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BASICS
name: Judith (Jude) Holder
age: 30
birthdate: 28/02/1981
sexuality: Repressed lesbitarian
occupation: Head Librarian at William Wells High School (2 yrs, Assistant before that)
affiliation: Neutral/good
pro or anti-mutant: Pro - not a banner-waving campaigner but not prejudiced against in any way.
pb: Rebecca Hall (298x298 | big)


POWER
extent of power: Jude is immune to the direct effects of other powers. Her mind can't be read, her thoughts or emotions can't be controlled, her dreams can't be walked in, her electromagnetic fields (or 'aura' I guess - anything internal to her) can't be fucked with. She's a walking, talking, personal-field power vacuum. This power is completely passive, on all the time, at no conscious energy expenditure on her part.
limit of power: The important thing to note is 'direct effect'. She should be thought of as sort of 'spiritually invisible' to others - her thoughts are unreadable, her location can't be sensed - it's like she isn't there. However, if you have super strength, you can still punch a hole in her - because it's not your power that's doing that; it's your fist propelled by your power. And while you can't manipulate her electromagnetic fields or, I dunno, make cuts spontaneously open up on her skin, you would still be able to chuck her around with telekinesis if said telekinesis is about moving a physical object by manipulating the air around it. You can still see through her clothes with x-ray vision, or hear her in the next room with your super senses, but you can't 'see' her at distance with clairvoyance or 'sense' her ability with a power sensing mutation. Also, just as it doesn't have an 'on' switch this power also doesn't have an 'off' switch. You can't heal her. You can't find her when she's lost and might need help. You can't beam helpful thoughts into her brain should the need arise.
weakness: This power doesn't have a 'weakness', per se - immunity is immunity. However, it's important to note that it is, of course, a power in itself. So while - being passive - it would be immune to any other power that would affect it, she would not be immune to, say, an artificially created mutant power-sucking ray or whatever. What she's immune to is powers, not 'all crazy shit'. Equally, if, say, a mutant had the ability to create a power-neutralising zone that was independent of them - so, say, they could 'power-neutralise' a whole room and leave it that way, that lasting effect might be something that would work on her. Basically, if anything came up that it would be logical and fun for her to be vulnerable to, I'm in.
note: Jude does not know that she has a mutation. I expect that this may be something she learns quite soon, but since (I imagine) mutants don't habitually go around manipulating/controlling people (and given they're unlikely to tell her "Oh yeah, I tried to read your mind/fry your internal organs/make you sleep with me but it didn't work"), it just hasn't come up yet.


PERSONALITY
positive traits: Honest, reliable, loyal, intelligent, creative, resilient
negative traits: Repressed, sarcastic, jaded, self-loathing, pessimistic, a little callous at times
strengths: Research, reasoned debate, good singing voice and skilled pianist, a decent writer (although she would never write for anyone other than herself), patient with children.
weaknesses: Trusting others, whether specifically or the human race in general. She's impatient with adults (more on this in the summary below). She finds it very hard to look on the bright side. She's terrible at arithmetic and has to mouth the numbers, write them down or even use a calculator when tallying even fairly short strings of numbers up.

summary: The best thing that can be said about Jude is that she truly believes in doing the right thing for its own sake. She's a genuinely decent human being and is about the most trustworthy person you could hope to run into. That's not to say she's a stickler for the rules - she's guided by her own compass, not by bureaucracy or regulations. But that compass is pretty solid and you can always trust Jude to do right by you.

That doesn't necessarily make her a pleasant person to know, mind you. For all her merits, Jude is one of those people who on a bad day will suck all of the energy out of a room with the sheer force of her pessimism. Those who've known her a long time - her best friends from school, her godparents, her father - know her for the warmth and loyalty she's capable of, for her thoughtfulness and creativity. But the Jude they knew has long since been near entirely obscured by the permanent black cloud of unmet potential and lost chances that hangs over her head. They know she wouldn't have it any other way, and can only hope that one day she gets to pursue the life she wanted - preferably while she's still young enough to make it.

Though she's quite patient with young people, she can be quite short with adults when they don't live up to her expectations, and tends to inadvertently make her disapproval known even in situations where perhaps it's not terribly tactful to do so (such as at work). Fortunately as Head Librarian she doesn't really answer to anyone in any direct sense, and she's good enough at her job that no one minds. Besides, Head Librarians are supposed to be grumpy and while she's a bitter curmudgeon, she's also kind enough to those who truly deserve it that only someone with very little experience of her would think that she was truly cruel or unpleasant.


