Eileen Harsaw

Player
John

Personality
Once a fun-loving, well-adjusted girl, Eileen has become jaded and cynical. She can be almost reflexively abrasive, even with people she doesn't truly dislike. Mostly, she's indifferent to others, or tries to be. Those that manage to earn her genuine animosity will find her vengeful, persistent, and cruelly creative with using her powers to cause personal inconvenience and discomfort. Friends, for what it's worth, can expect a little better, though every little act of kindness is likely to be accompanied by a scathing observation, or at least the reassurance that she doesn't honestly care that much. No, really.

Beneath that is a layer of hurt--very deep hurt that she keeps to herself as much as possible. She hates herself for feeling it, and her father and mother for being at the root of it, and the world in general for being capable of fostering anything like it. About the only thing she doesn't hate is her powers, for which she refuses to apologize. Eileen hates having to hide them, but she's prudent enough to recognize they're an even bigger advantage when combined with the element of surprise.

All this aside, she's not exactly asocial; Eileen is so used to having people around that shutting herself away doesn't exactly come naturally to her. Though undeniably intelligent, the irony of simultaneously disliking the company of others and craving companionship appears to be utterly lost on her. As is the fact that she's probably not nearly as hateful as she wants everyone to think.

Powers
Eileen possesses the ability to detect and manipulate many forms of electromagnetic energy, an effect she refers to as "harmonizing". In living beings, this can take the form of bio-electric disruption, resulting in pain, paralysis, nausea, and loss of coordination or even consciousness. A mutant affected by this disruption may suffer severe fluctuations in the relative strength of their powers, temporary suspension of their superhuman abilities, or a total loss of control over their mutant enhancements.

She can generate a field that counters the effect of gravity on her person, allowing her to levitate and fly with considerable agility. By disrupting the electrical fields of machinery, Eileen is able to short them out completely, and potentially even control them to a limited degree--for example, opening electronically-locked doors, or jamming weapons or targeting systems. Her power to affect machinery also manifests as a masking effect, allowing her to blind all forms of electronic surveillance to her presence and that of others around her. She can become effectively invisible by bending visible light waves around herself.

Eileen is extremely sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances in her vicinity, including that caused by concealed electronic devices or the atmospheric distortions that precede a teleportation event.

Her eyes once glowed when she used her powers, and Eileen noticed that the effect tended to linger longer and longer each time. Over time, this odd side-effect has become permanent.

Though formidable on a one-on-one basis, Eileen doesn't do well when she feels outnumbered. She's more likely to retreat and try to scare up reinforcements, in that kind of situation. Though she's vindictive enough to return to the fray as soon as she's sure she has backup. Since her powers are as capable of affecting groups as individuals with little noticeable loss of efficacy, this is probably a psychological quirk.

Personality
Once a fun-loving, well-adjusted girl, Eileen has become jaded and cynical. She can be almost reflexively abrasive, even with people she doesn't truly dislike. Mostly, she's indifferent to others, or tries to be. Those that manage to earn her genuine animosity will find her vengeful, persistent, and cruelly creative with using her powers to cause personal inconvenience and discomfort. Friends, for what it's worth, can expect a little better, though every little act of kindness is likely to be accompanied by a scathing observation, or at least the reassurance that she doesn't honestly care that much. No, really.

Beneath that is a layer of hurt--very deep hurt that she keeps to herself as much as possible. She hates herself for feeling it, and her father and mother for being at the root of it, and the world in general for being capable of fostering anything like it. About the only thing she doesn't hate is her powers, for which she refuses to apologize. Eileen hates having to hide them, but she's prudent enough to recognize they're an even bigger advantage when combined with the element of surprise.

All this aside, she's not exactly asocial; Eileen is so used to having people around that shutting herself away doesn't exactly come naturally to her. Though undeniably intelligent, the irony of simultaneously disliking the company of others and craving companionship appears to be utterly lost on her. As is the fact that she's probably not nearly as hateful as she wants everyone to think.

Though formidable on a one-on-one basis, Eileen doesn't do well when she feels outnumbered. She's more likely to retreat and try to scare up reinforcements, in that kind of situation. Though she's vindictive enough to return to the fray as soon as she's sure she has backup. Since her powers are as capable of affecting groups as individuals with little noticeable loss of efficacy, this is probably a psychological quirk.

Outlook
Could kindly be described as bitter. Eileen has seen a lot of the worst of what the human species has to offer in recent months, and it's done a fair job convincing her that people are, in general, scum. But she remains, at her core, a sociable misanthrope. She likes to be around people, so she can tell them how much she hates being around them.

Powers
Eileen possesses the ability to detect and manipulate many forms of electromagnetic energy, an effect she refers to as "harmonizing". In living beings, this can take the form of bio-electric disruption, resulting in pain, paralysis, nausea, and loss of coordination or even consciousness. A mutant affected by this disruption may suffer severe fluctuations in the relative strength of their powers, temporary suspension of their superhuman abilities, or a total loss of control over their mutant enhancements.

She can generate a field that counters the effect of gravity on her person, allowing her to levitate and fly with considerable agility. By disrupting the electrical fields of machinery, Eileen is able to short them out completely, and potentially even control them to a limited degree--for example, opening electronically-locked doors, or jamming weapons or targeting systems. Her power to affect machinery also manifests as a masking effect, allowing her to blind all forms of electronic surveillance to her presence and that of others around her. She can become effectively invisible by bending visible light waves around herself.

