Raven Rander

[Raven Rander]

Raven Lucy Rander
FACE CLAIM: Alecia Beth Moore.
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AGE:
19
GENDER: Female
ORIENTATION: bisexual
POSITION: Student, BA- College

POWER: 

Animal shapeshifting-Bear: Raven has the abiltiy to transform herself into a fully grown grizzly bear at will. To do so she concentraites on the task and takes around 5 minutes to complete.

Once done she has the strength and endurance of the animal, and is able to run at 65km an hour, even uphill. (but due to a lack of endurance in the species can only sustain this for minutes at the time.)

Her senses in this form are inhanced, giving her excelent night vision and a sense of smell more powerful then that of a hound, letting her follow scents for miles.

In her animal form, Raven looses a large part of her personality and inteligence to the animal, mostly due to her brain being altered during the change. Raven experiences being a bear as like a vivid dream, one where she isn't completly in control and not able to act 100% rationally. While she is able to open unlocked doors or remember how sliding fences and the like work, her bear form is incable of even turning a key to free herself from a room. Likewise using any kind of tool or electronic is beyond her in this state. Raven isn't really dangerous when transformed. most of her changes have been little more then her heading off into the woods near the school to look for food, or to just curl up somewhere and nap for an hour.

The transformation does not get rid of the hair dye Raven uses, as a result it is extremely easy to tell if it is her or a wild bear by looking to see if the fur on its head is bright red or not.

Raven does understand English as a bear, which does not mean the same thing as her current animal mind-set judging it important.  .as she forgets a large part of being human in this state, more akin to judging things on the terms of what matters to an animal. Technical words or ones to do with things her bear state does not recognise as important are forgotten as soon as they are heard. "there's food behind that tree" will stick with her and make her go investigate. "there's a computer behind that tree" means nothing of significance and so she will act as if she didn't hear it.

LIMITATIONS:

The process of changing is very painful for her as she feels her entire body grow and change in unnatural directions.

Transforming takes all of her consentration, so major distractions will cause the process to take much longer and be a lot more painful.

Once she has started to transform she can not stop herself from finishing and has to go through with it.

While as a bear, Ravens behaviour towards people is an extreamly watered down version of how she trully feels towards them. To people she likes, Raven will act friendly. If Raven trully trusts or cares about a person, her bear form will even obey most reasonable requests from them, although enough of Raven's mind remains that she will not do anything Raven would usually find degrading or immoral. If Raven does not know or does not care about someone, they will find her ignoring them unless they instigate interaction, and may consider very simple requests, such as being asked to move from her current spot, or to leave an animal alone. If Raven dislikes someone, her bear form will growl at the sight of them, and either back away, or try and make them leave her alone. For those very few Raven hates, or those that threaten her or those she cares about, they will find a fully grown Grizzly bear wanting them dead.

Due to her lack of inteligence, her bear form is incable of concentrating enough to turn back into a human. the transformation automatically happens an hour after she changed wheither she wants to at the time or not.

SIDE-EFFECTS:

The longest a Grizzly bear has ever lived is 45 years, and it is expected that Raven's lifespan has been shortened to around that, it's a certianty she won't see 50.

Raven is now a lot more sensitve to food, and can not stomach highly processed products. She has also developed a taste for eating things raw, especially fish. While it tastes good to her, it still makes her just as ill as it makes any human to eat raw meat. As a comprimise she tries to cook food as low as she can get away with, not always getting it right.

Raven develops an urge to hibernate during every winter, and while she has managed to ignore it for the most part, the winter months have her a lot more tired then usual, as well as having a harder time waking up in the morning, often sleeping in by accident.

since her first transformation, her aggression has gotten worse, and has a tendency to make her want to transform.

Raven suffers from extreme exhaustion and hunger when returning to human form from the energy expanded in the transformation process.

HEIGHT: 1.63 meters
HAIR COLOR: naturally blonde. dyed bright red.
EYE COLOR: Green

MISC: Has a tattoo of a giant raven that covers her entire back, from where her shoulder blades meet to the bottom of her spine. When not in uniform she sticks to sleeveless vests so that she can use her powers across her entire arm. Is muscular from years of athletics and training.


PERSONALITY: Raven is, and always has, been someone driven by their anger. She is quick to get ticked off and hard to calm down, preferring to argue over being rational or
respectful. She has a severe distrust of authority and bristles at being ordered to do even the smallest of things. She has an arrogant outlook on the world, thinking herself as better then almost everyone on general principle. Raven has claustrophobia, and will panic if she's either forced into an enclosed space, or for any reason feels like she can't leave when she wishes too.

