Mia Lynch

Mia Lynch was a troublemaker and delinquent from an early age. Struggling in school and failing to meet her parents' expectations, Mia rebelled through crime, becoming involved with gang activity. This led to only more trouble, not just with her parents, but with police too, and, with a future that seemed increasingly desolate, Mia only committed further to her own self-destruction and ultimately developed her own Abnormality. However, her elder sister, Sidney, who she had envied, was the only person to stick by her and continue to reach out despite everything. Thanks to her help, Mia was able to recover before she crossed a line, and eventually began to pursue a more healthy life.
 * -|Synopsis=

In the coming years, still struggling to move onwards, Mia decided to become a small-time vigilante, figuring she could use the outlet and put her abilities to more constructive use. Fifteen years later, after years of no contact with Sidney, Mia decides to go find her elder sister and show her what she's made of herself, and also to just make sure that she's still okay, after all these years...

Mia is only average in height, much to her frustration, standing at about 5'6, making her noticeably shorter than her big sister, something that she strongly dislikes. She is, however, built more broadly, a frame that packs on muscle easily, making her years of regular exercise and fixation on her physical health apparent. Brown, curly hair is cropped short, about chin-length, and Mia does little to maintain it, finding it to be a waste of her time. Her eyes are green, and she has to wear contacts on account of short-sightedness, something that irritates her to no end. She would like to get laser eye surgery, but it's not in her budget.
 * -|Appearance=

Fashion is unimportant to Mia, who still finds herself dressing like a punk after years spent separating herself from her former life as a criminal. She has a critical inability to grasp fashion and ends up exclusively picking out masculine clothing without really thinking about it. Faded jeans are typically combined with beaten leather jackets and windbreakers, along with any one of many faded, old shirts. She also wears heavy boots, often of the steel-toed variety, and always wears a crucifix necklace, which she fidgets with when nervous or bored. It's very common for her to go out wearing a facemask of some sort too, due to her health-related paranoia.

Mia wears a special motorcycle helmet and outfit when performing her vigilante duties. Crude and temperamental, Mia is a loner and, even as an adult, a persistently rebellious troublemaker, despite her best attempts to shape up a bit. Though she may no longer be much of a delinquent and isn't involved much with crime anymore (beyond beating down drug dealers with a baseball bat), she can't help but spit in the face of authority at every opportunity. Every boss at every job she's every had, the police, and her parents. No matter what, Mia ends up getting in fights with the people who have any amount of power over her. This deeply frustrates her, and despite her every attempt to chill out sometimes, when push comes to shove, she shoves back and feels better for it. She goes from job to job, which, though a trouble, suits her just fine, as she's hated more or less every single one of the jobs she's had.
 * -|Personality=

Mia still has no respect for the law, either, and regards those who uphold it with disgust. While she follows it now, it's only because it suits her, but her short temper and a tendency to pick fights without much provocation often gets her in trouble. Her tendency to actively disrespect cops is only going to dig a deeper hole whenever this trouble comes, much to her own displeasure. She misses the days when she had her smart big sister around to help her out with the cops, since she was always able to talk her way out of anything. Now, Mia, who doesn't believe herself to be very smart at all, has to handle it on her own. It's easier just to avoid them.

The sort to rarely smile, Mia's aggressive, hostile exterior drives off most people, and though this irritates and upsets her every now and then, she mostly rolls with it, believing it to be an inevitability. However, she can be kind and even sweet at times, attempting to emulate the loving, considerate treatment that her elder sister gave her when she comes across other people in need of help. It's an awkward and clumsy emulation, much to her own displeasure, but she honestly, humbly tries. She's been able to mend her relationship with her parents because of this, and she now spends more and more time taking care of them on account of their advancing age. It frustrates and confuses her that her smart doctor sister isn't the one coming back to do so.

Responsible and outgoing, Mia often volunteers herself to help others and has a tendency to stick up for anyone she sees being victimized. She does this thoughtlessly, often to her own detriment, and kicks herself for doing so when the moment has passed, only to do it again without much hesitation the next time the opportunity rolls around. This used to be far from the case, but her sister's been a good influence on her, and Mia is often proud of how she's changed with her help. Still, Mia has trouble being sweet and kind, and often drives away those she helps with more abrasive behavior, much to her own consternation, leaving her alone again. That's fine, though. Mia enjoys her alone time.

Fixated on physical health and fitness, Mia exercises regularly and puts a lot of thought into what she eats. Currently, she follows a Paleolithic diet, but she's been swept up by many health fads and diets over the years, switching from one to another unpredictably and suddenly. On the plus side, she's become an excellent cook due to this, with plenty of experience with a wide variety of dishes. Not that she ever cooks for others. If the opportunity came to her, she would most likely get overly anxious and screw it up. She grudgingly breaks her diets if necessary when spending the holidays with her family, believing that this is more important than her health fixations.

A practicing Catholic since her youth, Mia holds her faith in high importance. She partially attributes having gotten her life in order and conquering her drug addiction to said faith, and often speaks of the healing power of religion. Every Sunday, she goes to church, and she often goes whenever she is struggling with something in her life, particularly when her addiction threatens to come back. She spends all her religious holidays with her parents, trying to get into contact with her sister again, but even Christmas doesn't get her crawling back, so the holiday has slowly become something sour for Mia.

Mia has a passion for sports, which she plays when she can, particularly enjoying soccer. When she was little, she liked the idea of becoming a professional soccer player, but that didn't end up working out. She watches soccer matches obsessively and gets really into them every time. She also loves cool cars, but she loves cool motorcycles even more, having craved one since her childhood. Mia actually owns a motorcycle (a Sportster), which she's had for years, and is much more comfortable driving one than a car. Quite a lot of effort and money has gone into modifying that motorcycle, and she treasures it.
 * -|Abilities=

Abnormality
Mia's Abnormality is The Hand That Feeds. Developed during her adolescent delinquent years, Mia continues to use it regularly in her haphazard approach to vigilantism, though it's difficult to control and more than a little destructive. While she doesn't know it, her Abnormality is similar in nature to her sister's - they both center around the absorption of something at the expense of humanity.

