Difference between revisions of "Stepford Cuckoos"

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{{Application Received}}
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''This page is about the [[:Category: Phase 2|Phase 2]] incarnation of the character. For other uses, see [[Stepford Cuckoos (disambiguation)]].''
{{NPCinfo
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| name    = Phoebe, Sofie (deceased), Esme and Celeste Stepford
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{{Phase2}}
| image  = Stepfords.png
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{{CharacterBox
| pb = [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0993242/ Clemence Poesy]
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| name    = Weapon XIV
| alias = Stepford Cuckoos
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| image  = Cuckoos Wiki.png
| teams = [[West Coast Annex]]
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| pb = [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1455681/ AnnaSophia Robb]
| socker Socker required
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| codename = The Stepford Cuckoos; One-In-Five
| plot = [[X-Men Mission: Scary Little Blonde Girls]]
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| teams =
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| birthdate = April 27, 2004
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| journal [https://xp-cuckoos.dreamwidth.org/profile xp_cuckoos]
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| player = [[Chris]]
 
}}
 
}}
  
  
The Stepford Cuckoos - Sophie, Esme, Celeste and Phoebe - were the telepathic subjects of a long-running study of their unique group mind. When the study was shut down by the government, they were moved to what was considered the next best place for them - [[Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters - Phase 1|Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters]].
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''The best way to keep a secret: tell nobody. Second best: suppress the memory of everyone else who knows. There is no third best.''
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''Three people can keep a secret if two are dead, but five people can keep a secret if they're all the same person.''
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''"It's an important distinction," she said, "so pay attention. I may sometimes be a ''good'' person, but I'm never a ''nice'' person."''
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Having finally been rescued, Fourteen is making herself at home in the mansion - sort of. She's not really making herself any friends yet though.
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__TOC__
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== '''Details''' ==
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'''Character Journal:''' [https://xp-cuckoos.dreamwidth.org/profile Fourteen]
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'''Real Name''': Fourteen; Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme Cuckoo
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'''Codename''': One-In-Five; Stepford Cuckoos
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'''Aliases''': Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme Frost; Sophie and Phoebe Stepford; Irma and Esme Cuckoo
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'''First Appearance''': [https://xp-logs.dreamwidth.org/3800461.html December 18, 2015]
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'''Date of Birth''': April 27th, 2004. ''Note: Cloned at a physical age of 10''
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'''Place of Birth''': Weapons Plus Testing Facility, 50 miles outside of Roanoke, Alberta, Canada
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'''Citizenship''': Canadian
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'''Relatives''': Jessica Drew (Mother, Deceased). Marcus Drew (Father, Deceased). Emma Frost (Biological Mother)
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'''Education''': College-level education in multiple subjects. Degrees in Music Theory and Psychology (known as of today).
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'''Relationship Status''': It's Complicated
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'''Occupation''': Currently None
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'''Team Affiliation''': (if applicable)
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== '''Biography''' ==
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=== '''Childhood''' ===
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The Stepford Cuckoos are more officially known as Weapon XIV. They are a Weapon Plus project; five identical clones of Emma Frost created in a laboratory hidden in the wilderness of Alberta, Canada.  They don’t have a birthday so much as a general time of creation; they came into the world in test tubes and incubators in the early part of 2004, already physically 10 years old.
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They were an experiment, really. Nothing more than that.
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Weapon Plus was just curious as to what would happen, if you tried to clone such a powerful telepath. Would they have an army of Emmas to do their bidding? They started simple. Six bodies. Six Emmas. Designation: Weapon XIV.
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Weapon Fourteen was imperfect from the start. There was never Emma. The bodies, while close, were hardly identical to the original. ‘Corrupted DNA’, someone had said. They were ‘almost’ Emma. Emma-Lite, really.
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Her daughters, if you preferred.
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Still, Weapon Plus could deal with that. An army of Emma Frost’s daughters would be just as effective as the real thing. Possibly more so.  They moved forward, carefully. They woke them up.
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And quickly realized that there was no ‘them’.  Just a ‘her’. 
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They expected six different little girls to sculpt and mould. But quickly they found that between the five they woke up, there was only one consciousness. You could tell one of them something, and they’d all know it because they all were the same person. The Little Girl with five bodies. The One-In-Five.
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They called her Fourteen.
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Weapons Plus quickly scrapped their initial plan. What good was an army if that army was all one person? It wasn’t strategically viable.  They were going to scrap the entire project entirely, but they already came so far and honestly they were out of viable DNA from Emma, and someone somewhere decided they needed to get something from the project. So of the six bodies, the five that were awake and moving were taught the basics of being alive.
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The first two years were interesting, as the researchers of Weapons Plus came to find out. By the time she turned twelve, Fourteen had been taught everything they really should have learned between birth and the age of ten that didn’t come with the clone conditioning. Then she starts reading people’s thoughts as though they’re saying them aloud, and she was moved, out of the backwater woods of Alberta and to another compound outside of Edmonton before she was able to pull exactly what type of facility she was in from the mind of some passing scientist.
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Her inability to focus her five bodies in five directions is cute at first. Then it’s creepy, watching five identical girls act like… well… clones. Speaking in unison, dressing the same, moving in perfect sync. They try to take three of them away; let Fourteen come to terms with just two of herself before adding more. Ease her into it. Fourteen’s epic fit lasts a week before they decide maybe they should just try teaching her to control all five at once.
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So Weapons Plus decks out this new facility like a family and a school, while behind the scenes researchers monitor and test and observe. This is where Fourteen grows up for the next four years.
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She knows right away she’s not normal. It’s kind of a joint thing. Her parents (adopted, obviously. They look nothing like her.) and the scientists and all the home-schooling. It clearly has to do with why she has five bodies. She doesn’t mind, though. They may not have given birth to her, but they’re the only family she’s ever known and they treat her well and she loves them, so it all works out.
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She’s informed, for the most part, about what the researchers determine about her, and in turn she lets them know what she discovers for herself. After all, they’re family. So the researchers find out that a each body has to stay close to that specific body over there, less it falls into a coma (and isn’t that the worst feeling. Fourteen says it feels like someone’s ripped a part of her away when it happens. It makes her so sad it almost physically hurts).  She realizes that things she learned in one body carries over to another, and that she forgets things when they remove a body from her for a while.
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(Once, in the middle of an exam, the medical team examining one of her bodies accidentally knocked it out too early and Fourteen went from writing an artful essay about the American Revolution to staring at the words as though they were written in cyrillic. She failed that exam, but the researchers were happy with the new development.)
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It’s also during this period that Weapon Plus decides that there’s more data to be determined, about the self and the body. With the exception of the hub (what they call Fourteen’s ‘main body’, the one that all the others have to stay close to), each body is put on a strict regimen of drugs. Between the four they decide on stimulants, depressants, SSRIs, and euphorics. Each body gets a different type. And her power changes.
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Fourteen had always been able to read minds. It was never terribly strong; just what someone was actively thinking at any given moment. Then the drugs start. It’s the depressant first, and Fourteen finds that specific body starts feeling tired and sluggish all the time. That seems to be the end of it, right up until one day she really wants to spend some time outside after her mother had already told her ‘no’, and she somehow makes her mom forget that she’d already denied Fourteen.
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(She spends the whole damn day outside, letting the sunlight hit her five faces and watching the clouds go by, marveling at how each one seems different to a different pair of eyes.)
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Each time they start a new regimen, she gains a new power and her ability to read minds diminishes just a little bit. Next comes a frightening ability to read memories. The day after she outs a teacher as a horrible monster working for a secret facility (and really, who called themselves Weapon Plus anyway?), most of the people she interacts with daily changes. She doesn’t see most of her old teachers or her parents’ friends again.
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Each body reacted differently to drugs. One was always kind of tired. Another had too much energy to contain, like it’d drunk three big cups of coffee. A third was… chipper. There wasn’t any other way to explain it. It could and often was still mean or scathing, but it had this annoying habit of being so damn chipper and Fourteen couldn’t suppress it for the life of her. The last was just legitimately happy all the time. It was weird, and she wasn’t ever really certain how to deal with it. (She didn’t use that body when she was pissed off. It was hard to hold on to anger with it).
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They don’t dare risk adding anything to the hub, though. Words like ‘cascading cognizance failure’, ‘unstable side-effects’ and ‘chaining neurochemical damage’ are thrown around when they think she can’t hear, and although she’s not quite certain what they mean they certainly don’t sound good at all.
