InsaneJournal

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basic information
Name: Freedom Ciara Brite.
Nicknames: Free
Pseudonym: psi babe
Sex: Female
Age: 16
Birthday: 21st of May
Nationality: Irish.
Sexuality: Heterosexual.
Year: 6th
House: Zebul
Type: Witch
Special Ability: Psi Manipulation. Free’s been able to hear the thoughts of others since she was nine years old, and her powers have developed to the point where she can project her thoughts and emotions – allowing for silent communication in class with her friends – and even, for short periods, control another person’s mind. The former is pretty simple, but the latter is not; she can’t keep it up for long, and the further away someone is, the more difficult it is to reach their mind. If she practised, Freedom would be someone to be reckoned with, but past experience has left her terrified of what she’s capable of, and even for her classes she won’t do more than work on the volume control for the voices she hears. Nor is her control perfect; when she’s emotional or in pain, she often projects accidentally – giving others a glimpse into her mind. Her range is pretty big, but only the deepest trances shut out the voices; unless she’s sleeping, she hears every thought of every student (the professors are shielded) at Idris and most of the folk in the surrounding area; it’s taken her years to learn how to deal with that, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just because she’s scared of controlling others, though, doesn’t mean she has any compunctions about using what she learns from their thoughts against them, and she enjoys teasing her friends that she COULD be manipulating them. After all, how would they know?
Electives: Magical Balance, Higher Science II
Campus Activities: Blitzball, wing.

appearance
PB: Hayley Williams
Height: 5’ 10”
Build: Small curves, rangy and wirey.
Eye Color: Green.
Hair Color: Naturally, Free’s a brunette, but since she was twelve she’s been wearing her hair red and blonde.

Freedom is perfectly comfortable in her own skin, and it shows in her stance and choice of attire; a complete tom-boy, she never wears make-up and her uniform is always a mess. Outside of class, her t-shirts sport band logos and sharp-tongued witticisms, and her designer jeans are always torn and ripped, often with her own scissors late at night. She has three piercings in each ear, and she makes a point of having six different ones in at one time. The exquisite feminine jewellery that is her inheritance from her mother is ignored in favour of rubber wristbands or fingerless gloves, though she never wears a watch. Instead, she always has her trusty pocket watch somewhere about her person, which was given to her by her father when she received her letter to Idris. It’s her most prized possession, and it’s become something of her trademark.

Freedom could be beautiful if she tried, but she doesn’t want to be; always hearing what other people think of her – and judging them for who they really are, rather than what they appear to be – has driven her to making her outside as much like her inside as possible, so that other people can at least judge her for the real Free. So her hair is always mussed up, her clothes are semi-punk, and she never hides behind the mask that is cosmetics – and every inch of her says that if you don’t like it, you know where to shove it.

The only disfiguring mark she has is the burn scar on her solar plexus. It looks like a sunburst, and is a reminder of the day she killed her mother.

personality
Strengths: Funny, smart, loyal, good on the spot, determined, witty, understanding, brave.
Weaknesses: Sarcastic as an outlet for what she hears all day, cutting, gets depressed, sensitive, finds it hard to trust people, hot-headed.
Weird Quirks:
~Likes to experiment with special effects eye contacts. Cat pupils one day, black-and-white spirals the next.
~Clicks the face of her pocket watch open and shut when she’s thinking.
~Calls everyone ‘dude’, ‘sugar’, or ‘sweetie’, depending on how much she likes you.
~Always wears toe-socks.
Secrets
~Sleeps with a teddy bear she’s had since she was three. He’s a panda, and his name is James, after her brother.
~Is still a virgin. Hearing some guy’s thoughts while you’re making out? Real turn-off, so she’s never gotten further.
~Reads. A lot. It’s not really a secret, except that she doesn’t do it in public much.
~Scared that someday she’ll start using her powers and become corrupted by them.
~Is a romantic at heart.
~Wishes she’d been born mundie.
Likes: Rock music, hot guys, happy people, Blitzball, reading, hot chocolate and marshmallows, kittens, sleep.
Dislikes: Two-faced people, snobs (most Faie), rules, authority figures, big dog, liars.

