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Roger Davies and Linda Taylor met in college, and got married after they graduated. Roger went into Corporate Law studies, eventually going into international corporate management, and got hired into one of the major multi-national corporations (his paystub comes from “Fidelity Fiduciary,” which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of one of the larger multi-nationals). Linda went into writing romance novels under a pen name, and has been moderately successful.
Shortly after their daughter, Gracie, was born, the Davies family had to move to Melbourne for several years, while a new deal was getting hammered out with the parent company of Fidelity Fiduciary and a number of local companies and interests. What was supposed to take only a year or two turned into a dozen years, with Gracie spending her formative years in the Southern Hemisphere. She became friends with a pair of Chinese siblings in preschool, and their families discovered Gracie had a talent for learning Mandarin. By the time she was ten years old, her Mandarin, while accented, was quite respectable. By the time the Davies family was called to return to the United States, and Gracie was twelve, she was learning French, and using email to keep in touch with her Chinese friends.
By the time Gracie started high school, she was better than passable in French, Mandarin, and Russian, and was learning Arabic because she liked the food and wanted to read the recipes as they were written, rather than translations into other languages she could read. She was on the girl’s basketball team, and joined her high school’s ROTC, which happened to be connected to the Navy & Marines. She showed an aptitude for the physical demands, swam effortlessly through the intellectual challenges, and went the medical route, becoming a corpsman and going through EMT training during her enlistment. She extended her original enlistment and was deployed back to the South Pacific, attached to a medical unit. Eight months into that deployment, while assisting in a search and rescue in the Philippines, Gracie was moving some debris off a victim, when something exploded, destroying her hands completely, damaging her arms severely. The event earned her a medical discharge.
While Gracie was recovering, the medical branch of the mega-corporation her father worked for approached her, offering to help with her recovery and rehabilitation, if she would help them test a prosthetic procedure they had been researching. She felt some misgivings about it, but agreed. Her new arms were grafted into her flesh and bone, and tied into her nervous system. While her sense of touch isn’t as precise and sensitive as her real hands had been, she can still tell the difference between “wet” and “dry,” “hot” and “cold,” or “rough” and “smooth.” After one of her therapy sessions, her physical therapist was walking with her across the parking lot as they were discussing her progress. She didn’t remember actively thinking about it, but she grabbed him and yanked them both backwards just before a large, rotted tree limb fell where they were about to have been. They were still hit with the smaller branches, but the larger limb would have done serious damage to either of them. After that, her cyber-limbs received an upgrade, with the claws, palm-lights, and palm-spray.
Gracie transitioned into becoming a full-time paramedic, specializing in Search & Rescue, using her new abilities to safely extract the unwary from difficult situations. During a situation with a collapsed parking structure, they were having problems getting a woman out of her Honda Civic. Davies used her glue spray to keep the broken concrete up while part of her crew got the woman out with the Jaws of Life. The woman was able to get out, but it had taken more than fifteen minutes to pry the car open. The concrete was starting to come down, and Gracie tried to get more glue up, even just to try and slow it down, so Johnson could get out. They didn’t know that holding the debris back on their side had compromised the stability on the far side, and Johnson was lost. Gracie took Johnson’s death hard, and hid from the pain at the bottom of a bottle, for several months.