Cheyell Arthur

Individual

Character's full name: Cheyell Elisa Arthur
Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Kitty (and she's really open to a new one)
Gender: Female
Age: 21
Date of Birth: 06/31/1990
Nationality/ Ethnicity: Canadian
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Nanaimo, BC, Canada

Appearance

Hair colour and style: Very straight and very black; normally left as long as possible with cheekbone-length bangs (not parted)
Eyes: Dark amber
Height: 5'4"
Build: Moderate; somewhat broad shoulders, not particularly voluptuous.
Visible mutation:

• Fairly flat nose somewhere between feline and serpentine
  
• Thick, rounded ears
  
• Eye colour
  
• Somewhat lengthened eyeteeth (upper and lower)
  
• Two strips of black flecks along nose bridge
  
• Black at tear ducts
  
• Black leopard spots along spine from hairline to hips.

Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: None, but her spots may be perceived as tattoos.
Other features: Light- and fleet-footed, with trained endurance from regular running. Oh, and she wears rather heavy makeup to hide her spots and change the apparent shape of her nose if she wants to really pass as human. Also: she is moderately nearsighted but refuses to wear glasses. Personal preference.

Everyday clothing style: She's not picky. There's an old black leather jacket she's fond of, and if there are really no requirements she'll probably be lounging around in an old T-shirt and soft jeans.
Uniform: Plain grey button-up top and slacks (and no gun >.>), but hoping for something else… which has a gun… and a shiny badge…
Sleepwear: It has to be soft and fuzzy and warm. It does not have to actually be officially designated as clothing.
Miscellaneous clothing: When she wants to get along with people, she wears a bell on a collar. It helps people know when she's behind them.

Character

Personality: Cheyell is rather energetic and outgoing, though not hyper. She tends to have stubbornness issues and has difficulty giving up on something, including opinions. She also loves to be the centre of attention (especially worshipful attention) and is happy to sidle up to someone to get it. She isn't romantic in the least, but friendly and sociable are accurate enough. She is dedicated to her causes, especially that of making the world safer (even if she has yet to really experience some of the special danger for mutants, being from a neighbourhood with worse things to worry about), and people who get in her way do run the risk of being thoroughly trampled. She does hold grudges, and there are two ways to get to the top. The first is to be a willful criminal. The second is to scare her out of her skin without a really good reason. A really, really good reason.

Hobbies/ Interests: Cops, guns, and snakes. What else does a girl need? Well, okay. She also enjoys running, especially in wooded areas.
Job or part time job and description: She tries to pick up work with the NYPD to get her foot in the door, but it's not going well. Otherwise, she works part-time for Paladin Security wandering empty office buildings at night. Lots of office buildings. And every floor. And usually every room.
Fears/ phobias/ concerns: Despises fish. With a passion. Dangle a fish in front of her and you'll probably get punched or shot at, depending on her mood and the size of the fish.
Special talents: She's a decent shot with a handgun considering her distance vision, and her reloading time is downright uncanny. She talks to snakes (even if they don't understand her and don't listen) and apparently is never bitten by them, even bad-tempered poisonous ones. Not that she spends that much time around them, but still.

Morality

Good/ bad/ neutral/ other: Pretty good. She wants to be a cop and save the world, after all.

Mutations

Mutation description: Questing Beast: Cheyell is able to transform into a creature that was once known only as the questing beast. With the head and neck of a snake, body of a leopard, forelimbs of a deer, and hind end of a lion, she is quick and agile in this form. It takes approximately half a minute at least to transform completely, and the rate is dependent upon her concentration. The one exception is if she is sufficiently startled; she may be startled out of her skin, so to speak. In this case, a severe shock drives her to bolt even in human form, and by the time her first step lands she has already shifted. It is not intentional in the slightest. As her bestial form is largely a natural side of her, there are not significant limits on how long she stays in it. However, digestion is not its strong point, and the structure of the head and neck severely limit what she can eat - and what she can eat she has no desire to try. Her ability to rehydrate is also limited, so the length of time she remains in the form is largely constrained by bodily needs rather than bodily strain. She can remain in the form longer if she is well-fed (but not stuffed) and hydrated.

