Crystal Lowe

**Crystal Lowe** (born Christopher Lowe) is the titular protagonist and narrator of the *Miracle Girls* storyline. She begins as a high school student from Brandy, Washington. Being murdered and thrown into a river kicks off her second life as a fledgling superhero and apprentice to Extraordinaire.

## Personality

> Deep breath. Assess the situation.
>
>

Crystal demonstrates an odd stoicism in some stressful situations, reacting to the realization that she'd died with little more than vague disappointment and a resolve to salvage the situation, and handling her first meeting with Extraordinaire fairly casually.

## Abilities

Crystal's power allows her to create a dome of blue light surrounding the exact point that her eyes are focused on. The dome provides her with a "mind's eye" view of its contents, and she can manipulate those contents with her thoughts. By standing within the dome, Crystal gains authorial access to her own biology, allowing her to shut off her pain signals and switch between her civilian persona and the idealized self-image she intends to use for heroic pursuits. Those physical changes persist when Crystal leaves and dismisses her power's area of effect.

### Limits

The process of deploying the dome takes a few precious seconds, and it takes an equal amount of time for Crystal to banish the bubble. Only one area can be under her power's sway at a time, rendering it fairly cumbersome to move.

## Appearance

### Civilian Identity

Crystal is of a fairly typical height for a boy her age, bordering on underweight. She keeps her blonde hair at its maximum allowed length of around shoulder-level, and she has brown eyes that she considers boring.

### Power-Influenced

When seizing the opportunity to change her appearance as she pleases, Crystal becomes just a bit shorter and narrower, while her hairstyle extends to her waist and turns black. She recolors her eyes to blue and puts on a bit of muscle, as well.

## Biography

### Murder in Brandy Arc

Crystal attended some sort of party and lost track of what happened towards the end of it. She woke up on the bank of the river that runs through Brandy, finding a blood-flecked baseball bat and not finding her scarf. After collecting her thoughts, she was able to discover a superpower that she had access to, and this discovery was what tipped her off that she had been killed that night. On the bright side, returning to life cleared up any lingering exhaustion or hangover symptoms.

After testing her new power, Crystal returned to her original body in order to avoid alarming anyone she interacted with in her continuing civilian life. She supposed that she would eventually become a superhero, but she decided that she had other things to worry about for the time being.

The morning of Crystal's resurrection, Extraordinaire tracked down the high school of an individual who had been reported missing, summoning the student in question to the nurse's room for a one-on-one meeting. Extraordinaire was able to deduce some of what had happened from the roundabout answers Crystal provided, and she offered Crystal a business card before taking her leave. A fairly confused Crystal returned to her classes for the day, beginning with lunch.

During her afternoon classes, Crystal found time to call Extraordinaire, downloading a pair of encrypted communication apps for privacy in further communication and agreeing to later demonstrate her newfound powers. After that, she asked Austin if there had been any major reaction to the announcement in his second-period class, but he wasn't able to provide any useful information. When the group met up after school, they discussed their plans for the start of Spring Break: Austin was going to the beach, Pat and his brother were picking up the new Pishon Industries MMO *Cursebreaker: Light of Madness*, and Jade and Clara decided to go to Extraordinaire's charity event in the park after Crystal told them about it — to Crystal's dismay, since she told her friends she was grounded as a cover story for her own meeting with the hero there.

Crystal attended Extraordinaire's charity auction, demonstrating her new power before the event started. Extraordinaire deduced that unwilling targets within the bubble were immune to Crystal's reality-warping, but the effortless conjuring of matter made it a perfect power for running a refreshments table near the bidding area. Crystal wound up having to talk to Jade and Clara at the table in question, prompting a series of very poor lies to conceal her identity. Clara discovered who "Lucy Kramer" was not long after the interaction, but agreed to keep it to herself.

## Relationships

### Extraordinaire

Crystal's first impression of the world's first superhero was disorienting, but not unpleasant. Crystal was unnerved by some of Kaitlyn's eccentricities, and skeptical of the hints the hero dropped about wanting to talk again, but she still couldn't help being a bit impressed by the whole interaction.

### Classmates

Crystal's friend group at school includes Clara Stone, Pat Larson, Jade Driscoll, and Austin Jones. Jade and Austin each have some mischief in them, while Pat and Clara have their own ways of trying to make sure the whole group stays at least *somewhat* responsible. Crystal seems to be right in the middle of that group dynamic. She attends parties with Jade and shares Austin's lackluster approach to study habits, to an extent. Jade, however, still deems Crystal inexperienced in the ways of delinquency, stating she's the most likely of the three to get in trouble because she's the most likely to get *caught*. Crystal is also presumed to have similar taste in games to Pat, since he expected her to buy *Light of Madness* on release day.

## Trivia

* Changing eye colors from brown to blue, as Crystal does with her power, is technically possible in real life. The process involves burning away the pigments of the iris with a laser, and is neither reversible nor approved by the FDA for general use as a cosmetic surgery.