Life is full of ups and downs, and as long as you focus on the ups, and work on improving the downs, you can make it work for you. And while she had definitely had her share of downs, Jenni Spellman also had her share of ups. When she was a child, she got into mixed martial arts, specifically Historical European Martial Arts, or HEMA, as it was more often called. At age eleven, she got third in a national tournament, and at age twelve, she earned a silver.
But then the boys went through puberty, and outgrew her in both muscle mass and height, and she only got in the top twenty when she was thirteen, and barely landed in the top fifty the next two years, before she stopped entering competitions. She kept learning various forms of martial arts, including both armed and unarmed combat, and even spent a fair amount of time on shooting ranges. While she knew she couldn't go professional with her childhood hobby, she did also have a passion for justice, which the bullies in the schools she went to learned the hard way.
When a bully approaches a five foot five twig of a girl, the last thing they expect is for her to be able to bench 200 pounds and be as well trained in marital arts as anyone can be. While she may have stopped growing any taller when she was fifteen, she never stopped training, and wore clothes that did more to hide her figure than to show her muscles. So when they found themselves going flying or unable to even touch her, their confusion caused them to posture, and eventually they just learned to leave her and her friends alone, because even when they came at her three on one, she was able to thwart even their most practiced moves.
Now, she may have been more tomboy than fluttering flirt, but she was not without charm or good looks. Just being in shape tended to put her a step above most, and while she didn't really have obvious muscles like the 'roided out gym brats, she was quite well toned, and kept in shape. Once her friends convinced her to put make up on, and gave her a full makeover before she went to classes, and judging by how everyone around her acted that day, she must have quite good looks indeed.
But that was never her focus, she liked to be able to be in control of every situation, and to help those in need. Which was why she joined the police academy, and eventually even joined the S.W.A.T. team of her local precinct. She did so well, in fact, that they even transferred her into the busiest precinct in the state, and promoted her more often than she thought she deserved.
The local gangs called her Nightshade, the deadly flower, and she had a higher arrest to kill ratio than the rest of her team. Meaning that she managed to arrest most of her targets, and rarely had to resort to lethal force, even dealing with hardened gangsters and drug runners. She loved her job, and when she wasn't required to attend to other duties, she often volunteered in community outreach programs and youth sports groups to help her neighbors stay on the right side of the law, not to mention herself.
She didn't have it easy. Far from it, she craved challenges, and pushed herself hard when working out and even kept up her martial arts forms the best she could with her somewhat less than impressive height. And while she never sought out a fight, when she found herself in them, she tended to lead the flow of the fight in directions that benefited her. She drove herself so hard, that her mother had even given up trying to urge her to make room in her life for romance, and starting a family.
And when she was on her way back to work after an outreach program where she played basketball with kids less than half her age, and nearly half her height taller than her, something happened. She was a little behind schedule, and was jogging a bit harder than she usually did, almost sprinting even. But then she was somewhere else. Nearly three blocks further down the street than she remembered being and bouncing off the wall of the building that the street ended in front of.
She had often been accused of spending her whole life going turbo speed, and the biggest member of her team, a giant of a man with the heart of a teddy bear, often called her turbo because of it. But this was an entirely different thing. She didn't remember speeding up any more than a quick jog, but she obviously had gone much faster than that, as she couldn't think of any other time she had rung her own bell this hard.
Getting up she looked around, and seeing nobody in sight that she could consult with about what had just happened, continued on her way to work. Nothing else strange happened that day, other than a few news stories about weirdos in some other state play-acting as superheroes and supervillans, and she hit the gym on the way home for an hour or so before watching a T.V. show as she went to sleep.
The next day went as planned. Well, it went as planned up until she was once again trying to quickly move to an event she was late for, and pushing her “casual jog” a little too hard to really call it a jog anymore. Once again, she was jolted out of the zone she had fallen into as she ran by something unexpected happening. Though when she said unexpected, she might have under-exaggerated a bit, because she once again ran into something that she wasn't supposed to reach for another few minutes. This time it was a no outlet sign she usually used as a landmark for her next turn.
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Running into a no outlet sign was much more jarring than running into a wall, as the force of her whole body was concentrated on the single point where her face met the sign's pole. Surprisingly, she didn't have so much as a scratch that she could feel, and while it was a bit sore, it didn't really inconvenience her. Continuing on her way, she made it to the event she was headed to, this time a soup kitchen for the slums in the ghetto on the south side of town. She got there on time, and after she was done helping, she went for an easy run back to the station.
This time she was paying attention to her surroundings – one does not simply go for a casual stroll with their head in the clouds in a neighborhood like that. Especially if one happens to be an at least better than average good looks woman on the shorter side of small. So when she suddenly sped up, she noticed. Noticed, and nearly tripped over her own feet from surprise.
