[Character] Flicker

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

Legal Name: Nova Madigan (see below)

Nova Name: Flicker

Date of birth: August 12, 1993

Residence: Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Date of Eruption: August 20, 2015

Height: 5'10" (1.78 meters)

Weight: undisclosed (slim to athletic)

Appearance: A 22-year old caucasian woman of mixed European heritage born in the United States. Flicker has taken to wearing casual clothes from her recent university days. She is unemployed by choice, and apparently feels no particular pressure to dress up. She is tall and quite fit, with good posture and a relaxed and good-humored demeanor.

Distinctive Features: She continuously flickers in and out of complete transparency, in an erratic pattern similar to the way an old flourescent light bulb randomly flickers on and off. She is unable to stop flickering. Her physical presence is continuous -- this effect is solely visual. Flicker reports that her eyesight is unaffected by this aberration.

Known Powers: (updated) Flicker has demonstrated remarkable teleportation ability in distance, accuracy, and carrying capacity. She has also shown a strong knack for reading the peaks and troughs of financial markets; her 2015 personal income tax return contained an elaborate list of profitable financial transactions that continues to baffle many accountants. She has hinted at a minor talent for detecting dangerous situations, but this is difficult to confirm. Some witnesses report that she has had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, but this has not yet been proven to be a nova ability.

General History: Nova Madigan was born in a working-class suburb of Cleveland, Ohio in 1993-- well before N-Day. Her parents named her Nova for it's Hopi Indian meaning, "She who chases butterflies." She has no siblings. Nova's biological father adandoned the family in 1995, leaving her mother to fend for herself and Nova. As a result, Nova grew up poor.

Nova Madigan attended public schools in Cleveland, where she was an honor student, and played soccer and volleyball. Graduating in the top 10% of her high school class, she received a partial academic scholarship to nearby Cleveland State University.

She majored in Human Resources Management and completed a B.B.A. degree in December 2014, after four and one half years of study. She played three seasons for the University's intercollegiate volleyball squad, and was active in the College of Business' career prep program. While in school, she learned that hard work and determination are not all that is required for success. Upon graduation, her more well-heeled friends obtained lucrative corporate careers through their parents or social contacts-- contacts she lacked, having grown up poor. One by one, Flicker's former classmates turned their backs on her as they began their new lives.

Upon graduation, she found work as a human resources assistant for an insurance firm headquartered in Cleveland. Her new duties completely failed to utilize her abilities in any meaningful way, and it did not take long for her to realize her career path was a dead end.

Instead of purchasing lottery tickets, Nova began setting money aside for a M-R node latency test. By July 2015, she had saved enough for the test at the University of Ohio's Research Medicine School, a research hospital licensed to various Rashoud Center biotechnologies. She scheduled a test for August 18th. Two days later on the 20th, she returned to get her results-- the test was positive.

She declined the post-test counseling session and immediately departed the hospital. Still reading the test result form instead of looking where she was going, Nova left the medical office and inadvertently stepped directly into the path of an oncoming newspaper delivery truck. The driver locked up the brakes and sounded his horn, but it was impossible to stop in time. Eyewitnesses report seeing Nova look towards the truck, stiffen with alarm, and then vanish from the spot.

Flicker reports that she found herself at home in her apartment in the next instant, suffering typical post-eruption symptoms. She states that her aberration was already manifest at that time.

After a week's absence and no calls, her employers fired her, unaware of her circumstances.

She has not yet committed to any formal Nova registration program or agency, and has expressed no desire to do so.

Updated information: Flicker is now well-known around the Cleveland metro area, since her eruption was featured in the local print and OpNet news. However, aside from the traditional post-eruption media attention and modest increase in personal wealth, her life is largely unchanged.

Shortly after erupting, she took a salaried job with Metro Life Flight in Cleveland, Ohio. She worked as an on-call teleporting ambulance service for situations in which a helicopter is impractical or too slow. She quit or was fired from that job, according to conflicting accounts, on March 4, 2016. In addition, shortly after her eruption she had contacted the Cleveland municipal government with an offer to assist in emergencies on an as-needed basis. However after months of dodging the issue, the city finally declined to hire her.

SBC Tower incident, March 4, 2016: Flicker was called by a member of the Cleveland police department to assist with a man who threatened suicide by jumping from the SBC Tower. The jumper, later identified as Michael Lamb, was reportedly despondent after testing negative for M-R node latency. Despite Flicker's efforts to talk him down, he leapt to his death. It is notable that Flicker jumped after him in a rescue attempt, despite the fact that she cannot fly. Their fall was captured on low-quality amateur video, and it is estimated that they were only a few feet apart at the time of Michael's impact. Flicker teleported safely to the ground at that point, despite the fact that she was falling at nearly 180 miles per hour, thus demonstrating her ability to change her inertia in mid-teleport.

Further update, March 6, 2016: In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, March 6, 2016, Nova Madigan was seen visting The Phoenix Room in Ibizia, Spain, in the company of nova Neil Preston, the ex-elite Terat known as Long, and a previously unknown female nova who appears to manipulate light. Some witnesses report that she appeared to be there with Neil Preston primarily, and that their body language hinted at a romantic involvement.

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

At this time Flicker lives in Rio de Janeiro with her steady boyfriend Neil Preston. She is finishing pre-medical school studies this Summer, and will begin medical school this August. She expects to complete the entire degree in one academic year.

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

Image created by Stellar.