Damage Absorption
The Hand That Feeds triggers only when Mia takes harm from an attack, at which point the force of the blow is stored within her body as pure energy. She can then redirect its flow and control it to some extent, typically releasing it with a retaliatory attack of her own. While she can do this with a punch or a kick, she's found that the recoil often results in broken bones, so she prefers to use blunt weapons, most often a baseball bat. Normally, a single blow is all that it takes to knock out an ordinary person, and if she's not careful, even kill one, forcing her to use her Abnormality very, very carefully. With more focus, Mia can also channel the energy into things less destructively, producing various forms of it to power technology, but this is very difficult for her and could very easily just fry the machine in question.

Her Abnormality can absorb the impact of what seems to be nearly anything, but is most effective against blunt force, meaning that bladed weapons or bullets are more dangerous for Mia and could potentially kill her. The damage absorption isn't perfect, either - only about 50-75% of the force is stored normally. Most importantly, Mia's Aversion means her Abnormality is not painless - it turns out storing raw energy in your body hurts, and it may cause internal damage. The first time it activated, Mia vomited blood and passed out from the pain almost immediately, but she can now burden its effects and ignore the pain without much difficulty. She's even learned how to redistribute the energy throughout her body to avoid hurting herself too much. The more damage Mia absorbs and the angrier she gets, the further the Hand That Feeds' effects progress, eventually reaching three thresholds at which their effects will be amplified greatly, but with steadily steepening cost. Once a fight stops and she begins to calm down, the effects will dissipate and she will return to normal.

After passing the first threshold, Mia will unconsciously redistribute a portion of the energy she's absorbed across her skin, forming a thin, invisible forcefield that will amplify the damage absorption to nearly 100% and will protect her from further harm. A punch that broke her nose before is likely to result in her attacker breaking their fist, while bullets and knives may break on contact with the field. However, at this point, the pain caused by the Hand That Feeds is blindingly intense and damage is almost inevitable. The field, for example, is likely to leave Mia with minor burns dappled across her skin; this often results in Mia seemingly producing smoke after passing the first threshold. If she's not careful, she may end up actually causing internal burns, too, resulting in hospitalization on more than one occasion.

After passing the first threshold, Mia is in constant danger of pushing herself too far and passing the second threshold, at which point things will get bad. Once at this stage, the intense pain and stress produced is likely to send Mia into a violent fury as her mind buckles and gives into her rage. Her forcefield will quickly become visible as a reddish aura, almost demonic in its silhouette, and steam and smoke will rise from Mia's body as her anger quite literally begins cooking her flesh. The baseball bat becomes useless, as Mia is likely to hit hard enough to leave it twisted and broken, hard enough to splatter someone's brains across the pavement and kill them on the spot, which is almost certain given that Mia is motivated by pure bloodlust at this point.

The damage absorption also becomes even more effective, now absorbing 100% of the energy from attacks, and producing even more, not from nowhere, but by breaking down Mia's own flesh into energy. She also gains the ability to manipulate her forcefield to some degree, shaping it into crude but effective implements - typically some abstract, awkward representation of a fist, useful for punching someone into submission or death. The harm the side-effects of this threshold cause is obvious, and Mia has never avoided a hospital visit and a hefty medical bill after reaching this point. However, she finds that her injuries are never as bad as they should be (as in, often lethal), as if her Abnormality unconsciously diverted energy into accelerated healing once she began to cool down. The wounds are always serious, though.

Third Threshold
If Mia isn't able to cool down fast enough, she will find herself going even further and breaking the third threshold, which has only happened once before. She doesn't remember it at all, only that it occurred during a fight with a particularly powerful Abnormal with an ability that allowed him to bypass her damage absorption and hurt her anyways. When she cooled down after its use, there was nothing recognizable as human left. Mia, who had assumed the second threshold was as far as it went, was terrified by this experience and stopped her vigilante activities for a while - the experience that caused her to think about going to find her sister.

What happens at the third threshold is that the sheer rate of Mia's damage absorption and energy production rapidly breaks her body down into pure energy, completely stripping her of her humanity. The shape it takes is indistinct, a reddish mass of pulsating force usually partially contained by Mia's clothing, what remains of her skeleton, and the motorcycle helmet she always wears when performing her vigilante duties. She looks almost demonic, actually, an energy being no longer capable of properly understanding humans or doing anything but, well, annihilating them violently with excessive force.

With her ability to control energy now utilized on sheer, blind rage and instinct, Mia's shape is bound to constantly change as she forms and sheds limbs to attack opponents. Mia can also project energy in beams and heat up anything she touches, melting asphalt and reducing humans to ash if given the chance. She no longer absorbs energy, however, as this is the final result of that ability, but harming her is quite difficult due to her form. It is likely that, without a container (even one as vague as her clothing and charred skeleton works), Mia would dissipate and die if in this form for too long.

After concluding a fight, Mia will quickly run out of the energy to maintain this form, and it will unconsciously reverse itself, transforming raw energy into her physical body. She will collapse, unconscious, and wake up a few minutes later, covered in and vomiting blood, because it turns out her Abnormality isn't so capable as to put together her internal organs completely right. Without medical attention, she will die soon after its use. It also damages her brain chemistry in ways she doesn't fully understand, but Mia is guessing it's not so good, and she worries that repeated use may result in some severe changes to how she perceives the world, faintly remembering the changes that occur under the effects of the second threshold.