Name: Quinn
Age: 28
Preferred Contact: Discord!
Are you okay with interacting with an AU/CRAU/otherwise of your character? they're OCs...

Canon: Original
Character: Jim and Tonika Doe
Variation: Original Canon
About: Ah, yes. The modern Earth. Identical in time and space to our own, what more is there to say?

Aside from several lineages of telekinetic humans spanning back all the way to the dawn of history.

No one knows much about the origins of these powers— all the scientific research has come to offer is “how it works” rather than “why it’s here”. Were it not for the unique ways that inheritance worked, one could easily posit a theory that there was just something different in the wiring that had evaded most humans. Instead, the passage of these powers can only be described as supernatural— as there is only ever one who utilizes their bloodlines’ gift at once in the entire world. The gift is passed upon death— from the user to their youngest descendent. It’s possible to pass it to a child, a grandchild, a great-grandchild, so on. If the user dies childless, so does that bloodline. The power does not ‘leap back’ to the next eligible contender— it’s gone for good.

At one point, they were numerous, and not at all concentrated in one area of the world. The gift spread into the furthest reaches of human society, and while some would inevitably lost to the pages of time, others would be enveloped in the organization known as SCLERA.

‘SCLERA’ was formed in its infancy in the 1740’s by a group of likeminded individuals, very literally. Upon becoming aware they had gifts for telemancy that allowed them to manipulate others in deeply unique, mental ways, so began the era of “Well alright, how do we use this to gain power and protect ourselves, as opposed to being burned as witches”?

With powers like ‘being able to manipulate object permanence in grown adults, therefore allowing oneself to become technically invisible’ and being ‘able to instigate chemicals in the brain that control emotions through the warbling of one’s vocal chords, aka ‘singing’’, there was very little even a small bunch of them couldn’t pull off. Lords would find their treasuries ransacked in broad daylight with no memory or understanding to how it could have happened, their guards talking only about a very ‘blissful, distracted’ feeling, even though they were very sure no one opened the door or ever went near it.

Eventually, these likeminded people found more, and more— and so, research began as to why there were ever any likeminded people to begin with. Stories of how it was a family’s curse or gift eventually led them to understand its hereditary nature, and so, as they expanded their reach all over the world, gathering people from all corners of it who showed the signs, the money piled up, the influence doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled until it was a hidden superpower behind superpowers— a massive, secretive organization that posed as anything and everything. To the underworld, they were a mafia. To society, they were a research facility that would license cheaper drugs than their competitors as a cover-up.

Wanting something more official to title themselves, they gradually shifted from calling themselves likeminded to calling their kind Sanguine, as their powers changed hands via blood.

Of course, with the changing of hands, with the traitors, with those prone to listening to their conscience against the company’s greater good, SCLERA was eventually no longer just superhuman, but a mixture of both human and Sanguine, mutually benefitting each other. At the time of Tonika’s birth, there were only 52 known superhumans the organization was aware of. And also, at the time of her birth, most of them were under control by the organization, with a few managing to escape their reach against very desperate odds. (Hiding your location from a person who can bounce from brain to brain of bystanders to tap for information? Makes it hard to hide for very long.)

At that time, SCLERA had taken up a rather unethical hobby— they would breed the Sanguine, in the form of taking the infant and killing the parent, thus forcing the passage of power down manually, and raising them in the doctrine of the organization. They would be carefully selected by their powers for their future positions, to cement them as super-soldiers with unfailing loyalty and unbeatable odds. Several Sanguine within the program were also the product of genetic manipulation– you know, to make super soldiers even more super.

One such experiment was a man with a bar-code name who went by ‘Jim’. Inheritor of the power nicknamed the Sway, he had received the innate gift of manipulation by singing, able to trip wires in someone’s brain to make them feel whatever he needed them to— compliance, aggression, surrender— to make his assassination jobs easier. Alongside him, an outsider to the organization from a family who’d kept their heritage a secret, Grenadine had ended up joining SCLERA voluntarily. Grenadine’s power was the Sync, the ability to clairvoyantly forsee the best possible outcome for a proposed scenario, heavily weighted on risk versus reward. She would know when and where to place an upturned stone in an intersection to cause a ten-car collision, so to speak.

Anyway, they had a kid.

— So yes, the two had a daughter, hidden away in rural Montana, in the care of someone Grenadine had trusted as long as she was alive. After her death, though, all bets were off.

Grenadine had carefully chosen a small town clinic doctor to be her host for several months into her pregnancy. She’d planned it well– by leaving only when she was starting to show, Jim wouldn’t suspect her of being gone the whole nine months. By manipulating her superiors into thinking she would be out on a crucial job, she’d have the privacy she needed. She had her child in relative seclusion, stayed with her for only a week after, then marched back home as if nothing had ever gone wrong. Grenadine was well aware of SCLERA’s fondness of child soldiers, and if she could just narrowly avoid that for her own daughter, everything would be fine.

The doctor, who was paid with a handsome bribe biannually, was supposed to take care of and raise Tonika as his own relative, to treat her with care until the day Grenadine hinted she would be coming back for her. Those first four years for Tonika were fine– he was never super adoring, but he wasn’t deliberately mean, either. He’d hired maids for when he didn’t have the time or energy, and Tonika had gotten most of her affection from them.