The reptilian section of her body is similar in appearance to a blue coral snake, with a tangerine orange head fading along the sides to blue-white with black along her back and throat. Her eyes are relatively large and round, and generally appear to be all pupil as the irises are very near in colour to the surrounding scales. Her nostrils are small but her heat-sensing pits are quite pronounced.

Her fangs can indeed inject venom, though not in sufficient quantity or concentration to do more than slow or perhaps temporarily debilitate something of a human's size. The exact length of effect depends on the victim's metabolism and tolerance; previous exposure reduces susceptibility. On average, a new victim of medium size and metabolism will first experience tingling and moderate numbness around the injection site, which gradually (two to five minutes) spreads along the limb. It then begins to fade after about ten minutes and is completely gone in fifteen. Stiff joints and reduced reaction times are common symptoms. A single bite to, say, a hand will only inject enough venom to cause noticeable symptoms to the upper arm or occasionally shoulder. Bites to the torso or head generally have very little effect - local numbness is about as far as it will go. Under normal conditions, medical attention is not required, or even particularly helpful.

As blue-white and black scales fade into yellow and black fur, Cheyell's leopard section makes its first appearance. Her body is long and low-slung, and other than the difference in limbs, it only differs from that of a true leopard by the blue-white chest (formed by the joining of the two bright bands along either side of her neck), which fades to cream after the rib cage. The build of her torso provides her with a very strong heart and large lungs, which in turn provide her with considerable endurance.

Cheyell's forelimbs, from shoulder down, are structurally that of a deer but are patterned as a leopard's. Her hooves do decrease her stealth on hard surfaces, particularly manmade ones, but do not detract significantly from her overall agility. The hooves are made of black nail.

Her hindquarters are more in line with her body, being similar in design to those of a lion. They are stocky and powerful, and she does have a powerful lunge; no deer can leap as far as she, though her landing is far from as lethal as a lion's. The leopard pelt does not extend here as it does across her forelimbs; instead, the yellow fades slightly to cream and the spots are entirely absent. The heavy, retractable claws on each digit are black, much like the hooves of her forefeet. Her tail is also largely leonine, with a thick black tuft after a mildly extended length.

Strengths: How about strength? Cheyell's beast form is fast, agile, and powerful, though it is not built for real fighting. There isn't much that can outrun her for speed or distance, or outjump her, and what can probably can't dodge her strike.

• Speed: Standard running speed is a bit higher than that of a sprinting mule deer(~37 mph/60 km/h). Bolting speed peaks at slightly below cheetah sprinting speed (~65 mph/105 km/h)
  
• Endurance: Maximum sprinting distance over level terrain is approximately five kilometres. Maximum trotting distance over level terrain is approximately twenty five kilometres without rehydration and snacking, above fifty with reasonable breaks. Maximum walking distance is similar to trotting distance.
  
• Jump (length): At peak sprint on level ground, eight to twelve metres. At trot, five to six metres. From standing, four and a half to five metres.
  
• Jump (height): Negligible if travelling at speed. At walk, one metre. From standing, three and a half to four metres. Note: hooves are not ideal for hauling oneself over an edge. Cliffs and walls at the maximum height are not scalable without aid.

She is able to sense heat, and her proficiency at tasting the air allows her to identify most nearby objects and creatures. Under normal atmospheric conditions (negligible wind) she can identify presence up to about twelve metres away (about ten behind her head's orientation) and can detect more specific details, such as relative epidermal temperatures, at five metres. One and a half metres allows her to pick out subtle details like small items in pockets with different temperatures (generally those that have not been in the pocket for long, or have been held in a bare hand recently).

Her scales are strong enough to deflect some sharp-edge strikes, though not sheer force, and her pelt is thick enough to protect her well also. Neither are going to stay intact against a human with a knife, but brambles and broken glass lacking in momentum aren't going to bother her. The claws on her hind legs are quite sharp and can be used to potentially devastating effect… should she get into a position to use them. She's somewhat flexible, but no contortionist. She is also moderately stealthy, being light-footed and agile, and can remain motionless for extended periods of time. The hard part is keeping her from getting bored.

