[OOC] Reference - This isn't real.

[ellectrical]

Before she was born, Robert Bishop knew his daughter would be different. It seemed inevitable, really, and she wouldn't have to stumble on it like he had.

After she was born, he didn't waste time in trying to find out how she was different, and what that could mean for them. While tests revealed she carried the genetic marker her father did, for her first four years, she didn't seem to be anything more than a normal little girl. She wasn't a prodigy; she didn't do anything out of the ordinary. Her speech was delayed and stunted from spending most of her life in and out of labs and isolated rooms, and she only recognized a few consistent faces. Her father's wasn't among them; he lost interest in her to pursue other projects as those she was left with attempted to stress her into manifesting through intense mental engagement, to the point of duress.

But it worked. During one such session when she was four, the girl opened her hand and sparks snapped up from nowhere.

And with a loss of resources to power the modern world high among concerns for the future, especially among the Owls, Bob saw a goldmine like even he couldn't have imagined.

The girl became referenced as Elle, and for eight years was tested, more than anything, in ways that could force her to produce more wattage. She was rarely treated as much more than a potentially powerful battery, and grew to need to almost constantly produce electricity. But she could never produce the kind of energy her father and his colleagues were looking for. Her maximum output was enough to power a New York City block for five hours, and it nearly put her in cardiac arrest. The most obvious explanation – that Elle's ability was meant to be for her, for her own use, her own protection – was ignored by those who wished so badly for her to help serve some greater good.

So they decided to start over, erase her memories and reboot her like a machine. Start from scratch. And for that, they had an eighteen-year-old from Haiti. He was supposed to enter the room, put his hand on her forehead, and take everything.

But instead, that boy gave the thirteen-year-old girl the first embrace she'd ever had, and asked her a simple question:

"Can you keep a secret?"


Instead of taking her memories, he opened a Bible and made her to memorize words and names she didn't understand. It was all the telepaths heard when they tried to listen to her, and the Group had turned its attention to something that would be more useful as the paranoia among its members increased. They no longer prodded her to produce as much electricity as she could, but to blast apart targets and knock people out. She learned French and Japanese and Russian in broken increments, so they all became mixed up in her mind, but she responded correctly when cued. After two years she could hit every target just as she was supposed to, modifying her voltage and amperage appropriately. She memorized faces and names and information on potential targets.

But when they asked her to shock someone's heart into a fatal irregular rhythm, or incinerate another to death, the same words echoed in her mind: You shall not kill. When they asked her to make people scream, she only heard herself.

What it came down to was that she didn't want to do it. And that wasn't something she was meant to know how to do.

They tried sending the boy to her again, but he kept telling her the same thing – and when she begged him once to take it, because maybe then she'd be able to just do as she was told when they asked her to torture, to kill, he insisted it was better this way. That those things were wrong, and that her fear of and aversion to them was right. They couldn't make her the cruel killer they wanted as long as she still had her own life.

But they grew impatient with her; only so many things can be done with a failed experiment. Sometimes the only thing left is to terminate it.

And for the first time in her life, Bob Bishop intervened on behalf of his daughter. He asked a man named Noah Bennet to smuggle the sixteen-year-old out, risking both of their positions in the Group and probably their lives. They managed it with the Haitian. Her silence and trust of Him made her easy to transport, and once she was out of the country, the Haitian did as Bob had instructed – he erased Elle's memories of Noah, and Noah and Bob's memories of the mission at all. Elle had simply disappeared.

Living in hiding meant having to learn to not stand out. Elle could move on her own, but he frequently had to teach her how to behave and how to respond to things she'd never been exposed to. She couldn't work, or go out for more than simple errands, because he said she wouldn't understand people, she couldn't communicate, they would notice how she twitched every few minutes, occasionally dazed off when she heard buzzing, didn't understand music or literature or even the flow of time. After three years, she ended up in Tangier, living off a steady income from a source she didn't know (her father's gold), and posing almost decently as a French student. If an eccentric one - while her French could be flawless, she still spoke English like a second language, not her native one, still struggled for certain words, risked seizing if she wasn't constantly producing electricity. Elle still didn't understand when he tried to tell her about the Millennium Group, or the book she'd memorized and still recited. (He didn't try to explain her father.)

But she believed him when he told her that she didn't want to be found.