Name: Jennifer Monroe-Kennedy Tradition: Virtual Adepts Concept: Conspiracy theorist
Nature: Rebel Demeanor: Deviant Essence: Questing
Strength 1 Charisma 3 Perception 3
Dexterity 3 Manipulation 2 Intelligence 5 (logical)
Stamina 3 Appearance 3 Wits 3
Alertness 2 Drive 2 Computer 5
Awareness 2 Firearms 3 Computer Hacking 5
Dodge 2 Meditation 1 Culture 2
Expression 3 Research 3 Mathematics 3
Stealth 2 Occult 2
Technology 3 Science 2
Arete 4 Willpower 7 Resonance: Static 1 (Geometric)
Spheres: Correspondence 4, Entropy 1, Forces 3, Life 1, Matter 1, Mind 2, Prime 2
Foci: Correspondence – the Internet, Entropy – PDA/scanner, Forces – mathematics, Life - geometry, Matter – 3D modeling program, Mind – computer programming, Prime – HTML
Backgrounds: Avatar 4, Contacts 2, Destiny 5, Dream 3, Resources 2
Merits: (none)
Flaws: Amnesia, Crucial Component (electricity), Defective Sense (sight), Ineptitude (driving)
Gear (Carried): Handgun, extra clip w/ bullets, Trinary laptop computer, cell phone, PDA
Equipment (Owned): Red Volkswagen beetle, desktop computer, laptop, misc. techological gear
Background: Jennifer was born in a secret underground bunker on June 2, 1962. Her mother was none other than Marilyn Monroe; her father, John F. Kennedy, Jr. She would later learn that she was not only the product of an illegitimate presidental liaison, but a plan wrought by a secret organization. By capitalizing upon her all-star parentage (and their tragic, untimely deaths), they planned to turn Jennifer into the ultimate celebrity, a woman with her mother’s beauty and performance skills and her father’s political shrewdness. Through her, they would control the populace for a purpose so secret, even Jennifer hasn’t been able to figure it out. Jennifer never met her mother, who died (or was killed?) a few months after her birth. She was told that her father came to see her once as a baby, but she doesn’t remember it, and he was assassinated when she was a year old. She grew up in the care of two agents who posed as her parents. She knew them only as Mother and Father, and they trained her in all the social skills a young woman might need to make her way into the public eye. She showed a decent aptitude for life in the limelight, but was never truly interested in becoming what they wanted her to be.
At first, Jennifer’s “family” moved almost every year. A rival faction within the government had learned of the project, decided it had gone too far, and set out to put a stop to it by wiping out everyone involved. In the summer of 1969 they were living in a small town in Nebraska...and one muggy afternoon, July 21 to be exact, seven-year-old Jennifer found herself sitting on her living room floor, positively glued to the TV. For the first time in recorded history, human beings were walking on the moon. Although she was so young, Jennifer had no problem grasping the magnitude of the event. She’d never thought people could do such a thing. It seemed so wonderful...almost like magic. As she watched, Jennifer began to speculate on how it was possible to send a man to the moon. She’d heard it took a lot of computer power—and if a computer could do that, what else could it do? As her thoughts spun out of control, she watched Neil Armstrong step out of the lunar lander and say his famous words...and a voice behind her said, “You could do that, if you wanted. All that and more.” Shocked, Jennifer turned in the direction of the voice and saw a man in a spacesuit standing behind her. He seemed to have appeared out of thin air. At first, she wanted to run screaming from the room. But as she stared at the man, she felt curiosity and wonder beginning to grow inside her. “What do you mean?” she replied.
“You have a rare and wonderful gift,” the man said. “I will teach you how to use it, if you’ll let me.” So Jennifer took the spaceman into her secret hideaway in the backyard and listened to everything he had to tell her about how to do magic. She didn’t understand most of it, and he disappeared as soon as her questions started getting too specific. But she took to heart the parts she was able to comprehend, and started doing what he’d told her to do—making gadgets, learning more about computers and magic, trying to make something that would take her to the moon or beyond. Jennifer’s first working project accidentally blew up the garage. She let her parents think she’d been playing with matches. They weren’t happy. They had to move again. It didn’t matter to her. After all, they weren’t really her mother and father. All that mattered to her was the new skill she’d discovered, and how she could use it to find out more about the world around her.