Weaknesses: Well, she certainly stands out in her bestial form, and people seem to always want to hunt it. Her venom is not potent, and it is difficult for her to get her rear claws into action. Her vision is poor for everything except movement past two metres or so, and even movement more than ten metres or so becomes difficult to distinguish. The fight-or-flight instinct is also considerably heightened in this form; she becomes very quick to bolt and keep running. It is generally accepted that she is difficult to catch once set into motion. Due to the structure of her mouth, she gains a considerable lisp when she retains enough presence of mind to speak at all; distraction during shifting (or startle-shifting) translates to reduced reasoning and cognitive ability while shifted. It doesn't make her stupid, just more instinctive, less talkative, and far less reasonable. It is in this mental state that she is most likely to bark, her characteristic sound being the baying call of a few dozen hounds - not very stealthy. Shifting also generally destroys her clothing, so scaring her out of her skin is a very cruel party trick.

Fighting Style

Explanation: It depends. If she's human(ish), she likes her guns. If she's bestial, well, it takes an impressive corner to get her to actually turn and fight. Should that be accomplished, her usual method is dash-and-slash: charge the opponent and try to disembowel them with her hind claws on the way past. She might bite them first to slow their reaction and make them easier to hit.

Pros for fighting style: As a human, well, guns are generally pretty effective. As a beast… it doesn't require a lot of foresight or planning to execute.

Cons for fighting style: Her vision's horrible and she uses a ranged weapon. Obvious limitation. She also runs by instinct and tends to attack blindly if she's shifted.

Faction Allegiance
Unaffiliated (but wants to be a cop)

History Of Your Character

Cheyell is actually the daughter of her mother and her uncle.

Yes, her parents are incestuous. That can happen when your mother/aunt causes infatuation and obsession accidentally and your uncle/father has a naturally addictive personality. Neither were very bright, but no one expected their daughter to have spots and yellow eyes. Nevertheless, they named her Cheyell before her father was taken back to prison to finish his drug-related time. Somehow the sentence just kept getting added on to whenever he had the chance to visit the outside world.

Living in a very poor part of Nanaimo, population 75000, Cheyell and her mother, Crystal, were nearly constantly surrounded by petty crime, domestic violence, and the occasional minor gang disagreement. The nice young man in the apartment across the hall disappeared one day when Cheyell was seven, but she didn't figure out what had happened - his was the body taken away in an ambulance in the middle of the night - for several years. The nature of her neighbourhood started to sink in while she was in middle school.

She was on her way home from school, obediently doused with her mother's makeup and adorned with a few chains for noise, when a few boys from the area stopped her. They were several years older and wanted to join the reigning gang. The gang sent them away until they could prove their usefulness, so to speak. They figured that the little dark-haired girl might get them in; they'd heard rumours of the appetites of the man who had sent them away. Anyway, they came up behind her and grabbed her.

Cheyell had been lost in thought and hadn't noticed them approaching. When their grip settled around her, she panicked, and left the boys holding nothing but cloth and watching a black-tipped tail vanish around the next corner.

Cheyell headed home by instinct, and though it was quite a few blocks, she wasn't at all winded when she arrived. She had calmed somewhat, however, and was walking on two feet again before she even realized what had happened.

She never told her mother about the incident, nor anyone at school. Neither did either of the boys. In time, it all faded into the mists of memory.

At least until another boy tried to catch her.

Grade twelve. Summer was just starting to clear away some of the eternal damp of the coast, the sun could actually be seen as more than a faint glow behind the clouds for at least one period of time most days, and graduation was nearing. Cheyell was pretty smart, not the top of the class but personable enough to get people asking her for answers anyway. She had no problems dealing with people of either gender, and was looking forward to a career in law enforcement. She liked the idea of making places safer now that she was old enough to notice just how unsafe a place could be - and how lucky she was.

