Anima/Merinda Wyatt

ANIMA/ MERINDA WYATT


Real Name: Merinda Wyatt

Alias: Anima

Identity: Secret

Age: 22

Species: Human merged with Dreamtime Spirit


Physical Appearance: Merinda has three distinct forms due to her abilities, her true female form and the one that she most prefers walking in, the male form that she was born into, and the Animal Hybrid form that she uses to fight as Anima. In all her human forms, she is of Australian Aboriginal decent and she does not have the ability to shapeshift herself into anything other than these three forms, though she can limit how much of her shapeshifts as points. For example, she can make one of her arms beast mode while she retains a mostly human form.

As Merinda, she is a powerful and beautiful woman. She stands at an impressive 6 foot with a strong Amazonian like build, easily looking like she can take care of herself in a fight. Her skin is naturally darker, and her hair has a curl to it, though she often tries to tie it back to keep it out of her face. Her smile has a naturally entrancing quality and her eyes are a warm amber like brown. In this form she tends to wear more form flattering clothes, reflecting in the confidence that she has found in this body.

As Pangari, she cuts a much less imposing form, standing at around 5 feet 9 and being incredibly skinny and frail looking. Her hair in this form is shorter and messier, looking like she puts no real attempts to upkeep this form, which is not far from the truth. Her skin in this form is paler, like she has spent most of her life indoors locked away from other people. Her features are sullener and her sunken in appearance giving her a sicker quality. In this form she generally wears ill fitting clothes as if she is trying to hide her body.

As Anima, she has the most distinct change, becoming something akin to an Animal and human hybrid. The form is bipedal and stands a little taller than Merinda’s true form, around an inch or two taller, with this form seeming much more powerful. The form has a distinct cat appearance like a cougar in its markings, ears and fangs possibly resembling the descriptions given to the Phantom Cats often described in accounts in Australia. She remains a certain humanity to her face though it is obscured by fur and other features, making it difficult to connect Merinda to Anima. She also retains her long hair, though it is wilder in this form and has become darker in tone. She has several white markings on her dark fur that seem to resemble the markings often painted on in older Australian Aboriginal culture.

In the Anima form she wears leather armour that comes as part of her transformation, the leather armour is painted with markings of white modelled after olden warriors. The armour protects her chest and torso area while leaving her arms and legs exposed, apart from bracers around her wrists and shins, so that she has a full range of movement for her claws.


Personality: Compassion and empathy are Merinda’s two most defining qualities. As someone who had suffered for years with the unpleasantness and rejection, she seeks to help those being mistreated. If someone is hurting, physically, emotionally or spiritually, then she will do her upmost to help. She has a natural ability to get a read on people’s emotional states and she uses this to try and help. She obviously has a strong desire to help people in the LGBT community, but her desire extends to all good people.

Merinda is also an animal lover and because of her connection to the dreamtime she is aware of the connection that the whole world shares with each other. She will not abide animal cruelty or cruelty for no reason to nature. She has a strong activist side to her that has made her become a part of many charity organizations in the past.

In her true form she is outgoing and friendly, brimming with confidence. In her male form she is more subdued and nervous, feeling disconnected from the world that she does not know how to explain in words. In either form she has a strong love of literature and a fascination with the tales of heroes, considering she spent most of her life prior to her empowering indoors and trying to escape from her life.

There is a strong desire within her to find herself, the place where she can call home, after having been cast out by her family after coming out as Transgender and a superhero. Additionally, she has developed a very deep-seated fear of rejection that leaves her occasionally nervous about letting people get too close to her. That desire and fear often clash with each other, causing her to become conflicted about making any long-term partnerships, for fear that she might one day be betrayed or abandoned by the other party.


Powers: Shapeshifting: Merinda has been merged with a spirit of the Dreamtime called Anima. Through this connection, she has gained the ability to shapeshift, though it is limited between three forms. The first of these forms was the body that she was born into, Pangari, the young frail boy who knew that deep down that he had been born into the wrong body. The second was Merinda, her true form, a form that she gained from the spiritual remains of her twin sister that she absorbed in the womb after an accident when they were still within their mother. The third form is the hybrid between her and Anima, the feline Phantom Cat creature that battles against the personification of humanity’s darkest desires.

As Anima, Merinda naturally gains several abilities that are connected to a being from the Dreamtime.

Naturally Enhanced Physicality: To summarise, as Anima, Merinda’s strength, constitution, speed and reflexes are all increased greatly. She can run at higher speeds, strike with the force of a wild cat and able to take a punishment, battling on long past the point where a normal human would have been forced to yield. The exact limits of these abilities are somewhat fluctuating depending on the connection Anima and Merinda share at that time, depending on her confidence and clearness of mind, however she is generally at max 3 times more powerful than an average human, with the occasional greater burst.

Regeneration: Tied into the first point, Anima heals from wounds much quicker than a normal person as well, and she can focus her power into more quickly healing from injuries. In the middle of combat this can only offer so much, and it usually requires her to be outside of the fray, giving her amble room to focus. It basically means that injuries that would take some normal person weeks to recover from can be shrugged off by her in a few days.

