Evangeline Brie Jada

[Evangeline B. Jada]

The Basics

Name: Evangeline Brie Jada
Nicknames: Some close friends call her Eva. In a professional context, she’s fond of Ms. Jada or Evangeline B. Jada.
Age: Twenty-eight (November 30, 1984)
Orientation: Bisexual
She is attracted to men and women. She hasn’t found any non-binary or multigender people she’s met sexually or romantically attractive, although she has liked them just fine as people.
Desired Rank/Job: New Powers Trainer
Powers: State-of-matter manipulation
She can alter the state of matter that a particular substance is in through touch. Close proximity or indirect contact also work, though that takes more energy and leaves her more hungry and fatigued (and is overall less effective). It’s fairly easy and doesn’t take much energy for her to speed up a matter change that would have happened naturally on its own (I.E. making ice melt at room temperature). Influencing matter in the opposite direction is quite a bit more challenging, and doing that too much is quite taxing, both physically and mentally. While she cannot directly influence the temperature of an object, if a temperature change is a natural effect of a state-of-matter change (I.E. water getting colder as it turns to ice), that temperature change will occur with the state-of-matter change. The further the existing conditions are from the normal conditions for a given state of matter for a given material, the harder it is to influence a material to be that state of matter, and some things are simply outside of her abilities (I.E. the melting temperature for gold is 1,948°F (1,064°C), so she can’t make gold into a liquid at room temperature, though she could if the material were heated quite a lot before she tried to liquefy it).

[/b][li]Too much use of her power makes her weak and irritable.[/li][li]She will get occasional splitting headaches no matter what, and the frequency is loosely correlated with how much she uses her power.[/li][li]Influencing matter in a direction that it wouldn’t naturally go, in particular, is very taxing, and tends to make her body temperature colder than usual (if making things solid that wouldn’t normally be in a given context) or hotter than usual (if making things a gas that wouldn’t normally be in a given context). This can temporarily weaken her immune system and make her more susceptible to illnesses.[/li][li]If she tries to influence a material past her abilities (I.E. liquefying gold at room temperature), she will simply pass out and need a few days to physically and mentally recover.[/li][/ul]
Play By: Janet Mock[/font][/div][/blockquote]

The Details

Hair Color: Brown, lightens from base to tip
Eye Color: Brown
Any Piercings? Earlobes
Any Tattoos? Several bars of music winding around her upper right arm. Music notes are mixed with the names of her parents and siblings on the staff.
Any Scars? One long scar on her stomach, to the left of her belly button.

General Appearance:
Evangeline is a slightly tall woman with dark skin and a slender, curvaceous form. She has a round face and prominent features. Her eyes are especially expressive and intense, as she rarely tries to hide her emotions. Her gaze can hold surpassing tenderness or the most piercing disappointment depending on what she's feeling. She keeps her hair natural, which falls into a wide halo of loose spirals around her head. All in all she looks her age, not coming across as significantly younger or older than she is.

She has an air of maturity and self-control, and carries herself with confidence. Evangeline's style is decidedly feminine with quirky or intriguing touches such as an interesting cut, seam, or unusual item of jewelry. She has a particular fondness for the color blue. While she tends to mostly cover herself in professional contexts (as is appropriate for the weather), she will show a much more revealing side of her style when going out clubbing or dancing.

Personality:
Evangeline carries herself with poise, and has a very dignified aura about her. In a professional setting, as well as with people she doesn't know very well or doesn't like very much, this manifests as having a very formal air about her. While she is friendly in such settings, she keeps a certain amount of emotional distance from people, and has no patience for transparently false excuses and ignorant bigotry. This doesn't mean she is emotionally insensitive - quite the contrary. If she detects emotional pain behind insolence or dishonesty, she will try her best to address the root of the problem and accommodate personal problems that a student, colleague, or acquaintance is having. However, she still won't appreciate the dishonesty, and will not hesitate to strongly enforce her boundaries around that. The boundaries she does hold are very strongly held, and she very much expects them to be respected. She is very much a no-nonsense professional woman.

