(no subject)

[yinzpired]

BASICS

name
Aubergine "Doc" Yowell

alias
Doc
Bergie (ber jee) to close friends

division
Research

occupation
Research & Development Specialist

age & dob
38, January 25 (Aquarius)

pronouns
she/her

family
mother. retired mail carrier
father. auto body shop owner
a slew of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

CONCEPT

Save the world? This crackpot inventor could do it in her sleep.

POWERS

super power naps;

On the books, this ability is called "REM-state hyper-processing and rejuvenation," but that's a mouthful. Doc usually calls it her "REM RAM" or "Power Napping" instead. What it is is a sort of super genius that only manifests when Doc is dreaming. Doc's brain exhibits supernaturally heightened processing power, problem solving ability, memory storage, and regenerative capabilities, but only once she's entered REM sleep. Effectively, she's a super genius... in her dreams.

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In addition to generally being "smarter" while sleeping, Doc occupies a sort of absurdist mind palace in her dreams. Any dreamscape Doc's brain conjures up is a workshop where anything is possible and there is no limit to grant funding. This is where she does her best work, and all of Doc's best (and worst) ideas are cooked up in her dreams.

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Thanks in large part to Doc's ability to rapidly iterate ideas while sleeping, she is able to develop novel (potential) solutions to problems very, very quickly. Given a project, Doc can usually come up with some feasible ideas within one or two nights of deep, restful sleep, and has a pretty good idea of how to build them.

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Unfortunately, Doc's development space and the resulting inventions are all deeply influenced by her day. As a result, many of Doc's inventions bear striking resemblance to things that already exist in fiction -- things she's recently watched or read.

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Doc is able to pick up and improve on mundane skills more quickly by practicing them in her sleep. This is most useful for developing a muscle memory for certain repetitive tasks, making her work faster and more efficiently when awake. This ability is NOT useful for picking up new complex skills or knowledge wholesale -- if Doc doesn't already know what something is, how to perform a task, or how something works when she goes to sleep, her brain will fill in the blanks with dream-nonsense.

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While what Doc is doing is not quite lucid dreaming, she still experiences some of the negative effects that lucid dreamers experience. Namely, tiredness, increased hunger, and occasionally, after particularly arduous dream-planning sessions, waking hallucinations.

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As an added side effect, Doc is able to quickly recover from both potential brain injury and mind-altering effects. This seems to be her body protecting itself from sleep deprevation, but it manifests in other ways, too. For example, while Doc feels the other physical aspects of a hangover, she doesn't experience brain fog.

self-storage;

Doc is able to store small and medium-sized objects in her body, temporarily placing them into a suspended state if they are made of organic material (an apple, for instance). These stored items then leave an imprint on her body that resembles a tattoo. They can be retrieved again with an application of pressure.

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Doc usually uses this ability to store her most-used tools and occasionally, unfortunately, her lunch.

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Can't store anything larger than the bodypart used for storage. A baseball bat might fit in her leg, but a sledge hammer won't fit on her arm.

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Cannot overlap items. The "tattoo" is basically her body's way of saying "OCCUPIED."

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The pressure necessary to eject something is not as great as you might expect. A solid bump against the corner of a desk or counter can send items flying.

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This ability affords Doc some limited protection from blunt trauma. Try to stab her with a knife or break a bottle over her head, and you lose your weapon. This does NOT work for items traveling at a higher velocity than "human arm speed."

metallurgic touch;

Doc is able to manipulate metals via touch, altering physical state, inducing redox, creating alloys, and priming objects containing metals for faster extraction. This is an activated power and not a passive one, and Doc must concentrate on what she is doing to achieve a desired effect. While Doc can weld, combine, solder, and even whittle ores and metals with this ability, she isn't a metalbender, and isn't molding metal samples like clay.

PERSONALITY

😊: adaptable, creative, diligent, efficient, loyal, community-minded, courageous, big on charitable work, compassionate, if not nice

🤷: straightforward, thrives in chaos, needs stimulation and enrichment in her enclosure, goal-oriented, loves a cause, stubborn, stoic, fatalistic

🔥: taciturn, impatient, easily annoyed, superstitious, mooches food and weed, dislikes authority, hates bureaucracy, extremely cranky when naps are interrupted

APPEARANCE

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5'4". Skinny end of average build.

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Eclectic fashion sense that sometimes errs toward Bad. Knows how to put an outfit together, but will continue wearing a beloved t-shirt long after calling it a "shirt" would be generous. Takes dressing for herself to an impressive extreme.

HISTORY

Like many couples of that generation in that particular part of the Ohio River Valley, Doc Yowell's parents were high school sweethearts who married right on the heels of graduation. They did well enough for themselves after. Money was tight sometimes, but that's just how it was for a lot of folks in Wheeling, West Virginia at that time. Doc's mother carried mail -- the most terrifying mail truck driver on the county roads, they say -- and her father went from the mills to mechanic work.

