Topaz

PHASE 1

Topaz
Portrayed by Naomi Scott
Codename:	Topaz
Affiliations:	New Mutants
Birthdate:	March 10, 1997 (Adopted)
Journal:	Shades of Grey
Player:	Sam

A somewhat reluctant member of the Xavier community, Topaz is a girl with a rocky past and an uncertain future. One thing is definite, though: the road leading to that future won't be an uneventful one.

Details

Character Journal: x_topaz

Real Name: Vimala Ashdown (Will not answer to this. Ever)

Codename: Topaz

Aliases: Topaz (What she is mostly known by and will answer to); Topie (Sometimes)

First Appearance: October 30, 2012

Date of Birth: March 10, 1997 (adopted)

Place of Birth: India

Citizenship: Dual: Indian, British (through adoption)

Relatives: Luca Ashdown, “Taboo” (adopted father); Alice Ashdown (adopted mother; deceased)

Education: Up to Year 9 (8th grade in America) in the British school system. Home-schooled through Year 10 (9th grade), and arrived at Xavier's as a Sophomore. Currently a Junior (2013-14 school year).

Relationship Status: Single

Occupation: Student

Team Affiliation: New Mutants

Biography

Growing Up

Topaz’s story starts at the young age of one when, in the dead of night, she was abandoned on the doorstep of a small orphanage in Northeast India. Nobody saw who left her there, and the only evidence as to who her parents might have been was the necklace hanging around her neck - a small, amber-colored topaz pendant. It was from this that the child received the nickname “Topaz,” as no one knew her real name. The orphanage workers eventually named her Vimala (meaning “pure”), but the nickname stuck - growing up she was called “Topaz” more than “Vimala,” and hardly ever answered to the latter.

The next six years of Topaz’s life were spent in the orphanage. It was hardly an easy life - Topaz, small for her age, was often the target of the bigger kids she lived with, and the overtaxed orphanage workers couldn’t always help her. As a result, she was forced early on to learn how to defend herself. She wasn’t always successful at this - though there was one notable incident when she was five that involved an eight year old and a stick. The incident ended with the eight year old nearly getting his eye poked out. This led to a severe punishment for Topaz, but it also made some of the kids wearier about trying to mess with her.

Finally, when Topaz was seven, she found herself facing changes in the life she had become so used to. A British couple (the Ashdowns) had come the orphanage and, after seeing the kids and interacting with a few of them (including Topaz), the couple inquired about adopting Topaz. This brought up surprisingly mixed feelings for the child - the obvious joy at being able to escape orphanage life, but also a bit of fear, as this was the only life she’d ever known, and even if it wasn’t the best, it was what she was comfortable with. However, the Ashdowns were persistent, and it didn’t take long for Topaz to warm up to the idea.

The adoption process took just over a year - Topaz was eight when the Ashdowns finally brought her into their small, comfortable home in Chertsey, Surrey. She arrived at the house with nothing but the clothes on her back and the necklace for which she was originally named.

On the surface, the Ashdowns lived a very bland life - Luca Ashdown was an accountant at a local firm, Alice Ashdown a housewife. After the hectic life she’d lived at the orphanage, living with the Ashdowns should have been a welcome break for young Topaz.

Except first impressions are often deceiving. Both Alice and Luca were practitioners of magic - she specialized in making potions and charms, while he was better at the mental side of magic (mostly astral projecting, though he had managed offensive spells in the past). Like most practitioners, they didn’t advertise their involvement in the magical arts, and mostly kept to themselves, save for a few contacts in the British magical community. But it was important to them, and they wanted someone to pass their learnings on to. This was what led to looking into adopting. When the couple had found Topaz, they’d recognized a great magical potential in her, and after a year of searching, they weren’t going to let her get away.

Needless to say, this was all a little shocking for Topaz to try and take in. But she wanted to please her new parents - she put up no argument when the Ashdowns began teaching her magic. It wasn’t until well after she turned ten that she managed to perform her first spell - levitating a cup. The effort exhausted her, however - she was unconscious for almost ten hours afterwards. She got better as time went on, though.

Besides learning magic in her parents’ basement, Topaz led a generally normal life. She attended school, proving that despite her rocky beginnings, she was actually quite smart, and easily able to pick up on what she was being taught. Unfortunately, this and her still-small stature (just as it had in the orphanage) led to her being an easy target for bullies. She’d retained most of the lessons she’d learned in the orphanage, though she quickly learned that attacking a boy with a stick was socially unacceptable, and she’d have to find another way to deal with her problems. So instead of using sticks and weapons, she started using words, dipping into her always-growing vocabulary to insult and confuse the bullies who tried to torture her. In 2007, when she was ten, she skipped a year in school (putting her in the right age group, as she had originally started a year behind due to her educational background).

