General Information

Real Name Ivory Kettering
Current Alias Toxin
Marital Status Single
Classification Super

Characteristics

Gender Female
Age 35 (08/05)
Height 5'6"
Eyes Blue/Green
Hair Blonde
Discovery July '99
Abilities Pollution Mimicry
Pollution Manipulation
Knowledge Absorption

Extended Information

Nickname Ivy
Relatives Donna Carter
Lewis Kettering
Keith Kettering
Sara Kettering
Sexuality Bisexual
Handler Scott Deacon
Occupations Agent
Reg Recruitment Nov '02

appearance

Ivy is a bold and brash girl; she grew into herself from a shy young thing scared of her own shadow, nurtured by her adoptive parents who fostered a great strength of character in her. Ivy lives life like the world will end at any second, unwilling to have regrets or to water herself down to something more acceptable.

She's very much been shaped by those around her; learning to be herself from her mother, how to love life from her sister, how to be brave from her first friend in the program, how to be strong and sure. She's let those around her help her grow into the woman she is now, far more social than she'd been in her youth. Having missed out on a few of the normal situations life offers, Ivy is very much one for living in the moment now, unwilling to pass up anything else.

It can make her 'too much' sometimes, or make her exceptionally reckless in situations. She's a flighty girl by nature, often distracted by the next fabulous thing, caught up in whirlwinds of the moment. Although she forms close bonds and holds onto them dearly, she's learned to roll with the changes around her after numerous changes meant she lost those she thought she couldn't live without.

Despite her flighty nature and her short attention span, Ivy is a dedicated and hardworking agent; what she lacks in attention in her personal life, she makes up for in training and her role as an agent. She's highly dedicated to Regiment, understanding exactly what she's doing and grateful to the program for the assistance she gained through her youth to work out how to control her powers. Being able to say that she isn't poisoning everyone around her is a huge deal for Ivy, her ability to make friends without worrying is a step forward that she hadn't been sure she'd have for a long time. For that, she gives her all to paying back the assistance. She's a hard working agent, often trying to excel at her training, although handlers have told her time and again that she doesn't need to be the best at everything.

She has a reputation as the 'fun agent' most of the time, primarily because she does try to help other agents when she can, but she makes a game of it, finding that younger agents prefer to have some kind of recreational vibe to their training, and she can work with that. She does get very emotionally invested in her team mates, she tries to befriend each and every one of them, she falls in love and out of love easily, she's prone to heartbreak but is very good at brushing herself off and moving on, taking the experience for what it is.

Ivy is fitted with a standard subcutaneous implant in her shoulder blade, it's fitted with an especially strong sedative which is regularly swapped out due to her body seeing the chemical as a pollutant and adapting to it. Regiment are currently looking into alternatives.

Pollution Mimicry

Ivy has the ability to mimic pollution, by shifting a part of herself into a toxin like state. Regularly this is not a specific toxin or pollution type, but a mix if harmful substances that cause pollution and are toxic in make up.

These portions of Ivy are typically invulnerable while shifted, although she cannot shift her whole form from human-based to entirely toxic without completely crippling herself and risking not being able to return to her own human and non-toxic form. Typically, Ivy shifts her hands and arms, either one or both, from natural to toxic in state, changing them from skin, bone and muscle to take on a dark, sludge like form that oozes an oil like substance and occasionally releases a toxic gas.

Due to the nature of her ability, Ivy benefits from an enhanced lung capacity, although she is not utterly impervious to her own toxins she does have a higher threshold for the effects. Additionally, Ivy has demonstrated that her abilities offer her a degree of disease immunity, it's speculated that this is what allows her lungs to filter out the harmful toxins she mimics.

LIMITATIONS: As stated, Ivy has not been able to transform her whole self into a toxic substance; attempts have been made to see if she would become more maleable or if it could make her somewhat intangible due to a gaseous form. This has not been the case, as when Ivy attempts to push her powers past her usual state she gets disoreintated and nauseaus, indicating that her powers can affect her if she pushes it.

Pollution Manipulation

Aside from mimicry, Ivy can also manipulate polluting substances, such as smog or crude oil. By proximity to any type of polluting substance, Ivy can take control and manipulate it's effects. Like her mimicry, Ivy does not typically suffer any harmful health issues from the manipulations.