With people she knows well and is comfortable with, this dignified aura takes a rather different form. The emotional distance is no longer there, and she comes across as much more personable and intimate. Evangeline is prone to laughing, singing, and dancing fits when with friends, and generally lightens up a great deal. While those boundaries are still there and she still expects them to be respected, she takes it for granted that they will be and doesn't worry about it, hence the lack of a professional air. She is also a great deal more nurturing with those she knows well.

Aspects of her personable side can come out in professional contexts, especially when a student/colleague is up-front about their emotional difficulties. Her professional side sometimes comes up in personal settings, especially when a (usually former) friend has hurt her greatly and crossed her boundaries.

Your Vices

Likes:
Cooking: She frequently cooked for her family, her floormates at Hammel and floormates at college. She's quite good at it, and can make quite a large meal fairly quickly if she wants, though she often likes to take her time.
Equality & Intersectionality: She's always been passionate about equality, and has found a good intellectual fit with intersectional feminism and various types of activism.
Literary/Artistic/Pop Culture Analysis: She had to do a fair amount of it for her degrees, and enjoys deconstructing parts of culture to see the underlying messages.
Chemistry: In part because of her power. She studies it on her own time, and would probably be able to test out of several semesters worth of college courses.
Her family: She has always been close to her family, especially her twin brother Gabriel. She keeps consistent contact with them wherever she is.
Clubbing/Dancing: As formal as she may seem in professional contexts, she does enjoy going out and dancing.
Hip Hop: Another thing that may be surprising to those who only know her in a professional context. She's quite fond of hip hop and listens to it a lot on her own time.
Dislikes:
Bigotry/Ignorance: Unfortunately often the same thing, as she learned the hard way.
Violence: Being a survivor of transmisogynistic violence, she despises violence of any type. She is not a pacifist, and will defend herself if she has to, but avoids it if at all possible.
History: She regards formal history as revisionist nonsense and doesn't trust it one bit.
Country and Metal Music: Sorry, but it's not for her at all. She'll leave a room to avoid these musical genres.
Red Meat: It takes a very specific recipe for her to go anywhere near it. She prefers to cook with fish and vegetables.
Uncooked Cheese: Just... God, why would anyone want to eat that??
Strengths:
Emotional Sensitivity and Nurturance: She's good at reading the emotions of others and discerning emotional subtext. An excellent listener, she has a good intuition for what to say and how to treat someone who is hurting. She is also very in-tune with her own emotions.
Analytical: She has a sharp, analytical mind, and is good at detecting subtext and metaphor.
Observant: She sees the details that many would miss about a person or a location.
Teaching Approach: Her approach would work very well for some, especially those who just need someone to call them on their crap.
Boundaries: She knows how to enforce boundaries, and doesn't take cruelty from others.
Weaknesses:
Irritability: When her side effects start setting in, Evangeline gets very irritable.
Teaching Approach: Her no-nonsense approach to teaching doesn't work for everyone. Some students, if paired with her, would result in catastrophic (metaphorical, hopefully) explosions.
Lack of Patience: Her lack of patience specifically for ignorance and bigotry leaves her very easily frazzled and angry when presented with it, even when someone means well but is totally unaware.
Triggers: She does have a few specific triggers around her attack, and if presented with then would be totally out-of-commission for a while.
Fears: She still occasionally has nightmares about her attack several years ago, and fears a similar thing happening again.
Secret: When she was in Hammel, she briefly flirted with ideas around meta-supremacy.
Though they fell out of contact naturally, she really misses her Hammel friends, which in part motivates her desire to return.

Family Ties

Father: Isaiah Jada
Mother: Madison Jada
Siblings: Gabriel Jada (twin brother), Destiny Jada (older sister)
Any Other Important People:
Isabela Monroe: (played by Eddie) The two of them met in their time at Hammel. Being the same age, they entered in the same year and shared many classes. They were very close, though they fell out of contact when they left for their respective colleges.
Grant Newberry: Evangeline's boyfriend in college. They were serious for several years, until he betrayed her and she broke up with him.
Evangeline is fairly close to her extended family as well, though listing all of them would be tedious.

