Laurette Sorel

*"I ahm naht letteeng you escahpe ahgain, you hear me? I ahm going to crush you!!!!!"*

- Laurette Sorel to the Children of Slenderman during a helicopter chase

**Laurette Sorel**is a former French Army soldier and an officer in the French National Police. She is a character in the TACITUS series, being the main character of the story Vapor in the Wind.

## Biography

### Early life and military career

Born in Brittany, France, on March 25, 1988, Laurette was the result of a genetic enhancement experiment. When she was a young child, she had two of their chromosomes altered and her IQ was artificially enhanced far beyond that of a normal human being, resulting in her being a "super-child" of sorts; she was gifted with increased physical performance, pain suppression, and enhanced intelligence with additional unknown benefits. However, her parents kept the truth about her origins a secret, belieivng that if she knew, her innocence would be destroyed.
She had a huge interest in psychology as a child, but as she got older her interests eventually shifted to nursing, and later criminology and criminal justice. Thanks to her enhanced intellect and unusually high IQ, she graduated high school two years early.
She eventually joined the French military as a combat medic. She served in humanitarian missions in Africa, but then opted for discharge in 2015 following claims of a scandal within her military unit, which she was allegedly involved in.

Sometime after this, Sorel joined the French National Police.

### Police career

Not much is known about her police career, except for the fact that she helped to track down and arrest an Islamist fundamentalist after word got out that he was planning a terrorist attack in Paris. During her police career, she had her share of traumatic events.

One event that took the cake was the November 2015 Paris Attacks. It is revealed that she personally attempted to protect the father of Emmett Mack and even helped him fight off several Islamic State militants, but ultimately failed to prevent his death. Her failiure left Laurette ridden with guilt and she even considered quitting the force multiple times after this. It is for this reason that her supervisor suggested taking a rather long furlough to recover.

### Vapor in the Wind

*Main article:*Vapor in the Wind

During the events of Vapor in the Wind, Laurette was taking a vacation to New York City, when she met Joyce Briggs, a mentally troubled young woman. She also helped to protect Joyce from an assassin that tried to murder her. After finding out that Joyce suffered from clinical depression and that the assassin who attempted to murder her was a member of a murder cult known as the Children of Slender, Laurette decided to assist police and eventually the counterterrorism unit TACITUS  in the investigation.

Throughout the investigation, she got quite close to Joyce, as well as TACITUS agents Lydia Ross, Gerald Moore and Derek Westbrook, and Task Force Reaper operatives Vince Crosby, Nikolai Kalinin and Ellie Cohen. Later, she was kidnapped by the Children of Slender, alongside Ellie Cohen, Tamara Sultanovich, Joyce Briggs and Natalya Fashkova.

Following a long manhunt for the perpetrators, TACITUS and Task Force Reaper, along with the New York Police Department, found that kidnapping victims Helen Moore and some of her friends had managed to escape on their own, leading them in a race against the clock to find the girls before they could be recaptured. The girls were found, but were recaptured before Derek Westbrook and his friends could reach them first.

Sorel, determined to save Helen and her friends, chose to abandon her comrades temporarily, instead obtaining a helicopter and embarking on a hectic helicopter chase through the mountains. She was able to able to destroy the helicopter the Children of Slender planned to use to escape from the TACITUS rescue squad. Following this, Sorel and her friends engaged in a brutal hand-to-hand fight against the surviving cult members and rescued the girls.

## Personality

Laurette has shown herself to be a quite capable woman. In Vapor in the Wind, it is revealed that she had Asperger syndrome, leading to a struggle with empathy and reading body langugae as a child. She also has excellent observation skills, skills that make her almost equal with Derek Westbrook. She pays attention to minute details that could help her solve a case. She also has a strong sense of morals, refusing to leave people behind in situations, even willing to abandon her comrades to rescue other people, as demonstrated by how Laurette was so determined to save Gerald Moore's daughter Helen that she was willing to temporarily abandon Gerald in the process.

## Personal details

### Abilities

* **Genius Level Intellect**: Laurette was able to graduate high school two years early because of her intellect. She was the youngest graduate in French academic history. She possesses a sharp and bright mind, focused on analysis
* **Master detective**: Sorel has extremely acute deduction skills and is very observant. She is quite good at observing body language, and sometimes points them out during conversations with people while she is speaking with people during police investigations. She'll often pick up on a simple pause and relate it back to the original problem at hand.
* **Expert Marksman**: She is a very skilled marksman, almost never missing.
* **Master Martial Artist**: Thanks to her military background, she is quite proficient in hand-to-hand combat. She has also stated that she is a kickboxing champion. Her enhancements have also gifted her with near superhuman combat abilities; she is capable of using virtually anything as a weapon, she has even been known to handle different class pistols while handling one of them upside down. She is also capable of throwing punches reaching nearly 100 miles per hour. Her skills have led many to consider her a "female Jason Bourne".
* **Multilingualism:**She is fluent in French, Russian, Chinese, English, Italian, German, Icelandic, and (to a certain extent) Irish.
* **Mind Reading**/**Telepathy**: She is quite good at reading body language, as well as getting inside people's minds and reading them, with startlingly accurate observations and conclusions. She is so good, she often scares people when this superpower is in use.
* **Empathy:** She has an uncanny ability to interpret the emotions of others
* **Enhanced Tracking**: Laurette can also open a telepathic channel to track someone down.