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She has five times the amount of time other (not normal, she insists forcefully. She is normal. Everyone else is so strange, having only one of themselves) people do, and she has to keep herself busy somehow. She quickly finds that so many things are boring when she does them all simultaneously. Each body playing the piano was just the worst. So she split her attention and quintupled up on hobbies. One body would play piano, another would be out jogging, and a third would watch the fourth and fifth play chess (Unsurprisingly, she always won). Multitasking came so naturally to her, like breathing. As long as the activities were significantly different enough, Fourteen had no problem with it (even if the jogger would be humming along with the piano that was half a mile away at the time, or one of the chess players would be tracing her fingers over her thigh as though she was sketching).
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=== '''High School and College''' ===
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When she’s sixteen and well-learned, she’s moved again. This time, her parents move her to a house. An actual house. And they get sent to school. Actual school. With actual other people their age. It’s kind of almost intimidating but not really, because Fourteen immediately realizes that she’s so much better than any of the other kids there, what with her ability to learn five things at once and retain it better and spot the creeps and the jerks and the plotters with a quick glance at their thoughts.
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(Fourteen quickly realizes she has zero tolerance for stupid people. She also has no tolerance for terribly stupid people and high school politics mixing in one place.) 
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Of course, she doesn’t go as Fourteen. She doesn’t even go as five. No. Her parents sit her down all nice and calm-like and they talk and Fourteen listens and agrees that five sisters in one place is a little much. Being called Fourteen is also a little strange. So while she’s Fourteen at home, in public she has new names.
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They decide to call her bodies Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme. Then they split them up, into two sets of ‘twins’ and the fifth. Her two target high schools, Paul Kane High School and St. Albert Catholic High School, are close but not so close that she can send bodies to each one without the hub being somewhere between them, so it’s decided that Sophie and Phoebe Stepford will attend Paul Kane while Irma and Esme Cuckoo will go to St. Albert Catholic School. Celeste, as the hub, will remain home.
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Fourteen isn’t terribly religious, having grown up in secret military compounds disguised as perfectly normal houses. St Alberts does nothing more than give her a fairly impressive disdain for all the pomp and circumstance of organized religion, with its kneeling and hypocrisy.  She’s never done the subservient thing well anyways. 
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Still, five times the bodies meant five times the classes, and she already knew that taking the same thing five times was hopelessly boring. So Phoebe, with her stimulants and boundless energy, joined half the sports teams Paul Kane had while Sophie focused on high-level academic courses. Meanwhile at St Albert, Esme spent her free periods in the choir room playing piano and channeling those tired, sleepy days into music and painting while Irma, at the behest of her parents, socialized. Well, she called it socializing. Really, it was manipulation. Applied Sociology and Psychology, her old teachers had called it. She was the ‘happy’ sister (blame the Euphorics, really) that people got along with and it left her in the center of a chain of relationships and gossip webs that ran through every clique–sorry, ‘social circle’ in the school.
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(Private schools didn’t do cliques. Everyone was an equal under God, after all. Fourteen knew exactly how false that was, and was surprisingly good at using that knowledge to avoid petty bullshittery).
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And Celeste? Well, she stayed home and read, or daydreamed, or played chess with her father (he was surprisingly good) or, if she was really hurting for things to do, video games. Plus she’d look up exam answers or personal details in her little black books she used to record things she didn’t want to forget. Her parents made her learn self defense. Protection, they said. You can’t let your Celeste body get hurt like the others can.
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It wasn’t like she was bored, though. Even with Celeste at home, Fourteen was still attending school 4 times a day.
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High school was as good to her as it probably could have been. It certainly went a long way in teaching her how to interact with others firsthand. She’d known everything before of course, in theory. Still, there was that intangible something that came from actually having friends, rather than just learning about them and watching other people have them. It was nice, when they weren’t caught up in high school drama bullshit.
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(Again, she had no patience for it. And seriously, no, stop asking if her sister would like to double-date this really good guy you know. I’–She’s not interested.)
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Pretending she’s five people is weird, though. She doesn’t like it. She messed it up a lot, those first few months, forgetting which sister was supposed to know what or who was supposed to respond to certain questions. It’s really only the fact that she wears the same thing on all five bodies that she’s able to pass one body off as another in a pinch.
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(“Phoebe, I never told you that… Just Sophie. Did she tell you?!” “I am Sophie!” She’s totally Phoebe. Oops. She needs to be more careful.)
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And so the one girl who has five lives, five experiences, also has five (well, four, but who’s counting?) high school degrees. And five acceptance letters to the University of Calgary as well.
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It’s almost a waste of money, she worries, sending herself to college five times. But she hates to be separate from herself, and the last two years have been hard and long and she just wants to spend the next four years and change as close to herself as she can be.
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High school relationships fall to the side, like they tend to do, so none of her old friends ever learn that the ‘twins’ are actually quintuplets, and there aren’t any awkward questions or people demanding to know why they weren’t told, as though they were somehow entitled to the information.
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Phoebe’s in on a softball scholarship. It’s hard to beat a girl who can literally skip any non-essential activity to practice her sports and still maintain a perfectly balanced social and academic life. She doesn’t need to study; Celeste can do that for her. It wasn’t ever for the love of sports, but rather just something to keep her nervous energy in check. She’s not certain how much she likes sports, anyway. She must, really. She has five brains, so five chances to have an appeal for it. But she has fun, and Phoebe is always busy practicing, so that’s one fewer body to deal with when she’s fighting boredom.
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The others fall back to similar roles they created for themselves in high school. It’s routine, really. Esme does something music related; it’s not really important because she doesn’t exactly need to be able to support herself off of it. Irma tackles a psychology degree, as well as going back to her old habits of putting herself at the center of absolutely everything.
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Fourteen is pretty pleased, all things considered. She times it so that none of her degrees are finished before the others, so she doesn’t have to leave herself. But being able to chain courses together, plus some pretty blatant cheating that absolutely nobody could prove, and she’s done in three years, just after she turns twenty-one. Or fifty-five, if you want to be weird like that.
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And then, one day, right after graduation, she comes home from college (all five of her). The house has been torn apart. There’s blood everywhere. Then, there’s a prick in her neck and she’s falling fast (again, all five of her).
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The next time she wakes up, she’s in a facility. She manages to pull two words from the minds of her captors, although her telepathic powers are weak and leaves her feeling terrible and achey and like something she didn’t even realize she had has been completely ripped away from her.
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Weapon Plus. A name she hasn’t heard or thought of since that teacher, the day she realized she could read memories.
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She was rescued some undetermined amount of time later (it was hard to tell when she was constantly being put under for long periods of time), when she accidentally sent a psychic distress signal to [[Emma Frost]] - her real mother. More or less. During the rescue, Emma managed to insert herself into Fourteen's hive mind, instantly making all of the wary of her, and all five were brought back to the mansion for protection.
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=== '''At the mansion''' ===
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Living with a bunch of other people and trying to keep a secret was a lot harder than living alone, occasionally seeing people, and trying to keep a secret. Fourteen didn't make much of an effort to try and make friends, who would only complicate things, and the mansion residents were mostly equally unimpressed with her (them - she introduced them as quintuplets, as she always had) when she introduced "them" on the journals.
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Keeping a low profile at the mansion, of course, proved to be difficult. In February 2016, Celeste was dragged into a telepathic mess involving the mansion empaths, and ended up in the Candy Land hell mindscape of [[Meggan Szardos]]. She worked with the other mansion psis to escape, but it was certainly an odd experience. Thankfully, she managed to lay low after that, even having a few not horrible encounters with the people she was living with (a few. Some of them were still pretty bad).
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2017 was similarly, blessedly quiet. Aside from having to fight giant spiders with Marie-Ange. That was pretty fun.
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== '''Physical Characteristics''' ==
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The Stepford Cuckoos are five identical sisters. Each sister is identically similar, as all of them are daughter-clones of Emma Frost. She carries herself like a cross between the all-american blue-eyed blonde-haired girl next door and the bitchy head cheerleader from your old high school. The sisters dress identically and, unless they make a conscious effort to break step, move in sync as well.  With the exception of being five very similar girls, the Stepford sisters look extremely pretty, but are otherwise normal.
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'''Height''': 5'6"
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'''Weight''': 105lb average
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'''Eyes''': Blue
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'''Hair''': Blonde
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'''Other Features''':  They're five identical quintuplets. Really, what more do you want from them?
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== '''Members''' ==
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=== '''Fourteen''' ===
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Information about Fourteen herself.