Through the training, Ivy has learned to create artificial element constructs from pollution. Ivy can construct weapons from litter, make solid forms from toxic gas or smog and shape and manipulate liquid pollution such as oil, petrol or diesel. When around these substances, she can also utilise pollution generation and force an increase in the volume or density of the substance, shaping and controlling it while close by. While she cannot shield others from the effects, Ivy does have atmospheric adaptation, which protects her from the effects of most of the pollutions.

LIMITATIONS: Ivy cannot create new pollution where there is none, she can only generate what is already around her. She has had to research various types of pollution to understand how the effect the area and those around her, something to avoid her hurting her team mates by accidentally exposing them to something dangerous.

As Ivy is unable to shield people from all effects, she rarely pulls too much pollution or toxic substances towards her, regularly pushing them into an area that her team mates are not fighting in. The area in which these toxins and pollutants are released are not protected either, and the damage can be lasting.

To date, Ivy has not displayed an ill effect from her own powers, but no one is sure that it won't one day happen.

Knowledge Absorption

Ivy is able to steal or absorb selective knowledge from people and objects, such as computers or books, and store the knowledge herself. This allows her to learn vast amounts of information in a short time.

Ivy needs to touch whomever she's trying to take the information from, she can either steal it and leave the person with no memory of the information, or she can copy it, the effects of her powers are based on her emotional state at the time. When she steals the information, the victim is left in a catatonic state, depending on how much information she's stolen the person will be catatonic for a number of hours.

If Ivy is just copying the information, the person she copies it from is left dazed for up to thirty minutes before they regain awareness. Similarly, Ivy is left somewhat unfocused while her mind assimilates and sorts the information, regardless of how she takes it.

Ivy can take information from books or computers too, simply by touching the pages or the screen, feeding the information into her. With computers, it's a delicate process, since she could easily end up falling into the internet and attempting to copy all information. Too much and she herself will be left catatonic, possibly for a few days.

LIMITATIONS: Ivy finds it very difficult to break through anyone with a psychic shield, it's like trying to knock in a wall, and due to the complications for herself and the potential ramifications for the other person, she tends to not try to do so. She cannot even get into the mind of someone with pyschic immunity.

While Ivy is capable of assimilating vast amounts of information, she does need to pace herself. Portions of memory don't last for a long time, others can remain with her for years, additionally, she tends to absorb the last thing the subject was thinking about, which has caused more than a few earworms.

Ivory Kettering was born Ivory Sloane. Her mother and father were too young to responsibly raise a child, considering they themselves were children in many ways. Her birth mother had already agreed to sign her over for adoption, but did ask that she be kept on file in case her daughter ever wanted to find her.

The first few months of Ivory's life were spent in a nursery for babies given up, allowing her primary care as an infant born premature and to an at risk youth. When Ivory was old enough and hit her weight bracket, she was sent to a foster home. There's little that she remembers about the first few years of her life -although babies are regularly adopted early, Ivory didn't fall into that norm, she was four before she was placed with the foster family who would, eventually, become her adoptive family, and cycling through numerous houses and families before that meant it was hard for her to form connections at all -everyone always left, either aging out of the system or going to a new foster home.

New Family

When Donna and Lewis took her in, she already believed she'd be leaving not long after. Donna and Lewis were a little different from her usual foster families -they weren't married, and they'd already adopted two of the children they'd fostered before. At four, Ivory was a little shy of her older siblings, Keith was nearly 18 when she arrived and Sara was just shy of 12. But they were both welcoming, although Keith left for college soon after, he always visited on the weekends and took Ivory to the park to play, even though she had no friends there to play with and tended to just sit and swing.

Having already been through the process before, Donna was patient with Ivory, letting her get used to the family, to understand that she didn't need to keep her back packed and that she could ask for things. Ivory accidentally told Sara that she'd always wanted a puppy, as Sara had just recently gotten a hamster. While feeding him, Ivory let slip that she desperately wanted a puppy, because the little girls on tv with a puppy were never alone. The following week, hoping to help Ivory understand that she'd be with their family forever, Donna and Lewis took her to the pound to pick a puppy.

It took three more visits each weekend before Ivory believed them enough to tell them what one she liked. It took another three weekend visits afterwards for Ivory to admit that Dolly, the terrier puppy, was the one she wanted, sure that they would just tell her they weren't going through with it. Instead, Dolly became Ivory's best friend and Donna and Lewis explained that they always fostered to adopt. When Ivy was six, she was legally adopted by Donna and Lewis, renamed Ivory Kettering and finally believed that she had a forever home.

