London Fog is a nova who became municipal protector of London in 2006.
Biography[]
London Fog was born in 1974 in Islington and was assigned male at birth, with the name "Benjamin Emory". She spent most of her early years hovering between confusion and self-loathing, only to have shifted firmly into self-loathing upon reaching puberty. Benjamin ran away from home at 15 and tried to start the process of transitioning. Unfortunately, Emory lacked the funds for the expensive procedure. The police caught Emory and returned her to her parents.
At 18, Emory chose to forego higher education, choosing instead to try to find work to get the cash for reassignment. This began a long chain of low-paying jobs throughout London, none ever paying quite enough to finance medical transition. At 20, Benjamin Emory legally changed her name to Deborah Emory and began to live openly as a woman. Her life continued in much the same vein over the following 11 years. Expenses (especially England’s rising cost of living) made pursuing surgery impossible, since England’s socialized medicine system would not cover it.
In late 2005, Emory abandoned hope. Estranged from her family (who refused to accept the change), neglected by English law (that made it impossible for her to legally alter her birth documents) and unable to save the money for surgery, she decided to finish it. She walked to the middle of Hungerford Bridge, spent a few minutes working up the nerve to jump, and when she saw a police officer approaching, she steeled herself and leaped, only to regret the decision to the core of her being a brief fraction of a second later.
A strong wind preempted Emory’s suicide attempt. Instead, she exploded. The world around her flared into brilliant, flowing light, as she suddenly perceived weather around her as energy patterns that she could control. Even more significantly (to Emory), she discovered that she’d physically transformed as well, and now appeared to be a cisgender woman with a cloud of fog crowning her head in place of hair. Her newiy-manifested M-R node also gave her headaches the likes of which she‘d never before experienced, the intense pain triggering random electrical discharges into anything nearby.
Emory directly checked herself into a Rashoud facility, where the resident experts tended to her headaches and taught her how to control her powers, and she was released after a month of care and training. With Utopia assistance, Deborah Emory legally changed her name again, this time to Elizabeth Deborah Barton, to more clearly divide her old life from the new. Again with Utopia assistance, she located an agent who specialized in municipal defenders and started negotiations to fill that role for London.
On January 14, 2006, Barton had her first opportunity to present herself to London. She stopped what threatened to become a rampaging fire in downtown London with an incredible downpour. Her appearance also accelerated the negotiations her agent was in with the London city government.
In 2007, a tabloid reporter outed her. She responded poorly to questions on the topic, and her agent threatened well-funded legal action if a retraction wasn’t printed. One was (albeit buried on page four). London Fog doesn’t discuss the matter in public, but it’s common knowledge (if not universally believed). In private, she has made efforts to improve the rights of transgender people in England and the UK.
References[]
- TU: Aberrant Worldwide: Phase II, pp. 75-76