POWER DESCRIPTIONS

Nenetl's primary power is pyrokinesis. She has little in the way of control, although it is very strong. It awakened suddenly only this year and what control she has is entirely instinctual.  She can manipulate existing flames, of course, but she can also cause things to burst into flame. Flammable objects are more likely to do so without a trained will behind it and anything large scale is likely to knock her on her ass. Ever since awakening with this ability Nene's metabolism has been much higher and the more she uses her powers the more of her own energy the consumes. 

Related to the pyrokinesis is her ability to transport herself through flames. The fire has to be big enough to engulf her entire body and, right now, she doesn't have much say in where she ends up. It's much like throwing oneself into a portal roulette. Wherever she turns up inevitably ends up scorched at best and destroyed by fire at worst. It's something she has actively avoided dealing with after her first pyroportation.

APPEARANCE

Nene is short, let's get that out of the way.  At fourteen she clears five foot even, only when she stands up really straight. She is awfully cute, though her short stature frustrates her sometimes. Her frame is an odd one, truth be told. Rightfully, she should still have some of her baby fat kicking around and in some areas that's quite evident. Her cheeks are full over broad cheekbones and her proportions suggest that she should be a bit stockier than she actually is. In spite of her full cheeks, her ruddy violet eyes are a bit sunken into their sockets and her ribs are clearly visible below her bronzy skin.

Even her complexion shows evidence of hardship.  Although a warm, coppery brown there's a dullness to her skin.  She has been, quite clearly, suffering from malnutrition and only fairly recently at that; it's only been in the last few months that her body has really begun consuming itself for fuel.  

Her hair is thick, dark, and heavy enough that, if allowed to grow much longer than shoulder length, it can give Nenetl furious headaches. Generally though, she likes it closer to chin length; makes it easy to manage.  She never did have much in the way of fancy clothes of her own so her clothing style is a bit bland.  Bland, that is, aside from the riot of color.  Guava pink, papaya orange, lime peel green, and the red of a desert sunset are some of her favorite colors.  While her wardrobe amounts to hand sewn skirts, linen smocks, the odd pair of cast of gym shorts, and cotton tee shirts, at least she never looks drab.

PERSONALITY

Clever and passionate, Nenetl has a protective streak a mile wide.  She's small and scrappy, but fierce. It makes her a bit pigheadedly stubborn when it comes to others as she will burn herself up trying to help them.  That tenacity serves her well in other areas though as it makes her rather effective at learning the basics she needed to in order to make it here at Aurora.

Inside she's rather lonely, unsure of who she even is without her family around her. She masks the fear and worry well, not wanting to be a burden, not wanting anyone to ask her questions she can't answer.

BIOGRAPHY

Nenetl's life started out unremarkably for a girl in rural Mexico. She was one of several children so there wasn't any surplus material goods but there was an unplumbable depth of love. It was a hardworking family; they had to be in order to make ends meet in their little village. So it was a difficult life, but not an unduly hard one.  Her family was loving, her neighbors were kind, and the teacher at the small village school could hardly stop singing her praises.

"What a clever girl," said her teacher.  "Ah, how pretty you'll be when you grow up," crooned her grandmother, pinching her cheek and tugging her grubby tee shirt straight.  Nene positively preened under all the praise, but managed not to let it go to her head.  Having six older siblings to keep her ego manageable certainly helped with that. 

And so it went. Nenetl's stubby child's limbs grew and she left childhood behind for the beginning of adolescence. But that's when things took a decidedly drastic turn. Unbeknownst to his family, Ricardo's absences from home weren't aways due to work. Yes, he did travel far to the nearest city to find work in the dryer spells so he could send money back to his family like many other men in the village. The surprise was that he wasn't sending all the money he made back home, and some of his long strings of work days weren't always at work.

It had begun as a little friendly gambling between workers; no one bet anything they couldn't afford to lose so there was little in the way of winnings but it was all in good fun. It was all good fun until it just wasn't fun anymore.  So Ricardo and two of his friends found some other guys to gamble with. They didn't realize until too late that these guys played for keeps.  There would be no "I'll get you next time" with this crowd; and when they ran out of money they had to put something else on the line.

Having little else, and still not believing it would come to it, Ricardo bet his daughter. He didn't specify and they didn't ask.  At least, not until it came time to collect. No amount of pleading, begging, or promising made them relent and the location of his home was literally tortured out of him.  See, these men were more than petty thugs.  They were part of a human trafficking ring and they were going to take all of Ricardo's children as collateral.

They struck at night.  Meztli, Nenetl's mother, was subdued in moments and was dead minutes later.  She was too old to be profitable and too persistent to let live.  Nene's oldest two brothers and youngest sister also died that night; the brothers fighting to protect their siblings and the baby sister when the traffickers yanked her from the oldest daughters' arms so hard it snapped her neck.

When morning came the Cabral residence was home only to corpses and ghosts; the surviving children drugged and hauled off toward Mexico City where they could be passed along to a different set of traffickers. But one of the men wanted to sample the merchandise.  He dragged Nene's eldest sister off to the side of the lean-to they were housing them al in for the night and tried to force himself on her.  Drugged and in a state of shock, Yaya was unable to fight back.  But before he could even get past her clothes a fire had caught  in the dry, sun-bleached wood of the shack and they roughly hauled their captives away. 

It came to a head when Taca tried to run away.  He was younger than Nene, only 9, and had been crying himself sick for all the days it taken them to get to the old warehouse on the outskirts of the city. If there was a city, he reasoned, there would be people who would save them.  They shot him dead less than a meter out the door.  Then the whole place seemed to explode.

Flames, white hot and roaring, wreathed the building, licking the inside walls and burning through to the night air outside. Within the flames the Cabral children were safe, the raging fire feeling like the tickle of warm silk as they all looked around in shock and drugged befuddlement at the miracle.  All except Nenetl.  Her mouth was open in a silent scream, her eyes glazed and unseeing.  Their captors, meanwhile, burned; skin and hair sizzling and blacking in moments as their final seconds of life were truly agonizing ones. 

Then the fire went out.  Dead.  As if it never had been, save for the fire-gutted ruin the children were in, it all could have been a dream.  When Nene awoke two days later, her siblings were nowhere to be found. Or, more accurately, she was nowhere to be found. When the fire had vanished, so had Nenetl. Her siblings, thinking she had not been spared by the same miracle as them, mourned for her once they were safe and the drugs from their kidnappers were out of their systems.

For her part, Nene woke up in a scorched swath of earth that had once been a field.  Near her was a peculiar woman who told her she had a place for her to be.  That place was Aurora Academy and that woman was a staff member.  With nothing to her name but the slightly scorched clothes on her back, Nene accepted the invitation in a daze of confused shock. The woman from the Academy helped the poor girl acquire something in the way of clothes, but she was mostly on her own once the school year started.  If only she wasn't so hungry all the time... If only she knew if her siblings were ok...

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