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Fourteen is the consciousness in control of the bodies that make up the Stepford Cuckoos. She is the One of the One-In-Five. She is not any single body, but rather the combined total of the five minds and five bodies together, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. She knows everything her individual bodies know, and when she loses a member of the hive for any reason, she also loses all of that body's knowledge and skills.
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=== '''Sophie''' ===
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Info about Sophie.
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=== '''Phoebe''' ===
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Info about Phoebe.
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=== '''Irma''' ===
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Info about Irma.
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=== '''Celeste''' ===
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Info abut Celeste.
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=== '''Esme''' ===
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Info about Esme.
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== '''Powers''' ==
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'''One-In-Five''': The five Stepford Sisters are in fact a single person controlling five identical clone bodies.  Having been created in a Weapon Plus facility in Canada, the Stepford Sisters have never known any other way of living. Each body can operate autonomously of the others, but must remain within range of the hive. A body moving out of range of the hive becomes non-operational. Additionally, as her thoughts are fragmented across five brains, it is exceptionally difficult to read her surface thoughts. Memory scans are also limited to the memories of the specific body being scanned.
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While non-operational, a Stepford body is essentially comatose.  They remain alive, but have no brain activity beyond those necessary for sustaining life.  Moving a body back into range of the hive, or the hive back into range of the body, will reverse this effect. While there is no risk of brain damage while in this state, comatose bodies still require proper nutrition if out of action for an extended amount of time. While disconnected from the hive, a body does not have a psychic presence and cannot be read by a telepath.
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As there is only one consciousness, the Stepford sisters have a synchronized sleep cycle. Any Stepford can be knocked unconscious physically without affecting the hive as a whole, with the exception of Celeste. See the Hive Queen power for details as to why this is.
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Each body is a sum of individual experiences and abilities, but while a member of the hive they actively contribute those abilities to the whole. Each member of the hive can use skills and abilities learned by any individual member to a lesser degree of skill of the contributing member.  For example, if the Sophie body was the one to learn to speak Spanish, while Sophie is a member of the hive mind all other members can also speak spanish at slightly reduced fluency. If Sophie was to leave the hive or become incapacitated, none of the members of the hive could speak Spanish until she returned. This system could have redundancies if multiple bodies learn the same skill, but doesn’t beyond some general school knowledge.  As of this moment no one specialized skill is known by more than a single body.
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Additionally, her unique situation makes her almost impervious to having her thoughts read, as any individual thought she has is scattered across her five brains. Telepaths attempting to read her would receive only fragmented sections of individual thoughts. Fourteen can similarly 'shatter' secrets and important knowledge and spread it across her five brains for extra security. While this protection does nearly ensure telepaths are unable to discern her secrets, the instability and lack of redundancy in the system means that missing bodies result in corrupted and incomplete knowledge and memories.
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'''Living Diamond Form''': Each member of the Stepford Cuckoos has a living diamond form that they can shift into at will. While in this form, a Stepford sister becomes living diamond, a refractive, clear substance with similar toughness properties to that of real diamonds. Diamond form does not encumber the flexibility of a stepford sister. 
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While living diamond, a Stepford sister is unable to use any telepathic abilities. Additionally, their personal telepathic power is cut off from the rest of the hive-mind. However, they are not cut off from the hive-mind themselves, and are still fully capable of moving and acting.  Living Diamond has complete immunity to telepathy, increased toughness and endurance, and a moderate increase to strength, but completely cuts the girls off from their own telepathic abilities (with the exception of remaining connected to the hivemind).
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Living Diamond Form does not require constant focus and attention to keep active and can remain active indefinitely, requiring conscious effort to revert. However, the Stepford Sisters do not like using this ability often, as it not only limits their telepathic abilities but also extended time in diamond form strongly inhibits the body’s ability to express emotions.
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'''Telepathy''': The Stepford Sisters are telepathic. Each member has the ability to read surface thoughts. The power of the Stepford sister’s telepathy is inversely proportional to the number of active bodies she has active at the time. The more bodies connected to the hive-mind, the more power she has to dedicate to keeping the hive together, and therefore the weaker any given telepathic ability is.
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The Stepford sisters can forcibly deactivate bodies from the hive (with the exception of Celeste, for obvious reasons) in order to increase the power of their telepathic abilities. In doing so, deactivated bodies act exactly like they do if they’ve been moved out of range of the hive.  However, the Stepford sisters view this as a rough equivalent to chopping off your arm for a quick power-up, and finds the entire idea inherently wrong. Unless a situation is incredibly dire, this option is never even considered.
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Due to a life-time of drug treatments and tests, each of the Stepford sisters contributes a different telepathic ability to the hive.  The specifics of these abilities are detailed below:
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'''Hive Queen (Celeste)''' -  Celeste is the closest the Stepford sisters come to a ‘real body’ and has the mental power of the Hive Queen, the specific ability that glues the five minds of her bodies into a single entity called 'Fourteen'. While this doesn’t give her any special dominion over the other members of the hive, Celeste’s body is the focal point of the group. Distance from the hive is determined by an individual body’s distance from Celeste. Likewise, Celeste is the only member of the hive that will affect other members if she falls unconscious or is knocked out. Celeste losing consciousness completely brings down the hive-mind, and all member of the cuckoos will also go unconscious until Celeste has returned to anchor them.
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Any individual body can only remain connected to the hive as long as it remains within 4 miles of Celeste’s body. However, doing so leaves a body feeling anxious and physically itchy at long distances. The sisters prefer to remain within a few feet of each other at all times. This range, like many other things, depends on the total psychic strength of the sisters, meaning that with fewer bodies or increased psychic power, this range increases.
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Should Celeste be incapacitated for an extended period of time not less than one week, her Hive Queen ability will transfer to another member of the Cuckoos, replacing that member’s specific power until Celeste returns.  While another member has the Hive Queen ability, their own ability is lost and inaccessible by any member of the hive. Additionally, the hive itself is significantly less effective, lacking the multitasking and strategizing skills Celeste contributed.
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Celeste is the only member of the hive whose specific power persists through Living Diamond Form.
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'''Memory Amnesia''' (Esme) - Esme’s regiment of depressants meant that her powers mutated into the ability to suppress and recall memories in others. On weak minds or particularly old memories, Esme can suppress a memory so completely that its owner doesn’t even have any awareness that the particular memory existed.  She can also call forth memories that someone has forgotten, both by being suppressed by a telepath (such as herself or others) or that has been forgotten naturally over time. 
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It is easiest to suppress and recall memories in willing and weak-minded individuals, but small gaps of time and insignificant memories can be surprised on most people without training in the mental arts. When the hive is just Celeste and Esme, they are able to overpower most minds, including trained and well-defended ones, or suppress large swaths of significant memories and skills.
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'''Deep Dive Telepathy''' (Phoebe) - While all members of the Stepford sisters can read surface thoughts, Phoebe brings the ability to read deeper. In addition to surface thoughts, Phoebe contributes the ability to read the memories of others. Additionally, Phoebe also adds the ability to project their thoughts to others, allowing for things like long-distance communication. She does not have the ability to write false memories into existence as of this time.
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Phoebe's mastery of mind reading allows the sisters to be extremely subtle when needed, but also allows them to attempt to overpower barriers and rend weaker minds wide open through sheer force and fury.
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Phoebe’s skill in physical fighting is slightly above average for a normal human who learned for enjoyment rather than any specific combat scenario. However, because her fighting ability is most effective in Living Diamond form, which the sisters hate using, telepathic abilities are far preferred to any physical skill.
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'''Telepathic Tracking''' (Sophie) - Sophie’s regiment of SSRI medication gave her great skill at telepathically tracking the unique psionic signatures emitted by humans.  She is also able to track people by their thought patterns and psychic emanations. This ability is highly subjective to proximity, and is only accurate over very short ranges.  After a distance as short as 200 yards, her ability to accurately locate any given mind drops off dramatically, and by 500 yards she is unable to even sense anyone, much less effectively determine location.
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Thanks to being able to contribute this power to the group, in a hive of three or more Sophie and her sister bodies are able to effectively triangulate the location of specific people. This requires each body to be within the effective range of their telepathic tracking ability. The pair of just Celeste and Sophie can track a single target over long distances to within a few inches.
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'''Astral Projection''' (Irma) - When Irma is part of the hive, she brings along the ability for Fourteen to project herself astrally. This power is different from the others, as it isn’t a body-specific power that is shared between each member. Rather, Fourteen herself is able to use the ability to project herself as a single unit into other people's’ minds and mindscapes.
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As there is only one consciousness, Fourteen has only a single astral avatar (instead of five). That astral avatar is in the form of a relatively annoyed eleven year old girl. This is something high on the list of things she will not be pleased about if you decide to needle her about.
  