You either love her, or you hate her. Free runs with the boys; she has very few girl friends, and prefers it that way ‘caus guys bitch a lot less. She’ll tease them about their simpler minds, but in truth she’s grateful for it. Free’s very judgemental (hearing what people don’t say will do that to you), but if she likes you, you’re in. You have to be able to put up with her sharp tongue and her practical jokes, but she’s always good to have on your side; you’ll never get caught out after hours when she can nudge teachers and prefects down a different corridor. Always hearing what’s better left unsaid makes her a great person to go to when you’re upset, because she always knows what to say to make you feel better and she spends herself tirelessly for her friends.

That said, you definitely don’t want her as an enemy. She knows your deepest, darkest secrets and she will use them against you if you hurt her or the people she cares about; she’ll go to gossip girl, the people you hang with, or climb up on the tables at lunch and yell it to the rafters if you piss her off enough. The teachers at Idris shield their minds for just such cases as hers, so Free does have to work at her classes, rather than just taking the answers from their minds. Actually, Free really likes books, though you’ll rarely see her with one out of her dorm room; a really good book will put her into a trance that mutes out the voices. Music has much the same effect, and in the pockets of her baggy jeans you’ll always find her trusty mp3 player.

Free is confident, fun, and the life of every party; but every now and then hearing all the bitchiness gets her down, and she gets really depressed. In a sea of voices, she feels alone, and on her bad days she wishes she could have been born without powers. She tries to convince herself that she’s not a romantic, but she does want someone to love her – though she would never, ever, ever admit that. On her good days, which is almost all the time, she’s a troublemaker who’s never been caught and a shameless flirt – though she has a rep for never following through. The fact that she keeps her power a secret, unknown to the general school population, makes it easy for her to play with people, which she loves to do. Freaking people out using something they’ve thought always cracks her up – it never gets old.

Knowing what someone’s going to do before they do it makes her an invaluable member of the Zebul Blitzball team; some people shield their thoughts, some people try to, but years of reading minds left her well able to read body language and she can almost always predict where the ball is going. While this makes her popular with her team-mates and other members of her house, most everyone else thinks she’s an overgrown brat – coarse, disrespectful and altogether too sharp-edged. Does she care? Not a bit.

history
Family Residence: Townhouse in Dublin, Ireland.
Languages: English and Gaelic, but she can understand the thoughts of a person no matter what language they’re speaking.
Father: Laurence Brite, mundie.
Mother: Tara Brite, Mage (deceased).
Siblings: James (25) - mundie, Derek (23) - mundie, and Brian (21) – mundie.
Other Family: Free’s favourite cousins live in Italy, but there are also some in New Jersey.

The Brite family is not particularly powerful, but they are rich. Well-known for the quality of their gemstones and the elegant designs of their jewellery, many of the Brite’s patrons are members of the magical world, though until Laurence married into said world via Tara, a fire Mage, none of them knew this. Since then, the Brite family cater almost exclusively to Faie, among whom their creations are very popular.

Freedom Brite was born the youngest of four, the rest of whom were her brothers. She grew up doted upon and knowing all about the magical world from her mother’s stories; they were all loved equally, but as the only girl Free had a special place in her daddy’s heart. She was his princess, and they were close. In fact, the whole family worked perfectly in a unit; Free almost never fought with her brothers, her then-small size instead inspiring them to be incredibly protective – though they still taught her to wrestle, and the four of them spent one Summer converting the indoor pool into a Blitzball arena, a game their mother taught them. Freedom never got any allowances for being a girl from her brothers, which was just how she liked it; she adored all three of them, especially James, and they doted on her back. Her mother despaired of her, because she just would not wear dresses and act ladylike; what she wanted was to be just like her brothers, which is just what she did. Her father was proud of her tomboyishness, and encouraged her to be independent and strong in herself, unlike her mother, who was very dependant on her husband and more than a little needy. It was then the seeds were planted.

When it became apparent that Freedom was a telepath, the family were surprised, but mostly happy. Her father was very supportive, and her brothers learned new ways to play tricks on her with their thoughts, which she couldn’t help reading. Free’s mother was intensely disturbed by having a nine-year-old mind reader in the house, but she was the only one, and she kept her opinions mostly to herself.

And it was true, Freedom responded to thoughts as she would have to spoken words for those first few years, making her mother more and more frustrated when she overheard things she shouldn’t have. Soon after her powers developed, the hot-headed Free had a fighting match with Tara regarding something her mother had been thinking that had wounded her deeply, though she doesn’t remember what it was now. It was the first time anyone lay a hand on her outside of her brother’s games, and when her mother slapped her across the face Free honestly had no idea how to respond.

