| Kisha Dorogoi | |
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| Portrayed By | Oleysa Rulin |
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| Gender | Female |
| Date of Birth | 19th of April |
| Age | 16 |
| Zodiac Sign | Aries |
| Aliases | Karbon |
| Place of Birth | Detroit, Michigan |
| Current Location | New York |
| Occupation | Student |
| Known Relatives | Stanislav (Father), Alexei (Brother) |
| Significant Other | None |
| Identity | Suspected Mutant |
| Known Abilities | Machine Empath. Enhanced Intelligence (linked to her machine empathy) |
| First Appearance | ??? |
History
As a 3rd generation Russian immigrant, Kisha grew up in a relatively poor single-parent household in Detroit, Michigan. She was raised by her father, Stanislav, an off-and-on alcoholic and auto mechanic, and her older brother Alexei, 5 years her senior. Their home life was peaceful and, while money was never plentiful, they never went hungry or lacked more than expensive luxuries. She was always an active and inquisitive child prone to running off, exploring and getting lost, or bringing home strange things which she found laying on sidewalks and in gutters.
From a young age, she loved things that went fast, especially race cars and motorcycles. As soon as she was old enough, she started helping her dad around the auto-shop he worked at and whenever possible the family would take short weekend breaks to see car races and auto shows.
Aside from getting into the occasional fight at school, Kisha's main trouble in her early life came through the influence of her older brother Alexei. Not the smartest boy in the world, he always tended to find himself in trouble, usually petty theft, joyriding cars, and a wealth of petty vandalism and harassment charges while hanging out with a local gang.
By her early teens Kisha had drifted away from her father, who had lost his job when the auto-shop closed down, spending more and more time with her older brother and his friends. Slowly she picked up how to help them break into cars, through peer pressure and owing to her familiarity with the many different makes and models of their prey.
It was at this time her brother also got her helping him improve the gang and bring them into the digital age. She was never directly involved in the doing aspect, but Alexei was especially good at talking her into finding out exactly how things were done. Usually by betting she couldn't find something or other online or code programs which could do something specific.
It started out with little things, like how they could get make free calls and progressed to figuring out things like mapping the average police response times in areas. Things which seem harmless enough as thought exercises, but when put into use by Alexei and his friends often resulted in quite vicious consequences.
A few months after she had become part of the gang, Alexei was brought in for questioning by the police. He was ultimately released without charges, as although they strongly suspected him of being involved in a robbery a procedural technicality caused the case to fall apart.
To avoid her dad’s wrath at her and the time she'd been spending with her brothers friends, Kisha resumed regularly attending school. She quickly discovered her school's newly set up auto-mechanic club and never looked back. Soon she was spending all her free time at school, learning how to take things apart and put them back together again.
The subtle chemical changes in her brain required for her mutation to manifest developed over the course of months after her fifteenth birthday, building in strength and twisting her personality. She became unhealthily obsessed with assembling things, collecting broken gadgets from dumpsters and visiting junkyards in her spare time. She tried to restrain these impulses more than a few times, however without even realizing it she would find herself stopping to pick up broken computers or anything which seemed odd or in close to working condition. Her room evolved into a strange hybrid of a teenage girl’s bedroom and mad scientist’s lair.
This odd behavior began to weigh heavily on her family. Confused and worried by his daughter’s strange and secretive behavior and the unexplained nightly trips to gather broken machinery, her father spent an increasing amount of time drinking, trying to drown his worries with cheap beer at one of the few local bars not visited by Alexei and his gang.
Eventually the odds and ends she had collected reached a critical mass. Her mutation flared fully into life shortly before the school science fair. Unsure what exactly was going on, she lost control and fell into a trance while working away on her very first creation. She worked day and night all weekend, barely sleeping and only drinking when her thirst became unbearable, until the project was finally done. It was an odd machine, about 18 inches squared and covered with lights and strange steampunk-esque pipework.
On the day of the science fair she plugged the machine in, not entirely sure what it was or how she'd ended up with it. The device whirred, beeped a few times, and lit up with various lights. It didn't actually seem to be doing anything more interesting, aside from more lights coming on in sequence, until part way through the judging it exploded in a pulse of electromagnetic energy which knocked out every electrical device on the block – including the principal’s pacemaker.
Kisha was found lying unconscious near the remains of her project, arms and legs burnt and lacerated by fragments from the explosion. Thankfully no-one else was seriously hurt and the emergency medical team was able to stabilize the principal’s before any serious damage was done to his heart and complications could arise.
A major police investigation resulted, with forensics experts and the bomb squad called to the scene in an attempt to find out just what exactly Kisha's science project was. By the time she was well enough to answer questions most of the experts called in had already conceded defeat. No chemical traces of explosives were detected and a theoretical reconstruction of the device itself gave no clues as to the function – if it even had one.
Without solid evidence to the contrary the police couldn’t prove the explosion was malicious or intentional, instead putting the incident down to her project coincidentally malfunctioning at the same time as, or caused by, an unexplained electrical incident. Rumor began to spread that the explosion was the result some kind of mutant attack, although no evidence could be produced to support these claims either. While still in hospital, she was expelled from school for willfully bringing a hazardous device onto school property.
In the following weeks, still making regular trips to the hospital to receive treatment for her burns, Kisha received a mysterious invitation to study at the Xavier Institute, as the news of an unexplained machine produced by a teenager had come to the attention of one of the teachers (along with the detection of a mutation in the immediate local area).
Her father, secretly a little glad glad for the distance this would put between them, sold the family apartment to help cover both her tuition fees and the medical bills and to tide him over while looking for a new job. Her brother, disgusted by the whispered rumors about his sister, packed up and left home vowing to never speak to her again.
With the risks of her power it was decided she should travel to the school despite the summer break. As the chances of another accident caused by an unguided project were considered disturbingly likely by all. Especially her father Stanislav and indeed at times even by Kisha…
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