Samantha Cove

[Sam Cove]

NAME: Samantha Illyse Cove
NICKNAME: Salamandra, Sam, Sal, S, Salami, Slimester
AGE: 29
GENDER: Female
ORIENTATION: Absently pansexual
POSITION: Bellefonte Staff: counsellor. Has also filled in as a teacher in emergencies before
FACE CLAIM: Amber Rose

POWER:
Name of Power  Slime Secretion (she calls it Magical Slime of Sometimes-Numbness)

Sam’s got one of those weird powers where you tend to just kind of… pity the person who has them. From a safe distance. Every inch of her skin is capable of exuding a thick, clear (fortunately odourless) slime. Once upon a time it was a constant thing, but with the wonderful training at BA, she can now turn it off and on as needed. She usually douses herself for a bit before showering or while swimming to keep her skin in good condition, as an extended lack of slime tends to dry it out something fierce (and also make her a bit puffy from stored slime).

This slime has a few notable and noticed properties. One, it is very clear and has the consistency of really thick egg whites. Two, it is very good at repelling water and water-soluble things (including alcohol, so if she’s planning on getting drunk she usually slimes herself up first to keep clean… and from sucking up the booze through her crazy sensitive skin before she can taste it), although oils can work their way through it; tough soap is needed to clean it off stuff. Three, when she’s stressed it takes on a distinct indigo tinge and will deaden sensation in whatever part of anyone else touches it. More stress means more colour means more numbing. This part only occurs when she’s stressed and does NOT turn off, and only her own skin is immune to the effects (cuts, eyes, the inside of her mouth… all of that will go numb just as quick as anyone else). Stress also increases slime production and can overcome her control. Sam don’t sweat from nerves, she just oozes.

Limitations
Slime is not the most useful of abilities. Even when Sam’s stressed enough to numb people with it, it only gains some slight medical or combat properties. It won’t even kill someone if you prick them with a dart dipped in it. It can be unsightly, uncomfortable (to touch or for Sam to move; she gets really slippery), accidentally dangerous (slipping. bad. Sam is a big fan of socks), and is a really random but undeniably flag that she’s a mutant. Of course, her personal style choices make her look more like a mutant than her mutation usually does these days, but still.

The numbing aspect of the slime: Sam’s stress adds a compound to the slime that absorbs across human skin in an extremely short period of time (first effects are often felt within a few seconds) and interfere with nerve transmission in both directions. Sensory transmission (information going back to the brain) is inhibited first, causing numbness but not paralysis. If contact is maintained, information passed to the region becomes inhibited, impairing movement. Of course, if a joint is numb it will become difficult to move on its own, but true paralysis can occur as well. Paralysis begins to set in after at least a full minute of large-scale contact (more than a few flecks of slime) and will linger up to ten minutes after the slime is completely removed; the level of paralysis will not increase once the slime is removed even if the area was not completely incapacitated. Numbness subsides sooner if there was no paralysis (lingering up to one minute) but, if the paralytic effect has begun to set in, the numbness will not begin to subside until the paralysis is almost gone.

The slime dries and loses effectiveness very quickly when exposed to air.  Fresh slime will form a skin after about five minutes, and then dries to a weird useless crumbly jelly at an approximate rate of an inch per half hour.

Side-Effects
Generating slime doesn’t make Sam bald, but it’s infinitely easier to deal with if it isn’t getting into hair. Encouraging baldness is a definite side effect. Sam can also numb and paralyze herself if she isn’t careful: only the outer side of her skin (and not the ‘skin’ of her mouth or other areas that don’t excrete slime) and the slime system itself are immune to the effects of her stressed additions, so anything damaging that surface leaves her open for effect. Cuts, scrapes, burns, zits… it doesn’t have to be a bullet hole to let in slime. This works before numbing slime is excreted as well: if she is stressed and retains too much slime, some of it can start to leak into her own body. Since she can’t remove slime floating around between her cells… whatever gets in stays in until her body breaks it down in a few hours.


APPEARANCE SECTION: Dramatic. That is how Sam likes to be. She is extremely hard to misidentify as an individual, and is totally cool being the proof that someone is in the right place. She shaves her head daily to keep it nothing but smooth, shiny skin (and yes, she spends more time on scalp care than she would have on hair care; her duel with cancer gave her some pretty high standards), and may well be the staff member most prone to getting told to go cover up; she figures that a poncho (she has some really cool ones) is decent enough, and so what if everyone can see her bra? Sometimes it’s black and sometimes it’s purple with pink stars and moons, and the last time she taught a class she put a bonus question on the quiz about what her bra looked like.