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Beyond this, there is no special things of note about her astral projection ability.
  
 +
== '''Equipment''' ==
  
===Details===
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As of right now, nothing.
  
 +
== '''Trivia''' ==
  
'''Names:''' Sophie (deceased), Esme, Celeste, and Phoebe Stepford
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Fourteen ''hates'' Glee with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. Absolutely cannot stand it. Finds it incredibly shallow and vapid. Unless she's watching through Irma's eyes, in which case Irma absolutely has to stop and watch the whole damn thing. Immediately after, Fourteen has to have one of her other bodies suppress the memory of the whole event.
  
'''Aliases:''' None
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Fourteen is technically only eleven years old, but has the body and mind of a twenty-one year old. She has also experienced a total of fifty five years of live when you take her five bodies into account, leaving her age as 'It's Complicated'.
  
'''Occupation:''' Students
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Likewise, when Fourteen was only fourteen years old she set her Facebook relationship status to 'It's Complicated' and hasn't touched it since. She doesn't plan on removing it until she comes up with a way for her to actually ''be'' in a relationship without it being polygamy.
  
'''First appearance:''' [[X-Men Mission: Scary Little Blonde Girls]]
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For someone who considers herself a keeper of secrets, Fourteen is sometimes ''really bad'' about keeping secrets. She has a tendency to trade and sell secrets she has no personal stake in to the highest bidder.
  
'''Family:''' None known. 'Stepford' is the last name given to them by the scientists at the facility where they were being studied.
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Fourteen swears that Irma's Psychology degree is for more than manipulating people. It is, in her words, 'just a nice perk'.
  
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Fourteen mentally includes 'Double Speak' and 'Horror Movie Reenactments' on her list of hobbies. These are left off the list whenever she writes it down anywhere.
  
{| border="0" cellpadding="2"
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Fourteen brings the concept of 'talking to yourself' to a whole new level. She's gotten into a routine of talking out her problems with herself to solve some of her more difficult dilemmas. This is only as weird as you want to make it.
|width="125pt"|
 
|width="125pt"|
 
|width="125pt"|
 
|width="125pt"|
 
|-
 
|[[Image: Nm_esme.jpg]]
 
|'''Esme'''
 
|[[Image: nm_peobe.jpg]]
 
|'''Pheobe'''
 
|-
 
|[[Image: x-character.jpg]]
 
|'''Sophie - deceased'''
 
|[[Image: nm_celeste.jpg]]
 
|'''Celeste'''
 
|}
 
  
===Biography===  
+
=='''External Links'''==
  
When the McKenna administration shut down all programs and facilities involving mutant experimentation, it was discovered that a group of four sisters, all telepaths, were the sole research subjects at a small laboratory. The government took the girls into custody and [[Charles Xavier]] was contacted and asked if he would take them on at the school as students, as they were badly in need of training and had no family that could be found. The pickup was more difficult than expected, as the girls were traumatized from being moved unexpectedly from the lab to a government safehouse and lashed out with their powers, but the [[X-Men]] successfully brought them back to the mansion. The girls adapted somewhat to life at the mansion, but preferred their own company and made few friends among the other students. They are not well-liked, as they tend to use their telepathy instinctively and have a penchant for nasty practical jokes.
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[http://xp-communication.dreamwidth.org/tag/c:+fourteen xp_communication post]
  
In [[February 2008]], the events on the [[The Shadow King (plot)|astral plane]] and the stresses it inflicted on the mansion's telepaths drove them to an unwise decision. They created a [[Twisted Sister|telepathic avatar]], hoping to clear their minds of all the fear and anxiety the situation had caused. Unfortunately, the avatar, who appeared as a fifth Stepford sister calling herself 'Mindee', took on a life of her own and started to make the girls' lives miserable. It took the intervention of [[Nathan Dayspring]], [[Jane Doe]], and [[Tabitha Smith - Phase 1 | Tabitha Smith]] to figure out what was happening and call in Charles for his expertise. A [[Pas de Trois| further incident]] revealed they were not yet ready to integrate into normal society. Consequently, although the girls have graduated high school, their unstable powers and their still-delayed emotional and social development mean that they will be staying at the mansion for the forseeable future.
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[https://xp-journal.dreamwidth.org/tag/c:+fourteen xp_journal posts]
  
