Lydia MacBeth Age: 29 Writer: Yvonne Email: dprono@planet.eon.net Writer's Age: Old Enough Physical Appearance: Lydia takes after her Japanese mother. She is only 5'3" has dark skin and straight black hair that falls to her shoulderblades, which usually tied back to keep it out of her eyes. Her eyes are almond shaped and are the same dark colour as her hair. Physically she's fairly unremarkable and slightly out of shape, although her fingers are usually covered in small cuts and Band-Aids and her nails are very short and bitten. Personality: Never much of a socialite, Lydia takes refuge in her art, which tends to dominate her life. A little dreamy and very shy she's hard to get to know as she tends not to give away too much about herself, thinking it immodest and vain to spend so much conversation time on her own life, although she doesn't hold the reverse true, and loves to hear stories about other people's experiences and travels. Lydia has one all consuming fear -- that she is going insane. Occasionally hearing voices does nothing to help her get over this, and it's for this reason that she refuses to go for therapy. She's scared of being committed. Abilities/Weaknesses: Lydia is a strong telepath and a weak empath, but she hasn't been trained in either gift, although if she concentrates she can pick out individual voices from the cacophony, and has sometimes been responsible for whispering 'ideas' or 'suggestions' back to people. (unconsciously, of course) She has natural shields which developed as a defence mechanism and while they aren't strong or particularly stable they at least help her stay sane. Her talents are usually under 'control' but in high stress situations or when she's in crowds of over ten, or when the people she's surrounded by are very agitated, they shatter and she starts reading everyone that's within her range. It's never anything detailed, just echoes and snippets of thoughts, painted sometimes with emotions. Both gifts tend to feed off each other and quite often result in 'echoes' that she can't make heads or tails of. For this reason she's never very comfortable around people. She has been on anti-depressants to smooth her moods ever since she was eleven, and at this point she cannot get through a day without her pills. The moment she becomes frightened, stressed, intimidated, or angry, her shields collapse and leave her vulnerable, so although the pills keep her mind safe, it also means that she never really experiences the natural highs and lows that a person not on medication would. Lydia has never been tested for psychic talents and she's never told anyone except her mother that she sometimes hears voices. Lydia has also had a curse hanging over her head and she believes that her telepathy is the curse's manifestation. The curse has been on her since she was born but her mother denies that she knows how it got there and who cast it upon her. History: Her mother was Japanese but born in the States after her grandparents immigrated a year before, and her father was an American. Lydia was the second, and youngest, of their children. She had an older brother named Jacob whom she adored and followed around like a puppy, and surprisingly enough Jacob not only encouraged her to do so but was upset when she wasn't tagging along. They did everything together and as they were only a year and a half apart often were mistaken for twins. When she was eleven Lydia and her family was on their way to go camping when a drunk driver broadsided them. Jacob and Lydia father died, but not before Lydia, whose psi talents were just beginning to emerge with the first glimmerings of puberty, shared every last thought and emotion with them both. Lydia only fractured her wrist, but her mother became a paraplegic. For the next six months Lydia would not speak to anyone and was painfully shy around strangers. Her shields were developed as a defence mechanism to combat the fear and illness found in the hospital her mother was staying at but to keep her sane. The doctors placed her on anti-depressants and she's become dependant on them -- without the mood adjusters the more stressed she gets, the more likely her shields will crumble. She became extremely close to her mother during this time, who, after being put into hospital for a month had returned to live with her family. Lydia's grandparents were strict and and their household was significantly different from the slightly bohemian one that Lydia had come from. She was expected to be the model student and granddaughter but Lydia, even at that age, had problems at school and the only subject she did well in was art. Her grandparents disapproved of such a 'frivolous' hobby and hired tutors, but secretly her mother encouraged her talent and sent her for art lessons. Her mother did not take to life in a wheelchair very well, and when Lydia was sixteen her mother's health took a turn for the worse. At this time her psi talents began to re-emerge due to stress and for a while Lydia thought she was going mad because she was hearing voices in her head that were not her own, and she began having a harder and harder time distinguishing between her reality and other people's. Her prescription dosage was increased when the doctors mistakenly diagnosed the manifestations as stress-related hallucinations and with the smoothing of her mood, her natural shields were able to function again. Her mother died just before she graduated, leaving her entire estate to her daughter. Her grandparents came forward to claim custody but she had just turned eighteen and so she took her inheritance money and fled to Sanctuary, Maine, to go to the university there. She majored in Fine Arts and was introduced to stained glass along the way. When she moved to Sanctuary Lydia initially intended to buy a small property where she could set up, but was drawn to a small cottage in the university area. It used to be the gardener's house in the corner of a wealthy shipping baron's property, but since then the mansion has been converted to a historic museum and what property wasn't set aside for a small park was sold off to developers. The cottage itself is tiny, consisting only of a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room, and a bathroom, but the greenhouse was part and parcel of the deal. When she first moved in the panels of plain glass were dirty and cracked, but since then she's set the place up as her studio and replaced most of them with panels of her own design. For a long while she lived normally there, until the night when an island resort blew up just off the coast. Now she's convinced that her greenhouse/workshop is haunted as she hears voices when she goes in there, and sometimes even when she's not. She doesn't *really* believe in ghosts, but that's a better choice than the alternative -- that she really, truly is mad.
|