History

Evangeline grew up in a working class family in Pennsylvania. Both parents worked to make ends meet for her and her two siblings, so she developed a degree of self-sufficiency from a young age. Sometimes her older sister Destiny would help take care of her and her twin brother Gabriel, who she was always close with. She always felt somehow off about being read as male, but her family was unconventionally open enough in their approach to gender roles that it didn’t fully hit her until she entered school. Evangeline was fairly unusual in that she came out to herself and those around her at an early age, experiencing powerful dysphoria about the way she was treated in elementary school. Also fairly unusual was her parents’ openness and acceptance. Seeing her dysphoria and the harassment she was receiving at school, they worked together with her to switch schools and make her transition as easy on her as possible.

Familial acceptance or otherwise, being a Black trans girl still had its fair share of issues, including harassment from students and resistance from the educational institutions she dealt with. Though she was presenting the way she wanted to in school, she went to school in fear that her peers would catch what was happening with her and her parents’ fights with the school system and bully her more ferociously.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to worry about that for too long. When Evangeline was 13, she started estrogen. Very shortly afterwards, her mother asked her to carry a bag of ice up from the basement so they could fill a cooler and have their annual picnic with extended family. She tried, but she inadvertently melted the whole bag on her way up the stairs. Throughout the entire picnic she was accidentally melting solids, freezing liquids, and even subliming some ice. It was obvious to her parents that something was up, and later that evening when the family was at home a Hammel recruiter showed up at their door to inform her that she had a rather unusual meta-power: state-of-matter manipulation.

Given Evangeline’s previous experience with schools, her parents were rightly concerned about sending their 13-year-old daughter off to a different state for school. However, the recruiter assured them that her trans status would not be an issue, and the school had had experience with trans students previously and knew what they were doing. So she left for Hammel, feeling apprehensive but also very excited.

In contrast to her former school experience, Hammel was startlingly accepting and understanding of her needs. Not all the students were, of course, and there were some hiccups with the institution - this was over a decade ago, after all - but it was overall a much better experience than she had ever had. Hammel was where she learned the ins and outs of her power and found a relatively safe place to explore her own self and find out what kind of woman she wanted to become. It was where she met most of her friends, including Isabela Monroe. The two bonded quickly and were close friends for the duration of their time at Hammel. The most embarrassing aspect of her time at Hammel was her brief flirtation with ideas around meta-supremacy. As someone who faced a lot of discrimination from many sources, it was tempting to believe she really was superior for her meta-human abilities. However, it wasn't long before she came to her senses and threw those ideas out, in part due to Isabela's strong egalitarianism (and strong negative reaction to the ideas that Evangeline proposed).

Through her exploration, Evangeline discovered her strengths and likes. In particular, she found that she had a powerful passion for justice and equality, and figured that she would want to spend much of her energy in activism. Other things, she found, she liked but didn't want to study in an institutional setting. There were various times when the institutionalization of learning rubbed up against her, and she began to form ideas about ways in which the institution could be changed or done away with to improve learning and encourage equality. Education, justice, and equality seemed to be her biggest passions, and though she had some issues with the education institution, she wanted to try to utilize it for positive ends as much as possible.

When her time at Hammel came to an end, Evangeline parted tearfully with the friends she had made. Contact information and fervent promises to stay in touch were exchanged before she returned to Pennsylvania for college.

While she got some financial aid, she had to take out some money in student loans as well. Evangeline took on a sizeable workload in her first year of college, and she began to fall out of contact with her Hammel friends, including Isabela. She was at college for a year before getting involved with another university student, a man by the name of Grant Newberry. That was also the year that Evangeline became more involved in activism, hoping to educate the general public about issues around racism, misogyny, transphobia, metaphobia, and especially the intersection of all four. While she spent a fair amount of time educating about these matters, she never explicitly revealed her trans status while doing so, and as a result most of those in her personal life didn’t know. Grant didn’t know until she told him, and he responded fairly well, though he obviously didn’t know much about the issues surrounding it.

