application
In Character Information
Basics
Character Name: Megan "Pixie" Gwynn
Username: sellingdust
Fandom: Marvel Comics AU
Played By: Charlotte Free
Icon: http://i.imgur.com/RKpoc.png
Canon Character Section
Physical Description:
Megan is short, at 5' 1", slender-petite, white, and an obvious mutant. She has naturally pink hair, pointed ears, and is depicted in canon with pitch-black eyes that are often but not always coloured with red, pink or blue irises; I compromise by saying she has very dark reddish-pink irises such that they appear black at first glance. She has two giant insect-like wings sticking out of her back, similar in shape and structure to a dragonfly's wings but proportional to her body. They are iridescent white in colour, semi-translucent, and very fragile-looking; they shouldn't be capable of carrying her in flight, but LOL MARVEL SCIENCE, they can. She has some physical quirks because of this -- chairs are pretty awkward for her, so she tends to sit backwards, for instance.
Megan appears to be in her late teens (she's 19) but could probably pass older if she dressed like an actualfax real life adult, which she doesn't. Sartorially, her style is pretty enthusiastically trashy; she'd call it "kawaii acid grunge witchcraft princess." It looks like Tumblr threw up all over her. She lives in shorts and shirts that can accommodate her wings -- racerback tanks or baggy t-shirts with the back cut out, usually. When the weather gets colder she layers with tights and loose jackets, but she's resigned to being cold, since coats she's altered to fit her wings have holes in the back that let in cold air. Sad trombone. She has her ears, tongue, belly button and one nipple (she claims this was intentional but she just chickened out after the first one) pierced, and a couple small, home-made tattoos on her wrists and ankles. Her accent is Welsh, faded from having lived in the States a long time, and most Americans mistake her for English.
Sexuality:
~*Megan luvs boiz*~. There's some room for experimentation with regards to her sexuality, but she primarily identifies as straight and would not consider herself bisexual even if she were involved romantically or sexually with another girl. She's young enough that she does sometimes confuse admiration towards other women as being romantic or sexual interest -- she thought Illyana was really interested in her and was open to that -- but as she gets older she'll find it happening to her less and less. If anything, she'd call herself barsexual; she has no problem feigning sexual interest in women to appeal to men. It's aggravating.
She can be pretty sexually aggressive compared to what people are used to with girls her age -- she comes across as this great innocent but she's actually pretty experienced and most people are shocked to find out exactly how sexual she is. She has a great deal of casual sex that has no emotional significance to her, except that sometimes it's a pretty transparent ploy to get people to like her, which is a little sad. She can, will and has used her sexuality as a tool in the past -- for favours, protection, acceptance, and money.
History:
Megan comes from a universe where mutation is an extremely recent development -- as in, less than a decade recent. In December of 2012, a solar flare sparked waves of mutation amongst millions of otherwise normal people, throwing the world into chaos. Millions more died due to radiation poisoning. Within weeks, anti-mutant legislation in various countries threatened the rights of new mutant citizens, requiring them to identify themselves and their powers, or simply making it illegal to be a mutant under pain of death. In America, anti-mutant prejudice skyrocketed and never really went down again. Mutants were fired from their jobs, thrown out of their homes, denied medical care, and wrongly arrested at astronomical rates. In New York, the mutant population found themselves aggregating in a neighbourhood in Manhattan they called District X, or Mutant Town, with a 90% mutant population. While it was relatively safe to be a mutant there, the neighbourhood was pretty rough.
A few months after the solar flare, the US government initiated the Sentinel project -- initially human, highly-trained special ops forces in uniform and then special armoured suits, the Sentinels were deployed to most major American cities and worked in conjunction with the police to respond to crimes committed by mutants -- and not-crimes not-committed by mutants, because most people who signed up for the Sentinel program were massive bigots. They had complete freedom to do whatever they wanted and nobody questioned them. The project reached a head in 2014 with the introduction of completely robotic Sentinel machines that were released in New York first as a testing ground. The Sentinel machines were roughly human-sized and shaped with advanced AI that nonetheless presented real danger to mutants in a way even the tyrannical, violent human Sentinels had not -- because AI has a tendency to malfunction.
Meanwhile, Charles Xavier, a wealthy mutant philanthropist, had opened and run his Mutant Haven in Westchester for months, while his old friend and rival Magneto started the Brotherhood of Mutants -- an extremist mutant rights gang with a violent philosophy. Anyone who didn't fall cleanly into one of those two camps usually found themselves drawn into the same conflicts, anyway -- because what affected one group of mutants usually affected all of them.
Megan's parents met in Wales, near Cardiff, but moved to New York when Megan was young. Mr. Gwynn had developed a chronic pulmonary disease from his job at a coal mine and Mrs. Gwynn accepted a teaching position at Columbia University. Megan was born in May of 1995 and moved to New York in 2006, at the age of eleven.
