Jade Ashcroft

Jade Ashcroft is a teenage genius and university student. She makes no particular secret of the fact that she's a meta, but neither was she especially famous, until in October 2060 she published a book, Guilded Promises: Alien Lies, which controversially accused the Guild of numerous underhanded dealings and even attrocities in their relationship with Earth.

Description
Jade stands 5'2" tall and looks if anything younger than her 18 years; if not for the curves proportionate to her slight, delicate-looking frame she would look younger still. Her big green eyes are set in a cute, pixieish face, and the shortish cut of her brown hair adds to the image.

But most striking is just how hyperactive and bouncy she is: she bubbles with energy, and seems barely able to sit still. She seems not to have an attention span to speak of either, often getting rapidly bored of a conversation and looking around the room.

When she speaks, she gushes a hard-to-grasp stream of words in a rather childlike voice.

(in summer) She dresses, typically, in T-shirt, jeans and running shoes; for jewellery she generally wears only a necklace with a pendant.

Origin
Jade Ashcroft was born in Newton Abbot, England, the daughter of an unremarkable couple, a greengrocer and a plumber. It was obvious that she was extraordinary practically from the start: she was walking from the age of 1 month and already was showing signs of understanding English, though her ability to speak was limited by her physical development. Doctors soon concluded she was a mutant, and she enjoyed some brief celebrity as a child prodigy.

Much as they loved her, Jade's parents soon found that raising such a child was beyond them. As soon as she was old enough they sent her to Lord Markham's School for Talented Children, and this is where "home" is for Jade. (Although she remained on amicable terms withe her parents, elder brother and younger sister and spent the holidays with them, as the years passed she had less and less in common with them.) However, even at the school she was rather marginalised: she was the swat, the nerd, the teacher's pet, the one who made everyone else look stupid. But she did make one good friend: Malcolm Dace, a telepath of her own age with the unusual ability of being able to borrow unused "processor time" on the brains of those near him, making him the one person who came close to Jade intellectually. For a couple of years they were inseparable. Then came the big fallout.

Malcolm wrote a brilliant metahuman ethics paper, far outstripping Jade's, and using in some detail ideas she had had. She accused him of stealing her ideas (as well, no doubt, as her braintime), and he countered that she just couldn't take someone outthinking her. Malcolm's telepathy is very subtle and leaves little trace, so there was no evidence of (or against) wrongdoing. What had been a close friendship turned into a bitter rivalry, each trying to outdo the other in everything, sometimes by underhanded measures.

Ultimately Malcolm won, though through sheer luck. At the age of 11 he left for university. Jade, though no less ready, wasn't allowed to go: her parents didn't think it was appropriate until she was at least 16. In those five years Malcolm got his PhD and became one of the world's foremost experts on metahumans, as well as getting a high-paying job at the CBSU hospital. Jade, meanwhile, was left kicking her heels at Lord Markham's. But the rivalry isn't forgotten.

Powers
Jade is a mutant whose primary power is a superfast nervous system, which gives her intelligence, dexterity and reaction time on a superhuman level. She can process sensory data, especially visual and auditory, at a correspondingly high rate and in extraordinary detail. Her unusually structured mind is resistant to mental assault, can perform complex calculations in an instant, and provides her with a superb memory.

Perhaps more importantly, this intelligence allows her to learn skills at a prodigious rate she can master most physical and intellectual skills in the time it would take most people to grasp the basics. In principle she should have an advantage in social skills too (reflected in her above-average PRE), but her hang-ups and circumstances have left in stunted in that area. Her skills and observational powers combined make her capable of Holmesian deduction.

Her mutant metabolism also appears to have provided her with some lesser abilities: she is strong for a girl her size and can run at about 42 mph. Or it's possible that this is rather a consequence of her improved nervous system being able to get the most out of her muscles. She carries a miniature force-field generator which she modified herself for protection - a habit she got into at school in case the children with more physical powers played rough. It's not very powerful but is only about the size of a nickel, and can conveniently be carried in a pocket or, commonly, a necklace.

Personality
Jade may be one of the brightest people on the planet, but she's still young and in many ways immature, and not without her hangups. She has great confidence in her own faculties, and regards intelligence as the greatest of abilities because through it so much can be achieved. At the same time she is socially underconfident. Even at Lord Markham's school, the bright kid tends not to be very popular, and Jade's usual response to unpopularity of trying to win people over by being even cleverer was counterproductive. A conviction that she is no good at social skills has not helped her develop them, either.

Jade is resentful of being underestimated for her youth, manner and stature, but rather than working on the impression she makes considers the burden on other people not to judge her on her looks. Adolescence didn't help with this: she's still short and cute, and boys are now still more inclined to rate her on looks instead of intellect. But it helped with the social loneliness, if not the intellectual. Despite her reputation at the school as a swot, Jade doesn't study very hard unless something grabs her interest. In consequence there's not field at which she's world-class: rather she dabbles in whatever takes her whim. She generally soon loses interest because everything is just so easy, and anything she might read is aimed well below her level. She's always looking for something new or challenging, because she's always teetering on the edge of boredom.

Her rivalry with Malcolm Dace might never have started had they been more mature, but after years of tit-for-tat unpleasantries it's deeply ingrained in both of them.

She may have lost interest in studying metahuman ethics, but she did learn from it. Killing a sentient being is something she strongly disapproves of.

Relations
Jade does not make friends easily, not least because of the intellectual gap between her and most people around her. Her closest friend, with whom she is now romantically linked, is Alex Winters, a co-worker at Transmat Research. While Lord Markham's School for Talented Children is, in a sense, one big family, she's not especially close to anyone there any more. She's drifted further from her family too over the years; they still love her, but they can't understand her.

She knows Jennifer and Jessica Markham through the school, though they are not particularly close.

Her rivalry with Malcolm Dace remains as strong as ever.

History
Every effort was made at the school to ensure that Jade got as good and as broad an education as they could manage, though with the loss of the direct rivalry and the disappointment at not also going to university her motivation was reduced. Nonetheless she excelled in all subjects but metahuman ethics (she went into a sulk after the incident with Malcolm and lost interest entirely). She developed more of an interest in sports at this time - her reflexes were always astounding, but only how was she really beginning to compete with those with more physical superpowers she's surprising good at meta-basketball given her height. This did something to offset her reputation as a nerd, though she remained a relative outsider at the school.

But five years has passed, and now she is finally free to go to university. She chose to pursue Alien Studies, partly because it's a new and wide field and might present her with a challenge, but also because she knew it would take her to Colonial Bay and hopefully a fresh start in an environment where she might find people who are her peers. And of course it lets her keep an eye on that cheat, Malcolm.

Shortly after starting university, Jade was recruited by Transmat Research to work on the Riftgate project. She also explores extradimensional worlds as a regular member of RG-1. Her alien studies (she took her bachelor's degree in 2060) have led her to the belief that the Guild has not be honest in its relations with Earth, and she has written both a thesis and a popular book, Guilded Promises: Alien Lies, on the subject. The latter has suddenly brought her to general public and controversial attention.