Emma Connor

beauty in sinking ships

because we're far away from home
Look, until Emma went to college? Her life on Neibolt in Derry was pretty freaking normal. Her father worked in a bank, her mother at an elementary school. Her little sister was well. A little sister. The general sibling things that go with that relationship, when you're 15 and your parents have another baby. She took dance classes. Sometimes, when it rained, she got headaches. She went to college. On scholarships, but that doesn't pay for everything does it? Nope.

and there's no where else to go
So she took odd jobs. Worked at the library. Sometimes helped to teach dance classes to kids on the weekend. When there was a flier at the college, a research study that paid a thousand dollars for a weekend's worth of work? Well. Who wouldn't take that job? Stupid people wouldn't take that.

Or, you know, people who aren't given some kind of drug that makes them see tentacles flying on the ceiling, or knights fighting in the hallways for an entire weekend. A weekend of people freaking out in their hospital beds, some of them so bad that they claw at the skin. And other things.

But eventually it wears off, and she barely even remembers what happened that weekend at all. Until the first time she shakes someone's hand at a carnival and is absolutely stricken by the image of them getting hit by a car in the next ten minutes. Which, it turns out, is exactly what happened.

Emma is pretty good at basic math, so when that happens, two, three more times? She's pretty sure it has something to do with that drug she was given. She calls the company that ran the trial? Who wouldn't do that? People who have no basic paranoia about this sort of thing would do that, and of course they want her to come in for some tests. They can fix this right up, they assure her.

they can't save us now
Because everyone can always trust The Shop, right? Not that she knows it's the Shop at all. Not that she's aware that anything is at all wrong with this scenario. A side effect, that's all this is.

A year of painful and nightmarish testing later, she finds herself on a boat. A sort of mobile lab of sorts. Water, they have found, makes her visions work better. If she's submerged, all the better. She's been held under water, she's been doused with it, anything that they could think to do, they did. A sort of wet living nightmare.

And then the epidemic. Of course the people on the boat were not immune. She knew the moment one of them touched her that they had it. How they would die. When they would die. She didn't say. She refused to say anything. As they got worse, her visions got worse. As they died, and she didn't, her visions continued until all she could focus on was a lighthouse.

The very same one, as it turned out, whose tidal island her boat would end up crashing into very shortly.

because we're lost and won't be found
Tall, thin and dark haired. She was a dancer, and that's fairly obvious from how she moves, how she walks, and just her general build. Dark brown is not her natural hair color, but she thinks she looks pretty bad as a blonde, so she dyes it. We'll see how well that goes in the post-flupocalyptic world. Facial expressions tend to balance between cheerful and snarky, depending on how annoyed she is or how much she likes who she's talking to.

we can scream so loud
On the outside, Emma is a fairly cheerful person. If you're nice to her, she's nice to you. If you're not nice to her, she's probably still nice to you. Or at the very least, cheerfully sarcastic at you. Beyond that, is a girl who is pretty well...distressed about what has happened over the past few months. Even beyond the epidemic, there's what the Shop did to her, and that's fairly traumatizing. Nightmares abound, so she doesn't sleep much.

What does Emma like? She likes the color blue, she likes earthtones. She actually really does like the ocean, even if it does turn her into a huge mess. She likes roller coasters, and apparently dating men older than her who occasionally (all the time) rub people the wrong way. She loves to dance, and for a while she was sort of working on an architecture degree. What does Emma hate? Rats and hospitals. So you know. Welcome to your living hell, Emma Connor.

Emma's has two basic abilities, both touch-based. Objects or people can activate her abilities. With people, what she can generally see are their intentions, if her ability has been activated. She also has visions, for the most part they only show her what will happen within the next few minutes to the next hour. However, water will make her abilities stronger. The closer she is, the more she can see to the point of if she's actually in water, she can sometimes end up trapped in her visions for periods of time. Weak visions make her shaky, freaked out, or look like a goose walked over his grave. Deeper, more intricate visions are almost paralyzing. The deeper, longer the vision is, the worse she looks.