Katie Barnes
Katie Barnes is a Sophomore at Saint Joe's. She's probably the most conventionally "cute" member of The Tartans: she's naturally blonde, with clear blue eyes, and has both an easy smile and a disarming air of openness about her. In many ways, that makes her stand apart from the other three girls, with their dyed hair, multiple pierced ears, and punk raucousness. Katie gets a kind of thrill from being accepted by the others, since deep down she feels like she doesn't belong.Katie came to SJS to help her learn about her telekinetic powers. She's one of the school's "non-combatant" students-- while her telekinesis is extremely intricate, and able to manipulate fine detail with skill, she can't apply more than just a few pounds of pressure. Fighting crime with the equivalent of a ping-pong ball gun would be hazardous to say the least. So instead, Katie has mainly focused on bringing her powers more fully under her own control-- she has a tendency to exert telekinetic force on things without meaning to, including when she dreams.
In The Tartans, Katie plays drums, occasionally assisted by her powers-- what she and the other girls call "playing lazy." Of all the girls, Katie has the most natural talent, but she's simply not dedicated to it. Though she loves playing, she also juggles regular "girl stuff"-- dating, shopping, school-- and often, rehearsal is the furthest thing from her mind.
Lara "Click" Linnell
Lara is a senior, and the most sensible member of The Tartans in a "will you get with the program?" sort of way. Lara doesn't think of herself as very attractive, so she's gone a little wild with her look, preferring "striking" to "plain" any day. With a slim frame, her mannish shoulders seem a bit too wide, and her brown eyes are accentuated by her streaky dyed hair. She has a few piercings and one or two tattoos-- recently, she used her fake ID to get a new "The Tartans" tattoo on her left shoulder, and she regularly bugs the other girls to follow suit. She's slightly resentful that her efforts to talk the other three into getting inked has met resistance.Lara's powers are still partially uncontrolled, which is unusual for an SJS senior. She's hypersensitive to energy fields and currents, and can both hear and feel their flow through circuits, wires, and electronic devices. Most of the time, her powers are within her control, but she occasionally suffers severe headaches from the constant sensation and sound from the world around her. She can even detect the bioelectric fields in living creatures, which to her senses give each person a unique "chord." Using her powers, Click can detect even the smallest fault or anomaly in what would otherwise be a smooth electrical current. Her intricate knowledge of current and energy allow her to manipulate certain types of energy with a touch. Click can touch a live wire with one hand, and channel the electricity through her own body and out her other hand as a bolt. However, manipulating energy directly in this way is extremely painful to Lara, and the sound and sensation of direct current can send her reeling. Because she sometimes has trouble "tuning out" her powers, Lara enjoys working with things that don't have active energy currents and fields around them, and is a amateur auto mechanic of some skill. She likes working in the comparative silence of the metal shop on engines and transmissions, and she enjoys working with clay and potter's wheel.
Click plays keyboards in The Tartans, and is the go-to girl for the lights and soundboard. She's also semi-obsessed with the band's image, so she does a lot of promoting and wrangling opportunities for the band to play. She wants the band to succeed, not just on principle, but because Click really wants to do something with her life beyond SJS that doesn't include college and marriage and a job she hates. So she sees The Tartan's success as her own ticket to the life she wants. For that reason, she often comes across bossy and overly critical: she has a vision of what the band could be and she feels very threatened when the other girls act like they're not taking it seriously. This gets her into constant conflict with Katie, but Lara also recognizes how talented Katie is, so she puts up with it instead of trying to have Katie kicked out of the band.
