Name: Thatcher Soddensee Age: 9 Power: Omnilinguism House: N/A Faceclaim: Nico Liersch Status: TAKEN
POWER
For all intents and purposes, Thatcher is primarily an omniglot. That aspect of his power requires little control (though he suffers from headaches and sometimes gets confused by the tangle of words in his head) but because his psychometry has always been in the background - perhaps he didn’t even realize what it was or that he possessed it until he came to the school - he has never learned how to manipulate it with intent. It should be noted that he suffers awful migraines, which are likely a direct result of the sensory overload caused from his incidental psychometry.
PERSONALITY
✔ INTELLIGENT, CURIOUS, ENTHUSIASTIC, ADORABLE
✘ STUBBORN, IMPATIENT, ARROGANT, INDEPENDENT
BACKGROUND
South Africa is not what most people would constitute as progressive, too crippled by it’s violent and laboured political past to stand upright, but the end of Apartheid brought with it a wind of change and opened up many doors of understanding. What it did not bring was an acceptance of philandering politicians - which is exactly what Robert de Pluis was. A (seemingly) happily married man, the UN-representative director of communications was always meticulous about keeping his extracurricular activities under wraps. He came from old money, a Dutch family who had settled in the Cape with the first of the Boer transits and made their fortune in the dairy market, and with that well-gilded upbringing came a duel edged power; he was both expected to be a philanderer and required to make sure his dirty deeds never saw the light of public day, for the good of the family name.
So it was a remarkable inconvenience when his mistress du jour - an airy-headed hippie activist from Amsterdam - told him that she was pregnant. With his child, conveniently.
Robert refused to acknowledge the possibility that the baby was of his blood. Instead, he paid his legal team to pay the woman, Lodi Soddensee, a handsome sum of money and disappear. She did. Six months later in a hospital in Durban, Thatcher Soddensee was born, pale and tiny like his mother’s family. The arrangement seemed to have worked out for everyone.
There was just one caveat: Robert de Pluis was not the father of Thatcher Soddensee. The carefully constructed story was born of necessity, both to provide a bit of monetary insurance for Lodi and her child and so that she could keep the real identity of the boy’s father safe from the depths of public knowledge.
(She remembered him well, though; tall and stony still, quiet in a way that spoke of a hard life that had been carved into his fine musculature. Raleigh Ward was unconscious the first time she saw him and his convalescence on her couch - they had a mutual friend, a quiet telepath - took the better part of two months. There was a loneliness to him that called to Lodi and she could not keep herself from trying to comfort him, to coax the suspicion and tension out of his face and show him that there were small bits of good still left in the world. His body was healing but there were deeper wounds that needed tending to.
It was love, yet they were not in love. Lodi knew that. There were no strings attached, no expectations. It was simply her offering a part of herself to him, a shelter created by their coming together to enjoy a simple, humbling pleasure. She wanted to make him smile. She wanted to hear him laugh.)
Always one for adventure and taken by the broad, sweeping expanse of the African continent, Thatcher’s mother decided to stay in the country with her newborn son. There was something romantic in the notion of his taking his first steps barefoot beneath a sunny sky that appealed to her. In some ways, Lodi’s idealized dreams weren’t far off. Thatcher was a happy infant who grew into a happy toddler who spent most of his time on the beach, content to be passed from hip to hip as his mother played guitar and smoked pot with her wide array of free-spirited friends.
But it became clear as the boy grew that there was something not quite right. For all that he laughed and despite the bright sparkle of intelligence that lurked in his blue eyes, Thatcher never uttered a solitary word. At first it seemed perhaps to be a quirk. A doctor in Johannesburg told Lodi that he was a late bloomer and that eventually, when the time was right, he would start to speak.
His second birthday passed. And then his third. And then his fourth, each in amiable silence.
Lodi had a broad mind and an open heart but she worried with a mother’s sensibilities. A speech therapist friend suggested that perhaps Thatcher was only confused. After all, his mother spoke to him in her native Dutch but the boy was also bombarded with English and Afrikaans and snatches of various African languages. Perhaps there was simply too much auditory input for the poor little thing to pin words down. From then on, Lodi made a point of only speaking English to him. It didn’t seem to help.
When Thatcher was five, he and his mother returned to Amsterdam for a visit. Lodi’s mother had just passed away and funeral arrangements needed to be made. They’d been in Copenhagen for three weeks when suddenly, just as oddly as it had started, Thatcher’s silence broke.
"I miss the sound of the waves," he said one day, staring mournfully out at the canal.
Lodi was startled. “What?”
"I miss the sound of the waves. Ek mis die klank van die glowe. Ik mis het geluid van de golven. Mama, Je me ennuie de le bruit de l’océan.”
So. He had been listening. More than that, he’d been absorbing - and not just one language but all of them. Lodi was so relieved that she didn’t bother to notice that she’d never spoken a word of French to Thatcher. It was enough to know that everything would be alright now. That she didn’t have to feel guilty any more about immersing herself in her studies while her child struggled simply to find a voice.
Find it he did. From that point on, Thatcher didn’t ever hesitate to speak his mind. They returned to South Africa and it was as if he were a dessert finally given rain after a decade-long drought. He spoke to everyone who drifted through his mother’s house, soaking in all the details that he could.
And that included the tall stranger, Raleigh, who came to visit them one day. If Lodi looked surprised it was only for a moment, and then her expression melted into something of soft, wistful happiness that made it painfully aware to Thatcher that this man was someone to be trusted.
The revelation that this man was his father was frankly delivered by Raleigh himself, who didn’t feel Thatcher’s age was any reason to beat around the bush. He hadn’t known he had a son, not right away. Lodi’d been cautious about getting word out. But he was here. Here was a term that was relative and they would need to figure it out, but he was here.
It was a promise that Raleigh more or less kept. Even after Lodi and Thatcher moved back to Holland so that Lodi could return to university, Ward did his best to keep in touch with them. He dropped by whenever business brought him overseas. Thatcher relished the unexpected afternoons when school ended and he stepped outside to find his father waiting for him.
One day the visits stopped. No word came. A year passed. It wasn’t just as if Raleigh had lost interest, it was as if he had fallen off the face of the planet. There was no trace of him to be found. Lodi took it in stride, as she did most things. She told Thatcher not to worry.
A year later, Lodi went on a trip to Nepal with some friends. It wasn’t unusual for her to pick up and disappear for weeks, and Thatcher was used to being checked up on by family friends. This time was different. Days turned into weeks, which turned into months, and still Lodi didn’t reappear.
In the back of one of her journals, an address was found. Morgana Academy, in the United States.
Raleigh Ward, as it turned out, was very much alive and as the only existing, contactable parent, Thatcher soon found himself on a plane on the way to America.
CONNECTIONS
Raleigh Ward: Thatcher’s father. The boy idolized him when he was younger and still does, though he finds himself a little uncertain as to how things are meant to operate between them now, having never spent a lengthy period of time with the man.