Jenna Sampson

CHARACTER: Jenna Sampson

WRITER: Andria M

E-MAIL: Ashalenn@juno.com

WRITER'S AGE: legal

CHARACTER'S AGE: 26

NATURE: human, PSI

DESCRIPTION: Jenna is 5' 7", and weighs 150 pounds with an hourglass figure many men have admired. She has an air of fragility that is more felt than seen. With hair so dark a brown it's almost black, shimmering with red highlights and hanging to her butt when she leaves it loose, she often attracts admiring looks, which she is oblivious too. She tends to put it up in a braid or a bun to keep it out of her way and rarely leaves it loose. Her eyes are a deep chocolate brown.

PERSONALITY: A very shy, quiet girl, she tends to avoid large crowds as they make her uncomfortable. She is very nurturing and will go out of her way to help someone. She keeps a tight control over her emotions, afraid of what happened when she lost control as a child (see the history below). Happiest when she can fade into the background, she enjoys watching people and observing them in small groups. It fascinates her to watch the interaction between them as she herself was a recluse while growing up. She tends to be very patient.

ABILITIES: She is a natural healer, with a strong gift but little training, and a weaker gift in empathy, which she has only recently started using again. In order to heal someone, she needs to be able to maintain contact with them, over the area that is hurt. Thus, to heal a broken arm, she would need to hold the arm. With her empathy, she has a range of about 25'. However, in large crowds her sensing abilities tends to be muddled by the number of emotions. Extremely strong emotions can be sensed up to 50'. With people she really cares about emotionally she can form an empathic bond that increases the radius to about 10 miles. At the moment, that would just be her parents since she hasn't allowed anyone else close enough to care about. She has excellent shields, and was taught that it was wrong to intrude upon another person without permission, so except when she's counseling people, she blocks out everything around her. Strong pain and fear can get through, as those are the two emotions she is most attuned to. She usually gets the strongest thing a person is feeling, unless she works at it to read more and to separate the nuances to get to the *why* and the *what* that is causing it. As she is mostly self trained, she has a hard time separating the emotions, and so tends to not read any deeper than she absolutely has to. She has a very high metabolism from the energy her body uses. She unconsciously heals everyday things like flu bugs,colds, and the like, and literally cannot skip a meal without suffering the effects of hypoglycemia. She tends to keep protein and energy bars stashed about to combat this. as she doesn't consciously control her self-healing, and wouldn't know how to stop it if she tried. Not having consciously used her gift since she was a child, it is very rusty and she has only the vaguest memories of what to do. She has a knack, stemming from her empathy and sensitivity to energies, of being able to tell different types of were's apart.

WEAKNESSES: Typical human weaknesses, although as long as getting hurt doesn't kill her outright, she is likely to survive, even without proper medical attention, due to her healing ability. However, the physical drain can, depending on the severity of the healing, cause her to pass out and go into a coma-like state which, if she doesn't get any food or nourishment for her body, she remains in. From events in her past, she is terrified of werewolves, though work has helped her overcome this for a large part. She still has problems with male werewolves if they come into her personal space. She cannot do any empathic work around large groups of people in pain (i.e. a hospital type setting) because lowering her shields somewhere like that would give her an incapacitating migraine.