Sean was one of the school's more popular rugby players. Short, stocky, and confident, he was one of the ones that usually had a few girls fawning over him. Cheyell treated him like she treated everyone, but then happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or perhaps it was Sean who was in the wrong place? He usually took the bus while she walked, though they went the same direction for some time and she had the farther to travel. This particular day, he conveniently missed the bus and ended up walking half a block or so behind her.

Somewhere along the line, he caught up to her and started exploring. She had been listening to music (rock, nice and loud) and reacted much the same as she had the last time someone startled her so badly. She bolted.

Being about twenty blocks from home at this point, she left Sean far behind and settled down to a trot with several blocks to go. As she crossed through a park, she caught sight of her reflection in a musty duck pond and was stopped cold. The eyes that looked back at her were still the rich amber-orange she knew. The skin around them was scaled and much the same shade.

That was surprising, but curiously familiar. She studied herself in the water for a moment, and then bent to see if it was real. It was. It was completely unnatural, this nearly chimeric shape, and yet it was as natural as her human shape - perhaps even more so. Even the tail felt right.

Still, she wasn't so sure of the reaction others might have, so she went out on a limb and imagined herself being human. Judging by the sensation of stretching and wrinkling skin, she thought it worked. She opened her eyes and voila: she was pink-gold rather than tawny. And then rather more pink than gold; returning to relative humanity didn't involve a return to public decency.

There was nothing for it. There was nothing to be worn in the park unless she wanted to try to arrange some clothing out of leaves and twigs (not in this lifetime) so she closed her eyes and tried to remember just how it had felt to be that other real self. She set her hooves to the near-mud and started to run.

And she had thought that running as a human was the best thing to be had. Human-running had nothing on this.

She was home all too soon but had a great time trying to open the permanently unlocked but always sticky outer door with mouth, hooves, and tail. She did indeed manage it after a bit, and then she trotted up the worn stairs secure in the knowledge that no one had walked these stairs for at least half of an hour, much less was hanging around in the immediate vicinity. She only took the time to limit her senses and shift back when she reached her own door; it required a little more dexterity to get open without a key. She knew the trick and was inside long before anyone could come across her nudity, and that last point was rectified by an old t-shirt and jeans.

She grabbed a jacket and left a note, and then left the building even faster than she had entered. It was only a few kilometres to Linley Valley Park - one of the best places near Nanaimo. She settled into a jog and passed the time by comparing her human stride to her… beastly? one. This bipedal motion was definitely more jarring, rougher, louder despite the lack of hooves.

As soon as she was off the last street and away from the people, she dropped jeans and t-shirt next to a tree and remembered the drive of haunches and sink of flanks - then she flicked her clothing across her back, took a moment to tie the bundle around her neck (surprisingly easy with so long a jaw) and let herself go.

After that, it was a matter of course for Cheyell to spend her free time away from prying eyes. Her marks actually improved over that last month of school. Her graduation was nothing special - her class voted on a prom, but on impulse she decided that she had better things to do and slipped out once the music started. She didn't like the chosen genre anyway.

That was the first night that she went back to her career plans. Her graduation ceremony and celebration taking the place of any birthday party, she went to the little pawn shop around the corner from her home and bought a gun. Nothing special, just a little handgun with enough cheap ammo to get her target practice in. She built a sling for the holster out of a pair of leather pants her mother should have gotten rid of several decades before.

And then she went back into the bush. The sling kept the gun and everything else under control while she ran, and running far enough away from humanity so as to not be interrupted was therefore not an issue. Then she started on her target practice. She knew her eyes weren't the best (and she refused to consider glasses) but was stubborn enough to work on being a good shot anyway. Besides, if she couldn't shoot the best she could hope for was a desk job. A desk job was not what she wanted.

So, rather than get a job that summer, Cheyell spent all day (and numerous nights) shooting trees. By the time fall came around, she was getting pretty good, having learned to work past her nearsightedness.