She grew up in Yorktown, outside of the city proper -- they couldn't really afford to live in Manhattan, and her mother just sucked it up and opted for a longer commute for a lower cost of living and peace of mind, not wanting to raise a kid in the city she was honestly a bit terrified of. They were comfortable and happy, although Megan's father felt emasculated by being out of work and no longer the family breadwinner. He started drinking a lot since he was at home all the time and it gradually developed into a problem -- although he never laid a hand on his wife or child, he was unbearable to be around and disappeared sometimes for days at a time. The Gwynns' marriage suffered under the strain of his alcoholism, although they kept it together for Megan's sake. They didn't do a very great job shielding their kid from their marital problems and the stress of her parents constantly fighting (often over her) began to wear on Megan. She started acting out at school -- skipping class and hanging out with people her mother didn't approve of. It wasn't that they were bad kids, necessarily, they weren't violent or anything, but a lot of them were burnouts and they were more concerned with partying than academic achievement, and her parents hated them.
In December of 2012, when the solar flare hit, Megan was 16. The change in her eye colour was initially dismissed as some strange side effect of radiation poisoning; the change in her hair colour went unnoticed as Megan's hair was covered in purple dye at the time. Two bumps began growing on her back that her mother at first thought were cysts. Her father's already poor condition worsened rapidly from the radiation poisoning and after two weeks of fighting for his life in the hospital, he died. Over that same period, the "cysts" on Megan's back had begun to bud and grew into wings, marking her as a mutant -- and one who couldn't hide what she was. The reaction at her school was negative to the point of violence and she had to be withdrawn. Traumatized by the death of her father, her own bodily changes, and being rejected by her peers and removed from any semblance of a normal life, Megan went completely off the rails. When she discovered her ability to produce hallucinatory dust, she started trading it for other drugs with the kids who would still talk to her and spent all her time getting high. She constantly left home, sometimes for days at a time, to hang out with runaways, addicts, and general delinquents. Her mother couldn't control her and didn't know how to deal with her daughter's mutation -- Megan once overheard her describing it as "disgusting" over the phone -- and at some point she just gave up trying, which was the final betrayal for Megan. Feeling like no one cared about her and she had no one who would protect her, she ran away from home.
Being white and an obvious mutant excluded her from most gangs (skinheads tend to be anti-mutant as a rule), so she was on her own -- a bad situation for a pretty girl. She eventually ran into a group of mutant street kids like her who took her in and protected her, but the group fractured when the party kids and the straight-edgers couldn't reconcile their differences anymore. Megan went with the more unstable and self-destructive party kids, because she was the same way, and it fed into a lot of her bad decisions. They also didn't judge her when she started selling her dust as a party drug -- it brought in a lot of their income because it's not technically illegal, although the cops and Sentinels harassed her significantly about it when they caught on.
She heard pretty quickly about Charles Xavier's Mutant Haven but didn't seek out help because she was afraid of being turned in and sent back home, or worse, foster care, so she kept staying with friends, bouncing from crash to crash. When she was 18 she came back on the grid, no longer having to worry about being dragged back to her mother's, and started renting her own apartment in Mutant Town. She paid rent in cash, most of which she got from her dust but some from panhandling and the couple bucks her friends would scrounge up if they could, but found it impossible to find a real job. A high school drop out with no skills to speak of isn't exactly drowning in job offers, especially when they're such an obvious mutant -- places outside of District X wouldn't even consider her, and in many cases would not even let her in the door.
Megan began meeting some of Haven's residents over the period of a few months -- notably Jamie Madrox, Sofia Mantega and Laura Kinney. In November of 2014, Megan was evicted from her apartment for being late on the rent one too many times, and found herself back on the street. She still couldn't bring herself to go to Haven, having been there once at a Halloween party where it was extremely clear to her that everyone there was in a completely different class from her, so she turned to sex work when her drug dealing wasn't pulling in enough money. She did some escort and porn work until she had enough to get back on her feet, then started working at the Mutant Town strip club Camelot, which gave her more financial security than she had ever had. She was a popular dancer there due to her strange appearance, but no one in Mutant Town is rich and she just made enough to get by.
In March of 2015 she met a girl named Illyana Belasco at the local coffee shop and they hit it off as friends. Megan wasn't aware that Illyana was involved in a cult, called something stupid like the Cult of Limbo or whatever, run by one Dr. Belasco, a man whose mutation (genetic & cellular manipulation) had led him to believe he was some kind of demon or lesser god. He had kidnapped Illyana, aged ten, and tampered with her body in order to age her to a young adult, prompt the manifestation of her powers (teleportation), and alter her mutation. He brainwashed her into believing the same stuff he did, and then set her with the task of collecting a "pure soul" (read: virgin) in order to sacrifice to create "Bloodstones" that would "open the gates of Limbo" to them. An utter load of bullshit, but Illyana really believed him, and after meeting Megan, she decided she was the pure soul they needed. (Which, while an easy mistake to make, uhhh.) Illyana kidnapped her and brought her to the cult to be murdered -- in the process, Belasco altered her genes, giving her the ability of teleportation needed to "open the gates" -- but Xavier's X-men intervened, ostensibly killing Belasco and rescuing Illyana and Megan. (This is all very silly but it was the closest I could keep to the canon storyline given the game's strict no-magic rule.) They kept Illyana to work on rehabilitating her and extended an offer to allow Megan to stay, but she panicked, teleported, and wound up in Baedal.
