Post by ice on Dec 6, 2008 22:56:19 GMT -5
Bonjour. Guten Taag. Hola. Assalomu Alaykum. Ni Hao Ma.
There are 6,912 ways to say hello. And I know them all
My name is Felix Isabella McCormacy and I am 16 years old. I can't remember a time when I didn't understand every word someone was saying- whether it was a Latino
I may be able to speak in 6,912 different dialects but I guess you can say I'm a little slow.
Family;;
madre:: Vanessa McCormacy
padre:: James Henry McCormacy
-no siblings-
Personality:
Smart and witty, Felix is, as she likes to call herself, ‘a classic nerd,’ an individual who loves to learn and is very good at it. Unlike most students, Felix looks forward to the start of school and you can find her in libraries during the summer, rather than the beach or the pool. She delights in every type of knowledge available—she’s a huge Star Trek fan as well as a Social Studies freak. Her sponge-like brain makes it easy for her to grasp things, much to her fellow classmates chagrin. Yes, some find Felix annoying and Felix knows this. She tries her best to lay off her natural smart-alecky tendencies but one can only do so much.
Her cleverness also supplies her with a sharp tongue. While in elementary and middle school she let herself get bossed around and picked on, Felix hates bullies and will bite back, even though she’s not a big person. Sometimes she doesn’t know when to shut up—scratch that, she never knows when to shut up and often digs herself into a bigger hole then she started with. The friends she does have are close though, and Felix is very loyal. She would never do something to hurt another one and trusts you to do the same.
Beyond her brain, lies a good, simple girl who wants simple things. She doesn’t find herself special; in fact, she hardly considers her power a power at all. She is truly a romantic, but she hides it behind ridiculous philosophies such as “Love is a chemical imbalance in the brain quickly cured with marriage.” Pfft, she doesn’t believe that. Honestly, she would love a big, strong man to hold her hand and buy her chocolates. But she doesn’t believe she is the kind of girl to get that and therefore, she hides behind her books, her quirkiness, her glasses and her sweatpants. Really, she’s quite shy and withdrawn, her best friends found in literature, her home the library.
Is there a student at Solstice that can pull Felix out of her shell?
Special Ability:
Felix’s ability is, let’s be frank, not really a kick-ass power. She can’t throw fireballs, she can’t teleport and she most certainly cannot fly. Her ability if very simple; she can understand. It’s a unique talent, one very useful in the real world, though compared to many students within Solstice Academy, it is lacking. Felix can understand and speak all the languages that exist, without even trying. Sometimes, this is actually troublesome. Felix tends to slip in and out of languages, seemingly picking one at random. For the most part, she can control this rather confusing aspect of her power, but every now and then she’ll drop a word in there in Hebrew or Italian without realizing it. After all, it all sounds the same to her.
Her ability isn’t fully realized yet and will continue to evolve as she is guided within the walls of Solstice Academy. Soon, Felix will realize that she can understand all languages—whether the language is human or not.
Physical Description:
Felix Isabella McCormacy has never thought she was pretty. “I’ve got too much of my dad in me and none of that latino beauty my mom wears so well.”
But Felix is pretty, in her own, unique way. Her hair is kept short and straight (despite the picture) a rich, chocolatey brown color. It brushes at her shoulders, teasing at her collarbones, but dares to go no further, lest be cut away by Felix’s careless scissors. It’s always fixed one of two ways—up in a pony, pulled back and out of her eyes, or down, framing her oval face and sometimes hiding it from view. Her face is round and smooth, with a cute, upturned nose sprinkle with faint freckles, plus lips that are full enough to pout impressively. Finally, her eyes are large and inquisitive. Unlike most brown eyes, hers do not appear flat, and that’s possibly because of the dark, deep shade of brown that she inherited from her mother. She wears glasses—half-rimmed, square, quite nerdy—mostly because she’s scared of touching her eyes. She does own a pair of contacts, but she swears she’ll only put them in for a special, special occasion.
Felix is on the short side, standing at a proud 5 foot 4 inches. Her height has never bothered her much and she’s actually happy and accustomed to it, even if it means standing on her tiptoes every now and then, or getting called ‘Shortie’ all her life. She’s an average build, not the skinniest gal in the world due to her weakness for all desserts. (Her mother is too blame for this; the woman owned a pastry shop for goodness sakes.) She would have noticeable curves if she didn’t hide them with sweat pants and t-shirts, preferring comfort to fashion. Her skin tone is naturally tan, though she wishes she was darker and looked more like her mother.
History:
April 1st, 1992. It’s a day of celebration and of mourning in my family. Sixteen years ago, my mother went into labor on this day and was raced to the hospital by my abuelita—grandmother—while my father raced home from work. Yes, our family was thrown into an uproar, and my father was probably the most frantic one of them all.
