"I’m gonna leave my body (Moving up to higher ground)
I’m gonna lose my mind (History keeps pulling me down)"
Bronwyn Banes has the power of teleportation and telekinesis. She is 25 years old and an avid pro-Gifted rights activist. She is a former student of the Academy.
Powers: At first glance, Bronwyn’s powers of teleportation and telekinesis are just that. However, upon closer inspection, her powers are that of specific particle manipulation. To teleport, she dematerializes and rematerializes her atomic structure in one place to another. She can also do this with anything she touches. When broken down, her form looks similar to that of stardust for a fraction of a second.
Biography:
Bronwyn is the youngest of three children and the only daughter. Her powers began to develop as a child when she would play games such as tag or hide-and-seek with her peers. She would go missing for short periods of time and, when her parents finally realized what was happening, they decided to put her enroll her in the Academy to train her powers and be around fellow Gifteds.
Growing up in the Academy allowed Bronwyn to hone her abilities. However, this safe, contained environment did not completely prepare for the backlash against Gifteds that the general public holds. Seeing the amount of discrimination and hatred that Gifteds were receiving made her furious - her friends and mentors were great people with great powers, why should they be treated any differently?
She currently is a very prominent pro-Gifted activist. She tries to act as a mentor and protector for other Gifted members but will act swiftly and harshly to any anti-Gifted sentiments, even if it lands her in even hotter water.
"It would be so easy to let my fate just carry me away...following this same path my whole life through. But I know I can't. What I do, I do with no regrets."
Edith Mason has the powers of life and knowledge absorption, power mimicry. She is one hundred fifty years old and founder of The Academy for the Gifted, a program for Gifted individuals.
Powers: The power to drain life, mimic powers, and know the history of a person on touch.
Biography:
Edith was born in 1864. She was an orphan at first but got adopted by a young couple living in San Francisco. Her childhood was happy and her parents loved her dearly. The word "Gifted" had yet to be coined and no one dare spoke of those people with abilities. It was just something not spoken of, as a child she didn't even really know what it meant for people to have powers at all.
Until one day when she was 10 years old. She was playing with another little girl from the neighborhood. They skipped down the street holding hands when the other girl suddenly began to grow weak and her hair turned grey. No one knew what to do or what happened to the little girl and no one connected it to Edith until it happened again and again and again. Not always happening to other children but to cats and dogs.
She was sucking the life out of them and making them grow old beyond their years while she herself grew slowly. When she was 15 she looked no older than 12. She began to fear her power and never left the house anymore.
Eventually her parents thought that it might be best to move to another city to start all over, maybe their daughter would begin to come out more and in 1884, when Edith was 20, they did just that. They moved to New York City.
In New York she tried to get over her fears of being around people but with every contact with another person they would age horribly. She was right back where she started, being afraid to be near another person.
Back then there was no help for people like her. There weren't any places for her to go and people only spoke of powers in whispers.
Since she was gifted and cursed with youth, she began to spend time in her seclusion reading books about powers and convincing her father to buy mice for her to practice her powers on, to practice not using her powers, that is.
By 1904, when she was 40 years old but looked no older than 25, she had control of herself. She found a new confidence and began going out like every other normal person.
By 1906 she even met a man named Jason who she would marry later that year. While it was more a marriage of "I ought to" rather than "I love him" she did find herself happy with him and they shared many years together. They even had children. Her son, Mark, was born in 1910, followed a year later by a girl she named Andrea.
Her children never showed any signs of having abilities and they grew up happy and healthy. By 1931 both of the children were out of the house, Mark was joining the navy and Andrea was marrying her high school sweetheart.
Her life on the other hand grew dull and boring. She no longer felt a thing for her husband and was wondering if she had ever really loved him at all. In the summer of 1932 she did something unheard of at the time, she left him. Her children resented the idea and none of them spoke to her for several years.
During the radio silence between her and her family, she volunteered for a government study on people with powers. Her power got recorded and tested on different species of animals. Sure, she felt badly for the animals involved but if it was for the greater good of understanding then it was a small sacrifice to make.
By 1940 she had joined a government body known as FAPC. She went to Germany on missions that were kept so secret that even today they are yet to be disclosed to the public. And by the time World War 2 was over, she had done many assignments that were, at the time, for the good of everyone. She came back looking younger than when she left.
She spent the 50's and 60's continuing to work for the Agency while being sure to spend time with her children and grandchildren. But in 1970 everything changed, she discovered a side of the Agency that she didn't agree with. They were attempting to use the powers of gifted people for nefarious purposes in the name of research.
She wholeheartedly disagreed with experimenting on gifted people so she left, convincing many others to leave as well. She spent much of the 70's and 80's advocating for public education on people with abilities and she even coined the word Gifted for the first time during that part of her life and opened up schools to teach gifted individuals how to use their powers correctly.
The 1990's were a busy time in her life. Between educating the public and spending time with her now elderly children, she didn't have much time for herself.
But in 1995, she took her position as curator of the New York Academy for the Gifted and has retained the position ever since.