Her biggest positive trait is that Raven is as loyal as they come to those she becomes close to, willing to go to almost any length for anyone she cares about. she is smarter then she pretends, and often chooses to not let on when she's worked something out. Raven has a leaning towards unpleasant jokes, often stepping over the line to insult someone or taking shots at things far "too soon" after they'd happened.

Since learning of her limited life-span, Raven has started thrill seeking and quickly became far willing to risk injury or death on the chance to have fun. It has also caused her to drink more often and have the occasional spell of depression. Her rational being that since she's going to die anyway, why not?

SECRET(S): none that are significant enough to mention.


FATHER: John Rander
MOTHER: Suzy Rander
SIBLINGS: none.
WORTHY MENTIONS: Best friend, April Hood.

CHILDHOOD: Raven grew up in your average middle class neighbourhood, with a Dad that had a high position in an office, and a Mom that had a job with an advertising group. So she had a lot of time to herself after school, which she mostly used to go play outside with her closest friend April, who happened to live next door to her. They shared everything and were completely inseparable.

At school Raven's tendency to get angry easily got her into trouble constantly, if someone said something mean she'd probably yell a comeback which was naturally the bit the
teachers heard. so despite her ability to get good grades in most of the subjects, the school still saw her as a problem child and one of the bad ones.

Which she tended to find hilarious. Alice was her voice of reason throughout it all, able to reign her in and stop her going too far, at least before high school.

ADOLESCENCE: When she got older, Raven went from "a bit of a problem" to your classic teenage "rebel for the sake of rebelling." she bought cigarettes, would throw half the pack out and 'hide' it somewhere she knew her Mom would find just to tick them off, she sneaked out at nights to go do stupid things with Alice, and dyed her hair bright red on her fifteenth birthday, loving the negative attention she got from her family and neighbours.

This was also around the time Raven got into trying to get tough. her Mom was more then happy to pay for gym membership, thinking it was a goo way for her to work out her energy. And quickly Ravens favourite place was there, either weight lifting, using a punching bag or a treadmill. and by the time she was sixteen she was decidedly toned.

She had a string of boyfriends, and the occasional girlfriend, that went nowhere and never lasted.

one week after her fifteenth birthday, her powers showed up. her and her mother were in a massive argument over something stupid Raven had done at school, the usual. when out of nowhere Raven was struck by a terrible sharp pain all over her body. Her mother thought she was dying and rushed to the phone to try and get help, and was already dialling for the ambulance when she saw what was happening to her daughter. The process took nearly half an hour the entire time Raven was panicking and in pain trying to figure out what was going on and how to stop it. Her mother had long abandoned the idea that 911 would believe her daughter's limbs were shortening, that her body was growing, her skull bulging forwards and fur was beginning to grow all over her body.

Eventually it stopped. And A grizzly bear was sitting in the front room, staring at her Mother, who was the first person to ever see a bemused looking bear. Raven was still aware what was going on, and was well aware she had become an animal for some reason she couldn't explain, but it no longer seemed to matter so much. her animal instincts were kicking in and they didn't contain exterstential crisis in the book of tricks. When her mother (now backing slowly out of the room) asked her timid questions like "is that still you?" Raven couldn't think straight enough to come up with an answer but managed to nod her head in a vague enough way that seemed to be the end of it. When Raven's father came home from work fourty minutes later he came in to see Raven currled up in the corner of the living room chewing on the last of all the fish there was in the house and seeming rather content. His wife's assurances and the familiar shade of red convinced him just enough to not go get his gun and kill her there and then. especially when he saw Raven's mother had worked up the courage to stroke the bears head and he heard it make a sound of contentment rather then annoyance.

Requests for her to turn back were met only with upset whines when Raven didn't know what that meant. but when an hour had passed the strange transformation began again in reverse. and after thirty agonised minutes she was herself again, blinking in shock at what happened. the thing that struck her the most was how accepting she had been in that state. Not once had she even thought about becoming human again, or worried about anything other then the thoughts "i'm hungry" and "this place is cramped". It scared her.

Four days later men knocked on her door and informed her they would be taking her to a school for mutants. Raven told them to go away. They informed her she had no ability to refuse. In that exact moment, every stupid anti-authority "the government want's to enslave us through tv and a lying media" idea she'd insisted was true to her increasingly annoyed parents, was vindicated. So she legged it. going straight out the back door
and only loosing the agents because of how well she knew the area, Raven planned to spend the night camped out under a bridge, she figured if she turned into a bear to keep herself warm no one would bother her, and wished she'd had time to grab her money. or jumper. or anything she'd owned really.

less then an hour later, the agents found her only just reaching the bridge. One of them was a mutant with the power to calm people down and though even that wasn't enough to make her want to go, it was enough to make her accept the reality. She couldn't actually escape. even if she could, she'd have to keep it up for the rest of her life while the school would only keep her for a few years. It was a no win situation. best to just get it over with as fast as possible.