And somewhere in there, they had Doc, who, for the record, was named Aubergine Yowell. Not Doc. Aubergine was a word Doc's mom heard while they were on their honeymoon cruise and thought was just so pretty, it needed to be the name of one of her future children.

So, there she was. And for the next eighteen years, precocious, creative, hardworking Bergie lived a pretty bog standard life for a kid growing up in the 90s and early 2000s in the West Virginia panhandle. She's got plenty of tales from that time. Happy to recount them, too, if you'd like. Though she's pretty sure just about every other kid who grew up in that area has similar stories to share.

Yep, it was pretty normal. At least, until the rifts.

Trying to convince Aubergine Yowell that the rifts weren't consciously created by something intelligent is a fool's errand. She'll hear nothing else. Not when one of those rifts opened up right over I-70, turning the Ohio side into a terrifying purple wilderness out of an 80s scifantasy flick.

Eighteen at the time, upended every plan she'd made for the rest of her life. But, then, it did that to pretty much everyone else, too. And when you live in a place that's historically known for being upended by everything from robber barons to mudslides, it's hard to find the energy to be terribly fussed about it all.

So, in spite of the chaos around her, Bergie started taking classes at the local community college. Within a few months, just after her nineteenth birthday, her blood went purple. Scared her half to death, too, but by then she'd also seen and heard of others affected by the rifts. Celebrities, now, most of them, with phenomenal powers. But as far as Bergie could tell, all she'd manifested was a bit more blue in her blood. So she kept her status secret.

It took two years to get her Associate's Degree. In that time, some things got better -- an IRIS station went up south of Wheeling, boosting the area economy, the infrastructure, the schools and hospitals -- and others got much, much worse. Bergie couldn't bring herself to leave the valley, so she worked for a while at the auto shop her father had taken over, and watched with apprehension as the riftlands crept up to the western banks of the Ohio River.

IRIS eventually brought in a team from WVU to help try and solve the issue of Liminal creatures creeping into civilization. Bergie watched their first press conference in the auto shop waiting room, and that night dreamed up a dozen different ideas that could potentially help. She sat on all of them. Weeks and then months went by and the locals continued to be plagued by Liminal creatures. Eventually, IRIS put out the call for ideas from locals, and Bergie, who'd been unable to stop thinking (and dreaming) about those ideas of hers, stepped up.

Within two weeks, Bergie presented herself to the Ohio-side Station with a working prototype in hand: kinetic netting. It wasn't all that much different from the loose chain link fencing they already used to catch falling boulders and trees on roads that cut through the mountains. Except this netting used half as much material and harnessed energy to very effectively repel anything that came too close.

At twenty-one, Bergie Yowell had revolutionized the fight to protect human civilization in threatened areas like her home. Things kind of snowballed from there.

Though she'd had reservations about leaving home, she didn't have much choice. WVU wanted her as a student, IRIS wanted to study her, and most media companies in the US wanted to interview her. She was offered internships and consulting positions and at least one commercial deal (it was for her high school best friend's dad's landscaping company). Bergie was resistant to all of it at first, but then the requests to help solve other problems came in, and THAT interested her. She helped solve more problems. At twenty-three, her other powers started manifesting. Then, by twenty-five, she was awarded her first honorary PhD -- Engineering, from WVU. The nickname Doc soon followed.

The next fifteen years wound up being much the same: traveling as an independent contractor, coming up with unconventional ideas to solve problems, helping to build strange new solutions, and collecting honorary PhDs like enamel pins from destination cities. Over the years, she's taken jobs big and small -- whatever speaks to her, or, more specifically, whatever dogs her in her dreams.

Enodia was one of those places that chased Doc into her dreams. She first took a gig there in 2017, and has been regularly showing back up for project work ever since. It's not home, not properly, but it's entertaining enough, and it's given her plenty to do since the blip.

NOTES

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In spite of the nickname, Doc is not an actual doctor. She has an associates degree in ceramic engineering and a little more than half a dozen honorary doctorates from universities across the US.

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Works on contract with IRIS, and is project-based. Frequently leaves to take on other projects elsewhere, both for IRIS and independent entities.

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Works mostly for public universities, hospitals, and private individuals. Will not contribute to mega-corporations or to businesses that refuse to allow their employees to unionize. This makes her something of a divisive figure when her name does come up in media.

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Has a patent lawyer buddy who helps her patent troll any corporations that try to monetize her work.

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Absolutely refuses to work if there's a Steelers game. There is no such thing as an Emergency in Research when the Steelers are playing.

OOC

jenny . est . ruth negga . dropbox

code