Circuit Breaker

Well, this is complicated.

Stories

• Eat, Drink and be Merry

Origin

Back in October 2006, Chad Wilson was still a fifteen-year-old talented hacker who lived in Philadelphia with his parents, who were very restrictive and very against mutants, and his sister, Joni. He had a lot of odd medical problems, and one night when he had taken too many pain medications, he managed to stop an attack by the Palm, a supervillain who believed humans should die and be replaced by his AIs, who had been thought to be dead. Dr. Palm retaliated by blowing up Chad's house, which Chad avoided because he had collapsed and was in the hospital due to complications of his manifesting mutation, which included a high level of electricity in his body and the ability to control computers. When Dr. Palm sent a bomb to the hospital, Chad got out and was helped and recruited by John, an employee of the black ops wing of NEXT, a powerful computer company.

Problems in NEXT resulted in Chad being sent to live on the street for a while, as NEXT set up a fake death for Chad and renamed him Merry Powell, since his mutation had made him intersexed and looking female. Among her adventures there, she found a place under the sewers of Philadelphia where people had been used for experiments in downloading an AI into a human body, and she met Father Pete, a Catholic priest who ran a soup kitchen, and who inducted her into the Knights of the Church.

Since the AI experiments were beyond what NEXT could deal with alone, they called in the CIA, and arranged for Merry to get paid for working for them, under the codename Circuit Breaker. She did that for a while, but due to a series of events causing her sanity to break down, an attack where John was killed, and a corrupt doctor working for Nimbus who started using her to test illegal drugs, she was separated from her friends at NEXT and sent to ARC as a mental patient. By this point she had broken into four distinct personalities. Chaddy was the child he had been, before most of the stranger events of his life, though still remembering a lot of trauma. Chad was approximately the same person he had been at the start of the story, though he had mostly been just watching what happened. Merry was the girl, who had been created from Chad and some hypnosis to make her more female, and was usually the dominant personality. Mai was created from a Palm AI that had gotten into her head, but had to copy parts of the others to repair herself, so became more human as time went on.

At ARC, there was another corrupt doctor, Lenston, but on Mrs. Potter's advice, Dr. Otto introduced Sara to Merry. Sara chased out Lenston and offered Merry her mark in return for her help putting her life back together, and they all accepted. While not revealed to Merry, ARC discovered that Merry's biological father was not the one who raised her. Eventually they got Merry out of ARC, while leaving a fiction that she had been hurt and would be in a coma forever. The intention was to take Merry to Whateley, but on her way there she was intercepted by the Medawihla were tribe, who infected her as a were-panther in order to get Sara to help them against the Bastard. In order to do this, they had to cut off part of her arm, which then regrew into a clone of her. Once Sara forgave them, she moved Chad and Chaddy into the clone, which was not a were but was a church knight. The leader of the were pack adopted both girls, and their sister, who had been found to have survived the explosion and had manifested as a mutant as well. They were all put into the Witness Protection Program, and given new names. Merry and Mai became Paige Donner, Chad and Chaddy became Petra Donner, and Joni became Josephine (Jo) Donner. Paige and Jo went to Whateley, while Petra went to Rome to learn to be a church knight. The name Circuit Breaker may have been left with the fictional girl in a coma in ARC that the CIA wanted, but Paige has since used it as a hacker separate from herself.

Powers

Merry was a highpowered energizer, to the point that anyone touching her skin got an electrical shock powerful enough to knock them out, and electrical items around her tended to break frequently. She was also a "technopath," who could send her mind into any computer and do whatever she liked with the contents when she was there, and through the internet she could reach other computers to do the same to them.

Associations

Family

• Parents
• Uncle and Aunt
• Joni Wilson

Allies

• NEXT
• Knights of the Church
• Arkham Research Consortium
• Carmilla Counselor, and more
• Medawihla were tribe

Enemies

• Dr. Able Palm
• CIA
• Frank, Lenston
• Nimbus