### Weaknesses

* Asperger syndrome: Prior to being enhanced, she had Asperger syndrome, which led to her having trouble understanding people. However, once the enhancements were made, Laurette was virtually "cured" of her Asperger's.

### Habits and Beliefs

Laurette has a habit of listening to various sorts of music, with her main go-to genres being pop and classical. She has stated that her favorite classical artists are Mozart, Wolfgang, and Beethoven, while she doesn't have any specific favorite pop artists.

Initially Laurette had no religious beliefs, being an Agnostic for most of her life. However, she began to adopt some unorthodox view of Spiritualism, although she has researched Christianity during her college years. As of 2017-2018, she believes in a rather weird blend of Christianity and scientific ideas regarding death and what happens when people die. She seems to believe that God, if he exists, possesses powers of Telepathy, Mind Control, Mind Reading, and psychokinesis, among other superpowers. She has also read the Bible and has come to believe that the Bible actually supports, and teaches, the existence of such superpowers and that such superpowers can actually explain the various miracles recorded in the Bible. For example, Sorel believes that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was actually a result of astral projection, that Jesus' soul is currently still in the Heavens and His soul somehow projected itself into a new body three days after His death via crucifixion. She supports her argument with narratives in the Bible describing Jesus' ability to walk through walls in His resurrection body. Additionally, Sorel believes that when God created Adam and Eve, God astrally projected a portion of Himself into their bodies and continually does this to each new person that is born, thus explaining why all humans are made in God's image.

In regards to the Virgin Birth and Jesus' claim to be God, Sorel uses astral projection to explain away the miracle, contending that God had astrally projected Himself into Mary's womb, resulting in the birth of Jesus Christ despite Mary's virgin status and that this explains how Jesus could be both God and man simultaneously. In regards to the human soul itself, Sorel believes that the soul is just immortal energy that all humans possess, energy that came when God astrally projected Himself into humans when they were made in His image.

Regarding Jesus' claim to be the only way to God (John 14:6), Sorel contends that Jesus is actually saying in an unorthodox way, "I am the only one who can give you a better life. Come follow Me." She agrees that, based on the miracles Jesus did and the things He promised to His earthly friends, Jesus' claim must be true and that no one would willingly lie (which wouldn't make them moral) and that Jesus couldn't have been crazy, or else there wouldn't be millions of people following Him.

Sorel also has a rather interesting view of life after death: she contends that when people die, their consciousness (which she believes is part of the human soul) merely transitions to a higher state of existence and that contends that physical death is an "illusion" created by the human brain, which Sorel believes can be deceptive at times. To her, what we tend to believe is physical death is actually a transitioning to a higher quantum state. Once again, she supports this view with the Bible (at least, her view of it): whenever the Bible speaks of death, Sorel believes it is acutally speaking of a transition to a higher state of existence and that the kind of death humans speak of is an illusion created by the deceptive side of the human consciousness. She has read numerous books by Robert Lanza, a scientist, and she has come to agree with Lanza's position that since time and space are not linear, then death cannot exist in ‘any real sense’ either.

Though Sorel believes that the afterlife is really a higher quantum realm that people go where they die, she doesn't really call it Heaven or Hell. However, the quantum realm can *become*either Heaven or Hell depending on how someone has lived their life, a form of Karma that operates in the quantum realm after death.

She has insisted that this view of Karma isn't necessarily salvation by works. Rather it is just the natural result of someone's good or bad decisions. In her eyes, agreeing that Jesus is the only way to God and accepting that claim for yourself is, in her mind, the highest moral good that someone can achieve, at least, by human standards.

## Trivia

* She is physically modeled after French actress Clémence Poésy.
* She is the first character thus far to have a disability revealed (Asperger's).
* In early 2016, a rumor began to spread amongst the French police force that Laurette is bisexual, a claim that Sorel herself has insisted is false on multiple occasions (she is actually straight).

## Laurette Sorel pursuing a Children of Slender helicopter with another helicopterQuotes

*"I ahm naht letteeng you escahpe ahgain, you hear me? I ahm going to crush you!!!!!"*

- Laurette Sorel before ramming the Children of Slender's getaway chopper

*"Whaht eef I tahld you zat physeecahl death ees ahctually ahn eellusion?"*

- Laurette Sorel revealing her position on death and the afterlife.