Nickname/Alias: Switch
Name: Mackenzie Morgan. Except, she won't answer to that. Ever.
Aliases: None she responds to, but "female suspect" features on several police reports.
Age: 16
Height: 5 ft 2 ins
Weight: 110 lbs
Hair: Black? Purple? Neon Green? It changes so often the real shade may be a deeply held secret.
Eyes: They're meant to be blue. She uses coloured contacts a lot. So... little pentagrams? Kitty-cat eyes? Whatever!
Complexion: She tends to wear too much makeup. She seems naturally pale, though.
Sexuality: Switch is homosexual. It is just another reason why she despises her overly-prejudiced parents.


Appearance: Switch isn't big, or muscular, but she nevertheless seems to occupy a lot of space. Her appearance always makes a statement, and it is usually expressed pretty loudly. Her baseline look is 90s gothic. Lots of torn clothes, several different shades of black, crazy hair, and a fair amount of bracelets and necklaces. Big stompy boots, stripy socks (usually unmatched) and makeup that looks like someone smashed her in the face with a Lacuna Coil album. It is matched with a fairly forthright and aggressive personality. So, the fact that she is barely over five feet tall, and pretty petite, can get overshadowed by her room-filling personality.

Her voice has a broad Louisiana drawl. And wherever she goes, she has a big rucksack filled with... stuff. Weird stuff. A baseball bat - for self defence, presumably. Half a brick, a few tennis balls, and for some reason, several cucumbers. Don't ask why. The answer might be unsavoury.


Personality: Switch comes across as being outgoing, a little obnoxious, and filled with unsatisfied teen rebellion urges. She likes to make out she is self-reliant and can handle anything. In reality, she is uncertain, fragile, and trying to keep up a mask of bravado to make up for the fact that her life has been pretty awful, and has left her very hurt inside. The result is someone who can be a bit quick to take offence, and really annoying at times. She likes to poke at her friends. It may be in jest, but she can go too far at times. On the other hand, if someone so much as looks funny at her chosen friends and family, she will go completely apeshit. She's the only one allowed to behave that way, and anyone who hurts those she holds dear - or somehow gets on her metaphorical blacklist - is going to get a tiny goth forehead to the nose.



Mutant Powers:

• Matter Displacement - Switch can instantaneously swap the physical location of objects at will. To the observer, it is as if they simply vanish, change places, and re-materialise, in less than a heartbeat. She could swap a banana in her hand for an assailant's gun, or swap a speeding car with one parked by the side of the road. However, like all powers, hers has to obey the fundamental laws of physics.
  
  Firstly, objects that are switched need to be roughly the same in terms of physical properties. They must therefore satisfy at least one of the following characteristics:
  - similar size. A lunchbox with a cushion, for example. Or a shotgun for a baguette. If they take up very similar space, and are very roughly the same shape, they can be swapped.
  - similar mass. In this context, it is important to stess that mass is not the same as weight. Because of the way her power works (by passing through an alternate, pocket universe) mass in this context is defined using the laws of mass-energy equivalence. Or, simply put, the objects need to have approximate values of electronvolt mass. Consequently, an incredibly dense substance could be exchanged with a far less dense substance with a very different size. The size difference is trumped by the equivalent electronvolt mass.
  
  Switched objects also retain the effects of motion that were already acting upon them. A speeding car may be moved to a new location, but it retains momentum, so wherever it appears, it will continue traveling at the velocity it had before being switched. Which is very bad news for someone if their vehicle is placed on the edge of a cliff, or facing a large wall. Similarly, a bullet might be pointed in a different direction, but it is going to be moving. Anyone in the path will still get shot.
  
  In situations where there are no easily switchable items on hand, chunks of the local scenery may suffice. Someone may find that the gun in their hand has become an oddly shaped lump of concrete. However, this is a much more difficult and tiring application of the power, and has a tendency to have very unpredictable side-effects. The aforementioned gun may now be lodged inside a concrete wall, but the process of switching the two objects might destabilise the entire wall, causing it to collapse. Which could be dreadful in scope, if the wall happens to be load bearing. Emergency switching is only to be attempted in the direst circumstances.
  
  
• Transport Others - Although she cannot transport herself, Switch can relocate people using her power. If she can sense two people (including over cameras) she can swap them over. As a rule, human beings are close enough in nature to qualify under the laws that make her power work, as a few inches in height, and a few pounds in weight, will not upset her abilities. Those transported still have to go through the transportation process, however. (See below.)
  
  
• The Pocket Universe - Switch's power works by sending the first (object) item into a separate universe, and then popping it out in the location of the second (target) item. In return, the target item is sucked into the pocket universe, and moved into the exact spot vacated by the object item. To an observer, it seems that they instantly swap places. However, the laws of physics inside the pocket universe are slightly different, so objects being switched may spend more time inside the universe than it appears from an external viewpoint. For inanimate objects, this is unimportant. If a sentient creature, like a human, is switched, they may find themselves being rushed at great speeds through a swirling green and purple vortex. It can be disorienting, and this should be kept in mind for those who are then returned to the normal universe at the end of the process.
  
  There may be other things in the pocket universe. Switch cannot see inside it personally, so has no idea what else might live there...

Other Skills: Switch can survive on the streets very well. She can beg and panhandle if she has to, but she tends to be more self-reliant. She can open many kinds of locks, and is a fairly adept pickpocket. She's also good at running, especially in urban environments. It's not exactly parkour, but she can vault fences and leap across fire escapes with the best of them, if she has the right incentive. She can also punch, kick, and bite, and shoot a pistol.

Weaknesses: Switch is feisty as hell, fiercely protective of her friends, and has a very quick temper. What she doesn't have is the following:

- Muscles. Sure, she can throw a punch, but she doesn't hae the bodyweight to back it up. In a stand up fight, she's almost certainly going to be the loser. Unless she cheats. (She usually cheats...)

