Gender: Female
Age: 16
Grade: 11
Hobbies and Interests: Entomology and other associated disciplines, fashion, literature
Gift: Phenomena
Power Details: Isabella has the power to verbally communicate with any insect, arachnid, or any other sort of bug within a one-hundred metre radius of herself, in addition to being able to understand their thoughts, communications, and feelings through intuitive telepathy. She also has an intuitive knowledge of where all bugs are within her radius, and — should the bug actively want her to — has the ability to access their senses and memories, coming in the form of intense visions which forcibly take over her sight, smell, and touch. Her voice has a unique psychic effect which leaves bugs inclined to follow any orders she gives them — so long as they do not override the bug’s sense of self-preservation — and then in turn broadcast her voice and orders to any other bugs that would understand within the radius. Orders generally last until they are completed or otherwise overridden — they will still continue to follow orders if they are otherwise outside of the radius or if Isabella is asleep, though should their instinct or sense of self preservation take over they’ll generally forget what Isabella told them to do and return to their natural behavior. In addition, bugs affected by her power are friendly to her by default — even if she doesn’t communicate with them, they will naturally see her as a non-threat and will not act hostile to her under any circumstances.
Limitations and Drawbacks: Isabella’s Gift requires explicit verbal communication in order to commune with insects, which means that she would be unable to use a substantial portion of her power should she be in a situation where she can’t speak or if that function is otherwise taken away from her. Her ability to access senses and memories is physically disorientating — fully taking over the senses it uses and leaving her unable to see, touch or smell anything outside of the vision until it is over. Furthermore, being able to commune with insects often means that Isabella is attuned to bug ways of communication/feeling emotion, which in addition to causing issues with understanding and communicating with humans — Isabella not quite being able to understand specific tone or social cues — means that oftentimes her mental/emotional state is often at the whims of the swarm around her. Things such as conflict between species, hunger, or mating season can reflect hard on Isabella’s mood in ways that are notably strong and yet imperceptible to her — feeling these swings as completely normal even in the face of being told otherwise. In addition, should she be physically close to a large number of the same insect, she can be very easily absorbed into their collective memories, causing her to genuinely believe she is one of them and act as such. While early therapy and training has rendered her more resistant to this, she is still capable of being pulled if in a state where her brain is not working at full capacity, such as if she is asleep or under hypnosis.
Appearance: Isabella is rather short and lightweight, standing at 5’0” and weighing 109 lbs. She is Caucasian — with Eastern-European heritage — and slightly scrawny, lack of exercise making the majority of her weight flesh and bone. She has straight, silky black hair that would otherwise go down to her hips were it not tied up in a messy, disorganized beehive haircut. It hasn’t been washed in several months, and is nest to dandruff, spider silk — used to keep the clumps together and on top of her head — and assorted bugs and cocoons, including her pet Huntsman spider and best friend Melissa. She has a diamond-shaped face, with sapphire blue eyes, a button nose, thin lips, and assorted freckles dotting her cheeks. Her fingers are covered with band-aids covering some scabs and ripped-off skin from feeding bugs and habitual skin picking. Her clothing alters between cheap t-shirts and jeans she finds in the dollar store — generally preferring convenience over any particular sense of fashion — or novelty clothing which is generally bug-associated in some way or form, often given to her by her family. On the day of abduction, Isabella was wearing one of her attempts at a spider-silk singlet, a forest green sweater with gold cicadas pinned on across the front and back, a black-ankle length skirt depicting a spiderweb, and gold scorpion earrings. She is currently barefoot, having taken her shoes and socks off during the bus ride.
Background:
- Isabella was born on the 7th of July, 2005 to parents Louisa and Albert Lugosi, two old-money scholars who live off of their wealth, with one brother, Ambrus, in the year above, and a third child on the way. The Lugosis live in a mansion on the outskirts of town, and are avoided by the locals due to their weird and off-putting demeanor — finding joy in creeping out their community and refusing to conform to traditional ideals on how to act as a wealthy family, taking pride in their idiosyncrasies and valuing self-expression above all else.
- Isabella enjoyed her early childhood, taking an immediate shine to her gift — a lifelong passion in bugs had been sparked from the age of two, finding quick friends in them and spending several hours a day chatting and playing with them.
- However, when she was four, an incident occurred when jumping from a tree that caused her to lose consciousness. While unconscious, her mind came into contact with a swarm of bees living nearby, who then, through collective memory, assimilated her into the swarm. She spent several hours under thrall, convinced she was a bee until her brother found her and snapped her out of it.
- However, after this, she was not quite yet free from being a part of the swarm. She would often experiment with her powers, and allow her to become part of many different types of swarms. She found unification with insects to be a transcendent experience, and slowly started to spend what free time she had allowing herself to be assimilated, at times preferring to be a bug rather than a human.
- Her parents eventually grew concerned about this and talked with therapists to consider power-suppression so that their child would not continue to develop what was already an unhealthy attachment. They went through with it, and Isabella’s power became severely limited, not even being able to talk to other bugs like she used to anymore.
- This made her sad and morose for the better part of a year, and when schooling led her to become an outcast among humans — due to her interest in bugs and parents advising their children to avoid the Lugosi — her mother and father decided to discontinue power-limiting, wanting her daughter to be herself above all else and deciding mental training would be a better avenue to resisting more harmful influences on her.
- And as such, Isabella has gone through her life keeping her power and preferring the company of bugs over humans, with therapy and mental training preventing her from suffering the worst of the effects of the influence her power has on her.
- However, she is still able to feel the call of the swarm while she sleeps, and still possesses an addiction to and a belief in the experience of unifying with a group of bugs. She has recently come to start extolling the virtues of becoming a bug to anybody at school willing to listen, and while for the most part she has been dismissed as bizarre by the rest of the student body, she has found herself able to draw in other social outcasts across the school — if not for legitimately believing what Isabella is talking about, finding themselves connected with her due to the promise of a group of friends and bugs to interact with.
- This has attracted the attention and concern of teachers, who have given her detentions for her most overt attempts to extoll the virtues of bugs, though attempts to tell her parents to fix Isabella’s behavior now fall on deaf ears — they want to see Isabella happy and herself and they’re proud of her eccentricities.
- Isabella has had a lifelong interest in reading, both as a solitary activity that brought her away from humans and as a method of further experimenting with her power — reading out loud to her bugs to see whether they can be taught higher intelligence.
- Fashion, comparatively, is a more recent hobby — one she has started to pursue after a member of her group suggested the idea of creating clothing out of spider silk. She has recently joined an ameatur home economics club, and has since attempted to command her bugs to try and make clothes, though her skills as of yet are fairly limited.
- Isabella does decently academically, doing well in the sciences and the more practical subjects while tending to suffer in classes which require more abstract ways of thinking, requires co-operation, or require more complicated processes for answers, such as providing sources or showing the process of how she reached her answer. Her teachers note her as a student who excels when she’s covering topics she’s passionate about — it’s just that she is generally one-track minded and getting her to pay attention and put the work into other topics can be difficult.
- Isabella is unsure about what she wishes to do for the future, and finds herself split several different ways. While she still seeks unification and wants to find more friends to talk about insects with, she has been guided by teachers and her parents towards potentially finding a scholarly career and using her Gift to advance the field of entomology. The arrival of a little sibling is also a topic of great exuberance within the Legosi household, and Isabella finds herself quite excited to become a big sister.
Other Skills: None
