Capeworld Comics

“I hate it. I hate how they all wear swimsuits, eat aviny, and join the Fishermen. Why can’t they just TRY and be a little different like me? Do they like people thinking all Thule come off an assembly line?”

 

–Kimberly

 

“My poor cousin. Be gentle with Kim, will ya? She’s at that phase where its hard to tell if you’re who you want to be or if you’re who they want you to be.”

 

–Pearl “Percy” Adams, AKA Fishergirl

 

Name:

 

Kimberly Adams

 

Supername:

 

Darkheart

 

Some students picked their supername on their aspirations, or their powers, or a legacy they wish to follow. Kim picked hers because she wanted people to not talk to her, and “Darkheart” seemed a good “stay away from me” name.

 

Average Grade:

 

D

 

Though bright, Kim’s grades suffer from her lack of focus and commitment.

 

Emergency Response Class:

 

1

 

Kim has no interest in achieving a higher ERC class, more from a lack of wanting to do anything beyond the bare minimum required of her than any feelings about combat and violence.

 

Personalized Curriculum:

 

Controlled Reality Engineering 

 

As a hobby, Kim creates and maintains aquariums and terrariums inside her telekinetic “eyes.” As this is a common hobby for Thule and Kim wants to appear as far from the Joyous Harbor Thule stereotype as possible, she hides her creations from her peers.

 

Her parents and teachers are aware of her hobby and have enrolled her in Thespian’s controlled reality engineering class. That might sound daunting, but controlled reality engineering is just a catch-all term for using superpowers to create enclosed, self-sufficient spaces. It can refer to creating quantum bubbles of alien physics and geometries, but it can also simply refer to creating tiny tide-pool biomes as Kimberly and other Thule do with their telekinesis.

 

Kimberly hides her little worlds beneath her cloak when bringing them to and from class. The sight of Kimberly taking strange orbs of water and earth out of cloak when she thinks no one is looking and quickly putting them back under her cloak when she thinks someone is has caused her peers, who already keep her at arm’s length due to her antisocial personality, to ostracize her further. They don’t know what she’s doing. Is she making water balloons? Is she breeding spiders? They wouldn’t have a problem with Kimberly if she just explained to them that she’s in CRE. But Kimberly would rather be bullied than admit to doing “a Thule thing.”

 

It’s a shame she’s embarrassed by her little worlds as she’s very good at creating them. She has a gift for finding the right pressure and the right permeability for her telekinetic bubbles. She could apply her skills as a surgeon, a horticulturist, or an ecologist.

 

But those are common trades for Thule and so she wants nothing to do with them.

 

Contact Education:

 

Piper Museum 

 

Kimberly likes history–so long as it isn’t Thule history. She thinks that knowing more about humans than she does Thule makes her more of a human and less of a Thule. 

 

Her teachers have noticed a lack in enthusiasm in her studies. It seems she has no real passion for history and just uses it as a means to an end. They fear that she got into history simply because she thought it was the easiest thing she could do to immerse herself in a “human” field of study.

 

Bill Wright, who is deeply invested in the Piper Museum, often has to tutor Kimberly to keep her up to speed and drag her by the nose through research projects.

 

Hyperstasis:

 

Thule Telekinesis

 

Kimberly is one of many Thule/human hybrids that live in Joyous Harbor. As with most hybrids, her Thule blood dominates in terms of physiological expression and she is virtually indistinguishable from a full-blooded Thule. Like most Thule, she has magenta skin, pointed ears, blue sclera, green hair, and an invisible telekinetic force-field called an “eye” through which she can see.

 

Like most Thule, Kimberly can use her eye to exert and withstand tremendous amounts of pressure. The Nepots Ocean is an ocean of ringwoodite in the deep mantle liquified by incredible pressure. To simply survive, Thule had to evolve incredibly powerful force-fields.

 

Like most Thule, Kimberly can shape her eye and even split it into smaller bubbles of force.

 

Kimberly wishes deeply that she wasn’t “like most Thule.” Theoretically, she could enroll in an empowerment program and develop an additional power. But she lacks the ambition to do so.

 

Behavior:

 

Fair

 

Kim is a well-behaved girl. She’s not a trouble-maker. All she wants to do is keep her head down and get her education over with. Her problem comes from that being all she wants to do. She lacks ambition. She lacks goals. She’s a slacker and, though she’d vehemently deny it, being unconnected from the world around her is making her miserable.

