Darcy Rose Bishop

[Darcy Bishop]

The easy S T U F F . . .

Name: Darcy Rose Bishop
Nickname: Darcy, Darcy Rose (mostly by her mother), Darce
Age: Seventeen
Member Group: Student
Power(s): Pyrokinesis, Pyric Mimicry [see below]
Play By: Niki Huey

Let it F L O W . . .

ABILITIES
Put simply, Darcy is a firestarter. She can create and manipulate fire. Over the years, she has fine-tuned her manipulation to such an extent that she can briefly shape it into animated creatures. She can still be burned; she is only immune to her own fire. Fire and heat from other sources can and will still burn her if she can't manipulate the fire away from her skin.

Her lack of control is her biggest weakness in terms of her abilities. Darcy has a tendency to combust when she becomes too stressed, particularly when the heightened emotions are fear or anger. This combustion is actually a very poorly controlled form of pyric mimicry, but it took some time and a fair bit of counseling and training before she learned that the explosions were not due to a lack of control of her pyrokinesis but a lack of control of this second ability.

Conceivably, she could one day take on a fire form voluntarily, but that is a long, long way off. She's fighting to learn NOT to use the ability when she's highly stressed; she has not even considered the possibility of learning to use the ability on command yet.

Still, even when she's not quite at risk of going up in flames, if her emotions start to run too high, she sparks. Embers drip from her hair or come off her skin. This "sparking" can happen even when she's experiencing strong happiness, though that occurs less frequently. It also tends to happen when she's actively using her powers. In the event that she does outright erupt, she tends to succumb to exhaustion. It takes her a day or two to regain her strength.

One side effect of these powers is that her normal body temperature runs warmer than most. She's almost always warm to the touch. She's miserable in cold weather and can't stand winters.

BIRTHDAYS
The Bishop family always took birthdays very seriously, celebrating with breakfast in bed for the birthday person, meals of their choice all day long, and embarrassing hourly serenades. Darcy doesn't do much for her birthday now, but she still insists on celebrating her brothers' and her friends' birthdays.

COUNSELING
Since her arrival at Hammel during the summer between sixth and seventh grade, Darcy has seen a counselor. At first, she attended mandatory counseling twice a week. When classes started, this slowed to once a week. Over the years, the frequency of her counseling sessions has decreased. She now sees the counselor once a month, barring any emergencies.

DISLIKES
Winter, raisins, celery, sushi, yellow, roaches, history, vinyl albums, shoes.

ELECTIVES
Darcy has chosen to take photography every year. She always considered other options, but she always went back to photography. She's just come to enjoy it. She has also completed two years of Spanish and one year of French. Darcy's not very good at retention with foreign languages, and she's far from conversational in either language, but she believes she has enough understanding of either language to at least get by if she ever found herself stranded in another country.

FAMILY
Darcy Rose was born to Richard and Kate Bishop. Rick was a police officer, and Kate owned a bakery. Darcy was their first child and only daughter. They later had three boys: one two years after Darcy's birth and twins a year after that. Darcy enjoyed a happy home life up until the day her father was killed. She was taken to Hammel Institute just a couple of days after that.

She stays in touch with her family over the Internet, and she calls home at least once a week. Her relationship with her mother became distant when she initially arrived at Hammel, because of Kate's uncertainty regarding her daughter's apparent abilities and because of Darcy's sense of loneliness and rejection when her mother sent her to Vermont. That relationship mended a bit when Darcy's brothers also proved, over the next few years, to be meta-humans. Today, Darcy's relationship with her mother is better, but there's still a fair bit of bitterness on Darcy's part, both for the way Kate handled things after Rick's death and for her apparent willingness, now, to accept her meta-human daughter now that her sons were also meta-humans.

GOALS
Despite being nearly done with her primary schooling, Darcy has no idea what she wants to do "when she grows up." When she was a kid, she wanted to train animals for a zoo or a theme park. Now, she thinks she'd like to work for Hammel, if at all possible. She suspects she's going to need some extra training when she finishes school, so her "plan" right now is to finish school, then get a bachelor's degree in... something. And continue training at Hammel in the meantime. She hopes that, by the time she finishes university, she'll have the qualifications necessary to take on a job at Hammel.

