* Name: Julie Parish
* Codename: Blackout
* Age: 18
-- Looks --
* Hair: Jet black, long.
* Eyes: Totally matt black eyes, no reflections, like black holes in her
head.
* Height: 5'4"
* Weight: Seven and a half Stone
Appearance: Very pale skin, usually dressed in black often with some kind of gothic feel to both the clothes and any makeup she happens to be wearing. Lately she has been wearing more color, usually deep purples and reds. She still likes to wear big heavy black boots however. Julie has a collection of strange, funny and or sick slogan bearing T-shirts.
* Special features: Julie has many small scars on her arms and legs, acid burns from Murderworld.
-- Personal --
* Personality: When she first arrived Julie was very insular, very withdrawn, however she has overcome much of her early problems. She is now more vocal, more confident, more able to stand up for herself and believes in herself again. She is still fairly quiet, likes to listen and watch before committing herself to something unfamiliar or rash.
However she is able to state opinions and talk to people now. She is active in class, and is fast becoming a valuable and effective member of the school.
* Phobias: Julie has a number of traits that are hold overs from her days as a morlock, none now strong enough to be considered phobias, but enough to affect her behavior.
* Likes/dislikes: Julie loves reading, listening to all kinds of music, talking and listening to her friends, training with the teachers especially Mr. Logan. She loves swimming in the pool, and walking in the grounds. She adores riding on the schools motorbikes, but lacks the confidence to control the machines herself.
She hates Beta's, dislikes the Frost kids. She doesn't care for loud opinionated shallow people who don't take the time to listen to others. People who are too wrapped up in themselves really irritate Julie.
* Favorite pastime: There are a great number of things that Julie really enjoys. She doesn't really have one favorite, but many things that she loves more or less equally.
-- Powers --
* Powers: Julie is blind. Her body is filled with darkness, an all pervading impenetrable darkness. It is in her eyes, and if you look hard enough, down her thought. Which makes surgery hard. Still by touch this darkness can pass into others. Their eyes go totally black, which though a cool effect, and sometimes handy at parties, also denies that person sight. The effects can last up to four hours before the darkness dissipates, slowly fading away over time, the last quarter of which light starts to seep slowly and lazily through the gloom. She can bleed the darkness into the air around her. It will totally block out all light, and any light based devices, out to up to a sixty meter radius around her, though thirty to forty meters diameter is far more likely. She has been experimenting lately with directing the darkness more closely. She is showing rapid improvement in being able to direct tendrils and offshoots of the dark. This is something that still requires a lot of concentration. Julie can see. To a certain extent. Her human eyes are totally useless, clogged permanently as they are with the darkness. However in some strange fashion, similar to radar or lidar, Julie can see. However she can see shapes and forms only. Small surface detail is visible to her with a little concentration, and she can read
Braille just by 'looking' at it. However to scan closely Julie must be in close proximity to her subject, within around two meters or so. Color and any two dimensional images are lost to her. She can find her way about right enough, but she cannot watch television, read print, signs or billboards. She can't use a computer.. One advantage she has however is that the ability works in a sphere around her with a diameter of one hundred meters, and is somewhat penetrating. While it means she cannot see beyond that distance even while out in the open air, it does mean she can see though most walls and doors, ceilings, thin metal sheeting etc.
Julie, thus far only once, has also been the recipient of precognitive visions. The vision she experienced was almost certainly of a possible future, however it was the kind of experience that Julie herself is not keen to soon repeat.
Julie's hearing is very good, and she is also very good at telling who people are from their body shape, their stance, the way they carry themselves. She has adapted well to her powers coupled with her blindness. Thanks to her time in the Morlock tunnels Julie has the ability to move almost silently. This is not really something she does consciously, she sneaks habitually, for two years of her life it was a survival trait, and its a very hard habit to break.
* Weakness: Julie is unable to read, watch TV, or 'see' anything else that requires normal color vision. Her 'scanning' is very limited in range. She can find her way about, but is very much legally blind.
* Control: Julie has recently been learning how to control the shape of the dark clouds that she creates. Formerly only able to create spherical clouds of the stuff she is lately learning how to direct things. Her control of her scanning abilities is very good, she can read Braille from across a room if she puts in the required level of concentration. Concentrating on small details however detracts from her overall 360' view.