Powers:
Megan is a mutant -- a human being with special genes that provide them with superhuman abilities -- and like many mutants, she has more than one special power.
1. PHYSICAL: Megan's oddly-coloured eyes, pink hair, pointed ears, wings, and diminutive stature are all parts of her primary mutation. Her wings, despite being proportionally quite small, are capable of carrying her in flight for long distances, although she can't carry much more than her own body weight because she's so slight. She is not a particularly good flyer, though, and tends not to fly without wearing a bicycle helmet (it is purple) because she's still getting the hang of this landing thing.
2. DUST: Megan's secondary mutation is the ability to produce a dust that, when ingested (usually through inhalation), acts as a psychadelic hallucinogen. Symptoms include hallucinations, synaesthesia, euphoria, dissociation, and diminished anxiety -- it feels like crossing mushrooms with ecstasy. Although she can't control what people see when they're on her dust, the hallucinations it causes are usually shaped by Megan's psyche and mood -- which means that they tend to be quite pleasant and full of pink cuddly bunnies and unicorns and teddy bears and giant cotton candy clouds, etc. The euphoria it produces can range from very mild to very potent, depending on the dose and the individual; a large dose of it can easily render an average-sized person pretty incoherent and useless, rolling around on the floor and pawing at things and telling everyone "you're, like, so beautiful, man, I love you so much, oh man." It is not physically addictive or harmful in any way. The length of its effects again depend on the individual and the dosage, but usually no more than a couple hours, max.
3. TELEPORTATION: Megan's tertiary mutation is an unnatural result of genetic manipulation, so she's not quite in control of it, nor does she fully understand it. She can instantly teleport herself and anything she's touching that she chooses to bring along from one location to another -- in canon, she teleports faster than Nightcrawler, and with further range. Her maximum range is unknown to her but Baedal is a small enough area that she can easily get from one end to the other. The fog will interfere with her teleportation; if she tries teleporting out, uh... bad things. She also cannot teleport in or out of Bonetown, and she cannot teleport anything she isn't touching. Unlike a lot of other teleporters like Nightcrawler, she does not need to have ever seen where she's trying to go, although it's a good idea -- she will instinctively teleport herself away from obstacles and a few feet above ground if she's not familiar with the area, but falling on your butt is no fun.
Talents/Abilities:
Megan is a street kid who, under her fluffy-bunny exterior, does possess a rather shrewd mind in terms of survival tactics. She knows how to get around in the fringes of society, knows how to acquire things and make useful contacts. She's not some kind of super-spy but she has her fingers in a lot of pies and gossips a lot, so she knows a lot more than people know she knows. Uh... she knows a lot about drugs...
Megan also knows how to pole dance and can incorporate her wings in order to do tricks that should not be physically possible. Because FUCK GRAVITY, that's why. She's pretty good at dancing in general and also can ride a skateboard. What amazing, useful talents.
Personality:
Megan behaves how one would expect her to from looking at her -- she's the stereotypical fairy princess, bubbly and happy and helpful to everyone. She is an extrovert; in addition to being friendly and outgoing, she wears her heart on her sleeve. She's an emotional person who feels things very strongly and tends to act on those feelings, which also means she's pretty terrible at keeping secrets because she has to tell everyone everything all the time. She's an open book and, if nothing else, can at least be relied on to be honest. She says what's on her mind, often without thinking first, which can cause hurt feelings when she just blurts things out without considering whether or not someone wants to hear it. She also has a tendency to stick her nose in other people's business and get all up in their shit. It's only because she likes to be involved. She's determined and when she sets her sights on something, she'll go a long ways to get it; when she applies herself she's capable of great things and is a dedicated, reliable team worker.
Megan is also very gullible, and her gentle, conflict-avoidant nature makes her passive-aggressive. She's the "why can't we all just get along?" type, even though she knows perfectly well why we cannot all just get along. She's willing to stick her neck out in conflict if it's for a very good/urgent cause, but is extremely reluctant to engage in violence -- more likely, in the situation of, say, giant centipedes attacking, she would prefer to help get people out of harm's way rather than charge into battle with a sword in one hand. She does have the capacity for violence, part of her darker nature that she tries to suppress, which is why she works so hard to not engage in violence. She feels like once she starts, she won't be able to stop. When it comes to problem-solving, she usually falls back on the "don't worry, everything will work itself out" model, which is good in that she doesn't sweat the small stuff but bad in that it makes her not at all proactive. Her idealism is charming and her endless capacity for hope has pulled her out of some really tough spots, but it's ultimately not that useful.
