Julia Cross

Okay, this is ready to submit. I think it came out pretty decent, honestly... hope this works! This version of Julia is heading for teleios. (Last update: 10/15/13 - updated debt calculations.)

Name: MaxSalsa
Age: 24
Contact: MaxSalsa; maxsalsa
Characters Already in Teleios: N/A
Reserve: Here.

Character Name: Julia Cross
Journal: believeinlife
Age: 17
Universe: Glacier Peaks (OC)
Canon Point: Around the middle of her third year, after the narrowly-averted Ardent Winter incident but before school resumes after winter break.
Debt:

Class A: 2 counts treason; total 2 years
Class B: 5 counts assault, 1 count B&E; total 3 years
Class C: 1 count trespass, 1 count vigilantism; total 2 months
GRAND TOTAL: 5 years, 2 months

Setting:

The world of Glacier Peaks is not unlike a modern-day Earth - indeed, it is a modern-day Earth, but with a few changes, the largest of which is a faint but definitely present existence of magic. It's not readily accessible to humans, but there's an underground movement to change that, and it's centered on a specific place: Glacier Peaks Academy, a high school (and linked middle school) located outside the remote town of Whiteout, Michigan. The school has a reputation for accepting only the best and brightest, as a private high school that recruits from the general public, and offers scholarships for those unable to attend due to financial hardships. On the outside, there's nothing unusual about the school, except its sheer size and its knack for producing exceptional students. The campus sprawls out across a huge space, large than many college campuses, and stretches both several stories above the ground and a few below, though few outside the school know exactly how deep its tunnels and elevators stretch. At any given time, about one hundred young men and women roam the high school campus, and another hundred populate the middle school, which is smaller but no less grand.

Within the school itself, thing both are and are not as they seem. The students live in dorm suites, individual bedrooms joined by a common area and those joined by a further common area for each class. They travel together to classes they share, and split up for electives; the school's small size means that some classes could be as small as a single student, but there are seemingly enough instructors to somehow manage that load. Labs and classrooms are plentiful, and there's more than enough specialized equipment to go around. Basically, the whole place is a haven for a would-be student.

Beneath all this, though, Glacier Peaks is a place of innovation, for good or ill. There are a number of high-profile inventions that have come from within its walls and are highly praised for it, and a number more that nobody knows came from within. In addition to a place of learning and research, the school's grasp of magitechnology - and ability to cloak it as something else - means it's capable of less desirable advancements, too. Various manner of weapons and armor have been churned out of the school, and there are a number of interesting applications for technology so developed; it's said that at least some of the school's funding comes from various armed forces around the world. Some of the things that sleep under the school fall into the category of must never see the light of day, from world-ending weapons to solutions to problems various factions are not ready to see solved yet. Underground facilities include a launchpad for missiles, rockets, and space-capable vehicles, as well as sealed and reinforced testing rooms for weapons projects.

Some of the school's pet projects have become so big of hassles within that they have taken on lives of their own in its history, becoming known as "incidents" and referred to as such; a book in the school's library documents various incidents over the last decade or so. Some are simply amusing, while some represent crises that took intervention from staff - or other students - to bring to a peaceful resolution. Incident resolution, among other things, sometimes grants titles to students; titles are used by the school as one of its highest honors, and while some are a little silly or sound like they came straight out of a cartoon, the spirit in which they're given forgives that most of the time.

History:

Julia's very early childhood was a little rocky, but mostly pleasant. She grew up in a model family on the California coast, an only child with a bright future, though her family wasn't particularly affluent. But it was clear from a young age that Julia was very bright. Too bright, as her parents were quite a bit less impressive than she was. She would regularly try to talk to her parents about something she'd read and find they knew no more than she did, or try to ask questions and not get answers back. Slowly, they started to resent her for for that intelligence, and that resent grew into hate. Try as they might, they just couldn't come to grips with their daughter's gifted mind, and so they tried to seal it away, to force her back into their world, to make her into something they understood. She was forbidden to visit her friends, to spend time outside, to go much of anywhere beyond school. Over time, she became a social outcast, spending all her days in the comfort of the local public library, and wondering what would happen to her. Her parents no longer included her, and struggled to talk to her without exploding into outbursts (though they were careful never to express their anger physically). They wanted to find a way to send her away to boarding school, but they just couldn't scrape together the money. On the outside, they gave the appearance of a normal, though distant, family, but it was a much darker picture looking from within. Julia tried to look for some way out, but... she was a young girl with no real friends, and nowhere to go. What could she do?