Several years passed. Evangeline did well in her schooling and her activism, though she began to get burned out on educating others and began to doubt the value of focusing her energy on educating those outside of communities as opposed to helping those within communities. She and Grant became more serious and began to turn their thoughts to a future together. They started introducing each other to their respective social circles, and it really looked like they might have a life together.

That is, until Grant committed the unforgivable sin of outing her without her consent. It was mostly rooted in a misunderstanding: as she became more and more known for her activism, he was under the impression that most people knew she was trans, and thought he could bring it up in a discussion with one of his acquaintances. Evangeline was livid when she found out. Feeling utterly betrayed, she broke things off with him, fully intending to never see him again. However, the damage had still been done. On top of outing her without her permission, Grant had made a poor choice of who to out her to, and word began to spread. People began to look at her differently and whisper behind her back, and she began to fear for her safety. Unfortunately, those fears were entirely founded.

Word spread to an acquaintance of a friend of a roommate, a flagrant transmisogynist who knew Evangeline tangentially. In the spring of Evangeline’s senior year, he attacked her on a deserted street, leaving a long scar on her stomach. He ran off when she threatened him with a water bottle (she made the water boil and hurled some near him). She managed to call a friend who was at a nearby club, who rushed to her side and called 911. Evangeline was rushed to the hospital with her friend by her side, watching out for her and making sure she got the medical care necessary with a minimum of institutional discrimination on the part of the hospital.

The attack profoundly shook Evangeline. Her already limited trust in men in general – as well as white people - was shaken, as well as her faith in the concept of educating the masses about oppression. If even people like Grant could do something so unforgivable - with such deadly consequences - out of sheer ignorance, was it really worth focusing so much energy on educating the privileged rather than distributing vital resources and information to the oppressed? Her approach to activism radically changed, and her patience for privileged ignorance shortened to almost nothing. It wasn't worth her time or energy to deal with it, considering what it had led to in the past. She also started having nightmares about the attack, and found herself very triggered by encountering specific circumstances similar to those of the attack. However, she had neither the money nor the desire to enter the psychiatric system at that time, and had to learn to cope with her triggers on her own.

The confluence of factors - betrayal by and breakup with the man she thought was the love of her life, violent attack, PTSD symptoms - plunged her into a depression, and her grades dropped in her last semester of college. Fortunately, her grades had previously been high enough that it didn't affect her all that much academically. While she wasn't valedictorian, she graduated with honors, and spending quality time with family (who were very concerned for her in the aftermath of all that happened) in the following summer was a healing experience.

After she got her undergraduate degree (a Bachelor’s in Education as well as a Women’s Studies degree) she spent some time in Fasl (the meta school in Jordan) and later at Padhaai Guni (the school in India) acting as a diversity consultant. Evangeline spread herself much thinner in her time at Padhaai Guni considering how recently the school has been established, trying to help get the school established and running more smoothly. While she did her job well, she was notorious for having little patience for ignorance (and a short temper when pushed in that regard), and many regarded her as hard to work with. Some regarded her coldly and were cruel to her behind her back. This was much less pronounced at Padhaai Guni, the school where she spent more of her time, but wore on her nevertheless.

After a number of years at both schools, Evangeline grew increasingly frustrated with institutions of any sort, and trying to enact change through those institutions. The only thing left, it seemed, was to work directly with the people and groups she wanted to work with and benefit. Fondly remembering Hammel as a place where she could calm her reeling head and really get a good sense of herself and who she was, she made arrangements to move back to Hammel as a powers trainer. Also, she needed a steady job to pay off her student loans. She first visited her family in Pennsylvania, who were quite happy to see her after so much time spent away in other countries, then headed off to return to Pilot Ridge.

Roleplay Example

See Tori, Kimmy, or Alista (Orin also, no RP example for her tho)

What About You?

Name: lavender Purple
Age: A thoooousand years
Experience: A thooooousand more
How Did You Find Us? All along I believed I would find you
Ready To Play? Every hour has come to this

((I talked to Eddie about including Isabela in Evangeline's history, and she approves of this profile ^^))

[Evangeline B. Jada]

finisheddd

[Kallisti*]

Accepted!

Everything looks solid, so you know what to do!