HISTORY: Although both her mother and father were "nulls" without any psychic gifts, it became apparent at an early age that Jenna had a strong healing gift. From the time she could walk she would find strays that were hurt and bring them home to nurse to health. Neighbors would often laugh about how miraculous the animal's recoveries were, but other than that not much notice was taken of her. She was always the quiet one, while her brother, who was older by two years, took center stage. Daren was the athlete, the smart one, the "perfect little angel". And to her, as too everyone else, he was. She worshipped him, tagging along like a puppy, and he, with theatrical groaning and rolling of the eyes, let her. Her early childhood was a normal, happy one. She preferred things as they were, preferred being able to fade into the background, as she became very uncomfortable when she was the center of attention, it often giving her a headache from what she though was stress, but later learned was a budding empathy of which she had no control over and no shields to block emotions with. They lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the mountains. It was a fairly small city that was smack in the middle of one of the largest pine forests in North America, with, indeed, an abundance of animals for her to make friends with. Everything changed when she was 11, though. Her parents had recognized her healing ability a few years earlier, and also recognized that they had no idea how to help her control it (and frankly they were getting tired of the house being a zoo, between the dogs, cats, and whatever else she'd found that day) so they put out a discreet ad in the paper looking for a teacher. Luckily they found a good one. As gifts don't normally begin manifesting until puberty, Theresa, her teacher, was a bit unsure how to handle a quiet and withdrawn 8 year old. Lessons had been progressing slowly, more along the lines of "control it for now, learn how to use it when you're older" until one day when a girl in the neighborhood fell ten feet from the top of a storage shed. The child's arm was broken in three places and her shoulder was dislocated. Jenna, who was less than 30 feet from the accident, doubled up in pain at the same moment it happened, and without knowing exactly why ran out into their yard and then headed unerringly to the girl. She knelt beside her and took her arm, instinct guiding her as she tried to return it to the way it *should* be, from the way it *was*. She succeeded, not in fully healing it, but in healing enough that the bones and shoulder were in the right place and had begun fusing so that if they weren't jarred they would finish healing without any loss of mobility. She had never done anything like that before, but the girl's pain had called her, and she found once she began trying to help she couldn't stop. Although she ended up passing out after she finished from exhaustion and a reaction headache. Unfortunately, by the time Jenna had finished, a crowd had gathered around and seen what she had done. Thanking her profusely, the mother passed the story around to everyone she knew about the miracle child who'd "saved her daughter". After that day, people in the neighborhood treated her like a pet at a circus, poking and prodding and wanting her to heal every little scrape and cut they had. From this, she learned it was safer to hide and pretend to be just like everyone else. After a few months of this behavior, Jenna begged her parents to move. Her empathy had grown stronger, and even with the shields Theresa had taught her, the avariciousness of their neighbors who kept wanting more and more from her was intruding and exhausting her. Her brother Daren and she had grown closer, banding together against the outsiders, and he'd begun getting into fights to protect his little sister, straining the situation further. With their daughter close to a nervous breakdown, and their son close to being kicked out of school, both parents decided that it would indeed be better if they moved elsewhere and began looking for new housing. They ended up buying a couple acres of land about 15 miles from the city, and moved into a trailer while her father looked for a contractor to build them a house. With the stress of so many people gone, and receiving dispensation to move to a different school, Jenna's nerves began to recover, and things settled down again. Everything changed about a year later, when she was twelve. She and Daren went on a camping trip together, along with a few of his friends. She still adored her brother, and was so proud that he thought she was big enough to go along. The first night was peaceful, but on the second, there were odd rustlings in the forest, and she thought she saw shadows moving just beyond the light. The boys were busy joking and talking and didn't notice, and so Jenna bit her lip and stayed silent, not wanting them to think she was being a baby that was scared of the dark. But it hadn't been that. Though it was nearly a week away from the full moon, apparently a rogue werewolf had been passing through the woods. In front of her eyes, the boys were slaughtered, ripped apart and partially eaten. The combined rage of the shifter and the agony and terror of the boys' deaths almost broke her mind...she was screaming continuously, a high, broken keen, by the time he got to her brother...and ripped him apart as well. Perhaps the were had left her for last, seeing her as the weakest, but when he reached for her and grabbed her by the throat, lifting her, she felt detached, numb. She knew she was going to die, but as he held her there, she felt him, as she had felt the girl she healed, inside her head, but unlike the last time when she had seen what was *wrong* and fixed it, this time she saw, with her extra training, what was *right* and the terror and rage at her brother's death fused, as she twisted her healing power and threw it into him, not to fix but to hurt....and burst his heart. They found her three days later, after search parties had been called when the children didn't return, still sitting where he had dropped her, the dead shapeshifter at her feet and the bodies of the boys scattered around her. It was two years until she spoke again. She refused any more training in healing, horrified at what she'd done with her gift. She knew the were had deserved it and she didn't feel remorse for killing it...but she was terrified of the dark rush, the sheer pleasure she'd felt when she felt her brother's killer die. She returned to public schools when she was sixteen, her gifts, both in healing and empathy, tightly locked down and ignored. She buried herself in books, shying away from people, from physical contact, and from anything that would make her have to feel. After graduating high school near the top of her class, she went to Iowa State University on a scholarship, wanting nothing more than to get away from Arizona and the memories. She began with a major in English, but when a creative writing course had the students do a "brainstorming" project, all the pain and horror she'd been suppressing came bubbling to the surface, and she realized she would have to start dealing with it. She changed her major to Sociology and took a second major in Psychology, thinking that, perhaps, instead of hiding from people, she could learn to understand them, and to understand herself. She became determined not to lie to herself or hide from herself again. The four years she spent in school there she also spent going through heavy therapy, and she kept writing, filling journal after journal, pouring out her pain. Although she was still quiet, still reserved, much of the pain that had locked her into a shell had been relieved, and though it was a continual struggle she fought against becoming a recluse again. She began trying to get to know and work with some of the local werewolves, to get over her instinctive terror of them. Though when she started even the children made her freeze in fear, she made progress until she only had problems when her personal space was invaded by adult males. After she'd graduated she received a large trust fund her grandparents had left for her, and used part of the money to work on a Masters degree in Psychology, trying to understand more of herself and heal her old wounds. After that, she took some time to travel the country, and discovered that she was drawn to trauma victims, to those who had seen or experienced violence, and found that she had to try to help them. She began to use her empathy again, as it helped her tell when a patient was lying to her or to themselves, though she still remained afraid of letting her healing gift loose. She never stayed in one place more than a couple months, not letting herself get to attached to anyone, but while there she would volunteer at battered women's shelters, halfway houses, anywhere she felt a calling. After two years of that, though, she realized she needed more direction in her life and decided to go back to school and work on getting her Masters in Sociology. She moved to Sanctuary for two reasons, first being to study the interaction between humans and supernatural creatures, such as weres and vampires in a small community, and how it affected the social makeup of a small town. The second was her parents had recently moved there and after barely seeing them on holidays for over a decade, she decided it was time to try and mend fences.

	Return