In [[July 2011]], tragedy struck - during an [[Don't Close Your Eyes| invasion of the mansion]] by a [[Mesmero|vengeful telepath]] and [[Fear Lords|his minions]], Sophie was killed through psychic overload. Her sisters barely survived and are undergoing intensive therapy in dealing with the loss of one-quarter of their 'mind'. The remaining sisters, however, decided they could not remain at the mansion where their sister had died. Instead they chose to move to California and stay at the West Coast Annex in [[August 2011]] while they applied to transfer their studies to San Diego State University.
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[https://xp-logs.dreamwidth.org/tag/c:+fourteen xp_logs posts]
  
===Powers/Abilities===
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[https://xp-generation-x.dreamwidth.org/tag/c:+fourteen xp_generation_x posts]
  
Individually, the Stepfords are strong telepaths. They also share a group mind, something whose limitations and possibilities have been little-explored during their time at the mansion. When they combine their powers, they are capable of overwhelming even a trained telepath's defenses through sheer force.
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== '''Plots''' ==
  
 +
===2015===
  
===Plots===
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[[Little Paper Dolls]]
  
[[X-Men Mission: Scary Little Blonde Girls]]
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===2016===
  
[[Twisted Sister]]
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[[Great Attractors]] - ''(Celeste)''
  
[[Pas de Trois]]
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===2017===
  
[[Don't Close Your Eyes]]
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[[How To Kill A Spider]]
  
 +
== Meta ==
  
===Meta===
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'''Player''': [[Chris]]
  
'''PB''': [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0993242/ Clemence Poesy]
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'''E-mail''':  
  
Socked by:  
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'''AIM''':  
  
Formerly socked by [[Alicia]]
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'''Player Icon Base''':  (provide html link to IMDB, Wiki etc page)
  
 +
'''Meta Trivia'''
  
----
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The previous Phase 1 incarnation of the Cuckoos were kind of a mess, having been an NPC of four girls unrelated to Emma at all and vaguely evil for no actual purpose. They were also missing a member, who was later added as a malicious psychic entity the girls accidentally created for reasons that didn't make a ton of sense. Hopefully Fourteen will be a touch more put together.
  
 +
In canon, the names of the girls were intended to be Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme as reference to the SPICE Girls. However, the creator was only ever able to name four of them aloud in the narrative before being removed to do another project (Sophie, Phoebe, Celeste, and Esme).  The new writer, having never received the memo about the SPICE reference, named the last girl 'Mindee' by mistake.  This was later corrected in a retcon to make Irma her middle name. (Remember Mindee. She'll become relevant eventually...)
  
 +
There are a ridiculous number of finicky details that need to be considered when writing ANYTHING with Fourteen in it. Having five bodies changes everything from how she shops for clothes to how she makes food to what happens when she sleeps to the fact that she never needs a mirror.  Nothing can be taken for granted, making this a fun challenge for the writer.
  
[[Category: Deceased - Phase 1]]
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[[Category: 2015]]
[[Category: 2005]]
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[[Category: Generation X]]

Revision as of 14:44, 5 March 2018

This page is about the Phase 2 incarnation of the character. For other uses, see Stepford Cuckoos (disambiguation).

PHASE 2
Weapon XIV
Cuckoos Wiki.png
Portrayed by AnnaSophia Robb
Codename: The Stepford Cuckoos; One-In-Five
Affiliations:
Birthdate: April 27, 2004
Journal: xp_cuckoos
Player: Chris


The best way to keep a secret: tell nobody. Second best: suppress the memory of everyone else who knows. There is no third best.

Three people can keep a secret if two are dead, but five people can keep a secret if they're all the same person.

"It's an important distinction," she said, "so pay attention. I may sometimes be a good person, but I'm never a nice person."


Having finally been rescued, Fourteen is making herself at home in the mansion - sort of. She's not really making herself any friends yet though.



Details

Character Journal: Fourteen


Real Name: Fourteen; Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme Cuckoo

Codename: One-In-Five; Stepford Cuckoos

Aliases: Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme Frost; Sophie and Phoebe Stepford; Irma and Esme Cuckoo

First Appearance: December 18, 2015

Date of Birth: April 27th, 2004. Note: Cloned at a physical age of 10

Place of Birth: Weapons Plus Testing Facility, 50 miles outside of Roanoke, Alberta, Canada

Citizenship: Canadian

Relatives: Jessica Drew (Mother, Deceased). Marcus Drew (Father, Deceased). Emma Frost (Biological Mother)

Education: College-level education in multiple subjects. Degrees in Music Theory and Psychology (known as of today).

Relationship Status: It's Complicated

Occupation: Currently None

Team Affiliation: (if applicable)

Biography

Childhood

The Stepford Cuckoos are more officially known as Weapon XIV. They are a Weapon Plus project; five identical clones of Emma Frost created in a laboratory hidden in the wilderness of Alberta, Canada. They don’t have a birthday so much as a general time of creation; they came into the world in test tubes and incubators in the early part of 2004, already physically 10 years old.

They were an experiment, really. Nothing more than that.

Weapon Plus was just curious as to what would happen, if you tried to clone such a powerful telepath. Would they have an army of Emmas to do their bidding? They started simple. Six bodies. Six Emmas. Designation: Weapon XIV. Weapon Fourteen was imperfect from the start. There was never Emma. The bodies, while close, were hardly identical to the original. ‘Corrupted DNA’, someone had said. They were ‘almost’ Emma. Emma-Lite, really.

Her daughters, if you preferred.

Still, Weapon Plus could deal with that. An army of Emma Frost’s daughters would be just as effective as the real thing. Possibly more so. They moved forward, carefully. They woke them up. And quickly realized that there was no ‘them’. Just a ‘her’.

They expected six different little girls to sculpt and mould. But quickly they found that between the five they woke up, there was only one consciousness. You could tell one of them something, and they’d all know it because they all were the same person. The Little Girl with five bodies. The One-In-Five.

They called her Fourteen.

Weapons Plus quickly scrapped their initial plan. What good was an army if that army was all one person? It wasn’t strategically viable. They were going to scrap the entire project entirely, but they already came so far and honestly they were out of viable DNA from Emma, and someone somewhere decided they needed to get something from the project. So of the six bodies, the five that were awake and moving were taught the basics of being alive.

The first two years were interesting, as the researchers of Weapons Plus came to find out. By the time she turned twelve, Fourteen had been taught everything they really should have learned between birth and the age of ten that didn’t come with the clone conditioning. Then she starts reading people’s thoughts as though they’re saying them aloud, and she was moved, out of the backwater woods of Alberta and to another compound outside of Edmonton before she was able to pull exactly what type of facility she was in from the mind of some passing scientist.

Her inability to focus her five bodies in five directions is cute at first. Then it’s creepy, watching five identical girls act like… well… clones. Speaking in unison, dressing the same, moving in perfect sync. They try to take three of them away; let Fourteen come to terms with just two of herself before adding more. Ease her into it. Fourteen’s epic fit lasts a week before they decide maybe they should just try teaching her to control all five at once.

So Weapons Plus decks out this new facility like a family and a school, while behind the scenes researchers monitor and test and observe. This is where Fourteen grows up for the next four years.

