So I guess this is like the character sheet page? I'll slap mine up here then.
Username: Spamtek... yeah.
Email/Contact Information: [email protected]; AIM - Antifinger
Name: Anica "Swish" Tusser
Race: Homo Sapiens Sapiens - Female Human from a trivially alternate earth
Age: 25
Description: Anica stands about 5'7", with a relatively pale, indeterminately germanic complexion. Her hair is a very dark brown, appreciably curly and usually kept free-flowing a little lower than shoulder length, and she has color-matching amber-almond eyes. Her face, and frame in general, lies on the heavy side of normal - she's stocky enough to not get blown away by the breeze, about 150 lbs, but not chunky by a long shot. Personally, she'd call herself "well-rounded." Joke about it and your black eye will figure out pretty fast that it's not fat she's packing on those arms of hers.
Anica arrived at AA by complete accident, and before showing up here she lived a normal, modern earthling-style life - or as normal as her life could be given her unique talents. Right now she isn't wearing anything stupendous: a baby-blue sweater, dark gray-brown cargo pants, black sneakers, and an extremely well-worn black leather jacket that she's had for years and years. She never bought into the whole jewelry thing, so she goes unadorned.
She has a distinguishing scar on her left shoulder, a result of her falling from a tree when she was seven years old and landing upside-down on an incoveniently placed rock. It doesn't give her magical powers, or a thirst for vengeance against her father's murderer or anything cool like that - it just, you know, happened.
Personality: Anica is unsure. Her baseline personality typically runs towards hesitancy and skepticism, and while she has (had) friends and does (did) typical friend things with them, she is far from an extrovert in any way. She is amicable and congenial to those she knows and trusts, and sports a no-nonsense attitude towards most of the rest of the world - plain answers, simple conversations, honest explanations. If left to her own devices she will think, consider, and vacillate between decisions, rarely coming to a solid conclusion about something unless forced to by time or circumstances. She is apt to retreat from confusion and conflict, thinking to leave them to more decisive, more capable people.
But sometimes Anica finds herself pushed into situations she can't get herself out of, needing to become an active participant in order to get out of her own messes: in these instances, she tends to find that she has more ability than she wants to let on. Cornered into acting, she adopts a mantle of what she herself once called "bewildered, exasperated certainty": She doesn't know what she does, or why she does it, but something deeper than her conscious self pushes her through her fear and turns her hand to action, usually action she would never have even though to do under normal circumstances. Simply put, when put under stress Anica becomes somebody else: unthinkingly and aggressively sure, calm in the face of even the most daunting adversity, acting with a resolve beyond her means to understand. (Reluctant Hero complex, anyone?)
And then she gets over it and wonders what that was all about. She spends her normal hours trying to forget about it and instead being the quiet, unassuming creature she always means to be.
Anica likes cats, watching bad soap operas, stuffed animals, and doing girly things with her friends... but also harbors a secret passion for computer games and karate (she's a purple belt! She took the initiative after a creepy experience with an ex-boyfriend in her late teens). She is also, inexplicably, a fairly accomplished boy scout, for reasons involving parental coersion and, you know, inertia.
Abilities: The origin of Anica's ability are covered below, in her biography. The nature of it, here:
Anica is gifted with a form of planes-travelling she fancifully refers to as Schismancy, or casually just as branching and collapsing, or if she's joking around, just gardening (This universe had Borges too! how cool is that?). Current scientific theory in quantum mechanics suggests (or at least it damn well does for the purposes of this character bio) that whenever one comes to a crossroads between several actions, such as a coin flip or a decision to cross the street, that both or all outcomes actually occur, each one branching away from the potential of the moment into its own parallel universe. These parallel universes split away from each other uncountable times every second, on infinite amounts of ever-diversifying planes in a complete fractal nightmare.
When a normal person comes to a crossroad (as he does every moment of his life), he gets copied into every branching universe, but his consciousness stays anchored to only one of them - which isn't to say that there aren't conscious versions of him in those new universes, but that they too have no awareness of their alternate, branching selves. We feel as if we are living linear lives, yet in fact we are simply blind to the myriad amounts of undone actions that manifest themselves in parallel planes all the time, all around us.
When Anica comes to a crossroads involving her own decisions, she can choose to take two roads at once (or more, theoretically) in order to find the most advantageous route to go down. She splits her conscious awareness among two or more different bodies as they each perform different outcomes of a single choice, and then she crushes her consciousness back into one of those bodies in one of those universes.
For instance, say someone swings a sword at Anica, and she happens to be holding a shield. She's not certain where the blow will land - so she branches herself down two different resolutions to her conundrum: in one universe she blocks high, in another, low. The high block works, but the low block doesn't, and she gets a slight cut in that universe. From the two different universes, she then collapses back into one body, choosing the one in the universe where she didn't get cut.
