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Background
Josephine Kelly was born in the early 18th century to a crofter and his wife in northern Ireland. When the first Irish Famine hit (1740, not 1845), she and her new husband fled to the British Colonies in search of better prospects. Unfortunately, life in America wasn’t a whole lot better… though that had a lot more to do with the temperament of her husband than social pressure. Philadelphia was a fairly tolerant city for the time, but Michael McCormick was a mean drunk. A miller by trade, he became a merchant in the New World… but not an overly successful one. He frequently got into disputes with clients and colleagues and often took out his frustrations on his young wife.
Consequently, Josephine Kelly died sometime in the middle of the 18th century. Except… she didn’t quite. In a drunken rage, Michael McCormick gave Josephine what should have been a fatal beating and, realizing what he’d done, buried her in a shallow grave out on a neighbor’s farm. Josephine awoke there a day or two later, entirely healed of her injuries — although with a wicked headache. (You try going 3 days without food and water.) Realizing she couldn’t stay with the man, she stole a few of her own possessions back while he was away in town and took off through the forest.
Over the next several years she discovered that she didn’t age like others did. Nor did she require food or drink in quite the same way. She could certainly enjoy them and derive sustenance from them, but she was also somehow able to absorb nutrients directly from the environment around her — air, earth, water. She also discovered she healed quickly and aged very slowly… if at all.
This required her to stay mobile, so that others didn’t notice. Every ten or twelve years, she’d uproot and move to a new area, changing her name and creating a new identity. She became something of a social chameleon and a jack-of-all-trades, even as a woman. (Occasionally, she would even masquerade as a young man, if the situation demanded it.)
She saw many of the key moments in early American history, worked with organizations like the Pinkertons and Burns Detective Agency throughout the 19th century, and began dabbling in mechanics and inventions late in that century on into the early 20th. She also learned about investing and was careful over the decades to secure herself properties all over North America — from Alaska and northern Canada all the way down through the continental US, into Mexico and even Central America. She even weathered the Crash of ‘29 with a fairly even keel, mainly because she was used to playing the long game and disinclined to panic.
During WWII, she was recruited as a spy for the allies and spent some time back over in Europe for the first time since her immigration to North America in the late 1700’s. Already demonstrating a remarkable aptitude for mechanical engineering, she became an expert in demolitions and vehicle maintenance and, later, even learned to fly. Her code name during that time was, unusually enough, “The Mechanic”.
After the war, she built a small airstrip out in rural New Jersey and really did more crop dusting than anything else, though she also flew small charters and the occasional survey flight. Further, she maintained a workshop in one of the ostensibly “unused” hangars, where she worked on her own inventions and ideas.
Most recently, however, she’s relocated to Manhattan, leaving the air strip in the care of an old friend. She’s bought a small garage, fittingly known as Joe’s Garage, and is building a new workshop in a nearby factory that had been abandoned for years, which she got for a steal at auction. She lives in a small flat above the garage, quite modestly, belying the wealth she has slowly built and squirrelled away over the last 270 years.
IC Events
Traits
- Healing Factor: Jo heals remarkably quickly. Injuries that should be fatal simply arent. It might take her a while to get back up again, but she will. She doesnt heal as quickly as Wolverine, but she heals a lot faster than the average human. (E.g. A broken arm will heal in a day or so. A bullet wound will heal within hours, once the bullet is removed.) Shes no less susceptible to injury than the average human, but she has a higher pain tolerance and is less likely to go into immediate shock.
To kill her permanently, her brain, heart, and uterus must be completely severed from each other. Thus, the surest way to kill her is to chop her body in half and decapitate her. Other ways would include disintegration, or blowing her body to smithereens. She could burn to death, if the burning is complete enough that no tissue or bone remains to connect the three organs together. Otherwise, though it might take months or even years, she will eventually regenerate. She still needs oxygen to breathe, and so can be made dormant through suffocation or drowning, but it wont permanently kill her unless shes cut apart. Freed from such a prison, she will eventually regenerate.
She does age — just very slowly. It works out to about 1 year for every 25.
- Nutrient Absorption: Jo's body now naturally absorbs the nutrients it needs from the environment around her. When describing it, she likens it to breathing, except shes breathing through her skin instead of her lungs. This means that she can survive in some pretty toxic environments, providing she can extract the right nutrients from around her. Essentially, shes converting atoms and molecules into useable fuel. (Recombining them into usable forms is more difficult. Thus, she will suffer ill effects in toxic environments… but shell still survive.)
This also means that, in a pinch, if she needs a burst of energy to allow her to keep moving or perform some unusual feat, she can purposely draw in the nutrients she needs to refresh her and give her that extra boost. Consequently, she can also go several days without a lot of sleep and still function normally. Eventually, however, even she has to crash and let her body rest to regenerate properly. Still, her normal sleep cycle works out to about 3-5 hours a night at most.
- Enhanced Physical Abilities: Jo's strength, speed, and (obviously) endurance is better than the average woman, probably by about two or three times. Further, because of her increased sensitivity to her environment, her senses are better as well, though only to the very threshold of a superhuman level at most, rather than anything more. She doesnt have x-ray vision or telescopic vision, she cant hear in ranges outside normal hearing, and shes no bloodhound tracker. (She is likely to detect poison or unusual additives in food, however, because of her nutrient absorption ability.) But, she can see further in clear light than regular humans, she can hear extremely soft sounds, and can pick up subtler scents over longer distances than normal.