Minerva's bright green eyes shine out from underneath her wavy blond hair that falls past her face and onto her back, reaching just past her shoulders. She takes care of her hair religiously, and always has it loose, refusing to put it up at all. Her bright smile often lights up her face, her thin arching eyebrows emphasizing her grin. Her smile displays her straight white teeth, thanks to several years of braces and religious brushing. She often wears earrings that dangle down, although they are often covered by her hair. Her choices of jewelry are a bit odd, her favorite earrings being two owls with amethyst for eyes.
Minerva stands at about 5"8', and has a more of a slightly build. While not weak, Minerva has never really put any thought to working out, counting on a high metabolism to keep herself in shape. So far it has been working, as she has very little fat on her body. She does have somewhat more muscle in her upper arms due to loving swimming. The beach in Riga is relatively cold, but Minerva still goes there regularly and swims, leaving her with a healthy tan in the summer that doesn't wear off until about December.
Clothing:
Minerva's outfits vary quite a bit depending on mood and season, but her clothing always echoes how outgoing her personality is. She loves more colorful clothes, always matching various colors and designs. Her usual casual outfit includes close fitting blue jeans and a tank top, which of course is brightly colored, and a loose cardigan on top of that (looked up that word just for this). Jewelry is of included, always a bracelet or two, and a pair of earrings.
Personality:
If you asked Minerva to describe herself, she would probably say something like friendly or outgoing. While those adjectives are definitely fitting, others would use descriptive words such as "crazy" or "insane". It doesn't help that she is diagnosed with ADHA and OCD, which is an interesting mix for sure. She takes everything lightly even with bad news. She has developed the idea that bad things happen, and there isn't much we can do to stop it. So she easily accepts the reality of situations. This makes her seem somewhat unfeeling or uncaring to others.
Because of her OCD, Minerva has a crazy attention for detail, and is very good at analyzing the situation around her. Unfortunately, due to her detail oriented mind, she lacks the ability to see the big picture or see anything in a long term sense, which never helped with projects in school. She is also very creative and likes to think of new original ways of doing things, not just the typical solution, partly because she likes doing it and partly because she gets bored of repetition very quickly.
Minerva is a people person, and practically relies on other people to survive. She loves working in groups on projects, and needs positive feedback for her work, or she feels like she failed on her part. When working with friends on projects, they enjoy needling her on her work, which causes her to sulk and throw a bit of a tantrum, although she bounces back very quickly. Even though she loves being around people, she has a hard time trusting people due to past experiences in her life, and this keeps her from getting very close to anyone really, leaving her with many friends, but no close friends.
Despite seeming so positive, she has a bit of a darker side too. When Minerva becomes angry she sort of loses herself mentally and becomes much more aggressive and does things that she normally would never do. She also seems to forget most of the things that she does during this period of time. While not quite mental insanity, her mental psyche is significantly altered until she calms down. For whatever reason, this sort of mental disorder or whatever it is has occurred twice in the last two weeks since the Atlanteans revealed themselves. Whether this is by chance or not is yet to be discovered.
History:
Minerva has had what some would call a troubled childhood. Her father was killed in the Latvian military and was killed in 2003 during the Iraq invasion, and as such Minerva was left as an only child raised by a single parent. The single parent only lasted until she was nine when her mother remarried, then divorced a year later, then repeated the same process two years later. Home was hell, and the only place where Minerva could feel accepted was at school with her friends.
She became more rebellious into her teen years, disliking her mother more and more, often spending more time at her two stepfather's homes instead of her mother's. It eventually escalated to the point to where Minerva's mother forbade her to go to either of their houses, and she saw less and less of her extended family as time went on. Despite the absolute hell that she saw her home as, she took her stepfather's advice: "A positive spirit and a positive attitude can only amount to a positive outcome." Minerva took the words to heart to the point of looking at absolutely everything with a positive attitude.
Growing up in Riga, Latvia also had quite the effect on Minerva. After communist control was removed from Latvia, the people almost instantly became much more expressive through various arts. Similarly, the expressive nature of the people rubbed off on the girl, and especially the art portion, immediately taking to drawing through middle and high school. Although she was surrounded by friends, she had a hard time expressing her feelings to others, and so she expressed those cooped up feelings through drawing instead. At first it was just a hobby, but eventually she decided to turn her hobby into her career and go to an art school after graduating from high school.
She moved out of her mother's house in suburban Riga as soon as she graduated and rented a flat closer in the city working two jobs as a waitress and a swim teacher to pay for her bills and saving up for art school. Her plans were abruptly changed when the Atlanteans revealed themselves and Minerva found that she possessed the ability to manipulate metal. No longer sure about anything, Minerva is trying to continue to live a normal life, but is more focusing on finding out what the hell is going on rather than her long term future.
