Name: Helen Harden/ Overdrive
Age: 23
Appearance: Helen does not look all that different from your everyday young woman with a generally pleasant demeanor complete with a wide eyed expression. Her height is nothing to gawk at, standing only a little higher that 5'5, and she never really bothers to weigh herself, being constantly on the move as it is. With a fairly slim yet athletic build, Helen comes off as someone with fantastic genetics, especially considering he choice of diet, often seen munching on some piece of junk food. Aside from this, Helen is fairly unremarkable, aside from her long platinum blonde hair that glistens into silver in certain light. Bright blue eyes peer through the strands of hair that brush across her face. She generally tries to keep the hair out of her gentle facial features by tying her long hair back in a ponytail, minimizing any distractions and/or frustrations that could result from a wandering piece of hair.
Attire: Helen does not dress to impress, unless she absolutely has to. In most casual settings, Helen prefers function or comfort over form or style. This includes usually wearing jeans and a t-shirt, usually with some graphic design or something along those lines to offer some character. The occasional ear or nose piercing will accompany the outfit if nothing more to display some originality. She is also fond of wearing hoodies or anything else of that kind, hardly investing in dresses aside from the infrequent formal gathering. However, as a professional, Helen does dress up. Working her way up from a struggling internship on at a local paper, Helen is an rookie journalist and subsequently wears business attire when required, investing in women's suits and some formal dresses to look presentable.
When she is out trying to save the day, Helen wears a spandex suit very similar to the one below, one that she may or may not have illegally acquired:
Personality: Helen is a difficult individual to adequately describe. Despite not having the best of childhoods and experienced more than her fair share of struggles when growing up, Helen is surprisingly optimistic, easy-going and fun-loving. She does not appear to take life, or anything really, seriously having adopted an attitude of going with the flow. Challenges to her are nothing to stress over, and for the most part Helen adapts well to most situations. It seems that by not caring about much that, she has learned how to keep things generally in order. Guided by a well meaning heart and some semblance of determination, Helen does her best to do the right thing, even if she has a poor way about going about it from time to time.
With this being said, Helen does not necessarily come off that way. In fact, that would underplaying much of her personality. Helen's optimistic nature has developed to the point of being naive, almost excessively so. She almost refuses to admit the bad side of anything, as if it reminds her of something she would rather forget. Additionally, she does not see her own faults or mistakes particularly well, making the phrase "I'm sorry" a novelty when she says it. She may be easy going, but it also means she hardly, as mentioned before, takes anything seriously. Pranks, jokes, cheeky one liners and snide remarks are all too common when interacting with the young woman. She enjoys demeaning others with the best intentions, having developed a perverse and immature sense of humor. While this could be mistaken for poor social skills, Helen is very outgoing, but just handles herself in an eccentric manner. Those who have known her for a long time have gotten used to Helen's unique means of interaction, but she can rub new friends the wrong way unintentionally. This seeps into her fun loving nature, more or less snowballing in Helen's fondness of partying, hanging out and simply enjoying life, having caused her to be somewhat irresponsible, unless the situation truly calls for her to stop messing around.
In summary, Helen is a young woman who is still coming into her own. While she means well, she performs poorly, and refuses to admit her faults unless something truly terrible happened. Despite being an effective adult, Helen is more a of child or a teenager who needs to grow up a lot more, but despite this displays the resolve to adapt very well.
Oh, and she is random, hyperactive and borderline insane, lacking any sense of self control and restraint. That is probably the first thing you would actually notice.
Powers/abilities/weapons/etc: Helen's abilities are multifaceted, having completely reworked her physiology, having effected her physically, mentality, and to a certain extent emotionally. While it is difficult to strike at the core of her abilities, Helen's wide skill set is generally easy to break down regardless:
Enhanced Speed: Helen has the ability to move at superhuman speeds, easily eclipsing the speed of sound. While she is not aware of her top speed, she hazards a guess that she could easily go beyond that if she obtained more control and experience. As her speed has developed over time, her body has adapted to the forces that act on her body due to moving at this unnatural rate, having acquired adaption to the gravitational forces that act on her body and being gifted with a resistance to the ridiculous amounts of friction that she and her clothes have to endure, seemingly coated in an aura that further reduces the friction. Helen is able to localize her super speed to different parts of her body to the molecular level, and can, in theory, vibrate her body through physical objects given further training.