She knows right away she’s not normal. It’s kind of a joint thing. Her parents (adopted, obviously. They look nothing like her.) and the scientists and all the home-schooling. It clearly has to do with why she has five bodies. She doesn’t mind, though. They may not have given birth to her, but they’re the only family she’s ever known and they treat her well and she loves them, so it all works out.

She’s informed, for the most part, about what the researchers determine about her, and in turn she lets them know what she discovers for herself. After all, they’re family. So the researchers find out that a each body has to stay close to that specific body over there, less it falls into a coma (and isn’t that the worst feeling. Fourteen says it feels like someone’s ripped a part of her away when it happens. It makes her so sad it almost physically hurts). She realizes that things she learned in one body carries over to another, and that she forgets things when they remove a body from her for a while.

(Once, in the middle of an exam, the medical team examining one of her bodies accidentally knocked it out too early and Fourteen went from writing an artful essay about the American Revolution to staring at the words as though they were written in cyrillic. She failed that exam, but the researchers were happy with the new development.)

It’s also during this period that Weapon Plus decides that there’s more data to be determined, about the self and the body. With the exception of the hub (what they call Fourteen’s ‘main body’, the one that all the others have to stay close to), each body is put on a strict regimen of drugs. Between the four they decide on stimulants, depressants, SSRIs, and euphorics. Each body gets a different type. And her power changes.

Fourteen had always been able to read minds. It was never terribly strong; just what someone was actively thinking at any given moment. Then the drugs start. It’s the depressant first, and Fourteen finds that specific body starts feeling tired and sluggish all the time. That seems to be the end of it, right up until one day she really wants to spend some time outside after her mother had already told her ‘no’, and she somehow makes her mom forget that she’d already denied Fourteen.

(She spends the whole damn day outside, letting the sunlight hit her five faces and watching the clouds go by, marveling at how each one seems different to a different pair of eyes.)

Each time they start a new regimen, she gains a new power and her ability to read minds diminishes just a little bit. Next comes a frightening ability to read memories. The day after she outs a teacher as a horrible monster working for a secret facility (and really, who called themselves Weapon Plus anyway?), most of the people she interacts with daily changes. She doesn’t see most of her old teachers or her parents’ friends again.

Each body reacted differently to drugs. One was always kind of tired. Another had too much energy to contain, like it’d drunk three big cups of coffee. A third was… chipper. There wasn’t any other way to explain it. It could and often was still mean or scathing, but it had this annoying habit of being so damn chipper and Fourteen couldn’t suppress it for the life of her. The last was just legitimately happy all the time. It was weird, and she wasn’t ever really certain how to deal with it. (She didn’t use that body when she was pissed off. It was hard to hold on to anger with it).

They don’t dare risk adding anything to the hub, though. Words like ‘cascading cognizance failure’, ‘unstable side-effects’ and ‘chaining neurochemical damage’ are thrown around when they think she can’t hear, and although she’s not quite certain what they mean they certainly don’t sound good at all.

She has five times the amount of time other (not normal, she insists forcefully. She is normal. Everyone else is so strange, having only one of themselves) people do, and she has to keep herself busy somehow. She quickly finds that so many things are boring when she does them all simultaneously. Each body playing the piano was just the worst. So she split her attention and quintupled up on hobbies. One body would play piano, another would be out jogging, and a third would watch the fourth and fifth play chess (Unsurprisingly, she always won). Multitasking came so naturally to her, like breathing. As long as the activities were significantly different enough, Fourteen had no problem with it (even if the jogger would be humming along with the piano that was half a mile away at the time, or one of the chess players would be tracing her fingers over her thigh as though she was sketching).

High School and College

When she’s sixteen and well-learned, she’s moved again. This time, her parents move her to a house. An actual house. And they get sent to school. Actual school. With actual other people their age. It’s kind of almost intimidating but not really, because Fourteen immediately realizes that she’s so much better than any of the other kids there, what with her ability to learn five things at once and retain it better and spot the creeps and the jerks and the plotters with a quick glance at their thoughts.

(Fourteen quickly realizes she has zero tolerance for stupid people. She also has no tolerance for terribly stupid people and high school politics mixing in one place.)

Of course, she doesn’t go as Fourteen. She doesn’t even go as five. No. Her parents sit her down all nice and calm-like and they talk and Fourteen listens and agrees that five sisters in one place is a little much. Being called Fourteen is also a little strange. So while she’s Fourteen at home, in public she has new names.

They decide to call her bodies Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme. Then they split them up, into two sets of ‘twins’ and the fifth. Her two target high schools, Paul Kane High School and St. Albert Catholic High School, are close but not so close that she can send bodies to each one without the hub being somewhere between them, so it’s decided that Sophie and Phoebe Stepford will attend Paul Kane while Irma and Esme Cuckoo will go to St. Albert Catholic School. Celeste, as the hub, will remain home.

Fourteen isn’t terribly religious, having grown up in secret military compounds disguised as perfectly normal houses. St Alberts does nothing more than give her a fairly impressive disdain for all the pomp and circumstance of organized religion, with its kneeling and hypocrisy. She’s never done the subservient thing well anyways.

Still, five times the bodies meant five times the classes, and she already knew that taking the same thing five times was hopelessly boring. So Phoebe, with her stimulants and boundless energy, joined half the sports teams Paul Kane had while Sophie focused on high-level academic courses. Meanwhile at St Albert, Esme spent her free periods in the choir room playing piano and channeling those tired, sleepy days into music and painting while Irma, at the behest of her parents, socialized. Well, she called it socializing. Really, it was manipulation. Applied Sociology and Psychology, her old teachers had called it. She was the ‘happy’ sister (blame the Euphorics, really) that people got along with and it left her in the center of a chain of relationships and gossip webs that ran through every clique–sorry, ‘social circle’ in the school.

(Private schools didn’t do cliques. Everyone was an equal under God, after all. Fourteen knew exactly how false that was, and was surprisingly good at using that knowledge to avoid petty bullshittery).

And Celeste? Well, she stayed home and read, or daydreamed, or played chess with her father (he was surprisingly good) or, if she was really hurting for things to do, video games. Plus she’d look up exam answers or personal details in her little black books she used to record things she didn’t want to forget. Her parents made her learn self defense. Protection, they said. You can’t let your Celeste body get hurt like the others can.

It wasn’t like she was bored, though. Even with Celeste at home, Fourteen was still attending school 4 times a day.

High school was as good to her as it probably could have been. It certainly went a long way in teaching her how to interact with others firsthand. She’d known everything before of course, in theory. Still, there was that intangible something that came from actually having friends, rather than just learning about them and watching other people have them. It was nice, when they weren’t caught up in high school drama bullshit.

(Again, she had no patience for it. And seriously, no, stop asking if her sister would like to double-date this really good guy you know. I’–She’s not interested.)

Pretending she’s five people is weird, though. She doesn’t like it. She messed it up a lot, those first few months, forgetting which sister was supposed to know what or who was supposed to respond to certain questions. It’s really only the fact that she wears the same thing on all five bodies that she’s able to pass one body off as another in a pinch.

(“Phoebe, I never told you that… Just Sophie. Did she tell you?!” “I am Sophie!” She’s totally Phoebe. Oops. She needs to be more careful.)

And so the one girl who has five lives, five experiences, also has five (well, four, but who’s counting?) high school degrees. And five acceptance letters to the University of Calgary as well.

