Stepford Cuckoos
This page is about the Phase 2 incarnation of the character. For other uses, see Stepford Cuckoos (disambiguation).
| Weapon XIV | |
|---|---|
 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 that isn't you. There is no third best. ~Fourteen
Having not been rescued yet, the Stepford Cuckoos are probably still stuck in pods somewhere in Alberta. They will be arriving at the mansion as soon as their controller gets his act together and gets the introduction plot write-up finished.
Contents
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: (link to LJ (x_logs) with date as link text)
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’ll be rescued sometime later. It’s hard to keep track of days and weeks when she keeps being put under for extended periods. Her saviors claim they’re the… X-something. She’s heard of them. Vaguely.
But apparently her mom is a member. Her real mom. Emma Frost. They take her to a mansion in upstate New York.
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?
Powers
Preferably more than one line. Describe how their power works, the limits, the applications.
Equipment
Examples: Illyana's Soulsword, etc
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 Esme's Psychology degree is for more than manipulating people. It is, in her words, 'just a nice perk'.
External Links
Links to the tags for each character in x_communication, x_logs and x_journal.
[html link x_communication posts by tag]
[html link x_journal posts by tag]
[html link x_logs posts by tag]
Plots
2015
Meta
Player: Chris
E-mail:
AIM:
Player Icon Base: (provide html link to IMDB, Wiki etc page)
Meta Trivia
Any curious little things about why the character, if the character had a prior player before you (and who they were), etc.
