xxxxxBorn in Stillwater, Minnesota, Winona was born the only girl in a family with three older brothers. Her parents being Lakota Sioux, they taught about (and made sure that Winona would be proud of) her heritage. The family would sometimes pile into their family van to go visit her grandparents a couple of hours away, and participate in community events there. Their family was not exceptionally well-off, but aside from a couple of rough patches, they managed to make ends meet.
xxxxxFrom a young age, Winona enjoyed telling stories and arranging activities for her fellow classmates, and would often be called a ‘bossy’ girl because of the latter inclination. Her teachers took note of her writing skills even early on, and as she progressed from elementary to high school, she would start to submit her work to all kinds of youth literary contests because of the encouragement of her teachers.
xxxxxShe started hanging out more with skater kids, skateboarding late into the evening with her friends in the town wherever they could, but also going to the library and talking to her parents (and grandparents when she had access) in order to learn more about the history of her family, her tribe and the area that she grew up in to get more inspiration for her writing.
xxxxxWhen she was fourteen, her mutant ability manifested when she was visiting with her maternal grandmother and examining a piece of old jewelry while listening to the older woman tell the tale. Winona felt as though she was transported into the past, seeing the moment that her grandmother received the pendant from her own mother clear as if she was just an observer. While she felt like she was observing the interaction between her grandmother and great-grandmother for minutes, it was only a few seconds that she remained in the trance. There was a slight glow to her eyes and the place that her skin had contacted the pendant, alerting her grandmother that something odd had happened.
xxxxxThey discussed what had happened as a family, and her parents were a little skeptical at first, but were convinced because Winona’s grandmother was well known to be very no-nonsense and because Winona seemed to be having a lot of emotions at the time. Ultimately, they were accepting of their daughter, and even thought that it was a gift to be able to connect to the past so clearly.
xxxxxWhile she did not make much use of her gifts to start, she started to practice more as she got more into her new (or at least additional) passion: film. With some of the images that she got from objects were more abstract, and others more clear, she was inspired to experiment a lot with visual styles. Sometimes her videos included doing crude stop motion, other times telling the story while creating a set, and still others adding action from climbing. At first, she used her phone or webcam to record most of her projects, her family pooled together on her sixteenth birthday to get her a nice camera and microphone, which she made great use of in her future video projects.
xxxxxShe started a series of videos where she investigated supposed hauntings in the town, which was ultimately a framing device to talk about the history of Stillwater with some added scary tales. The web series that she started around this time was called, ‘Uncovering the Uncanny: Stillwater Chills’. When she graduated, she was accepted into Tisch School of the Arts for film studies but decided to take a gap year to film the third season of ‘Uncovering the Uncanny’, where she would travel and explore some of the states in her old beater of a car, having been modestly funded on Patreon for the series.
xxxxxWhile she hit a couple of places in the midwest to start with and got some great footage for her next video, on one of the abandoned properties she had gone to investigate, a rural sheriff had followed her to it (having found her to be a ‘suspicious character’). When he pointed a gun at her to put her under arrest, Winona quickly and quietly complied with his demand. As the sheriff was putting the cuffs on her, his hand brushed against Winona’s and her powers activated. She read the man’s past, putting them both momentarily in a trance to view together the moment that he had beat his son in a moment of drunken rage. When he got his bearings he angrily shoved her into the squad car for a very tense, quiet drive back to the station.
xxxxxOnce there, he made contact with Prometheus, having heard that they can take mutants off of law enforcement’s hands. He did not want someone who saw his secret (and who knows what else she might have seen!) to be in his station, and it seemed like a quick way to make his problem disappear.
xxxxxDisappear she did. Winona was brought to the Prometheus facility, where she has remained for a year since. She’s been starting to lose hope that escape is even possible, that she may well live the rest of her days in the facility, that she would never see her family again or be able to attend the film school she had looked forward to for so long.
xxxxxTo those who had been following her story online, rumours started to circulate that Winona White had vanished, having become one of the very ghost stories that she had been investigating.
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