#about volt

Did she ever have a run-in with the cops? Considering how YOUNG she is, what’s she planning to do with her life? What was her favorite subject in school, what are her favorite bands?

Oh boy, HAS SHE EVER. Technically, Volt is on the lam for a long list of reasons: Petty theft, destruction of property (public and school), disorderly conduct, curfew violations, minor in possession of alcohol, and she is also classed as a runaway.

She hadn’t really decided what she wanted to do with her life before her mutant abilities manifested. She was still in high school with plenty of time before university, with her favourite subjects being chemistry and biology. The requisite number of volunteer hours (to pad out any college applications, of course) were met by spending time at the local animal shelter, which made her think maybe she’d like to be a vet someday. Now, she just wants to find a place to call home that will not only accept her mutation & identity, but embrace & celebrate them. Maybe once she finds that kind of safety, stability, and connection, then she’ll start thinking about what she wants to do with her life.

Presently, she not-so-subtly idolizes the vigilante superhero groups like the X-Men and Avengers. She thinks she’s chill about them but she totally isn’t; given half a chance, she’d go full fangirl at the opportunity to meet one of them.

AS TO HER FAVOURITE BANDS… I would say she strongly favors bands like The Shondes (here’s their song On Your Side), Austra (Utopia), and CREƎP (Day). Plenty of EDM and punk on her playlists!!

What were her teenage years like?

Now, I’m still undecided as to her age. At first I just matched her age with her FC, but… still mulling over some character pieces. She’s either going to be in her late teens or early 20s, we’ll see! But for the most part, her home life was troubled, turbulent, and abusive. Her parents thought they were good people, but they most assuredly were not. Even before her mutation manifested, she was already acting out at school and often clashed with peers and teachers who didn’t think well of outcasts, which only served to further heighten tensions at home.

What can she do, what can’t she do?

Right now, she can conjure up limited amounts of electricity, but control/manipulate existing power sources with more oomph. Volt’s pretty new to her abilities, so presently her talents lie in things like: charging dead batteries, temporarily powering devices that aren’t plugged in, and blowing things up. In classic X-men style, a lot of her powers get a boost from emotional overload and can cause a ton more destruction.

Eventually, with lots more practice and hopefully some training, a long way down the line she’s going to be able to manifest an electrical form and actually possess devices or travel through wires, call down lightning, and someday? Potentially begin manipulating people’s bioelectricity. Having any of that under control is late-game Volt, though she may manifest some of it occasionally in bad situations (probably to very destructive results, haha.)

How did she realize that she’s capable of all these things? Are there moments when her abilities conflict with mundane tasks?

It started off innocuous and simple. Whenever she made skin-to-skin contact with people, through something as simple as passing a pencil (for example), they got a little shock sometimes. No big deal. Then her devices started behaving… strangely. Sometimes they’d drain in 20 minutes, even when she wasn’t using it. Sometimes the battery wouldn’t go down for the *whole day.*  Her home computer fried itself pretty thoroughly while she was working on a particularly exhausting/vexing assignment for school and occasionally the computers she used at school would randomly shut themselves off. She blamed it on cheap, old tech most of the time. And shocking people? Just static shock, happens to everyone sometimes.

But then things started to get… odd. When she became upset over something, she found that lights began to flicker. The first couple times, she wrote it off as bad wiring. When it continued to happen, she and other people began to notice. Slowly, she realized she could make the lights flicker on command if she focused really intensely. This lead to experiments with other things until she was certain she could control electricity. She was a mutant.

The stronger her abilities grew in practice, the more often they manifested without her permission. All too soon, it became impossible to hide from people who spent any significant amount of time around her. Growing pains weren’t subtle!

I’m sort of toying with the idea that maybe she tried to take on her electrical form way too early and lost her left arm to the ether in the process. I’m still mulling that over.

What’s, in her opinion, the greatest advantage and the greatest disadvantage of her skills?

Honestly, Volt would tell you the only downside is other people. She is fiercely proud of what she can do and thinks there’s a lot of ways her powers could be used. Sure, she’s the first to admit she doesn’t have it all on lockdown yet, but she’ll get there.