Raven talked loudly about 1984 to the agents all the way back to her house, all through packing her stuff, she stopped to say a tear filled good bye to her parents and Alice who they'd called over when they knew Raven had been found. Whereupon she started right back up with rambling about police states and fascism.

The first few months at the school, Raven tried to escape, and was promptly dragged back and punished for it. Spent a weeks worth of lessons refusing to so much as pick up a pen in class out of spite, (a staff member pointing out that doing so didn't actualy acomplish anything except hurt her own education put an end to that. as it had been her trying to feel in control again rather then her thinking it was a good idea.) And two fights with different class mates that she had started over very small disagreements.

She stopped all this not because of the punishments she was given for them, but because she was smart enough to recognise when she might have been beating her head against a wall for all she'd actually done towards getting to go home. So bitterly, and with more then one fantasy about burning the acadamy down, she accepted the fact the jailor says when you get out, not the prisoner. The answer was simple, show up to whatever they told her she had to show up to, keep to herself the second she got the option, and then freedom and home and maybe seeing if the UN had a ruling about imprisoning teenagers for the crime of being born different. maybe one of those lifetime movies would make a film about her.

Three years passed, in that time the training she was given got her transformation down from thirty to ten minutes, which she was grudgingly thankful for, she had a couple of relationships with students but nothing that meant anytihng to her. and she spent as much time in the local area as she was allowed, often spending afternoons in the woods as a bear just so no one would bother her.

ADULTHOOD:

When Raven finished high school, (now nineteen) the academy told her they still required her to stay. As much as her training had progressed in the last year (shaving off another five minutes) there was no doubting that a transformed Raven was a serious danger to anyone that had got on her bad side lately, meaning they had extream doubts someone with anger issues could get your avarage job and not end up mauling her boss or something similar.

Raven demanded she was allowed to leave the room due to those exact same anger issues. When she eventually calmed down enough she wasn't thinking about killing anyone, she returned and accepted it with a numb sounding hollowness to her voice.

When asked what she wanted to sign up for as a college course, Raven immediately
chose to studdy law. Deciding then and there if they
wanted to teach her the best way to bring down this (in her
mind) authoritarian nightmare of an institute, she'd grudgingly
play ball long enough to let them.


SAMPLE:
Nissa had been teasing when she'd said it, but May knew it had carried enough truth, she really didn't visit her sister enough and it wasn't fair of Nis' to be the one making the journey every time they spent time together. Workload was an excuse. It wasn't like she was working 24/7 or any such thing.

so she'd set out early in the morning, planning to just have an easy walk down to the farm and surprise Nissa. she had no idea what Nissa's work schedule was but Mary would be happy to help her get things done if it turned out she was in the middle of something that couldn't be put aside for a while. The journey too and from the farm was long enough to be tiring, especially when walking instead of taking Nissa's horse, but seeing as she in no rush Mary didn't push herself beyond a leisurely stroll. As a result it took her a great deal longer then usual but she felt completely fine when she arrived.

The morning had been a lot colder then recently, and as a result Mary was wearing her winter coat that was warm, but old and somewhat lumpy in places with the hood pulled up as high as it would go to keep the wind off her neck. Not that it really made any difference what it looked like, Mary wasn't exactly the type to care about her looks beyond 'presentable' and especially when she was only visiting her sister.

Speaking of her sister, the last thing she wanted to put up with was the nagging over Mary's bad habit so when she arrived at the farm, Mary didn't go straight to finding Nissa, and instead sat on the front steps of the farmhouse. Her left hand pulled a smoke from the box in her coat pocket on automatic, the years having made it something she could do without having to think about it. her right hand likewise moved to where she usually kept her lighter and her brain had a strange hiccup when it wasn't there.

her eye's widened in horror as she desperately patted down every pocket before turning them inside out. that lighter had been their dad's and was the only part of home she had left. if she'd dropped it on the walk she'd probably loose her mind.

taking a deep breath Mary retraced her steps of getting ready this morning, and managed to be reasonably certain that she had simply left it on the bedside table next to her alarm clock. probably. 75% sure. Mary sighed and rubbed her nose with her thumb. "so that's the kind of day today is huh?" she grumbled. Oh yay not being able to smoke until she got home. Especially as Nissa would never let her near matches out of some stupid sense of the things being bad for her. this was a good idea. she was glad she'd come out here.

USERNAME: BladeOfKenpachi

AGE GROUP: 21

EXPERIENCE: since I was 13 or 14 I think

WHERE DID YOU FIND US? Wiz told me to

[Kam *]

Glad to have you with us, Blade! Be sure to do your claims!