While she's one of the sweetest people most people will ever meet, Megan's darker, rougher edges can scare people off -- mostly more sheltered, middle-class types who cross the street to avoid delinquent-types. She's still pretty perky, but trauma and street life have darkened her about the edges. She still likes hearts and rainbows and puppies and sappy shit, but she's a lot more sarcastic than she used to be and her humour is blacker than most people suspect, looking at her. Her roughness is charming to the less uptight, especially in contrast with her gentle nature -- it would seem fake on someone who didn't have the life experience to back it up, but nothing about Megan is an act, beyond her propensity to behave in whatever way she thinks will get people to like her more. She is not a good liar or actor and has to rely on her actual personality to get by in lieu of subterfuge -- thankfully, her actual personality is endearing. The sweetness to her personality has led people to want to take care of her in the past, which she is aware of, like she's aware that if she weren't white, people wouldn't be lining up to protect her in that way.
A mistake people make in dealing with Megan -- especially those trying to help (read: "rescue") her -- is assuming that she's a child. She's not; she's an adult woman, albeit one who is very young and still has a lot of room to mature -- but having experienced street life, Megan matured emotionally much faster than she would have if she'd grown up in the burbs. She might be manic pixie tiny fairy girl, but she is not a child who needs to be coddled and especially not talked down to. The flip side to having people assume the need to protect her is that they do tend to treat Megan like she's more fragile than she is, and it's aggravating. She's gotten as far as she has mostly through her own volition -- certainly with help, but nothing she could really steadfastly rely on for long and usually with a price tag attached -- and it drives her nuts when people act like she's incapable of taking care of herself because hello she's been doing it for years, under circumstances that would break other people. She is very aware, in this way, of the class she comes from vs. other people she interacts with -- and it makes her self-conscious when interacting with people. She feels like she is constantly being judged for being low-class or ~trashy~.
Like a lot of teenagers and young adults, she takes her problems very seriously and has trouble seeing things in perspective -- everything's very important to her right now, she can't really see very far in the future -- which is also a consequence of having spent quite a bit of time homeless, where the emphasis is more on day-to-day survival. She doesn't have the emotional capacity to care about a year from now or five years from now, just the immediate future -- is she going to be safe today, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow? Is she going to be able to feed herself today? Does she have a place to spend the night? That's all she'll consider. Her time being homeless trained her to be wary about how she interacts with people -- Megan has some obvious hardened street behaviours, but tempered by her compassionate, gullible nature, her choices are sometimes very confusing. It's difficult for her to say no to people when they ask for her help or want something from her. She was on her own long enough to build up some walls and get used to a certain degree of independence, but not so long that she's completely incapable of trusting people, which tends to happen to street kids -- she is not as naive as she appears but she is still comparatively pretty sheltered, she's had a lot of people look out for her and protect her.
Megan is a pretty unlikely drug dealer -- for God's sake, she dots her i's with hearts -- but she is a very likely drug user. She really, really likes to party, and everything about her kind of advertises that fact, from the kandi she wears to her overabundant enthusiasm for life. Megan's a bit of a mess in this way, which people may be able to pick up on -- she drinks a little too hard, smokes a little too much, and she'll keep going even when other people are starting to turn in. Aware of this tendency towards self-destruction in herself, she prefers to stay away from really hard drugs, but it's common knowledge that Megan likes to have a good time. This is part of what strained her relationship with her mother -- Megan spent more time getting trashed than going to school. When people think of bad kids they tend to think more overtly malevolent than Megan has ever been; her intention has never been to hurt anybody and she's very soft-hearted, but she does not and has not, for a long time, behaved in a socially acceptable way. Laws are more like guidelines to her, and people who live outside the boundaries of authority in the way she does tend to scare the middle-class suburbanites from which she came. She makes some really bad choices and her behaviour escalates around the type of people she surrounds herself with, who tend to be more extreme and more dangerous than she is.
She is extremely insecure. She has body image issues out the wazoo -- she used to be pretty confident until her mutation manifested and the extreme anti-mutant prejudice she faced after that crushed her self-esteem. She doesn't think she's pretty enough, or skinny enough, or good enough. She's judged for being too trashy, too rough, too soft-hearted, too naive, too skinny, not skinny enough, too ugly, too pretty, too weird, not weird enough, too mutant. She's internalized a lot of the verbal abuse she's received about her physical appearance; while she may act like it doesn't bother her and she's used to it, honestly every unnerved, frightened or disgusted look hits her like a physical blow. She'll be thrown for a loop by the very different reception she'll get in Baedal, anti-xenian discrimination notwithstanding, but a little acceptance after years of persecution isn't nearly enough to smooth over her issues. In terms of personality, Megan feels like she doesn't measure up to anybody. She's not funny enough or nice enough or smart enough or witty enough -- she constantly measures herself against every woman around her and finds herself coming up short, even if it's not actually objectively true. As a result, she throws herself at anyone who shows her the least sign of attention and clings to them as much as she can because she thinks she'll never get another chance. She tends to cycle through boyfriends like some people go through clothes because once they get what they want from her and move on, she has to replace them immediately.
Object:
The suitcase she's been living out of -- it contains some of her belongings (clothes, jewelry, toiletries, etc), her bicycle helmet, and her purse, which contains her wallet, keys, cell phone, and a bottle of pink pepper spray.