The spring before she entered high school. Julia had just about given up hope of anything resembling a normal life, when a letter came for her. It was a notification from a school called Glacier Peaks Academy, far to the northeast, that they were willing to offer her a full scholarship. It was a miracle for all parties - Julia could finally get away from home, and her parents would be rid of her. They agreed to let her go, on one harsh condition: this was it for her. They would still be her parents on paper, but in reality she would be cut off. No contact outside of what was necessary for school or the like, no support beyond enough funds to get her to Michigan, and no place to return to once she left. The Cross residence was no longer her home. And while it hurt, she found she couldn't object - there was nothing tying her here anymore. So she replied in the affirmative, and a few short months later, Julia found herself on a jet to New England, and a prop plane into a tiny town one would be forgiven for overlooking on the map: Whiteout, Michigan. Everything she owned was in a suitcase, and as the plane touched down, she told herself she'd never look back.

That first weekend was a whirlwind of activity and emotion; Julia's roommate, Heather Dawson, was a force to be reckoned with, and when she put together the pieces of Julia's life to now, the East Coast girl was about ready to fly over there herself and give her parents a piece of her mind. However, the two eventually made their peace with everything; Julia couldn't help but be happy someone finally spoke to her on even terms, and knew about her family without wanting to keep their distance from her. She did her best to support Heather, too; it was the girl's first time away from home as well, and she worried after her sister that had never really known life without her. The two grew into a relationship where they depended on each other, and Julia was okay with that. It gave her someone to keep her grounded, and she'd always wanted someone that thought she was important for something.

Once school started, the girls quickly developed a lifestyle of studying in every free moment, staying up all night to finish projects, and - surprisingly, for Julia - spending their free time together. She knew the other girls in her class, sure, but there were none she was as close to as Heather. They spent pretty much all their time together, and knew each other's secrets. Julia was sure, three months into their freshman year, that there was no other person on the planet that understood her as well as Heather did, and she knew that, when she had to leave this place, she wanted to make sure she would be somewhere that she could see her most important person on a regular basis.

The classwork was about as hard as Julia expected - which was to say, very. It was, however, beyond Heather's expectations, and they spent a lot of time working out her issues with everything. With some doing, they got her to a point where she was able to keep up, but it took time away from Julia's pursuit of further knowledge, and in apology, Heather elected to help her look for new and interesting things to do to fill her time - there were only so many books in the library, after all, and she didn't want to blow through all of them in her first year. That brought her to the elective class "Artifact Creation", involving the creation of items of power - weaponry, guns, mechanical devices, and the like. The name was definitely suspicious, but it was handwaved as a common nickname from students having taken the class that stuck officially. After a short time of work, however, the girls quickly started to see why it had its name: things worked... differently than they'd expected. The materials interfaced differently with each other, and with them. She got ideas, from the many books she'd read, and started on a monumental project. As the first year drew to a close, she knew a few things in particular: Heather was her best friend, no matter what happened; she was going to make the best damned artifact anyone had ever seen; and there was a boy in her class that was starting to concern her. Eric Marsh was a loner, and was at the school because he wanted to use it to boost his reputation; he'd joined the Artifact Creation class for much the same reason, interested in forming a weapon to blow away opposition. Heather was, bit by bit, trying to break open his shell and get him to ease up, and so far it seemed to be working... but Julia worried after her all the same.

