Subject C01 - Samantha Reynolds

[Hallucinogenic*]

Name: Samantha Reynolds
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Hometown: Seattle
Grade: 12
Hobbies and Interests: Swimming, jogging, rap and hip hop music, studying

Appearance: At 5’10” and 145 pounds, Samantha is a tall and slender girl. She has dirty blond, shoulder-length hair, which she keeps neatly parted down the center. Her hair tends to be curly, especially in high humidity climates like that of Seattle. She has pale blue eyes, and wears square-framed glasses when she is not swimming.

Samantha’s face is narrow and somewhat somber; she does not smile very much, and when she does, she does not show her teeth. For the most part, her face is well-proportioned: she has thin lips, a slightly pointed chin, and a somewhat high brow. Her nose is the exception to this, being noticeably long. This is one of the only physical features that Samantha is unhappy with.

Samantha is fair-skinned, with generally good complexion. She has made sure to cultivate fairly good posture, though if she is upset or discouraged she tends to slouch.

Samantha tends to wear clothing that edges towards the formal, particularly button-down blouses and shirts and slacks or smooth, mildly-colored skirts. All of her clothing is fairly modest. None of her skirts are shorter than knee-length, and her shirts are always fully-buttoned, so as not to reveal any of her chest. When she is working out, she forgoes this attire in favor of practical garb (sweat suits and swim suits, as appropriate).

Biography: Growing up, Samantha was a fairly typical child, slightly brighter than average, but in no way a standout. Her parents, a doctor (her father) and a professor (her mother) pushed her to excel in everything she did, and, while she was never at the top of her class in elementary and middle school, she did well. Throughout her childhood, Samantha also looked up to her older sister, Rachel. Rachel was four years her elder, and always seemed incredibly mature and talented to her impressionable younger sister.

Upon entering middle school, Samantha made her first close friends, joining a clique or girls a grade higher than her. These girls were not the sort of people Samantha’s parents approved of. They were loud, sometimes rude, and on the lower-performing side of the academic scale. They also seemed incredibly cool and mature to Samantha, though in a different way than her sister did. These girls introduced Samantha to hip hop and rap music, genres she had never experienced before, which she still enjoys to this day.

Samantha’s grades steadily declined, in part due to the influence of her new friends. Her parents worried; however, since she was sill slightly above average, they did not directly intervene. Rachel eventually had a chat with her, and explained that she did not have to emulate her friends in all aspects. Samantha took this lesson to heart, and by the middle of seventh grade had pulled her grades up to a higher level once again.

Samantha’s clique disintegrated near the end of seventh grade, when the ringleader was expelled after being caught smoking marijuana in the bathroom at school, and a subsequent search of her locker revealed a large pocketknife. Samantha, shocked by the event, avoided her other former friends for the remainder of the year. After that, they left for high school, leaving Samantha alone. She did not bond with anyone for the remainder of middle school.

In high school, at her parents’ suggestion, Samantha took up swimming and track. She found that she enjoyed jogging to sort out her thoughts, but not the competitive aspects of track, so she quit the team, although she made it a point to jog several miles a couple of times a week afterwards. She remains on the swim team. Her swimming performance is on the lower end of the team, but she enjoys it enough that she has stuck with it and practices regularly.

Early in high school, Samantha found a new group of friends, one far more like her. They were all upper-middle class girls, who were never involved in anything remotely questionable. All of them fell squarely in the academic middle-ground. Samantha found her high school classes more challenging than those in middle school, but was content to drift down to average marks.

At the end of Samantha’s first year of high school, she received devastating news: Rachel called home in a panic because she had failed her first year of college classes, and, worse, had become pregnant. Her parents, rather than reacting supportively, disowned her. For the first time, Samantha found herself at odds with her parents, resenting their treatment of her sister. Soon, however, that resentment transferred itself to Rachel; since Samantha had to deal with her parents every day, she found it easier to blame her sister for her poor choices, and to tell herself that if her sister had only been more responsible, she would not have had a falling out with her parents.

