Kate's father, a police officer, had fallen in the line of duty a hero when she was eight years old - the age in which one can fully remember the experienced grief.
And so, Kate made it her goal to follow in her father's footsteps, and be as much of a hero as he was - to make him proud.
This put her at odds with almost every student at every school she attended.
No instance of injustice of cruelty would be tolerated by the spunky girl, who would intervene with both clever words and, almost always, fisticuffs. From Primary through Secondary school, Kate left no rule-breaker unpunished, no cheater uncaught, and no bully humiliated in some way. No attempt at convincing the stubborn young woman from the rest of her family succeeded, so Kate would unveil every weekend more often than not a plethora of new scars and bruises. She saw them as her great "battle scars", boasting about the glories of her exploits to both concerned and amazed family members.
It is a wonder how Kate survived all the way up to college. Her judo and karate experience had enabled her to defend against three knife attacks and five attempts of group violence in bathrooms, and the image of her father kept her mental state flying high through her self-imposed trial.
On the day the Fusion Wave hit, Kate had finally met her match - she had exposed the three most popular sorority queens in her university for cheating on multiple midterm exams, and they had gone and cried to their adoring boyfriends' gangs to teach the "hero" a lesson.
Kate had run for thirteen minutes through the campus, avoiding the dozen men on her tail, before she was tripped and placed at the receiving end of an aluminum baseball bat. The fiends took her to a back alley as the "distraught" supreme bitches directed every punch, kick, kneeing and elbowing thrown at Kate.
But she wouldn't stop fighting back. Not even as bats and glass bottles, piss and dog shit were brought into the "game."
And so, much to the bitches' frustration, the number of guys in the "torture ring" began to trickle away, amazed at Kate's bravery and resilience. Shocked at every taunt, every "COME ON!" she yelled as she spat blood from her swollen lips, screaming at assailants she couldn't even see with her bruised eyes, they shook their heads and apologized before disappearing - this was no fun.
An hour later, only the three boyfriends of the four "queens" remained.
When one of the "wronged" queens decided to get personal with their boyfriend's knife, Kate let out a gasp as the cold metal pressed against her throat and accidentally nicked her skin, spilling blood. Blocking out the screams of the six remaining aggressors, for once, Kate thought of her own safety, and truly considered the fact that she might just die a death her family would see as stupidly avoidable.
And that was when the Fusion Wave hit.
Writhing, her aggressors howled and yelled as their bodies twisted and melted into helpless, immobile forms as Kate stumbled away, panicking as she saw from a crack of light in her right eye the horrific forms they were twisted into.
Initially unscathed, Kate stumbled away grinning triumphantly, spitting blood as every step she took sent waves of pain from her feet all the way up her body.
When the Fusion Wave's effects finally did transform Kate, only one thing occurred - she was healed completely, her body cleansed top to bottom.
Waking up more refreshed than she had every been in her life, Kate got to her feet and initially chuckled before seeing her university's alumni's various fused, conjoined, multilimbed, anthropomorphicised, and plainly strange new bodies.
Out of curiosity, she turned back into the alleyway to see what her assailants had turned into.