Branching is incredibly taxing on Anica's mind. How long she can hold herselves apart in different universes, and how many of herselves she can hold apart, all depend on how taxing, distracting, confusing, etc. the situation she's branching through is, as well as her mental clarity at the time she does it. If something traumatizing or shocking happens to her (like sudden pain) in one universe before she can anticipate it and collapse out of that plane (or into, as the case may be), it can destabilize her attentions, potentially collapsing her down into or out of that universe against her will. If Anica isn't concentrating very well, she can also accidentally branch down paths she didn't mean to take, which can be a problem if she doesn't collapse out of them before something inexplicable happens to her there. Since literally infinite amounts of possible (however improbable) outcomes arise out of each choice of hers, she can find herself branching down absolutely inexplicable courses of actions, like fudging a branch down which she flips a light switch, and finding herself hovering three feet off the ground instead, or shooting fireballs out of her eyes. This doesn't mean that she can branch herself down inexplicable pathways all the time to give herself superpowers, though: if she can't conceive of how to do the action under normal circumstances, then she can't consciously branch herself down that path. Lack of concentration will result in personally devastating and inescapable consequences much much more often than consequences that end up favoring Anica's survival (simply because there are many more states of the universe that don't support human life than there are that do).
Anica has had the ability to branch for almost eight years now, but for much of that time she has tried to forget that she has the ability. When she was younger and more reckless she put herself into harm's way several times using it, and usually managed to just barely escape it using the same talent. She's only ever used it in the context of combat a few rare times at karate classes, where the dizzying kaleidescopy of fighting in dozens of different bodies in different configurations and successions left her completely frazzled. She may soon have to learn how to better handle herself in the heat of the fight, though.
Equipment: Anica has little on her person. She has her clothes, her wallet, car keys, and a swiss army knife, none of which offer her any appreciable amount of utility in a combat setting. She is decently proficient with a variety of weapons thanks to her martial arts/boy scout background, any of which she could certainly stock up on in the Arena's facilities. She has little to defend herself with but intuition, the luck of being in fairly good shape, and her branches.
Biography: Anica grew up in the northern plains of Minnesota, on a version of earth whose physical laws are much more malleable, where magic, psionics, and other paranormal phenomena occur often enough for most people to accept that they exist, but not to the point where they're commonplace or commoditized, and definitely not predictable. She spent her formative years in a cold little 'burb called Fairham, living in an upper-middle-class household with a spacious yard and good old authentic Minnesota farmland all around. She had a mother, Donna Tusser-Huyman, a father, Michael Tusser, and a brother younger by two years, Christopher Tusser. The family was fairly typical, supportive and loving, with her father doing boring but profitable government work and her mother a stay-at-homer.
She had her clique of friends, did well in school, and aspired to be a veterinary practician from an early age (she likes kitties, after all). She had a particularly strong relationship with her brother, and the two rarely did anything that the other wasn't at least invited to, several times, incessantly. Chris himself was a "cool nerd," one of those versatile kids who managed to be both assertive and extroverted while busying himself with things like books and role-playing games, and had a dopey sense of humor that Anica could always rely on to put her in a good mood (he was a good foil to her impersonal quietness). Life was stable, and good, and altogether a fine thing to be living, despite the occasional depressive moment (breakups, dead pets, the usual).
When Anica was age 18, her brother vanished. Officially the police investigation turned up no clues, but evidence was left: Anica discovered a cryptic note under her pillow the day he went missing. The message was short and confusing:
Originally posted by note
Anny, I don't get it either, but I have to go. They need what I have. You've got it too, and they'll come calling for you eventually... I know they will, and we can meet again when it's your time up, that's what they said, I trust them. Just be safe until-
I have to go now. I'm sorry.
Anica didn't have to wonder what her brother meant by "it" for long, either. Just weeks after his disappearance she began experiencing her first, inadvertent schisms - just tiny breaks in existence, little flashes of alternate reality that stopped her in her tracks and looking at a situation in disbelief, because hadn't she just seen something different than that happen? Years went by, and she pined for her brother to return (he never did) while slowly learning how to use her freaky new ability. It occurred to her, although she had no evidence for it, that using her craft might somehow bring her brother back to her - or at least bring the "they" he mentioned to her sooner rather than later. In college, she got a little too carried away practicing her schismancy and getting herself into sticky situations, and her grades slipped enough that she failed the prerequisite tests needed if she ever wanted to practice veterinary medicine. That opportunity lost to her, Anica became turned off to her power, disgusted at what it had made her forget about her life - what she actually could have obtained, rather than what she just wanted to imagine she could obtain (finding her brother, become a superwoman, etc).
(It was here, before she got disgusted with her power, she got her nickname, "Swish" - one of the few friends she ever dared to explain her power to, and a fellow martial artist, gave her the name after going a round against her while she schismed. "Jesus christ, Anica, you were just - you... just, like, swish! and I was down on the mat! That's incredible!")
She stayed in college just long enough to finish a throwaway bachelor's degree and got enlisted into a corporage schlock job: her life was meager, but she had friends and enough money to afford necessities and a few extravagances, so she was happy enough. She tried to forget about her ability, which she considered an annoyance and a sordid reminder now, although her diligence with it in her college years had worked it into her instincts to a certain degree; for instance, if she tripped on the sidewalk she would find herself branching without even thinking about it, sorting through alternate realities to find solid footing again.
It was during one of these involuntary branches that Anica hit a snafu, and completely lost herself to reality as she knew it. Walking down a flight of stairs in her shared townhome in the dark, late, late into the hours of the morning, Anica misjudged a step, and began falling out of control. She branched, and branched, and felt herself twisting through darkness and knew that no alternate reality she could switch to would give her control over this situation, and braced herself breathlessly for impact... but nothing ever came. She found herself floating in darkness, and knew something was wrong.
Seconds later, the Arcane Arena torqued into her viewing angle. A metal ice-cream cone. And she was floating, in every dimension she could think to schism to, right for it.
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