Sarah Bright
Human Female

Place of Origin: Boston, Massachusetts

There’s nothing about Sarah that screams (or even whispers) the word mutant. By all appearances, she’s just an ordinary young woman. Ordinary might be a good word to describe her in general, really. She has plainly styled long brown hair, average stature and build, and a quiet demeanor that rarely draws attention her way. Few would call her plain, as she is quite pretty, but Sarah clearly favors a simple, timeless presentation over the latest fashion trends. She went to a private school for most of her youth, and tends to dress like she still does, wearing layered blouses and sweaters in various hues, paired with pleated skirts and tights. She can usually manage a work day in a pair of black heeled pumps, but once she’s on her own time she’s usually quick to trade them for well-worn black Converse chucks that look older than she is.

Sarah is friendly, sociable and has a well-adjusted personality, but she is not an extrovert and seeks solace in low-key environments more often than not. She’s very much a creature of habit, and is quite predictable in terms of her own behavior and personal taste. She has a deep appreciation for the simple things in life, and for those like her, who know and stick to what they like, instead of always chasing new experiences or the latest craze. Her coffee shop peers call her ‘Vanilla Bright,’ and not just because she always orders the same coffee at the same time of day—in the morning before work. This is not to say that Sarah is incapable of change. She’s willing to try new things in order to foster friendships or get what she wants. She also can and will adapt in the face of unavoidable challenges that come her way, but in most cases she will seek to avoid those challenges and stay within her comfort zone, if she can.

Sarah was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle child in a modest upper-class household. Her father is a pediatric oncologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, and her mother is a professor of literature at Harvard University. Both were early achievers, and have held those positions for some time. Sarah would have liked to say that she had a typical upbringing, but she grew up in a three-story town house, and her parents drove luxury sedans with heated leather seats. Her parents valued restraint and modesty, which helped foster an illusion of normalcy, that and they were too busy to teach her any better.

From age five to fifteen Sarah attended an all-girls boarding school overseas in the United Kingdom, the same one her English-born mother had attended as a child. She’d always had the choice of going to a public school, which her older sister opted for, but Sarah preferred the uniformity and routine. As a result she became very independent at a young age, but didn’t have as a strong a connection to her family or community that her other siblings had.

Unlike her namesake, Sarah was never seen as particularly bright. She struggled both academically, and at most every extracurricular activity she ever tried. Reading and public speaking were significant challenges for many years. She had perseverance however, that and a kind and cheerful demeanor that never failed to earn her a steady supply of friends to help her get past her shortcomings. She was charismatic and popular, and many of the other girls wanted to be around her, even if they couldn’t exactly say why. And as she matured, Sarah began to discover that she wanted to be around them too… though she was too afraid to say why. In this respect Sarah learned to hide parts of herself years before she discovered she was a mutant. But unfortunately for her, she was never very good at it.

Sarah’s closest friends figured out that she was gay straight away, but they kept her secret well, and never let on that they knew. Others at her school weren’t as understanding or accommodating though. Sarah was fourteen when her nosy roommate got her hands on her secret diary, where she confided her feelings for some of her classmates. It did not take long at all for photocopies of the more embarrassing diary entries to find their way into every bathroom and meeting place at school. That was the day when everyone she knew found out she was gay… and it was also the day Sarah first suspected that she might be a mutant.

It happened during lunch that day, when Sarah entered the school cafeteria and tried to take up her usual spot at the cool kids table. Of course she was no longer welcome… biggest understatement of her life. Sarah seethed with embarrassment and outrage as most of her ‘friends’ shunned or mocked her. All those ugly feelings boiled over, and caused her mutant abilities to manifest for the first time. The luckier girls only puked on themselves and one another. The unluckier ones? Well… some things are better left unsaid, and hopefully forgotten.

No one could prove that Sarah was responsible for making all of those girls so violently ill, but there was no doubt that she certainly had motive. The school could not expel her for something they could not prove. But they could kick her out for being gay—it being against ‘core values’ and all that BS. Sarah decided to leave and save them the trouble. She probably didn’t have any friends left there, so what was the point in fighting to stay?