Manifesting

In 2010, Topaz was thirteen and her life changed yet again. It started, unsurprisingly, with a pair of boys in her class. Topaz had stayed after school and was sitting in the library, trying to finish her homework so that when she got home, she could focus entirely on practicing with Luca and Alice. She’d sat herself in front of the librarian’s desk in hopes that this would stave off anyone who wanted to mess with her. Unfortunately, the librarian left to put some books away, and two boys took this as their chance to have some fun. While one of them distracted Topaz, the other stole her backpack, and they both ran. Topaz, furious, ran after them. The chase ended in a stairwell, with the boys taunting Topaz and daring her to try and get her bag back. Topaz, well aware that there was no way she would be able to fight the boys, began wishing the two would just turn on each other and make her life easier.

Several things happened at once, then - Topaz’s mind was flooded with the vicious, cruel emotions of the two boys in front of her. And at the same time, the bag (which the smaller of the two boys had been swinging over his head, taunting Topaz with it) accidentally slipped from his grip and landed on the other boy’s foot. The bigger boy, suddenly furious, turned on his friend and shoved him into the wall. The second boy shoved back, and before long they were wrestling on the ground. Topaz, stunned by these developments, took this as an opportunity to grab her bag and run before a teacher could find them and somehow connect her to this mess. She ran home in a blur of fright and other emotions that weren’t hers, and by the time she was behind the closed door of the house, she nearly collapsed. She was kept home for the next few days while the Ashdowns tried to figure out what was wrong with her. It was Alice who finally figured out that their daughter was a mutant. While this was entirely new territory for both her and Luca, neither backed down from the challenge of helping Topaz learn to control her empathy, as sending her away would have complicated things too much, and they risked losing their protege.

More Changes

In May 2011, tragedy struck the Ashdowns after Luca accidentally crossed paths with a group of magicians. Walking home late from a night at the pub, he found himself on the wrong side of a mugging when two men cornered him in an alley. Upon realizing that one of the muggers was trying to use magic, Luca performed a spell of his own, creating an energy blast that drained him and fatally injured one of the muggers. Luca made it out of the alley and got a block away before he was forced to call Alice to have her come pick him up.

A few weeks after the incident, Topaz came home from school to find Alice Ashdown on the kitchen floor - dead. The cause of death was eventually ruled “Unknown,” as there were no inward nor outward signs to indicate how she had died. However, a day after her death, a letter was delivered to Luca, reading: “You take one of ours, we take one of yours.” And Luca concluded it had to be connected to the attempted mugging.

Over the summer, he and Topaz moved out of the house, relocating to an apartment building on the edge of town, and Luca quit his job and withdrew Topaz from school, saying he would homeschool her instead. Everyone chalked this up to a grieving man trying to protect the only family he had left, but as always, first impressions on the subject were wrong. Luca was planning to avenge his wife’s death, and he didn’t want any outside interference. Using a few acquaintances he had in the underground magical world, he learned that he was looking for the Destine Clan - a family of magicians. With this information in mind, Luca set about beginning to plan his revenge. Under the alias “Taboo,” he began collecting intel on the Destines, also using Topaz to help him. They spent a year finding everything they could on the family, meticulously planning out the details of the revenge plan.

Revenge

In October 2012, Taboo’s plan was put into action. He and Topaz invaded the Destines home in the dead of night with the plan of killing Adam Destine, the apparent leader. They were caught, and a fight broke out. Taboo and Topaz retreated back to their apartment, where they were later attacked by the Destines in retaliation. Romany Wisdom, upon hearing of the attacks and learning that a teenager was involved, called Amanda Sefton, and an X-Force team was assembled and headed to England to put an end to the conflict. After one fight resulted in the death of Dominic Destine, Taboo and Topaz carried out one final attack on the Destine house. Topaz was knocked out by Adam, and X-Force managed to intervene in this attack. In the chaos, Taboo was apparently killed.

When Topaz regained consciousness, she found herself at Romany’s house. Amanda explained everything that had happened, right up to Taboo’s death, then told Topaz she had two options - stay in England and live and train under Romany, or move to America and attend Xavier’s. Neither option appealed to Topaz, but she found herself wanting to get as far away from England as possible, and decided that Xavier’s would be the least troublesome place to go.

