“I’m so ashamed! I had an episode when Jigsaw Judy exploded in front of me. It’s not like I didn’t who she was or what her metapathogen did, but seeing it happen in front of me…I thought my thoughtforms did something to her! One second she’s next to me on the stairs, and then the next she’s on the walls and on the steps and on the rails….so I freak. “Mom” surrounds me in light, “Dad” surrounds me in brambles, and I cause a whole embarrassing episode. I felt like I wanted to die after I came out of it and realized what happened. Good thing Joule was there to sedate me before things got worse.”

 

–Donald Swift, AKA Light-in-Darkness

 

“Superheroes typically have type-A personalities. They go, go, go, go! I think the most important thing the Statesmen do for them is pump the breaks. We tell them to slow down, take a breather, assess what’s going on. And that can be hard for them to accept. What I feel I bring to the Statesmen is that I know what it feels like to be forced to go slow. You count up how long I’ve spent in pieces, you’ll count months easily. But going slow doesn’t mean wasting time. I learned how to never waste time. That’s what I want to teach superheroes, before anything else.”

 

–Jigsaw Judy

 

Name: 

 

Lindsay Childs

 

Supername: 

 

Jigsaw Judy

 

People are often surprised to learn that Lindsay isn’t named Judy. Lindsay chose her supername simply because she thought it sounded cool. Jigsaw Judy does kind of have a spring to it when you say it, doesn’t it? It goes up and down like a roller coaster.

 

Jig-saw Ju-dy. I think it’s a great name. Out of all the students’ supernames, I think her’s is probably the most memorable. It’s a testament to its sticking power that Lindsay’s won Martin’s Supername of the Month contest four times–a record.

 

Average Grade: 

 

A+

 

Jigsaw Judy is a diligent, hardworking student. She never procrastinates, always gets her assignments done early, and keeps a schedule so well-organized that it puts most teachers to shame. Even her dreamscape is well-organized–so well organized that its actually a copy of her Statesmen office.

 

Emergency Response Class: 

 

0

 

Lindsay provides a rare example of a student with an ERC of 0.

 

0 is a rare class. It means that a person either cannot or should not participate in emergencies. For 1, people are expected to, within limits, try and make an emergency better and can suffer legal penalties if they do not. If you are 1 and someone is dying right next to you and you do nothing, it means you had a practical understanding of first aid and the ability to administer it–and did nothing. 0 means you are exempt from providing aid, and in extreme cases cannot, under legal penalties, provide aid. 

 

0 is for students that can only make emergencies worse by not removing themselves (this applied to Donald Swift until very recently), are under legal obligation to remove themselves (Shep provides an example–as he contains several hundred students within himself, he must prioritize the well-being of those students and get as far as possible form an emergency unless by not taking action he places the wellbeing of those students at risk), or cannot be expected to react in any way to an emergency. The last applies to Lindsay because in an emergency she goes to pieces.

 

Lindsay’s metapathogen means that she never has to worry about self-defense, as her puzzle pieces are completely invulnerable, but it also prevents her from contributing in any meaningful way to an emergency. Her teachers at Martin’s School are struggling to find some way to make an emergency response class meaningful for her. Results are forthcoming. Steel Dolly has found that when deliberately “jumbled” at the start of an emergency response situation by her peers Lindsay can be a good “eye in the sky” for her team, but that requires her being jumbled in exactly the right way just as a situation breaks out, which isn’t very realistic, and also requires that the situation doesn’t move beyond her puzzle pieces, which also isn’t very realistic.

 

It’s all a work in progress.

 

Personalized Curriculum: 

 

Form Mastery with Form Master Gora

 

We’ve often been asked why Lindsay, a girl whose metapathogen forces her into a specific, unchanging form, is in a class typically for shapeshifting kids like Monster and Heart of Gold. The answer is that form mastery isn’t just about shapeshifting. 

 

Form mastery is defined by the Form Masters (and they would know form mastery, wouldn’t they?) as “the mastery of a body’s functions and limitations and the harmonious and efficient shifting between bodies.” Gora’s meditative teachings are thus useful not only for shapeshifters but for those that get locked into a shape. 

 

Thus far, Gora has managed to get Lindsay to “zoom” in on specific objects through the senses bound to her puzzle pieces, but hasn’t been able to find a way for Lindsay to exercise substantial control over her metapathogen. It seems that a way for Lindsay to control her jumbling might be as far off as a way for Gunnar Cropsey to not regenerate into the same malformed shape.