At least Sarah’s parents were happy to have her back home with them. For a little while, anyway. Shocked to her core, and fully in the midst of any child’s most chaotic and transformative years, Sarah wasn’t exactly a shoe-in candidate for daughter-of-the-year. She stopped listening to others and did whatever she wanted, which included trying (unsuccessfully) to date girls, and going through this god-awful punk phase… which was thankfully short-lived. Most of it was pretty harmless, but it alarmed her parents, as it was all a far-cry from the straight-laced kid she’d been before. But as long as she kept her grades up, and didn’t get into trouble with the school or local authorities, Sarah was more or less given free rein to do whatever she wanted. After a while she forgot about what had happened before. She couldn’t be a mutant, as nothing crazy had happened since that one time… right?

Sixteen was by and far Sarah’s favorite year. Her dyslexia, which had plagued her all throughout her school years to that point, somehow miraculously straightened itself out. Books, once the bane of her existence, now made almost anything seem just within reach. She got her first job as a barista at a Cambridge coffee shop, where she got to hang around cute college girls half the day. She also met her first girlfriend … a feat she managed to keep secret from her parents for a whole two weeks. Her girlfriend was a couple years older and soon to graduate from high school, but surprisingly her mom didn’t freak out… probably because the pair were trying to keep their relationship discreet. Sixteen was also the last year that Sarah lived in blissful ignorance (or rather, denial) about her being a mutant.

Seventeen was not so great a year. Her girlfriend graduated and moved away to attend college in another part of the country. Long distance relationships before the advent of the internet felt like pointless affairs, so yeah, they basically broke up. Sarah was crushed for months, and due to her budding mutant abilities (which she was still in denial about), couldn’t help but drag her family into a rut of misery with her. Her parents started fighting a lot and she overheard them talking about divorce. Sarah’s paternal grandmother also started having trouble managing her health during this time, and had to enter an assisted living facility. Weekly visits from the family made her grandmother (along with other nearby residents) feel rejuvenated and inexplicably healthier, but left Sarah depleted and even more withdrawn. Her father was the first to connect the dots. Being a pediatric oncologist, he essentially specialized in childhood mutations… except he dealt with the non-beneficial ones. He quietly reached out to several of his trusted colleagues and had her tested off-the-record for an X-gene. The tests all came back negative, but by that point Sarah knew better. She knew what she was, and that somehow, her body had found a way to hide it. She was also old enough to realize that she couldn’t just live in denial and pretend she was normal… she would have to be very careful about learning how to control her abilities, as her well-being depended on it.

No one in Sarah’s family ever mentioned the ‘M’ word around her again, but she now knew that they knew too. In a way, the secret revelation had the opposite effect that Sarah had been expecting. It made her parents more supportive and understanding of the many secrets she had to keep, and it also brought the family closer together as a whole. Sarah especially grew closer to her mom, and began to share an interest in literature… something that would’ve been unthinkable in years past. And as she neared graduation from high school, she decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps… in her own way. Like her mother, she too ended up going the ivy league route, though Sarah still has no idea how that was even possible. Even though she always earned good grades, Sarah to really fight tooth and nail for them. Because of this she had a bad habit of devaluing her own worth, when comparing herself to those who didn’t have to work so hard.

The next several years essentially went by in a blur. Sarah did earn two degrees at Harvard, a Bachelors in Literature and a Masters in Library Science, but she had to devote literally all of her time into her studies, and experienced very little in the way of social maturity and personal growth. The one upside of all this is that there was less of a chance for any unpleasant drama that might trigger her mutant abilities.

After finishing her Master’s studies Sarah took a rare vacation… the first she’d ever undertaken on her own. She returned to the United Kingdom, for the first time in almost fifteen years, and spent the summer with her maternal relatives. One thing led to another, which resulted in an unexpected job offer. She might stay, if she can get her visa paperwork sorted.