Emily Rhodes, Aera.

APPLICATION

OOC Information.
Name: Rian.
Age: 22!
E-mail: moc.liamg|4091yawarac#moc.liamg|4091yawarac
AIM: itsbenfranklin
Time Zone: Arizona Mountain Time.
PB: Hayley Atwell.
Journal: aerian
Canon or OC: OC.
Non-Counted Plot Character or Normal: Normal!

*If already a member of Beyond Evolution, why do you want to take on another character? If not a member, how did you hear about us? Addiction.

IC — General Information.
Name: Emily Rhodes.
Alias: Emma, for reasons nobody can really remember beyond she's "been called that forever." Also the usual shortenings — Emily, Emmy, etc.
Field Name: Aera. CHANGE THIS RE: MELODY GUTHRIE/AERO. Aerius? Aerian? AERIS LOLOL
Age and Birthdate: 19/April 11. She took a year off before returning to school.
Nationality: All-American, babe.

Genetic Information.
Mutation: Emily is an elementalist — more specifically, an elemental telekinetic. Like telekinetics, she can move any of the five elements around within her line of sight — earth, air, fire, water, and metal/ore — change their direction if already moving, heat them up, cool them down, change their velocity, or even just change their color. Once fully trained her range will be relatively limitless, enabling her to turn a swimming pool into a destructive miniature tidal wave, to feed air into a lighter until it consumes an entire building, or even to redirect tectonic tremors away from a given area.

At the moment, however, that simply isn't possible. Emily's abilities are incredibly latent, having only presented in the last year as opposed to popping up during puberty. She is limited to only controlling those elements directly within her sight; there may be a vast lake she can whip into a frenzy, but if it's behind a copse of trees, she can't do a thing with it. Her biggest limitation — and one that won't change — is her inability to create elements. She can work with what's there, but she can't change how much is there. For example, she can heat up your glass of water to boiling, freeze it, send the water as a glass-shaped missile at someone, splash it around, make shapes with it — but she can't make more of the water than what's already there. The only semi-exception is in regards to fire, but that is entirely due to Emily feeding the flames with the air around them, rather than actually tapping into the chemical structure of the fire and increasing its mass.

Her greatest strengths are wind and earth-based abilities, those two being some of the most readily available elements at any given moment. She is able to make herself and sometimes others fly by creating a pocket of warm air around herself/them and bouying that pocket up on the winds. Her abilities are generally strongest on warm, dry, sunny days, when there isn't any inclement weather to interfere. She has difficulty combining elements at the moment, or separating ones that are already combined (i.e. a storm), except for fire, which she has gotten very good at combining with wind to make it grow. By and large, however, she mostly just flies around. Childhood dream #34: FULFILLED.
Registered Mutant: Registered, because she's a good, law abiding girl. When her powers started manifesting and her hometown made such a giant fuss of things, there wasn't much she could do to keep under the radar, anyway. As it is, she doesn't see the harm in it. It's just like being registered to vote or something, right? Right.