Finals came and went, and the end of the first year was upon them. A brief letter back to her parents told Julia that, no, she wasn't to come home for summer, but she wasn't prepared to stay at the campus alone all summer, either. With some convincing, Heather convinced her parents to let Julia stay with them. The trip to the Dawson home was short, and over the course of the break, Julia came to be treated as family by Heather's parents, and as another elder sister by Heather's younger sibling, Tara. Heather and Julia, too, grew closer, becoming almost sisters in their own way. While the time was enjoyable, and their stories entertained the family for countless nights, the three months passed in a blur, and the girls returned to the campus for their second year.

The second year started much the same as the first. The classes were harder, as they'd expected, and Julia had the weirdest feeling... like the others were watching her. Her and Heather both, in fact, and it was horribly unsettling. Unsettling enough that she spent a lot more time than she expected, in the first half of the year, working out the kinks on her artifact: by now, she'd designed how she wanted it to come out, and through a lot of application of questionable technology, she had the framework for a ring. The construction didn't take as long as she expected, and near the winter of their second year, she and Heather had engineered and constructed a working prototype, which they tested and deemed complete over the next several months. At first glance, it was a plain silver band, sized for Julia's right ring finger (a symbolic choice, after reading too much on the topic). But with a thought and focus, it could be used to make things. They weren't permanent, and if they were battered enough they disappeared, but while they lasted they were perfect copies. This was everything she'd been aiming for and more, and she was proud of her creation. After some consideration, Julia dubbed her completed artifact the Ring of Boundless Horizons. Heather, too, was proud of her; they'd alternated between working on Julia's project and Heather's, and while they spent more time on the former, the latter was no less impressive. Heather had, for herself, cooked up a pair of shoes that allowed her to hover several inches above the ground, and with some loose application of physics, "run" on walls for short periods. They liked each other's projects, to be sure, but agreed to stick with what they had for the moment.

Heather and Julia agreed to stay at the campus for the holiday break that year, partly because they wanted somewhere to keep practicing with their shiny new gadgets, and partly because things were getting unusual with the others; the twins that lived across the room, in particular, were getting very snappy, were oddly (for them) quiet when not being coarse, and generally gave the sense of something being very wrong. Indeed, the tension reached a breaking point just after the holidays; it turned out the twins' parents couldn't pay to continue to send the girls after this year when then lackluster performance didn't justify it, and they were being dragged home, much to their chagrin - this was a status symbol to them, and they weren't willing to leave. But since they had to go at the end of the year, it seemed they were determined to make everyone else's life a living hell while they had the chance, being general brats the whole rest of the semester. One of Julia's first meaningful uses of her power was to conjure up a rope, making her intentions clear if they tried anything. That, of course, meant they just acted up where she couldn't see them, or couldn't do anything about it. Julia tried quite hard to convince them to stop, but the twins weren't having any of it, and over the remainder of the semester she learned to just tune them out and get back to work.

The tail end of Julia's second year was mostly composed of studying, gently threatening the twins to leave herself and Heather alone, and further experimentation with her ring. There was also a disturbing letter that shook Julia to her core, the day after her seventeenth birthday: a plain envelope with no return address, containing a brief letter from her parents that they'd moved - but they didn't tell her where to, only that they'd left the coast and California behind. That devastated her in a way her original exile hadn't - one way or another, Julia was on her own now. Heather, predictably, was scandalized by the turn of events, and immediately contacted her parents regarding what they could do, if anything. Word didn't come right away, and Julia pushed her grief aside as finals drew near. Their study group contained the two of them, the remaining three girls in their class that didn't hate them, and one unexpected member - Eric, whom Heather had finally seemingly gotten through to. Between the six of them, they were able to cover all their collective subjects without issue, and another year drew to a close relatively quietly.

The day before the girls left for break, Heather's parents came through in a big way: they were trying to ask a lawyer questions about how to handle a case of clear child abandonment, and if there was any way to make it work, they intended to look into adopting Julia into the family - she was already practically inseparable from Heather anyway, this would just make it official. The girl didn't know what to say, and it was a tearful arrival at the Dawson home the next day; Julia couldn't wipe the smile off her face for a full week.

