Marie Van Eyck [Dr. Van Eyck] [Research Fellow]
Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2011 3:33 pm
IRC Nickname: Holtzmann
Name: Marie Van Eyck
Alias: Dr. Van Eyck, Thieving Spirit
Age: 357
Date of Birth: Spring, 1654
Hometown: northeastern United States
Height: 5'3" (variable)
Weight: 125lbs (variable)
Hair Color: reddish black
Eye Color: none (originally black)
Nationality/Race: Native American
Occupation: Research fellow, somewhat mad scientist, PhD-level in far too many fields.
Personality Profile: despite her age and her mutations, Marie can still pass for a more or less normal person in casual conversation. She is fiercely independent in her endeavors and highly patient and disciplined. She presents herself as calm and polite, but aloof when dealing with people she perceives as ignorant, oafish or rude.
Science and the acquisition of knowledge have become the main driving force in Marie's life for the past two hundred years, and she rarely misses out on an opportunity to learn or test something new. She keeps herself tuned to both world news and the latest scientific advancements, but she is generally uninformed about local affairs. Her knowledge of scientific subjects is impressive, even though it might take her body a few minutes to metabolize and remember a specific fact, theory or experimental result.
Her quirks tend to appear when she is looking for solutions to problems: when it comes to getting things done, Marie is clearly out of touch with reality. Her first suggestion to solve most situations will likely be to develop a dangerous complex machine, chemical substance, or otherwise to challenge the laws of physics in some strange way. Failing that, simply applying bruce force and seeing what sticks is her most common way to solve problems.
Marie dislikes conflict, considering it at most a study in applied sociology she is already tired of carrying out. She's seen plenty of blood, death and destruction in her time, and she already got over the natural human instinct to enjoy other people's misfortune. While Marie has extensive knowledge of many forms of combat, she lacks the muscle memory to be a competent fighter, so she tends to remain intangible at all times and evade aggression. She holds no grudges against humans, but she does find mutants much more interesting test subjects.
Physical Description: Marie's appearance varies with time, but currently she is a female humanoid with deep red skin. Bundles of mutated muscle and sinew poke through her skin, and there are many chitinous plates, bony spikes and outgrowths scattered across her body and down her spine. Her face is eyeless (yet she can still see) and her hair has mutated into fleshy tentacles, squirming constantly and giving her a rather medusa-like appearance. A thick crocodilian tail tipped with a blade-like stinger extends from the base of her spine, and her feet are two-toed, with bony heels. Both her hands and her feet sport short black claws.
Marie wears only a matching dark gray top and bikini bottom, often covered by a white labcoat. More modest outfits tend to rip and tear whenever her more aggressive mutations manifest themselves. Her trachea and her mouth are not connected, and she speaks using a tiny cybernetic implant fitted to the back of her throat. It gives her a surprisingly soft and pleasant voice. When in public, she often wears a holowatch of her own design, powered by her induction field instead of batteries. This holowatch is permanently locked into producing an image of a native american female with brown eyes and long black hair.
Character Picture:
---------------------------------
Mutation/Powers:
Primary : Selective Intangibility - While Marie's secondary mutation is much more apparent, the first mutation she developed was the ability to become intangible at will, fully or partially. She can select which parts of her body still interact with normal matter, allowing her to stand up on the ground without falling through, or to walk up walls like a spider. This power originally only allowed her to walk through walls, but she had enough time to make it so she can stay intangible indefinitely, as well as turn a mass of up to her own weight intangible as well. Her most common uses for this power are walking through walls and crowds unhindered, as well as fixing and replacing parts of machines without having to open or disassemble them.
A side-effect of this mutation is that Marie's body emits a weak electrical induction field. Marie uses tends to use this induction field to power up small machines and her own cybernetic implants, and she always wears a small nullifying device to take care of any residual voltage so as not to damage any of her fragile lab equipment.
Secondary : Genetic Memory - Marie stores knowledge in her DNA as well as her brain, allowing her to retain incredible amounts of information with perfect memory. Marie learns extremely quickly, and within a day any new memories formed are fully incorporated into her genetic code and then simply erased from her brain. It might take her a few minutes to "metabolize" certain memories, as her body needs to parse through her entire massive DNA until it finds the information she needs. Those memories are impossible for anyone (including her) to decode artificially, and any clones of Marie are instantly born with all the knowledge and recollections of Marie at the time the genetic sample was taken.