Reason for playing:
I LOVE MEGAN she's defs one of my favourite Marvel characters because she is so ridiculous, but canon Megan skews too young for Baedal and also I would have weird playercest issues. This Megan I made for a game on IJ -- I had never paid attention to her before but someone wanted her in game and suggested that someone could play her much darker than canon and I was like, "HMMMM. Wheels turning..." Then I read the issues she was in in the comixs and thought she was cute as hale. I dropped for Reasons and thus had to quit playing her before I was ready to, which made me sad, because I really liked this take on a character a lot of people think of as being really fluffy and shallow and only good for comedy relief. I also really wanted to play a character who actually socializes ever /dead eyes...
Gods:
Carme, because she's a party animal and a ~deviant.
Misc
Other:
Super relevant Youtube link that explains everything...
Basics
Character Name: Megan "Pixie" Gwynn
Username: sellingdust
Fandom: Marvel Comics AU
Played By: Charlotte Free
Icon: http://i.imgur.com/RKpoc.png
Canon Character Section
Physical Description:
Megan is short, at 5' 1", slender-petite, white, and an obvious mutant. She has naturally pink hair, pointed ears, and is depicted in canon with pitch-black eyes that are often but not always coloured with red, pink or blue irises; I compromise by saying she has very dark reddish-pink irises such that they appear black at first glance. She has two giant insect-like wings sticking out of her back, similar in shape and structure to a dragonfly's wings but proportional to her body. They are iridescent white in colour, semi-translucent, and very fragile-looking; they shouldn't be capable of carrying her in flight, but LOL MARVEL SCIENCE, they can. She has some physical quirks because of this -- chairs are pretty awkward for her, so she tends to sit backwards, for instance.
Megan appears to be in her late teens (she's 19) but could probably pass older if she dressed like an actualfax real life adult, which she doesn't. Sartorially, her style is pretty enthusiastically trashy; she'd call it "kawaii acid grunge witchcraft princess." It looks like Tumblr threw up all over her. She lives in shorts and shirts that can accommodate her wings -- racerback tanks or baggy t-shirts with the back cut out, usually. When the weather gets colder she layers with tights and loose jackets, but she's resigned to being cold, since coats she's altered to fit her wings have holes in the back that let in cold air. Sad trombone. She has her ears, tongue, belly button and one nipple (she claims this was intentional but she just chickened out after the first one) pierced, and a couple small, home-made tattoos on her wrists and ankles. Her accent is Welsh, faded from having lived in the States a long time, and most Americans mistake her for English.
Sexuality:
~*Megan luvs boiz*~. There's some room for experimentation with regards to her sexuality, but she primarily identifies as straight and would not consider herself bisexual even if she were involved romantically or sexually with another girl. She's young enough that she does sometimes confuse admiration towards other women as being romantic or sexual interest -- she thought Illyana was really interested in her and was open to that -- but as she gets older she'll find it happening to her less and less. If anything, she'd call herself barsexual; she has no problem feigning sexual interest in women to appeal to men. It's aggravating.
She can be pretty sexually aggressive compared to what people are used to with girls her age -- she comes across as this great innocent but she's actually pretty experienced and most people are shocked to find out exactly how sexual she is. She has a great deal of casual sex that has no emotional significance to her, except that sometimes it's a pretty transparent ploy to get people to like her, which is a little sad. She can, will and has used her sexuality as a tool in the past -- for favours, protection, acceptance, and money.
History:
Megan comes from a universe where mutation is an extremely recent development -- as in, less than a decade recent. In December of 2012, a solar flare sparked waves of mutation amongst millions of otherwise normal people, throwing the world into chaos. Millions more died due to radiation poisoning. Within weeks, anti-mutant legislation in various countries threatened the rights of new mutant citizens, requiring them to identify themselves and their powers, or simply making it illegal to be a mutant under pain of death. In America, anti-mutant prejudice skyrocketed and never really went down again. Mutants were fired from their jobs, thrown out of their homes, denied medical care, and wrongly arrested at astronomical rates. In New York, the mutant population found themselves aggregating in a neighbourhood in Manhattan they called District X, or Mutant Town, with a 90% mutant population. While it was relatively safe to be a mutant there, the neighbourhood was pretty rough.
A few months after the solar flare, the US government initiated the Sentinel project -- initially human, highly-trained special ops forces in uniform and then special armoured suits, the Sentinels were deployed to most major American cities and worked in conjunction with the police to respond to crimes committed by mutants -- and not-crimes not-committed by mutants, because most people who signed up for the Sentinel program were massive bigots. They had complete freedom to do whatever they wanted and nobody questioned them. The project reached a head in 2014 with the introduction of completely robotic Sentinel machines that were released in New York first as a testing ground. The Sentinel machines were roughly human-sized and shaped with advanced AI that nonetheless presented real danger to mutants in a way even the tyrannical, violent human Sentinels had not -- because AI has a tendency to malfunction.
