IRIS BATES
b. 1813

BACKGROUND
(cws: self harm, asylum horror, medical malpractice, medical experimentation, human experimentation, homophobia, corrective rape, ableism, power imbalance, toxic relationships, domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, references to ww2 and real world fascist police states, cults, suicide, group suicide, racism, orientalism, body horror, cancer mentions)

Family:
At the turn of the 19th century, the Bates family was a well-respected family of Catholics that owned a series of textile factories in London that boomed during industrialization as they processed imported Chinese silk. Iris' parents therefore placed a lot of social and religious pressures on her behavior that never made sense to her autistic brain. Despite this, Iris explored her queerness in adolescence via a codependent relationship to her childhood friend, Lydia Stewart.

Bedlam Asylum:
Faced with a threat to the family's reputation, when she was 17, Iris' parents sent her to Bethlem Hospital at St. George's Fields, aka Bedlam Asylum. Bedlam, already under scrutiny for its treatment of prisoners, faced increasing attacks against its martial practices against its patients from Quakers during this period. In the hospital's west wing, Iris was locked in with other female patients. Because she would not stop writing love poems and letters to Lydia Stewart, she was collared, cuffed, restrained, and otherwise abused (including through corrective rape) by the orderlies and doctors.

The worst of it came from one particular doctor, Rastus Cooke (c.1801-1875), who in 1834 moved Iris and some other patients to a co-ed ward where the patients were subjected to inhumane scientific and medical experiments. Some were mundane in their horrors--new lobotomy techniques, etc.--while others were more macabre, related to forcing evolutionary adaptations on human subjects. As the result of these experiments, Iris began to heal at an accelerated rate. Fast enough to nigh instantly heal wounds and even bring her back from death. Her resilience made her the target of increasingly worse experimentation in the years that followed.

When a new director (William Charles Hood) took over Bedlam in 1852, he banned the experiments, but Dr. Cooke only moved them underground into a basement ward, and they persisted without Hood's knowledge. During this time, it became apparent that Iris's regenerative power also kept her eternally youthful, so she continued to suffer these experiments for over a century. When Dr. Cooke passed, his daughter Mary took over his practice and continued his work. During this time, Iris developed a romantic and sexual fascination with Mary Cooke (c.1831-1902), eroticizing the torture inflicted by her until she passed away, unmarried and childless, leaving Iris and the other patients in the care of her assistants until the hospital was closed and relocated to Kent in 1930.

Escape to Italy:
During the relocation, Iris and several other patients broke out. Some stuck together, but others like Iris went their separate ways. She made her way to the Italian countryside where she hoped to find peace and quiet and isolate herself from what felt like temptations towards sin. However, Mussolini's secret police had already established power in Cremona. In 1932, Iris was caught in the violent crossfire of Roberto Farinacci's blackshirts and killed. Exploiting her presumed death, she escaped the town and made her way back to London where she chartered passage on a boat to the United States to escape the social unrest preceding World War 2.

Homesteading in the United States:
In 1933, she met and married a New Deal homesteader named Michael Potter (c.1903-1953) who was headed out West. They settled in central California to farm oranges. Mickey became increasingly paranoid about her potential infidelity as (1) she continued to miscarry; (2) he aged and she did not. The more violent he grew, and the more receptive Iris was to that violence, the more resentful he became of his wife until one day in 1953 he attempted to kill her. Iris woke up after her death when he was attempting to sink her body into Lake Isabella, so she drowned him and continued to operate their farm as a widow. During this time, her husband's death was declared an accident, as he'd already arranged a 'fishing trip' to Lake Isabella to get away with dumping Iris' body, and she developed a reputation as a grieving widow who'd become a shut-in.

Joining a Cult:
Many came to wonder if the farm had shut down until, in 1964, a group of young college drop-outs came through looking for land for their commune. Iris allowed them to park and camp on her land, and became friends with them all. During this time she went by the name 'Lydia' and claimed to be the daughter of Mickey and Iris Potter. She fell in love with the cult leader, Robert Knowles, who denounced Christianity, marriage, and authoritarianism. (He was an Orientalist who claimed to be a Hindu prophet and asked his 'family' to call him "Sengupta.") He and his family introduced her to psychedelics, free love, and more.

They participated together in a number of sadomasochistic orgies, but even Knowles and his family were unnerved by Iris' enthusiastic masochism and fetish for violence. Despite this, he took her on as his primary partner and claimed that her magical healing powers were a mark that she was his equal. Iris, meanwhile, became romantically and sexually fixated on another of his partners, Rebecca Fisher. However, when Becky tried to escape the cult and leave the homestead, Knowles called on Iris to help him murder her. Iris, considering it one of the most intimate experiences of her life, discovered she had a taste for it. However, within three years, Knowles pushed the cult to commit a group suicide. Iris woke up after and moved on, and the news reported that the Potter family farm had been long abandoned until it was taken over by Knowles' cult.

Black Widow:
Since '67, Iris has been road-tripping around the United States to 'find herself.' She tells herself that she doesn't like that she keeps falling in with abusive men, but instead of pursuing her longstanding attraction to women, she continues involving herself with men who have all kinds of abusive red flags--especially those who will move her in with them quickly. They inevitably begin abusing her, and she takes masochistic pleasure in it, telling herself that she both deserves it for her own proclivities and that it's better her than some other woman who'd actually be hurt. When they eventually go too far, such as by killing her, she kills them instead and justifies it as righteous because of the danger they pose to others.

POWERS:

Following experimentation, Iris' cells repair and regenerate at an accelerated rate. She heals rapidly from all kinds of physical damage to her body. She can regrow lost limbs, heal broken bones, and even come back from death. She's also immune to all viruses and infections and cannot be suffocated because her lung tissue regenerates too quickly. This ability can be temporarily transferred through blood transfusion.

However, the trade-off is that she has a very high metabolism, and her food/energy needs go up when she has to heal a lot. She cannot get drunk, and cancers would spread rapidly if introduced to her body (however, her regeneration is perfected and she cannot develop cancers on her own). Further, she's susceptible to psychosomatic effects that replicate suffocation symptoms and similar. The only way to shut down her healing is to separate her brain from the rest of her body and limit its ability to regrow its missing body.

CR WISHES:

EXPERIMENT SUBJECTS: Other people who've been subjected to human experimentation, especially in a real earth history period who she might've met in her past. Bonus points for attempted trauma bond relationships that fail because their experiences are different enough that they don't get each other's issues (e.g., soldiers and the like).

SERIAL KILLERS: Unhealthy soulmates with someone who needs an eternal victim.

LAW ENFORCERS/INVESTIGATORS: Anyone who'd catch onto her black widow thing and try to pin her down and/or discover her unnaturally long history.

CULTISTS: Fellow cult members from the 60s who partied with her, especially if they are unnerved by the extent of her violent tendencies.

SHITTY DUDES: People she might victimize--those who she might seek a relationship with and who would become abusive and controlling.

OBJECT OF FIXATION: The girl of her dreams! She's drawn to high femme presentations with a mean streak who'll let her be an embarrassing puppy who worships them.

LOOSE THREADS: Her family went on to have children and grandchildren and so forth, so she's got descended relatives out there somewhere who are heirs to the family fortune. Lydia Stewart would have some too. The doctors and staff from Bedlam also have inheritors who she might seek out for vengeance. The cultists might have families who find her and know she was connected to their dead children, or the ex-wife of a man who left them for her before she killed them, etc.