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Aquerna

Aquerna in her Wondercute uniform. By Rosebunny, using artflow.ai.

Anna Raquel Parsons, codename Aquerna, is the avatar of a squirrel spirit, and a member of Whateley Academy's Class of 2010, living in Dickinson Cottage. She can talk with squirrels - they view her as one of them, just a little bigger. She is a member of the Underdogs, the Parkour Hooligans, Wondercute, and although she doesn't realize it, the Friends of Ayla. As of Fall 2007, she is the leader of the Underdogs training team.[1]

MID[]

MID as of 2006-12:[2]
Diane was nice enough to post her original entry for Aquerna to the New Character Concepts: Guidelines for Posting a Character / Concept for feedback thread on the Crystal Hall Forums. Most of it is here. Which is a good thing, since the post was lost in the Forum Crash of 2011.

Mutant Identification Card
Code name AQUERNA
Ratings Avatar-1, Martial arts - basic
Techniques Tree climbing, Jumping away
Weak vs Magic, Psi, Speedsters, Fliers, Bricks, Energizers, Warpers, More powerful avatars, Devises
Backup / Team Affiliation Underdogs

Stories[]

Main Character[]

Physical Description[]

Anna has 'plain brown' hair and eyes and is perky and cute. She's got the spirit of the squirrel! What did you expect? She's pretty cute but not beautiful by baseline standards, so she's background noise at Whateley. She has low expectations for herself, so this doesn't surprise her. She comes from a low-income family in Zanesville, Ohio, who all but disowned her after manifestation.

She used to be fat and nearsighted, but her spirit took care of it (even if she can't figure out how she got a squirrel spirit in Zanesville).

Powers[]

As the avatar of the squirrel, she's stronger and faster and quicker than she used to be. She has roughly the quickness and speed of an Exemplar-3, roughly the strength of an EX-2 her size, and an unusually good leap for her strength. (Running broad jump: 50'; standing broad jump: 25') The leap is in part due to the odd change in her bones and muscles, making her about 10% lighter than someone her size ought to be. She heals at roughly the rate of a Regen-2. She also has lost any fear of heights. She can scramble up and down trees, buildings, any place she can get the slightest purchase, and faster than a chipmunk. She can evaluate a potential landing spot instantly and know whether it will hold her weight. Her nails have gotten strong enough to climb up concrete or brick walls. She has abnormally good hearing and an abnormally sharp sense of smell. Her eyesight is abnormally sharp: she can read a bulletin board from across a room. She can understand squirrels, speak to them, and command them (in force if need be). Squirrels automatically love her, and will follow her all over campus if she doesn't ask them to stop. She loves them too, and is always sneaking food out for them. Spring will be the hardest time of year for the squirrels of Whateley, and she'll be sneaking nuts and grains out to her furry friends all during the season.

Note: it has since been revealed that her spirit can sense magic.[3]

Avatars often have some of their behaviour influenced by their animal spirits, and Aquerna is no exception: on Spring 2007, her hormonal levels skyrocketed, affecting her self-control -- a situation she was unprepared for due to inadequate class planning by her faculty advisor. Since then, she is taking hormone depressants and Deprovestia to help her deal with it.[4]

She appears to be hosting Ratatoskr of Norse Mythology.[5]

But you're the one with her, aren't you?" She looked at Ratatoskr quietly. "She's always watching, always learning, and the more she learns the harder she is for someone to pin down. Learning about all the worlds."
[Diamondback] smirked as Ratatoskr chittered at her, admonishing her not to tell. He chittered in a way that told her he intended Aquerna to learn to play and be a child before he taught her to do anything else. Greater lessons could wait until adulthood, when she was ready.[5]

Skills[]

Other than her powers, she's not too skilled. Because of her dad's job, she knows more about junkyards and scrap metal collection than a teenaged girl needs to know. She's really good at cooking and the other things she has learned from her mom. She's been working hard in aikido, but Sensei Ito has only advanced her to an orange belt. So far. She's determined to get a high-degree black belt, and be able to defend herself from stupid bullies. This has become more urgent since she beat Buster in her combat final[2] and he and his friends are now after revenge. Since she's a scholarship student, she's been working as a groundskeeper, which is a job she loves. (She can clear the entire Quad of leaves and twigs in fifteen minutes, just by asking all the nearby squirrels to pile the stuff up where she points.) She's found that she's also really good as an arborist, since she can climb trees like a squirrel, innately assess how sound branches are, and get her little friends to tell her about things like holes inside the trees and weak root systems.

Personality[]

Anna is perky, friendly, and a lot more persistent than she used to be. She's curious about things in general. She doesn't think about how much of that is the squirrel spirit and how much of that is her. She's definitely one of the good guys, even if she doesn't see herself that way. She's not a predator, even if she still eats meat.

She'll stand up for herself and her loved ones if she has to. But she'd rather avoid trouble in the first place. She sees herself as small and insignificant, although it is anyone's guess how much of that is her squirrel spirit and how much of it is being one of the school losers as a kid. She values family and social interactions over personal achievements.

Despite her natural shyness and self-deprecating ways, Aquerna is slowly becoming more assertive and, in the process, someone the other Underdogs may look up to. She memorably defeated one of the least-liked campus bullies in her Final. She regained (by coincidence, but still...) their own clubhouse (from Jeckel).[6] She acted heroically during the Halloween Invasion, and is treated as an equal by the likes of Phase and Zenith.

