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girlforlorn · 5 years

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taissa farmiga + cis female + she/her.┊ ❛ ━ hey, is it just me or do you hear “goodbye mr. a” by the hoosiers playing in the distance ? oh, that’s just melanie “molly” watson, a twenty-three year old assistant research scientist working with the sector of humanity. according to my sources, i heard she can be neutral good and is meticulous, but also desperate. that’s probably why they remind everyone of a thrift shop cardigan two sizes too big, cooking shoplifted hot dogs over a burning garbage can, & a light at the end of the tunnel bright enough to damage your eyes. anyway, make sure to keep an eye out, the doves are more powerful with them on their side ! ( nina, 21, est, she/her )

howdy everybody! my name’s nina and i’ve been thirsting to join this rp ever since lis reblogged one of the first pre-opening promos onto my dashboard! this is my very depressed and shy child molly, who is going to be quietly watching and taking notes as your mutant muses scream in the experimentation lab. 🤠

BIOGRAPHY !

Melanie Watson was born to a very poor and very dysfunctional family, in a rural town in Sapphire state, where supervillains knew there was plenty of land to set up a base secluded from Crystalline. The majority of the population’s tax dollars went not to the school systems, but to reparations on the destruction caused by the supervillains hiding out on the outskirts of the town, the local mutants with no control over their abilities, and the hot-shot superhero who made monthly rounds to the town to bust villain operations.

While raising their daughters in a town with the lowest life expectancy in the state, the Watsons always did what they could to make sure Molly and her twin sister, Valerie, would have a way out. So they pushed their kids to work toward scholarships, and when Molly was revealed to be a particularly bright student, they cut critical corners to help pay her tuition to a private school one town over, in their only chance to give her an education that could compete with kids from more affluent neighborhoods in Sapphire.

Economic strain from paying for schooling caused the kind of stress that would send the twins’ parents to an early grave--- two deadly strokes within one year of each other--- but by the time they passed away, Molly had earned her scholarship to Staurolite College, and Valerie insisted that she didn’t let all of their parents’ sacrifices go to waste. They shipped off to Crystalline together, and saved money on Molly’s boarding by renting a cheap apartment above a rowdy pub in the Jade District.

Things went well for most of Molly’s schooling, with grief over the loss of their parents quelled by a change in scenery and a sense that they had a bright future ahead of them. Molly majored in biophysics with a minor in engineering, and worked a year-round part-time job shelving books at Crystalline Library, while picking up an additional jobs waitressing during the summers. When she started to feel more comfortable, she’d abandoned most of her anti-mutant politics in favor of keeping her head down and staying out of trouble.

Tragedy struck again shortly before Molly’s graduation, when a superhero’s pursuit of a villain escalated to a destructive brawl across rooftops in the Jade District, and the hero’s desperate outburst of power led to the complete decimation of Molly and Valerie’s apartment, with a hungover and housebound Valerie being fatally crushed in the rubble.

An uninsured Molly was left without a home, without a family, and without a purpose in life; powerless and hopeless. The end of the school year meant that she couldn’t even couch surf in her friends’ dorms for long, and after exhausting her savings and local resources in under a month, she was left on the streets in a near-catatonically traumatized state.

After months passed with no response to his emails, a former professor of biophysics looked into whatever happened to the student of his who lost her apartment days before receiving her diploma, and he spread the harrowing results of his investigation to his colleagues. Word of Molly’s story eventually piqued the interest of politicians looking for anecdotes about the devastating downsides of letting mutants walk the streets of Crystalline, and it wasn’t long before Molly Watson became a person of major interest for the movement.

With Autumn creeping in, cold nights and shivering skin shook Molly out of her depressed stupor, and the pressure to escape her situation started to weigh on her. So when she was tracked down by a scientist with the Sector of Humanity who had done extensive research into her history, she didn’t have enough endurance or dignity in her to turn down his proposition. In exchange for her to share her story with their journalists and make a few public appearances, he offered her his guest room, a guiding hand to get her education back on track, and an opportunity for her to work as an assistant research scientist in the Sector’s labs while she earned her Master’s degree at Staurolite.

While the gesture seemed nothing short of charitable and empathetic to a girl who fell through the cracks, more wisely cynical eyes would immediately realize that she was recruited to the doves for PR purposes. Her story was easily exploitable for anti-mutant hit pieces (a pretty, white, bookish, doe-eyed and angelic orphan who worked so hard to pull herself up by her bootstraps and pursue the American Dream™, only to have her future #RIPPED #AWAY by these ReCkLEsS mONsTErS!!!), and she already had a small grassroots following in the news cycles from other working-class non-mutant people who could relate to the plight of living at the mercy of superheroes, who made insurance unattainable and had no accountability behind their anonymity.