That summer, Heather and her family made a major effort to include Julia in whatever ways they could manage: regular hanging-out sessions with Heather's sister Tara, group ventures into town for shopping trips, and even a day trip to the beach. She was ashamed to admit it, but this was all new to her, and it made her happier than she could express in words. Regardless of what happened, Julia was more than ready to treat these people as hers. After six weeks and quite a bit of discussion, the lawyer finally got back to them with good news - the paperwork would work out, somehow, and they could move forward. It wasn't like they could find Julia's parents to track them down to sign anything, so the decision was left up to her. The resulting "yes" spilled from her mouth almost before the man stopped talking, and just like that, Julia had a family again. A family that actually cared about her. That meant the world to her.

The remainder of the summer passed in a blur, and it wasn't long before the girls returned to the school for their third year, with an added surprise: Tara was also joining them, having heard so much about the school from Heather and Julia that she wanted to go as well. The three of them returned to the academy without much fanfare, and settled in for what they expected to be a big year, filled with fun times and new challenges.

They were more right than they could have ever dreamed. The pace of classes picked up even further, bordering on insanity, and the girls spent quite a few evenings in the library trying to keep up, though that was mostly Julia making sure Heather had a hold on things. Julia also grew to depend on her ring even more than before, conjuring simple items like pencils and glasses when she didn't have the time (or presence of mind) to retrieve her own. With the twins gone, it was relatively quiet in the commons, leaving the girls time to relax every so often. It also, however, gave Heather (and by extension, Julia) time to continue to bond with Eric. But since that summer, something had been... off. He was more withdrawn than he'd been before, and try as she might, Heather felt she was losing ground. That worried Julia, and she started to wonder what was going on. The last constraint on Julia's time was weapons practice - she'd found something she liked to work with, a thin spear constructed of metal forged pure white, and light enough for her to use. Of course, she wasn't trained, so between YouTube and books, she started to take up the striking arts, practicing on conjured felt dummies. She enjoyed the exercise, and she had a sinking feeling she'd need to know how to defend herself someday, so she kept up the practice a few nights a week, Heather sticking around to watch sometimes.

It was that winter that everything started to fall apart. The week before break, Eric suddenly stopped talking to Heather at all, and they couldn't find him outside classes, or sometimes even during them. When he finally disappeared altogether the day before break, the girls panicked, following any clues they could scrape together, eventually leading them to the restricted research section under the school. Julia didn't want to go down there - partly for fear of getting caught, and partly for fear of what they'd find - but Heather convinced her, and they descended hundreds of feet under the school, finding what they never expected: a nuclear weapons development facility, run by none other than Eric Marsh, and having experienced a breakthrough in the last few days. The space was abuzz with activity, and most of it was bad. On the cusp of perfecting a cleaner and higher-payload nuclear weapon, a foreign government had gotten wind of what was going on, and blackmailed Eric both to keep everything under wraps, and to fire a test strike into a lightly-populated area; if he failed to comply, his family would be taken elsewhere and probably never seen again. There wasn't a lot of time to put together a plan - the launch was scheduled for just an hour from when they found the lab, and was already automated - but with some doing, the girls broke in and promptly came under attack by several soldiers. Clever application of created weaponry, a fair amount of rope, and some skating on walls later, the girls secured the area, and only Eric remained. By this time only minutes remained until the launch, and they couldn't stop it - they could only redirect it. At the last second, Julia managed to punch in the coordinates for a space in the Atlantic, and they watched the missile launch from the underground pad with heavy hearts, but knowing they did what they could. Minutes later, they watched the explosion on television; nobody could figure out where it came from, but what mattered was that it was over now. Everything was over, and they were safe. The school later released limited information on the incident, and condemned the country that had tried to force the launch; the safety of Eric's family was assured, and Eric himself was placed on probation, but wasn't punished harshly, as his actions were not exactly voluntary.

That brought to a close what the school would later coin as the Ardent Winter incident, and Heather and Julia returned home the next day with light hearts and heavy bodies. They'd come very close to injury or worse; Heather had a broken arm from a fall after a bad jump, and Julia sported a number of bruises and one fresh wound from a narrowly-missed bullet to the shoulder. But they were alive, and their injuries would mend. Late in the break, the girls received letters from the school, thanking them for their service to the academy and the world; they were to be granted titles, as well. Julia's new title was the "Manifest Will," supposedly both for her artifact's powers, and her personal tendency to speak her mind when it came down to it. Heather had kept hers a secret, telling her she'd find out when they got to the academy again.

