Name: Katelyn Palmer aka “Kat”

Age: looks like 30s but is much older

Gender: female

Sexuality: Hetero

Profession: Private Investigator

Type of Variation/Abilities: Seeker

Appearance: Dark hazel eyes stand out against the dark hair framing her face, with just enough waviness to make it interesting. Her full lips and smooth skin are most often seen in a neutral position, making people wonder if she’s smiled a day in her life. She has, but only a select few know that her eyes light up as the smile takes over her entire face, as if it nearly transforms her into a different person.

Standing at an average height, Katelyn tends to blend into a crowd easily, allowing her to pass unnoticed much easier. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t know how to attract attention when the situation asks for it. Her athletic build and years of practice provide Katelyn with the necessary skills to fit into most situations seamlessly.

Personality: Kat has a knack for understanding people that goes beyond simply imagining herself in their shoes. She can sense some of what they are feeling, but usually only as glimmers of the emotion when she focuses. She can understand the logic behind someone’s actions, and what might have caused them to take such measures.  While this is usually helpful in her line of work, Kat finds herself struggling sometimes. She understands where the Scientists and Researchers are coming from, and why they want to know what they do. However, she still finds their methods abhorrent, a conflict that has sometimes put her at odds with people that don’t get how she can see both sides of the coin at the same time.

Because of this, Kat can sometimes come off as stoic when really she just needs a break from feeling all the time. While she often disappears from time to time, there is still no one better to understand where one is coming from.

Strengths:
          Seeker - Can sense variations in others and how strong, but not what they can do.

          Empathic - Can sense emotions in others as faint glimmerings, but has been around long enough to read them much more accurately than their faintness implies.

          Blends In - Whether it be a crowd or a dark street, a high society party or deep in the slums, Katelyn can look like she belongs there.

          Prolonged Lifespan - Kat ages slower than others, something she has realized, but doesn’t speak about. More due to other things going on being more important, and it’s not polite to ask a woman her age.

Weaknesses: Katelyn can get overwhelmed if there are a lot of people or high emotions in too close a space, often resulting in a migraine and confusion over which ones are hers if it gets bad enough. While she can read people’s emotions, she cannot read the mind, leaving her with sensing the emotion, but not the cause unless it’s physically obvious or the person tells her.

Kat also gets panic attacks and nightmares that seem to come out of the blue. They aren’t tied to anything related to the day, as she can have a calm day and they still might happen.

History: Kat grew up in the Hope Decks, so long ago she doesn’t quite recall her childhood. Most of her life has been a series of survival, moving from one place to the next, trying to make enough to get by, even from what she can remember of her childhood.

She remembers nightmares and panic from a young age, not constantly, but fairly often. As she grew, she started to understand that it wasn’t necessarily caused by anything happening around her, leaving her and her parents with more questions than answers, while trying to ease the struggles caused as much as possible.

That is, until her late teens when someone from the Prosperity Decks arrived, wanting to talk to her parents about something. The men arrived in suits and ties, promising compensation for some study. Kat wasn’t in the room at the time, only hearing some snippets. As the voices rose, however, she peered down the hall to see what was going on, only for her mom to scream at her to run and never look back as her parents were all but dragged from the house.

Kat listened.

She ran, and when she found herself too exhausted to run, she found others who were running as well. She learned that her story wasn’t unusual, that others had a similar experience of loved ones going missing, of people in suits, stories of a study or research. The more she looked into it, the more Kat realized this was common, but only to people who had certain abilities.

In the process of meeting others, Kat encountered a man who went by Doc, having brought him a woman who had been badly injured trying to get away from the researchers. He healed the woman, and while she rested, Kat spoke with Doc, long into the night. As time went by and more and more people were needing to be saved, the idea of the Underground formed, Kat working with others to turn it into a functional system where people could hide when hunted.

As time went by, Kat grew to rely on Doc, trusting him to help when she needed it. Trusting him to help when the migraines came, even if it was only his quiet company that he could offer. Trusting him with the secret of her nightmares and panic attacks. So many people rely on her, that Kat feels like it is too much of a weakness, too much of a risk to let it be known she has them. But when she slipped past once with a wild look in her eyes as she all but ran until he found her curled under a desk, shaking like a leaf, she felt an explanation was due, since he watched over her though the night, sitting up with her through the nightmares that followed.

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