application (deerington)

[nakedsingularity]

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Henrietta "Henry" Coles
Canon: Impulse
Canon Point: 1.10: "New Beginnings" (as of Jan 2020 she has been canon updated to 2.10: "Making Amends")

In-Game Tattoo Placement: On the top of her right thigh.
Current Health/Status: Henry cribs from the X-Men in that she has a genetic abnormality that grants her the ability to teleport. When this ability first manifests, it presents as seizures which doctors have wrongfully chalked up to some idiopathic condition. She currently takes seizure medication even though she's not technically sick.
Apparent Age: 16.
Actual Age: 16.
Species: Human.

History:

Most of the fandom wikis have misleading or incorrect info, so I’ve written up a history for her. Impulse is set within the Jumper universe (raise your hand if you remember the 2008 movie, eyyyy), a series which tells the story of people gifted with the genetic ability to teleport or "jump." These so-called jumpers face persecution, hunted by shadowy organizations bent on either experimenting on them, or eradicating them on the grounds they're an affront to nature. Impulse has yet to assign the token term to the ability, but for simplicity's sake I'll refer to it as "jumping" from here on out.

(Before reading ahead, this is a series that deals with themes of sexual violence, particularly pertaining to Henry's character. Please be advised!)

Henrietta Coles--otherwise known by her nickname, Henry--is a 16-year-old girl unknowingly born with this latent ability, inherited from her father. When she was four years old, her father was abducted from their home in Vermont by a member of one such organization bent on hunting teleporters while Henry hid unnoticed in a closet. In the middle of their struggle, the two men disappeared into thin air--young Henry, unable to understand what she was seeing, soon repressed the memory. Her mother, Cleo Coles, came home to find Henry alone in the house. Unaware of his powers and thinking he had abandoned his child, she raised Henry with the story he left them for another woman.

This early loss paves the way for a rocky and unsettled childhood. From that point on, her mother bounces from boyfriend to boyfriend and town to town, rarely settling them in one place longer than six months at a stretch. As a teenager, Henry grows increasingly resentful of her mother's capricious lifestyle; their relationship deteriorates over time with Henry acting out in such ways as disappearing all night, vandalizing property, and once stealing a motorcycle. Henry assumes it's only a matter of time before they pick up and leave again when Cleo moves them to a small town called Reston in upstate New York, but for once it looks like this time might actually stick. Cleo finds love with a man named Thomas, a single father of his own teenage daughter. Henry and Jenna couldn't be more different: Henry is a rebellious wild child who'd probably wear the same pair of jeans every day of her life if she could get away with it, while Jenna is a popular girl with good grades and a squeaky clean reputation. The four move into the same house, the growing pains of their blended family making for a tense, uneasy dynamic.

To complicate matters, Henry starts having seizures for no discernible reason, puzzling doctors. Little does she realize, they're a symptom of her maturing teleportation ability. When stressed or scared, a jumper's survival response attempts to teleport them away from a perceived threat. It becomes apparent Henry's seizures aren't of the normal medical variety, but her body trying to teleport to protect her. On one particular day a teacher manhandles her and she goes into convulsions in front of her class. Her classmate, Townes, notices objects in the room are unnaturally drawn toward her as if magnetized, and rightfully begins to suspect her seizures are more than they seem.

It takes a traumatic event to unlock her abilities in full. After Cleo and Thomas decide to sell her car as punishment for misbehaving, she decides to steal it back by enlisting the help of Clay Boone, town golden boy and youngest son of Bill Boone, owner of the local car dealership. The Boones are a powerful family and not one to cross, their dealership a front for their real business: drug smuggling.

Alone in his truck, they flirt harmlessly enough at first, but while Henry backs off Clay doesn't take no for an answer and attempts to rape her. Fear sends Henry into an especially violent seizure that allows her to finally teleport successfully back to her bedroom, a place representing safety and familiarity to her. However, the force created by the jump crushes the truck with Clay still inside it. He survives, but is severely injured and in a coma, with doctors unsure if he will regain consciousness.