By the early 1970s, the rival groups had lost interest, and Jennifer and her “parents” settled down in the Atlanta suburbs. Having learned her lesson in Nebraska, Jennifer put a lot of effort into hiding her abilities and dabblings in magic from the rest of the world. She was untrained, confused, and more than a little frightened...which is how David Holloway found her in 1971, at the beginning of her fourth-grade year. He lived three blocks away, rode the bus to school with Jennifer, and was seven years older than her. He was also a relatively powerful Virtual Adept who had been training under his science teacher for almost two years and had progressed very rapidly through the ranks of his tradition. He recognized Jennifer for what she was and, despite the age gap between fourth-graders and high-school sophomores, befriended her quite easily. She begged him to teach her the “cool tricks” he knew, and he agreed.
Jennifer was David’s first student, so her training was full of trial and error. At first she progressed slowly and haltingly, but after a year or two she had been completely accepted by the other tradition members. David soon became not only her mentor but her best friend. It was from David that she first gained her interest in the government conspiracy that had spawned her. She hadn’t thought much of it until it came up in a late-night lab conversation. David was horrified at first, then fascinated. He had always been fascinated by the supernatural, the occult, the paranormal, and the just plain weird, and wanted to investigate the strange happening right in his own backyard. They took a few steps toward finding out about the shadow organization, but had little luck.
Noticing Jennifer’s outright brilliance and boredom with school, David and his mentor convinced the school to let Jennifer skip two grades. At the age of 12 Jennifer entered high school. Despite her young age, she held her own in her studies, although she was anything but popular (which didn’t matter, since she preferred to spend time with adults and mages, anyway). And David’s geeky Sleeper friends were surprisingly quick to accept her, assuring her some friends (if not a guarantee against teasing, of which she experienced plenty) throughout the rest of her high school and college career. In 1974, David enrolled in a local university and moved into Glass House, a chantry in downtown Atlanta. He wanted Jennifer to move there, too. Of course her “parents,” still clinging to the hope of creating an uber-celebrity despite the fact that their organization had all but dissolved, refused. So Jennifer ran away. After a perfunctory search for their missing child, Mother and Father seemed to lose interest and moved away. She never saw either of them again, and has never really missed them.
Jennifer spent the next three years attending high school, living in Glass House, and learning all she could about magic and technology. In 1977, Jennifer graduated high school with a very respectable GPA. She entered the same university as David, where she studied math and the brand-new field of computer science. Her life was rosy and perfect at first. But in the middle of her sophomore year, she started receiving letters in her mailbox that said nothing but, “We know who you are. We are coming for you.” At first she didn’t take them seriously—until one February night in 1979, when an attempt was made to kidnap her. Jennifer and her fellow mages managed to dispose of the kidnappers, after learning from one of them that Jennifer’s “parents” had sent them. Apparently the organization was interested in her again—but the last thing she wanted to do was what they wanted her to. Jennifer convinced David and the others that she needed protection from her attackers, and they agreed to hide her until things cooled down. Jennifer dropped out of school and spent the next six months trying to evade her pursuers while David tried to find a more permanent solution. Finally, in late May, he talked a few colleagues researching cryogenic freezing techniques to put Jennifer in a state of hibernation. Then he’d fake her death, wait for things to blow over, and unfreeze her within a month or so. Jennifer was apprehensive, but she saw no other option and agreed. On June 4, 1979, she went into hibernation in a secret lab outside of Atlanta.
While Jennifer slept, she had a dream (or so she thought at the time). She dreamed that she was born Jennifer Baker, in 1980, to Jim and Debbie Baker in Huntsville, Alabama. Her father worked for NASA at the Huntsville Space Center. Her mother was an elementary school teacher. She was an only child who led a thoroughly normal childhood, with a stable middle-class family, a safe town, and plenty of friends. She did well in school, particularly math and science, and dove into the booming computer business with gusto. She could spend hours just sitting in front of her computer, writing her own programs, figuring out how it all worked. She wanted to be an astrophysicist, like her father. Her life was perfect. Her future was bright. Her only problems were the foolish troubles of childhood: fights with best friends, confusion over boyfriends, test anxiety. She had nothing to worry about.
