BROOKE, CHARLIE.

Standing at just over five foot Charlie without a doubt vertically challenged, however if you reminder of that fact you might just get a little smack in your face. Her hair changes with the changing direction of the wind, Charlie likes to reinvent herself from time to time which normally means a new hair cut and a new hair colour. From blonde to red, to purple and pink she's tried every hair dye on the market but she always seems to come back to bright orange. Charlie guesses the bright hair means people can always find her in a crowd even when she is tiny!

Still, Charlie is some what her own woman, she's not much into fashion and honesty most of the clothes she owns are from thrift store – she doesn't make that much money – and just part of her doesn't want to conform to peoples normal standards of female 'beauty' which is why she's more likely to turn up to a party in jeans and a ramones tshirt. Hell if the guys can get away with it why can't she? After all most of the time her job means she's jumping around a stage for hours on end or waiting tables. Comfort is her main priority.Tom boyishness aside she still kinda is a girl, she's insecure about her lack of height, about her bra size and the little gap inbetween her two front teeth which she didn't even know she had until the boys started calling her Sponge Bob.

Charlie is loud. She is brash. When she takes the stage with a microphone everyone knows exactly what is going down. Charlie has always said that she doesn't sing to change the world, she just tells stories about what it's like to be nineteen and live in New York. Writing songs is about the only thing she knows how to do, it's the only thing that she'd every really done and truth be told it's the only thing she really cares about as well. Charlie lives for her music.


She's not a materialistic person, Charlie can get by on next to nothing, they are just things after all and you can't take them with you when you die. She just doesn't see the point in wanting things, in spending your entire life working to make money to get things that in the end bring nothing. They are just objects. In her view true life comes from moments. You lived moments. You were proud you were there. You treasured them and then you moved on to find another moment to be proud about. While she's unconcerned about her pay check it doesn't mean that she doesn't feel the pinch like everyone else. Charlie lives hand to mouth going from one pay check to the next wondering where the next meal and next rent payment will come from and how on earth is she going to afford the next utility bill? As much as she worries about it she tries not to. What's the worst that could happen?

Charlie is a pacifist down to her core, she has a set of rules that she lives her life by and she sticks to them. She is the kinda person that plants herself in the middle of the street and tells someone else to move. She stands up for what she believes in with everything she has and Charlie just wants to do the right thing. Sometimes the right thing gets her in trouble, gets her arrested, gets her beat up by the cops but she doesn't care. Charlie will plant her little ass in the way and refuse to move and refuse to throw a punch. She believes in peace, that the world can learn to get on...and she tries so hard to live a life that makes it a little easier.

Charlie doesn't want to live her life backing down, she wants to stand for something and she will fight tooth and nail for what is the right thing. She's an active member of the mutant equal rights movement and was an active anti-registration protester during the hero civil war. While people tell her to grow up and get on with life, to conform and get a job Charlie clings to the anger that she has with a society that let her generation down. To a system so broken that herself and her friends fell through at every stage. To a system that sees her exercising her American rights of democracy as something to be tolerated and shut up instead of celebrated. While she admits that a lot of her problems were through her own choices she feels the need to give the middle finger to a system deliberately weighted out of her favour because of her socio-economic bracket and her mutant status.

All Charlie really wants is to see the end of people being kept from being something for being something. No one should be denied a job or a basic level of living because they are a woman, mutant, a different religion, their skin colour or bank balance. Is that really too much to ask?

Astralprojection has often been understood in terms of out of body experiences, the ability of a persons consciousness to separate from their physical form and walk around like a ghost. Her powers allow her to observe without being detected like a fly on the wall. In her projected state she can not interact with people and they can not with her. She is in all intents and purposes watching through the walls of two planes, she is observing from the astral plane (hence the name astral projection) and therefore has no ability to interact with the real world in her astral state. Almost like watching the world from the other side of the window. It is however possible to interact with others who can access the astral plane.

Theoretically with correct training Charlie should be able to project her consciousness in to any space in the world with a careful idea of where it is. It's rumoured that some people with the ability can project to specific coordinates with enough instruction. However much to the opposite Charlie suppresses her powers.

Her powers often manifest themselves when she is stressed, when she wishes she was somewhere else and is looking for a way out of a situation. As a person projects they normally pass out, with no active consciousness they are pretty much comatose and medically would appear to be in a coma with no reaction to stimuli from the outside world.

Charlie is a Brooklyn girl born and bred. She was the only child of teenage Angela Brooke who following a one night stand at a school dance managed to conceive Charlie. Her mother herself was a teenager, one who really didn't want much to do with her own child, her mother always saw her as a burden and a mistake and struggled to bond with her new born child which resulted in her grand parents doing the vast majority of work raising her in her early life.

Her grandmother Susanne and grandfather Richard met during the war, her grandmother was one of the few women who worked with the armed forces and her grandfather fought in Vietnam, her great grandfather in the second world war. Charlie remembers vividly being told many stories of the war from him, tales of Captain America and Bucky her grandfather had been told by his father and how they lead the fight. Sometimes she never got to hear the end of the story, her grandmother saying that it was inappropriate for children. To this day Charlie still doesn't know how some of the stories end, she wished she did.

While her mother tried to finish school, went to college and struggled though Charlie lived with her grandparents full time and most of the time they felt more like her actual parents than her own mother did. It didn't actually make a difference to her, she had a stable up bringing and sure her grandparents were older than her friends parents but Charlie didn't care. It was cool. They were the coolest people ever.

