faith harris
faith katherine harris • july 14, 1978 • 39 years old • born in manhattan, new york • resides in boston, massachusettsformer us gymnast • mit graduate • businesswoman comicverse etcetera journal
Faith Harris was born in July 1978 to Walter and Lydia Harris in New York City, and from the very start she was given an expensive and privileged life. Her father Walter was a well known (at least to the underground) jewelry thief and her mother was a socialite who was more than okay to turn a blind eye to her husband's activities. The less she had to think about the illegal activities he was doing, the better, and Lydia was all the more pampered for it. Faith was used to seeing her mother so aloof to what her father was doing, and while Walter considered his daughter Faith to be his entire world, Faith still felt the need to rebel from him. Which, was hard to do considering his illegal activities were what was keeping their family moving forward.

Walter showered his only daughter with gifts of anything she wanted, and when Faith decided she wanted to learn how to be a gymnast, well Walter made sure that Faith had the best coach money could buy on the upper east side. There was nothing more that little Faith Harris wanted more than anything than to be a real famous gymnast, and a good one at that. She wanted to prove to those who knew the family that not all the Harrises needed to turn to illegal activities to make a name for themselves, and so she pushed herself hard. Even at a young age, Faith understood the power of what her name brought (and didn't bring) her, and she wanted to prove that anything she had, she earned. So through her youth, Faith went to school, went to practices, and that was it. There was no time for a social life outside of those two places, not if she wanted to meet her ultimate goal: becoming a member of the US Gymnastics team.

The dream came true when she was chosen to join the team in 1992 when she was 14, while the team was in preparations for the 1996 Summer Olympics. She won gold at a few US based competitions and world competitions, but she wanted more. Faith was on a personal quest to make sure that she could be better than anyone around her, that she could make herself proud, and a small part of her wanted to make her father proud as well. So she trained, she competed, she slowly worked her way to the top, and then it was time for them to pick who would make the team. After dedication and hard work, Faith Harris found herself a member of the 1996 US Olympic Gymnastics team, and life could not be better for her. Well, it could be better if she helped bring home the gold, but everything seemed to be going amazingly for her.

The Olympics came and went, she helped the team take the gold medal for the team all-around, and managed to get gold for the balance beam as well, so returning home with two gold medals was so much more than Faith could ever have dreamed of. At 16 years old, she was doing far more than she could have ever dreamed of, and she was on top of the world. Absolutely nothing could go wrong -- but that's usually when life decides to step in. She didn't get to celebrate her victories very long - a month after returning home, she was in a car accident, one that killed the other driver, and injured her legs so badly that she needed to relearn how to walk. Her shining and growing Olympic career was over in an instant, and Faith was devastated. She had worked so hard to get to where she was, only to have it completely ripped away, it just wasn't fair. And like any teenager who didn't like how things were going, she really started to rebel.

As Faith regained her ability to walk and got her gymnastics skills back (but, not her career or spot on the team, that was far gone), she was also starting to grow into her body. Her features were starting to come in, she was starting to be a far more attractive young woman than her mother was, and she started to see that if she wanted, she could use her looks to get anything she wanted and needed. Once realizing this, she fell into a different type of crowd in high school. Her grades began to fall, and she decided to seduce a few of her male teachers into giving her better grades; it worked, and she even ended up having a few affairs in the process. By the time she was 18 in 1996, Faith was heading off to college with the help of a few male admirers that she had.

Of course, her father disapproved of her methods, and they fought about it constantly, but in some way, Faith knew her father understood where she was coming from - he too had everything taken from him as a teen, and it had been why he turned to a life of crime. Faith, in some ways, was finding her life was mirroring her father's. So, she decided it was best to get some distance from him, she moved to Massachusetts and went to school at MIT, studying Mathematical Probabilities. Despite needing to sleep her way through her senior year of high school, Faith was rather smart in fields of math and science, and had opted to prove herself academically to the MIT admissions board. To her surprise she was accepted, and decided that she would try to reinvent herself again. No more messing around, or treating her body like it was to be sold. She needed to respect herself again, and Boston could do that, it could give her that inner peace.

Her collegiate career at MIT was great, and Faith ended up completing her degree in Mathematical Probabilities, proving that she was so much more than a pretty face. It was after graduation in the summer of 2000 when she was 22 that things had changed for her. She had been invited to a frat party off campus, and went with a few of her girlfriends, but drank so much she blacked out. When she had woken up, she found herself in the middle of being raped by one of the men she had been chatting with all night, and while she fought back and cried out, nothing would stop it. She went to the police and reported it, but when it was revealed the man she was accusing was a son of a well known Massachusetts State Senator, the police swept it under the rug. She was shamed by women and men who knew of what happened, telling her that she deserved it by how she was acting, by how she was dressed. That she should have been thankful that the State Senator's son wanted to sleep with her at all. Once more, Faith found her life to be completely stripped away from her, and there was nothing she could do.

