#theres a tldr at the end for anyone who wants the short version lol

[strpaloma]

EIZA GONZALEZ, FEMALE, SHE/HER-——- Paloma Vega has been identified as a twenty-eight-year-old resident with super strength. their files indicate that they work as an actress, and may have no affiliation. they are known to be talented and jaded, and knew the deceased because she tried to be a whistleblower on a mutant testing operation years ago only for no one to believe her. (Louisa, she/her, 19, est )

TW: drugs, gaslighting

Paloma Vega was born for the spotlight. She grew up in Hollywood and from the moment she saw her first movie she knew she was destined to be on the screen. She got her power very early. From the age of five she was a whirlwind of a child, accidentally ripping doors off hinges and causing the family repair contractor to just become part of the family. It took her a while to gain control of her strength, but that is probably just because it takes five-year-olds forever to gain control of anything.

Little Paloma didn’t let her power distract her movement towards her goal. Every day she would come home from kindergarten and beg her parents to get her in front of some cameras. She would throw very destructive temper tantrums about the fact that she didn’t have a talent agent, a concept generally beyond most five-year-olds. Eventually her parents caved in and started taking her to auditions for child actors.

She was cast in a few commercials very quickly. Paloma was a beautiful child and had an energy and enthusiasm that was unparalleled. The tantrums stopped. She reined in control of her strength. When she was seven she got her big break as the titular character in “Raising Lola”, a sitcom about a family of non-mutants and their daughter who has super-strength. It had a laugh track. It was terribly written. It won no awards. But it was extremely popular nonetheless, and so it stayed on the air far longer than it should have. Her mother homeschooled her as Raising Lola filmed.

After the sitcom, opportunities started throwing themselves at her. There seemed to be no limit to how far her star could rise. She acted in a wide variety of projects before carving out a home for herself in the action movie genre. For many years she was action’s silver screen darling, playing a diverse portfolio of heroes and femme fatales and detectives and damsels that all probably should have been wearing just a little bit more clothing.

Then, during a film shoot in Diamond City, she witnessed something odd: a strange glow from the windows of a supposedly abandoned warehouse. She had spent enough time playing hero that part of her had begun to believe she was one. So, on a reckless impulse, she ripped the door to the warehouse off its hinges and waltzed into a mutant testing facility. Needless to say, she was immediately captured.

Most of her time in the facility is exceptionally blurry. She couldn’t be kept in restraints because of her power, so instead they kept her heavily sedated at all times. Occasionally she caught names and faces- among them, the name Raúl Suarez- but nothing more concrete.

One day, about two months into her stay there, someone made a mistake. Maybe they gave her the wrong dosage, or they gave it too late, or they forgot to give it at all, but Paloma woke up from her medicated fog. She immediately burst through the wall of the facility, kept running, and didn’t look back. She freed no other test subjects, she fought no testers, she just ran. In that moment she realized she wasn’t the hero after all. She didn’t have it in her.

Paloma did, however, run straight to the DCPD. She told anyone there who would listen about the testing facility- about where it was and what went on inside, about the names she had heard, the faces she had seen. Unfortunately, Paloma had made a key mistake. She was an A-Lister who had gone missing on set for two months, and the gossip columns had mostly hypothesized she was on a drug bender somewhere. Now she was showing up at a police station extremely disheveled, with drug tests showing she was high as a kite on a strange concoction of painkillers, confirming the rumors. She was laughed off by every officer except one, who kindly said they would check out the facility tomorrow. Only by the time tomorrow came the facility was gone, and the warehouse was just a warehouse.

For a few days Paloma wondered if she really was just a celebrity recovering from some bad trip because she’d been gaslit to hell, but when she tried to get back to work she found peculiar roadblocks that drugs couldn’t explain away. Yes, her first instinct wasn’t to find out more about what had happened, it wasn’t to find other cops or heroes who would listen, it was to act again, even despite the fact that she was going through heavy withdrawl symptoms. Above all else, it is her passion for acting that drives her. 

She returned to the set of the movie she had been shooting before she went into the facility in hopes that they had miraculously been waiting for her. No, her part had been recast. Fine. Understandable, it’s a tough industry and she was missing for two months. She called up her agent she had worked with for twelve years and he answered the phone only to say that he no longer wanted to work with her. Sad, but maybe it was better for his PR if he didn’t work with people who were suspected addicts. As she ran through her list of industry contacts from the A-Listers to the guy who directs the commercials for male pattern baldness medication, every single one of them turned her down. That cued her that something sinister had actually happened. If anything, her two month absence should only have made her a more desirable hire given all the press she’d gotten. Whoever was orchestrating her blacklisting clearly had one hell of a reach- Though she could never fully shake the thought that maybe it all had just been one bad trip.

In theory, she could have gone to the press with her story. None of her press contacts seemed to be blocking her the way her film contacts were. But she had learned a lesson. If she didn’t have evidence, no one would believe her and she would only become more of a laughingstock.

She stayed in Diamond City after the debacle (which was two years ago) because she didn’t want to go back to Hollywood and stare at the stardom she could no longer have. The whole incident left her jaded as hell. Her career and reputation she’d curated for over twenty years was gone overnight and she didn’t have the skillset to do anything about it. On top of that, the people who did have those skills didn’t believe her. She spent most of those two years trying to kick a painkiller addiction and only slightly succeeding, telling the press her early retirement was a personal choice (super false), and keeping her head down.

And then a few weeks ago Raúl Suarez died and his speculated connection to the underground was released to the public and she knew, she knew she wasn’t crazy and finally people would believe her and finally she would be able to act again and she wasn’t crazy and-. No. Calm down, Paloma. Nothing was solid yet. There was still nothing she could contribute to the investigation and she didn’t exactly trust the DCPD. Besides, even if they uncovered the whole operation it wouldn’t necessarily un-blacklist her.

But for the first time in a long time, Paloma has begun to hope.

TLDR: A-list action movie star makes a dumb decision, ends up in a mutant testing facility, escapes but finds she’s been blacklisted from the film industry and loses her sense of purpose.

Power: She has super strength. It’s pretty straightforward. She’s never done any combat training other than stage/stunt training because she’s a normal civilian though so like she doesn’t really know how to use it in a Useful Manner ya know? Other than Lifting Stuff and Pushing Stuff. She hasn’t learned how to be a badass, but with some actual training she could probably become a real powerhouse. 

Personality: Paloma is a jaded diva. She won’t sign autographs, she’s incredibly cynical, and she’s fairly paranoid. She’s not mean (bc i can’t play ppl who are Mean), she’s just distinctly not nice. However, it’s worth noting that she can change her personality at the drop of a hat as needed. #acting

Wanted Connections:

Under construction i gotta think on this but hmu for whatever