InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Shut your pie-hole!"

thegooddoctor_ (thegooddoctor_) wrote,
@ 2025-03-22 14:40:00

xswap

Name: Cecilia Reyes (presumably)
Codename: n/a
Professor/Resident/Student/Etc.: School doctor, medical researcher, and general fiddler with all things science related.

Age: ??? She appears to be in her late 20s / early 30s

Abilities/Powers: Cecilia has a set of bone spikes, three per hand, that emerge from between her knuckles by splitting her skin open. She has enhanced senses of smell, sight, touch, reflexes, speed, and strength. But her defining mutation is her ability to regenerate.

Cecilia can heal any wound. Bullets to the head, dismemberment (so long as her limbs are close enough), having her guts spilled, her flesh and muscle seared from her bones, her eyes plucked out. She heals such wounds within minutes, without scaring, and without fail. More ‘minor’ injuries, the sort that won’t floor her immediately, heal in a matter of moments. There doesn’t seem to be an upper limit on how much damage in a period of time is ‘too much.’ Anything shy of dismemberment, cremation, and scattering the ashes won’t do a damn thing. She can’t even get calluses. Because of her healing ability, it’s hard to tell how old, exactly, Cecilia really is. Especially since part of the healing includes memory loss.

Skills don’t leave her, but incidents, people, places, times… Cecilia theorizes it’s part of her body’s way of protecting herself from the losses and past injuries she may have sustained. Walking around with a permanent cast of PSTD wouldn’t be very helpful. She’s noticed even with recent, violent incidents she knows happened, her memories of the experiences are extremely fuzzy, at best.

Personality:
Cecilia is a woman of infinite patience, if a somewhat caustic tongue. She’s watched the world go through several wars, and the United States in particular go through several Civil Rights movements. She’s had more people die, and live, under her hands than she can count. She’s watched roughly three generations be born, grow up, and die. As such, she has a bit of a ‘been there, done that’ mentality, and her default mannerisms vary between brusque professionalism and exasperated amusement. She is not always the easiest person to get along with - she is often extremely critical, of both herself and others. She tries to manage a balancing act, acknowledging that people can and do make mistakes, and to try to not treat others like they’re teenagers who don’t know better just because they’re younger than she is. She isn’t always successful at this, but she does try.

She has a somewhat conflicted view of personal relationships, stemming from the fact that she feels she’s going to outlive everyone. Provided she doesn't die from some extreme circumstance (she figures falling into a volcano or being shot into the sun should manage to kill her), everyone Cecilia knows is going to die before she does. She only has a little less than a hundred years under her belt, and she’s spent more time moving away than actually watching those she’s bonded with die. But if she doesn’t have an upper cap on how long she can live… it’s inevitable. She’ll happily discuss almost anything under the sun - she loves a good argument - and so long as things remain hypothetical, Cecilia will remain comfortable. Even if Cecilia likes someone, and puts in the effort to see them safe and educated, don’t expect to get any declarations of loyalty or permanence from her. Even calling her a friend can make her a little twitchy, even if she will go to the ends of the earth for you.

For Cecilia, everything is temporary.

So she winds up spending a lot of time reading and on science pursuits. Despite only getting her formal degree four decades ago, she’d kept up with various medical and science journals for as long as the post would deliver copies to her. Not to mention, living as long as she has gives her a lot of time to pursue any particular branch of scientific inquiry that piques her interest, and it’s one of the things that genuinely makes her happy. Her downtime generally involves a lot of internet-browsing (she has come to love the internet), mostly of scientific journals and updates in the medical fields.

History:
Cecilia woke up naked on a beach in Florida in 1913 with no idea who she was, where she was,or how she got there. To this day she has no idea what happened to her prior. But she knew her trade, and her languages. She was a doctor. She’d always been a doctor. And she was well educated. But for a black woman in 1910’s United States, that was a little… unusual. But there weren’t a lot of people living in Florida in the 1910s, and she was a welcome addition to the black communities there. Somewhat. Cecilia was always a bit of an outsider - her diction too foreign for the black communities, her appearance too… well, black, for the white communities. Still, people were happy enough to have her tend their broken bones and gaping flesh wounds and deliver their babies, and she was certainly good at her work.

With nowhere in particular to go, Cecilia stayed. She had a lover or two, but never married, the relationships usually falling apart for want of long term compatibility. She lived in Fort Lauderdale for 20 years, and by then people had noticed something rather peculiar about Cecilia that had nothing to do with her mannerisms, and had everything to do with the fact that Cecilia wasn’t getting any older. Cecilia had always known she was a bit odd - the bone claws that she kept carefully hidden were clue enough - but the lack of aging puzzled her just as much as it disturbed her neighbors.

Cecilia moved on not much after people started making the sign of the cross every time she was in public, and her doctor’s practice ceased being a profitable venture. Thus began the pattern of Cecilia’s life: she would move to a new place, live there as a medic of some capacity for a decade or two, then move on when the neighbors started looking at her funny. However, this became harder and harder to do as documentation became increasingly stringent, and especially as the civil rights movement came into full swing in the 1950s=1960s. At one point, Cecilia was forced to leave town not because she’d lingered too long, but because some of her white neighbors set fire to her house. Then shot her as she tried to flee. It would’ve been a bit difficult to explain her lack of being dead. That and she didn’t particularly want to be around people for a while after that incident.

Cecilia went west, settled near the Texas-Mexican border, and wandered into civilization only for the occasional book or newspaper. It turned out she could take care of herself in the wilderness quite well, her heightened senses letting her easily find food, and her durability letting her survive eating things that would’ve killed people with a lesser constitution. But mice and the occasional coyote aren’t stimulating conversationalists, so by the 1970’s she attempted to rejoin society again. There was yet more paperwork involved, and it was getting harder to forge those sorts of things. Coupled with some advances in technology that had happened when she was being a recluse, simply walking into a job at a hospital as surgeon or some other medical professional wasn’t an option, and no town had a ‘resident doctor’ who might’ve just wandered into town with the profession and a few letters of recommendation.

So Cecilia fudged some paperwork, and went to college instead. Some of it was irritating - she knew a lot more than most who just start out - but some was enlightening, and useful, and some was just pointless time wasting for the sake of a piece of paper. But she had her degree, and soon enough a job, and a paper trail wide enough to convince people that she really existed and was who she said she was.

The problem, as always, was the fact that Cecilia simply didn’t age. There was only so much she could do to play off the ‘aged well’ when the paper trail insisted she was 50, and she looked like she was in her late 20s.

It was 1996 when she first met Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, which was a somewhat alarming experience. Cecilia had spent most of her life hiding her mutation, only two have some strange men approach her out of nowhere for coffee and politics. Cecilia was skeptical at first, but the practicalities of her situation had her conclude that perhaps going somewhere where she didn’t have to lie all the time may be for the best. That, and there was the opportunity to fiddle with all sorts of new equipment and research opportunities.

Cecilia’s been a fixture at the school for roughly twenty years now. Some of the students who are now teachers or fulfill other functions grew up with her around, and it’s entirely possible that Cecilia will be there until the thing turns to ashes and blows away in the wind.

Additional Notes:
Cecilia speaks four languages: English, Spanish (composed primarily of the regional dialects of Central America and the Caribbean), Creole, and German. She learned the German on purpose in the 1990s. The Spanish and Creole languages she can only guess at, since she woke up knowing them in 1913.