Tertiary : Unstable Biology - Marie's mutations have extremely aggressive effects on her body. As more information is incorporated into her DNA, her body changes and mutates accordingly, healing wounds extremely quickly. While she usually keeps to a humanoid shape, random limbs and body parts grow and mutate overnight, sometimes over just a few seconds, keeping her appearance in constant shift and occasionally giving her minor temporary powers.
Side-effects effect of this unstable biology include the fact that she is immune to all known viruses, highly resistant to radiation, and many organic and inorganic substances have different effects on her than on most other people. For example, recycled paper makes her itch and lean red meat makes her hyperactive. Likewise, she has a certain dietary requirement of toxic metals like mercury, lead and arsenic, making her flesh incredibly poisonous and her blood thick and dark.
Drawbacks/Weaknesses/Side Effects :
- While Marie can be a force to be reckoned with if she has time to prepare, being caught without a plan will force her to run away. She's not a hero by any stretch of the imagination.
- Marie's mutations sometimes take on rather debilitating or awkward forms. She has stopped bothering to count of how many times she had to amputate a newly-mutated limb to replace it with more functional prosthetic. Likewise, regenerating a wound while whatever caused it is still lodged inside her causes a large tumor-like fibrous growth to surround the foreign object.
- She needs to be extremely careful with what substances she comes into contact. Her reactions change with time, making something that was perfectly harmless to her one week become a powerful allergen the next. This is one of the reasons she prefers to remain immaterial most of the time.
- The minor powers her mutations sometimes grant her can be just as bothersome as they can be helpful, since she rarely has time to learn how to control them properly before they vanish.
- An SND will stop her from storing or retrieving information from her DNA, so she avoids those things like the plague.
How do you believe this character's powers will further develop in the future? (Note: Not required for staff members.)
Background:
Marie Van Eyck was born Ayaek, part of the Iroquois tribe. As a young teenager, her mutations first manifested, allowing her to effortlessly slip through solid obstacles. She was renamed "Thieving Spirit" and eventually exiled by the shaman of her tribe once their visions indicated her presence within the tribe would only bring them ruin. Abandoned, the girl traveled towards the coast and spent a few years assimilating the colonizers' culture and living off small crimes while trying to avoid being caught.
Eventually, Ayaek seduced a dutch merchant called Johan Breen and convinced him to take her to Europe. Once in the Old World and fluent in the local language, she took up the rather generic dutch name Marie Van Eyck, left Johan and started exploring the continent. Both seducing and tricking her way through the miles, she avoided incarceration through a combination of guile and simply walking out of whatever dungeons she was thrown in. Marie learned the languages of cultures of most European empires of the age as she left a trail of befuddled and impoverished noble men in her wake. Noticing she wasn't actually aging, Marie decided to settle down in Russia and managed to insinuate herself into Peter I the Great's court.
Now part of the Russian aristocracy, Marie had access to the Empire's great libraries and started exchanging letters with writers and scholars from Russia and beyond. As the Tzar's reign drew to a close, Marie moved down to France and, from that point on, started taking up different identities and worming her way into different courts every twenty years or so. In the process, she kept in contact with the new generations of intellectuals as they rose and fell.
As she learned more and more about the world around her, and read more and more books, her body started to change. At first, the mutations were easily concealed under the large dresses and elaborate makeup of the time. But as her skin started to warp and change color, it became impossible for her to blend in so easily. Having amassed quite the fortune from her royal patrons (and not just a few thefts), she moved back to the Netherlands in the early 19th century and lived in relative obscurity as she assembled a rather spectacular library. In time, her mutations became even more pronounced and debilitating, and she called upon a few favors with the Dutch East India Company.
Marie lived in the south of Sumatra until the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Half-dead and having lost most of her library to the cataclysmic volcano, she returned to the Netherlands, then moved to Prussia just in time for the Great War. She laid low in the rural areas, fully immersed in the newest developments of science as the German Empire collapsed around her as was restructured into the Weimar Republic. Then the Third Reich rose up… and it was time to move to England.
