Roulette

Desdemona "Dez" Shelley, known publicly as , is a member of the Anchorage Wards.

Personality
Roulette has a lot of self love and has a good relationship with her parents. She is highly artistic, though this is not appreciated by her supervisors, given that this often leads her to waste the advertising budget satisfying her creativity.

Roulette can be petulant and likes to change things up, injecting chaos into things.

She enjoys shooting targets, and was skilled in both armed and unarmed combat (partially a result of her power offering her hours of practice in an instant), although her short stature limited her in that area.

Parents
Has a good relationship with her parents.

Feint
As she tended to take problems in stride, she was able to deal with Feint better then Auroch could.

Appearance
Dez is a short, dark-skinned girl, having Aboriginal and African heritage. As Roulette, she wears a black and red mask and costume. She wore one half of her hair braided, the other loose.

Abilities and Powers
Dez is, in her words, a 'shotgun precog', viewing a number of relatively inaccurate visions.

She views a spread of futures in a matter of moments with the number of events and the length of the viewing periods depending on the time since her last 'shotgun', her emotional state, and her degree of rest. During testing, the number of futures viewed varied from two to six and the duration varied from seconds to hours, respectively. The ability hits a ceiling at the point where she is incapacitated for longer than the visions last.

Capabilities and priorities Roulette observes are reasonably accurate, but events can diverge wildly. Testing conducted proved she had her best return when she was in direct combat. She speculated, based on the occasional vision that featured extreme differences (such as the Moon being a different shape), that her power was observing possible worlds and then extrapolating one possible future of that possible world.

Roulette's power sometimes seemed to actively work against her and her allies' attempts to figure it out, especially if she avoided combat. <!--► Power Test Results: WRD_ROULETTE

Further testing may be required. The scaling nature of Roulette’s power and the fact that it is exhausted with repeated use (suffering in number & duration of viewings) makes it hard to gauge whether efficiency in viewings is linked to fatigue. ​ ​ To outline the ability in brief, Roulette can willingly activate a number of visions, which occur in parallel, hereafter referred to as a burst. In the course of only one or two seconds from our perspective, each vision gives her the sense that she has seen, heard, smelled, tasted and touched the world from the time of the vision on. Each use of her power reduces the efficiency of future uses, while time allows her to recover it. ​ ​ In testing, we aimed to measure the duration of the vision, number of visions, accuracy and efficacy. Rather than keep her for a full day, we contacted her by phone in the evening to see how fast the abilities had recovered, having her measure the above metrics and estimate.​ ​ Please note: testing was fairly unreliable, as there are no strict measurements we could take, and we relied on Roulette’s self-reporting, which may have some difficulties (see accuracy, below)​

​Number of Visions​ Number of visions ranges from six to two. Roulette’s own estimations and a late-night check in on our part suggests that each successive burst reduces the number of visions per burst by one. She recovers one burst per two hours, to a maximum of six.​

​ Duration of Visions​ Vision duration scales somewhat more dramatically, ranging from seven hours to six seconds. Repeated use of her power reduces the duration of future visions in fits and staggers, with tests suggesting that each burst used could reduce duration of future bursts by fifteen minutes to one hour. We were not able to identify why this might be the case. We were able to surmise that the reduced duration of visions is roughly percentage-based.​

Accuracy​ The information Roulette can take away from a vision is still reliant on her ability to recall. Standard limitations for memory apply.​

​Further, the visions themselves do not record future events. We relied on flash cards with symbols and the ‘Svensken’ random event test to determine the symbols and events we would show Roulette, then had her self-report after the vision had faded. Roulette reported a rough 40% accuracy rate in terms of the events, and 27% in terms of the symbols flashed for her. She admitted this result may be partially because she was quote, ‘bored to tears’.​

We would have taken this result at face value, but Roulette suggested another variable. We conducted a set of combat simulations, with Roulette using a firearm against a mounted, nonliving target, a nonlethal weapon against a living target, and with Roulette herself being subjected to a set pattern of strikes with a padded weapon delivered by a volunteer. Roulette’s results showed significant improvement, with a rough 60%, 74%, and 82% accuracy rating. Testing stopped here, as she was at the point where visions only lasted three seconds, and she was incapacitated for two.​ ​ Efficacy​ Roulette’s ability seems to be more accurate when Roulette herself is directly involved in conflict. Given a full twelve hours of rest, Roulette may well be able to view six futures, at seven hours each. However, the viability of this particular application is somewhat doubtful - if she isn’t involved in conflict, it may make for inaccurate visions. She does, however, retain knowledge and learned skills, while not retaining muscle memory or other gains. Given a strict study schedule and sufficient discipline, Roulette could become a polymath, or a ‘Jill of all trades’.​ ​ As the efficacy of visions declines linearly in terms of quantity (from six to two: no less than two even with the ability exhausted) and by a percentage in terms of duration (seven hours to one second), while accuracy increases in active conflict, Roulette may have some promise as a combat precog. She would have to manage the number of bursts used, but her power may well be better suited for more, shorter, higher-accuracy bursts for field use.​

The testing lab would very much like to see Roulette again, so we might conduct further tests. They would also recommend that she use her power in more direct conflict to better report the accuracy therein, and inform these future tests.​

​ - Rowland​ -->

Background
Roullete had a natural Thinker trigger event. She revealed her power to friends and classmates, and reached out to the PRT as well. She and her family were subsequently relocated and given new identities.

Post-Echidna
After an incident where she was overprescribed sleeping pills in an attempt to to facilitate the use of her power, she was transferred to the new PRT department in Anchorage.

The Timeskip
She had a lengthy vision, and barely managed to scribble part of it down before she collapsed into a coma from the strain.

Trivia

 * Roulette is one of the few characters from PRT: Department Sixty-Four confirmed to exist canonically.