Kult - Danielle "Dan" Williams

What she knows:

Dan was adopted when she was just barely two years old by Rosa and Thomas Williams of Vader, Washington. She doesn't know anything about her real parents, and doesn't care to. She is not quite 20, and just entered the Army after having worked in her father's auto shop for a year after graduating from high school... she's currently spending most of her time at the Fort Lewis base finishing up basic training.

Dan has always had a talent for sports; she's been studying judo (jujitsu in game rules) for a few years now and was a track star at her high school. She brushes off falls and torn muscles like water; when she was a child, her parents called her "indestructable" (endure pain).

She doesn't keep in touch with her friends from high school save for one, Sean Meyers (note - he can be older than her... I don't care if they were in the same grade or not). He moved up to Seattle a few years back, and Dan takes every chance she can to get up to visit him. No one really understands why she and Sean get along - she's never been in trouble and he's always been the small-time problem child. But people just tend to like Dan, so they figure that must be it. She can't seem to resist trying to take care of him and keep him out of trouble, and he seems to trust her the way he won't most people (partially due to the motherliness advantage, probably).

When Dan goes up to Seattle, she also tries to go out of her way to visit her great uncle, a professor of medieval literature at the UW. Dr. Vaughn is her mother's uncle, and Dan adores him (not least because he always gets her in to the Big Time Brewery and lets her drink with him and his friends). She thinks what he researches is incredibly boring, but appreciates the beautiful manuscripts he turns out.

Dan's never been a great student. She explains it away by pretending to be not interested in school, but that's only part of it. The greater part is that she doesn't sleep well, and so has never been able to concentrate her mental energy that keenly on schoolwork - she's either too tired or too caffeine jittery to concentrate (thankfully, it doesn't tend to affect her physically too much). Dan's been tortured by nightmares since she was a little girl (nightmares due to mental constriction); she can never remember what they're about in the mornings (and when she can remember, she wishes so hard that she didn't that she blocks them out). She gave up long ago trying to figure out why she gets them, and tries to sleep as little as possible every night to avoid them. She relies very heavily on strong coffee, Coke and Mountain Dew, and NoDoze to keep her going. She has "extra-strange" experiences (unwilling medium), and sometimes has things which she admits to herself are akin to visions (enhanced awareness), on occasion. She has convinced herself that they are due to too little sleep and too much stimulant in her system.

She doesn't tell people about these things anymore; when she was twelve, back when she still mentioned her nightmares and "freak-outs" to people, the school counselor tried to get her to go to a psychiatrist. She hated and feared the idea from the outset and convinced her parents that she didn't need any help... ever since then, she's kept very very quiet. It seems an important thing to do. In lieu of psychiatric treatment, she relies on a mediation technique she learned from an old judo sensei to calm herself when she needs it.

What she doesn't know:

When Dan thinks about it at all, she figures that her real mother and father are out there somewhere. Little does she know that her "mother" is an ovary kept in a freezer, and her father is a "researcher" at a private medical lab in Michigan. I've not thought too hard about what exactly the researchers were trying to do with Dan and the other 39 children conceived along with her (I'll leave that to you), but Dan's enhanced phsyical abilities are a direct result. Her visions, "experiences," and even her likeability (motherliness) are imperfect manifestations of other abilities that the scientists were trying to generate (victim of medical experiments). Dan's nightmares are often related to being subjected to horrific procedures in a pale green room with no windows.

When Dan was about a year and a half or two years old, the lab was attacked by a group of activists in the middle of the night. They destroyed most of the equipment, and all 40 children were taken. Unfortunately, no one more important than the night watchman was around... the team of fourteen researchers had taken a weekend vacation unexpectedly. The activists decided that the children would be safest if they simply disappeared into mainstream America; they did something to keep the kids from remembering their experiences and repeating them to others (post-hypnotic blocks or somesuch - partially responsible for Dan's terror about being taken to a psychiatrist and strong desires to not tell other people about her problems, a large part of her mental constriction), and used a contact at an adoption office to get the forty children placed in as innocuous homes as possible.

The only problem is that the research team (and their sponsors) had quite a bit vested in the children, and have been trying to hunt them down for the last eighteen years (wanted). They've found fourteen of them so far...