Anna enjoys Catherine Coulter's Regency romances, although she is slightly embarrassed about it.[7] She is not so shy about being a Twilight fan, but she wouldn't go as far as calling them the best books ever.[8] She hated the ending of Romeo and Juliet.[9]

Weaknesses[]

Her powers are not very awe-inspiring for Whateley, so pretty much anybody at Whateley can clobber her. She's overly curious. She wants to be outside more than before. She has to make an effort not to climb all over things. (She loved doing that Parkour thing that Mister Mahren let her join, but he died, and things aren't the same even if that Caitlin girl asked her to come join them.) She has two front upper teeth that are a little on the large size, and she constantly has to make sure she's not letting them slide out onto her lower lip like a squirrel. She has a major sweet tooth, but she had a bad sweet tooth before she ever manifested.

Notes[]

Phase gives Anna her codename in 4th period Basic Martial Arts on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006.[10] 'Aquerna' is Middle English for 'squirrel', from the Old English word 'acweorna'. Who else besides Phase is going to make that connection? After some jerks teased her about being a 'Squirrel Girl' like in Marvel Comics, Anna has deliberately aimed for a costume like that of Squirrel Girl (but with no tail).

This ends the materials from Diane's post.

Phase also gives her a signature move[10], 'Squirrel Scampers Over Tree Trunk'[8].

Appearances[]

She's in classes with Ayla, and gets mentioned a lot; Ayla likes her.

Mr. Mahren is so mean! She's got detention for running from a bully! What else was she supposed to have done? He's got her running all over the place in really weird ways.[6]

She and the rest of the Faerie Queen Appreciation Society get their picture taken with Fey at the 2006 Halloween Dance. Later that evening, after the craziness started, she rescued Nitro from some of the Tiger Guards.[11]

She is matched against Buster for her Winter term 2006 combat final. Buster wants to hurt her more than he wants to win, and this lets her call upon the squirrels that they've kept on hand for her combat final, just to give her a chance; Buster loses, big time, getting an 'F'. Anna gets an 'A-'.[2]

Anna checks up on her 'little friends', the squirrels and chipmunks who helped her against Buster, and finds out they're going to be dumped out in the cold without any proper preparation; they'll die, all of them! She has to do something about this, somehow! With lots of help from various people, some whom she's never met before (hey, some she's never heard of before), she gets them properly prepped and safely snugged away for the winter. And she gets a boyfriend, to boot! One of the one's she'd never heard of before, Hazmat, without whose help she couldn't have saved her 'little friends'. And he's not freaked out by her talking with squirrels.[7][9][12]

It's not the same without Mr. Mahren, but they still want her to run with them. Which is kinda cool, even if she feels uncomfortable hanging with Zenith and the other Parkour Hooligans who are big names on campus, while she's just an underdog... and now there's a new big noise in the group, what will Eldritch think of Anna?[13]

A date! She's going on a date with Jerry (Hazmat) to Dunwich for pizza and a movie; not the fanciest date, but still, a real live date! The underdog girls get together and get her all prepped for it, and see her off. Its a good date. And when they get back, well, so that's what kisses are all about.[13]

Christmas could have been really depressing, with her family not wanting to have anything to do with the big scary mutant she's turned into, but Rhiannon's folks agree to her staying with them over the holidays. And they're really nice, and it's really nice, even if she does keep thinking about home, and then she stops a mugging so a little girl still has Christmas, and maybe this is the best Christmas ever![8]

Last term she worked with the Excellent Adventure cleaning up around campus, this term she gets to work with Charlie's crew of arborists! It's like her squirrel powers were made for this, but they make sure to teach her how to do it without her powers, because if she did this for a living she'd need to not freak out her clients with amazing squirrel powers. It's really cool![14]

She saves Chaka! Well, kinda, then Rez has to save her. Belphegor sets a trap for Chaka, using a hologram of Generator as the bait, and Anna can see it's a hologram, and gets in front of Chaka so she doesn't get caught, only Anna gets caught, and it had lots of icky tentacles, and when her little friends tried to help her they got shocked, then Rez got the trap to shut down. And Tabby came up with a plan to get Belphegor to stop bothering Chaka by turning his trap on him using her little friends, she wasn't sure about that but they wanted to help so they did. When Belphegor came up in his chair, looking just like a supervillain, her little friends all leapt up on the chair, looking for snacks (which they found) and Belphegor tumbled out of his chair to get away from them, right into his trap, which caught him, and then Rez had the trap do everything Belphegor had built it to do (eww!). And Chaka bought treats for her little friends in thanks, so they sat outside tossing treats to them for a while, even though it was really too cold.[14][15]

Phase invited her to her party in Boston! Anna can't believe it, and keeps expecting her to send someone over to take the invitation back; it's happened to her before, and that was back in Zanesville, and she's so out of her league, she just knows it's going to happen.[16][17] OMG! It was for real! A 767! Limousines! A rented restaurant! Scrumptious food! Phone calls from Boston SWAT? The Kimbas head off to fight The Necromancer? And now some bad guys are here! ADRIENNE![3]

They want her to teach Parkour! Molly and Chou, and Winnie, and Ree, they all want her to teach them Parkour! Eep![17]

OMG! This is SO embarrassing! She totally went into heat, and was crawling all over Jerry, and who knows what might have happened![4]

Classes[]

Fall 2006[]

Winter 2007[]

Spring 2007[]

Fall 2007[]

Associations[]

Family:

  • Father
    • Grandmother
    • Jim (Grandfather)[14]
  • Mother
    • Grandmother (has Alzheimer's)
  • Unknown number of cousins[14]

Whateley Academy:

References[]

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