NAME: Grace Carter
AGE: 37
MARITAL STATUS: single
PB: Mary Louise Parker
PROFESSION: Director of the group home for at-risk mutant youth which is simply known as Robin Road (because it's really the only house on Robin Road)
POWERS: Grace is an empath. That means that she reads the emotions of people in her general vicinity. The power is limited by distance and her own ability to put up walls in her own mind. The stronger the emotion is, the harder it is for Grace to block. The up side of this is that she knows exactly how anyone around her is feeling. The down side is that she is physically incapable of completely detaching from people. She can restrict how much an outside emotion affects her, but she cannot just "not care."
BRIEF PERSONALITY/HISTORY:
- was born in New York City, which is a truly terrible place for an empath. Grace got hit with her first blast of outside emotion when she was 11, and it terrified her. Out of nowhere, a full city block of stress and anxiety and joy and love and anger all flooded into her head. Her mother found her curled up in the living room floor, covering her ears and screaming.
- Grace was first taken in at the psych ward at Bellevue, where her parents were given the hard truth: the success rate with empaths and telepaths was very low. Mutants with these powers had an extremely high rate of suicide and permanent hospitalization. The only chance she had was to either isolate herself from people entirely, or to go to a specialist out in California.
- So Grace was shipped out to a dairy farm out in CA, which was home to a mild telepath with a medical degree: Dr. Martin Holmes. She learned to deal with the simple emotions of the cows, and soon the familiar feelings of Dr. Holmes. He worked with her on putting up walls, and on focusing her power on individuals. Within a few years, Grace could reliably isolate her mind from 3 or 4 people at a time, so long as they weren't feeling anything too terribly strong.
- high school was accomplished through a combination of teachers who worked with her over the phone and occasionally in person, and by the time she was 18, Grace would occasionally go out into small gatherings.
- Finally, Grace took on college. She deliberately chose a small college: Warren Wilson, a tiny private school out in the mountains of North Carolina, with its own working farm. It was a hippie school, but Grace found the students and teachers' emphasis on making a positive impact on the world rather inspiring. It gave her a focus for her energy and efforts.
- There were a few hard days in college. When her roommate's mother died and the girls in the dorm next door were having a fight in the same day, Grace missed a week of classes. Other people's emotions are harder to handle than your own, it turned out. But she made it through, and when it was all done Grace joined in a group that was going to form a small cooperative farm in Oregon.
- The others eventually lost interest, but Grace continued maintaining the small farm out on Robin Road. It was far enough out in the country that she seldom had to fight emotions any bigger than that of a cow or cat or occasional roaming wild animal, and she could always hire a few hands for help actually taking things to market.
- She started taking in kids when in correspondence Dr. Holmes mentioned the need for foster homes for kids with mutant powers. She volunteered, and when the state saw her space and her qualifications and the fact that she was an empath who hadn't gone off the deep end, they were thrilled to add her to the list.
- And thus she found her calling. Grace has been working with kids at Robin Road for ten years now. Kids range in age from elementary school to high school, with one or two who attend college and come "home" for holidays and summers. They all call her Miss Grace. She cares deeply about all of them, and her work with them defines her.
- She's done very little dating, and has only a few friends. She seldom leaves the farm. When she does, it's usually because one of the kids needs her to - to talk to a teacher, to advocate for one of the kids in court, to watch the kids in a play or a baseball game. Otherwise, she's much more comfortable with the cows and the chickens and the soybeans.
Personality:
- empathic (duh)
- listens more than she talks
- intelligent
- fascinated by WHY people feel what they feel or think what they think
- socially conscious
- believes more than anything in making a positive impact on the world through making a positive impact on the people she encounters. A sort of chaos theory of kindness.
- loves microbrews, grilled fresh vegetables, animals, and hiking up in the Cascades
- vegetarian (The kids are welcome to eat meat if they prefer; Grace contracts with a local butcher for organic, humanely raised meat. She just chooses not to eat it herself.)
The farm produces:
- strawberries
- blueberries
- blackberries
- edamame (soybeans)
- sweet corn
- dairy (milk, yogurt, and cheese)