HINESVILLE
Darcy was born and raised in Hinesville, Georgia, population 30,000. She attended preschool through her family's church, and she completed elementary school and her first year of junior high school at Hosford Elementary and Junior High School. Her powers manifested over the summer, so she completed grades 7 through 11 at Hammel. She is about to start grade 12.

INSTRUMENTS
Rick and Kate encouraged their children to get involved in one sport and to pick up one artistic hobby. Darcy chose soccer and guitar. She's been putzing around with guitars since the age of seven, and she absolutely loves it. Her favorite music tends to feature unique guitar riffs or particularly interesting/catchy guitar solos.

LIKES
Blue, wood, worn T-shirts, hot chocolate, Polaroids, sweat pants, hot baths, Mexican food, slightly melted Coke Icees, breakfast foods.

MANIFESTATION
The sound of glass breaking woke Darcy up. At eleven years old, she understood what that noise meant: someone was trying to get into the house. She slid out of bed and padded quickly to the door of her tiny bedroom. When she opened the door just a crack and peeked outside, she saw her father coming out of her parents' bedroom, a gun clasped between his hands. Darcy closed the door almost completely as he passed, lest he shoo her back to bed. When he'd moved past her bedroom door, she peeked outside once more. Her father had moved out of the hallway, and Darcy tiptoed quickly forward to find him again.

No sooner did she reach the end of the hall than she heard two loud shots and a thump. She ran to the source of the noise and found her father crumpled on the kitchen floor and the back door wide open. Part of her wanted to fall to the floor beside her father, but the other part, the one wanted revenge, drove her out the back door after the shooter. Darcy ran after the fleeing shadow. She made it as far as the fence before the shooter turned, still moving, and put a bullet in her arm. The force of it knocked her back onto the ground, and Darcy's entire world became pain and grief and a horrible sense of failure that she had not caught the shooter.

It was all too much for eleven-year-old Darcy Rose to handle. She was only aware of everything hurting, and a rush of blinding heat overwhelmed her, and then everything went black. When Darcy woke up, she was in a hospital, and her mother introduced her to a representative from the Hammel Institute.

PROPHECIES (OR: 10 THINGS AN OLD (POSSIBLY CLAIRVOYANT) MAN WITH AN IMPOSSIBLY LONG BEARD WOULD TELL HER)

• "Control of your emotions will be paramount for your survival."
  
• "You have a gift for music, but you will never use it to its fullest potential."
  
• "You are not naturally a hard woman; time and events have made you that way."
  
• "In fact, you have a big heart. You are well suited to a career helping people."
  
• "You are fiercely protective of the people close to you, but it is very difficult to become one of those people."
  
• "You are very responsible; you will do what you must when you must."
  
• "You believe that the rules do not apply to you. You will bend the rules or go outside of the law to do what you feel must be done."
  
• "You seldom forgive, and you never forget. You hold grudges for life. You must work on this, lest your hate fester and become venom in your heart."
  
• "You will be a wonderful mother if you open yourself to the possibility."
  
• "You will blame yourself every day of your life for things you can not possibly be held responsible for, unless you learn to forgive."
  

QUILT
Darcy's bed is covered with a very large patchwork quilt given to her by her godmother when she was a girl. It's blue and green and white, and Darcy loves to curl up under it and watch movies when it's cold or rainy outside.

RELIGION
In the Bishop household, as in many Southern households, Sunday mornings meant church. Darcy regularly attended church with her family as a kid. It was more of a cultural practice than a religious one; Sunday morning church was just a normal part of life. The Bishops regularly went to lunch with other families from the church after the service, or, during the fall, the dads would go watch football while the moms took the children to the beach or the park.

Still, she did grow up in a house that held onto liberal-moderate Christian values and beliefs. Darcy identifies herself as agnostic now; she has too much trouble with her father's death and the standard doubts many teenagers and young adults experience to comfortably identify herself as a Christian. Even so, for the the first eleven years of her life, she was at church with her family almost every Sunday.

SCHOOLING
Darcy generally passes her classes. She doesn't make excellent grades, but she's never failed a class, either. Sure, she's failed assignments and tests, but she always gets her act together just enough to pass the class with average or slightly above average grades.