In A New Place

Topaz made her entrance into the mansion as quiet as possible. She mostly kept to herself, wary of the school setting (something she hadn't had to deal with in over a year), though she quickly learned that her fellow New Mutants were very different from the kids she'd gone to school with in England. Even so, she continued to keep her distance, busying herself with homework and magic lessons to keep her mind occupied. After an incident with Tandy's powers in December, Topaz discovered something new about her magic - namely that when she drained someone's emotions when casting a spell, she temporarily renders that person unable to feel anything for a brief amount of time. When Tandy went to Topaz to ask her if she could it again, Topaz happily took the opportunity as a chance to experiment with this new-found aspect of her powers. At the end of the month, she found herself prodded by Amanda into going on the NYE school ski trip - something she did reluctantly and unwillingly.

Right Out Of The Gate

The New Year started in typical Xavier's style when Topaz, along with the other New Mutants, found herself being stalked by otherworldy creatures known as Slendermen. She and fellow student magic user Billy worked together to devise a way to protect the New Mutants from the stalking. It failed, however, when they were dragged into the Askew World. Once there and separated from the other students, Topaz found herself trapped in darkness and taunted by the disembodied voices of Taboo and Adam Destine, telling her she was pathetic and useless. She was eventually rescued by Matt, and worked with him and Sue to save Hope before all four went to save Renee. They were eventually rescued from the Askew World by X-Force.

Following the incident, Topaz withdrew even further, something that did not go unnoticed. At the same time, Tandy once again approached Topaz in order to have the young witch drain off her emotions so she wouldn't have to deal with them. This continued for some time before Maddie discovered what was happening. After a rather tense "discussion" between Topaz and Maddie, the redhead outed Topaz and Tandy (mostly Topaz, whom Maddie believed should have known better) to David Haller, Adrienne Frost, Professor Xavier, and Amanda. This got Topaz into quite a bit of trouble with the staff and her fellow students, though she and Tandy did manage to forge a friendship through the ordeal. After some amount of stubbornness and a failed bid for independence, she began leaning a bit on Amanda, who was worried about the path the younger witch seemed to be forging for herself. She also - slightly against her will - found herself under a concerned Kurt's watchful eye after a conversation with the teleporter revealed a bit more about her than she meant for the man to find out. As time went on she also struck up quite the friendship with Matt and newcomer Frank Ludlum - both of which were as surprising to her as it might have been to everyone else.

Starting Over

The end of June 2013 brought with it a rather unpleasant surprise in the form of Taboo, back from the dead and supposedly with the intention of reconciling with Topaz. She was understandably suspicious of his motives, but eventually gave in and left the mansion to meet him in the dead of night. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be the wrong choice, as Taboo was simply trying to lure her away from the protection of the staff in order to trade her for information on the whereabouts of the Destines. It was only the timely arrival of Amanda, Scott Summers, Logan, and Kurt (alerted to Topaz's disappearance by a panicking Tandy) that saved her. The buyers got away, and Taboo was let go to save Topaz from having to go through a trial, but not before being "informed" that if he ever set foot in New York again, he'd be lucky to walk out of the city.

Topaz once more fell back on her own standby of repressing and pretending she wasn't bothered by her father's betrayal, but it backfired quite horribly when the build up of repressed emotions rebounded and burnt out her shields, exposing her to the emotions of every person in the mansion. Unwilling to ask for help, Topaz retreated into the unused wings of the mansion for a couple of days, putting as many walls between herself and everyone else as possible, only coming out when everyone else was asleep. She only managed to get away with this for a couple of days, however, before Scott finally found her and tried to take her to the med lab where someone would be able to keep an eye on her. Being dragged out into the mansion in the middle of the day became the straw that broke the camel's back when they encountered Frank - she snapped, draining off the emotions of every single person within range in an attempt to find some sort of peace, forgetting until it was too late that the emotions she drained would invade her mind. Overwhelmed, her mind shut down. She woke up several hours later, confused and with very little memory of what had happened since the encounter with Taboo, and no answers to the questions waiting for her.

She had a week of downtime in the Box, and was then confronted with the ask of trying to redo the life she'd built for herself in the mansion. Her friendship with Frank suffered due to his anger at her over what had happened, though the other mansion residents were confusingly understanding.

The rest if the summer passed mostly quietly, save for an incident during a field trip with the other New Mutants when a cave came to life and tried to kill the students. At the end of July she joined the other New Mutant girls on a trip to California, and in August she began working with Meggan Szardos, the other empath-type in the mansion, on different ways of using her powers to help her deal with her own emotions.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 5'3"

Weight: 110 lbs.