In the spring of 1997, Jennifer’s father lost his job. He was unemployed for several months until finding work in a research lab in Atlanta. The family pulled up their roots and set off for Georgia. At the beginning of her senior year, Jennifer was forced to leave behind her school and all her friends and start over in a new place. It was a very difficult time for her. Although she was smart, she struggled in her new school and saw her grades slipping as never before. She was overwhelmed and miserable. Her only friends were her computer, the Internet, and her math teacher, a man named David Holloway. She’d walked into his class on her first day in school and liked him right away. Soon they’d started talking after classes and forming a real friendship. He loved conspiracies and alien abduction stories and all sorts of weird things like that, and taught her to enjoy them, too. He was a mentor to her, always willing to listen to her and help with any problem she might have (computer-related or otherwise). He’d even shown her a few amazing computer tricks she’d never even thought were possible.
In 1998, a few months before graduation, Jennifer was sitting in her room and working on a particularly difficult science assignment. She’d been struggling in physics and knew that if she didn’t pass the class, she wouldn’t graduate. But she just couldn’t bring herself to work up any interest for it. She set her book aside, sat down at her computer, and began to surf the Internet. After wandering aimlessly for awhile, she suddenly remembered an address David had told her about. She typed it in, and couldn’t believe what she saw. Unbelievably complex equations floated across the page. Weird geometric forms swirled before her eyes. And suddenly, a voice said, “This is what awaits you if you Awaken.” She couldn’t say she understood it, but she shrugged and said, “Okay.” She opened her eyes...
...Into a lab outside of Atlanta, with David standing over her and shaking her awake. The year was 1998. Jennifer’s past came back to her in a flash. She tried expressing it to David, and he seemed shocked. “What are you talking about? None of that ever happened.” He swore her second life was true. She told him it had been a dream. He thought she had gone crazy, but refused to take her to a doctor. She asked him why. He only demanded that she come with him. She saw no choice but to agree. David seemed to be on the run from someone. He wouldn’t tell Jennifer anything that had happened to him in the 18 years she believed she’d spent sleeping, nor explain anything else. He believed her Awakening had driven her mad, claimed over and over that her “dream” was true, and seemed bent on proving her “delusion” wrong with mountains of evidence against the existence of her conspiracy. Soon she began to doubt everything about her past.
One thing David said was true, though; someone was following him. They went on the road again, and she spent a good six months on the run with David, travelling all around the country, never sure what was really happening, always only one step ahead of their pursuers. In Miami they faced off against a government agent who Jennifer shot to death—but not before he killed David. She mourned her mentor’s loss, but part of her was glad she no longer had to deal with his double-talk. More than anything, she was upset that she hadn’t been able to pry any answers out of him.
Jennifer went back to Atlanta, got an apartment and a job as a computer programmer, and spent a year trying to forget the confusion of her past and her magely heritage. But she found herself drawn to the very things David had loved: conspiracies, the paranormal, the strange and bizarre. In late 1998 she founded conspiracytheorist.org, her website which became very popular, very fast. It soon attracted the attention of some notable people, among them a powerful Virtual Adept named Gabriel. Jennifer and Gabriel began to talk through email, and he became her mentor about a year after David’s death. Since then, she has returned to the life of a mage with a vengeance and a supreme dedication to learning the truth, spreading information, and finding out what really happened to her.
To this day, Jennifer is unable to determine which version of her past is true and which is pure invention and dream. She remembers both lives in exquisite detail, and both seem equally real (or unreal, as the case may be.) She prefers the first version, but there are still so many unanswered questions about both: Why did the secret organization suddenly want her back? Why was she kept asleep for so long? How did she learn magic? How much did David really know? Who is she, really? She still doesn’t know, but she has dedicated her life to digging through the lies to get to the truth that is in the world—and the truth in her own life.