Getting back into control of herself, she quickly made her way to a nearby park that was near a station a friend of hers worked at, and sat on a park bench to take stock and look over what she had just done in her memories. She didn't notice anything different in how she ran, nor how she breathed or moved her arms or anything. She kept at it for a while, but she was quickly running out of time to get to work, so she made her way to the station and continued her day.
Having noticed a trend in the three odd experiences that she had recently had, she decided to spend some time on the track at the gym she went to. Paying close attention to herself and her surroundings, she started with a jog to loosen up, and slowly worked her way faster and faster. She almost missed when it happened as she was getting into the groove and really letting loose. But she managed to keep her mind on what she was feeling, and that's when she felt the slight jolt in her muscles as she sped up faster than she should have been able to.
Now, being able to feel a difference is far from being able to control said difference, and she spent the next hour trying to trigger it on purpose, crashing more often than she would like to admit. Once she even zoomed right off of the track and crashed into one of the “'roid-tards” as she thought of them. You know the type, they use steroids to bulk up and then go to the gym to try and bulk up further. He went flying, Jenni barely caught herself, and while Jenni was unhurt, the 'roid freak was not so lucky.
Rushing over to where he landed – he bounced twice – she quickly helped him up, and checked on him. While she bounced twice as far away from him as he did from her, she barely had her clothes disheveled at all, and he was bleeding from multiple scrapes, and he also broke his arm. Keep in mind, 'roiders often have to deal with bones that are unable to keep up with their muscles, and sometimes poor quality steroids even decrease bone density, making the problem worse. This particular user of steroids must have been new to the scene, as he reacted quite poorly to his broken arm, even trying to tense up the muscle to suppress the pain – a very bad idea.
After the ambulance left, and the pair of cops they sent to check on the incidence had all their questions answered, they went to the security room of the gym to verify her story. And that was when she first got a good look at her abilities. Or rather, a thoroughly blurry streak that was the same colors as she was periodically shooting off from the track and running into or barely dodging various objects in the room.
By the time they got to the part where she ran into the idiot, the patrol cops were barely holding in their chuckles, or at least that's what she imagined they thought they were doing. And when she ran into the idiot, and both went flying, nobody in the room could stop themselves from laughing. A few minutes later they got themselves under control, and the manager copied the relevant video files for her to take to the precinct and share with her supervisor. She wasn't sure how to feel about how that meeting was likely to go, and was both dreading it and looking forward to it.
The meeting went as bad as she expected and also way better than she expected. As it turned out, she was not the first policeman in the state to suddenly develop powers, and there was a boot camp that she could attend for it. After jumping on the chance, she left her still chortling supervisor in his office and headed to her office to fill out the forms, before going to HR to drop them off. It was late already when she went to the gym, and she was sent straight back home after the report, so she went to bed as usual, and ended her day.
The next morning just after she finished getting ready for the day, there was a knock on her door. She opened it to find her ride to the boot camp, which she hadn't expected so soon, but apparently her case had a rush order put on it, so she packed a quick bag of necessities and hopped into the car. She got an even bigger surprise once she got there, as they had already set up a gym specifically for her, and while it was a bit embarrassing, she also found it rather funny that the walls were thoroughly padded. They brought in the relevant weight racks and exercise machines she asked for, but put most of them in a separate room, something she hadn't thought of, but was glad for later that day when she bounced off the wall behind where she had planned on putting them.
The biggest adjustment she had to get used to after arriving at the camp was that she had to purposely walk anywhere she went unless she was actively training. She almost jogged to her next destination a few times, and only managed to break the habit when she tripped in the middle of a pond she had accidentally ran across and bounced a few times before she landed in the gym they had made for her. Slowing down, it turns out, can have advantages though, as she started interacting with the other policemen at the camp and came to enjoy their company quite a lot.
By the time she finished getting a handle on her powers, a few months had gone by, and she had made nearly a dozen new friends. They exchanged contact info as the was checking out, as had been done with the few who had finished before her, and she went back to work. Now, however, she could stuff her days with even more meetings and other such things as it only took her moments to get from one side of town to the other. Except that she didn't. Her bosses insisted that she actually slow down with her side projects and she had to spend more time idle than she had had since she was ten years old.
It was definitely a time of adjustment and adaptation, but she soldiered through and even started hanging out with her team outside of work, which pleased them to no end. By the time she was no longer limited to her reduced schedule, she had filled the extra time with social outings of all kinds. This, while it was quite enjoyable, came with a hidden danger, her mother started bugging her about finding a “nice man” to settle down with again.
As she returned to the mortifying conversations with her mother, and even started to enjoy them a little as she got to vent or gush about things that the guys around her did, her life fell into a rhythm again. And as we close this chapter in the record, it bears mentioning that she was put in a new force of specialists for dealing with crime committed by super-humans.