Ability:Ferrokinesis (Metal Manipulation) – Minerva has the ability to manipulate metal by causing it to melt, reform, and shape the metal in various ways.
The melting part of her ability causes the metal to become liquid very quickly. Normally, extreme heat must be applied to cause metallic objects to melt and become liquid. However Minerva's ability allows the metal to remain the same temperature by causing the molecules to un-bond with each other. She currently has very little control of this part of her ability, and often causes random metal objects she touches to randomly melt into metallic sludge.
Minerva is also, although she is currently unaware of it, able to cause the metal that she melts to reform into a new shape. Just as with melting, she bonds the molecules in the metal together again. This requires intense concentration to achieve, especially if the reformation of the metal is in a specific or detailed shape.
Minerva has very little control over her ability simply because she hardly understands it herself. Her lack of control leads to problems, and she has since resorted to constantly wearing a pair of gloves to keep herself from inadvertently touching something important by accident. Whenever she enters one of her mental relapses, she has become significantly more competent with her ability, although her skill reverts to normal as her mental state does.
Writing Sample:
So far, Minerva had melted a spoon, two forks, three pens, a rung from a ladder, a screwdriver, an iPhone, and a fold out metal chair, all within a week. Which really sucked, especially since the iPhone wasn't even hers. Minerva ran her fingers through her hair as sighed, leaning back in her chair. Late afternoon light leaked in through her closed shutters, leaving a pattern of lines slowly move across her table moving as the sun slowly made its descent. One of the lines intersected with a plain metal knife lying table, reflecting the light back into her eyes. She scowled at the knife, her current target for her frustration. She had been trying to replicate the events of the past week for the past hour, trying to melt the knife into the same metallic sludge that her other casualties had become.
She picked up the knife once again, turning it, watching the light play off its reflective surface, sending rays of light reflecting around the small plain room. The light illuminated the small kitchen of her apartment. The beams of light flashed across the gray tile counters, across the oak wood cabinets, the fridge littered with magnets, notices and pictures, and then flashing out of existence as the blade of the knife became shadow and the other side of the blade began reflecting light along the same path as before. She picked out small details in the blade, a nick here, and fingerprint smudge there, the curve and sharpness of the blade. She closed her eyes and focused, putting all her concentration on the object clenched in her fist, trying with all her might to will the blade to melt and spill through her fingers onto the table below. But when she opened her eyes, the blade remained just the same, taunting her with its defiance to her so called ability.
She slammed the blade down onto the table in exasperation, sighing again. "What am I doing wrong? There wasn't anything that I did special before, it just happened! So why won't it happen now!" She pounded the table with her fist, causing the knife to bounce slightly. She stared at the blade once again, slowly calming down as she watched the reflection in the blade. She contemplated the fact that she was in fact insane, and that the events of the past week had never happened. But she shrugged away the thought; she knew what madness felt like, and this wasn't it. This was something new.
She supposed that it probably had something to do with those Atlantean people she had heard about on the television. Sneaking around for who knows how long, then they finally reveal themselves when they get backed into a corner. Suddenly people popping up everywhere with weird abilities and stuff, it was a little hard to process. The news was full of skeptics, but when you start to see metal melt when you touch it, it becomes much more believable. The few news networks that were half reliable were still vague about them, nobody seemed to know much about them at all.
Minerva stood up abruptly tipping the wooden chair over behind her, bouncing a couple times before coming to a rest, the sound of the impact echoing slightly in the kitchen. She was sick of this, all of this stupid power stuff. She debated calling a few of her friends, but tossed away the idea. She didn't have any close friends anyway. Sighing again, spun the knife lying on the table in circles, the dying evening light barely touching the metal from through the slits in the window. Scowling at the blade, she snatched it off the table, and walked over to the fridge. She opened the fridge, cool air spilling out of the frigid box, and stared at the various contents. Abilities could wait, food was now required. Tossing various ingredients onto the counter, she began to assemble a sandwich. Lettuce, tomato, mayo, Minerva nonchalantly piled ingredients on the flat slab of bread. Taking the knife to cut the sandwich in half, she felt something wet on her hand. Looking down, she noticed a slowly dissolving thing in her hand, small beads of metallic liquid fall onto the bread. "Course, now you work, just in time to ruin my dinner." She rolled her eyes, slightly elated that something had happened. She cleaned off the counter, tossing the sandwich in the garbage, then went back to preparing her dinner.