Personal Information.
Appearance: The first thing people notice about Emma is that she's a) a little on the heavy side, and b) has a magnificent rack. Emma doesn't mind either way; if anything, she worries about breaking these city girls in two. She is on the taller side of the spectrum at 5'9", and combined with her weight, she is anything but the typical image of a flier. Her coloring is stereotypically European — dark eyes and hair, with fair skin — and as she's gotten out of the awkward pubescent ages, she's managed to fill out the otherwise harsh angles and squareness of her face. She looks very feminine in a homegrown way, the kind of girl you expect in patterned a-line dresses, possibly baking a bie or putting laundry out on the line. She looks positively Cleaveresque when she curls her hair up. Most of the time, however, she vastly prefers casual jeans and bargain tops, as she has almost zero big-city fashion sense (JC Penney, for instance, is a totally chic shopping venue) and, living in a school where basically everyone is super gorgeous all the time omgwtf, she has a number of self-image issues.
Personality: A Very Nice Girl. Likes being kind and good-hearted, and likes putting other people before herself. Self-sacrifice, humility, tolerance aren't just words, and they aren't obligations. Is genuinely unhappy when she has to treat people poorly, even when she gets into arguments. Tough love is a foreign concept. Horrifically susceptible to guilt-trips, though she has some degree of resistance to favors. Still guilt-ridden about a) not being able to help her neighbors and b) leaving town and never looking back. Believes everyone is inherently good, and even people who do horrible things aren't horrible people. Will try to help anyone and everyone, even if they don't want or ask for it. Huge advocate of social justice; after traveling for a while, she saw a lot of things she just didn't know about in her town, and now she's hugely in favor of mutants using their powers for good (and she believes every power can be used for good in some way, with the right training). Wants to be an X-Man, but also wants to go teach English in an underdeveloped country, or join the Peace Corps, or a dozen other things. No real set plan. Sort of flighty without being flippant, and difficult to pin down. Has something of a mutant superiority complex, though it's not nearly so developed that she wants to subjugate humans or put mutants above them — just that mutants, as a superior race, have a duty to protect humans, like adults have a duty to protect children, etc. This is, unsurprisingly, partly driven by guilt over the whole thing with her town. Has very few coping mechanisms besides bottling everything up and bailing: she holds it all in until she can't take anymore, and then she leaves for a while to get her head back on straight. This usually only lasts a couple days at most, but can be much longer: e.g. she's been away from home for two years, and hasn't been back to school since the cure attacks ended. Has a real sense of uselessness whenever shit hits the fan: sure, she can attack and defend, but when people are hurt, what can she do?
Likes: Reading, classic rock, taking care of people, attempting to cook and failing horribly, flying, blah blah being made of sugar and spice and everything nice.
Dislikes: Disrespect, social injustice, when people are cruel for no apparent reason, doing laundry, being grounded, being stuck
Personal/Religious views: Very, very Christian, though she doesn't rub it in people's faces. Was raised on practical Christianity — do unto others, obey your parents, put yourself last etc. — as well as the Bible, but she makes an effort not to prosyletize. She tries to let people believe what they want to believe as long as they let her keep her own faith, and can get somewhat testy when angry atheists tell her God doesn't exist, but won't listen when she insists that he does. Fair play, people. Really, she would just like everyone to hold hands around the campfire and sing kumbaya, but she's aware that it probably won't ever happen. As far as mutants go, she's torn — especially seeing some of the things that have happened at Xavier's. She definitely believes they have a responsibility to use their powers for Truth, Justice, and the American Way (tm), but she knows they have several hundred hurdles of mutant prejudice, government interference, and mutants who don't want to be mutants before they can get there.

History:

• Born to Karen and Harry Rhodes, a nurse and hardware store owner in Arona, Pennsylvania (pop. 407). Very small, very white, very religious town. Everyone knew everybody else's business at all times; you grew up to marry little Susie from down the street; the local Catholic priest was more of a social leader than anything; etc. The kinds of things you'd expect in a small town.
• Was a very good little girl from a young age. She had her moments of rebellion, particularly as a pre-teen, but she never went smoking behind the gym or running off with a boy on a motorcycle. Was voted prom queen as a teenager, was in the 4H club, etc. She was just a genuinely good kid.
• Abilities first manifested at 13, but very small: winds seemed to change around her, and every so often it looked like she was floating slightly above the ground. They didn't become really noticeable until she was 15, when a storm threatening to knock a tree into her family's home was suddenly blown out of the way by an errant, shifting wind. The effort knocked her out for three days, and she didn't talk about the incident for a while afterward.
• Powers kept coming out without warning, though. A boy drinking water who made fun of her suddenly found that water in his face; once, when utterly scandalized that a friend of hers had started smoking, Emily suppressed the flame in his lighter for three minutes straight.
• It soon became apparent she could do things, and when enough people started questioning — not like anyone could keep secrets in Arona — she came out with it. They were leery at first, scared even, and gave her a wide bearth.
• It took weeks for the priest to finally condone her abilities, and with his approval — the approval of the Church — people started acting normally around her again. Her ability to fly was cool rather than frightening; the fact that she could heat up the only pool in town when it got cold was a pleasure rather than some kind of sin.
• Approval turned to curiosity turned to neediness, and by the time she was 16, people were asking for favors. Small things, at first: Carrie's hair dryer had broken, mind being a human beauty appliance? Or helping heat Mrs. Johnson's house, since the heater had broken, or shift around the nutrients in the soil of Farmer Enman's crops, since his corn wouldn't grow. The more Emily did, the more people asked. Her pastor increasingly touted her abilities as a gift from God, and people took it and ran with it.
• Over the next eight months, the favors became increasingly impossible, from making it rain in a dry summer to melting all the snow in the roads.
• Soon after her 17th birthday, someone began a rumor that not only were her abilities a gift from God, but Emily herself was some kind of divine being — an almost messianic figure. The belief spread, despite the Rhodes' fervent denial that Emily was anything but a normal human girl. Favors she wasn't strong enough to fulfill became favors it just wasn't possible to fulfill. People began asking her to intercede with God on their behalf, to heal the sick, to give last rites to a dying man, to bring people back from the dead.
• Emily, obviously, couldn't do any of this, but all her insistence that she couldn't, she was sorry, only got people angry. None of them had abilities; none of them were chosen by God; clearly it was Emily's responsibility to help them.
• Things came to a head that October when someone threw a rock through her family's window. Her parents made the best of it, but Emily couldn't take it. She debated for weeks, but just before Halloween, she packed up a bag and left in the middle of the night.
• She almost went right back afterwards. She had rarely been out of her town except to go into Pittsburgh or — once — Manhattan, and the thought of leaving home for who knew how long was almost incomprehensible. She flew back three times, only to stop at the city limits and leave again. It was better, she figured, for everyone: they could get back to their normal lives, and her parents wouldn't be in danger. She'd write when she was settled.
• Except she didn't settle. Once the fear and shock of suddenly being on her own had worn off, Emily discovered a taste for traveling. She almost never had to take conventional travel if she didn't want to, she could work when she wanted and leave when she wanted, and just go wherever she wished. It was more than difficult at first, to get used to occasionally sleeping outside, to dealing with the elements and equally tempermental mutant-phobes, to learn how to defend herself against less than honest men. She had to steal more than once which she was not happy with, but she found herself in amazing positions to help people, which she hadn't been able to do at home.
• She hopped a cruise liner across the Atlantic, bartering cleaning service for free passage, and then took her time travelling through Europe and Asia. She took the train when she wanted, but often flew on the air currents (it was, of all her abilities, the one she had gotten the most control over). Europe was, in general, more accepting of mutants than people had been back home, and she used that liberality to put herself into a position of social concern. That is, she spent her time in Europe helping people as best she could.
• Briefly considering joining with the Peace Corps when she turned 18, but her powers started to go on the fritz that year, and that hope went out the window.
• In September, after nearly a year of travelling, her utter lack of training got to her. She'd been using her abilities too much, too often — specifically, her wind manipulation, and not nearly enough of anything else. She found herself losing altitude and missing control of air currents; shifting dirt to make a dry, compact bed in a park for the night left her with a muddy patch of ground; maneuvering water and fire was nearly impossible.
• But really, what was she supposed to do? She didn't really know about Xavier's, and there weren't a host of mutant schools and teachers crowing after her. It almost seemed like her abilities were dying out — and if that was the case, shouldn't she go home?
• It took a few weeks of debate — longer than it had taken to decide to leave Arona — but ultimately she started the flight back to the coast, where she planned to work her way across the Atlantic on another cruise liner. Or she would have, had her powers not gone on the blink halfway over Switzerland. Quick thinking bouyed her back up in gusts until she landed in a heap through the awning of a fish stall, snapping her arm.
• The shopkeeper took her in and had a doctor look her over. When she told them in stilted French that she was a mutant, that she needed to get home, it was through an associate of the doctor's that they recommended Xavier's school. The doctor, interested in genetic anomalies, had followed the school in the news and figured it was the perfect place for a mutant with her abilities practically broken. He contacted the school, and they had Emily transferred over that November.
• She's been there since — through the Cure madness, things crashing into the lake, even hooking Rogue up through EHarmony. Her parents were duly informed of where she was, but she made no plans with them to return home.
• Honestly, she's not entirely sure she's ever going to. Running from her problems, she can has.