- An off switch. She is in your face, and frequently irritating, all of the time. She almost certainly has untreated ADHD, and it takes a lot to keep her focussed on things unless she personally finds them interesting or important. The result is that some of her academic work is good, and some is cringeworthy. Possibly even diabolically bad.

- The ability to read other people. Switch is not selfish. And she can see when someone is really upset, or angry, or laughing. But the quantity of empathy that others have passed her by. She can never tell if she is going too far with the joke. And subtle emotional cues fly right over her head. It is too early to tell if she is autistic, or a bona fide sociopath or psychopath. Testing her never goes well, she simply clams up and refuses to cooperate. But her records will probably include serious concerns that she may actually be a sociopath. She has not yet been medicated, as interfering with mutants in puberty NEVER ends well. Screwing up her brain with chemicals might cause any number of unwanted effects. She does have weekly mandatory counselling at the school, though, whether she likes it or not.

Previous History: Switch was born into a fairly normal family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Normal parents with normal jobs, a normal school, normal siblings. Anyone less likely to have radical life-changing events would probably be harder to find. And, because they were so "normal" they had a lot of white privilege, and associated prejudices. They weren't racist, they had so many non-white friends! Not homophobic, nope, though they wouldn't want any of their children to be that way, of course. And other similar clichés. But they drew the line at mutants. They went on the anti-mutant rallies, had stickers on their car, and her parents proudly voted Republican at every turn, without even caring about policy.

So, this caused a lot of problems when, aged thirteen, their eldest daughter started to display some pretty weird traits. The usual run of pissed off teenage hormones, of course, but also... stuff started to go missing. Or odd things would show up. More than once she was hauled off to see the Principal at school for stealing, when she was adamant she hadn't done anything at all. And it was at home, too. After months of what her parents thought were stupid pranks, things started to get serious. The critical point came when her father wanted to find his briefcase. And when he went to get it, all he could find was... a dead raccoon. The inevitable argument boiled down to accusations, yelling on all sides, and protestation of innocence that fell on deaf ears. The final salvo left no doubt as to what was wrong with their daughter. She screamed "Get the fuck away from me!" And teleported her father out into the street. Which meant that she had just dumped a fully blooming rose bush into the middle of the house. There was a pause, and then everyone started screaming at once.

After that, it went from bad to worse. Punishment did not help. Forcing her to take lithium didn't kill her powers - it made her more likely to use them without any feelings of remorse. After months of all sorts of humiliating treatment, they eventually arranged for her to go to a "special hospital" where they could give her new drugs and - and this was important - they could pray the mutant out of her. And to ensure she would go, her family tried to lock her into her room to prevent escape.

But it is almost impossible to keep her anywhere she doesn't want to be. Her powers were new and not too accurate, but she could switch in more or less anything she needed to escape. And so, after a small time of seeming to be compliant, she simply packed up what few things she could not leave behind, and left. She had no clue how to survive on her own, but she knew damn well she was not going to live the way her family intended.

She learned to survive the hard way - mostly through abuse, going hungry, sleeping in wet doorways, and being thoroughly miserable. She had no plans about what to do next. She did meet a couple of sympathetic people who were likewise homeless. They gave her good advice - though a lot of it included "Just go home" which was never going to happen. After a month or so, where she learned how hard her family were trying to find her when she saw her own poster stuck on a wall, she decided to leave town for good.

Her idea was to get to California. It seemed like some liberal promised land to her, raised as she was far in the South, in the right-wing heartlands. She managed to alter her appearance enough with hair dye and makeup, so she looked somewhat older, and not like herself - a practice she has kept up for so long that her real appearance would probably startle even her. She used what little money she could scrounge to get a coach ticket, and left town.

Her money wouldn't get her all the way, of course. It got her as far as Texas. But even one State over was better than staying where she was. Stuck in Dallas, she found that her attempts to raise the rest of the money were somewhat harder. Maybe the people were not as nice, or they didn't like her weird goth vibe. She had real struggles to raise money to keep alive. And there were a lot of gangs of homeless or street-level hoodlums. More than once she ended up fighting, and she tended not to come out of it very well.

She might have ended up in very serious trouble, or worse, if she had not been picked up by one of the local mutant groups. They were not much better off than she was, living in a derelict warehouse in a part of town that looked like "condemned" would have been a step up for them. But they were able to give her shelter, and food. And teach her how to survive. And most of all - how to properly develop her abilities.

That was two years ago.

She's grown in a lot of different ways, and become very skilled in her own particular areas of expertise. While crime was not something she wanted to turn to, she found she had a knack. Sure, picking locks or pockets was not without risks. But with her special skills, certain crimes became very easy - and almost entirely without risk to anyone. She could walk down the road, see something nice in a shop window, and walk on by. At night, she could walk past again, and without breaking step, switch out the nice thing for some old piece of garbage. She was able to steal a lot of things, and a fair number of them were very valuable. Of course, pawning or fencing them meant she never got anything like their real value, but when she had no overheads or risks, she did not mind. She actually did very well out of it - she certainly had more income than any of her street-begging friends could ever aspire to. A lot, she kept. The rest, she pumped into the funds kept by her mutant protection group. She was able to get nicer clothes. Smarten herself up. She still looked like Marilyn Manson's kid sister, but she did it with style, not just cruddy clothes out of a dumpster. This made it easier for her to access better places - and, of course, to steal from them.

When someone showed up to take her to a safer place, she was not entirely convinced, but went to the Haven anyway, as it was getting increasingly hot for her where she was. A new place, who had new people who did not know her face, or her tendency to steal anything not nailed down, was a better thing all around. Whether she will thrive in a more stable environment remains to be seen.