Devastated by what happened, Faith fell into a deep set of depression. Feeling as though she no longer had any control over her life, Faith started to act out. She lost her job at a respectable accounting firm, was being blackmailed by the State Senator's son (as he was aiming to become a senator and didn't want Faith telling the world what he did to her) and she ended up moving out of Cambridge, Massachusetts and taking an apartment in the Theatre district of Boston, barely able to make rent. She hid out there by herself, going through the money that had been given to her by her father. By the time she turned 24, the money started to go dry, and she was too ashamed to ask him (or anyone) for help, so instead she decided to do something else. Something she had learned by watching her father. She had never been good at being a damsel in distress.

On a particularly windy and cloudy day in September of 2004, Faith walked into a jewelery store and started to sweet talk the gentleman behind the counter, asking to be shown expensive jewels and anything else she could get her hand on, and started to slip them into her purse. Someone spotted her slipping a particularly expensive diamond bracelet into her purse and grabbed her arm. She turned around to see her father, dressed in an FBI jacket, proclaiming loudly that there was a thief in their shop. He pulled out the bracelet that Faith had just pocketed and told her she was under arrest. Faith, shocked and confused, decided it was best to just go along with it, and the shame she felt was beyond anything she could truly comprehend.

Her father escorted her out of the building and down a back alley, to where there was a car parked. He told her to get into the car, and she did so, waiting to see what would happen next. Was he really FBI? Thankfully he wasn't, it seemed that Faith was at the same shop that he was planning to rob blind. He was disapproving of his daughter trying to rob, when she called him out for doing the same, and finally the argument lead to Walter and Faith having their first honest conversation in years. Faith told him everything that had happened to her, and did not leave any details out. Walter told Faith of what his life was like at her age, and also let her know that her mother recently left him for a police commissioner in Washington state that she met online. Their lives were understandably messed up, and in that moment, Faith realized her father was the only person in the world that she had.

They decided, after a few days of him staying at her place sleeping on the couch, helping her get her life back in order, that they would start to work together. He would teach her everything he knew, and she would try to teach him a few things as well. Walter moved his business to Boston and together they worked out a decent way to hide the money: an escort company hidden under a high class gentlemen's club. While Walter was not okay with his daughter opening an escort business (and would not tie his name to it at all), he understood that they needed a cover job to put the money in. Walter opted for the old standby of a construction company, only instead of stealing money from the workers, he'd use it to help give back to the workers using money from the other jobs he was doing. With both of the companies finalized, Faith and her father Walter opened them both up in 2005, and started to, in a way, turn into weird modern versions of Robin Hood. They took from the rich, and gave to those who needed it. Of course, they kept some for themselves as well, but never enough to be noticed.

From 2005 through to 2012, this business system worked. Walter ran his construction business, Faith ran her own business, and both found themselves coming more legitimate business people (though her father was considerably more respected, given the company he opened up). Due to working together, and working on robberies together, father and daughter grew close. With Walter's help, Faith was realizing the type of person that she was, and the type of person that she could be again. Because everything was going so right for Faith, that was when she should have known things were about to go south. One morning she got a call that her father had been in a dangerous accident, and had been pronouced dead at the scene. She had been told that his body was too badly burned for identifcation, but they were able to idenitify him by his dental records. Devistated, Faith accepted the news from the police, and mourned the loss of her father, finding it hard especially considering he had just come back into her life so recently. After the reading of Walter's will (which was only limited to Faith and Walter's lawyer), Faith took over his half of the company, and worked on making it worker-owned, so that it was the men and women who worked in the construction company that owned the company, not her.

After the construction company was taken off her hands and placed onto the workers in 2013 (though, she still held a 85% stake in the company, just for legal and financial reasons), Faith focused more on her own business, and slowly started to train some of the girls to also go on a few jobs with her. It was at this time that a man from her past, the son of the State Senator, came calling on her. He had become the new State Senator, getting elected after his father was mysteriously killed, and he needed to make sure his past stayed a secret. He had found out about her business (though not of her father's thieving past, but of hers), and offered a deal. Either he would turn her into the authorities, or she would pay him 15% of all her revenue once a month to him personally to keep quiet. It was a terrible way to go about things, and she was pissed that her rapist was blackmailing her, but she wasn't stupid enough to think that she could blackmail him in return. Thus started the blackmailing of her, and the fact that part of her life was being taken away from her piece by piece.

Despite the blackmailing, Diamond Services continued to grow and prosper. She turned herself into one of the more respected businesswomen in Boston ones given her ability to keep a secret (and considering a lot of her clients were and are politicians, policemen, and other important figures, that's a good reason to respect her). The more the business grew, the more power Faith got, and the more she was paying the senator -- much to her dislike. The blackmail arrangement went on for years, with Faith not letting anyone know what was going on or asking for help, but it was starting to become unbearable.

Then, in 2016, everything started to change. Faith started to experience blackouts, started to wake up with large sums of cash in her bank account and more jewels than she could ever imagine, and started to realize she couldn't remember some of the weeks. And, she had woken up one week to realize that not only was she a lot richer, but the Senator who had been blackmailing her, had seemingly taken his own life -- but not before confessing to everything that he had done to her.

