Alys was born in the Greater Denver Metropolis Allied Industries (GDM-AI) Corporate Sector in 2009 to a mid level manager at Fairline Engineering and a house husband. She lived a moderately normal corp-kid life, with a solid (if limited) corporate education and a generally happy childhood in a comfortable and safe corporate community.
Alys was a typical kid, brighter than most but otherwise not really spectacular. She did well in scholastics and athletics and was popular with other kids, but she didnt excel in any of those categories. She was comfortably above average at everything and slated for a life of comfortably above average accomplishment, likely in a cubicle and eventually small office job at one of the GDM-AI companies.
When she was 15 though she discovered her meta abilities by accident when she was almost run over by a car while crossing a suburban road one night after sneaking out to go join some friends at a summer party her parents had forbidden her to attend. Crossing a poorly lit segment of the road near a bend in the road, she was startled when a late night driver barreled around the corner at high speed. She should have been mowed down and crushed by the low-flying sports car but she reflexively shifted into shadowform and the vehicle passed right through her.
Alys fled the scene, moving much faster than she could in her physical form, flowing seemingly by will alone in a semi-weightless state, and eventually found herself in a copse of trees. Once she had her initial panic under control, Alys turned back to her normal form, and she shakily made her way back home and snuck back in. Over the following few weeks Alys was in a state of denial, until she almost had herself convinced that it was all a dream. She also began to feel tired and listless and suffer headaches through the day, which she attributed to not being able to sleep well at night.
But then it happened again when she slipped in the tub and transformed before she could hit the ground. Instead she fell straight through the floor and into the basement before she could get control of herself and brake her fall, ending up floating near weightlessly above the basement floor. After that Alys had to face facts and began to experiment with her unexpected abilities in the days to come. Over the next few months she was able to learn to control her abilities and shift at will, but her nocturnal tendencies also became more pronounced and her school work suffered. She started having attendence problems and was in a poor state even when she made it to school. She also became more alienated from her former friends as she spent more and more time alone to practice her abilities, and was increasingly surly and "weird".
Her parents became very concerned for her and assuming she was into drugs or something and eventually put her into counseling after their best efforts to return her to her previous state failed. Suburban life became more and more troubled for Alys, and finally at age 17 she couldn't take it anymore and ran away from home, seeking a life of her own in the big city.
Needing money to live off of Alys naturally began using her abilities to steal, and though she was clumsy at first her meta ability allowed her a tolerance for error that most would be thieves don't get. Eventually she got pretty good at it, and started to develop the idea that she could make a good living as a professional Breaker. The Runner scene in the Greater Denver Metropolitan (GDM) area was really booming and word on the street was that there was a shortage of good Breakers in the area -- out of town talent was brought in for a lot of jobs due to the local shortage.
Alys's intro into the biz was pretty amateurish, but again her natural ability made up for it and after turning some ill-advised contracts that probably would have gotten a normal would-be Breaker fragged she started to get wise. Her natural intelligence allowed her to get up to speed before she dug too deep of a hole for herself, but she didn't survive her apprenticeship completely unscathed; one of her Runs was against a Bio-Corps facility and she was picked up on some unusual surveillance gear while in shadowform, and her obvious meta state peaked some eyebrows. There are some Bio-Corps scientists that would very much like to "study" her. Fortunately she wasn't identified, but if Bio-Corps ever discovers that she is one and the same person as the strangely amorphous meta they detected she could find herself in someone's sights. She is unaware of the interest as of yet.
Over the last few years Alys has begun to develop a rep for herself, but was getting pretty hot in GDM and recently moved, probably temporarily, to northern SanSan. The Breaker scene is highly comptetitive there, and Alys is determined to prove that a Denver girl can hold her own in the field. However in GDM she had developed a reputation as a loner that doesn't work well within a team environment, and its likely to follow her to SanSan.
Alys doen't show off or talk about her ability, though its not exactly a secret among those in the know either. She figures the less people that know about the specifics of her gifts the better and thus she takes some pains to not be observed shifting from one form to the other. This is part of the reason she developed a rep as not being a team player -- she prefers to limit exposing her abilities to others and would deviate from mission plans to prevent teammates from observing her in shadowform whenever possible, and would outright refuse to take part in any plan that required her to be in normal form for any part of it. She also resisted doing anything during the day, which isnt that big of a deal since most Runs are nighttime affairs, but she didnt even like to show up for team meetings and planning sessions during the day. Since she was also loathe to explain herself, she often came off as a diva. |
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