Her sister’s fall from grace shocked Samantha, and spurred her to work her hardest to avoid meeting a similar fate. She began to obsess over her schoolwork, pushing aside her friends and most of her hobbies to make time for studying. She was able, with a large amount of work, to drag herself to the tops of her classes and maintain that position. She also worked to distance herself from anything she perceived as dangerous or scandalous. She stopped gossiping about boys to her friends on the rare occasions that she spent time with them, and actively shunned anyone in a relationship. She developed a strange, contradictory view of romance; on the one hand, she feared and avoided it, believing it would destroy her like it had her sister, and on the other, she secretly yearned for it, both out of typical teenage hormones and because it was something she viewed as forbidden.

As the years wore on, Samantha’s behavior changed very little. Her friends, initially shocked by her abrupt change of demeanor, soon realized that it was going to stick, and began avoiding Samantha themselves. By the end of her Junior year, she no longer had friends; instead, she had a social circle of like-minded individuals with whom she studied and worked on class projects. When given an option in class, she worked alone, loathe to entrust her grades to anyone else. When forced to work in a group, she typically did all the work for her partners, for the same reasons. This made her somewhat popular among the lower-achieving members of her classes, something she did not care for at all.

Samantha became known around the school as a fairly cold, unfriendly individual, a reputation she did not feel she deserved, but made no effort to change. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, some boys were drawn to her, and she was asked to several school dances. Samantha was made highly uncomfortable by the attention. She recognized that she was fairly attractive, and worried that the boy’s aims were less than noble. On another level, though, she was drawn to the prospect of a romance. She fought this traitorous urge by flatly and bluntly denying her would-be suitors, and by the middle of her Senior year, the advances had halted entirely. While this was, to an extent, relieving, Samantha also misses the attention, and unfairly blames the boys for not making more of an effort to secure her affections.

While she seemed fairly in control and confident at most times at school, Samantha actually spent much of her high school career in a state of extreme stress. While intelligent, succeeding at the levels she had set for herself required a tremendous commitment of time and energy on Samantha’s part. Retaining her position on the swim team did as well; though she was able to scrape by, Samantha was simply not naturally built for the sport, something which often pushed her to frustration.

Samantha did not cope well with her stress. She used her jogs as a way to think things through, decompress, and come to terms with her feelings, but, as time went on, the method proved insufficient; her jogs grew longer and longer, yet she still returned home frustrated and cranky. Her parents, pleased with her academic success, chose to ignore indicators of her personal problems, trusting that she would let them know if anything was wrong. Samantha, however, no longer trusted them enough to do so; having seen how they treated her sister, she felt that admitting any weakness to them would be a disaster, and destroy her image in their eyes.

Samantha has had several breakdowns during her high school career, sparked by everything from performing poorly on a math quiz to being overloaded with homework. During each of these episodes, she emotionally collapsed, raging against herself, her schoolwork, her parents, her sister, and the world as a whole, then spending several days in an emotionally-charged state of apathy. Each of these breakdowns caused her problems in her classes, forcing her to work even harder to pull herself back up. She managed to hide these incidents from her parents, feigning illness to cover up her true feelings.

Another factor contributing to Samantha’s stress is her average performance freshman year. The mediocre grades she received at that time have prevented her from having any chance of becoming valedictorian, and have lowered her overall GPA. She harbors some resentment towards her past self, for not taking things seriously enough, though she is also jealous of her more carefree prior existence.

Now, Samantha has nearly completed high school. With the end in sight, she has been both energized and disheartened; while she has nearly succeeded at her goals, on some level she resents the fact that she has spent most of her time working without much in the way of fun or release. Secretly, she longs for more meaning in life, and a more interesting life in general. She has no plans to bring these hopes to fruition, though; in her future she sees college, graduate school, a career, and ever-mounting stress levels and workloads.

Advantages: Samantha is fairly good shape. She has endurance while running and jogging, and knows how to swim well. She is also fairly intelligent, and very dedicated when she sets her mind on a goal.

Disadvantages: Samantha has poor stress management skills, and does not tend to cope in healthy ways. She comes across as cold and impersonal, even when she is not trying to. She pushes people away, which could be fatal in this sort of environment. She is also a poor judge of character, tending to group people based on first impressions or prejudices rather than their actions, which could lead to severe problems if she trusts or mistrusts the wrong person.

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Mutation Classification: Facial Morphing

Conclusion: Subject C01 has spent her whole life judging books by their covers, and now she has the power to change her own at will. I've never been a fan of irony, but at least no-one will recognise her body.