 

Contact Education:  

 

Joyous Harbor Statesmen Center

 

Living with her metapathogen is a burden, but it’s a burden that Lindsay believes has done a lot of good for her character. When Lindsay’s metapathogen activates, it often creates a very disruptive scene in a very public place. People are surprised, scared, and sometimes even angry. Lindsay has been forced to learn how to deal with awkward situations and the emotions they create.

 

Case in point–the time Pulverizer tried to do his namesake to the Joyous Harbor boardwalk.

 

Lindsay was snacking on a pretzel when the boardwalk caved in. She saw through her many puzzle pieces that she was buried beneath some rubble with a family. The mother was unconscious with a head wound. Her children, a brother and a sister, were frightened by the state of their mother and by Lindsay’s appearance. But Lindsay was able to take charge of the situation and calm the children down. She instructed them in caring for their mother’s injuries and told them stories about her friends at Martin’s to keep them calm. When they were rescued, Lindsay was rightfully hailed as a heroine for her actions. 

 

Inspired by her success in a crisis situation, Lindsay decided to pursue a career in the Statesmen. 

 

The Statesmen organization is the oldest superhuman advocacy group in the world dating back to 1938. They work to create superhumans, strengthen and refine the abilities of superhumans, find meaningful employment for superhumans, and  integrate them within their community. Every state in the United States has at least one Statesmen center. It’s Lindsay’s great luck that Rhode Island’s Statesmen center is located right in Joyous Harbor not far from Martin’s.

 

The Statesmen need people like Lindsay. Lindsay is good at handling awkward situations and superpowers cause all sorts of awkward situations.

 

 “I’ve been having dreams about a girl I like in class. I’m afraid I’m astral projecting. I don’t want to be a creepy stalker, what should I do?”

 

“Some kid keeps making sonic booms every morning and it’s driving me crazy. Who do I complain to?”

 

“My neighbor’s power armor keeps making beeping noises. Should I be concerned?”

 

And then there are the superheroes.

 

Most people live in a world where superpowers cause situations that are merely awkward. Very rarely do these situations become frightening or deadly. But superheroes live in a surreal world of constant and confusing danger. When you fight against criminals hellbent on forcing their tiny obsessions upon the world with godlike powers, madmen that can replace reality with dreams and dreams with reality, and sociopaths with the resources of galaxies at their disposal, your trust in a sane, stable, and consistent world quickly erodes.

 

Anxiety disorders and paranoia are distressingly common for superheroes. Daily abnormalities and discomforts that normal people brush off as inconsequential become warnings and clues to the eyes of superheroes. A bad day isn’t just a bad day, it’s a supervillain hiding in the bushes using a power dampener to throw off your skills. Depression isn’t just depression, it’s a psychic attack by the depressor. But a cool head and a warm heart can guide superheroes through their district and paranoia and help them feel like the beacon of reassurance they appear to others as.

 

Who better to help superheroes manage their fragmented lives than a girl who goes to pieces?

 

Recently, Lindsay was awarded “Organizer of the Year” by the Statesmen for her work on the yearly sandcastle contest. Martin’s couldn’t be prouder.

 

Metapathogen: 

 

Pressure activated dimensional displacement.

 

Lindsay goes to pieces in a crisis–not mentally, never mentally, but physically.

 

Lindsay’s metapathogen is one of those that seems like a superpower at first glance. Like Gunnar Cropsey, Lindsay has something that people throughout time have coveted–true invincibility. When she gets jumbled, nothing can harm her. No power in all the universe can break her puzzle pieces. No power in all the universe can even budge them once their orbit is set.

 

But imagine that this invulnerability is activated by someone jostling you in a crowd, and once activated you’re frozen in position for hours.

 

When Lindsay feels significant pain, is startled, or subjected to more than 200 psi, she explodes into several hyperdimensional shards. The average is 15,  but she’s been recorded producing as few as 4 and as many as 45. She appears within these “puzzle pieces” as distorted, funhouse mirror images of herself. Sometimes, these shards show just one of her eyeballs. Sometimes they show her stretched thin as a wire. Sometimes, they show her with a ballooning, leering head. It can be very disturbing for those not familiar with Jigsaw Judy to see Lindsay explode into all these images, but Judy is completely unharmed by the transformation. 

 

When “jumbled,” she says she feels disembodied as if she were in a dream watching things happen around her. She’s not in any pain or discomfort. The most she feels is a tingling sensation such as one feels when their body is coming out of anesthesia. It’s been hypothesized that this is the result of Lindsay’s metapathogen “remembering” her body so that it can reconstruct it later. 

