Click for hyena and alien character pictures. (ref sheet from my DeviantArt)

Name: Abigail Normal. Goes by Abbi.

Race: Furry--spotted hyena (almost all the time, alien appearance is also furry)

Powers: Limited shapeshifting ability. Very limited. Has a knack for feeling electromagnetic energy in the vague way some animals do, like migrating birds sensing magnetic north. This is of limited usefulness, obviously, but is quite handy when she's working with her electronics. Her shapeshifting ability is granted by her unstable Morphic Field: due to her accidental creation in a lab accident on an alien ship, the physical parameters of her cells weren't created under controlled conditions. So, they're very changeable, as the "quantum container" giving the atoms of her body their arrangement can be caused by Abbi's electrical sense to vibrate differently, producing the over-all effect of changing her appearance. In short, she has limited shapeshifting abilities. They're not perfect, and she can't change certain aspects of herself. For example, she can't change her tusks, her eye and hair colour (except with dye like everyone else), her number of limbs, or her need for glasses. She also can't instantly learn abilities associated with a form, like the use of gills or wings. She learned the hyena form from her family the way other children learn their first words, and she can remain as a hyena as long as she wants, even while asleep, etc. She lives most of her life as a spotted hyena, and only her family know about her alien-ness. She can't do the same with any other form she learns, though--and they do have to be learned with effort, one at a time. Her unstable Morphic Field will start to fold into itself, attempting to revert her to her own form, or at least one more familiar, and the results of uncontrolled reversion can be unpredictable and random. The better she knows a form, the longer she can hold it without it becoming unstable.

Bio: Abigail was adopted, obviously, and was raised by a family of hyenas. She was found in a field by her adoptive parents, a few years before the birth of her younger sister, Nabani. The family that adopted her were the Digs-In-Graves, a very traditional, well-respected hyena surname. She grew up in a tiny community just outside BlueBell, just hyenas from families in her own clan, in which her mother was a ranking huntress and guard, and her father an artist and scholar. She and her sister moved to BlueBell as young adults, but frequently visit their family back home.

Abigail knows very little of her own origin and what she is, though she's fairly certain there are others out there. All that's to be known of her origin is the strange capsule covered in writing she was found in as a baby, which her parents had gotten her name and the designation of her species from.They were superstitious, though, so after they rescued the oddly-coloured infant they found crying in the round, black, pod engraved with a message in languages known and unknown, they buried it deep at the bottom of its crater on the distant corner of their property that it crashed at.

Growing up, they told her that the pod had said that she was something called an Edano, and that her name was Abbi Normal, which must be short for Abigail. At least, they were fairly sure that was the name. They hadn't had a good look. When she was older, Abbi found and dug up the pod she'd been found in just to have a look at it. The message in English (and supposedly the ones in other scripts) turned out to actually say, "GENOTYPE: ABNORMAL. Exogenetic Disposal Action Number: EDA-NO 42". Abbi kept the name anyways. It also told her there were at least 41 other "Edano" in the universe somewhere.