It’s almost a waste of money, she worries, sending herself to college five times. But she hates to be separate from herself, and the last two years have been hard and long and she just wants to spend the next four years and change as close to herself as she can be.

High school relationships fall to the side, like they tend to do, so none of her old friends ever learn that the ‘twins’ are actually quintuplets, and there aren’t any awkward questions or people demanding to know why they weren’t told, as though they were somehow entitled to the information.

Phoebe’s in on a softball scholarship. It’s hard to beat a girl who can literally skip any non-essential activity to practice her sports and still maintain a perfectly balanced social and academic life. She doesn’t need to study; Celeste can do that for her. It wasn’t ever for the love of sports, but rather just something to keep her nervous energy in check. She’s not certain how much she likes sports, anyway. She must, really. She has five brains, so five chances to have an appeal for it. But she has fun, and Phoebe is always busy practicing, so that’s one fewer body to deal with when she’s fighting boredom.

The others fall back to similar roles they created for themselves in high school. It’s routine, really. Esme does something music related; it’s not really important because she doesn’t exactly need to be able to support herself off of it. Irma tackles a psychology degree, as well as going back to her old habits of putting herself at the center of absolutely everything.

Fourteen is pretty pleased, all things considered. She times it so that none of her degrees are finished before the others, so she doesn’t have to leave herself. But being able to chain courses together, plus some pretty blatant cheating that absolutely nobody could prove, and she’s done in three years, just after she turns twenty-one. Or fifty-five, if you want to be weird like that.

And then, one day, right after graduation, she comes home from college (all five of her). The house has been torn apart. There’s blood everywhere. Then, there’s a prick in her neck and she’s falling fast (again, all five of her).

The next time she wakes up, she’s in a facility. She manages to pull two words from the minds of her captors, although her telepathic powers are weak and leaves her feeling terrible and achey and like something she didn’t even realize she had has been completely ripped away from her.

Weapon Plus. A name she hasn’t heard or thought of since that teacher, the day she realized she could read memories.

She was rescued some undetermined amount of time later (it was hard to tell when she was constantly being put under for long periods of time), when she accidentally sent a psychic distress signal to Emma Frost - her real mother. More or less. During the rescue, Emma managed to insert herself into Fourteen's hive mind, instantly making all of the wary of her, and all five were brought back to the mansion for protection.


At the mansion

Living with a bunch of other people and trying to keep a secret was a lot harder than living alone, occasionally seeing people, and trying to keep a secret. Fourteen didn't make much of an effort to try and make friends, who would only complicate things, and the mansion residents were mostly equally unimpressed with her (them - she introduced them as quintuplets, as she always had) when she introduced "them" on the journals.

Keeping a low profile at the mansion, of course, proved to be difficult. In February 2016, Celeste was dragged into a telepathic mess involving the mansion empaths, and ended up in the Candy Land hell mindscape of Meggan Szardos. She worked with the other mansion psis to escape, but it was certainly an odd experience. Thankfully, she managed to lay low after that, even having a few not horrible encounters with the people she was living with (a few. Some of them were still pretty bad).

2017 was similarly, blessedly quiet. Aside from having to fight giant spiders with Marie-Ange. That was pretty fun.

Physical Characteristics

The Stepford Cuckoos are five identical sisters. Each sister is identically similar, as all of them are daughter-clones of Emma Frost. She carries herself like a cross between the all-american blue-eyed blonde-haired girl next door and the bitchy head cheerleader from your old high school. The sisters dress identically and, unless they make a conscious effort to break step, move in sync as well. With the exception of being five very similar girls, the Stepford sisters look extremely pretty, but are otherwise normal.

Height: 5'6"

Weight: 105lb average

Eyes: Blue

Hair: Blonde

Other Features: They're five identical quintuplets. Really, what more do you want from them?

Members

Fourteen

Information about Fourteen herself.

Fourteen is the consciousness in control of the bodies that make up the Stepford Cuckoos. She is the One of the One-In-Five. She is not any single body, but rather the combined total of the five minds and five bodies together, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. She knows everything her individual bodies know, and when she loses a member of the hive for any reason, she also loses all of that body's knowledge and skills.

Sophie

Info about Sophie.

Phoebe

Info about Phoebe.

Irma

Info about Irma.

Celeste

Info abut Celeste.

Esme

Info about Esme.

Powers

One-In-Five: The five Stepford Sisters are in fact a single person controlling five identical clone bodies. Having been created in a Weapon Plus facility in Canada, the Stepford Sisters have never known any other way of living. Each body can operate autonomously of the others, but must remain within range of the hive. A body moving out of range of the hive becomes non-operational. Additionally, as her thoughts are fragmented across five brains, it is exceptionally difficult to read her surface thoughts. Memory scans are also limited to the memories of the specific body being scanned.

While non-operational, a Stepford body is essentially comatose. They remain alive, but have no brain activity beyond those necessary for sustaining life. Moving a body back into range of the hive, or the hive back into range of the body, will reverse this effect. While there is no risk of brain damage while in this state, comatose bodies still require proper nutrition if out of action for an extended amount of time. While disconnected from the hive, a body does not have a psychic presence and cannot be read by a telepath.

As there is only one consciousness, the Stepford sisters have a synchronized sleep cycle. Any Stepford can be knocked unconscious physically without affecting the hive as a whole, with the exception of Celeste. See the Hive Queen power for details as to why this is.

Each body is a sum of individual experiences and abilities, but while a member of the hive they actively contribute those abilities to the whole. Each member of the hive can use skills and abilities learned by any individual member to a lesser degree of skill of the contributing member. For example, if the Sophie body was the one to learn to speak Spanish, while Sophie is a member of the hive mind all other members can also speak spanish at slightly reduced fluency. If Sophie was to leave the hive or become incapacitated, none of the members of the hive could speak Spanish until she returned. This system could have redundancies if multiple bodies learn the same skill, but doesn’t beyond some general school knowledge. As of this moment no one specialized skill is known by more than a single body.

Additionally, her unique situation makes her almost impervious to having her thoughts read, as any individual thought she has is scattered across her five brains. Telepaths attempting to read her would receive only fragmented sections of individual thoughts. Fourteen can similarly 'shatter' secrets and important knowledge and spread it across her five brains for extra security. While this protection does nearly ensure telepaths are unable to discern her secrets, the instability and lack of redundancy in the system means that missing bodies result in corrupted and incomplete knowledge and memories.

Living Diamond Form: Each member of the Stepford Cuckoos has a living diamond form that they can shift into at will. While in this form, a Stepford sister becomes living diamond, a refractive, clear substance with similar toughness properties to that of real diamonds. Diamond form does not encumber the flexibility of a stepford sister.

While living diamond, a Stepford sister is unable to use any telepathic abilities. Additionally, their personal telepathic power is cut off from the rest of the hive-mind. However, they are not cut off from the hive-mind themselves, and are still fully capable of moving and acting. Living Diamond has complete immunity to telepathy, increased toughness and endurance, and a moderate increase to strength, but completely cuts the girls off from their own telepathic abilities (with the exception of remaining connected to the hivemind).

Living Diamond Form does not require constant focus and attention to keep active and can remain active indefinitely, requiring conscious effort to revert. However, the Stepford Sisters do not like using this ability often, as it not only limits their telepathic abilities but also extended time in diamond form strongly inhibits the body’s ability to express emotions.

Telepathy: The Stepford Sisters are telepathic. Each member has the ability to read surface thoughts. The power of the Stepford sister’s telepathy is inversely proportional to the number of active bodies she has active at the time. The more bodies connected to the hive-mind, the more power she has to dedicate to keeping the hive together, and therefore the weaker any given telepathic ability is.