Though she is exceptionally bright, and a fast learner in STEM fields, the doves didn’t recruit a 22-year-old because she was the most qualified candidate for the position, but because the philanthropic act of “rescuing” fallen angel and giving her a cinderella story would be good for their image; it softened their reputation among skeptical humanists who thought their organization was too focused on tearing down the mutants and not concerned with uplifting the common people. She’s being used in marketing to bring in a younger generation of Doves, and they’re making sure her name and face is becoming more public than any allegedly brutal scientists on board, who may have some controversial scandals under their belts.

PERSONALITY !

Molly before she became an only child, a.k.a. Molly for her first four years in Crystalline, as a student at Staurolite and a part-time page at the Crystalline Public Library:

Molly was a sweet girl-next-door type, with a quaint small town charm that made her shy in a big city. A studious mom friend and perfectionist. She was used to being the voice of reason to keep her wild child of a sister from doing anything too dangerous, and that carried over into her friendships.

Because of her bashful nature, the strange and dry sense of humor that comes out when she gets comfortable ends to catch new friends off guard. She’s had a few people in her life that she’s been close enough to to playfully bicker with, and she holds her own in a way you wouldn’t expect. She has a taste for weird kitsch and earnestly terrible movies and pulp fiction, and always tried to make it to the Uptown Cinema’s weird midnight screenings of Ed Wood movies.

Always aspired to be a librarian, but never thought it was an ambitious enough career path when she expected she would have to make enough money to support her whole family and all of their massive debts. She’s always gravitated to working part-time jobs at libraries to make some extra cash, and used to shelve books at Crystaline Public Library for four years while she was an undergrad. She has a big affinity for genre-bro fiction; authors like Bradbury, Salinger, Faulker, Gaiman, Pratchett, Palahniuk, Alan Moore, and especially Vonnegut. Veered into more pretentious russian authors for the sake of conversational fluency when she hung around literature majors, but she’s always preferred her boyish fiction.

She never had a car, and always tried to save money on public transportation by riding her longboard to get from place to place whenever possible. More interested in the utility of skating than the #Thrasher culture. Came off as a bit of a spectacle when she was shredding across the city in a turtleneck dress and stockings.

Molly among the monsters, a.k.a. Molly as a Dove:

After she lost her home, an already timid Molly had completely retreated into herself, and the girl who could a least smile and laugh and go out to parties seemed to abandoned any range of emotion beyond numb absence and melancholic despair--- and that's the narrative the Doves try to push, to both the public and to Molly, erasing any history of wholesome hijinks or moments of genuine joy and solace she may have had while travelling in the same circle as plucky street urchin and jokester magician Jett Hawkins.

Since finding shelter and making her way back into academia, she’s at least made the appearance of coming back out of her shell.

While her mental health is recovering from the toll that the streets’ harsh physical conditions were taking on her, she may not be healing properly. A mind left vulnerable and weathered is, of course, the easiest to mold and manipulate. And as her surface levels personality traits of calm smiles and composure come back, there’s something fundamentally different about her at her core.

Molly always had political leanings toward a preference for regulation of superheroes, and agreed with some canvasing her more radical sister did for government-enforced superpower blocking medication, but she never got too involved, for fear of getting on the bad side of gods walking among tiny mortals.

With a lack of research into the fringe opposition to the Doves, she was too naive to truly understand what she was getting into in this organization, and it was easy for her to let her guard down when the scientists who saved her life were subtly priming her for the human rights atrocities she was about to witness in the labs.

Now, there is still a part of her core humanity and nuturing personality that may have survived her roughest days, and it still screams out in moral objection to what she's seen done to the mutants, but the survival instinct she developed knows that she's locked in with the Doves, and it knows that she doesn't exactly have anywhere else to go, and especially wouldn't be able to make it anywhere else if her betrayal of the anti-mutant scientific community gets her blacklisted from future job opportunities in Crystalline, or compromises her ability to finish her Master's degree.

She considers herself trapped in enabling inhumanity and doesn't have the emotional fortitude or stability to take a stand, still disturbed at heart, still waiting on a moment to exhale and truly mourn her sister. She holds it together on a surface level, and lets her shyness come off as icy silence, but anyone who can pay close enough attention might notice that she's the only scientist in the lab who flinches or has to subtly avert her eyes when one of the "test subjects" is being electrocuted. Fortunately for her, most of them seem to distracted by unimaginable agony to notice the wallflower in the back of the room.

