Template:Featured Articles/50-2007

Karma: Mạnh Cao Xuân or "Shan" as she prefers to be called, is the daughter of a South Vietnamese war veteran suffering from post traumatic stress and a leg injury. The family immigrated to the US when Shan was a young teen - it was on the refugee boat that she manifested her ability to psionically possess others when they were attacked by pirates. She built herself a successful life in the States, studying hard, until her college graduation when a hotel fire killed her parents, made her twin brother and her uncle fugitives from the FBI and placed the responsibility for raising her young siblings directly in her hands. Struggling to cope for some time, she eventually got a job at Xavier's as the school's librarian, the position suiting her quiet, orderly nature and the school providing an education to her younger brother and sister, also twins and both X-positive (but not yet manifested). She remains at the school, caring for Leong and Nga and debating whether or not it is time to take an active role in her own life again. Shan's mutant power is psi-based: She can project a psionic energy surge enabling her that overwhelms people's minds, putting her in control. It's fairly strong; while it would not stand up to a developed telepath like Charles Xavier, or someone with really good shields, she can take down fairly powerful minds otherwise. Her power extends to being able to 'lift' information from her victims' minds, such that she can hear what they're thinking, and to make them tell her what she wants to know (however, they don't know that they're being possessed until after the fact, which makes that a bit easier to handle). Her power allows her to alter perception as well as memory, and eventually will enable her to generate a psionic deflector field that makes her immune to psychic attack. She has to consciously generate the field, however; it's not natural. She doesn't, at this point, know how. There is no physical manifestation of her powers. The range is limited, but the number of people she can take control of is less so -- she can get about ten people under her control with some effort, which isn't much use for crowds, but good enough that she won't have a problem with small groups. Shan's control is mostly self-learnt, but pretty tight because she's had about a decade and a half to control it; since her power does, for the most part, take conscious effort, it's a bit easier to control than some of the 'always on' powers.