Empathy: Anima’s natural empathetic sense gives her a clearer read on what the people around her are feeling. This does not mean that she can read minds or even necessarily understand all people, it just means that she can get a sense from people on their intentions. Her senses can be tricked by someone who is skilled at shrouding their emotions, but the average person is generally easy for her to read.


Abilities: Through her travels and trials, Merinda has become skilled in hand to hand combat. She is most easily able to use these skills as Anima or Merinda. In her Pangari form, she is basically incapable of fighting, less from his frail body and more from the drastic loss in confidence and steadiness in this form. Merinda can fight quite well in her natural form and while she doesn’t have much formal training, she has picked a distinctive style of fighting.

Computer Skills/Engineering: Being a shut in for much of her life who used her computer to escape her life, Merinda has picked up a few tricks when it comes to building computers and handling minor repairs. She isn’t an expert by any means but it’s more an interest that she has, an interest that has helped her get a little extra money while she has been wandering.

Psychology: To better understand her abilities and better combat the shadows that she faces, Merinda has studied psychology to a university level. While she is still young she is able to have some decent insights and has at times served as a counsellor despite her own spectrum of problems.

Weapons/Equipment: The most Merinda has is the clothes on her back and the stuff that she has in her backpack. She doesn’t have much worth mentioning. The armour that she wears as Anima comes about naturally as part of her mystical shape shifting. She does have a rather high-performance gaming laptop and some repair tools, but they aren’t bleeding edge technology.

History: Merinda was born as Pangari Wyatt, surviving her twin who died in the womb after an accident. She was born to her parents, Maka and Tarni Wyatt, and she was the second born child, though she never had a strong relationship with her older brother, Mowan, instead developing a stronger kinship to her younger sister, Lowanna, who was born a few years later. Though at different points in her life she would be distant with her family, Merinda was always close to her Grandfather, Pindari, who was a kind and wise man who had always accepted his grandchild and who offered a stronger connection to her heritage than her parents did.

Merinda’s early years were filled with a strange sense of wrongness, one that the girl could not put her finger on for many years. It was something that she couldn’t explore because of her family’s dynamics. She often found herself the target of her father’s frustrations for being too feminine and for not being more like a boy and this caused her to retreat into herself more, being unable to live up to her father’s standards.

Her understanding of herself did not truly begin until she made her first real and longest lasting friend, Erin Autumn, a young girl that grew up in the same area as her. Erin and she formed a fast friendship, with Erin often standing up for her more soft-spoken friend. It wasn’t until they were playing in Erin’s house one day that Merinda began to have some understanding of who she really was, they were playing a game and Erin convinced Merinda to dress in some of her clothes. The moment she did, and the young girl looked at herself in the mirror, something seemed to click with her, that strange sense of wrongness with her that she had felt for so long seemed to melt away and she felt right. This was her first moment experiencing Gender Euphoria, though at the time she had no understanding of what was occurring.

It was a feeling that lasted right up until the moment her father arrived to pick her up and saw her dressed in Erin’s clothing. His reaction was incredibly negative, and he cut Merinda off from seeing her friend outside of school, even verballing abusing the young child for dressing in girl’s clothing. This left some deep scars with Merinda, which caused her to deny who she was, receding herself deeper into the shy persona of Pangari.

Being unable to spend time with Erin outside of school, Merinda dove into the internet, becoming an avid reader and role-player. She used the latter to in secret explore her true self, creating female characters and telling her friends online that her name was Merinda, using the name that her mother had planned to give her unborn sister. This was where she made another one of her long-time friends, a young Korean boy named Hyun Ki, who spent most of his time indoors because he suffered from extreme agoraphobia. Merinda even had romantic feelings towards Hyun for a long time, but she kept them to herself because of her father’s very vocal opinions on the LGBT community.

Highschool trapped in the wrong body went as well as one could imagine. She was a regular target for bullies, including her own older brother, and found it difficult to make friends. Even her relationship with Erin became incredibly strained when Erin came out as Bi Sexual and Merinda, fearing her own hidden truth, cut off their friendship in the hope of protecting herself. Their distance in her senior year pushed Merinda closer and closer to the edge, eventually leading her to decide to run away from home, to try and start a new life somewhere else.

It was on this fateful night that Merinda met Anima, she had already made it out of the city when the rift between her world and the Dreamtime was cut, allowing the dark spirits, known as Shadows, to escape into the world. Merinda was possessed by one of these creatures, that tried to use her depression and fear to make her a vessel for it’s power. When all hope seemed lost, Anima merged into her form and fought back the dark presence, becoming wounded in the process. The dark spirits escaped into the night and Anima and Merinda were forced to make their bond permanent to save both of their lives.

Merinda became the dominate persona with Anima acting as a spirit guide, fearing that the girl would be erased if the spirit took control away. The two chased after one of the spirits and together were able to slay it before it could hurt anyone else, though the rest of the spirits had long since disappeared.

