Conduit

## Origins

From a young age, **Kara DeHaan** always loved sport and being active. She begged her parents **Alec** and **Greta DeHaan** to let her try out for every school sports team, spent every spare moment of her days poring over football matches and athletics competitions on TV to improve her techniques, and basically dedicated herself to the pursuit of sport.

Fortunately it turned out that Kara excelled in this area, competing at increasingly high levels as she grew older and becoming the star player both on her school football and athletics teams, far outstripping the other kids she was competing against. Her parents couldn't be prouder, and Kara felt happy and accomplished with her goals and what she was striving to achieve.

All that changed, however, when she collapsed during a football match. She was rushed to hospital, where a tumour was found on her spine. Desperate to help their daughter, Alec and Greta paid through the nose for top notch private medical help, and Kara was taken into surgery less than 24 hours after the initial collapse.

Unfortunately, no medical procedure has a 100% success rate, and even though the surgeon was able to remove the tumour and excise any other cancerous cells present in her spinal column, the amount of tissue that had to be removed meant that it was highly unlikely that Kara would be able to walk again.

Bedridden and depressed, Kara was given a laptop by her parents and told to write her feelings down in an effort to get them out of her head and into the real world. When they returned from a shopping trip one day, however, they found that she had torn the laptop apart and arranged the components in size order to try and understand how it worked, exactly the same way she did with sports techniques before the operation.

Alec and Greta encouraged Kara's newfound interest in computers, and helped her to build new tech from scratch, and she found a network of people in the same situation as her which helped her to recover the optimistic outlook she had lost, and although each day took work she found herself coping and growing stronger, even getting back into upper-body exercises to quench her thirst for physical activity.

### Emergence

One day in her late teens, Kara suddenly started hearing strange sounds all around her, bleeps and whirrs and scratches that threatened to deafen her, and over time they gradually evolved into something more understandable. It wasn't quite a language that she was now hearing, but her brain was making connections and she started to feel as though she could understand the noises.

What Kara didn't understand at this point was that she was classed as an **Evohuman**, a human whose genetic code contained a mutation which granted them extraordinary superhuman abilities. She was contacted over the internet by a man calling himself **Phrenic**, who offered to meet her and explain what was happening, and she decided to take him up on the offer while ensuring that the meeting was taking place in a public space and her friend **Marie Danvers** was at a coffee shop across the street in case anything weird was going to happen.

Her conversation with Phrenic was enlightening: he introduced himself as **Matthew Evans**, explaining that he was an Evohuman and so was Kara, and that he would be able to help her understand what her newfound abilities were. She allowed him to look inside her mind with his considerable telepathic abilities, and together they identified that the sounds Kara was hearing were the inner working of electronic equipment around her, and if she focused hard enough she may be able to talk back to them, and control them with her mind.

Phrenic offered to take her to his headquarters on **Scepta Isle** in **Scotland**, where he had built a safe haven for people like her. However, Kara declined this offer, choosing instead to do what she had always done and test herself to try and figure things out independently. Phrenic left with no hard feelings, but told her that he would be ready to help her if she ever needed him to.

### Conduit

Over time Kara found herself better able to control her abilities, and as Phrenic had suggested she discovered that she was able to open two-way communication with the machines and electronic equipment around her. She started being able to control how machines worked and what they did, and it increased her knowledge and understanding of the technology around her, and opened new possibilities.

Finding that she was able to increase the range of her abilities using the innate connectivity of the internet, Kara decided that she would use her powers to help people around the world, and she adopted an online persona under the name **Conduit**. Using otherwise secure information gathered by security companies and even governmental organisations, she was able to identify people in trouble around the world and guide them using the endless amounts of technology surrounding them, utilising every piece of available hardware to her advantage. She could control lights and street signs to direct people in different directions, disable monitoring devices remotely and unlock doors with electronic locks, keeping people safe and secure around the world.

During one of her routine trawls of **UNION** secure file systems, Kara discovered a series of connections between pieces of information, documents and data packages which seemed to have been missed by the data analysts within the organisation, and which pointed to a major crisis likely to occur in the next twelve months. Kara knew that pointing this out to anyone involved in UNION would likely result in her being arrested as she had technically hacked into their systems, so she decided to take matters into her own hands, using her considerable resources to search for a group of young people with a specific set of abilities who would ultimately be able to save the world.

## Personality

Kara has always been exceptionally driven when it comes to achieving her goals. She is highly proactive, preferring to go to work herself rather than waiting to ask permission or for someone else to tell her what to do, and is incredibly motivated towards action, even when she is working on her own. It was these traits which made her such an effective athlete and competitor, and what makes her such a dedicated hero these days.

After the surgery which left her without the use of her legs, she sank into a deep depression, and elements of this still linger today. While she refuses to feel limited by her wheelchair, she does occasionally get angry and upset with how much longer certain activities take. However, overall she maintains an optimistic attitude towards life and a genuine desire to help people and do good in the world.

## Superhuman Abilities

Kara is an Evohuman whose powers manifested when she was seventeen and allow her to talk to machines.

* **Technopathy** - Kara is able to intuitively understand machines and computers as long as there is some form of circuitry contained within them, as she can hear and understand the different electrical impulses that trigger different actions within machines. Initially she used this ability to understand problems with certain pieces of electronic equipment and to fix them more efficiently and effectively, however over time her ability has grown to the point that she is able to telepathically manipulate these electrical impulses and essentially 'command' machines to do what she needs them to do. While her use of this power was initially limited, she discovered that she was able to use the information relays that make up the internet to expand her reach, allowing her to perform such feats as controlling the wording on an electronic sign on the other side of the world and shutting down computers in secure 'event shielded' rooms.

## Weapons and Equipment

The only piece of equipment that Kara uses on a daily basis is her wheelchair, a state of the art electronic model which she controls using her abilities, keeping her hands freed up to carry out other tasks. Aside from this, she is generally found with some kind of electronic device in her hands, and she has a stash of phones, tablets, laptops and desktop PCs stored all around her apartment, so she is never too far away from the ability to help people.