She didn’t tell anyone, but kept it a secret, sure it wouldn’t happen again. After all, her mother wasn’t a violent person. What she didn’t know, however, was that Tara was growing more and more dissatisfied with life in the mundie world (though she was, in fact, born of mundie parents), and that she, Freedom, would soon prove the perfect outlet for that.

Over the next few years, Tara began taking out her frustration on her daughter. Verbal barbs became extra chores for no reason, then smacks and cuffs as her mother turned to alcohol. Free avoided her when she could, dealing with it as she did her brothers’ teasing, but slaps eventually evolved into black eyes and split lips, and she broke her leg and three ribs when her mother pushed her down the stairs. As far as the rest of the family knew, Freedom was just accident-prone and getting into a lot of fights at school, and after Free received her letter from Idris things settled down a little. There were only the holidays to deal with, and she made it a point of avoiding her mother: over the whole Summer of her third year, she spent every moment with James, who had just finished his pre-law course at Cambridge and had come home to visit.

This was the final straw for Tara; she had doted on the boys as they grew older, and now not only was Free her husband’s favourite – over his wife! - but Tara herself was being ignored for her by her sons as well. She didn’t get a chance to get at Freedom for weeks, but she bided her time.

On the day it all erupted, towards the end of the Summer, her mother finally got her chance when James left her alone to grab a book from the house’s library; Tara slammed into James’ room, where Free had been studying, and attacked her with fire. Free’s telepathy was no good as an offensive weapon (then; projecting memories of pain works well against would-be attackers), and she was badly burned. James heard her screams for help and raced back to his room in time to see a blast of flame throw Freedom through his fourth-story window.

She didn’t know that she could do it; she just did it instinctively. In the moment when she hung weightless, the instant before she started to fall, Freedom’s mind was completely blank, panic and pain wiping the slate clean, and her child’s heart screamed that it would never forgive.

Somehow, it became a psi-strike that compelled Tara to kill herself. James was running to get to his sister, screaming at the servants to get an ambulance and his father at once; he never saw his mother turn and walk down the stairs, into the street, and into the oncoming traffic.

Freedom didn’t wake up for almost two months. She’d broken bones that they couldn’t reach through her burns without putting her into even more agony, and when they touched her her pain bled out into the minds of others through her new talent, making it impossible for people to be around her. Eventually, they put her into a drug-induced coma while she healed. Laurence and her brothers were distraught at the thought of losing their daughter and sister. The full story – or what they thought was the full story – came out while Free was unconscious; a servant had seen Tara run into the road, and enraged by what had been done to his daughter Laurence refused to attend the funeral, or allow his sons to do so.

When Free finally woke, they were all relieved to find that she could still walk – something they hadn’t been sure of, before. Families of Freedom’s Idris-made friends offered to help, and magic and potions cleared up most of the scars from the burns, except the one on her chest. After another six months of getting her muscles used to moving around again (the doctors wanted to be extra careful) Freedom was good as new. Physically. She’d missed a lot of school, and spent that year on extra classes and the following Summer with books and tutors; she worked hard to catch up so she wouldn’t have to be held back a year from her friends.

Did Free feel guilty about what she’d done? In a way. She was scared of what she could do, but it was instinctive, and whenever she tried to replicate what she’d done she was unsuccessful; Idris taught her how to control the ability and keep from using it accidentally, but she was too scared to really try and develop it – and she couldn’t achieve the same level of trance without the same level of terror and pain. In her mind, it was almost self-defence, and seeing her father and brothers so enraged, wishing Tara were still alive so they could take care of her themselves, convinced her that she’d done the right thing. As she grew older, the full scale of what she’d done finally made it through to her, but her close friends and brother James, the only ones who know, helped her work through it. Instead, she uses the experience to make sure she never misuses that side of her powers.

Free’s confidence was badly shaken, and it took her some time to get it back, but the constant support and care from her family and friends helped enormously. Eventually, she recovered from the emotional scars – more or less – and became the person she is today; loud, sarcastic, smart, and shameless.

Free loves and hates Idris. On the one hand, she has some really great friends she can always convince to pull a prank with her; on the other, being constantly surrounded by the thoughts of a bunch of teenagers is frustrating and draining, sometimes depressing. There’s ups and downs, but on the whole, she’s not looking forward to graduation – she’ll miss her friends too much.

ooc information
Name: Sia