One of the recurring problems I have with Maisy is that she works FAR better as a secondary character than as a main one. It's hard to place my finger on, but Maisy is just the type who works better when everyone's attention is on someone else, letting her do her thing without anyone the wiser. She's always been more of a trickster type than a flat-out hero, with a dark side that always makes her one step away from an anti-hero rather than outright villain, which part of why I have so many problems adapting her to other projects. So, when I first started to have problems with the Academy story, one of my ideas was to make a totally NEW protagonist that would allow Maisy to take a step back out of the spotlight.

Thus we have Norma Blank here. Yep, that's her name. She was a pretty blatant rip-off of Gwen Tennyson from "Ben-10," only a little less perfect and a little more sympathetic. Of course, why would a totally normal girl go to a school for monsters..?

To summarize, after the end of the Age of Monsters, when the last of the daikaiju were killed off during their "Final War" (which also claimed Zoe's "life" in the Academy-verse), a new problem surfaced in the form of a mutagenic retroviral disease called "Formorian Complex"...basically, it was where all the monster-people came from. It had two active forms, passive K-Type which would just mutate/deform/empower the victims (the kaijumorphs) or virulent D-Type which would turn the victim into full-on rampaging bloodthirsty monsters (who would typically be put down by the military like mad dogs). Unfortunately, Formorian Complex was typically latent until puberty and, until it triggered, there was no way of knowing which type it would be. It was essentially a riff on X-Men mutants, only with an added horror element.

...and Norma was diagnosed with it. Rather than risk her going active around "normal" humans, she was forcibly transferred to St. Harryhausen's since they were better equipped to handle whatever she'd eventually turn into. Until she DID trigger, however, she was a bog-standard human girl attending a school full of deformed superhumans, basically an outcast from EVERYONE and EVERYTHING.

Of course, she was not alone in being alone, as there was another "freak among freaks" just starting classes as well: Maisy, the school's first and only synthetic student and "sister" to the legendary monster-killing robot, Zoe. Maisy's instinctive hero tendencies would pretty much compel her to protect Norma, while Norma would, in turn, help Maisy...er...in some way that I don't think I ever figured out. Maybe helping her pass as a human better, I dunno.

Unfortunately, Norma had about as much personality as her name would imply, and since I was going through a soul-crushing divorce at the time I never took the time to GIVE her one, and absolutely NO chemistry with either Maisy or the setting. These days, I use her name as a "secret identity" that Maisy!Wardoll uses when she goes incognito...still, she's cute, at least.