Meanwhile, Charles Xavier, a wealthy mutant philanthropist, had opened and run his Mutant Haven in Westchester for months, while his old friend and rival Magneto started the Brotherhood of Mutants -- an extremist mutant rights gang with a violent philosophy. Anyone who didn't fall cleanly into one of those two camps usually found themselves drawn into the same conflicts, anyway -- because what affected one group of mutants usually affected all of them.
Megan's parents met in Wales, near Cardiff, but moved to New York when Megan was young. Mr. Gwynn had developed a chronic pulmonary disease from his job at a coal mine and Mrs. Gwynn accepted a teaching position at Columbia University. Megan was born in May of 1995 and moved to New York in 2006, at the age of eleven.
She grew up in Yorktown, outside of the city proper -- they couldn't really afford to live in Manhattan, and her mother just sucked it up and opted for a longer commute for a lower cost of living and peace of mind, not wanting to raise a kid in the city she was honestly a bit terrified of. They were comfortable and happy, although Megan's father felt emasculated by being out of work and no longer the family breadwinner. He started drinking a lot since he was at home all the time and it gradually developed into a problem -- although he never laid a hand on his wife or child, he was unbearable to be around and disappeared sometimes for days at a time. The Gwynns' marriage suffered under the strain of his alcoholism, although they kept it together for Megan's sake. They didn't do a very great job shielding their kid from their marital problems and the stress of her parents constantly fighting (often over her) began to wear on Megan. She started acting out at school -- skipping class and hanging out with people her mother didn't approve of. It wasn't that they were bad kids, necessarily, they weren't violent or anything, but a lot of them were burnouts and they were more concerned with partying than academic achievement, and her parents hated them.
In December of 2012, when the solar flare hit, Megan was 16. The change in her eye colour was initially dismissed as some strange side effect of radiation poisoning; the change in her hair colour went unnoticed as Megan's hair was covered in purple dye at the time. Two bumps began growing on her back that her mother at first thought were cysts. Her father's already poor condition worsened rapidly from the radiation poisoning and after two weeks of fighting for his life in the hospital, he died. Over that same period, the "cysts" on Megan's back had begun to bud and grew into wings, marking her as a mutant -- and one who couldn't hide what she was. The reaction at her school was negative to the point of violence and she had to be withdrawn. Traumatized by the death of her father, her own bodily changes, and being rejected by her peers and removed from any semblance of a normal life, Megan went completely off the rails. When she discovered her ability to produce hallucinatory dust, she started trading it for other drugs with the kids who would still talk to her and spent all her time getting high. She constantly left home, sometimes for days at a time, to hang out with runaways, addicts, and general delinquents. Her mother couldn't control her and didn't know how to deal with her daughter's mutation -- Megan once overheard her describing it as "disgusting" over the phone -- and at some point she just gave up trying, which was the final betrayal for Megan. Feeling like no one cared about her and she had no one who would protect her, she ran away from home.
Being white and an obvious mutant excluded her from most gangs (skinheads tend to be anti-mutant as a rule), so she was on her own -- a bad situation for a pretty girl. She eventually ran into a group of mutant street kids like her who took her in and protected her, but the group fractured when the party kids and the straight-edgers couldn't reconcile their differences anymore. Megan went with the more unstable and self-destructive party kids, because she was the same way, and it fed into a lot of her bad decisions. They also didn't judge her when she started selling her dust as a party drug -- it brought in a lot of their income because it's not technically illegal, although the cops and Sentinels harassed her significantly about it when they caught on.
She heard pretty quickly about Charles Xavier's Mutant Haven but didn't seek out help because she was afraid of being turned in and sent back home, or worse, foster care, so she kept staying with friends, bouncing from crash to crash. When she was 18 she came back on the grid, no longer having to worry about being dragged back to her mother's, and started renting her own apartment in Mutant Town. She paid rent in cash, most of which she got from her dust but some from panhandling and the couple bucks her friends would scrounge up if they could, but found it impossible to find a real job. A high school drop out with no skills to speak of isn't exactly drowning in job offers, especially when they're such an obvious mutant -- places outside of District X wouldn't even consider her, and in many cases would not even let her in the door.
Megan began meeting some of Haven's residents over the period of a few months -- notably Jamie Madrox, Sofia Mantega and Laura Kinney. In November of 2014, Megan was evicted from her apartment for being late on the rent one too many times, and found herself back on the street. She still couldn't bring herself to go to Haven, having been there once at a Halloween party where it was extremely clear to her that everyone there was in a completely different class from her, so she turned to sex work when her drug dealing wasn't pulling in enough money. She did some escort and porn work until she had enough to get back on her feet, then started working at the Mutant Town strip club Camelot, which gave her more financial security than she had ever had. She was a popular dancer there due to her strange appearance, but no one in Mutant Town is rich and she just made enough to get by.
