death in his sleep. The murder being premeditated, she'd set the bedroom up to be easy to clean, and made sure he was very, very drunk before she tried it; in one of those 'grisly, maybe unnecessary but relevant for characterwise details' I sprinkle through these things, she pretty much stabbed his face...off, the head and neck being the preferred target for many revenge-based murders. She quietly cleaned up, packed the body for travel, and spent the weekend disposing of it. When she came back, she called her sister and arranged for an alibi, and when Bo was finally missed on Wednesday Cat claimed she'd been at her sister's all weekend, and she went home immediately to anxiously await his return.
There was no reason the police could see to treat the case as a murder, so they investigated it as a missing person's case, discovered that it seemed Bo had packed for a trip, and left it at that. Local interest in solving the mystery of his whereabouts wasn't high, and when Cat left town six months later, leaving the house to her little sister and her little sister's boyfriend it almost died completely, becoming a piece of gossip to pass around when nothing else interesting was happening.
Cat chose to end up in Atlanta, Georgia, where the first thing she did was get a haircut that left her with a step above a buzzcut, an operation she followed by finding an apartment while she crashed with a friend who'd moved to the city earlier. Cat ended up finding her apartment through the job she got at a fairly upscale Italian restaurant as a waitress, moving in with two of her coworkers, which on good nights was like having two surrogate sisters to hang out with and on bad nights was like being three caged, feral ferrets, all dipped in BBQ sauce and hopped up on caffeine; such is the chemistry of three highstrung women in their early twenties. Cat worked steadily on rebuilding her self-esteem and sense of security, while praying nightly that no one ever decided to take a closer look at Bo's disappeance; as the weeks stretched into months, then into a year, and then into a whole year and a half, she finally started to believe she'd gotten away with it. She has begun going by her maiden name again, and few people knew she'd been married at all, a theme which would persist.
Things were going well, or at least better, until Cat happened to wait the table of a man who at first seemed charming and tipped well; when he returned for dinner three nights later she finnangled her way into dealing with him again for that reason, but was surprised (although not...much, it happened) when he asked for her phone number. She let him down as gently as she could, and assumed that was the end of it. She left work late to walk to her bus stop just down the street; he was waiting at the halfway point on that walk, and he persuaded her (though mental suggestion, this being where more of the paranormal enters the picture in her history) to get in his car and come back with him to his apartment. He kept her for three days, during which she was essentially a puppet he had sit in a corner while he prolonged his consumption of her energy as long as possible. He planned to drain her almost completely, then send her home, where she'd die one way or another, but in his last 'session' he took a little too much and she blacked out--he hadn't thought of letting her sleep, which took a severe toll on her resilience. Frustrated and dismayed by this turn of events already, his day only got worse when he turned around and was confronted by Cat, again, but this time detached from her physical body, extremely upset, and psychically starved.
Cat can only articulate what she did as 'devouring': she took back everything he'd taken from her, plus some, and left him whimpering and nearly catatonic while she spent a few panicked minutes trying to get back inside of her own body. There have been better introductions to the magical world of psychic powers, but Cat eventually succeeded and fled the scene. She still doesn't know the name of this man beyond 'Ray', which she now suspects was an alias in the first place.
When she got home her roommates were furious and relieved simultaneously, and then furious and confused as she insisted on packing and getting the hell out of the city without stopping to tie up loose ends--like her job, or the rent. She had almost no money set aside, no destination in mind, and no plan except escape, but she stuck to it and ended up running out of resources in Jackson, Tennessee. In the two weeks since the incident, she'd developed tremors, recurrent nose bleeds, migraines, and nausea, and she believed she was probably dying of some kind of exotic tumor or radiactivity, it was that bad. She would have been completely lost if not for the intervention of a precognitive, Susannah Daniels, great-grandmother and general badass, who wandered down to the bus stop to pick a very disoriented Cat up when she arrived.
Susannah assured Cat she wasn't going to die any time soon, as far as she knew, and that she'd be able to stay with Susannah in her home until she felt the need to move on--"in about six months, honey, don't you worry about it". She gave Cat a crash course in the little she herself knew about psychics and the specific subtype that had attacked Cat, along with at least a name for what she was capable of: astral projection. Cat settled in with her as her physical transition continued and her symptoms began to clear somewhat, while she tried to get a handle on her new abilities. Soon she figured out how to trigger the projection herself, through sleep, and then that while in her astral body she could do quite a few interesting things, including dip into the dreams of others. This accomplished, Cat announced to the surprise of no one that she was moving out, and going to figure out more of what was going on.
