- “When you can see into someone’s soul, you don’t have the same illusions that other people do.”
- —Emma deLauro
Emma deLauro (played by Lauren Lee Smith) is a character on the television show Mutant X. She starts off as the newest recruit to the team and their first Psionic, with the power to read and influence people's emotions using her mind. She is extremely powerful but super-sensitive (and sometimes naive) to the pain and troubles of those around her.
Biography[]
Emma's parents had been willing guinea pigs for Genomex, and it was when she was 5 that she realized she was different. She was separated from her parents at a rock concert and she used her Tele-Empathic abilities to locate them. Emma's parents abandoned her when she was 10, leaving her with a foster family. Emma has now very little contact outside Mutant X.
The GSA tracked Emma down and would have captured her if Shalimar Fox and Jesse Kilmartin hadn't intervened. Emma was taken to Sanctuary, and it didn't take long for her to decide that joining Mutant X was the best thing to do. Her limited medical knowledge and positive personality are invaluable assets to the team. She is also a skilled martial artist.
Emma was killed during the beginning of the third season.
Personality[]
Emma is very kind though she does have a rebellious side. She also seems to be insecure. Emma acts as a doctor of the team and has persuasion when she uses her empathic illusion casting ability on other people. Emma is also Empathic on others as well as she can know how others feel.
Powers[]
Emma is a Psionic, which means she is very powerful and she focuses her powers through her mind. She is also one of the most powerful New Mutants, and, until her death, she was secretly the most powerful and dangerous member of Mutant X.
Tele-Empathy: Since she was a child, Emma could feel other people's emotions and feelings. She would often use this to her own advantage, especially in her early career in a fashion shop. Emma soon discovered that she could implant emotional states into others' minds. Unlike similar Empathy, her power seems to work even over vast distances, as she can communicate with others in a distance of ten miles. Also, by honing onto their feelings, Emma can pick up sights and images.
Empathic Illusion Casting: Emma is able to focus this power to allow her to draw on people's emotions and feelings in order to make them see illusions or to make them believe that they are being physically impaired (being choked, blinded, suffocated, burned, strangled etc.).
Empathic Camouflage: Emma can alter the apparent physical appearance of herself and other people by altering the perceptions of those around her. This can go far as to make other people believe that the camouflaged people are not there (invisible). The only limit to this ability, if one exists, is only imposed by the number of people Emma is trying to fool not the number of people Emma is actually camouflaging. Using this ability, Emma can make people think that she is not there or that she is someone else.
Enter Consciousness: She is able to enter another person's mind or dreams to speak with the person or even combat them.
Tele-Empathic Manipulation: Emma can manipulate other people's minds, achieving a wide variety of effects.
- Mind Control: She can control the thoughts and actions of others by placing Empathic imprints in their minds.
- Heal Trauma: Emma can erase a person’s memories and to heal mental trauma through “psychic surgery,” the power to stimulate or deaden the pain and pleasure canters in a person's brain.
- Induce Pain: Emma can Psionically induce pain in others via Psionic Blast or send back pain waves from other Tele-Empaths.
- Negate/Inspire Emotion: Emma can deaden or negate the emotions of others, such as negating pain within the mind of Pain-Synthesizer Silva to prevent him from using his power. She has even used this power to make someone feel emotionless, such as a Tele-Cyber who negated her own feelings.
Empathic Link: She developed a mental link with her teammates and she can feel their emotional states, emotions and feelings.
Telepathy: Emma can read the emotions and feelings from the minds of other people and communicate both Telepathically and Empathically. Emma is not a mind reader like all Telepaths are, but she can learn a lot about a person's state of mind from their emotions and feelings.
Psionic Reflection: Emma is able to reverse the powers of other Psionics back onto themselves, once sending a telekinetic combustive blast back at the sender and another time using her powers to enter a Psionic Illusionist's mind, despite him attempting to enter hers.