She returned to the RCMP recruiter she'd worked with during high school and started the official recruiting process. The aptitude battery went well enough, being nothing unexpected, and the physical test was where she excelled.

In fact, it was downright perfect until she was talking to one of the testing officers afterwards and he realized that she was a mutant. Despite the changing and growing view in the world, this particular department refused to hire known mutants. In fact, the RCMP in general wasn't fond of them. The viewpoint ticked Cheyell off, and she left. As she headed out the door, the officer called that some places were far friendlier - like the NYPD. Everyone had heard of the NYPD in same fashion. Cheyell never imagined that she would end up trying to get in with them.

She didn't go immediately. Plane tickets were expensive, and she'd need enough money to sustain herself until she could find work there. She picked up work with a security company patrolling the convoluted borders of the recently renamed Vancouver Island University. The job also gave her free access to a shooting range, which she could now legally use with her newly registered gun. Most of the people she worked with never realized that her eyesight was poor.

She wasn't the only mutant with the company either. There was another woman, Giselle. Giselle kept the company's computer network running trouble-free - for free. The only real drawback was her habit of giving out nicknames. While Cheyell was still 'on-trial' and so actively supervised via her little camera (later just recording), Giselle caught Cheyell tracking a young cougar that had crossed the highway and had wandered a little too close to the university. When Cheyell returned, having determined that the cat had been spooked back into the relative wilds by a local dog, Giselle cornered her and persuaded her to reveal the mystery form. Everyone liked Giselle. She was charismatic like that, and it had nothing to do with her powers. Cheyell showed Giselle. Giselle declared it very catlike (to repeated protests) and called Cheyell "Kitty" thereafter.

Cheyell stayed with the security company until it went belly-up a few years later; the head of the company died of a stroke, and it never recovered. Cheyell collected her savings, packed her bags, and boarded a flight to Vancouver and then to New York via Toronto. It was a long flight, and when it landed Cheyell had to hurry to her pre-arranged apartment (hopefully only short-term), drop off her luggage (and Coatl the garter snake), and nab a taxi to an interview with a small security company. The position was part-time but paid kind of decently, and apparently the biggest requirement was to be able to cover a large route quickly and still have energy to follow up on anything.

Nailed it.

Hopefully it will be enough for her to jump over to the official police force and their real mutant-friendliness. Paladin Security just looks the other way.

Roleplay
Where did you learn about this site?: Google! And roleplaying.top-site-list.com
Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: N/A
Sample RP:
She paused just before the corner, still in the triangle of shadow. The footsteps along the sidewalk before her were not old - a minute at most. The air didn't taste of anyone, but she trusted her heat-sense more than her sense of taste-smell. She tapped a hoof against the pavement as if she were taking a step foreword.

She caught sight of a fur-trimmed collar swinging around the corner before the tip of her tongue caught metal-scent and placed it. Guns were good in your own hand. Pointed at you… not so much. As the tip settled into place she crouched and drove forwards. She dropped her forelegs back and set shoulder to shoulder; as the scentless gunman went down she dug in with her claws to keep her balance, and then lightly sprang into the road. This time of night, on a street this obscure, there was no traffic. There weren't any pedestrians either, though the gang-presence might have something to do with that. This didn't seem like the gang-type, though.

She circled around to the figure huddled on the ground and tasted a cheek. Definitely no taste. Interesting. "You do know that I didn't disembowel you, right?" she rasped reasonably. "A couple of scratches across the hip are just going to make the girls go crazy over you." She cocked her head and examined the whimpering lump. "Well, maybe in a few years." She carefully caught the gun between her fangs and flicked the safety on with her tongue. "Kidth shouldn't run 'round with thomething tho danderouth, ou know." A moment's fiddling had it tucked next to her own gun against her chest.

A strangled yell behind her flared her pupils and her feet were moving before she could think to react. As instinct shot her away from the attempted mugging/hunt, she glanced behind her just long enough to see a little girl crouched over the drama-queen boy.

Well, she got a gun out of it and maybe someone would see the kid at the hospital and get him on the right track, if only for his sister's sake.