[quote=@Joshie][@Liliya]

I know a little about 'Ursae'... but lets get to know more about you, 'Alexis'.

Let's just pretend that you couldn't bench press Ethiopia. Your mom is not one of the greatest heroes in present time Halcyon. Your mom isn't well known at all. You are just a beautiful, normal teen attgending Halcyon High. Surely, you have dreams of what you want to be. What are they?

Oh yeah, and on the subject of Halcyon High, it came to my attention (Riley, if you must know) that Halcyon High is kind of ran by cliques. The students there are very image conscious, whether by looks or reputation. Were you aware of this? 

And where do you think you stand on the scale of 'coolness' at Halcyon High? Why? [/quote]

Just Alex, b. Alexis is a name for some bubbly blonde happy person. Assuming my best, well, only friend wasn't stuck into some contract with a demon that's slowly eating her alive, and my mom was just some former Lonestar City cheerleader who came to Halcyon City to try and be an actress or something stupid like that? I mean, I have this idealized vision of myself just having been a happy, normal kid who had friends, went to the mall on the weekends, cried about my boyfriend breaking up with me instead of my friends being in mortal danger. I mean, I see them all the time; the girls who, even when they're unreasonably sad about something, just bounce back because there is no permanence to their troubles. Like one week their world has ended because Robbie Bowman didn't jump to correct them when they said that maybe they could stand to go on a diet in front of his friends, and now they're, "fat and ugly and," and what? Doomed to never get a f#$%ing date with Robbie Bowman? Next week they’re over it and still running off after Robbie, of course, as though nothing ever happened because nothing ever did happen. Nothing permanent, anyway, not the kind of thing supers deal with, and knowing you can’t be that makes it all the more obvious when other kids get to be. In my vision I’d be one of those bitches, just fumbling around in the dark trying to feel wanted, validated, loved by someone, but devoid of any real, serious complications. Really though, I’d be kidding myself if I thought things would be that simple. 

Maybe I get it from my mom, but I occasionally think I have a serious martyr complex. Like, even if I was some normal kid I’d find something to get into, some cause, probably something to do with digging wells for poor people in the third world like my dad. I’d still be fumbling in the dark, just like I am now even with super powers, but I’d be overcome by the soul crushing guilt and understanding that if we as a people, as a species, would only just come together, work together to try and make the world a little bit better, lives of actual people could be saved, entire cycles of poverty and death replaced by a reasonable quality of life and health and happiness, instead of being crushed down by the understanding that to act means my eventual death and to not act means the immediate deaths of other people, totally okay people who didn’t have to die. If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m killer fun at parties. Good thing I’m tall and blonde and hot, otherwise there’s no way anyone would put up with my bullshit. I really do think it’s a brain chemistry thing, though. Like I’m not really crazy or anything, I just feel like I for some reason always have to, if I’m flattering myself, “stand in the way of darkness,” or some stupid shit like that. More realistically I think it’s just more comfortable for me when the sky is falling all around me and I feel like me and mine are the only ones who can, or will, do anything about it, even though it hurts us. 

We’ve established that I’m not a particularly selfless person. I really do care how other people feel, but I think I care more about how bad [u][b]I[/b][/u] feel when I see people in pain than I care about how they’re feeling. Maybe everyone’s like that, maybe I’m just not a totally okay person, but really I can count on one hand the number of people who I care more about how they’re feeling than about how I feel. Like, my mom has that prayer of St. Someone of Assisi hanging in, like, seriously every room in the estate, right? The one that goes, “seek not to be comforted, but to comfort,” yeah, that was my dad. I don’t think he was religious, we never went to church, and my mom’s one of those Southern Christians who hates gay people and Papists and somehow justifies it against Jesus telling people to love their neighbors, sinners, and Samaritans, however that one goes, but he really lived that prayer. He’d have given you the shirt off his back, and managed to keep a functioning charity and some old money estate going strong without stepping on any little people, basically an impossible feat in modern Halcyon City. He dies, my mom hands financial control over to the supposedly, “proper,” money people, and suddenly the estate lays off its employees, most of whom have been here longer than I’ve been alive, hires illegal immigrants and threatens to call Immigration on them if they aren’t basically slave labor. Meanwhile, Savannah Newman-Hathaway talks on every conservative talk show about how much we need to build a wall and set up a deportation task force. 

But I don’t say anything, do anything. I feel bad for them. I could stand up to my mom, but I don’t. This isn’t abnormal, either; you can easily demonize the woman behind the mask of Lodestar for being a total c#$%, which she is, but this is just normal for people with the kind of money dad’s family had. He was one of the only holdouts who wasn’t doing this kind of awful shit, because he was a good person. Three super heroes live in this mansion, while wage-slaves keep up the grounds and robot butlers cook our food, because we can. I mean, it isn’t Andrea’s fault, she doesn’t know what’s going on here, but I do. We actually have bunkhouses on the grounds for the families who work the property, and most of their pay is in room and board. It’s f#$%ing gross. Don’t even know what happened to the groundskeepers I grew up around, the ones that were paid well and taken care of, dad sent their kids to university, the whole deal, and mom just threw them out with the last of dad’s clothes. I mean, at the time I thought she was just going through a lot, I mean I was going through just as much, but I hardly noticed, just kinda in a daze for weeks after he died, you know? But she never brought anyone back on, and if they’ve tried to contact me to figure out what the hell happened I have no idea. At the time I was more concerned with secreting dad’s clothes up from out of the trash and into a box in my closet. 