It was from her grandfather that she got her sense of morality, a good man who fought a war to try and keep oppression away from people, he often apologised to Charlie for the world that she had been brought into. That this wasn't the world he had wanted for her but it was the only one they had so she had to shine her shoes, hold her head up high and go make a difference. He always encouraged to do the right thing, to not stand by and watch evil being done. Charlie has always taken that idea and ran with it.

Unfortunately her grandmother passed away when she was eleven, it hit Charlie hard...it was like loosing her mother and she was dealt another blow as her grandfather became ill and infirm social services had two options, she either went to live with her mother or went into care. Under pressure from her family and the authorities Charlie's mother finally stepped up to the plate, she was housed with her mother from eleven which is when most of her problems started.

Charlie's mother while presenting the ever perfect presentation was chaotic and unloving, she shared no connection with her child what so ever and her partner was loud, violent and emotionally unstable himself. Charlies numerous attempts to run back home to her grandfather stood testament to how much she disliked her mother and step father. However when her grandfather passed away two years later Charlie had no choice and no one there to fight for her interests.

Her behaviour began to spiral out of control. Charlie withdrew and while the school called her parents with their concerns they simply were never acted up on and the threat of being knocked back to the 40s by her step father was enough to keep her in line and pretending everything was normal for a while. With plummeting grades and behavioural problems ranging from outright ignoring teachers and skipping school Charlie fell in with the wrong crowd. It was there she discovered her love of music.

Music was something new, it was comfort, it was something she understood and loved in a world full of screaming and shouting and violence at home which she endured. The truth was Charlie fell through the system, she's often angry at the fact no one realised she was being abused and she doesn't think it's fair that someone would blame her. She had been a child and the safeguards in place had not protected her. The multiple domestic calls the police received about the family had never brought up any alarm bells because Charlie always – at least appeared – to be okay and her bad behaviour at school was chalked down to the trauma of essentially loosing both parents in a short space of time. In all honesty the school were sick of having to call the police because she had decided to try and run away and the police were sick of having to bring her back home again. They had a mutual hate of each other.

Discovering her powers was another blow to her, her step father was a staunch anti-mutant right winger who believed they should all be locked up. He was violent and Charlie was pretty sure he was a member of radical right wing group that liked to beat them up. Charlie set about hiding her powers from him. From everyone. Terrified at what she was and what was happening to her she tried her hardest to lock them up and never let them out. However things go wrong. Mistakes happen and misfires happen. For years Charlie lied to her friends, they were just faints...they never really bought it.

She doesn't want her powers. She doesn't care. As far as she can see there is nothing noble with being a mutant. She doesn't see it as the next stage of human evolution. She sees it as different people being taken advantage by someone for their own game and she is convinced that just because she can do something different that in reality she is 100% human and therefore should be treated like any other human. So she goes about her days like she has no powers what so ever. Denial much?

She ended up failing and graduating without her diploma, Charlie didn't mind she was more interested in being in her band anyway. She didn't care. What was the point? The day she turned 18 she left home, left school, took off into the world with nothing and ended up living with a friend who had an apartment. Since them Charlie's been making her own way. Her band arn't famous, they arn't big, they play to rooms of five people but she stands for what she believes in. She might have a crap job in a diner in Manhattan but she's happy. It's not an important life, she doesn't do anything really great to contribute towards society but it's better than what she had. Charlie's got friends who accept her for who she is, short loud and mutant, she shares an apartment in Brooklyn and has shitty job but she has moments lived and memories to keep the fire alive.

Sure she doesn't battle the world but she goes to protests and holds banners for her cause to try and make sure that no one else gets to go through the things that she does. That no one else has to be scared of what they are. The only thing she can take away from it all is that she stands for something, that was all her grand father had every really wanted. That's the only person she wants to make proud.

Last night had been one of those nights, it was surprisingly easy to get alcohol under age even if you looked about twelve, especially in Brooklyn. Some places never questioned a fake ID. Charlie wasn't going to moan about it though, it was to her advantage. They had left the club when it shut, missed the bus back to their own neighbourhood and had ended up walking home the twenty blocks in the drizzle and darkness laughing most of the way with her friends. This was their home. This was the city they grew up in and these streets had every piece of them. There was something about home towns that you couldn't escape, the fact that despite the little changes the place still stayed the same. They were Brooklyn kids though and through.

Brooklyn was a different place at night, the kids danced like they were hours away from death, girls dressed in too much make up and showing too much flesh. They smiled and smile to take away the breath of everyone who passed through, flowing though the streets like water, cutting paths down to the river. They were there for a few hours washing the city in red to disappear by the time the commuters made it out for the first trains into the city.

They were laughing, trying to work out who's apartment was going to hold a free for all. She had woke up on a sofa in an unfamiliar house surrounded by sleeping folks that she didn't know, having woken her friends they decided it was time to go. Making her way out of the door it was quiet outside, quieter than it should have been they made their way home in the sobering sunshine unaware of what had happened while they had been passed out. Charlie was longing for a shower, clean sheets and charger for her phone, it had been a heavy night but she could just about remember where she had been even with how hungover she was. They did what they did though, they picked themselves up, checked their vital signs and got going.

It wasn't until they got home, turned on the TV and saw the news, saw the city freaking out that something was wrong. Charlie joked, they all did, about how drunk they must have been to pass out and miss the world literally splintering off into its own before she waved it off and headed for a shower. “Don't worry, the Avengers will sort it out, everything will be normal in a few days.”

Charlie had faith in her heroes. She was also too hung over for this crap.

USER NAME: KatieKate

YEARS RPING: too god damn long. Way too long. I'm so old.

REFERRED TO BY: Vinny is holding my sanity hostage and demanded I join or he'll set it on fire

OTHER: Kate Bishop