Sam is a tall woman, standing easily somewhere around 5’11” without heels, but wears such a variety of shoes and ear attachments that predicting her biological height accurately can be extremely hard. She’s very fit (and has plenty of things in her wardrobe that show off some belly to prove it) and very content with her body. She does usually wear pants rather than shorts or shorter skirts, though: her right knee is pretty visually mangled and apparently that is less acceptable than a bit of bra. She seeks to amuse and horrify kids, not scare them, and the mess of purple and red and white scar tissue that now makes up the outside (and some of the inside) of the joint has a tendency to scare people. Never mind that her tattoos seem meant to terrorize… A sniper monarch butterfly peeks out from her right hip and a viper with black widow markings - and a grenade pin caught in its tail - covers the left side of her neck. She also usually covers her surgery scar as well, but that’s more because it’s right under her ribs and she doesn’t usually flash that high.

The paint that can get on her face sometimes scares people too, but the face itself really isn’t scary. It can seem really big, since the only hair near it is her brown eyebrows (she also has very dark brown eyes, and tans well, should anyone be curious). The bridge of her nose is narrow while the tip is broader, and she’s got a pretty big (and pretty expressive… and often dirty) mouth. Her ears appear small, but that’s mostly because they’re very used to being squished into cuffs with random stuff projecting out of them.

MUST HAVE APPAREL: One thing’s certain about Sam: there only doubles in her wardrobe are paired socks. It might surprise people to find out that her socks are indeed all paired, and she wears them as pairs. As for the rest of her clothing… Sam’s a big fan of ponchos and other draping upper outer garments. She has a wide variety of styles, fits and colours. She usually just wears them over a bra unless she’s planning on being somewhere cold, and then she’ll stack some layers. Where her tops are usually loose, her bottoms are usually painted-on tight, even if it takes some extra work to get it over her right knee. Leggings or jeans, these range from lime green and torn to black with glow-in-the-dark skeleton bones. She likes those ones. They’re fun. Poofy, silky pants also come in some crazy colours and patterns, so there’s a bunch of them in her wardrobe as well.

Shoes and accessories really make Sam’s world go round, though. From her sunglasses (perfectly round awesomeness, and completely identical to a pair of prescription ones for when she can’t stand contacts anymore - she is extremely farsighted) to her ear cuffs (her dailies have three vividly coloured feathers spreading out like an axolotl’s gills) to her mismatched gloves to her totally awesome umbrellas (which are good for threatening kid’s butts with if they misbehave, even if she’d never actually hit one… unless they were about to run into traffic or a bear or something, anyway), random add-ons that don’t count as clothing are just plain cool. Sam frequently wears gloves (unlike socks, these don’t have to match) and has a particular fondness for fingerless gloves, lace, and laces. She has a number of ribbons, chains, and charms to adorn her cane with (and even her cane has a few different styles she can swap between). She doesn’t wear jewellery other than her ear cuffs, though, and has no piercings. Her shoes and boots range widely, from heels to flat things to knee high to barely covering the soles of her feet. Most are either really, really bold colours or have a lot of different colours.

PERSONALITY SECTION: Sam is undeniably… Sam. She’s loud, she’s bold, she’ll take a surprising amount of idiocy before snapping (even if she’ll totally pretend to be furious long before then), and she will lie through her teeth to children.

Clear out all the drama, the crazy clothing, the baldness and the occasional face paint, the umbrella she twirls around and (playfully) threatens misbehaving minors with, and the common bra exposures, and Sam’s a really nice person. She might be pretty boring by that point, since most of her fun has been taken away, but she’s really nice. Her primary goal in life is to enjoy it, and for everyone else to enjoy it too. She has a gigantic soft spot for depressed, repressed, and angsty teenagers, and will dote on them and wrap them in feather boas until she’s helped them worked through their problems and are happier with themselves (even if that makes them menaces to society because they aren’t issue-laden loners who hate interacting with the world anymore).

Samantha Salamandra the magical name-bestower… well, nicknames are just one tool to make kids smile and feel better about themselves, aren’t they? Sam has a wide variety of nicknames for herself (Salami’s her military-history-story one, any variant of Slime is applicable, and she went by Lady S to an entire hospital while she was smashing cancer’s face in with an oversized brick), and she’s just as creative and dedicated to finding names for people who need a bit of a boost. Sometimes it’s just a silly thing to earn a smile, but at other times someone really needs a new way to think of themselves. Some names are obvious, and others are random (like, say, Ramphlephagen).

