Name: Harper Yates, PhD
Nicknames: Brainy, Harperpedia
Age/DOB: 28/May 4th, 1989
Powers Developed Date: May 4th, 1994 (ish)
Powers Discovered Date: Hasn’t (yet)
Joined Regiment Date: May 5th, 2007
PB: Felicia Day
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Heterosexual
Occupation: R&D Tech
Room: TBD
Height: 5’4 1/2″
Hair Color: Red
Eye Color: Green
Family:
Mother – Angelica Yates
Father – Kyle Yates
Siblings – 3 older, 2 younger
Appearance
Harper enjoys wearing what’s comfortable to work in. While she is typically hands on this tends to be t-shirts and jeans. However, when needing to be work professional she tends to dress what can only be classified as bohemian-nerd. She tends to keep her hair long, to medium and will frequently pull it up and out of the way while she works in a chaotic little bun supported by some pencils. She wears contacts but will sometimes wear her glasses if she’s in a hurry. She doesn’t wear a lot of jewelry typically and barely wears make up other than maybe a light powder to make her skin not appear as pale as it is (seeing as she’s inside a lot and doesn’t see a lot of sun). Granted she has the complexion where she never really tans, just burns and goes back to pale.
Personality
So, Harper is unaware she is a super. Since she was a kid she had a gifted intelligence, when her powers did kick in it seemed like a natural progression of her intelligence, however it did extenuate some issues she had. For example she tends to miss social queues of people, if they’re upset or being sarcastic, or romantic. While she has tired to study facial queues to help, it only seems to exacerbate the situation. Her propensity to get lost in a memory or over focus on things caused some issues and people tend to think she’s ‘flighty’ or not paying attention to her. She can also get wrapped up in her work a lot, focusing really hard for long lengths of time and hates to give up if unsuccessful at first. Though she does hate to fail, she’s not afraid of it and will use that dissatisfaction to try again. This can sometimes make her very single minded on a project and has to forcefully pull herself away to work on something with a higher priority.
That being said, Harper does love to make friends and share things she figured out, knowledge she knows, something she made, etc. with people- regardless if they are really interested. She’s also a bit of a nerd and geek, preferring board and card games to video games. Video games she can figure out too easily, but with most board and card games they’re different every time. While she does love to socialize, she can sometimes come off as a bit of an oddball to some people. What with missing those social queues and ‘zoning out’, also the random facts she shares some people are just put off by her. It doesn’t help that she didn’t have a normal childhood. College at 10 sort of hindered her ability to grow up around people her own age. Granted her siblings were there and some were close to her age, she still spent the majority of her childhood as an adult. With that it is accurate to assume she’s not very experienced dating anyone. While in the Regiment she did try a couple times, they weren’t really successful and she discovered they were better friends than lovers. Not that she’s discounting meeting ‘the one’, the odd are skewed because her work takes up a lot of her time and working for a secret government organization means you have a small social circle, but she still has hope.
*Note* Harper is unaware that she has powers. She’s not even sure exactly when her powers manifested if she was aware. She was always smart, and as she grew up she was even smarter.
Mental Library – A variation of Panmnesia, Harper has the ability to recall every event, feeling, experience she’s ever had. She only has to look at the page of a book to ‘download’ it into her mind to review it later. Movies, TV and even memories replay in her brain like movies (memories from her POV of course) exactly as she experienced it the first time. This can allow her to replay a memory and pick up on details missed the first time. Everything is kept organized and stored in her mind, her ‘library’. It operates very similar to a computer where files are stored and categorized mentally and can be accessed and replayed. Her mind has developed something of a ‘desktop’ so she can work on multiple things at once. People she meets and places she goes all contain files, projects she’s worked on. Her ability to process information is truly impressive. Of course this does come with some limitations. The major if which is she can’t turn it off. One might think this is great, but that means that she not only recalls the good, but the bad. Every person she’s lost, fights she’s had, illness or sadness. All of it as crisp and clear as the moment it happened. Another major flaw in this is that she can’t always control when things are recalled. Sure, if she’s ‘looking’ for something she can find it (though older information can take longer to pull open than newer- minutes vs. seconds), but sometimes something will trigger another memory. A sound, smell, whatever it is, many times that memory will replay and she has no control over it. This can be more than a little distracting.
Seeing as no one (including her) knows she’s a super she does not have a limiter.
She has a multiple degrees from Oxford; Mathematics & Statistics, Computer Science, General Engineering, Electrical & Electronic Engineering and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (Many taken congruently). She also has a breadth of knowledge from the books she’s read and things she’s seen and experienced she can call upon.
History
Born in Liverpool, England, the third child out of what would be a pack of six, Harper was always a bit odd. All her firsts came before her siblings, first crawl, step, word, use of the potty. The doctors tested her and determined she was advanced for her age. She was speaking full sentences before she was a year old and when she was two when she was tested and found to have an IQ of 160 and joined MENSA. Her parents really didn’t know what to do with a genius kid, but Harper was pretty self reliant. They tried to put her into regular school, but it was clear it was a bad fit from the start so they ended up sort of home schooling her, though she pretty much taught herself. She got on well with her siblings, and when she was around them she seemed like a normal child. When she was six she took GCE and when she was seven took her A-Level and passed. She was accepted into Oxford, but her parents wanted to wait a few years until she was a bit older before they let her go.
At 10 years old she started her undergraduate at Oxford. Her parents didn’t have a a lot of money and Oxford is an expensive place, but between scholarships and some community contributions (she was sort of mini-famous in the local paper), she was able to attend. She was a great student too, so the school liked the publicity of a prodigy so by her second year she was there almost entirely on scholarships. When she turned 11 certain things started to click into place. She started to hit puberty and her memory got sharper. Unbeknownst to her, her powers had developed. But for her she just felt like she was finally hitting her stride. It was at this point she started to think more analytically, and of course getting stuck remembering something caused her to zone out. Everything seemed like just a natural progression for her growing intellect.
It didn’t stop her, she got her first doctorate by the time she was thirteen and started to work on her second and third. By the time she was 18 she had five doctorates under her belt and had been consulting for BAE Systems, an aerospace company, on the side she’d helped them develop a new hydraulic system for their aircraft. Her name and skills were noticed by someone in the Americas and she was presented with the opportunity to work on new projects of her own choosing and pretty much free reign to invent things. There was clearly more to the offer, but it sounded interesting enough and while the pay wasn’t as good as other places, there was just something about it that made her say yes.
Her first station was South Dakota and she learned that she’d be helping with basically spy stuff and superhuman stuff… it was pretty awesome for her little geek heart. She was in SD for three years before being transferred to the Everglades. She was there for another four years before being transferred to Texas where she was for almost four years before now being transferred to Limbo in Washington. Through her time in the Regiment she’s enjoyed the freedom to create… stuff. Problem solving has been her favorite, a handler gives her a problem and she figures out how to solve it. Yes, this sometimes means creating the limiter devices that some of the Agents wear and she does feel a little bad about it. But, it’s her job.