With the Second World War heating up, Marie became involved with the scientific community at large. Mostly writing papers and carrying out experiments by herself, she helped improve British radar technology, and her potential was fully recognized when the US government invited her back to the land she had left almost three hundred years before. She was promised she would be able to push science forward even further as she became involved in the Manhattan Project. Her work was fully theoretical, given her status as a mutant would make direct contact with other scientists difficult, but it did allow her to exchange letters with some of the sharpest minds of the century.
After World War II, her constant need for more knowledge led her towards the quickly-advancing fields of medicine and genetics. All throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and early 80s, Marie became more and more eccentric as she performed more and more experiments, both on humans and mutants. She was in constant danger of losing funding as her increasingly bizarre experiments made her lose favor with both government and private companies. It came to the point META developed special parameters to interfere if Marie Van Eyck snapped for good. Eventually, in the late 80s, she vanished almost completely from the scientific community.
Nowadays, Marie is still interested in physics, genetics and medicine, but she's quickly assimilating a new field: robotics, cybernetics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Sure, she could still unleash the occasional zombie plague if she so desired (as she did in two occasions, in '69 and '77, both quickly contained), but she seems to have settled down again. Her last lab was built near Salem in 1988, in the site the Cobalt Academy was later relocated to. Instead of moving somewhere else, she decided to be a little more sociable and stick around. Maybe even do some honest-to-God Science.
Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts:
- Marie is fluent in Iroquoian, Dutch, English, Russian and other slavic languages, Latin, German, French, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian (one of her favorites), Tagalog, Turkish, Indonesian, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Swahili, Afrikaans, Zulu, Mandarin and Cantonese. She can also read a respectable amount of ancient languages. Of course, her vocabulary might be a little outdated.
- At some point back in the 1800s, Marie became something more similar to a human-spider hybrid, but she simply assumes that was a freak mutation. She blames her streak of extremely unethical experiments in the 20th century on the fact she was actually growing a second head and it made her extremely cranky. Once fully-grown, she severed that head and mounted it on a life support machine, so she could have someone to talk to in her lab.
- Her bony growths are very sharp, but Marie dulls most of them herself to avoid accidents. The only place left sharpened is the blade at the tip of her tail.
- Marie does not have an actual doctorate, but doesn't mind being called a doctor.
Name: Marie Van Eyck
Alias: Dr. Van Eyck, Thieving Spirit
Age: 357
Date of Birth: Spring, 1654
Hometown: northeastern United States
Height: 5'3" (variable)
Weight: 125lbs (variable)
Hair Color: reddish black
Eye Color: none (originally black)
Nationality/Race: Native American
Occupation: Research fellow, somewhat mad scientist, PhD-level in far too many fields.
Personality Profile: despite her age and her mutations, Marie can still pass for a more or less normal person in casual conversation. She is fiercely independent in her endeavors and highly patient and disciplined. She presents herself as calm and polite, but aloof when dealing with people she perceives as ignorant, oafish or rude.
Science and the acquisition of knowledge have become the main driving force in Marie's life for the past two hundred years, and she rarely misses out on an opportunity to learn or test something new. She keeps herself tuned to both world news and the latest scientific advancements, but she is generally uninformed about local affairs. Her knowledge of scientific subjects is impressive, even though it might take her body a few minutes to metabolize and remember a specific fact, theory or experimental result.
Her quirks tend to appear when she is looking for solutions to problems: when it comes to getting things done, Marie is clearly out of touch with reality. Her first suggestion to solve most situations will likely be to develop a dangerous complex machine, chemical substance, or otherwise to challenge the laws of physics in some strange way. Failing that, simply applying bruce force and seeing what sticks is her most common way to solve problems.
Marie dislikes conflict, considering it at most a study in applied sociology she is already tired of carrying out. She's seen plenty of blood, death and destruction in her time, and she already got over the natural human instinct to enjoy other people's misfortune. While Marie has extensive knowledge of many forms of combat, she lacks the muscle memory to be a competent fighter, so she tends to remain intangible at all times and evade aggression. She holds no grudges against humans, but she does find mutants much more interesting test subjects.