Eyes: Dark Brown

Hair: Black

Other Features: None

Powers

Mutation

Topaz is a an empath/telepath hybrid. She can gauge how a person is feeling, as well as manipulate those emotions and intensify them (she’s discovered that she’s quite good at manipulating the more negative side of emotions - for example, anger and envy). The telepathy is very secondary - the only thoughts Topaz can hear are ones that are accompanied with particularly powerful emotions, giving her the ability to interpret why a person feels the way he or she feels. But she can’t just read a person’s mind and know his or her every thought.

At the moment, her empathy only extends as far as her immediate area (approximately a twenty-ish feet radius), and gets weaker after ten feet. She can almost always sense a dull buzz of emotions from the people around her, but over time she’s learned to tune that out.

Magic

Pre-mutation, Topaz drew on her own life energy in order to perform spells. After her mutation developed, the Ashdowns changed direction a bit, deciding to find a way for Topaz to use emotions to fuel her spells instead. They started with using her own, generally suppressed emotions, which was a success. She also began learning how to allow others' emotions to amplify her own, therefore making her magic stronger, but she hasn't had much of a chance to practice that one yet.

Topaz's magic is limited by how much energy she can draw off her own emotions and the availability of the emotions of people around her. How strong the spell is depends on how strong the emotions are — in a high-stress situation like a riot, for example, when there are a lot of people around panicking and/or feeling angry, she's more powerful than she would be if she was just sitting in a room with a bunch of very calm people.

The type of spells Topaz can use focus largely on the mental plane. With the development of her mutation, she began to drift away from her foster parents' original teachings, forging her own magical path.

One fun ability that she'd just begun to experiment with right before Alice's death involved the idea of karma — causing things to happen to people based on their emotions and actions. One attempt to use it involved witnessing a mugging one day while she was in town. A man took a woman's purse, and as he was running away a flower pot fell off a window sill and onto his head. On a different occasion, she witnessed a teenage boy spending the last of his money to buy an ice cream for his crying little brother. As they were walking away, the boy happened to look down and find a ten pound note.

It's important to note that: A) Topaz has no control over the events that will take place. A subtle suggestion is planted in the back of a person's mind (like the boy choosing just that moment to look down at the sidewalk), causing them to take a route that will lead either somewhere good or bad, depending on the person's emotions. The suggestion is random, however. It depends largely on how much energy is available to Topaz in the moment — the more energy she has, the more long-reaching the consequences of the suggestion will be. So, for example, if she'd been surrounded by panicking people when she witnessed the mugging and tried to cast the spell, the mugger probably would have turned into the street and gotten hit by a car. B) Topaz herself does not cause these events. For example, the flower pot was going to fall whether or not the man mugged the woman. Topaz just made it so that the man was under the pot when it fell.

When Topaz draws energy off of other people's emotions, it renders them temporarily apathetic (usually lasting anywhere from five minutes to half an hour, depending on the strength of the emotions). In turn, she takes the emotions on herself, making for a very crowded emotional plane at times. Again, depending on how strong the emotions are (and how many people she drew off of), this can last for minutes or for hours. This effect is negated when she draws energy off her own emotions, though due to the limited power source (she can only get so much energy from herself) the spells aren't nearly as strong.

She possesses a vague ability to astral project, taught to her by Luca in the early days of her training, but that was a test in patience for him, and to this day she can't manage it for longer than thirty seconds.

The number of spells she can perform is limited right now - she can do up to two within a twelve-hour time frame without seriously endangering herself, though she discovered throughout the events of Operation: A Hammer To Fall that she can push that limit if need be.

Equipment

A journal given to her by Kurt for her sixteenth birthday. She writes in it in Hindi so no one else can read it.

Trivia

She's a closet fan of the Harry Potter series, having read them all with Alice and seen all the movies.

Once she's set a person straight, she will not respond to Vimala - that is, in her mind, a random name given to her by strangers. Topaz, at least, has some connection to her and her past (as weak as it may seem).

Always wears her topaz pendant.

She has a strong aversion to the dark. It's not a fear, don't call it a fear (due to the events of Something Slender (and Awful) it seems safe to classify it as a fear).

Fluent in Hindi; even after moving to England, she held on to her native language to stay connected to her home.

She's a vegetarian.

Topaz learned the hard way through the events of Somewhere I Belong that she is unable to safely drain more than one person at a time.

Plots

2012

Operation: A Hammer To Fall

2013

Something Slender (and Awful)

Somewhere I Belong

She Sells Sea Shells

Meta

Player: Sam

E-mail:

AIM:

Player Icon Base: Naomi Scott

Meta Trivia

Topaz is Sam's second character and baby, introduced in October 2012. Samvrutha Sunil was her PB until September 2013.