In March of 2015 she met a girl named Illyana Belasco at the local coffee shop and they hit it off as friends. Megan wasn't aware that Illyana was involved in a cult, called something stupid like the Cult of Limbo or whatever, run by one Dr. Belasco, a man whose mutation (genetic & cellular manipulation) had led him to believe he was some kind of demon or lesser god. He had kidnapped Illyana, aged ten, and tampered with her body in order to age her to a young adult, prompt the manifestation of her powers (teleportation), and alter her mutation. He brainwashed her into believing the same stuff he did, and then set her with the task of collecting a "pure soul" (read: virgin) in order to sacrifice to create "Bloodstones" that would "open the gates of Limbo" to them. An utter load of bullshit, but Illyana really believed him, and after meeting Megan, she decided she was the pure soul they needed. (Which, while an easy mistake to make, uhhh.) Illyana kidnapped her and brought her to the cult to be murdered -- in the process, Belasco altered her genes, giving her the ability of teleportation needed to "open the gates" -- but Xavier's X-men intervened, ostensibly killing Belasco and rescuing Illyana and Megan. (This is all very silly but it was the closest I could keep to the canon storyline given the game's strict no-magic rule.) They kept Illyana to work on rehabilitating her and extended an offer to allow Megan to stay, but she panicked, teleported, and wound up in Baedal.
Powers:
Megan is a mutant -- a human being with special genes that provide them with superhuman abilities -- and like many mutants, she has more than one special power.
1. PHYSICAL: Megan's oddly-coloured eyes, pink hair, pointed ears, wings, and diminutive stature are all parts of her primary mutation. Her wings, despite being proportionally quite small, are capable of carrying her in flight for long distances, although she can't carry much more than her own body weight because she's so slight. She is not a particularly good flyer, though, and tends not to fly without wearing a bicycle helmet (it is purple) because she's still getting the hang of this landing thing.
2. DUST: Megan's secondary mutation is the ability to produce a dust that, when ingested (usually through inhalation), acts as a psychadelic hallucinogen. Symptoms include hallucinations, synaesthesia, euphoria, dissociation, and diminished anxiety -- it feels like crossing mushrooms with ecstasy. Although she can't control what people see when they're on her dust, the hallucinations it causes are usually shaped by Megan's psyche and mood -- which means that they tend to be quite pleasant and full of pink cuddly bunnies and unicorns and teddy bears and giant cotton candy clouds, etc. The euphoria it produces can range from very mild to very potent, depending on the dose and the individual; a large dose of it can easily render an average-sized person pretty incoherent and useless, rolling around on the floor and pawing at things and telling everyone "you're, like, so beautiful, man, I love you so much, oh man." It is not physically addictive or harmful in any way. The length of its effects again depend on the individual and the dosage, but usually no more than a couple hours, max.
3. TELEPORTATION: Megan's tertiary mutation is an unnatural result of genetic manipulation, so she's not quite in control of it, nor does she fully understand it. She can instantly teleport herself and anything she's touching that she chooses to bring along from one location to another -- in canon, she teleports faster than Nightcrawler, and with further range. Her maximum range is unknown to her but Baedal is a small enough area that she can easily get from one end to the other. The fog will interfere with her teleportation; if she tries teleporting out, uh... bad things. She also cannot teleport in or out of Bonetown, and she cannot teleport anything she isn't touching. Unlike a lot of other teleporters like Nightcrawler, she does not need to have ever seen where she's trying to go, although it's a good idea -- she will instinctively teleport herself away from obstacles and a few feet above ground if she's not familiar with the area, but falling on your butt is no fun.
Talents/Abilities:
Megan is a street kid who, under her fluffy-bunny exterior, does possess a rather shrewd mind in terms of survival tactics. She knows how to get around in the fringes of society, knows how to acquire things and make useful contacts. She's not some kind of super-spy but she has her fingers in a lot of pies and gossips a lot, so she knows a lot more than people know she knows. Uh... she knows a lot about drugs...
Megan also knows how to pole dance and can incorporate her wings in order to do tricks that should not be physically possible. Because FUCK GRAVITY, that's why. She's pretty good at dancing in general and also can ride a skateboard. What amazing, useful talents.
Personality:
Megan behaves how one would expect her to from looking at her -- she's the stereotypical fairy princess, bubbly and happy and helpful to everyone. She is an extrovert; in addition to being friendly and outgoing, she wears her heart on her sleeve. She's an emotional person who feels things very strongly and tends to act on those feelings, which also means she's pretty terrible at keeping secrets because she has to tell everyone everything all the time. She's an open book and, if nothing else, can at least be relied on to be honest. She says what's on her mind, often without thinking first, which can cause hurt feelings when she just blurts things out without considering whether or not someone wants to hear it. She also has a tendency to stick her nose in other people's business and get all up in their shit. It's only because she likes to be involved. She's determined and when she sets her sights on something, she'll go a long ways to get it; when she applies herself she's capable of great things and is a dedicated, reliable team worker.