Status: Student, senior (for the coming year).

Writing samples.

Sample third-person post: Emily was one of those nauseatingly optimistic people it was nearly impossible to kick when she was down — she just wasn't ever down to kick. And no matter how many times you told her a thing was impossible, or that it couldn't be done, there was little in this world or the next that would convince her once she'd set her mind on it. So no matter how many times trying to bake a batch of cookies to leave out for the residents ended in black smoke billowing out of the kitchen or seven of Emily's burnt fingers wrapped in gauze, she was convinced that if she tried enough times, she could surely figure out this elusive "baking" thing. After all, her mother used to do it all the time; Emily had watched her bake some kind of confectionary thing at least once a week when she was living at home, and that was in between her mother's shifts at the nursing home and clinic. It couldn't be <i>that</i> difficult.

Fourteen eggs, a bag of flour (half of it on the floor), two packages of chocolate chips, and a baking-soda sneezing fit later, and she was wondering if maybe she shouldn't call for help. The oven was beeping angrily with the batch of seven lumpy fist-sized chocolate messes she'd thrown in there; when she ran over to open the door, acridly sweet smoke poured into the kitchen and out into the hallway. The smoke alarm went off, and half a minute later, Emily was slipping and sliding through a maze of wet flour and sugar on the floor, half covered in the sticky white mess. It looked rather like she'd been trying to do a Scarface impression and gotten lost along the way. Smoke obscured her vision as she came hacking and wheezing and wet out into the hallway — someone, she couldn't hear who, asked if she was all right — and she could barely choke up a reply.

"Oh, I'm fine!" she said between floury wheezes. "Just — made a little mess in the kitchen. I'll clean it up! Um. How do you turn the — uh — sprinklers off?"
Sample first-person post: Right, okay, I know the secrets posts are pretty intense, but there's <i>got</i> to be something else to talk about around here! You guys just graduated? What are you going to do for summer break? Is anybody working? Anybody staying on to TA next term? Moving into the city, going abroad, taking up underwater basket weaving? Come on, I've only got a couple hours a day where I can spend trolling your entries, make it good! ;)

Plot/Character development plans
Getting better control of her powers, I AM SO CREATIVE. There's some room to futz around with her mutant superiority thing, too. And, duh, doing anything and everything she's guilt-tripped into. I'd also like to see her start to settle down some; she's something of a roamer at the moment, and it'd be nice to be able to have something that keeps her around when shit hits the fan.

NOTES

http://twatty.insanejournal.com/27965.html
http://www.scribbld.net/users/baobabble/154728.html
http://www.scribbld.net/users/baobabble/146874.html
http://dalek.insanejournal.com/8931.html
http://gimcrack.insanejournal.com/40498.html