The morning they were due to return, Julia packed her bags up and got on the plane. A little tired, she decided to take a nap while she still could; things would likely be busy as always when they got back, and she'd need all the mental focus she could muster.

When she woke up, she was somewhere... else. (This is the point at which Julia is brought into Teleios.)

Personality:

Early in her life at Glacier Peaks, Julia is compared to a flower: pretty to look at, but easy to crush. While this is mostly true, it takes a lot to actually break her spirit. When she does lose faith, though, she crashes hard. Over the several years before she came to the academy, Julia learned to be self-sufficient. Aside from financial support, she can take care of pretty much anything on her own - meals, transportation, keeping herself occupied... On the outside, she seems like a normal girl, but within there's a crushing loneliness begging to be addressed. Heather is a godsend in this respect - more on her in a moment.

Julia hides behind her schoolwork as a defense mechanism, and beyond that, in books. As such, she's a little bit of a romantic, having a surprising amount of faith in the world, and in people, considering how she grew up. Beneath the surface, though, there's a deep-seated anger - or perhaps regret - stemming from her parents' effective abandonment, and culminating in her being shipped off to boarding school with no way home, and not welcome even if she could return. She put up a strong front, but inside she was worried about how she'd hold up... and then she met her roommate.

If you were to ask Julia to sum up her feelings for Heather in a single word, she'd happily respond, "a miracle." At quite possibly the lowest point in her life, Heather took her under her wing, and gave her somewhere to come home to at the end of the day. More than ever before, Julia strove to keep Heather in the loop, and do what she could to support her. Heather also gave Julia the courage to rise above what she left, and become someone she could be proud of, in spite of everything.

And rise above she did. The support she got from Heather gave her a new energy, and she flourished at Glacier Peaks, penning breakthrough after breakthrough, and destroying any obstacle in her way with a smile and unbreakable determination. As time passed, and she started to work on what would become her magnum opus - her Ring - her hunger for knowledge grew ever stronger, and she started to spend days on end in the library, searching for the truths of the universe, and having bright-eyed conversations with Heather every night she could get away with it (which was pretty much every night). When she finally finished the Ring, and was granted a title for her contributions to science, the feeling in her heart was something she could scarely describe. She felt like, if she died at that moment, she'd be okay with it. And if she'd had to go through everything again, she would do it in a heartbeat, for a chance to meet the precious friends she'd made again.

Though she is a little bitter about her parents, especially after they've abandoned her, she doesn't begrudge others that happily enjoy time with their families; Heather's family helps immensely in that regard, though it will take time for her to be truly back to normal. To that end, she's more than happy to spend time with large groups; it makes her feel more complete. She's also protective of her friends, perhaps to an extreme, and will do whatever it takes to keep them safe if something should happen. This, combined with what would become her signature ability (almost to the point of becoming spellcraft), meant she was respected and feared as a lady of war if crossed. And she didn't mind that - she kept a polite, serene exterior, but if there was something harsher within, that was okay. It would ward off trouble, or so she hoped. It didn't, but... well, that's another matter entirely.

Within Teleios itself, Julia will spend a fair amount of time confused - while she agrees she's done some things she probably shouldn't have done, she's not really sure they're sins in the sense that they need to be worked off. Everything she's done, she's done either to protect her most important person, or to protect the world. While she'll admit to the first being selfish, she does not believe either is truly wrong. That said, she won't mind the work too much, though she generally objects to attacking someone that didn't shoot her first; considering her Ring doesn't work (which will confuse and scare her to no end), that won't really be an issue.