Unable to explain how she made it back to the house, in her confusion she confides details of the attack to Jenna, the first person she goes to for help after the fact. She also shares details of the teleportation side of things with Townes in an effort to make sense of how bits of Clay's truck ended up littering her bedroom floor. They band together to keep the secret of how Clay was injured to themselves, but the three are unable to conclusively make heads or tails of Henry's condition. For her part, she does her best to bury it and forget it. However, Lucas Boone, Clay's older brother, has other ideas. He finds out she was the last person to see his brother before the accident and has a hunch she knows more than she's saying. Confronted with her reluctance to talk, he kidnaps her, locking her in the trunk of his car. Frightened into teleporting back to her bedroom again, she does similar damage to Lucas' car, bewildering him in turn. Meanwhile, the patriarch of the family, Bill Boone, similarly believes Henry was a witness to the accident but is instead convinced his business partners in the drug trade were responsible, an act of vengeance for a deal gone wrong. Not long after she escapes from Lucas, Bill tracks her down and forces her into taking a midnight drive with him where he proceeds to take her to his business partners' compound and coerce her into identifying the culprit.

Honestly, this show should just be renamed to Henry's No Good, Very Bad Experiences with Boone Men in Vehicles.

Eyes opened to just how dangerous the Boone family really is, Henry feels she has no choice but to go along with Bill's demands and adopts the cover story in place of the truth, laying the blame at the feet of one of the young men she sees. It's a move she later comes to regret, as he turns up dead, murdered by Lucas who thinks he's avenging his brother.

Henry hopes that with the Boones' attentions turned elsewhere her part in the nightmare is over, but her hopes are in vain. Jenna informs her Clay has regained consciousness, though now a paraplegic.

The news sends Henry into a full blown panic attack, which unintentionally triggers a jump so violent it destroys part of the school. She, Jenna, and Townes can no longer deny something superhuman is happening to her, and they set out to test the theory her ability is triggered by fear. Henry confirms it by drowning herself, her ability depositing her on her bedroom floor before she can die. Gaining some tenuous understanding of her power gives Henry the courage to approach Clay in the hospital to ascertain what he remembers. Unexpectedly, he greets her warmly, happy to see her unharmed. He has no memory of what happened and believes the version of events his father told him, that he and Henry were having a good time before they were attacked by his father's associates. Realizing he doesn't remember she's responsible, she chooses to back up Bill's story.

In an effort to bridge the gap with her daughter and make sense of some of Henry's recent erratic behavior, Cleo then reveals the truth of how her father really left, feeling Henry is old enough to handle the truth. As a result, it jostles loose Henry's buried memories of hiding from the home intruder, and that night while asleep she subconsciously teleports into the closet of her childhood home where her father's kidnapping took place. Under the mounting pressure of the assault, Clay's rehabilitation, her out of control powers, and her repressed memories, Jenna tries to convince Henry to break her silence on the assault and seek support, but too late, she attempts to broach the subject with her mother in time to find out Cleo has accepted an exciting new job opportunity: as a saleswoman at Bill Boone's dealership.

Seeing her mother making a real attempt at setting down roots, Henry can't bring herself to ruin it by disclosing the truth about her and Clay--at least not with her. Once Henry's able to recover her childhood memory of her father's abduction, she confronts Clay, this time armed with the real version of events.

Although it's clear he remembers enough to recall his part in things, playing the amnesia card gives Clay the means to deny the assault ever took place and instead claim Henry is exaggerating; enraged by his refusal to admit what he did, she reveals in the heat of the moment that she's the one who paralyzed him--and it's the one good thing to come out of this shit show, as it means he can't hurt another person ever again. Overhearing their exchange from another room, Lucas comes to understand Henry is the one being honest, based on what he saw of her teleporting. He's sickened, both by what Clay's done and the fact he murdered an innocent person for him.

Tensions with the Boone family finally come to a head when Henry gets the opportunity to help a member of the police department find solid proof of their criminal enterprises. To do so, she must give the deputy time to search the house for evidence of Lucas' complicity in the murder by going along with her mother's idea to have the Boone family over for dinner. Pretending to make nice with Clay is the hardest thing she's done to date, and the charade brings tensions to a boiling point.

Lucas surprises her by apologizing to her over the course of the dinner, but Clay demands an apology from her for what he deems to be ridiculous accusations, and the stress of the moment sets off a seizure she doesn't come out of. Beginning to confess the truth to her mother, she falls unconscious in a state resembling a coma, stuck in the middle of a teleporting jump. In the hospital she has a vivid dream of needing to rescue her four-year-old self from Clay; it takes playing the vision out to completion while her body fights to recover to finally complete the jump, which deposits her back at home.

Other interested parties have taken notice of her developing ability by this stage. Seeing a new jumper has emerged, the organization hunting her traces the location of the gravitational shifts back to her town, where initially they presume Clay Boone is the teleporter based on his proximity to her initial jump until they discover Henry was with him. The very same man who once took her father breaks into her house looking for her while Jenna is home alone. Henry jumps back from the hospital just in time to help Jenna fight him off. Gravely injured in the skirmish, the man teleports away in self-defense--leading them to realize he possesses the same ability.