-- Family --
* Mother: Deceased
* Father: Deceased
* Brothers: None
* Sisters: None
* History: Julie grew up as the only child of a middle class family in the south coast UK city of Brighton. Her home life was happy and normal enough, until her school was rocked by the news that one of the sixth formers was a mutant. The school was called into assembly and the head teacher told the whole school how it was important to be tolerant of others, and that people should be judged on individual merit. None of which stopped the student in question being hounded from the school, and from the city, by the weight of public opinion. Julie knew however that it could never happen to her, and at least she had not been involved in any of the name calling and bullying... Her exams out of the way, Julie returned just the once to her school, to return all her textbooks. The assembly hall was full of her contemporaries all doing the same thing.
Julie was standing there in the middle of the hall, wandering which table to go to first, which one of her old teachers she should face first, when it started happening. It was subtle at first, a darkness at the edge of her vision, crowding in on her. Raised voices around her went beyond notice as things rapidly deteriorated until she was completely blind, plunged into a shroud of total darkness. Julie collapsed into a heap right there on the floor, totally confused.
Confusion turned to horror, somehow her sight had been taken from her, and people around her were screaming... Which was odd. She started to become aware of the darkness around her, the sphere of dark that had leaked out of her, she was not sure how she knew about it, but it was there. It was her. She was doing it, she was the reason people were screaming. She had to try to bring this back under control, to regain a normal life, draw it all back inside before everyone started pointing fingers and calling her names...
The humiliation started soon after, and only became worse as the months went on. It was not long before her parents were desperately looking for ways to insulate their daughter from all the abuse. The information pack arrived from Xavier's School for the Gifted about the same time that
Julie started to see shapes and outlines. Much deliberation followed, and more than one phone call to the professor himself. It was decided in the end that the best policy would be for the whole family to visit the school, with the professor picking up the tab. The family took the opportunity to turn the whole thing into a holiday. Landing in Florida they took a week in Orlando, doing all the usual touristy things, crawling round the theme parks mostly. Then it was off up to JFK in New York, the plan was for them to take a couple of days in the big apple.
To see the sights, then to hire a car and drive to Westchester, stopping off in a couple of places on the way. However on their first night, staying in a motel in Queens the night was shattered, as was the building. One of the giant robot army known as the Sentinel's landed directly on the building. The room Julie's parents were staying in was one of those crushed. Julie herself barely escaped with her life, fleeing into the night wearing only her nightclothes. A cold metallic voice ringing out behind her, 'Mutant Subject Julie Parish Not Found. Unit Returning To Base.'
Julie was picked up a couple of hours later by a scouting party of fellow mutants, Morlocks, outcasts who choose to live in the myriad tunnels and chambers deep beneath the city. These were 'Beta's the outcasts of the unwanted. They were vicious, callous, using Julie for their own ends, planning to discard her once they had become bored with their new toy. She was saved by a young Morlock calling himself Sticks, who became a firm friend, who she still communicates with on occasion. Julie spent two years down in those tunnels, learning to live the life of the hunted, the unwanted, the mistrusted. When she was rescued by the
X-Men, by accident, two years later she had been deeply scared by her experiences of the last two years.
Julie had a brief relationship with former student Sheila Grant, which ended when Sheila left the school. Julie is now open about her status as being the token Blind English bi girl at the school. After all, every school should have one.
Xavier Background:- Julie has been with the X-Men for over a year now. When she first arrived she lived in the basement of the mansion, insular, shy and quiet. However she has come a long way from those early days, moving out of the underground into one of the dorm rooms upstairs. She has recovered a lot from her experiences prior to arriving at the house of Xavier.
Financial Background:- Julie has taken delivery of the total estate of her parents following their deaths. The amount, a sum that had been waiting for her in a high interest account till she was either found, or declared legally dead, came in at around seven hundred thousand pounds. Having transferred that sum to the US, where she now has a student permanent resident status, she is now a minor millionaire. A fact that she is not in the least happy about, or proud of. She sees that inheriting the money from the death of her parents, deaths that she herself feels partly responsible for, an bit of an insult to their memory.
