Country of Origin: Greece
Age: 20
Power: During a freak accident when she was 17 (see background) Teri's body was fused with a swarm of locust. Since then her bio-mass is basically made up of individual critters, allowing herself to disperse into a swarm of insects. She has control over it as a whole (or even several smaller swarms operating independantly of each other) or with some effort individual insects. Since her mind is fused with the swarm as a whole she can maintain seperated ones over an almost limitless distance. However, to return to her human form the swarms have to merge again and since her mind is spread over it as a whole once they're apart more than about a hundred yards the intelligence of the individual swarms drops, as it is split between them. 2 seperated ones would still be considered intelligent although a little slow by human standards. 3 or 4 maintain a level around that of a chimp or dolphin while 5 or more quickly deteriorate into mindless animals with 3 basic functions. Feed, swarm or be recalled to rejoin the rest of Teri. Along with that comes a metabolism worthy of a swarm of locust, causing her to require 2 to 3 times the amount of food a normal person her size would need if she spends much time split apart like that.
A less obvious effect is that Teri's mind became all messed up by the merge. Her mental faculties are composed of thousands of individual 'nodes', giving her what is basically a hive mind that her original personality was imprinted on. A side-effect of that is that telepaths have a very hard time with her, because they'd have to try and filter out the individual voices and affect enough of them so the telepathic effect doesn't get drowned out by the rest of the "hive". The same goes for reading her mind, making it a jigsaw puzzle of assembling together thought fragments.
Addendum (as cleared with Dom): The underlieing mutation that lead to the "merging" is Teri's ability for forming psychic links of insects (not spiders) going to the extend of full psychic posession. It's what connects the hive mind together and is a permanent condition. This rather vulnerable part of her mind lies "encrypted" within the hive mind and is only distinctly there when the structure of the bug gestalt collapses (as she subconsciously did here)
She has growing conscious control over it now and can extend her mind network to other insects.
Personality: Not surprisingly Teri can be somewhat erratic, often jumping back and forth between incoherent topics or thoughts. She usually comes off as pretty cold, having a hard time bringing herself to feel anything but the strongest pangs of feelings through the patchwork of emotionless chatter that makes up most of her mind.
Description: At 5'8" she's neither paticularly small or tall, but thanks to her almost ridiculous metabolism she's extremely slim, bordering on looking scrawny. She has black hair usually hanging loosely and somewhat messily down past her shoulders. The most striking feature about her though are the scincillating compound eyes.
Background: Up until the age of 17 Teri pretty much had a normal childhood groing up in a rural area of greece. When a serious plague of locust swarms hit the area, the loss of anything edible in the path of the creatures prompted the government to try and stop them by generous deployment of an experimental viral agent. For the most part it worked and the locust died off en masse. Some of the creatures appeared to be immune though, swiftly mutating due to the virus. When the newly formed swarm passed through the small city Teri lived in she managed to be at the wrong place at the wrong time while on her way to a friend. After the swarm had passed all that remained was a bike and some torn-up clothes.
After a few days Teri suddenly appeared at her parent's house again, but she was... different to say the least. After years of struggling with their estranged daughter and her barely managing to finish school they were somewhat glad for the opportunity to send the thing that had replaced their daughter in their eyes far away to London.
Edit for finally finding a decent shot of not too wussy looking locust. :>
