Madison Holt
From DevilshireWiki
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Madison Holt came to Devilshire in January 2010 when her father took up a position teaching physics at Devilshire University. She attends Devilshire High School, avoiding all clubs and generally being unpopular.
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Background
Madison Lee Holt was a smart kid. A really smart kid. She started to read early and was tackling books well above her age group. Paul Holt, a university Physics professor, often invited other friends and colleagues to his home, since going out with a young child is harder than it might seem. It was one afternoon visit with a fellow professor, Michael Duffy, that he discovered his daughter had picked up chess. Walking by the board, she stopped and told his friend that he was going to be checkmated in three turns if he didn't move his knight /there/. And she was right. Thankfully her father was more impressed by her skill than annoyed she'd helped his opponent. He had his suspicions, but he took her for some tests and they came back with the result of S-M-A-R-T.
Paul was a good teacher. He liked to challenge his students, and he liked to challenge his daughter. He started playing chess with her, gave her puzzles and math problems to solve. And she did it all. He set up a computer so she could play chess online with other people. His daughter was fascinated by computers and their complicated codes. Her mind for math took readily to programming, and to any language at all. She had a gift for them; coding was just an extension of that gift. Madison loved writing programs, which became more and more complex as she got older and gained more experience.
School was another matter. She was very good in class but didn't relate to the other kids very well. She was a lot smarter than most of them. They didn't read the same books she did, they sucked at chess and Go, and they liked computers for video games more than programming. She got picked on. Once a particular fear of snakes got noticed she had a good two years of being tormented by another boy whose sole talent was catching them. When she hit about twelve she started being concerned about her lack of companionship; her father encouraged her to join some clubs. So she joined the chess team, and the badminton team (ending up the one badminton player in history that was usually benched because she was so bad), and she won awards for excellence. She was still terribly shy. While she wrote simple games, she was too shy to share them with other geeks (and non-geeks) who might have enjoyed them. The other girls her age were particularly mean, teasing her about her red hair (hit a ginger today), lack of grace (benchwarmer badminton player), disinterest in boys and dating (at least until she was fifteen and started noticing boys a little more, which was when they started making fun of how she turned bright red around them and was rendered unable to speak) and clothes. The boys weren't all that much better. The library was her only refuge during the school day.
When she was fourteen, boys and teasing were not her not her biggest problem. There was a shooting at her father's university; a student of his came to class one day with a gun, and three people were injured and two killed. Madison realized she was petrified of losing her father; she'd always had him and he was the one person she could rely on. If he was gone... she couldn't bear to think of it.
More than Paul Holt's leg was damaged. The shooting had truly shaken him and made him reluctant to continue teaching. He started his own research, told his daughter he was working on writing a book. Madison worried; her father had always loved teaching and now he was avoiding it.
On her sixteenth birthday she hit a turning point. She had no friends and she knew it and it was lonely as hell. For once she felt sad she didn't get along with people she'd kind of looked down on her whole life. It was an arrogant outlook, and there it was: that's why nobody came to her birthday party. That and she never talked to anyone. She could barely handle being in the spotlight at chess tournaments. But how to change that? She couldn't without a fresh start.
Her opportunity came when her father agreed to teach physics at Devilshire University; Maddie was more than pleased to go and immediately began planning her makeover and new life. It was hardly a good idea, changing herself completely, but then... sixteen year olds don't always have the greatest ideas.
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No more being a dork. No more badminton. No more chess (at least in public). No more Mathletes! Contacts instead of glasses! She needed a new niche. Somewhere she could be accepted. Somewhere being quiet wasn't so much of a drawback. Maybe quiet could be... mysterious.
Some research on her new home turned up a certain key demographic: goths. It would be easy to be a goth; she just needed to weed most of the colour out of her wardrobe and hit Hot Topic. And maybe dye her hair. She was already pale! While Goths did seem to favour snakes, the ratio of snakes to bats, spiders, and skulls was low and deemed acceptable.She examined web sites to determine how she should cut her hair, what clothes she should wear, how to apply makeup, and just what the difference between goths and emos was. (She is still not sure.) Her plan to not be a dork involved a considerable amount of research, which was pretty dorky in itself, but she had to start somewhere, right? Nobody has informed her that Goths aren't actually all that cool. And while she's pretty sure witchcraft isn't real (ha ha), she's going to take a stab at the Wiccan thing. And maybe not tell her father, who would wonder why she decided not to be Jewish all of a sudden.
Personality
Madison is a nerdy teenager who desperately wants to fit in at her new school and maybe even be popular. Or at least not teased. Despite her insecurity, she is a very bright girl and would be better off not trying to be something she's not. Nobody likes a poser. Maddie loves computers, languages, chess, Go, puzzles, and reading in about that order. She's pretty innocent and clueless, which is why she never gets the 'cunning linguist' joke.
Powers and Abilities
Madison is really good at maybe six things: math, computers, chess, puzzles, codes, and languages.
Math and computers go hand in hand, and they often lead to programming. Programming languages are just that, languages, and Maddie has a knack with those. She's studied German, Hebrew, Latin, Japanese, and Spanish.
She has a head for strategy, at least with board games. Chess and Go are among her favourites. She can power through a Sudoku puzzle super fast. She loves puzzles and codes and using her freakish brain.
People
Paul Holt: Dad. He's a physics professor at Devilshire University.
Amria: A cheerleader at school who is surprisingly nice. Like really nice. Also loud but little, which is kind of amazing.
Scout: Amria's friend, kind of mysterious. But also nice!
Keith: A guy determined to be helpful. Also Irish. Maddie tends to be a shy, stammering mess around him.
Anna: She doesn't believe in Wicca or magic. Madison figures she won't mention them around her so she doesn't get laughed at. Not for that, at least.
Cody: A nice guy who also knows Latin. Maddie figures everyone else must think he's diseased. That would explain why he wants to hang out with her.
Leona: She seems very nice for an alcoholic. She gave Madison beer, which Maddie foolishly drank.
Emm: Emm is a boy who thinks Madison has a pretty name and also that she is sweet! This reduces Madison to stammery mess.