Physical Description: Marie's appearance varies with time, but currently she is a female humanoid with deep red skin. Bundles of mutated muscle and sinew poke through her skin, and there are many chitinous plates, bony spikes and outgrowths scattered across her body and down her spine. Her face is eyeless (yet she can still see) and her hair has mutated into fleshy tentacles, squirming constantly and giving her a rather medusa-like appearance. A thick crocodilian tail tipped with a blade-like stinger extends from the base of her spine, and her feet are two-toed, with bony heels. Both her hands and her feet sport short black claws.
Marie wears only a matching dark gray top and bikini bottom, often covered by a white labcoat. More modest outfits tend to rip and tear whenever her more aggressive mutations manifest themselves. Her trachea and her mouth are not connected, and she speaks using a tiny cybernetic implant fitted to the back of her throat. It gives her a surprisingly soft and pleasant voice. When in public, she often wears a holowatch of her own design, powered by her induction field instead of batteries. This holowatch is permanently locked into producing an image of a native american female with brown eyes and long black hair.
Character Picture:
---------------------------------
Mutation/Powers:
Primary : Selective Intangibility - While Marie's secondary mutation is much more apparent, the first mutation she developed was the ability to become intangible at will, fully or partially. She can select which parts of her body still interact with normal matter, allowing her to stand up on the ground without falling through, or to walk up walls like a spider. This power originally only allowed her to walk through walls, but she had enough time to make it so she can stay intangible indefinitely, as well as turn a mass of up to her own weight intangible as well. Her most common uses for this power are walking through walls and crowds unhindered, as well as fixing and replacing parts of machines without having to open or disassemble them.
A side-effect of this mutation is that Marie's body emits a weak electrical induction field. Marie uses tends to use this induction field to power up small machines and her own cybernetic implants, and she always wears a small nullifying device to take care of any residual voltage so as not to damage any of her fragile lab equipment.
Secondary : Genetic Memory - Marie stores knowledge in her DNA as well as her brain, allowing her to retain incredible amounts of information with perfect memory. Marie learns extremely quickly, and within a day any new memories formed are fully incorporated into her genetic code and then simply erased from her brain. It might take her a few minutes to "metabolize" certain memories, as her body needs to parse through her entire massive DNA until it finds the information she needs. Those memories are impossible for anyone (including her) to decode artificially, and any clones of Marie are instantly born with all the knowledge and recollections of Marie at the time the genetic sample was taken.
Tertiary : Unstable Biology - Marie's mutations have extremely aggressive effects on her body. As more information is incorporated into her DNA, her body changes and mutates accordingly, healing wounds extremely quickly. While she usually keeps to a humanoid shape, random limbs and body parts grow and mutate overnight, sometimes over just a few seconds, keeping her appearance in constant shift and occasionally giving her minor temporary powers.
Side-effects effect of this unstable biology include the fact that she is immune to all known viruses, highly resistant to radiation, and many organic and inorganic substances have different effects on her than on most other people. For example, recycled paper makes her itch and lean red meat makes her hyperactive. Likewise, she has a certain dietary requirement of toxic metals like mercury, lead and arsenic, making her flesh incredibly poisonous and her blood thick and dark.
Drawbacks/Weaknesses/Side Effects :
- While Marie can be a force to be reckoned with if she has time to prepare, being caught without a plan will force her to run away. She's not a hero by any stretch of the imagination.
- Marie's mutations sometimes take on rather debilitating or awkward forms. She has stopped bothering to count of how many times she had to amputate a newly-mutated limb to replace it with more functional prosthetic. Likewise, regenerating a wound while whatever caused it is still lodged inside her causes a large tumor-like fibrous growth to surround the foreign object.
- She needs to be extremely careful with what substances she comes into contact. Her reactions change with time, making something that was perfectly harmless to her one week become a powerful allergen the next. This is one of the reasons she prefers to remain immaterial most of the time.
- The minor powers her mutations sometimes grant her can be just as bothersome as they can be helpful, since she rarely has time to learn how to control them properly before they vanish.
- An SND will stop her from storing or retrieving information from her DNA, so she avoids those things like the plague.
How do you believe this character's powers will further develop in the future? (Note: Not required for staff members.)
Background:
Marie Van Eyck was born Ayaek, part of the Iroquois tribe. As a young teenager, her mutations first manifested, allowing her to effortlessly slip through solid obstacles. She was renamed "Thieving Spirit" and eventually exiled by the shaman of her tribe once their visions indicated her presence within the tribe would only bring them ruin. Abandoned, the girl traveled towards the coast and spent a few years assimilating the colonizers' culture and living off small crimes while trying to avoid being caught.