Cat had never been particularly troubled with questions about the nature of things, or why things were the way they were, but she decided that at this point that had only gotten her scared and in trouble, and she needed to take a new approach to things. She also felt that she had a responsibility to protect other people, if she could, from the predation of men and women like 'Ray', because no one else seemed to be doing it, so why not her? She was young, empowered, and motivated, and so she began a two-pronged mission: the first part involved figuring out more of just what the hell these powers were about, anyway, and the second part involved putting them to work. Susannah gave her the keys to her beater of a car and wished her luck, while Cat set off after the short list of names and possible aids that Susannah had given her.
So began Cat's questing years, spent moving from city to city and never settling down in one place longer than she had to in order to patch enough money together to keep going. On this journey she managed to start piecing together a few truths and commonalities, along with brushing up against a tenuous underworld of people like her--and people very much unlike her, in their mental dining habits. She had few direct encounters with psychic vampires, out of the necessity of knowing when to pick her battles and her own relative weakness compared to most of these people, but she charted what she perceived to be their weaknesses, and intervened to protect their victims as subtly as she could. During this time she also went through a few relationships, none of which lasted and all of which ended in some semi-hilarious fashion, for the purposes of humorous anecdote later.
At the time of stealing her from her world, Cat is working at a restaurant in Houston, Texas, called Kitty's, where the lights are dim and the uniform involves a pair of cat ears. Cat goes by Candy, there, because otherwise oh god, the puns, they would consume the sun.
Arrival Post (Third Person):
"I know, I know, in one damn minute, now would you just for the love of baby Jesus let me--" That is a soft, breathy voice with an Appalachian accent that's marked, although (mostly, probably) perfectly comprehensible. The voice is attached to a tall woman made even taller by a pair of black pumps, wearing hose, a black pencil skirt, and a black blouse perhaps a size too tight around the chest and certainly unbuttoned to a fascinating degree. She's also wearing fuzzy cat ears.
"--oh, now, this is not where I was gonna be." Cat sighs heavily, reaching up to pull her ridiculous ears off before she lights the cigarette in her hand and, for lack of pockets, tucks her lighter down the front of her shirt before doing up a few of those buttons.
"I have lost my damn mind, I swear," she mutters, taking a deep drag off her cigarette, and her apparently casual attitude barely hides her nervousness and shock; it's just that inexplicable things happen to her all the time, only to end up explained shortly after one way or another, and if she kept getting worked up every single time she'd give herself a heart attack. "All right. I hope I ain't been kidnapped, that'd ruin my whole day--not that it's not already a mess, but there you go, that's life - Jesus, girl, are you talking to yourself? Maybe you are crazy."
She picks up the tablet, since it's the one thing in this room besides the door she can really do anything with, and starts fiddling with it. Because what else is there to do?
"If this is a sign I need to take a vacation I'm moving to Florida, soon as I get back, you mark my damn words." Cat Lachance, Taxon, smoking like a champion and dangling half of a bad Halloween costume from one hand.
Additional Third Person Sample:
"You ready to wake up yet?"
The limit of dreams is what the dreamer perceives, which makes them sound infinite, and actually makes them sharply finite. A human mind can't hold an entire universe inside, it can barely hold a single room together, and Cat watches the scenery fracture and vanish only to return as soon as it's remembered. They're in a place that's what a forest should be in the ugliest fairy tales. Every tree is a silent, grey accusation, telling nothing; every leaf rustles noiselessly against itself.
"No," the younger woman says, sitting next to a brook as grey as the trees are, composed of the same silky, unreal material.
Cat sits down next to her, dipping her hand in water that breaks like paper, crackling and stiff, against her fingers. This place (this mind) gives her shivers all up and down the spine that isn't real, but she's in here, and she's going to do what she can. She said she would.
"Sandy," she says, pulling her hand free to turn and touch the other woman's thin shoulder, which cuts into her palm with standoffishness. "You can't stay in here, you know that. This is no place for a person to be. You didn't make it that way, so why don't you just come on out with me?"
Sandy tucks her knees up to her chest, and Cat shifts behind her, combing her fingers through her dark grey and gently drifting hair before she begins braiding it.
"Once upon a time..."