Taise

Taise Ó Siodhacháin pronunciation: Tasha o'Sheeahan
Player: @Sourceress
Her brother has trouble moving, but not rousing her ire.
Character Build
Class Focus:	Shadow
Power Level:	40
Research & Development:	Science
Biographical Data
Real Name:	Taise Ó Siodhacháin
Known Aliases:	(none)
Gender:	Female
Species:	Human
Ethnicity:	Mixed Caucasian; primarily Irish Gaelic
Place of Birth:	Alberta, Canada
Base of Operations:	Millenium City
Relatives:	Parents, brother, sister, extended family lives in Canada
Characteristics
Age:	25
Height:	185cm (6'1')
Weight:	56kg (125lb)
Eyes:	Blue-Green
Hair:	Blonde
Complexion:	normal?
Physical Build:	Thin, mildly malnourished
Physical Features:	None in particular
Status
Alignment:	██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ Chaotic Good
Reputation:	██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ Reputable
Identity:	Public, but powers are a secret
Years Active:	1
Citizenship:	Dual (Canada/U.S.)
Occupation:	Student
Education:	BSc. Computational Neuroscience
Marital Status:	In a relationship
Known Powers and Abilities
None except for integration with foglets
Equipment and Paraphernalia
Utility Fog [1]

Attributes
	Strength	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Endurance	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Agility	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Speed	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Fighting	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Projectiles	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Durability	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Resistance	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Intelligence	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Psyche	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Intuition	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Charisma	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
ReldinBox Template

WIP. Sometimes the narrative won't match up with this completely. When in doubt, explore IC or failing that, send a tell.

Pronunciation: People tend to use the traditional spelling (Taise) and the phonetic spelling (Tasha) interchangeably. That is fine.

Taise is the eldest daughter of a pair of self-absorbed university professors. Her brother and sister run Siodhacháin Nanotech, a small nanofabrication firm which does contracts for various hero and villain organizations, and employs people with mutations of the non-meta variety (ie. disabilities). Her 'power' is a lattice of interconnected self-configuring nanomachines which can produce incredible forces while being completely transparent and mostly imperceptible. She is just starting to learn how to use them consciously and effectively. She is technically a heroine, but due to her strong and indiscriminate empathy, she finds it difficult to harm people even if that's the best choice.

Biography

Early years

Taise's parents took a preventive approach to parenting: "if the only things to do in the house are to read books and solve puzzles, then surely our child will become a super-genius without much effort on our part!" Heavily sheltered from the world, she suffered from a lack of much-needed attention, but she was far too placid to rebel; she was kept healthy and fed a steady stream of high-brow literature, classical music, science educational media, and logic puzzles, all of which she devoured with the voraciousness of a Lovecraftian monster. Aside from her imagination, she never ventured beyond the house, yard, and local park, until the age of 8, when her siblings came of school age and, due to a mix-up in the homeschooling adminstration, they were all forced to go to public school.

Elementary School

In the park, kids saw Taise as kind of weird, but she was always warm and enthusiastic and pretty average physically, so she was a welcome addition to any games. At school, however, things were different: there was a pecking order, and Taise, given her lack of knowledge regarding social norms, was on the bottom. She was bullied, to say the least, and despite finding solace in the 'nerds' group, being a girl meant she was sometimes excluded even from them. The straw that broke the camel's back came when, during a swimming lesson, a budding young telekineticist abused his newfound powers and her exceptional sensitivity to molest her while she was doing laps. Nobody believed her (until several years later when he was caught flipping skirts at the grade 8 year-end dance), and she refused to go back to school; a psychiatric evaluation resulted in an ADHD diagnosis. Her parents had been considering moving back to Detroit (where her father was from) to take advantage of the boom occurring there since Dr. Destroyer's attack - they took this as an indication that the time was right.

Junior High and High School

By this point, Taise had learned to lay low and not to talk about academics to avoid spurring jealousy. To her delight, this - along with some early growth spurts - were all it took to become fairly popular with the relatively shy and awkward children at the local school in Millennium City. Her confidence grew and she became somewhat of an anti-bully, standing up for those who were excluded and chastizing those who tried to pull the same 'pecking order' behaviours as she had previously suffered under. However, her puzzle-solving mindset quickly led her to question the source of the behaviours. She noticed, when she stood over the bullies (literally - at 6'1", few were taller), they seemed just as dejected as she had been. She couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. She began tracking them, using techniques from detective novels to spy and gather information. Sure enough, each of them had reasons: abusive or neglectful (or missing) parents, siblings, neighbors, or even just growing up on the wrong side of town. The missing element was always acceptance. So she began to reach out to every person she came across, regardless of what sort of person they were. To connect everyone into one giant support network.

Unfortunately, it was a lot more arduous than she had anticipated. Taking on the pains of so many people, many of whom were mutants facing strife from the general public, was taxing on her sensitive and vulnerable nervous system. She couldn't do it alone, and the more she tried, the more she realized how alone she was.