Accelerated Metabolism: A possible underlying explanation for Helen's super speed is her ridiculously accelerated metabolism, which has been supercharged to the fullest. This makes Helen resistant to weight gain, disease, injury, as well as increasing her ability to recover from anything. It must be noted that this does not act as a healing factor and simply increased healing speed (such as a few days to fix a broken bone rather than weeks). Additionally, Helen must eat a larger amount of food to maintain this accelerated bodily functions.
Accelerated Perception, Thought Process, and Reflexes: Imagine trying to move at super speed with the current human brain? Impossible. Helen's body has adapted to solve that oversight. In essence, Helen is capable to perceiving and responding to any form of stimuli at a far faster and more efficient rate, capable of adapting, learning and responding at incredible speeds. In as few words as possible, Helen can think, learn and react faster at superhuman levels. However, this does not mean she is super intelligent, as Helen is still limited by her own, a bit average, intelligence.
Enhanced Endurance and Stamina: In summary, Helen does not get tired very easily, as her body has adapted to her incredible speeds over the years of possessing this ability. She is capable of being active for extended periods of time without even thinking of getting exhausted. However, this works in conjunction with her metabolism, meaning that if she is not properly maintaining her nutrition her stamina will drain.
Strengths:
Innate capabilities of Super Speed: Simply put, Helen's power is not reliant on manipulation or any augmentation, and is a superpower completely ingrained in her physiology. It can be called upon at any moment and its only true limitation is Helen's own individual capabilities.
Creative and nearly complete understanding of abilities: Having experimented for some time with her abilities, Helen has a better solid grasp on the extent of her abilities, including her capabilities and limits. As a result, Helen has conceived some pretty unique applications of her abilities and due to her...eccentric dispoisition, is more than willing to experiment further to find any new applications. This allows her to push super speed to its limits.
Rudimentary understanding of physics and other sciences: Thanks to her accelerated learning, Helen has acquired a rudimentary understanding of most sciences, allowing her to understand and implement scientific thought into the application of her abilities.
Weaknesses:
Damaged psyche: Helen is....well, she is not all there. Born with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), one can imagine the effects of having a super power put everything into overdrive. Combine that with being thrown between asylums and hospitals for the better part of five years and all the medications and wrong treatments have had a traumatic effect on Helen's mind. While Helen is not explicitly insane, her psyche is best described as erratic or unstable, most commonly interpreted as possibly having mild schizophrenia. Luckily, Helen's delusions are mostly innocent and mostly contribute to her randomness rather than violent outbursts or anything of that nature.
Easily distracted: Give a person with ADHD super speed and you can imagine the results. Her power allows her to pursue any distraction and only feeds the disorder. Couple that with her tendency to be easily bored and it is not a good recipe.
Mediocre fighting capabilities: Lacking any formal training in martial arts, Helen is not the best fighter. While capable against any untrained opponent, any honed fighter can defeat her in a fair one on one fight. This makes Helen extremely dependent on her abilities.
Origin Story (history):
So you want an origin story, eh? I suppose I can't really blame you. After all, I am pretty interesting. AndIhavethecoolestsuperpowerthatallowsmetodovirtuallyeverythinginablinkoftheeye. Oh, right, right. You probably didn't catch that. That's okay. I'll speak slower. And I should probably get to the point shouldn't I?
