Cynthia Stedman

About

Dr. Cynthia (Cindy) Vance Stedman is a physicist, engineer, and the Global Defense Agency's head of technology and arms. She is responsible for the groundwork of some of the GDA's most impressive classified technology, including the teleportation devices used by the top brass. She was a part of the research and technology department for a long time, and often served as an expert consultant for mission operations. Eventually, she was promoted to head of the division.

There is a reason that she only came up with the groundwork and not much further, however. 

Though responsible for overseeing all sorts of research at the Pentagon, Vance had a pet project of her own that led to her initial downfall. She had discovered a way to reach into the closest neighboring plane of existence to ours, which was dubbed the rift plane. The rift plane takes the same cosmological space as ours, and individuals in it can still see and mostly interact with the material plane. However, they are unable to be harmed by creatures in the material plane, and vice versa. This technology was groundbreakingly useful to the GDA for protecting sensitive subjects, as they could be planeshifted out of harm's way. 

Vance, and many of the rest of the GDA, such as Director Stedman, saw that this technology could also easily be weaponized. He asked that she would explore this possibility, and she agreed, albeit, in a less conventional way than expected. She figured that if someone was able to manipulate the rift plane temporally, they would have ultimate power over those in it, being able to throw things into suspended animation, stopping them dead in their tracks and making them easy to dispatch or restrain. 

Unfortunately, that is where Vance messed up. When trying to inact stasis on the rift plane, she accidentally froze herself in place. When she regained conscious, what felt like a split second to her was actually 8 years to the world. Her experiment had been deemed a failure, and it was a miracle that she was even back. It was only thanks to Rudy, the only one that could figure out how to unpause the stasis, that she was able to be saved. This is only one half of this story, however. For a long time, even before his promotion, Cynthia was married to future GDA Director Cecil Stedman. As initially she was a higher rank in the organization then him, she persuaded Director Radcliffe to pardon Cecil for his mistake and instate him as the new GDA director, to which he agreed. 

As director, Cecil pushed for Cynthia to pursue her research into the rift plane, as previously explained. Their bond grew stronger over time, which would only inflict more pain on them in the future. After the incident involving the rift and Cynthia, Cecil blamed himself for encouraging the experiment, especially after more time passed and it became less and less likely that she would be able to be saved. As a result, the already cold man grew colder, now taking steps to make sure that he'd never become emotionally attached to someone again, especially romantically. The incident had caused him a lot of mental anguish which did affect the quality of his work, and he believed he was paying for a weakness. If he was to display max performance in his position, he would have to forgo this aspect of his life. 

8 years later, Rudy, being the snooping POS that he is, learned about this aspect of Cecil's life, and in an attempt to do what was right, looked into fixing it. And he succeeded. Cecil, however, was still broken and at first tried to resist interacting with Cynthia. From her perspective, no time at all had passed, but for him, he had 8 years of emotional turmoil on his back. He soon realized, though, that in a way, his avoidence of relationships wasn't what he had convinced himself it was (to avoid an exploitable weakness), but rather his devotion towards her-- as much as he hated to admit it. Though it took him some time to loosen up from the damage inflicted, Cynthia's presence made him realize that what he had with her was not a weakness, but rather, a reason to be motivated. 

(COMIC SPOILERS AHEAD- around issue 110ish)

(Spoilers End) 

During her time working for the GDA, she did suffer from one major injury in which she lost her right arm during an invasion on the Pentagon. The GDA had it replaced with a prosthetic (similar to that of Donald's). However, being the scientist she is, she made some of her own improvements, including imbedding a semiauto pistol into her hand. Though low caliber due to the size of her hand, she often uses specialty ammunition that causes things like fragmentation of the insides. It's mostly used by her as a nonlethal hinderance to superpowered people who aren't immune to firearms. She has a literal finger gun. Her hand can also interface with GDA computer systems to an extent, but nothing extreme.

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