WANTED CONNECTIONS!

THE SCIENTIST WHO TOOK HER IN TO HIS/HER/THEIR HOUSE!!!!!! I might send in an official wanted connection for this, but the gist is someone who's very tied to the anti-mutant cause and sees Molly either as a genuinely sympathetic victim of the mutants, or as a very useful prop to use to political pathos (possibly both!). This would be her closest contact in life, since they saved her from the darkest moment in her life, and she probably sees them as a surrogate family while her brain tries to cope with the realization that she has no biological kin left.

People who may have encountered her while she was bouncing between shelters or sleeping in playground tunnels. At the time, she was basically catatonic from the trauma, and probably easy prey for the thieves and the cretins lurking the streets. There’s definitely room for someone who picked up on that and either exploited it or tried to help her out. (The only condition is that it’s important that she wasn’t assisted by anyone who would actually help her get a permanent shelter, since it’s crucial to her story that she was a vagrant at the time that the Doves found her.)

People! Who! Knew! Valerie! Maybe Val’s former coworkers? Someone who traveled in the same anti-mutant activist circles as her? I haven’t decided what she did for a living yet, but I can tell you that she worked at least two jobs and was the more wild and outgoing of the twins, and definitely hung out in harder party scenes, so this could be any connection to Val, from a short-lived fling, to a best friend, to a coworker would work. I’m thinking Val might have worked at the dive bar below their apartment?

And speaking of that dive bar, someone who used to frequent that pub in the run-down Jade district and might recognize Molly or Valerie from there would be cool, too! Maybe someone who got into a fight on the street in front of the place that Molly had to break up to get back inside, or even someone who got her to stop and smoke a cigarette outside the pub with them after a particularly stressful day.

CLASSMATES!!! CURRENT (Staurolite grad students) OR FORMER (undergrad Staurolute students)! Or just people in her age group who would hang around the same places the college students would chill at, like the bowling alley or The Neon Room. I think most characters went to Crystalline University while Molly went to Staurolite College, but maybe there’s an area between Staurolite and Crystal U where students from both campuses used to coalesce for housing and hanging out. People she used to tutor! People who used to drag her out of her shell and bring her to parties! People she used to stay in with to drink tea and study together! People who helped her rural ass assimilate to city life; and the flipside: people she would drag out of the city to go pumpkin picking every autumn!

She’s very inexperienced in the field of romance, so I can picture her having maybe one serious romantic relationship in her life, that she probably still thinks about a lot. So maybe someone who dated her a few years ago? Any gender ~

A N Y T H I N G there’s such a range of unique characters in this group, i feel like i can’t even begin to touch on all the possibilities in one WC section, so just shoot me a message and i’ll write up a list of ideas for your character to be connected to Molly, either through history together or a future plot!

#PLEASE excuse my theme right now!! i'm going to ... redesign that in the near immediate future #gloryhqs.intro #i think this got too rambly to keep anyone's interest so i'll just slap a tl;dr in these here tags:#very poor staurolite college student who lived in an apartment in the jade district slums with her sister valerie #as molly finished her undergrad: a superhero in the heat of battle with a villain destroyed their home with valerie still inside #valerie died in the rubble and molly was left with 1) no home 2) no family #and 3) too much trauma to really maage her emotional and physical affairs in the aftermath #within a matter of weeks she blew through her resources and wound up living on the streets for a few months #//#after a former professor looked into what happened to her and spread the word to his colleagues #the anti-mutant side of the city ate the story up and realized she could be a great PR prop for the doves #and she was rescued - taken in by one of the doves' scientists and offered a work-study position while she finished grad school #in exchange for her doing some press rounds telling her story to the media #so she was effectively exploited for her tragedy;#but she didn't really understand what she was getting into when she was so desperate and tired #now she's locked in with the doves and even if she has some sense that she's being manipulated and mislead #she doesn't exactly have anywhere else to go #she doesn't exactly have anywhere else to go - especially because #they have a lot of power and it's terrifying to think of what could happen to her if she betrayed them - much less blew the whistle.#so she's just trapped in enabling human rights violations and honestly has a little too much emotional distress to take a stand anyway #because she still hasn't had the moment of silence to grapple with the loss of her sister #/// and she keeps to herself and gives the appearance of holding it together #but a very watchful eye might notice that she always flinches or casts her eyes down when a mutant is in pain in the labs

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