My name is Helen Harden. I'm an only child, born to the lovely Hank Harden and Christie Harden. They were pretty young when they had me, but that's what you get when you are not the most responsible of parents. Needless to say, they matured pretty damn fast after I was born. They kind of had to all things considered. Life wasn't easy in Suburia for them the first couple years I was around, but fortunately my dad finished college and got a pretty nice job working in some research lab or something, trying to create fancy cures for all kinds of disorders. Now for a while, it was kind of a "show up, do your stuff, leave" kind of job for my dad. I guess you could say he wasn't all that motivated or something. Not I blame the guy, staring down microscopes all day would be pretty boring to me too! Or would it? I'm not sure. I guess if the money is good. Oh sorry, I got distracted again thinking about kittens.
But all of that changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Okay, fine, I'll be serious for a little. It actually changed when I was just starting school and I started showing symptoms of ADHD. The stuff isn't fun, at least it wasn't for my parents. My father got a whole lot more motivated in his research, hoping to find a cure, or at least a halfway decent treatment for my ADHD. In the meantime, I was drugged up to high heaven. It wasn't too much fun either being all dependent on the stuff, but it worked well enough to keep focused for a little while.
A number of years passed. About 6 or so to be precise. I think. I don't really know. I hate math. Makes my thinker box hurt. It was "Bring your daughter to work day!" So my father wanted to show all the cool stuff he was doing and how he was doing everything for me. It was sweet really. I kind of felt bad for wandering off during his lunch break when I look back. If it wasn't for my curiosity egging on all the problems in my head, I probably would of stuck at his side and not being here answering this question.
Anyway, the wandering is important because of what actually happened. I walked up to my dad's floor and just starting going through the different doors to stare at all the different equipment. I soon found myself in some strange room. It was all electronic looking, like a giant tube or something. I don't really remember a lot of details, but basically I found a bunch of buttons and my dumb 12 year old self slammed all of them. A massive power surge flowed through the tube and the next thing I know I was in a hospital bed, flashing forward about 5 days into the future.
From I was told, gathered and kind of guessed on, the tube was some molecule accelerator thing that was used by a different department that happened to be on my dad's floor. I turned it on and somehow did not implode. In fact, medically, the doctor's were perplexed about what actually happened to my body. I was in a coma yet all my body systems were functioning at like 200% or something. My metabolism was unreal and I was processing everything many times faster than anything they have ever seen. I woke up with seemingly no ill effects...well until all my mental disorders acted up in overdrive.
The doctors attempted to treat me with meds, like they always do. Most didn't work because everything flushed through my system like water through a hose. It was really annoying and I swear I consumed more drugs than a meth addict who inherited Microsoft. And not the fun type of drugs either. In due time, the doctors all but gave up, referring my supercharged ass to some treatment asylum that specialized in mental disorders.
You see, my accident essentially threw my brain for a real ride, with electrical impulses overloading my body. So my ADHD was the most advanced case ever. My overloaded brain struggled to handle everything so other disorders were beginning to crop up too. The docs at the new place basically did the same thing. Diagnose one problem. Drug me up. Find another one (or a new one if it was Tuesday) and drug me up. It was a vicious cycle. None of it really worked, if I am going to be honest with you.
You know what did? Growing up and running. You see, while the doctors picked each other's brains looking for some secret underlying cause, the insane chick right here figured it out! Well, at least I kind of did. When I was about 16...yeah thereabouts, I started realizing that reading (for my "homeschooling" that was done in the confines of the facility) was becoming really easy. Like I read a book in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days. It was strange. But then I started noticing that I could everything a lot faster. Reading, writing, reacting, thinking. Running. Oh yeah, that was the one that made everything real fun.
As this was happening, a lot of my problems began to slowly get under control. I put an emphasis on slowly. It was like my body needed to adapt ever so slowly. In due time, I was able to become well enough to check out when I was 18 years old. Shortly after that, I made my way to college, pursuing a degree in English and Journalism. Why? Well, I could read and write really fast that the homework didn't have the opportunity to bore me. I managed to score an internship at one of the local papers here in Hyperia that later hired me when I graduated, giving me enough of an income to move out and be my own lady.
A lady that happens to have superpowers. It's pretty fun.
