Ever reflect on earlier periods of your life and feel like you were silly about a possible relationship, or didn't take some project, or work seriously enough? I hear people relay those concerns all the time, so often in fact I hardly bat an eye when someone brings up wasting a portion of their life and have pretty well rehearsed responses to reassure them.

For me, I carried the weight of the world on my shoulders, metaphorically of course. I was born to a family who... Well lets just say that they were more than simply affluent. And they had plans for me. My grandparents certainly had a lot to do with this, and my mother didn't do much to stand in the way of it. Though to be fair she may have just wanted me to succeed.

So I spent the first few years of my life in homeschooling, via a private tutor, and around the time that I was 12 I ended up studying at the institute my family had been running for several generations, due to some very specific genetic circumstances.
Life was hard for a good long while. I tried to take things in my stride a little too much, and not in the arrogant way (Maybe a little of that too), but more that I didn't really believe I had the right to complain or think outside the box I was being pushed into.

Eventually my Grandmother decided that it was time for me to get a real idea of what her plans for me would entail, turns out she wanted me to take over the running of the school (My Brother and Sister were inappropriate for this, apparently.) And as a result shipped me off to a similar school in the US. To my understanding, they helped found the school in England.

I studied and interned there for a while, the experience helped to bring me out of my shell and foster my independent aspirations, or at the very least start nudging me in that direction. But before I knew it there was trouble in the air again, and I ended up being shipped back to the UK.

The whole year was troubled, and in the lead up to December my family relationship was more strained than ever, and my mother had me shipped off for the third time in my bloody life to another different private school. My family name got most of my relatives into trouble, however I'd received the last name of my other parent, courtesy of some form of rebellion by my Mum.

Shortly thereafter I lost contact with most of my relatives, and I heard that my mother had passed away a year or so later. Life was lonely for a good while, but I managed to keep up my grades through it all and then as an independent adult decided that on graduation, I would go to University in the US. Weighing up my options I fell in love the with University of Portland, and have since undertaken a Psychology degree there.
It's been a year since I moved here, and I'm happy to say that I've moved on with my life from my problematic teenage years. I'm independent, on a scholarship and am making new friends. I'm happy.

Passive Empathy and Emotion imprinting. 
Passive Empathy:

Heather's power is that of sensing the emotions around her, this is always active and has been since her power activated when she was 11, leading to her quickly becoming overwhelmed by a tornado of emotions, fortunately her family were prepared and immediately got her help with initially suppressing, and eventually learning to manage it at their school, St Bethany's.

She's become a lot more adept at managing it since she's become older, but it is always on and can only be deactivated by power suppression.

Imprinting: The second part of her mutation, which only activated when she was 15 is that through skin to skin contact she can either push an emotion from nearby or her into another person, and encourage it to take over. In other words, she puts an emotion into them and gives it an advantage over other emotions, this does not necessarily mean a depressed person can become happy, but it does significantly increase the chances of this happening.

LIMITATIONS
-Heather's passive empathy has a range of about 50 yards, although she can only distinguish a particular person's emotion within 20 yards of them, unless she knows the person well in which case it's about 30 yards, generally speaking she cannot discern what a specific emotion is or where it's coming from beyond 30 yards, although they will still effect her.

-Heather has to have skin to skin contact for at least a 10 seconds to imprint an emotion on someone, and for it to be effective they have to be open to her words.

-She can also only imprint 4-5 times in a day

SIDE-EFFECTS
-The first and most obvious side effect of her passive power is that the emotions, to greater or lesser extents effect her. As with most people, being around a happy or sad person will often incline you more towards their mood if the emotion is intense enough, this is also true with Heather. The advantage she has however as having been an early bloomer she has had time to get to grips with her power and can often focus on the happy ones and as such isn't depressed very often.

-This can also lead to a lot of confusion and quite severe headaches with her not being sure what emotions are hers, and what is coming from other people.

-Using the imprinting often leaves heather feeling emotionally exhausted or more often also has the same effect as intended for the target on herself.

-She often suffers from insomnia in populated areas due to intense emotions waking her during her sleep.

-If she tries to imprint more than 4 times a day she will get very dizzy and exhausted.