HISTORY
family: Only child, mother Helen, deceased, father Robert, 70, has Alzheimers (early stage)
favorite memory: A holiday to a seaside town in Maine with her parents and another couple they were close friends with (who were also her godparents). She was fairly young at the time, only around ten, but she was a bright, solemn child and as they included her as much as they could in all aspects of their holiday including the sitting-around-chatting parts. She had never before felt so valued or accepted; it was the first time she felt like a real human being in her own right and not some 'proto-person'.
least favorite memory: The aftermath of her mother's suicide. The worst memories are of her father's reaction - no child should see their parent in that state.

the story: Jude is sort of a walking 'what might have been'. Not that there's anything wrong with being a librarian in the town where you were born. But Jude was going to do so much with her life once - she got a good degree from a good college (BA(Hon) English Language and Literature at Brown) and was awarded a place at Columbia Journalism School for her graduate degree, with the intention of going into print media publishing.

It didn't really work out that way.

Jude's mother was a registered precog - she got flashes of the future seemingly at random and, with some meditation and concentration, she could also deliberately look into the future of a person or location. Helen had been fragile for as long as Jude could remember, and she could never shake the nagging feeling that it was her fault. She was born when her parents were both 40, quite accidentally, and although she felt every day how much they loved her and how precious she was to them, she also couldn't help but see how scared her mother was - for her or of her she didn't quite know. As the years went by, the older Jude got, the more fragile her mother became - she seemed at once so happy to have her daughter in her life and yet perpetually sad or even a little afraid in her presence. Jude would ask her father if he knew what was wrong, but Robert either didn't know, or wouldn't speak of it.

Therapy seemed to help, a little - Helen couldn't take antidepressants due to her mutation, but regular counselling seemed to keep her on an even keel. As Jude grew and went to university in another state, though, things got worse again. Her mother would call her every day, sometimes twice a day, always sounding almost panicked, relieved beyond measure just to hear Jude's voice, to hear that she was all right. Jude began to doubt that she should move to New York for grad school. Perhaps publishing could wait. Perhaps her mother needed more help, and from her personally. She never got the chance to make this decision, though, because Helen Holder hanged herself in her own bedroom at the age of 61.

Helen left no note, gave no warning. Robert was devastated, inconsolable for weeks, leaving Jude to handle all the necessary arrangements herself - contacting family, organising the funeral, dealing with legal matters. After everything had blown over, she couldn't entertain the idea of being away from her bereaved father, and so she moved home, initially to stay back with her dad.

It wasn't meant to be permanent, but after a year living at home with her father, working in an office to bring some money into the house (although as a retired accountant Robert has a pretty decent income), Jude moved to an apartment nearby, and began to look into more permanent options in Burlington. She enrolled in a School Library Media Studies course at Vermont University, and after some years as a Library Assistant working on a part-time distance MLIS from New York University, Jude walked into the position of Head Librarian at William Wells High School on the retirement of the old Head two years ago.

Her father was diagnosed with early stage Alzheimers in late 2010. He still lives alone and she fully intends to let him continue to do so until he ceases to be safe by himself, which shouldn't be for some years yet.

Needless to say it's not where she thought she'd be. But her dad needs her, and so this is just how it is.


RANDOM
quirks: Peeling the labels off beer bottles and reducing cardboard coasters to tiny piles of debris, accidentally drawing on her hands with a ballpoint while she's not paying attention, generally fidgeting with her hands. Naturally she's a nail biter - chewer, anyway. She also bites her lip when she's thinking but that's mainly just cute.
cross to bear: Her father: at once her greatest burden and her greatest ally.
biggest fear: That when her dad dies she'll somehow Do It Wrong - not be there, not feel whatever she's supposed to feel, fuck up the funeral. Whatever. And beyond that, the fear that having jettisoned all of her own plans to be here for him, she won't be able to get it all back after he's gone. And then she feels guilty for even thinking that way about After, and so the spiral of self-doubt and self-loathing continues!
pet peeves: Charming people (who are they trying to deceive?), witty people (who are they trying to impress?), optimism to the point of idiocy (she has a pretty arbitrary definition of where the optimism ends and the idiocy begins, basically amounting to "when it starts to annoy me"). People who listen to music with leaky headphones; seriously, how hard is it to get a pair of the in-ear sound cancelling ones? If you can afford an iPod you can afford decent headphones, *mutter, grumble*. Yes, she's secretly an old lady.
likes: Cats (she doesn't have one; she's worried that if she got her own cat it would be mean, or boring), intelligent argument, music, writing, reading, walking, tea.
dislikes: Very warm weather, coffee, the smell of cigarette smoke, unacceptable noise levels in her library (quiet chatter is okay), being set-up on dates (the well-meaning Head of Reception keeps trying), or on some days almost everything.