It was as if a weight was lifted, but Faith knew there was more to the story here. Soon, she had come to find out that the blackouts she was experiencing were due to a second life she apparently had, one of a comic character. It was hard for her to deal with at first, and honestly still is hard for her to deal with, but she's trying to take it one step at a time. And with the fact that her blackmailer and rapist is now gone, she has gotten a lot of her life back, and she's extremely thankful for that.

For now, Faith is continuing to figure out her life now with the shifts occurring, and the new people in her life, but for the first time in a long time, she's happy, and back in control.
black cat (felicia hardy)
Felicia Hardy's father Walter Hardy was a world renowned cat burglar who, before his arrest, encouraged her to never settle for second best. If she loved basketball, she should work to become a basketball player and not just a cheerleader.

During her freshman year in college, she had gone to a party and was nearly raped by a drunken student in a bathroom, when she was saved by another student, named Ryan. Felicia and Ryan became close friends, spending most of their time together until one night Ryan demanded that it was time for their relationship to become physical. Felicia's protests were in vain. Hating the idea of being a victim, she decided that she would murder her rapist despite the consequences. She put aside her studies and began training in various fighting styles and acrobatics.

Finally, after months of preparing, she set out for revenge, but before she could find him, Ryan was killed in a drunk driving accident. Furious that she was denied the chance to steal the life of the man who had stolen hers, and feeling reckless, Hardy decided to utilize her new skills to follow in the footsteps of her father. After amassing a fortune in stolen items, Felicia chose to adopt a costume identity. She first donned the Black Cat costume in order to break her father out of prison. On the same night, she met Spider-Man. Despite her antipathy towards men, Felicia felt a kinship with this lone hero. Spider-Man was the first man she felt she could trust and she grew to love him. Felicia looked for a way to earn his trust and continued with the Black Cat persona as a misguided attempt to attract his affection. However, she was still cunning enough to fake mental instability when captured, ensuring she was housed in a less secure facility. When she was released, Felicia initially agreed to go straight for Spider-Man, and the web-slinger even had his friend on the force Captain DeWolff begin drawing up amnesty papers. The Black Cat decided to pull one last big score, however, and attempted to manipulate Spider-Man into joining her life of crime. He tried to capture her again, but Felicia seemingly flung herself to her death rather than go back to jail. Captain DeWolff ironically arrived with the now useless amnesty papers shortly after. (READ MORE. Is currently played more with her villainous side.)
tie-ins
• Same initals, and parents share the same name.
• Close relationship with their father, who passed.
• Both have similar college experiences.
• Both are determined to prove themselves.
• Both believe diamonds are a girl's best friend.
• Takes what they want, without question.
• Is a cat burglar, though Felicia is more of one.
• Not afraid to use sexuality to get what they want.
incentives
KEY: unlocked in CV | unlocked in AU | unlocked in au & cv

other Veil Lifted July 4, 2017

powersProbability Field Manipulation

abilitiesExpert Thief
Olympic Level Athlete
Olympic Acrobat
Skilled Martial Artist

itemsBlack Cat's Costume
      Peak Human Strength
      Superhuman Speed
      Superhuman Agility
      Retractable Claws

Equilibrium Earrings
Electromagnetic Contact Lenses
Grappling Hook
Sleep Darts
Diamond Mind Control Claws

locationSlide-a-Way Casino
      Back Room
      Casino Office
      Main Gambling Floor
      Private Gambling Rooms


memoriesMemories of Black Cat
• Memories of Black Cat's Criminal Army
• Memories of Cat's Eye Investigations
• More to come

misc facts
• Holds a degree in Mathematical Probabilities from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• Is the owner of two Olympic gold medals. One is for Team All-Around for Gymnastics, and the other is an individual gold medal on the balance beam. These two medals are stored in shadow boxes and hung up in a place of honor in Faith's home.

• Has a big love for Quentin Tarantino films; her favorites are Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and she's known to have marathons of the films as much as she can.

• Her sense of humor can be kind of dark and a bit sexual at times, but only when she really lets her guard down. When she is around those she doesn't like, she puts on more of a public persona, one that isn't as crass.

• It's not often that Faith opens up to people, and is completely honest about who she is, what she does, or what her past was like. If you are told any of these, it usually means that she holds a great deal of trust in you, and expects you to trust her as well. She's big on keeping secrets, and will take those to the grave if needed.

• Her sexual assault was by a man who was the son of a Massachusetts State Senator. He eventually took over the State Senate seat, and proceeded to start blackmailing Faith into staying quiet, even though she had more information on him than he had on her. He recently took his life in December 2016, and publicly outed himself.

education
• Bachelors of Science in Mathematics (Concentration: Mathematical Probabilities), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Graduated 2000)
• MBA in Business Management, Harvard Business (Graduated 2009)

family
walter harris
father. former master thief.
lydia harris
mother. 72. socalite (estranged).