Meanwhile, thinking Henry is still unconscious at the hospital, Cleo confronts Bill, now knowing that all along the man she's been working for and his children have been terrorizing her daughter. She's not the only one who's uncovered the Boones' treachery, either, as the Boones' business partners are also aware of Lucas' hand in the murder of one of their own. They set the Boones' house on fire with Clay inside out of revenge. In the wrong place and wrong time, Cleo is caught up in a threeway shootout between the Boones, their partners, and the police who act on the evidence gathered on the Boones' operations. She almost manages to escape before Lucas takes her hostage to secure his own way out.

Thinking her mother might have ended up at the Boones' house, Henry arrives but finds the wrong brother inside the burning building, trapped and barely conscious. She has every opportunity to leave him but conscience wins out over vengeance, and she wills herself into teleporting the both of them out, jumping them safely to her room. The shock of it jars Clay's memory of Henry teleporting out of his truck, and he lashes out at her, calling her a monster and threatening to expose her and her powers for ruining his life. This time, though, Henry is better prepared to stand up to him when his powerful family is crumbling down around his ears.

With Clay badly burned and without his wheelchair, she enlists Jenna and Townes to drop him off at the hospital. Lucas, gripped by a crisis of conscience, releases Cleo and gives himself up to his family's partners. Bill, on the other hand, manages to cut a deal with the police and gets released from custody. Hearing how Clay escaped the fire and seeing the evidence of Henry's jumping at the house for himself, he finally pieces together Henry's involvement and holds the newly reunited mother and daughter at gunpoint to force Henry to account for how she managed it. She demonstrates instead, grabbing his arm and teleporting in a blind panic just as he fires. Upon coming to in a strange house in a foreign country, to her horror she discovers not all of him made the trip: just his severed arm and part of his torso.

While trying to piece together where she ended up, she finds an old photograph sitting on the table--of her and her family. Impossibly, it suggests the owner of the hideout is her father--and that Henry somehow jumped herself right across the globe to him in her distress.

Left unsure of her mother's fate, she prioritizes returning, wandering along a beach until she hears a passing train. As life-or-death situations trigger her teleporting, she throws herself in front of it to send herself home.

She'll wake up in Deerington before she can make it back.

Hometown/World: Reston, New York.

Personality:

Black hoodies and sarcasm: that's how people who know Henry describe her. "May she stay out of jail," toasts her mom wryly at one point. A pistol since day one out of the womb, Henry was born with an array of traits that would give any parent grey hairs, an outspoken, strong-willed, stubborn, fiercely independent, and aggressively private girl. Cleo's comment comes with an air of resignation, as she's fought (and lost) enough battle of wills with her daughter to know she isn't one to be talked down to or controlled by anyone, and attempting to rein her in goes about as well as trying to put a cat leash on a grizzly bear.

Her actress has succinctly summed this up as Henry being admirably and unapologetically herself--she does her own thing, and if people don't like her, she's not about to bend over backward to convince them otherwise. That extends to people at school, the community, and her step-family. On the opposite side of the coin, she's choosy about who she lets get close to her to look under the black hoodie hood, so to speak. Henry has a habit of retreating into herself, protective of her feelings and her hidden sides; people have to prove they're worth opening herself up for.

Jenna expresses envy of how little Henry seems to care about belonging, but the truth is, like any young person just trying to find her feet, she does. Like any young person coming off a fucked up childhood, leaning so hard into the grunge and bad attitude stereotype was a coping mechanism, a means of walling her feelings up to protect them from the instability of growing up in the backseat of a car. Their impulsive moving exposed Henry to few meaningful relationships; her life was at the mercy of her mother's, who fell into too-fast romances with men, changed her mind, and moved them out almost as quickly as they'd moved in. Each time her mother promised the next time would work out; each time it didn't. It was a lonely and extremely isolating time, having to say goodbye to people and places without warning. Eventually she became used to being alone and told herself she preferred being the perpetual new girl until she halfway believed the lie. Underneath it all is still the girl who wants to be normal and find people to fit in with, but learning to get out of her own way is a WIP.

At her best, Henry's grown into a self-sufficient person able to stand on her own, not one to be taken in by inauthentic people or superficial influences. (She gives Clay a chance in this regard and it blows up in her face spectacularly.) Her core strength is resilience. When she decides to do something, she grits her teeth and does it no matter her fear. She's never met a fight she didn't like--especially when it's in defense of the few people in her life, as evidenced by being ready to rip Townes' girlfriend and Jenna's wannabe boyfriend new assholes should a mean mom friend be required.

