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xxxxxBorn to a drug-addicted, prostitute mother in inner city Chicago, the girl who would become Anima grew up tragically but unremarkably. Her mother named her Helene in a cruel and ironic play on Helene of Troy who caused a war and the fall of an empire. In her case, Helene represented the failure of a certain allusive brand of contraceptive that resulted in her birth. And her mother resented her every day of her life for it with her abusive, hellish lifestyle that led to a sporadic presence in young Helene's early years. Shuffled from foster home to foster home, her mother appeared every so often with a court order that granted her custody of her child and access to the increased payment on welfare checks motherhood entitled her to.
Despite this, Helene never grew up a shy or timid girl for all the inconstancy, neglect, and sometimes-violent abuse she was subjected to as an unwanted child lost in the cracks of the system. Although withdrawn, and detached, she showed promise and even brilliance in school. She had potential to be a somebody instead of a nobody. That is, until she began to manifest some... peculiar behaviors with the onset of puberty towards the end of middle school and beginning of high school.
For one, Helene started to hear voices - the voices of her peers. And they said awful, mean things about the poor, dirty girl who sat in the back of the classroom and rarely spoke. Soon, a rage swelled within Helene, tortured all her life by feelings of being unloved, and worthless. And now she had proof. It was secret proof, but a self-verifying truth nonetheless as she became privy to the thoughts of others. With time, she also learned she was able to influence these thoughts, plant seeds of action in others' minds and force them to treat her well. But this did not make them inherently nice. No, on the contrary, it bred a more blatant animosity towards her, this weird girl whom they hated but were unable to enact their hate against. The torment continued.
Then, one day, Helene snapped, and forced a group of her peers to kill themselves and set fire to their classroom. Helene was a lone survivor as she compelled her classmates to remain there, trapped and burning in agonizing pain until they were all blackened husks of their former selves. Implicated as the only one to escape, events escalated, and Helene was outed as a mutant. The authorities arrested her, lost in the system, this time in psychiatric wards especially designed for dangerous mutants such as herself. She was housed with the other freaks, but even then she was to be feared. So they kept her strapped to a gurney, under 24-hour surveillance, all number of IVs stuck into her, pumping her full of sedatives. They even fed her intravenously. This is how the next few years of her life passed, in a dim, drug-addled haze wherein Helene was alone, forgotten, and powerless, trapped within her mind with all this potential.
Potential: it has always proved to be her saving grace. Eventually, Prometheus learned of her existence and acquired rights to her. Helene was transferred to a new facility, unstrapped from her bed, unhooked from all those medications and the liquid foods that sustained her. Prometheus was interested in testing her potential. She was identified as a mutant, as a telepath specifically, with a particular aptitude for mind control. And so the experiments began. Prometheus was eager to learn and experiment on her. Helene was ready to do the same with them.
Which brings us to present day. Helene has once again become dangerous and unwanted. Prometheus called her a liability. But Helene would not go under again. And so she began to plot her escape. The costs were grave - for Helene would never be allowed to walk away from the system. At least, not in her own body, and not with the same talents.
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xxxxxAnima has the ability to transfer hir psyche over to other living organisms. A consequence of psychic possession is the physical deterioration of hir host body over time; it appears that an organism cannot sustain the presence of two minds for too long before it begins to shut down and try to reject Anima the longer ze resides in the foreign body. The more complex the organism, the longer the body lasts, but the more difficult it is to control.
Possession exacts a toll on Anima's mind too. While capable of suppressing the conscience of hir host, there is no way of keeping hirself altogether separate. The longer ze controls another organism, the more ze is likely to take on characteristics of the original host's personality, resulting in an increasingly fragmented being. Over time, ze might become too integrated with a host, and risk losing not only hir identity, but also becoming trapped in that host body whilst ze inevitably withers away.
Once Anima psionically possesses another organism, Anima acquires full use of its natural abilities, including mutations. By accessing what are often subconscious neural pathways, ze displays a much finer command over said powers than the original host might exhibit, able to utilize them to their fullest extent.
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