 

Lindsay’s puzzle pieces function as sensory organs. Through them she can hear and see her surroundings. Her power processes all the different viewpoints into one similar to an insect’s compound eyeball, though Form Master Gora has taught her how to filter information from her puzzle pieces so that she can see and hear out of selected puzzle pieces instead of all the shards together. This allows Lindsay to “zoom” in on elements of the environment, to focus on small pictures instead of one big picture.

 

Gora hopes that this small bit of mastery may lead Lindsay to one day develop greater control over her powers.

 

Lindsay is perfectly safe inside her shards and in fact, wouldn’t be any safer with a Vril wall around her. Her shards are hyperdimensional filters. Similar to black holes, they scramble physical information. Unlike black holes, Linday’s shards are selective of what they garble. A person touching a shard is just as safe as Lindsay is. A force greater than 200 psi will be absorbed and nullified by the puzzle pieces. Theoretically, all force is absorbed by the puzzle pieces without limit as with the Vril walls, but this can not be safely tested.

 

When Lindsay is jumbled, her puzzle pieces orient themselves to the rotation of the planet. This means that they are “still” relative to people on Earth’s surface, but once set in this orientation, they cannot be moved.

 

Once jumbled, Lindsay is stuck as Jigsaw Judy for four to ten hours, then she feels a vague tingling sensation that grows in intensity until she feels warm. Once she feels warm, Lindsay is able to draw her puzzle pieces to a central point and will herself back into existence. When she does so, a small explosion occurs through mass displacement. Depending on where she manifests, dangerous shrapnel can be created. For this reason, Lindsay is always careful to manifest in a clear area.

 

Sometimes, Lindsay’s puzzle pieces stick in things. Walls, ceilings, and even people have been stuck by Lindsay’s puzzle pieces. It can be very frightening to look down and see a puzzle piece with a giant eyeball sticking out of your abdomen, but people stuck by Lindsay’s puzzle pieces are completely safe. They’re fixed in places, but their divided parts are still safely “connected” through the hyperdimensional properties of the puzzle piece. They can breathe, and they can even eat.

 

Martin’s has proposed several possible uses for Lindsay’s metapathogen, though none so far have panned out. Scientific research seems the most likely use. Lindsay can survive anything, thus she can be placed into the most dangerous wormholes and physical anomalies to collect data. Unfortunately this requires her to be transported to the location, and once she’s within the location she can’t move herself. There are already invincible beings that dive into black holes for the sake of science, and they don’t have to be fished out of the black hole later.

 

Not all hyperstatic abilities are useful. But that’s alright. Jigsaw Judy is proof that it’s not powers that makes one useful, it’s applying themselves productively.

 

Behavior: 

 

Exemplary .

 

Calm, quiet, and collected, Lindsay is often who her friends go to with problems before going to their parents and teachers. Very little phases her. She’d never describe herself as such, but she’s also very courageous. It may not be hard to keep up your courage in an emergency when you’re completely immune from harm, but it is hard when you have to live your life worrying about the next time hours of your life are taken from you by chance. To keep up your courage when it would be so easy to give into despair, to continue living an active, helpful life when inactivity would be so easy–that is admirable.

 

Lindsay sometimes faces difficulties interacting with other students. They sometimes see her as fussy and more like a little teacher than another peer.

 

Appearance: 

 

Being acutely aware that her metapathogen can make her appear horrific, Lindsay dresses with her metapathogen in mind. She wears a simple jumpsuit with a puzzle design and jacket. Like Captain Protector, she believes that leaning somewhat into the negative aspects of her metapathogen gives her some control over them. In Captain Protector’s case, he wears a skull helmet, in Lindsay’s case, she wears puzzle patterned clothes.

 

Lindsay goes out of her way to keep her wardrobe simple. Too many colors or designs can make her look extra-weird when she’s divided into shards. A cat’s face on a t-shirt, for instance, looks like a leering multi-headed monster through her puzzle pieces. 

 

Lindsay keeps a low-grade photite field on her at all times for the purpose of explaining her power to those that see it in action. She can use her photite field to cause parts of her body to flash. “Don’t be afraid? See? It’s just my hand. You can see it flashing.”

 

Her friend Lucia, aka The Conductor, contacted the designers that do her own outfits and gloves to make something special for Lindsay–a costume with a red body, blue sleeves, and yellow pants.

 

Lindsay accepted the gift with gratitude, but has yet to wear what she privately calls “a primary colored nightmare.”