The Stepford sisters can forcibly deactivate bodies from the hive (with the exception of Celeste, for obvious reasons) in order to increase the power of their telepathic abilities. In doing so, deactivated bodies act exactly like they do if they’ve been moved out of range of the hive. However, the Stepford sisters view this as a rough equivalent to chopping off your arm for a quick power-up, and finds the entire idea inherently wrong. Unless a situation is incredibly dire, this option is never even considered.

Due to a life-time of drug treatments and tests, each of the Stepford sisters contributes a different telepathic ability to the hive. The specifics of these abilities are detailed below:

Hive Queen (Celeste) - Celeste is the closest the Stepford sisters come to a ‘real body’ and has the mental power of the Hive Queen, the specific ability that glues the five minds of her bodies into a single entity called 'Fourteen'. While this doesn’t give her any special dominion over the other members of the hive, Celeste’s body is the focal point of the group. Distance from the hive is determined by an individual body’s distance from Celeste. Likewise, Celeste is the only member of the hive that will affect other members if she falls unconscious or is knocked out. Celeste losing consciousness completely brings down the hive-mind, and all member of the cuckoos will also go unconscious until Celeste has returned to anchor them. . Any individual body can only remain connected to the hive as long as it remains within 4 miles of Celeste’s body. However, doing so leaves a body feeling anxious and physically itchy at long distances. The sisters prefer to remain within a few feet of each other at all times. This range, like many other things, depends on the total psychic strength of the sisters, meaning that with fewer bodies or increased psychic power, this range increases.

Should Celeste be incapacitated for an extended period of time not less than one week, her Hive Queen ability will transfer to another member of the Cuckoos, replacing that member’s specific power until Celeste returns. While another member has the Hive Queen ability, their own ability is lost and inaccessible by any member of the hive. Additionally, the hive itself is significantly less effective, lacking the multitasking and strategizing skills Celeste contributed.

Celeste is the only member of the hive whose specific power persists through Living Diamond Form.

Memory Amnesia (Esme) - Esme’s regiment of depressants meant that her powers mutated into the ability to suppress and recall memories in others. On weak minds or particularly old memories, Esme can suppress a memory so completely that its owner doesn’t even have any awareness that the particular memory existed. She can also call forth memories that someone has forgotten, both by being suppressed by a telepath (such as herself or others) or that has been forgotten naturally over time.

It is easiest to suppress and recall memories in willing and weak-minded individuals, but small gaps of time and insignificant memories can be surprised on most people without training in the mental arts. When the hive is just Celeste and Esme, they are able to overpower most minds, including trained and well-defended ones, or suppress large swaths of significant memories and skills.

Deep Dive Telepathy (Phoebe) - While all members of the Stepford sisters can read surface thoughts, Phoebe brings the ability to read deeper. In addition to surface thoughts, Phoebe contributes the ability to read the memories of others. Additionally, Phoebe also adds the ability to project their thoughts to others, allowing for things like long-distance communication. She does not have the ability to write false memories into existence as of this time.

Phoebe's mastery of mind reading allows the sisters to be extremely subtle when needed, but also allows them to attempt to overpower barriers and rend weaker minds wide open through sheer force and fury.

Phoebe’s skill in physical fighting is slightly above average for a normal human who learned for enjoyment rather than any specific combat scenario. However, because her fighting ability is most effective in Living Diamond form, which the sisters hate using, telepathic abilities are far preferred to any physical skill.

Telepathic Tracking (Sophie) - Sophie’s regiment of SSRI medication gave her great skill at telepathically tracking the unique psionic signatures emitted by humans. She is also able to track people by their thought patterns and psychic emanations. This ability is highly subjective to proximity, and is only accurate over very short ranges. After a distance as short as 200 yards, her ability to accurately locate any given mind drops off dramatically, and by 500 yards she is unable to even sense anyone, much less effectively determine location.

Thanks to being able to contribute this power to the group, in a hive of three or more Sophie and her sister bodies are able to effectively triangulate the location of specific people. This requires each body to be within the effective range of their telepathic tracking ability. The pair of just Celeste and Sophie can track a single target over long distances to within a few inches.

Astral Projection (Irma) - When Irma is part of the hive, she brings along the ability for Fourteen to project herself astrally. This power is different from the others, as it isn’t a body-specific power that is shared between each member. Rather, Fourteen herself is able to use the ability to project herself as a single unit into other people's’ minds and mindscapes.

As there is only one consciousness, Fourteen has only a single astral avatar (instead of five). That astral avatar is in the form of a relatively annoyed eleven year old girl. This is something high on the list of things she will not be pleased about if you decide to needle her about.

Beyond this, there is no special things of note about her astral projection ability.

Equipment

As of right now, nothing.

Trivia

Fourteen hates Glee with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. Absolutely cannot stand it. Finds it incredibly shallow and vapid. Unless she's watching through Irma's eyes, in which case Irma absolutely has to stop and watch the whole damn thing. Immediately after, Fourteen has to have one of her other bodies suppress the memory of the whole event.

Fourteen is technically only eleven years old, but has the body and mind of a twenty-one year old. She has also experienced a total of fifty five years of live when you take her five bodies into account, leaving her age as 'It's Complicated'.

Likewise, when Fourteen was only fourteen years old she set her Facebook relationship status to 'It's Complicated' and hasn't touched it since. She doesn't plan on removing it until she comes up with a way for her to actually be in a relationship without it being polygamy.

For someone who considers herself a keeper of secrets, Fourteen is sometimes really bad about keeping secrets. She has a tendency to trade and sell secrets she has no personal stake in to the highest bidder.

Fourteen swears that Irma's Psychology degree is for more than manipulating people. It is, in her words, 'just a nice perk'.

Fourteen mentally includes 'Double Speak' and 'Horror Movie Reenactments' on her list of hobbies. These are left off the list whenever she writes it down anywhere.

Fourteen brings the concept of 'talking to yourself' to a whole new level. She's gotten into a routine of talking out her problems with herself to solve some of her more difficult dilemmas. This is only as weird as you want to make it.

External Links

xp_communication post

xp_journal posts

xp_logs posts

xp_generation_x posts

Plots

2015

Little Paper Dolls

2016

Great Attractors - (Celeste)

2017

How To Kill A Spider

Meta

Player: Chris

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Meta Trivia

The previous Phase 1 incarnation of the Cuckoos were kind of a mess, having been an NPC of four girls unrelated to Emma at all and vaguely evil for no actual purpose. They were also missing a member, who was later added as a malicious psychic entity the girls accidentally created for reasons that didn't make a ton of sense. Hopefully Fourteen will be a touch more put together.

In canon, the names of the girls were intended to be Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme as reference to the SPICE Girls. However, the creator was only ever able to name four of them aloud in the narrative before being removed to do another project (Sophie, Phoebe, Celeste, and Esme). The new writer, having never received the memo about the SPICE reference, named the last girl 'Mindee' by mistake. This was later corrected in a retcon to make Irma her middle name. (Remember Mindee. She'll become relevant eventually...)

There are a ridiculous number of finicky details that need to be considered when writing ANYTHING with Fourteen in it. Having five bodies changes everything from how she shops for clothes to how she makes food to what happens when she sleeps to the fact that she never needs a mirror. Nothing can be taken for granted, making this a fun challenge for the writer.