| Heather |
|
|
| Portrayed By |
Amy Lee |
| Gender |
Female |
| Date of Birth |
August 12th |
| Age |
16 |
| Zodiac Sign |
Leo |
| Aliases |
Timeslip |
| Place of Birth |
St. Louis |
| Current Location |
Xavier's Institute |
| Occupation |
Student |
| Known Relatives |
Cheryl Brown, Dan Brown |
| Significant Other |
None |
| Identity |
Public |
| Known Abilities |
Super speed |
| First Appearance |
OC |
Reality is what you make of it.
History
Heather’s childhood could be described as anything except for ‘normal’. When your parents are mutant supervillains who treat you more as a strange psychological experiment than their own flesh and blood, life can be quite different indeed. Not that Heather knew the particulars of what her parents did. With Dan, her father, being an illusionist and her mother, Cheryl, being an extremely strong power booster, they made an excellent crime team. Using these abilities, they managed to accumulate resources and keep ahead of the law through cleverness and sensory deception, managing to keep a stable home in St. Louis instead of changing places like many other supervillains.
However, they wanted to make sure that their daughter didn’t reveal too much about them and give them away. Because of this, Heather never left home. She was home schooled (on what she needed to know, anyways) through the use of books and the help of her parents. Dan’s abilities were particularly useful in forming interactive lessons, but not only this: most of Heather’s friends were imaginary in a very real way. She didn’t have any real friends or visitors, only illusions of friends created by the intertwining of her parents’ powers. Heather began to suspect that, in fact, nobody was real except for herself (and /maybe/ her parents). Despite this delusion, she got along well with the illusory people, despite always thinking of herself as the center of the universe. The illusions always submitted to her commands and she was the boss in all of the games they played together.
The home itself was constantly changing, unstable and strange. Her reality was constantly altered, and anything that she might have encountered was most probably illusory. Even when her parents were out, the residue of her their powerful illusions remained (and remained in such a way to keep Heather inside). Whenever she did something considered bad, the reality shifted to something much darker, scarier, more dangerous and more punishing. Being that the parents were hardly psychologically stable, themselves, these punishments were perhaps more frequent than one would expect.
It was during one of these episodes that, at the age of thirteen, Heather manifested: as she ran from her perceived attackers, it seemed to her that time slowed down around her, and instead of being caught by the dreadful illusory pursuers, like she usually was, she managed to outpace them, because her father hadn’t caught on to what had happened. Cheryl, however, did notice, and tried to get Heather to come to her. Because her parents never did her any harm directly, and they rarely appeared in these illusions except to protect her (and boost her trust in them), she went directly for her mother to seek her protection once more.
What happened next was just as much a surprise to Cheryl as it was to Heather. As a combination between the energy that Heather was leaving off from just manifesting, and Cheryl’s booster touch, as soon as they made skin contact, Heather simply vanished. This isn’t quite what actually happened, as Heather would know, but this is precisely how it appeared to Cheryl. Out of concern that her daughter’s boosted abilities included teleportation, Cheryl headed out of the house to try and locate her, since she couldn’t find Heather anywhere in the house.
This was the mistake that got the couple caught: while Heather was out of the house, she wasn’t wearing any kind of illusory disguise like she normally would, since she had been acting out of panic and had not told Dan anything. One of the nearby residents recognized her and immediately reported her presence to the police, who then followed Cheryl as she gave up her search for Heather and headed back home.
Meanwhile, Heather was trapped in a slow motion nightmare. The illusions that she was being punished with still lingered, but they were slowed to a near standstill. She was unable to tell that they were even moving at all. At first, this slowness caused her to find the nightmare illusion to be laughable, but as time passed, minutes into hours and hours into days, days into months of being caught in a slow motion hell. She ate what food she could find whenever she was hungry, but these seeming months of isolation were too much for her to bear in that environment.
Months didn’t actually pass, however, only a few hours did. Heather was just so far accelerated by her mother’s discharge of powers that seconds stretched into hours by her eyes. In those same hours, the police and a special unit designed to stop superhuman threats managed to invade the house and remove and arrest both Dan and Cheryl. The police later investigated the house and, to their horror, they found the emaciated, terrified, dirty and damaged Heather, having slowed down to just five times the normal speed. They brought her back to the station and later she was sent to a psychiatric hospital, since most thought that she wasn’t quite right enough to be brought into a foster home, even with foster parents who were supportive of mutants.
There she remained, under the care and scrutiny of these doctors, for a couple of years. The psychiatric hospital, however, had a hard time dealing with her because of the nature of her mutant abilities. She was fairly passive, and would not harm anyone except in retaliation, and seemed pretty stable despite some of her delusions and neuroses. The Xavier’s Institute took custody over her, though, after hearing about her situation, since they were better suited to giving the girl the proper care and socialization that she so desperately needs than this hospital that could not meet her needs.
Timeline
Quotes
Trivia
- Heather is a synesthete. She possesses a variation where she perceives colour whenever sounds are made.
- She suffers from the delusion that the world is a product of her own mind. As such, she takes everything to have some kind of psychological meaning for herself.
- Theme song: http://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/temporal-shenanigans
Gallery