 

Her lack of ambition is tied to her deep embarrassment at her Thule heritage. Kimberly wasn’t always embarrassed of her Thule heritage. When she was a younger girl, she loved being a Thule. She loved eating shrimp flavored popcorn, attending the annual Fisherman barbecue, and helping her mother make aviny out of kraken eyes and leviathan hearts. Then she got older and turned on her heritage. 

 

As with many psychological changes during adolescence, there wasn’t simply one cause. She didn’t like the other girls at school asking her what aviny was made from–though she knew indeed what it was made from. She didn’t like them assuming she had relatives in the Fishermen–though she did. She didn’t like her cousin Percy Adams becoming the first female Fisherman–a Fishergirl–and tying her that much closer to the Fishermen.

 

She didn’t like how people could look at her and know so much. She used to love being part of a culture. Now she finds it restrictive and limiting.

 

When she arrived at Martin’s and learned that she was a natural at creating biomes with her eyes, she tuned out of academics and socialization. She bought a cloak. She stopped styling her hair. She took the supername Darkheart. She stopped saying hi to students in the halls and talking to other girls at lunch. She did everything she could to get people to overlook her and leave her alone.

 

She couldn’t find satisfaction in what she was naturally gifted at. Because of this, she assumed she couldn’t find satisfaction in anything and stopped trying.

 

Her teachers work to bring her out of her shell. But there’s only so much that can be done with an unwilling student. Ultimately, it will be up to Kim whether she or not she yields to acedia.

 

Hormones might actually help her. Typically, they lead to nothing but confused feelings and stupidity in adolescents. But they may do some good in Kim’s case. Kimberly has a crush on a fellow Thule student named Henry Price. She’s ashamed of it. She knows it’s a stereotype that Thule only date other Thule. But she can’t deny her feelings.

 

She’s currently trying to date someone–anyone–so she won’t have to date Henry. Such schemes make sense to young people in love. She’ll have to talk to boys and lower her guard, and maybe in doing so she’ll learn how to construct an identity that is effective and true.

 

Appearance:

 

Thule typically don’t wear a lot of clothing and Kim HATES that. In their homelands within the subterranean Nepots Ocean, they’re virtually naked. Their telekinetic fields evolved to protect themselves from one of the most brutal environments on Earth. They had no need to create clothing to protect themselves from their climate. The closest thing the Nepots Thule have to clothing are enormous ribbons they tie to themselves that flutter in their telekinetic currents and display intent and status to other Thule at a distance.

 

On the surface, in human-dominated environments, the Thule wear clothing to fit in but typically dislike how it feels on their skin. Swimsuits are common, especially in the ubiquitous yellow of the Fishermen. Men wear trunks and women wear one-pieces and sometimes two-pieces.

 

Kim would rather die than show skin. No one is going to call her a slut. No one is going to call her a primitive cavewoman. She bundles up in a cloak and hat so that only a little of her face and hair shows. She finds it a little uncomfortable, but finds the embarrassment of being a stereotypical “water nymph” even moreso, and wears her cloak and hat even in the middle of Summer. 

 

Unfortunately for Kim, some other girls make fun of her for how she dresses. They interpret her chilly personality and lack of socialization as posturing and attack her where she’s most vulnerable. They spread rumors that she wears a lot of clothes because she’s embarrassed by an underdeveloped physique. Kim hears these rumors and wants less to do with her peers. She puts more distance between herself and them. They think she’s posturing even more. They hurt her more. It’s a vicious cycle.

 

Yellow and black are the official colors of the Fisherman. To avoid anyone possibly thinking she’s associated with the Fishermen, Kim avoids yellow and black like the plague. She likes to wear a lot of green which has led to her classmate Matthew, AKA the Coat, to call her “Thule Elf.”

 

Kim loves her hat. She bought it in middle school from an old supercostume shop on the Joyous Harbor boardwalk often used by Fishermen called McKenzie’s back when she entertained the idea of following her family into the Fishermen. It wasn’t always a green cap with a white, crooked point on the back. Originally, it was a unicorn cap. It’s crooked point was once a straight horn.

 

Kim loved that hat. She wore it wherever she went. She loved unicorns, and so she loved her unicorn hat. It was that simple. Everything was so simple back then. But then she got older, and other girls started to laugh at her, and so she turned her hat around and used her telekinesis to bend the horn.

 

Kim still loves her hat because it reminds her of sunny days on the boardwalk eating shrimp flavored popcorn with her family back when she really didn’t care what others thought about her.

 

Even if she has to disguise it, she still loves it.