Eventually the checks stopped coming. Tonika, at four years old, had gone from a life of comfortable normalcy split between kind nurses who’d acted in place of a mother into a colder home where it was just her and her father and his accumulated wealth— his fancy home and rich surroundings and all of his stark neglect. Her room had gone from reasonably normal looking to sparse as she outgrew her toys, with a tube television and whatever books she could get her hands on to keep her company.

The doctor had already been registered as her guardian as an uncle, so it wasn’t as if he could dump a four year old out on the curb lest he face criminal neglect charges. He was tense until it became clear Grenadine was truly unreachable, then he slowly started taking turns for the worst. Tonika was no longer a job, but a burden, and he wouldn’t bother hiding it. The trauma wasn’t one big event as opposed to the constance of several little ones– neglecting her to the point of her learning to take care of her own problems, to avoid making him angrier. Telling her lies to quiet her, and treating them as absolute truth where he’d punish her for doubting him. Accidents around the house were her fault, regardless of the culprit, and any time she pointed out that it was something he forgot, or he misstepped on– was met with even harsher punishments and intimidation.

Tonika grew up fraught with anxiety, because she was constantly on alert. Though he never did much more physically than slap her cheek or grab her upper arm so hard her fingers would start to numb, she was still deathly terrified of him, and escaped any way she could. Fond of the forest near their house, she’d frequently wander in to continue her hobby of mapping the trails by hand as an excuse to stay out of the house. One day, when she was ten, she was accidentally shot in the eye by a group of young hunters who had mistaken her movement for that of a deer’s.

Fearful that they’d go to jail and that they’d killed her, the party abandoned her at the spot (after a bit of a gruesome detail to cover up their involvement), leaving her to wake up hours later, caked in blood and in a lot of pain. It was by her own map that she found her way back home, knocked on the door of the nearest house, and waited for an ambulance. Though her memory of the entire thing is fuzzy, it resulted in PTSD. From that point on, she had difficulty dealing with loud bangs and letting people get too close to her face. She refused a glass replacement and took to covering her eye socket with a scarf and a bit of elastic tied at the ends, out of a sensitivity to letting anyone see it again.

The next four years of her life continued in much of the same. She’d known a lot of neighbors who prevented her from becoming completely bitter from her treatment. In particular, a Russian expatriate had noticed her injury after she’d come home from the hospital, and gently asked her to explain. Offering his garage to her, he became her teacher in all things about guns in hopes of giving her some sense of safety, reassurance, and closure in regards to her experience. To his credit, his efforts were not in vain and Tonika started to grow past it, though she was still at a complete loss on what to do about her home life.

Eventually, Jim would find a letter in an old jacket of Grenadine’s, fourteen years later from when he’d last seen her wearing it. He’d use the combination on the note to find a bank vault with some old photos and an address in Montana.

By then, Jim had become a more rounded adult, subdued and secure, understanding of his position in SCLERA as opposed to being their unwitting pawn. Of course, no one can drop out of a place like SCLERA easily, and despite the anti-brainwashing intense therapy Grenadine set him up with, he wasn’t completely fixed by it. He was still complacent to be their hitman, he just no longer took pride or enthusiasm in the work, understanding his deal was ‘do it, or be scrapped for his next of kin’. So when he found out he had a next of kin already– well, one might understand his shock. That shock wasn’t much in comparison to the gut-wrench of seeing the state of her. An eyepatch and bruises on her upper arm, her completely shrinking personality as her foster parent asked if Grenadine had set anything aside for him to be paid for his efforts.

Jim took him for a walk in a local graveyard, found a hole dug for a next-day burial, and put the doctor in with a bullet. That was the end of that.

And the beginning of him telling her to pack her things for the plane ride back to Michigan. To be fair, she had always dreamed of something like this happening in a very childish way– her birth parents would come get her, and they’d protect her, and she’d be happy… but Jim was understandably a bit intimidating, by the size of him alone. While he was more well-rounded, he lacked some subtle graces, and when he decided to tell Tonika the truth about himself, that he was an international-class assassin for a conspiracy-grade corporation, she handled it less than gracefully. First by running away as Jim patiently waited by his car for her to come back, second by isolating herself in the room he gave her in his spacious apartment, imprisoning herself as Jim gently pressed her for information and gave all the reassurance he could that she would be kept a secret from his employers

But it got better. Tonika got over her fear of him with time and acclimation. With Jim’s promise of her uninvolvement, he began giving her freedoms she’d never had or thought possible or that she was particularly deserving of. Jim, meanwhile, was carrying both fascination and deep guilt for the fact that he had a daughter, and the idea that she spent all that time alone when he could have rescued her. Tonika was quick to become attached, feeling like this was the first time she’d ever felt safe in the real way in her entire life. Jim, while never anticipating raising his own child, was warm and patient with her.

With that in mind, he took his time before breaking the news that in addition to her having a still-living father, she also had a gift from her mother. One she’d never known she had the ability to tap into since she was four, on the day of her mother’s death. He told her she was a Sanguine, something more terrifying than a wizard or a chosen one, and that she had one of the most dangerous powers of all, the very last gift from a departed mother she never knew. She had the power of ultimate manipulation, the Sync— a power she immediately grew fearful of thanks to the man she’d grown up with.

And that’s where we are, now.