Adulthood

Her gradual descent into depression was accelerated by one of her classmates from high school - whom she'd thought she'd healed - being convicted of second degree murder for incinerating his parents during an argument. Eventually, she gave up her dream of reaching out to misfits, and despite stellar performance in the first semester of university, she stopped going to classes and just slept, hardly leaving her bedroom for months. It didn't help that her digestion was also degenerating. Her parents were too preoccupied with their rapidly disintegrating marriage to notice, and her brother and sister were neck-deep in some kind of project. None of her 'friends' were close enough to be worried; they just assumed she had latched on to yet another basket case to try and mend.

Sooner or later, she found a customer care job with a large technology developer, and immersed herself in it, not daring to expose herself to anyone around her except as necessary for continued employment. The wake-up call came a couple years later when her sister left a message on her voicemail. "Tash, I know how you feel about doing things, at all, ever," the message chided, "but you should really come and see this. We could use your ... uniqueneness... and I think you'll like it."

Siodhacháin Nanotech

First Impressions

Taise wasn't exactly enthralled, but she was interested, for the first time in a long time. She helped to shape their startup into a competitive, enjoyable place to work, and refined some of their processes to be safer and more efficient. Taise was reminded that regardless of where her passions might lie, she had a very rare and useful skillset. She continued working part-time on a nano-fog seatbelt replacement, and started university again, choosing a subject that combined her interest in people, social interactions and behaviour with her intuition for maths and logic. Courses and independent research on neural networks, actor-network theory, and techno-utopianism began to coalesce into a clear image in her mind. "The way our brains work is like an ever-changing unity. No single part is the locus of the 'self', and dissonance is resolved non-destructively. Why don't we engineer our society to work the same way? Come to think of it - if we can organize our foglets' computation that way, we could achieve much greater capabilities with it."

Second Wave

She set to work on reprogramming them, and before long, it was working exactly as intended. She couldn't get it past the nanotech safety regulation board, though - as a 'collision injury prevention mechanism', the risks associated with consensus computing were higher than with a simple shock-sensitive design, they argued. Unwilling to let her creation just fall by the wayside, she tested it in private (against regulations) and has found it to be quite...useful. The foglets found her to be a compatible 'queen' and began gradually integrating themselves into her body, carefully ousting and replacing cell-by-cell, self-replicating using trace amounts of material from the environment. She is not aware that they are doing this.

Family

Sister: Aislin

Aislin ("ASH-lynn") o'Siodhachain, the 'elder twin', was born congenitally deaf, due to a malformation of the eardrum. However, with an early cochlear implant and intensive therapy, she was a social butterfly, easily scoring points as popular and attractive, and even going so far as to design stylish earpieces for the hearing mechanism. Like her twin, Kyle, she found her skills to be more... hands on... than her parents and older sister, and took only the minimum required core courses in high school, supplementing them with a variety of career & technology studies. In 2010, she and Kyle founded Siodhachain Nanotech, which landed its first contract when she applied to a car safety awareness competition. She has a sharp eye and isn't afraid to take what she wants (within reason) - so be careful! Although she teases her siblings, she loves them dearly and would stop at nothing to protect them.

Brother: Kyle

Kyle o'Siodhachain, born 6 minutes after Aislin, has a bone growth disorder which, although it makes him even taller than his sisters, severely limits his range of movement to the point of needing special techniques to clothe & feed himself. With the help of Justiciar's cybernetics program, he has acquired a wide range of assistive technology which helps him to live an independent life. The fact that he uses these devices on a daily basis makes him especially skilled at manipulating robotic tools, including the nanoconstructors in the lab. Although he fights with his sisters a lot, he values them both - as mentors as well as family.

Parents

Neither Taise, Aislin, nor Kyle keep in touch with them anymore.

Traits

Taise's overresponsive nervous system results in a variety of mild disabilities, including ADHD, IBS, and occasional hypersensitivity (sound/light/etc).

Power Profile

Observation Results:

• Individual foglet size: 160nm (arms retracted) 940nm (extended)
• Maximum pressure exerted: 900 kN/m^2
• Rapid-response pressure (combat situation): 10 kN/m^2
• Response not quick enough to stop most projectiles as of yet, but deflects subsonic rounds with high fidelity
• Neural network configuration results in adaptive heuristic behaviour
• Protects others as efficiently as host
• Configures to reflect a wide range of light, potentially may be used to create illusory duplicates of items
• Leaves no traces except for possibly 10nm indentations which may be difficult to identify
• Vulnerable to magic, intense heat (400+ degrees), strong electrical interference (they are insulated but they're tiny)
• Serves as a psionic amplifier, for both incoming and outgoing signals

Given that this puts her above peak human performance in some areas, she's been branded 'super' and put on watch.