• Christian! Very Christian. Not all that in-your-face about it, but she was brought up Christian, she has Christian ideals, blah blah blah. Her parents — mother, particularly — are much more serious about their religion than she is; they are somewhat bigoted (by no real fault of their own besides growing up in white, Protestant communites with white, Protestant friends) and prone to cite God's will whenever something bad happens to someone else, and bad luck whenever it falls on them. When Emily presented with her powers, they vacillated between horror and awe, and when the church and their pastor officially said that these mutations were a gift from God — suddenly Emily was more of a miracle than a teenage girl. Truth be told, part of the reason she wanted to come to Xaviers, aside from learning about her powers, was because she has almost forgotten what it's like to be treated like a normal kid.
• Comes from a small, insular little town in Pennsylvania. Everyone knows everyone else's name and business; you grow up with the same kids you knew back in grade school and usually marry little Penny Lou who you kissed on the monkeybars. They have farms in the outlying areas, and except for when shipments of goods or tourists come passing through, they don't have a whole lot of contact with the rest of the world. They're not backwards of stuck in time; merely self-sufficient and happy with small town life.
• Emily is the only mutant in the town. You can imagine how speshul that made her. She wasn't ostracized as a mutant (at least, not outside of a few social rebels), but instead, almost deified. The major pastors and priests of the country — including the Vatican — believed mutants were "touched by God;" Emily's hometown took that and ran with it. First, the town priest said she was a "miracle in the flesh;" people began seeking her out for help, and Emily, not knowing what else to do, did what she could; asking for a small wind to shake some pigeons out of a tree became asking for rain to make the crops grow. The country was in an energy crisis — why didn't Emily harnest some wind for the town windmills so they didn't have to worry about it? Favors piled upon favors, becoming increasingly unreasonable, even asking Emily, this walking "miracle," to intercede with God on a dying man's behalf. Which was bewildering, to say the list, since she was pretty sure she wasn't some kind of messiah. Whether they were religiously deluded, driven by mob mentality, or just looking for a quick solution as the economy fell and the town slipped into unemployment and depression, Emily's neighbors turned her into a messianic figure — and when she couldn't deliver, they weren't happy.
• SO SHE LEFT, MOAR DETAILS TO COME.
• Very interested in the political sphere of mutations. Registration, equal rights, civil liberties, etc. She tries to keep abreast of all the mutant registration news around the world, and is really very horrified at most of it. Emily has something of a small-town mentality (no surprise), in that she is aware all these horrible atrocities happen, but it's difficult for her to conceive of people actually doing them.
• Relatedly, she is more than willing to see the good in people. While she doesn't gloss over faults, she understands that there has to be a reason for them, and she'd much rather learn that than judge (lest she be judged). Turn the other cheek, not casting the first stone, etc. She was heavily raised on a lot of the New Testament morals, as well as some of her parents bigoted small town thought, which can often raise some conflict. Of course she doesn't have anything against Muslims, but do they really have to wear those big black robes all the time like the Taliban? And no, she certainly doesn't think any less of you for your "lifestyle," but maybe you could be a little more discreet? She's gotten much better about it since she first started at the school, but old habits die hard, and some of the more controversial topics — Islam, homosexuality, abortion rights — will send her into a vaguely conservative nervous wreck.
• Has difficulty making friends, because she tends to be so on the fence about things. She has reservations on a lot of hot-button topics that teenagers talk about or are involved in, so while she'd like to keep everyone on her Christmas card list, sometimes they just rub each other the wrong way. It is, she will always insist, her fault. Somewhat self-deprecating, and is always willing to take the blame first. She's not a doormat, but she is extremely susceptible to guilt (please see: her reactions to her neighbors; as soon as they played the guilt card to get her to help, she was all over it).
• All this being said, it's not as if she doesn't have her own opinions. Blah blah blah self-assertion stuff here. She's not great at it, but she does hold that when you believe something, no one should be able to take it away from you (this goes for people whose beliefs don't line up with her own as well, which often combats her natural inclination to tell them they're wrong).
• Can bake damn near any cookie — but that's about it. Is otherwise completely hopeless in the kitchen, something that really chafes, as she would really like to be a wife and homemaker at some point down the line. Maybe not immediately, but the whole white picket fence, 2.5 kids thing really appeals to her. It's what she grew up with; it's what she'd like later. At least, she thinks so. Maybe. Being out in the world beyond her hometown has made her aware of some of her other talents, her skills with her powers, and that there are things she could and should be doing beyond getting married and settling down.
• Hospital stuff stays, or at least the car accident that landed her there, as this will be what wakes up her dormant abilities. It's a pro-mutant non-mutant who is her nurse, and when her bloodwork comes back with the little mutational blips, he is the one who first initiates her into the idea that being a mutant is Not That Bad.
• Was possibly on the road a while before being dropped in Xaviers? Left home at 17, should have been at the school in two days, but just — kept going? This would have helped loosen her up, certainly. Idk if I like this.
• Has a tendency to cut and run when things get too much for her. She'll stick it out admirably to that point — but once it gets there, all she wants to do is get the hell out. The most notable example, obviously, is when the issues with her hometown became too much. She could have gone to some official, clarified, talked to people, made it clear she wasn't what they thought — but instead, she left. She gets scared, and her usual method of dealing with situations is to pile everything on herself until she can't bear it anymore, and then drop it all at once. Probably actually fled Xavier's in her first few months there, when it seemed like she would never be able to handle being a mutant and would have to go back home where people thought of her as some divine answer to their problems.