When Merinda followed Anima’s instruction and attempted to revert to normal, she found herself, to both her and Anima’s surprise, transformed into her female form. Neither had been expecting this and at first Anima did not have an answer for Merinda on how it had occurred, only learning later that the remnants of her sister’s spirit still lived on within Merinda. Merinda for her part, was filled with that same strange sense of completeness, becoming what she had always secretly wanted but was too afraid to admit. She tried to hide this away from herself, refusing to use this power to help people, trying to cut herself off from the power, but when she found that people in her hometown where becoming the targets of these dark spirits, she was forced to act.

At first, they struggled to maintain their form but as Anima slowly got Merinda to open up she was able to take positive steps in her life. She reconnected with Erin and let her in on her secret, gaining a confidant that she could rely in. Erin helped Merinda in her journey in the LGBT community and assisted her through the awkward transition period.

Merinda was having to live three lives, her life as Pangari with her family, her life as Merinda with the friends that she was making and her life as Anima. It was exhausting, but she lacked the confidence to come out to her family for fear of being abandoned. It was however impossible to keep this up in the long term and eventually Merinda had to take her younger sister and her Grandfather into her confidence, when they saw her using her abilities. Though they had some difficulty dealing with it at first, both did what they could to support the young woman. Even coming to support her choice to life as Merinda instead of the body that she was originally born in. Her Grandfather did struggle more with this, but ultimately his love for his grandchild won out in the end and he helped to keep her secret. He also proved invaluable in being able to connect more with her heritage, which helped to strengthen her bond with anima, exploring her spiritual side in a way that hadn’t really been encouraged in her family.

As she grew in her understanding of herself, she grew in power as Anima. She was slowly able to work her way through most of the shadows that came through to their world, rescuing the people that had become vessels for their power, even learning about their leader the Overshadow. Through her battles, she learned that the best way to break down the darkness inside people was to try and help them, by showing them compassion, and through that she was able to slowly accept herself. Anima was able to handle this while also dodging her way around the oppressive government forces that hunted Super humans, using her shapeshifting abilities to easily vanish into crowds and making herself less of a target.

Merinda’s life was touched by tragedy just as she finished High School with the passing of her grandfather, having one of her major pillars of support pass away like that set her back on her journey and caused her to slump into a depression. The Overshadow tried to take advantage of this to take over her mind, slowly chipping away at the girl’s resistance until she was nearly ready to kill herself. It was only through her connection to her remaining friends and with the memories of her Grandfather that she was able to pull herself back from the edge, even managing to find a weakness in the Overshadow’s armour.

Merinda went off to college and was able to be more freely herself outside of the confines of her parent’s house. She studied Psychology with the intent of helping others, trying to understand the human mind. She had her first boyfriend during this time, but things eventually fell apart between the two because Merinda was not able to come out to her parents at that time and because of the many secrets that she had to keep from him about her activities as a hero.

It was during her final year that she was finally able to slay the last of the Shadows that had escaped into the real world, killing the Overshadow in their last-ditch effort to break Anima. Freed from this battle, Merinda felt a huge weight lifted off her shoulders and she was able to finish college in relative ease. She took a step back from super heroics for a time to focus on her own mental wellbeing and life.

After college, it was finally time for her to come out to her parents and after much trials she did so. It went as well as one might imagine, with her being kicked out of her home, for being Transgender and being a superhuman. Her mother was more open, but her Father and her brother disowned her, even calling the authorities. Perhaps things might have been different if she had her Grandfather for extra support, however she did not wish to put her Mother and Sister in jeopardy, so she decided to leave, basically going on the run. She was obviously heart broken, but she would not deny who she was.

Thankfully, Merinda was able to get out of the country using her feminine form and made her way to America to avoid forces in Australia. She is currently now on a journey of discovery, walking the earth and trying to achieve the next stage of wisdom. She has managed to get her hands-on documents which list her name as Merinda Wyatt, which has allowed her to avoid detection because her Father and Brother were unaware of her new name. She is seeking a way of making her form as Merinda her permeant default form and trying to find other people to help, hoping to start a new life.

Weaknesses: Merinda’s power as Anima can be drastically affected by her own self confidence and self-belief. When she is suffering from bouts of depression or is denying herself she can find it difficult to transform and even when in her Anima form she will find her strength greatly reduced. If she is unable to clear her mind, then she will likely be over powered or will fall in battle.

Merinda has a deep routed fear of rejection and betrayal, which can sometimes make it difficult for her to open up to people about her secrets. This can have a real negative effect on her relationships with people as she will find it difficult to connect on deeper levels.

Merinda in both her human forms and her Anima form is particularly weak to weapons infused with spiritual energy. Attacks of this nature are more difficult for her to heal from and can risk forcing her back to her human form. If she was attacked by these types of weapons enough she could be killed or could have Anima seperated from her, which would also likely lead to her death, though over a slower time frame. 

Other Information:


OOC Information

OOC Name: Anima

Character color: Bronze or Gold

Group title: The Dreamtime Champion

Face Claim: Madeleine Madden