Anna Cross backstory

Anna Cross was born in Portland, Oregon in 2005 to a poor family. Her father was an alcoholic with anger issues and would often beat her and her mother. She loved her mother deeply and in a way she supposed she loved her father as well. Unfortunately one day she had arrived home from a friend's house to her parents fighting, much worse than she had ever seen, her mother and father both had blood on their hands and faces, which was odd because her mother normally never fought back. She ran to her room immediately and locked the door behind her. The fighting continued until much to her surprise she heard a pair of gunshot ring out. The sound was deafening in their small house and she grew fearful, the sounds of screaming were over on both sides and she didn't know which parent had the gun. She knew neither of them had owned one before tonight. Eventually after a few hours, morbid curiosity overwhelmed her  and she unlocked her door as quietly as possible and peeked down the hallway. She could hear the TV blaring some sort of sports game as she crept from her room out into the living space, she could see the pool of blood leaving the kitchen and peeked around the corner  to see her mother laying lifeless on the ground, one hole in her chest and another in her abdomen. Tears welled up in the young girls eyes but she remained silent, there was a sharp knife in the kitchen sink that her mother had used while preparing dinner the night before. she grabbed it, holding it behind her back as she made her way into the living room, her father sitting in his recliner watching football. Beside him sat the small snub nosed revolver and two empty bottles of vodka. A third bottle clutched against her fathers chest as he lay there sleeping. He had just murdered her mother HIS OWN WIFE! and then passed out drunk like it never happened. Filled with an indescribable rage she had never felt before she moved up to her father and stabbed the large chef's knife through his throat twice before he realized what had happened to him. His arm flailed around, trying to find the gun, but only succeeded in knocking it on the ground as she brought the knife down again this time through the man's eye. She felt it hesitate just a moment as it hit the thin bone of the skull behind  the eye and then pass through into his brain. Both of her parents were dead now, and she knew that after the gunshots the police were probably on their way. She panicked, grabbing the gun and stuffing it in her pocket and throwing the knife in a backpack along with a couple changes of clothes and as much canned goods as she could carry. This was in 2013.

    The young girl fled her home, heading south as fast as she could Eventually making it to Vegas. Staying to alleyways and rooftop of large cities where she could scrape up food for herself and stay hidden She noticed the changes starting to happen about a year later, The cities were loud of course, but there was no reason for them to be this loud,  even in the dark alleyways she could hear the sound of stray animals tearing the flesh of their smaller pray from dozens of yards away, something was wrong with her but she couldn't seek medical attention, she'd murdered her father, surely there were Amber alerts for a missing child even this far south. As she grew further changes came, she found that she needed to wear gloves most often because things were sticking to her hands. She'd notice that if she held still people would ignore her almost completely, like she wasn't even there. She was faster than she thought possible for a human to be. It wasn't until she saw her reflection in a pool of water that she noticed the physical changes. Here eyes had gone dark, eerily so. She avoided letting people see her eyes by wearing  a large hood, and eventually goggles. While she was living in the city she trained herself, she was fast now, and whatever had happened to her hands had made climbing things easier. She had seen older kids adn adults at "free running parks" not letting any obstacle stand in their way as they ran leapt and climbed over anything in their path. She knew that with practice she could do these things as well, though you had to pay to enter the park and she couldn't afford something like that so instead the city itself became her park as she learned how to traverse it's  fire escapes and rooftops with brutal efficiency. She also learned that surviving meant stealing. She got caught often at first, but was fast enough to get away before police arrived. eventually though, she got the hang of it. After stealing her first wallet she pulled the cash out of it and tossed it in a storm drain along the road. her first score netted her Fifty dollars. The first thing she did was run to a small hardware store on the corner near the abandoned building she often squatted at. The owner knew her as she had often done odd jobs for the man in exchange for sandwiches that he would buy her from the street vendor. This time though she  wasn't there for a job. She picked up a small respirator and about 6 cans of spray paint. She'd seen the tags around the city, even knew a few of the artists by reputation and she had always loved art, even before  she left her home. After a few months scrawling tags in the dark alleyways that no one cared about  she had gotten pretty good. Eventually she started tagging outside of the alleyways slowly going to more dangerous places that even some of the braver artists were either too afraid to go or just plain incapable of getting to. She started making a name for herself. She had long since given up her first name and was now just going by "Cross" her mother's maiden name.