Eileen is extremely sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances in her vicinity, including that caused concealed electronic devices or the atmospheric distortions that precede a teleportation event.

Her eyes glow when she uses her powers, and Eileen has begun to notice that the effect tends to linger longer and longer each time. Eventually, this odd side-effect may become permanent.

Limitations
While she's nimble in the air, she has no special resistance to wind friction or prevailing meteorological conditions, which limits her top flight speed and the conditions under which it is safe for her to fly. She tends to rely on her powers somewhat excessively, employing them when other measures would be more discreet or more useful. Her personality can be unnecessarily cold, and she has learned to distrust anything she perceives as too "normal". Weird she can almost trust; normal is the polite mask of intolerance, or the betrayal of self needed to pass as something less than oneself.

Talents
Once a skilled softball player, Eileen hasn't bothered much with the sport since leaving Ohio. Still, her fundamentals are still probably pretty solid. She has a gifted mind, but has never been driven to excel academically; she works just hard enough to get by with a solid "B" average, and spends the rest of her time doing things she finds more enjoyable. Her intelligence has been a big help in figuring out her powers, however, and she's very good at discovering (and remembering) which particular electromagnetic phenomena to manipulate to achieve a particular effect on her environment (or people and electronics).

Interests
Right now, her powers. And very little else. She used to love action movies, the OSU football, Johnny Cash, and music from the 80's, but didn't give a lot of thought to any of that during her time on the road. Maybe she will get into them again, as her life limps back toward stability. Or maybe she'll need to find new things. Right now, she's just not sure.

History
Born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Eileen Harsaw was a bright girl raised in extremely average, Midwestern circumstances. Her father worked as a powerline technician and her mother, once their little girl was big enough to start getting to and from school on her own, was a nurse's assistant at one of the busier local clinics. All in all, it was a fairly Rockwellian childhood, with scraped needs, Saturday morning cartoons, family camping trips, and an occasional life-lesson learned from the minor tragedy of a lost family pet or cheating on a math test.

Things started getting weird when Eileen hit puberty--more so than it usually does for two young parents trying to help their first daughter through that rocky time of teenage rebellion and training bras. Alan and Cara had the added confusion of randomly malfunctioning electronics (which forced them to go without a microwave for over a year), a Dodge that was far more temperamental than it ought to have been, and Eileen's passionate insistence that there were all these multicolored waves everywhere, and if she just concentrated hard enough, she thought she could bend them this way or that.

The family pediatrician, a man who had known Eileen since before she was in diapers, was consulted. His diagnosis: kids say the darnedest things. Prescription: one lollipop and a week without all those violent TV shows that fill kids heads with weird, scary ideas.

So, life went on, the Harsaws clinging with increasing desperation to the normalcy that had previously defined their lives. But with every brand new cell phone that suddenly went on the fritz, every television shorted out for no apparent reason, every freak electrical event on a clear day, Eileen's strangeness grew harder and harder to ignore. It didn't help that her mother began to have bizarre dreams, very possibly as a result of Eileen reaching out to her without realizing it and unknowingly manipulating the subtle bio-electric interactions of her nervous system.

But it became impossible to pretend when Cara was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer shortly after Eileen's sixteenth birthday. Despite doing everything possible on a middle-class budget, and a few moment's of fleeting hope in the downward spiral of despair, there was nothing anyone could do. By May, she was gone.

Throughout Cara's illness, and even more so after her death, Alan had grown distant from, even hostile toward his bizarre, electronics-wrecking daughter. On more than one occasion, the nurses tending Cara had threatened to call children's protective services, or Eileen's grandparents, if he did not calm down. Between stark terror for herself and grief for her mother, Eileen did occasionally wonder why that threat seemed to work, since she'd had no contact whatsoever with her mother or her father's parents at all in her life. She even managed a moment or two to wonder why she'd never found that odd before.

Alan's simmering resentment blazed into outright hatred shortly after Jasper's Warp--an event which, curiously, left most of Ohio unaffected, or at least changed in no obvious way. Here, at last, was a name for the thing that took his wife: mutant. Not daughter, mutant. He chased Eileen out of the house with an iron poker from the fireplace, casting barely-articulate curses and bloody promises of what would happen if he ever saw her face again. Eileen fled into the night, and, scared out of her wits and lacking any real plan, began drifting east along the Interstate.

It was, to say the least, a difficult adjustment. But her newfound suspicion for others and the growing strength of her powers helped to get by, in part by giving her the confidence to play the charming teenage hitchiking runaway, and in part by allowing her to incapacitate anyone who made even the least bit sketchy move in her direction. Or anyone whose wallet she required the use of.

That last one became less important, once she figured out how to short out ATM's (and security cameras) directly.

She was gorging on fried eggs and pancakes at a truckstop in central Pennsylvania when she first saw him on TV, the mutant with the helmet and cape that controlled metal, announcing his presence to the world. Wonder at his magnificent stupidity warred with grudging admiration--and both lost out to the pragmatic conclusion that, if there were mutants on Krakoa secure enough to reach out to the public like that, then Krakoa was where she needed to be.

Eileen even figured out how to fly along the way, which cut down on her travel time considerably. Although, after she reached the relative-Sentinel-free portions of the Western U.S., she was confronted with the realization that she knew nothing at all about Krakoa, other than that it was full of people like her. She certainly didn't know where to find it.

But Eileen is nothing if not determined. A fortuitous and entirely chance encounter with a Brotherhood strike team lead to her recruitment to that group, and an invitation to travel back with them to the mutant homeland. Eileen's never looked back once.