Recently, most of Jennifer’s time and energy has gone into bringing the members of her cabal closer together as they establish their chantry in Aminus, Oregon. Also, after several years’ worth of sexual tension, she has finally begun a relationship with Gabriel. She realized she loved him after a Paradox backlash temporarily turned him into stone, but Gabriel’s discovery of the existence of his wife and son (and Jennifer’s hesitation) kept anything else from happening. They exchanged their “I love you”s the night before Gabriel died in the process of killing his son, Tim, a powerful member of Iteration X. Jennifer was distraught until she discovered Gabriel’s backup plan—he had downloaded his entire personality (minus the memories of Elaine and Tim) into the Digital Web, allowing his Avatar to live on as a free-floating AI which manifests as the Microsoft office assistant. What happened during the three days after Jennifer discovered this is none of your business.
Appearance: Jennifer is average height (5’5”) and
somewhat underweight (121 lbs). Her
hair is short, shaggy, and looks as though it was cut at home with a dull pair
of scissors (which it was). Its color
is subject to change, since she gets bored with it easily and is perpetually
dyeing it, in shades the stranger and brighter, the better. (At the moment it’s a vivid orange-red. Her natural color is dirty blonde, not that
anyone other than herself would know that...)
She wears glasses with thick black rims to correct her nearsightedness;
behind the glasses, her eyes are bluish-grey.
Her style of dress is outlandish, flamboyant, and unusual, consisting
mainly of thrift-store finds. Most
commonly she is seen in a button-down shirt (either a man’s dress shirt or
something loud and polyester) with the top three buttons undone, jeans, and
beat-up high-top shoes. She wears a lot
of jewelry: three silver studs in her right ear, four in her left, a ring in
her right eyebrow, and various silver necklaces and rings as desired. She pays little mind to how she looks or
what people think of her, unless she’s trying to shock them.
Personality: “Subtle” is not a word you associate with Jennifer. In all areas of her life, she tends to burst in without warning, make grandiose entrances, and alert the world to her presence. She saves her subtlety for delicate hacking operations. When she does something, she goes all out and doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. Despite her penchant for snooping around for juicy tidbits of knowledge, manipulation and deceit in the social arena aren’t in her nature. In Jennifer’s book, information is free, and everyone has a right to know what she knows, if they so desire. She is outgoing, gregarious, and always ready to make new friends and exchange information. The truth is out there, and by God, she’s going to get to the bottom of it and then share it whether or not anyone is listening. Most people either find her automatically obnoxious or undeniably fascinating. With Jennifer, there are very few shades of grey. However, one of her great strengths is her non-judgmentalism. She is more than willing to hear everyone out, regardless of how much their views or opinions may clash with hers. If she disagrees, she won’t hesitate to say so. But in the end, she is a truly tolerant and open-minded individual who lets everyone have their say in the interest of continuing the flow of information. Jennifer speaks loudly and rapidly, jumping from topic to topic in a manner that can be hard to follow at first. When excited or otherwise emotional, she develops a truly foul mouth and tends to intersperse four-letter words with moments of brilliant intellectual discourse. She is fascinated by the culture and events of the eighteen years she believes she missed, particularly the ‘80s, and frequently seeks out music, trends, and styles that went out decades ago. At heart, she is a true rebel without a cause and will frequently strike out against something simply because it’s popular or widely accepted. However, she develops unshakable opinions on most of the causes she stays with for any amount of time and will fight tirelessly to uphold them. Jennifer has a strong interest in making all information free, all the time, and essentially getting to the bottom of whatever truth may be out there. But what she really wants to know is the true story of her childhood. She has a strong interest in gathering any other kind of random information she can get her hands on, particularly data on the conspiracies she details on her website (the Kennedy assassination in particular), but researching Area 51 and the like will always take a backseat to exploring her own past. Most of her free time goes into surfing the Internet, making connections, and digging through public records in the hopes of finding anything about what really happened in her past.
No question about it, Jennifer is my favorite character
ever (if only because I worked my ass off to come up with her background). The group in which I play her hasn’t always
been the most stable (lots of player, character, and plot changes, for reasons
we won’t get into here), but I’ve kept coming back week after week in order to
keep playing her. In particular, her
relationship with Gabriel and her interactions with other members of the cabal
(especially Bria and Kenley) have been a delight to roleplay. I can hardly wait to find out what happens
next…