She is a pretty girl, but full of anger and quietly building hate. She hates those around her for their curiosity and barely-disguised contempt, the stares she gets when people encounter her around town. She hates the whispers, which she can easily hear. Moose Jaw is a fairly small town (population: 35,000; your personal business: everybody's), and she's reasonably well known.
Sally Eriksson, the mutant.
It isn't that they hate; they're mostly just curious, frightened, and a bit disgusted. But they talk, and they treat her differently than they used to. Than they treat everyone else. At first she tried to publicly downplay her differences, pretend she was the same as everyone else, but it eventually became apparent to her that it just wasn't true. And it made her furious. Already an introvert (but not shy, she'd been standing up for herself against boys and bullies for years), she withdrew into herself, and made this anger into a bilious little organ of hate. She wanted nothing to do with any of them, and still doesn't. She's a loner, hangs out by herself, avoiding her peers. Wears black.
Some people her age call her a Goth, which she isn't, of course. She has nothing but contempt for those pretenders, just as she feels contempt for all those she believes are responsible for her isolation. She almost never uses her powers, knowing them to be the source of all this misery. Sometimes, annoying little kids ask to see demonstrations of her “weird” electricity, but she prefers to keep it bottled up---it's frustrating enough as it is to have it kick in at the most inopportune times and destroy expensive televisions and such. It's occurred to her that maybe she should revel in what makes her different, since people are going to ostracize her for it anyway, but the truth is, she's frightened of these strange abilities.
Fear is a powerful emotion. Just as she defended herself against those who'd picked on her for being a skinny, red-headed tomboyish girl when she was ten, at twenty she now wants to scare away the seething tide of humanity which sometimes threatens to overwhelm her.
“It's just teenage angst,” her mother tries to console her, as dense as always. “You'll get over it.”
Maybe she will, but at the moment, Sally doesn't see how. She graduated from high school a couple of years ago, but has mostly drifted since. No real job. Is it because she's a mutant, a local oddball, or because she's not interested in being a part of the community? (It's got to be the first option). Her sister was never burdened with any mutancy, and is now happily married with a sweet baby daughter, something that Sally hates her for.
So she spends much of her time at the outskirts of town, thinking. She plans to run away whenever she can figure out where the hell she wants to go. Calgary? Think bigger. Toronto? New York? Maybe she can disappear and blend in; perhaps no one will notice her, and she can find someone to teach her self-defence or something. Maybe Tae Kwon Do, so she can kick any jerk's ass. For the first time in several years, things are starting to sound pretty good.
Footsteps, behind her. She turns around and sees a tall but non-descript man, who smiles coldly at her.
“You are a mutant,” he says, and she nods. “You are wasting your time here.”
Again, she nods. She feels like she ought to trust him, though she doesn't know why.
“They don't want you here, but there are places where you are wanted.”
“Like where?” she snaps back, almost incredulous that he could be telling the truth.
“A place with others of your kind, away from the weak dregs of humanity. A place where none of us are ashamed or…hounded for those abilities which make us better and stronger than them. Where they will learn the meaning of the word apocalypse.”
She stands up and stares defiantly at him as he suddenly increases in size and turns blue. Hope, anger, curiosity, and pain bubble over almost visibly on her face. “Show me.”