At her worst, she can be withdrawn, bottling her feelings up to the point even those closest to her have a difficult time seeing through her poker face. Combined with a reckless streak and an almost maddeningly stubborn insistence at handling things on her own, Henry has moments of being her own worst enemy. She keeps her assault and the domino effect of shit it sets off to herself, causing her to have several debilitating panic attacks over the course of the series from the sheer amount of stress she was under. This extends into putting herself in considerable danger without a thought to her own limits. When jumping off a cliff into a pool of water with Townes and Jenna nearby isn't enough to provoke her teleporting, thereby proving it's real, she comes back alone and duct tapes a backpack of rocks to herself for round #2, knowing there's no one to save her and that if she's wrong she'll most certainly drown. Similarly, she goes toe-to-toe with a drug smuggler even after he takes her on the car ride from hell, taking it upon herself to try and get a incriminating recording once she learns the police don't have enough to charge him.

That said, when contents under pressure explode they tend to explode intensely, and Henry is no different. At her extreme worst, she can be aggressive and abrasive, lashing out at people when her patience is expended, even when undeserved. This includes people like Townes who, having been diagnosed with autism, tends to view Henry through a very black-and-white lens, much to her exasperation. Unaware of the events surrounding how she got them, simply knowing she has abilities is enough for Townes to hold her up against comic book superheroes and grade her accordingly on her actions, believing her to be at the start of her origin story. At first he's unsure whether she fits the mold of a superhero or a super villain: to his eyes she has qualities that count against her, such as doing drugs, not seeming to appreciate praise or enthusiasm, and having what he considers "a genuine disdain for people," but in the end he judges her superhero worthy in her own unconventional way based on the strength of her character and her friendships.

Henry ultimately surprises herself as well, finding within her a capacity for growth and connecting with the people around her in a more open, caring manner. Ironically, it's the very events that cause her to hit rock bottom that in some ways crack her open and allow her to take steps to begin defining what matters in her life. By saving Clay, Henry demonstrates a desire to find better outlets for her own hurts and anger than revenge.

Personal Moral Codes:

↪ Petty crime gets a pass in Henry's morality book. Her own rap sheet includes smoking weed, stealing cars, vandalizing buildings, and lying through her teeth to little old ladies--there's not much in form of teenage rebellion she hasn't done.

↪ Much as she claims she prefers to mind her own business, she can't help but step in when she sees people who can't defend themselves in need. When pushed, Henry's the type to push back--and maybe it's because she is that when someone's being pushed around, she pushes back for them, just as she does when her teacher gets aggressive with Townes who's ill-equipped to defend himself.

↪ When Henry finds her abuser trapped in a burning building, she saves him, despite him being alive making her life infinitely harder when he could expose her and her abilities. She doesn't want to be a murderer--and she doesn't want what she's been through to make her a murderer.

Insecurities/Personal Demons:

↪ Clay Boone, her demon all wrapped up in a bow and a letterman jacket. After her assault, she exhibits signs of PTSD, experiencing shortness of breath, anxiety attacks, and discomfort with people touching her unexpectedly, coupled with self-denial and guilt. Not the best combo when your powers activate via stress. Confronting Clay only to be denied validation, she see-saws between anger and grief, downplaying the severity of the attack and thinking she can manage on her own. It takes the support of the people around her and the events of her coma dream for Henry to realize she can't do everything by herself.

↪ She doesn't know what her powers are or how to control them, and it's terrifying feeling like a stranger in her own body. Henry has difficulties sleeping as a result, and fears letting her emotions get the better of her in the event she has an episode.

↪ She's not a hero. Henry is intensely uncomfortable with her friend Townes referring to her as a superhero with a duty to help others. She's under no illusions about herself: she's a hot mess barely keeping her own shit together, let alone anyone else's. Not to mention the guilt of being responsible for not one, but two, deaths. Although she'll leap in front of a gun, she has a more difficult time believing she can make up for the damage she's caused. She's just a normal girl trying to get by.

↪ Mommy issues, daddy issues, abandonment issues, intimacy issues, authority issues... the girl was a bit of a chex mex bag of hangups even before everything.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses:

Henry is a jumper, someone with the ability to teleport. Rooted in science more than any "woo-woo magic" type logic, the standing theory is that jumpers are able to generate the mass necessary to open a wormhole and travel through it instantaneously. This can be conscious, or in Henry's case throughout season one, triggered when the jumper's body senses a threat and jumps them out of harm's way.