Memory Manipulation: Emma can enhance and erase a person's memory using her mind and Psionic Blast at will. She once enhanced a witness' memory of a car's license plate number and erased Jesse's memory of her using her Broadband Tele-Empathy power.
Mediumship: Emma can perceive ectoplasmic residue left behind by the death of living beings and see them as ghost-like substances. Also she can communicate with them and let them speak through her body. She once absorbed a Fire Marshall's dying psyche becoming possessed by his ghost for a little while. This in contrast to the others is not a Psionic ability derived from her mutation, but a capacity that Emma inherited from her mother who was a medium.
Broadband Tele-Empathy: Emma can broadcast emotions and feelings to a much wider range, though she could not isolate targets when doing this. She used this ability to scare off soldiers of the Kovakistan Liberation Army.
- Mental Detection: She can sense the presence of another New Mutant within a small but as yet undefined radius of herself by perceiving the distinctive mental radiations emitted by such a being.
Psionic Blast: After further mutation, she can focus her mental power into a Psionic Blast and use them as an offensive weapon to render opponents' unconscious, alter and erase memories and kill her enemies upon impact at will. She couldn't control this power at first, but with a little help from Jesse, she soon got a handle on it. Emma could also fire a concentrated Psionic beam. She has also used this power to implant thoughts and actions into other people's minds simply as an extension of her powers.
- Psychic Liberation: Emma can also use her Psionic Blast to set others free of mental control. Her most prominent use of this technique is to expel Ashlocke from Shalimar's mind at the beginning of season 2. She was also able to release Ashlocke's Telepathic hold on Shalimar at the end of season 1. On another occasion, she was also able to knock an astral projection out of the possessed person's body during season 2.
Empathic Precognition: Emma can foretell future events and observe what might happen by utilizing her personal thoughts and feelings about another. The strength of her emotions corresponds to how evident her vision of the future will become.
Empathic Postcognition: Emma can see past events and observe what happen by utilizing her personal thoughts and feelings about another. The strength of her emotions corresponds to how evident her vision of the past will become.
Abilities[]
- Martial Arts: Like all the other members of the team, Emma is a skilled martial artist.
- Technology Usage: Like all the other members of the team, Emma also has technology usage such as her com-link ring, compact decoder and Sanctuary's computers.
Retrieved from
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- According to early casting breakdown, the character was originally named Emma DeSalvo, codename "Rapport." Her original New Mutant ability was Telepathy (akin to X-Men's Jean Grey), and she was to have a romantic relationship with the Scott-like character Brennan. Her codename was discarded, her last name was changed to DeLauro and her ability was changed to Tele-Empathy emphasis on the "m" after the Fox Studios vs. Marvel lawsuit discouraged similarities to the X-Men film.
- As a child, Emma once communed with the ghost of a small girl during a séance of her mother's. Emma's biggest fear is of being blind.
- Emma's age: Emma is consistently listed as the youngest member of Mutant X, so she must be younger than Shalimar's 25 years of age. Indeed, her official site profile agrees that she is in her early twenties.
- Emma's Tele-Empathy: Throughout the first season, Adam calls Emma a Tele-Empath, one who can sense and manipulate the emotions of others. She does indeed have this gift, but her range has always exceeded this one facet of Psionics, since the very first episode of the show. She demonstrates her ability to cast illusions on Allison Turner in "The Shock of the New", by making two harmless dock workers look like harmful GS Agents. In "Russian Roulette" and "The Meaning of Death," she makes Sonya and Jesse respectively feel as though they are choking. Fear and panic are emotions. Suffocation is not and neither is blindness which she accomplishes with the GS Agents in "In the Presence of Mine Enemies," and with Adam in "Double Vision." In "Fool for Love," she displays memory manipulation when she enhances a witness’s memory of a license plate number. No one should be surprised, therefore, that her teammates are unaware of Emma’s growing proficiency as the second season wears on.