A lot of stuff about Sam is really random. She’s been absolutely terrified of being blind since she first got glasses as a kid (and no, she isn’t near-sighted, she’s far-sighted and it’s a huge pain not being able to see anything that’s closer than thirty feet away), worms unnerve her but she’s still debating getting pet spiders and lizards and amphibs and kittens. She is a strong supporter of clean socks (and, for the record, will not let anyone into her bed with dirty socks on; clean ones are fine) and accepts mis-matched socks for other people but doesn’t make that lifestyle choice herself. She’s pansexual but doesn’t have a very stubborn sex drive (especially while she was cancer-ridden; things might change as she gets back on her feet the rest of the way), and she refuses to have sex in storage areas even though her limp doesn’t really bother her. She also tends to be a bit more reserved around pretty female vibration controllers.

She can also whup any pretentious brat’s ass with her cane and umbrella if they think they can pull one over on the old bald cripple. Honestly, the canes are as much to get her better parking and shorter lines (and to hide candy in, in the case of her big clunky winter one, which is all carved wood and fake drawers and hollow core; she used to hide booze sometimes but that’s kind of a bad idea these days). She can walk without one just fine and just needs to pop an advil at the end of the day if she does go without.

As loud and fun and party-friendly as Sam is, people who don’t know her recent history are often surprised to discover that she doesn’t drink much (and she f***ing definitely doesn’t do drugs; she’s even off tattoo needles now). She does drink some - slowly, carefully, and with careful records to make sure her now undersized liver can handle it - but she usually sticks to nonalcoholic things these days, and just splurges on the odd taste. Once upon a carefree time she’d even occasionally get drunk just by getting booze spilled on her skin, but now she even lets out a tiny bit of slime to protect herself before going somewhere with a lot of drunk people. She’s well aware of her physical limitations and, while they do not define her, she accepts them and lives with them.

EXTRA QUIRK: Always found with her circle-lensed sunglasses on or near to hand, Sam also carries an umbrella far more often than simply dictated by rain. She doesn’t subscribe to the suspicion about opening umbrellas indoors either. She never wears earbuds or over-ear headphones and so always shares music if she is listening to some, and is such a stickler for clean socks that she will lend people a change if necessary. She also likes tattoos and would happily get more… if she could get over a certain well-deserved paranoia about needle hygiene. Injected vaccines are also a bit of an issue these days.


FATHER: Jonathan Robert Cove
MOTHER: Ellexandra Maridien Cove-Vehrtz
SIBLINGS: Jonn Marin Cove (3 y older brother); Avelin Ann Cove (1 y older sister); Suzandre Jenna Cove (2 min younger twin sister)
PET: none
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: none
WORTHY MENTIONS: none


CHILDHOOD: Sam had a fun childhood. She was forever playing doubles with Suzandre, at least until her sister grew out of physical and temperamental similarity, and wrestling the neighbour boys (triplets; they were, however, the only other set of multiples in the area) into the mud. She was loud, she was proud, she had a tendency to be cheered up by getting in trouble (the principal ended up just sending her home without a meeting by the time she hit grade four and was caught ‘fighting’ with someone else, since that was boring), and she had very little interest in things that didn’t have a strong physical component.

Despite her roughhousing and extremely stubborn illiteracy, Sam got along very well with everyone, including her teachers. She was a muddy and unintelligent-seeming kid who wasn’t interested enough by so-called IQ games to get an accurate score, but she wasn’t a mean one. It took until she was in grade two - and still couldn’t read, although she was moderately able at anything verbal - before her parents finally took her to see the optometrist two hours away. Small towns, y’know. Unfortunately, she wasn’t short-sighted. She was just deemed half blind. Well, that eased her school’s expectations and got her to grade four, where another eye doctor found out she was just really, really farsighted. And people wondered why she could see someone across a field just fine!

ADOLESCENCE: Newly armed with glasses (and so very addicted to them don’t let the close world go away DON’T TOUCH THE GLASSES), Sam caught up on her reading and even started experimenting with her clothing. Grade six featured bright yellow and jeans. Grade seven featured rubber boots and rain gear, even during a drought. Grade eight featured slime and a quick relocation southeast, with her parents finding work in Kalispell since apparently there was no choice about Samantha Cove the Slimeball going there.

That was certainly an interesting stretch of days.  Puberty had been one thing, and the fourteen-year-old was all geared up to just chalk the gunk clinging to her skin to the same mess of You're Growing Up, but apparently some fancy people with fancy vans disagreed.  They showed up a week or two after the ooziness started; Sam wasn't keeping track.  It was a pretty sucky christmas present, and a really undramatic reaction to a month of unseasonably dry air and chapped skin, even if moving somewhere new was kind of cool.  And meeting a ton of people with far more useful so-called powers.  Was oozing slime really a power?  It sounded more like a disease, even if it didn't bother her.  Her siblings eyed her a bit weird after that, but her parents just went through the we're-family-we-stick-together spiel.  They'd used it when Jonn came out as asexual too.