It's not always as cool as it sounds. Jumpers aren't immune to physics. It's possible for them to move themselves, other people, things that aren't nailed down (a backpack, a chair), and things in motion (bicycles, even speeding cars), but size and weight play a part. Moving a bag of potatoes you can pick up in your arms would be easier than a heavy fridge you can only get your arms halfway around. Likewise, in line with Newton's First Law a car in motion would be easier to travel than a car at rest. Something like a building would be next to impossible because of its size and the fact it's anchored. A jumper would have to rip it free from its foundations, and the strain of generating that much energy would kill most in the attempt.

Anything near or that makes contact with the jump scar (a term for the hole a jumper pokes in space) can also be in danger of being destroyed by the force the wormhole produces. Jumps done in a focused and relaxed state usually barely cause a ripple, but inexperienced or rushed ones can be highly destructive. In Henry's case, most of hers are chaotic, done in the midst of high emotion, and her teleporting has been known to cause shockwaves, crush entire vehicles, and tear apart buildings.

In a similar vein, a jumper must often be in physical contact with the thing they want to move. Things that don't manage to travel with the jumper, or that only travel halfway through a wormhole, can be cut clean in half--human bodies included.

There are other variables that affect their abilities. Usually they must have either travelled to the place they want to go to before, or else have a very clear idea of it in their mind. Henry is unusual in that she can teleport on subconscious instinct alone. No matter where she is or where she wants to go, she almost always jumps back to her bedroom, a place of familiarity and safety. As her ability develops, this grows to include places she has a strong emotional connection to--even places she doesn't remember, or hasn't been to. She unintentionally teleports into a storage closet at her old house she hasn't seen since she was four years old, and later on seemingly teleports to her dad despite not knowing his location.

Additional weaknesses:

✘ Because the gravitational shifts in a wormhole can cause things to move in all sorts of wacky and unpredictable ways, it can be extremely dangerous to jump near bullets or other projectiles. A bullet fired into a jump scar can come out the other side moving in a completely different direction.

✘ Certain high pitched frequencies will debilitate a jumper and leave normal humans unaffected.

✘ Electrical shocks disrupts a jumper's ability to teleport, making them susceptible to high voltage. Enemies of jumpers have since developed weaponry designed to pin them in place with electrified, highly durable cables to take advantage of this weakness.

✘ There is a drug called Factor that can block teleporting abilities.

Ability/Power/Magic Warping:

As it currently stands, Henry has little to no control over her abilities and has to scare herself shitless in order to spark them into working a lot of the time, so I think she makes an ideal candidate for a horror setting without needing too many nerfs to bring her down to a playable level. Per teleportation rules, her power will only work within the boundaries of the game and she won't be able to leave, and she doesn't yet have the skills to pick her destination, or do most of the tricks mentioned above.

Being so new to it, her jumping is still largely preceded by blackouts and seizures and triggered by generating a fear response in her body. Henry canonically controls her ability only once--the rest of the time she was either in flight or fight mode or asleep--and consequently, Henry relies on activating her ability via forcing her body to act in her defense (drowning herself, jumping in front of a train, etc.).

Normally, this would cause her to instinctively jump to her bedroom or another familiar place, except in Deerington Henry's jump destination will now be random. There will be no guarantee her teleporting will take her somewhere she knows. If she jumps to avoid an attacking monster, she may end up somewhere worse--like closer to danger, or the middle of Lake Tomie, or someone's cellar. I'd like to play around with this further by having certain events or game effects temporarily block her ability entirely. The cherry on the shit cake: the more she relies on her seizure meds, the more unstable/destructive her jumps will be until she stops taking them.

Inventory:

1. The outfit she was wearing.
2. Her headphones.
3. Her leather jacket.
4. Her phone.
5. The family photo she found in 1.10.
6. Seizure medication.

Writing Samples:

Sample one.
Sample two.

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Shira
Player Age: 29
Player Contact:
• Plurk: whatinthefuck
• Discord: bubblebear#4826

Other Characters In Game: Josh Hoberman (herbmancer).
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Henry Coles: Shira
Permissions for Character: Here.
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Yes!

What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: Spoopiness. Creep factor. Supernatural critters. Trauma bonding. THE WHOLE SHEBANG, I LOVE IT ALL.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: Nope!
Additional Information: You know Shira is making a bad life choice when she impulse apps a second character...