TACO TUESDAYS
Taco Tuesdays were a tradition in the Bishop household. Tuesday evenings were the one night during the week when all six Bishops had to be home so that they could all eat dinner together. Kate Bishop sometimes elected to make quesadillas or burritos, instead of tacos, but the cuisine was always Mexican or TexMex in origin. The years of Taco Tuesdays gave Darcy an undying love of Mexican food.

VACATIONS
Childhood vacations typically consisted of day trips to Savannah or to the beach. One year, the Bishops indulged in annual passes to Disney and took multiple trips to Orlando to visit the theme parks there. Other vacations included trips to Colorado to visit Rick's parents, California to visit Kate's parents, and trips to Atlanta. Darcy also visited Washington, D.C., on a weekend field trip in fifth grade.

WARDROBE
Mostly, Darcy's day-to-day wardrobe consists of jeans and fitted T-shirts. She dislikes shoes, preferring to go barefoot, but she has a couple pairs of Converse sneakers that she's broken in enough for them to be comfortable. In winter, she covers up with a hoodie and either a thigh-length coat or a blazer. She likes to layer short-sleeve shirts over longer shirts, frequently with wrist warmers under the sleeves. Even if the temperature only drops to the 30s, she layers up.

X-TRACURRICULARS
The only extracurricular activity Darcy has chosen to get involved with is soccer. She's been playing for the soccer team since her third year at Hammel. When she's not in class, she spends her time practicing guitar, studying, reading, or hanging around the student lounge.

ZODIAC
Aries is the first sign of the Zodiac and governs the head. Positive characteristics of Aries include courage, enthusiasm, idealism, charisma, quick wits, an ability to "think on one's feet," leadership potential, exuberant energy, zeal, and innocence. Negative traits include selfishness, tactlessness, egocentrism, an inability to save money, impetuousness, a hot temper, combativeness, oversensitivity, carelessness, and cruelty.

Behind the M A S K . . .

Name: Statler
Age: Mid-twenties
RP Experience: Years and years and years. Prefer to play at intermediate level for ease.
How did you find us?: Tony posted in my site search on Caution!

Show your S K I L L S . . .

Show us a sample of your rp talents. Don't worry about any fancy coding, just give us text. It can be from another site, but we'd like to see you with this character. It's up to you though. Just make sure it is a realistic average post for you, not the one time you wrote three thousand words.

I have a writing gallery at ATF. If you'd like to see more samples, please feel free to browse through the pieces listed there. This is not a Darcy piece, but it's pretty representative of my average post.

- - - - -

"Tired" did not even come close to describing Pepper Potts. She was worn right the hell out. In the past couple of days, she had (A) been promoted to CEO of one of the largest companies in the world, (B) delivered the Iron Man suit to her boss mid-drag race and then seen both sides of the car she was in shaved off by lightning whips while she was still inside, (C) tried and failed to prevent her completely wasted boss from destroying his entire home at his birthday party, (D) been attacked by heavily armed robots and almost blown up, (E) been scooped up and flown out of harm's way by her boss, (F) quit her job as CEO of one of the largest companies in the world and (G) kissed her boss.

Pepper Potts was more than tired. She was exhausted. All she really wanted was to devote a full week to sleep in a fluffy king-size bed. Of course, given that her boss was Tony Stark, that was never going to happen, but she could dream. Or... she could if she could stay asleep, even on the couch with Tony's head cradled in her lap. Sleep was sleep.

Unfortunately for Pepper, something--some feeling of dread--was nagging at her, and she was slowly regaining consciousness. This wasn't a new sensation for Pepper; after all, she did work for Tony. The sensation that WAS new was the wet, grimy slime slowly enveloping her. As soon as that clicked, Pepper was irreparably awake.

Somehow, she was not on Tony's couch anymore. She wasn't even in his house anymore. Somehow, she... and Tony!?... were now in a swamp. And sinking. Pepper would be very upset about the state of her ever expensive clothes later; right now, she had to do something. The grime was inching up to her waist and had already covered Tony's cheek.

"Tony!" she yelled, desperate to wake him. Suddenly fueled by adrenaline, she pulled him up sharply so that he didn't drown in the muck--at least, not yet. Pepper hauled his arm around her shoulders to hold him up, but she sank a little bit deeper as a result. She looked around frantically; she needed something to hold onto or even to pull the two of them out of the swamp with.

[Admin!]

Accepted!

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