Powers/Abilities:

Julia is mostly mundane, though she has one "power" she designs via magitechnology in her first year, constructs in her second, and hones in her third: the Ring of Boundless Horizons. True to its name, it's a simple, silver band she wears on her right hand; the academy classifies it, and other items like it, as "artifacts." Its power, however, is extraordinary. With the Ring, Julia can shape constructs from thin air, giving them solid form and bringing them into reality. This can encompass pretty much anything, from a patch job for a wall Heather accidentally put a hole in, to notebook paper for class, to a long, light lance, her preferred weapon. There are limitations; she's restricted to whatever her imagination can conjure, and she needs at least a basic understanding of what she's creating - she can't just conjure up a cure for cancer. The other problem is that, whenever she makes something, it takes a physical and mental toll on her - it's exhausting to design the blueprint for something, and bringing it into the world has an energy cost she must pay. She also, for whatever reason, has trouble with organics - she can make something organic, or with organic components, but it's much more "expensive," in terms of energy and time. It's part of the reason the shaft of her lance is made from lightweight metal, rather than more classical wood. Without her ring as a tool, she can't use any of this; the Ring itself contains various equations, materials, and general support for her abilities. Should she ever meet someone with another Ring, they can work together to manifest something larger and more complicated; alternately, they may be able to help her work around her limitations (anything she doesn't know how to make, or something organic in nature). Of course, she would have to make another ring just like her own, and give it to someone she trusts not to misuse it... so, this is amazingly unlikely to ever come up. (There's a little more information about how she made it in her background.) On her arrival to Teleios, it will be depowered.

Appearance: In general, Julia is an average seventeen-year-old girl. Her skin is fair, though a little pale from spending so much time inside at the school. Piercing blue eyes are framed by blonde hair down to just past her shoulders, which she'll admit to being a little vain about. She's thin, but not reasonably so, and she turns a few heads at the academy with her figure; she's not the most attractive girl around, but she's certainly blessed enough. Julia's normal idea of "casual" clothing is a plain top and a skirt to mid-thigh, usually in cool colors, and a set of flats, but the way she carries herself conveys just enough presence to get your attention, even dressed simply. She typically carries a messenger bag on her shoulder for her schoolbooks and few personal belongings. As of her arrival in Teleios, Julia has a single (healing) wound on her left arm, near the shoulder, from being grazed by a bullet during the Ardent Winter's resolution, along with several bruises that are clearing up well enough. The bullet wound will leave a scar; the bruises will heal in a few more days. (Julia is played by Hayden Panettiere as far as her icons are concerned.)

Samples:

Actionspam Sample:

Would a thread from the test drive meme be acceptable? Here's another with her as the top-level.

Prose Sample:

That first night, Julia was fairly certain she would get no rest. It wasn't that the bed wasn't comfortable enough - she'd put up with worse, previously - and it wasn't that it was too loud, or too quiet, or any of the million other things she could have used as an excuse. No, she missed home. She missed Heather, she missed the school she'd been about to return to, and she had no idea why she was here. That last one, perhaps, was the most vexing - she didn't want to go to some trumped-up utopia (and whether or not she believed it existed was another matter entirely!), she wanted to go home. She had more than enough where she was. Couldn't these people see that? If they were supposed to be the gatekeepers to almost-utopia, surely they could select the people most willing, or most in need. She was neither, no matter how much her life sucked before she went to Glacier Peaks, and she was going to make a point of finding whoever was in charge here and convincing them of that... though if it came to the other kind of "convincing," she wasn't likely to succeed - not without being able to fight. That was even more unnerving; since she'd finished her Ring, she hadn't removed it except to shower and whenever she was doing something with her hands where she thought she'd lose it. Now she was wearing it and it wasn't even working, and that made her quite nervous indeed.

Of course, the little voice in the back of her head that she might not make it back wasn't helping, either; shaking her head, she sighed, looking up at the dark ceiling, staring at the point she'd been focused on for the last half an hour. "It'll be okay... I'll figure out what's going on, and go home. Or if I have to, I'll work off this debt of theirs, and I'll go home then - that's all the utopia I want, especially if I can't bring Heather with me," she insisted. Nodding to herself, she closed her eyes, trying to sleep again. "I'm coming... wait for me, okay?"