Unfortunately some people take their tags VERY seriously and Anna, no longer a child but a street smart young woman had angered one of these particularly unstable people by tagging over one of his pieces. She didn't think much of it, it was rubbish, didn't even look that good. She later found out  his anger was because that was the man's first tag he'd done in the city. The man had somehow managed to find out where she was crashing, unsure how, but she suspected the street vendor where that Hardware store owner used to buy her sandwiches was the culprit. Still, the  unstable man didn't come after her even though she'd seen him around, watching her. It wasn't until she started noticing some of her tags getting covered by his own that she knew trouble  was on the way. Sure enough about a week after she noticed her tags getting covered, the man confronted her. She could tell by the look in his eyes that he meant trouble and the girl had to think quickly. She had long since sold the revolver to some aspiring gang banger looking for a "piece" she still carried the knife, tucked across the small of her back in a sheath she had made for it herself. She looked at the big man, he wreaked of pot, but that didn't seem to dull his senses much as he pulled out an odd sort of knife.  The flat of the blade was narrower at the handle then it had a dramatic curve in the blade and  it widened out. She knew this could be trouble. The man had her trapped in the alleyway. At least he though he did, she backed up, feigning fear until her back was against the wall. She lifted her hand behind her back, gripping the handle of the knife in her right hand, and open can of hot pink spray paint in her left. She lowered her self. left foot against the wall like a track runner getting ready for the 200 meter. As the man finally though he had her cornered he approached, his confidence in his knife skills showing as he tossed the odd blade from hand to hand. He was about twenty feet away  when she sprinted at him as fast as she could, ripping the knife from it's sheath as she dropped  to the ground in a slide. She sliced wildly at the man's leg, aiming for his Achilles tendon but missing. Instead tearing open a gash in his calf as he jeans quickly stained crimson. She jumped back to her feet and turned to face him as he screamed, as he turned around though she let him have it with the spray paint, aiming for his face. Blinded by the pain he dropped his knife and  pawed at his face, trying to fix it somehow as she plunged her knife through his eye, just like she had done to her father. She had gloves on, even if she didn't due to whatever made her hands so sticky she doubted anyone could get a print off of it so she left it buried in the hot pink face of the man and picked up his knife. She thought it looked cooler anyways.

Less than a year later she had bigger things to worry about. the D13 outbreak had affected the entire country, throwing the whole continent into a panic. Lucky for her she had spent the time since her encounter with the man learning how to fight with that strange blade she later found out was called a kukri. She practiced relentlessly and for good reason. The man she killed had friends, a gang, and learning of his death did not make them happy. They had sent other after her and she had dealt with them in a similar fashion and decided that it was time to leave Vegas for a while. She Traveled east for a few days, avoiding roads as much as possible and eventually found a nice forest  that she set up camp at. That was when the headaches started. She hadn't gotten sick since she was little. The flu, a year or so before  the incident at her home was the last illness she could remember but these headaches were something different entirely, she felt like drills were boring through her skull at a slow grinding pace. Often leaving her curled up on the ground in the forest screaming, However she noticed that during the headaches, things would move, nothing major. broken  tree branches getting flung a few yards, things like that. It wasn't until a year or so after the outbreak that she noticed a spray can  floating about a foot off the ground during one of her headaches that she realized what was happening. She thought maybe it was the forest doing it to her so she left and once more went back to Vegas. Upon her return she heard that two groups had taken control of the city. One of them, a group called Gojira ran the shadier aspects of the city and it was to them that she was drawn. She learned they were mutants, something she didn't really know she believed until she met one, later finding out that the changes she experience marked her as a mutant as well. They had heard of her from before she left the city and agreed to help her  get over her headaches and control the telekinesis, in exchange for some favors of course. Her skills were useful to them and they soon had her working as a pickpocket for them, eventually teaching her the best and easiest ways to get less than legal goods from one place to another.

The problem with organized crime is that once you become an asset, they don't like to let you leave. Luckily for her she was good at not getting found.  She fled the city again, heading north once more and eventually arriving back in Portland, the trip was easier this time. She was nearly an adult now, her 18th birthday in about a month. No longer a scared little girl fleeing from who knows what after killing her father. She was a young woman now capable of surviving off the urban wastes and defending herself against most situations if she had to, or avoiding the ones she couldn't fight through. she'd learned to devise minor  traps and obstacles to lure smaller groups into that would turn a fight to her advantage. Once she arrived back in Portland she found it a completely different city. She knew that no one here cared about the little girl from the past. Gangs ran rampant and seemed to control most of the city, but she heard rumors of a place off the coast of Oregon that was protected from all of what had happened. An island sanctuary from the chaos called Convergence. She didn't know how to get there and she thought that if her former ties with Gojira  were discovered she would likely not be allowed entry so she came up with a plan. She stole a crowbar and hid inside a shipping crate bound for Convergence and dumped the cargo in the ocean before crawling in to the crate and making herself as comfy as possible under the packing materials so that she was hidden. The next morning someone  came and nailed the crate shut, just like she hoped. She knew that once the crate arrived at convergence she would have two options. Either wait for someone else to open the crate and find her hiding inside, or hope they didn't open it right away so she could wait until dark and use the crowbar she'd stolen to try and open the box from the inside. Now all she has to do is wait for the ship to stop and the crate to get unloaded.