So. New people, new used clothing stores to rummage through (admittedly indirectly, using new friends who weren’t covered in slime except after wrestling or hugging), and a really cool project: figure out all the magical details of this slime that just oozed endlessly out of her skin. She tried moulding it into things, she tried cooking with it (people did mention an odd taste to the meringues), she tried taping her skin shut. As it was, she had a loooong phase where she had to wear prescription goggles all the time because the slime kept getting in her eyes.

She cut her hair really, really short for the first time in grade ten, a year and a half after moving to Kalispell, and rocked it. Way easier to maintain, way less gross when the slime’d been in it for a while, and kind of really fun. She couldn’t dye it as much (since that was also the first year her parents gave her permission to dye it) as long hair, but she could still have neon green or snow white fuzz. And then, with two and then three years of constant work, the slime started thinning out when she wasn’t thinking about it. By the middle of grade eleven, she reliably only oozed when she wanted to. That proved to be more often than she had thought (she only got to go on so many slides and in so many wrestling brawls) since her skin dried out and she got all… puffy if she didn't let some slime out every few days.

ADULTHOOD: With her mutation under control, Sam got to venture out into the world again. She refreshed and expanded her wardrobe, found her first ear cuff (she still has it, and saves the little pewter tentacle for more subdued formal occasions), and fell in love with umbrellas all over again. She picked up a habit of twirling one all day, and got pretty good at it before she graduated.  Even with things under control, she didn't expect much enthusiasm from the world if she tried to go out into it full-time, so her options for careers were limited to things within the Bellefonte Hierarchy.  Teaching didn't interest her, but talking to people and helping them out?  Sure!

Three months of freedom (aka hanging out at Bellefonte for the summer and about to start as an assistant counsellor for students with pointless mutations) later, Drama entered. Sam was hanging out with a really cute girl who was just about to start her final year. She magnified vibrations, so she was always really quiet and Sam found her endlessly adorable. When things went a little far, though, the younger girl got a little caught up in the moment and essentially caused a localized earthquake. The building wasn’t damaged but an old fish tank that had been stacked high above them tipped forward and managed to land corner-down on Sam’s right knee.

Since they weren’t supposed to have been in that storage area and the girl was panicking so much about getting in trouble, Sam hid the injury (and got rid of all the shards of glass in the store room AND her knee without raising suspicion) and was able to pass it off as a sprain until she was still limping a month later. By then the scar tissue was settled in enough to meet Sam’s approval, and she refused to let it be healed away. Besides, the little limp that ended up hanging around permanently wasn’t really enough to impede anything (even if sometimes it took a dose of stubbornness to keep running).

Sam did pretty well as a junior counsellor, and with a few distance courses on the side she moved up the ranks to a junior rather than assistant counsellor by the time she hit 22. She stayed a master of all mutations pointless and annoying, and ended up adding coping with permanent changes as well, be they serious injuries, permanent physical mutations, or realizations about sexuality and gender. Her standard point is that these things can describe a person, but they shouldn’t define them. You can be a giant gay gender fluid grasshopper and still be a person who dreams of being a real estate agent. Being one thing doesn’t have to change anything except that one thing.

She’s also had plenty of time to learn from her fellow teachers, and isn’t half bad with a range of combat skills (mostly long-distance sniping; she prefers guns to fists), and even has some more modern (and non childish) moves for her casual wrestling. All of that, though, has faded in recent times, thanks to a two-year long fight with liver cancer (hey, at least she was already bald!), which was eventually traced (probably, anyway) to a hepatitis B infection from her second tattoo, her military-esque viper. She just wanted to be more convincing when she told new kids that she’d been in the military and that was how she’d hurt her knee! (details range from grenades to mutually half-dead knife fights)  So much for an awesome 26th birthday slash promotion (she was bumped up to full counsellor!) present to herself.

Sam was hospitalized and the tumour was located. A lot of discussion, a few rounds of chemo (which triggered a certain stress response that the doctors don’t talk about, and Sam quietly went back to working to control), and then one big dramatic surgery later, Sam seemed to be done. It took her a long time to be cleared by the doctors, and then to fully recover from the chemo, but she does have to shave her head again (and has new standards for smoothness). Guess what, Bellefonte Academyyyyy, Salami’s back in action!

Just please don’t tackle her for a few more months, all right?


SAMPLE: You’ve seen zis~

USERNAME: Bowen

AGE GROUP: 22

EXPERIENCE: Very much long time

WHERE DID YOU FIND US? You know where.

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[Kam *]

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