Eventually, Ayaek seduced a dutch merchant called Johan Breen and convinced him to take her to Europe. Once in the Old World and fluent in the local language, she took up the rather generic dutch name Marie Van Eyck, left Johan and started exploring the continent. Both seducing and tricking her way through the miles, she avoided incarceration through a combination of guile and simply walking out of whatever dungeons she was thrown in. Marie learned the languages of cultures of most European empires of the age as she left a trail of befuddled and impoverished noble men in her wake. Noticing she wasn't actually aging, Marie decided to settle down in Russia and managed to insinuate herself into Peter I the Great's court.
Now part of the Russian aristocracy, Marie had access to the Empire's great libraries and started exchanging letters with writers and scholars from Russia and beyond. As the Tzar's reign drew to a close, Marie moved down to France and, from that point on, started taking up different identities and worming her way into different courts every twenty years or so. In the process, she kept in contact with the new generations of intellectuals as they rose and fell.
As she learned more and more about the world around her, and read more and more books, her body started to change. At first, the mutations were easily concealed under the large dresses and elaborate makeup of the time. But as her skin started to warp and change color, it became impossible for her to blend in so easily. Having amassed quite the fortune from her royal patrons (and not just a few thefts), she moved back to the Netherlands in the early 19th century and lived in relative obscurity as she assembled a rather spectacular library. In time, her mutations became even more pronounced and debilitating, and she called upon a few favors with the Dutch East India Company.
Marie lived in the south of Sumatra until the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Half-dead and having lost most of her library to the cataclysmic volcano, she returned to the Netherlands, then moved to Prussia just in time for the Great War. She laid low in the rural areas, fully immersed in the newest developments of science as the German Empire collapsed around her as was restructured into the Weimar Republic. Then the Third Reich rose up… and it was time to move to England.
With the Second World War heating up, Marie became involved with the scientific community at large. Mostly writing papers and carrying out experiments by herself, she helped improve British radar technology, and her potential was fully recognized when the US government invited her back to the land she had left almost three hundred years before. She was promised she would be able to push science forward even further as she became involved in the Manhattan Project. Her work was fully theoretical, given her status as a mutant would make direct contact with other scientists difficult, but it did allow her to exchange letters with some of the sharpest minds of the century.
After World War II, her constant need for more knowledge led her towards the quickly-advancing fields of medicine and genetics. All throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and early 80s, Marie became more and more eccentric as she performed more and more experiments, both on humans and mutants. She was in constant danger of losing funding as her increasingly bizarre experiments made her lose favor with both government and private companies. It came to the point META developed special parameters to interfere if Marie Van Eyck snapped for good. Eventually, in the late 80s, she vanished almost completely from the scientific community.
Nowadays, Marie is still interested in physics, genetics and medicine, but she's quickly assimilating a new field: robotics, cybernetics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Sure, she could still unleash the occasional zombie plague if she so desired (as she did in two occasions, in '69 and '77, both quickly contained), but she seems to have settled down again. Her last lab was built near Salem in 1988, in the site the Cobalt Academy was later relocated to. Instead of moving somewhere else, she decided to be a little more sociable and stick around. Maybe even do some honest-to-God Science.
Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts:
- Marie is fluent in Iroquoian, Dutch, English, Russian and other slavic languages, Latin, German, French, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian (one of her favorites), Tagalog, Turkish, Indonesian, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Swahili, Afrikaans, Zulu, Mandarin and Cantonese. She can also read a respectable amount of ancient languages. Of course, her vocabulary might be a little outdated.
- At some point back in the 1800s, Marie became something more similar to a human-spider hybrid, but she simply assumes that was a freak mutation. She blames her streak of extremely unethical experiments in the 20th century on the fact she was actually growing a second head and it made her extremely cranky. Once fully-grown, she severed that head and mounted it on a life support machine, so she could have someone to talk to in her lab.
- Her bony growths are very sharp, but Marie dulls most of them herself to avoid accidents. The only place left sharpened is the blade at the tip of her tail.
- Marie does not have an actual doctorate, but doesn't mind being called a doctor.