He was so nervous that he drove to our house before the hospital. He was so nervous, that when he pulled out of our driveway again, he ran over our family cat.
My mother loved that cat.
So when she heard of the cat’s little ‘accident’ she insisted my father took him to the vet. He did. The cat died anyway, he missed the birth of his daughter, and my mother was so distraught with grief over the death of her favorite feline that she spontaneously decided to name me after the cat.
And so I was born at 4:52 P.M, ten minutes after Felix the Tabby Cat passed on.
Though I am the one with the ‘gift,’ I’m relatively normal compared to my family. My mother is 100% Latino, and she swears that her blood “is spicier than a jalapeño pepper freshly picked from the fields of Mexico.” She speaks fluent spanish, is a cat fanatic (she believes they’re lucky), and owns a pastry shop just down the street of our three bedroom apartment. She met my father when she was an illegal immigrant, 17 years old and starving—my father was 32.
Many people would say that it was pedophilia, and considering she was underage, then I suppose they would be right. They fell in love anyway, after my father got her an apartment and helped her look for a job and pretty much became her knight in shining armor. Despite the age difference, the culture difference, and the financial issues, they decided to elope a year after meeting. My father saved my mother from certain death and (even worse) becoming a crazy cat lady.
I came along when she was 22.
My father is your average business man, and he travels from country to country often, though he’s terrible with languages and needs a translator wherever he goes. He would always bring me back small tokens from the countries that he visited—a chadar from India, voodoo dolls from Africa, a kimono from Japan—and those souviniers sparked my interest in different cultures. I became a classic nerd in school, dragging along big books on Ancient African Rituals, Eastern religions, and the different species of animals that lived in Central South America. I kept all my treasures tucked safely away in a treasure box I made when I was five years old and would often take them out.
I haven’t mentioned my ‘gift’ yet because I never knew I had it until I was thirteen years old. As strange as it is, I never thought that I was hearing anything different from anyone else. My mother spoke fluent Spanish and so could I—I was only aware I was speaking another language when I conversed in secret with her. But one day, my mother and I were working in her pastry shop when two men walked in.
The men were similar. Olive-toned skin covered their slim, fit bodies, black coats fit squarely on their shoulders, and both had sloppy black hair and a face in need of a good shave. My attention was turned to them, my smile bright and welcoming to the customers, so it was not hard to hear the words that they quietly uttered.
“You keep an eye on the door, yes?”
“As long as you don’t pull the gun until after she opens the cash register. Remember that!”
I froze in an instant, both confused and shocked by this. My mother did not react and I supposed she had not heard them. Even I doubted my sanity in that moment, wondering why two full grown men would reveal their plan so carelessly.
I headed for the phone in the back, dialing 911 before rushing back out. My mother pull a small croussiant in a paper bag and then headed for the cash register.
“Mamá! ¡No lo abra, esos dos hombres tienen un fusil!” I hissed in Spanish. Mama! Don't open it, those two men have a gun!
“¿Qué habla usted de?” What are you talking about?
“What are you rattling on about?” The man growled impatiently.
“I’m sorry sir, my daughter is confused,” my mother said to the man.
“¡Yo no soy confundido, acabo de los oír!” I grab my mother’s arm and start to pull her away. I'm not confused, I just heard them!
The man whips the gun from underneath his coat and points it at us both. My mother screams, shocked, though all I want to do is whisper ‘I told you so.”
“Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”
The man at the door suddenly yelped, “The police are coming!”
“What?”
“The police! Someone called them! We have to get out of here.”
The man with the gun turns back to us, cocking the gun back, finger stroking the trigger carefully. “Did one of you call the police?”
My mother shakes her head. He curses, but before he can shoot, the police come through the doors, their guns pulled and trained on the man. “DROP THE GUN, DROP THE GUN!” They screamed.
The two men are arrested and my father is called, though my mother does not speak until the very end of the day. She tucked me in and kissed my forehead, before finally asking the question that changed my life forever—
“How did you know that the man had a gun?”
“I heard him say so. Didn’t you hear? They said it right when they came through the door.”
My mother frowned and touched my cheek. “No, Felix. They were speaking in another tongue, one I could not understand. Judging on their ethnicity, it was probably Arabic. There is no way… you have never heard it in your life.”
“I did Mama. I swear it.”
We sat there and stared at each other for a while, both of us uncertain with what just happened. The next day we would rent movies in different languages. She would cover my eyes and I told her what I heard.
That was the beginning. Two years later, someone else found about my ability, and I received a letter from Solstice Academy. [/center]