Fitting In

It was Donna that taught her that who she was, the person she'd become, was special. That her past was just the first chapter in her own story, and that it didn't need to be her defining feature, she had a whole story ahead of her. Sara was the one who taught Ivory to love life, to embrace each day and throw herself into it. Ivy started talking to people at the park when Keith took her, Dolly and Ivory had games they'd play that no one else was privy to, but all the same, she'd invite other kids to spend time with her and Dolly, far more than she used to. School was less daunting, and Ivory never felt like she was somehow less, being a foster child. She had a proper family who were helping her understand how loved and loveable she was, her teachers noting the change in her. She was never the class clown, aware of the hard work that was put into teaching and unwilling to jeoprodise someones education, but she always had a joke and a laugh ready for the day, a beaming smile and determination to conquer her world.

Over the course of her school life, Ivory found it easy to make friends, and she continued to do so, even if she was burned or they didn't last past a few weeks, always prepared to put herself out there. She fell in love, she fell out of love, she got her heartbroken, she broke a few hearts. She discovered that she wasn't drawn to just boys, but liked girls in a romantic fashion shortly before she was meant to start high school. As always, her parents embraced her differences and encouraged her to explore any aspect of her life that she felt needed exploring.

And it was around this time that Ivy learned how different she was.

After school, a bunch of kids went out and hung around a junkyard. It wasn't safe, but it was somewhere to go. Unknown to her, Ivy was drawing and manipulating some of the chemicals around the junkyard, localising the damaging chemicals around them and making it all the more dangerous. Several of her friends got sick, but Ivy didn't notice any change. When her friend Darla told her she'd left her backpack at the junkyard, Ivy offered to pick it up after school, since she wasn't getting sick from whatever it was that was affecting everyone else. She got the backpack, but she also discovered she was what was making everyone sick.

While grabbing her friend's stuff, Ivy came in contact with a spill of petrol from one of the junked cars, subconsciously, she mimicked the spill, her arm turning to sludge and dripping oil all over the ground. Panicking, Ivy dropped the backpack and ran home, locking herself in her room with Dolly and hiding from her family.

Being a Super & Regiment

She wasn't able to keep it a secret for long, she understood what it meant and accepted that she wasn't like everyone else. She was a Super. Donna wanted to hide it, Lewis thought they should tell someone, but they were both aware that it meant Ivy was dangerous to other people. She became a recluse over night, dropping out of public school and hiding from her friends. She couldn't tell Sara or Keith because their parents didn't know what they were going to do. Time passed and Ivy didn't know what she was going to do. She was absently flipping through a dictionary at home, bored out of her mind, when she suddenly knew every word and definition in the book. Lewis had been trying to get her attention while she was absorping the information, to no avail. It worried him more than just her ability to turn into sludge, given how unresponsive she was during her absorption.

The year that Ivory was meant to graduate, she made the decision for her parents and contacted the Government department to report Supers. She'd already packed a bag and sent letters to her siblings when the officers arrived at the house. After a heartfelt and tearful goodbye, Ivy thanked her parents for giving her the chance and making her feel loved, prepared to go with the officers to prison so that she wasn't hurting anyone else anymore.

Ivy spent almost 14 months at a facility in Maine to test her powers, understand them better. It helped her to understand it wasn't sludge she turned to, but pollution she controlled, and how she managed to absorb information the way she did. She trained with some people in Maine until they were sure she could control her powers, and then the Wraiths Regiment was explained to her. Seeing an opportunity to help rather than hurt, Ivy jumped at the chance to join. She was fitted with her limiter and transfered to the Texas facility.

After four years with little contact with anyone but her family, it took a while for Ivy to find her feet again before she finally made traction and resumed her usual friend making habit. She knew that people moved bases a lot, but she found that it didn't matter, since they were all in this together and it was important to her that she make the most of her life. Some of her friendships were the type to last forever, some fell apart when people were transferred, but Ivy could accept that in the life that they all lived.

She spent a short while in the Everglades facility, her knowledge powers needed to extract information from former terrorist agents. And while other agents came and went, Ivy was returned to Texas on request when her assignment was completed, until further shifts in agents down the line, Ivy was tagged for a shift to Limbo.

1. thing
2. thing
3. thing
4. thing
5. thing
6. thing
7. thing
8. thing
9. thing
10. thing