That got dark fast, sorry. I’ll change course, --, have I mentioned I love computers? Like, not as in social media and all that, but the actual construction and programming of hardware and software? I know that I’m the muscle in the group and all, but I’m actually really smart and good at stuff. I tried to open up the robot butlers, see how they tick right? Reprogrammed one to drive, did the software myself, and it actually worked. Not on surface streets, never took the project that far, but it could recognize obstacles I set up on the property and intelligently respond to them. Talk about a science fair winner, assuming I could bring one of these things into school, which of course I can’t. Felitrix was impressed with my code though, real neat, tight, efficient, great stuff, --, for an amateur. I didn’t take it as a slight, I mean she is Scarborough Enterprises, and they are technology. If anyone can call anyone an amateur in that field and not sound like a bitch it’s her, she is modern robotics and supertech. My dad was an engineer, or educated as one anyway, before he was in charge of the Hathaway Charitable Foundation. We used to solder little circuits together, and I could get some pretty cool stuff built up by the time I was around eight. Maybe even in some alternate universe where I wasn’t a super I still would have wound up at Scarborough Enterprises doing some kind of research and development type of stuff, working for Felitrix. I guess I’d have known her as Anne Scarborough in that world, but still. 

We used to play chess, too. I got pretty good just before my dad died. We’d sit and talk and play, and he’d tell me all about the different moves and strategies and the history of it all. I never won, unless he let me, and he could never bluff well, too honest maybe. Maybe I just knew him well enough and recognized his tells, or maybe he’d have had an easier time bluffing someone that wasn’t his daughter. I’d get mad if he let me win, throw a fit and all, so I always lost. I learned, though. He was a grandmaster, young one at that. Guess it isn’t hard to get to that point if you’re smart and basically have unlimited resources, but he did have a job and me and other stuff going on, so maybe he was just really good at the game, couldn’t say. Maybe in some other world I’m a chess geek, I’d wear those thick rimmed glasses that were ironic for a while but phased back into being lame real quick, and I’d get open mouthed stares when this six foot tall blonde hottie walked into a chess tournament and actually took games off of fat nerds. I kinda like that alternate universe. In this one, I haven’t touched a board since he died. I mean, unless I actually did join the chess club I don’t have anyone to play against, and if you’re going to play yourself in this day and age may as well just play the computer, right? Besides, it’s one of those memory things. His death doesn’t hurt day to day anymore, why open old wounds? 

As to the day to day life of Alex Hathaway, the high school senior, things are in a grey area. It’s busy, I take AP classes and hardly have time to study, so I manage a B- to C+ average just trying to pick everything up on the day I walk into class, I’m on the cheerleading squad because my mom is bribing the dean of students to keep me on the team, even though I’ve made maybe half the games and probably less than half of the practices, and literally no actual cheer events, and I eat lunch alone and on the fly more than half the time. I say, “eat lunch,” because supposedly that’s what high schoolers do at lunch break, more realistically I eat half an apple from a school lunch cart or picked from off of some freshman’s tray while walking hurriedly between classes and the computer lab trying to get homework done that’s due in my next class. I had a date to homecoming, who bailed for some more prestigious prize, which turned into a total disaster thanks to Ian, and wound up dateless, covered in hot fudge and chicken feathers, and all in front of the entire school. I considered Carrieing him right then and there, but didn’t, and am now known as Hot Fudge Sunday. Most people wouldn’t actually say that to my face, I think they think I’m like a weird dangerous person or something, probably because I’m taller than most high school senior guys and eat lunch alone, plus my mom is the crazy Build a Wall chick from the TV, but even so the kids say hello. 

I’ve never been disliked, or uninteresting enough for everyone to just ignore me. I think that would have to be worse than what I’m dealing with, the kids that [u]no one[/u] says hi to, talks to. I say hi to f#$%ing everybody, which is probably another reason people think I’m weird. Not that I’m terribly nice to people as a rule, I’m not, but I don’t walk by human beings and pretend like they’re not f#$%ing there because they’re what, below my station? Now there are a lot of short, fat, nerdy, friendless freshmen who have asked me out because I say hi to them, which would be awkward if I had time to let it be, but mostly I just turn them down and make it clear that I’ve never even been on a date the way my mom is, and the way she keeps my schedule. I think they understand. Everyone knows what a right wing bitch Savannah Newman-Hathaway is on the TV, I assume they think she’s the most overbearing parent on the planet and just accept that I’ll probably never go out with them or anyone else which, unfortunately for me, at this rate I probably f#$%ing won’t. Hell, at this rate I’ll wind up going to prom with Andrea, if I’m lucky and she doesn’t have a date. I think Riley pays more attention to the game then I do, tries to play it and use it to her advantage. I don’t need leverage over high schoolers, she does, it makes sense that she works her pheromone thing and gets people to like her, offer her the goods and services she needs.