Megan is also very gullible, and her gentle, conflict-avoidant nature makes her passive-aggressive. She's the "why can't we all just get along?" type, even though she knows perfectly well why we cannot all just get along. She's willing to stick her neck out in conflict if it's for a very good/urgent cause, but is extremely reluctant to engage in violence -- more likely, in the situation of, say, giant centipedes attacking, she would prefer to help get people out of harm's way rather than charge into battle with a sword in one hand. She does have the capacity for violence, part of her darker nature that she tries to suppress, which is why she works so hard to not engage in violence. She feels like once she starts, she won't be able to stop. When it comes to problem-solving, she usually falls back on the "don't worry, everything will work itself out" model, which is good in that she doesn't sweat the small stuff but bad in that it makes her not at all proactive. Her idealism is charming and her endless capacity for hope has pulled her out of some really tough spots, but it's ultimately not that useful.
While she's one of the sweetest people most people will ever meet, Megan's darker, rougher edges can scare people off -- mostly more sheltered, middle-class types who cross the street to avoid delinquent-types. She's still pretty perky, but trauma and street life have darkened her about the edges. She still likes hearts and rainbows and puppies and sappy shit, but she's a lot more sarcastic than she used to be and her humour is blacker than most people suspect, looking at her. Her roughness is charming to the less uptight, especially in contrast with her gentle nature -- it would seem fake on someone who didn't have the life experience to back it up, but nothing about Megan is an act, beyond her propensity to behave in whatever way she thinks will get people to like her more. She is not a good liar or actor and has to rely on her actual personality to get by in lieu of subterfuge -- thankfully, her actual personality is endearing. The sweetness to her personality has led people to want to take care of her in the past, which she is aware of, like she's aware that if she weren't white, people wouldn't be lining up to protect her in that way.
A mistake people make in dealing with Megan -- especially those trying to help (read: "rescue") her -- is assuming that she's a child. She's not; she's an adult woman, albeit one who is very young and still has a lot of room to mature -- but having experienced street life, Megan matured emotionally much faster than she would have if she'd grown up in the burbs. She might be manic pixie tiny fairy girl, but she is not a child who needs to be coddled and especially not talked down to. The flip side to having people assume the need to protect her is that they do tend to treat Megan like she's more fragile than she is, and it's aggravating. She's gotten as far as she has mostly through her own volition -- certainly with help, but nothing she could really steadfastly rely on for long and usually with a price tag attached -- and it drives her nuts when people act like she's incapable of taking care of herself because hello she's been doing it for years, under circumstances that would break other people. She is very aware, in this way, of the class she comes from vs. other people she interacts with -- and it makes her self-conscious when interacting with people. She feels like she is constantly being judged for being low-class or ~trashy~.
Like a lot of teenagers and young adults, she takes her problems very seriously and has trouble seeing things in perspective -- everything's very important to her right now, she can't really see very far in the future -- which is also a consequence of having spent quite a bit of time homeless, where the emphasis is more on day-to-day survival. She doesn't have the emotional capacity to care about a year from now or five years from now, just the immediate future -- is she going to be safe today, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow? Is she going to be able to feed herself today? Does she have a place to spend the night? That's all she'll consider. Her time being homeless trained her to be wary about how she interacts with people -- Megan has some obvious hardened street behaviours, but tempered by her compassionate, gullible nature, her choices are sometimes very confusing. It's difficult for her to say no to people when they ask for her help or want something from her. She was on her own long enough to build up some walls and get used to a certain degree of independence, but not so long that she's completely incapable of trusting people, which tends to happen to street kids -- she is not as naive as she appears but she is still comparatively pretty sheltered, she's had a lot of people look out for her and protect her.
Megan is a pretty unlikely drug dealer -- for God's sake, she dots her i's with hearts -- but she is a very likely drug user. She really, really likes to party, and everything about her kind of advertises that fact, from the kandi she wears to her overabundant enthusiasm for life. Megan's a bit of a mess in this way, which people may be able to pick up on -- she drinks a little too hard, smokes a little too much, and she'll keep going even when other people are starting to turn in. Aware of this tendency towards self-destruction in herself, she prefers to stay away from really hard drugs, but it's common knowledge that Megan likes to have a good time. This is part of what strained her relationship with her mother -- Megan spent more time getting trashed than going to school. When people think of bad kids they tend to think more overtly malevolent than Megan has ever been; her intention has never been to hurt anybody and she's very soft-hearted, but she does not and has not, for a long time, behaved in a socially acceptable way. Laws are more like guidelines to her, and people who live outside the boundaries of authority in the way she does tend to scare the middle-class suburbanites from which she came. She makes some really bad choices and her behaviour escalates around the type of people she surrounds herself with, who tend to be more extreme and more dangerous than she is.
She is extremely insecure. She has body image issues out the wazoo -- she used to be pretty confident until her mutation manifested and the extreme anti-mutant prejudice she faced after that crushed her self-esteem. She doesn't think she's pretty enough, or skinny enough, or good enough. She's judged for being too trashy, too rough, too soft-hearted, too naive, too skinny, not skinny enough, too ugly, too pretty, too weird, not weird enough, too mutant. She's internalized a lot of the verbal abuse she's received about her physical appearance; while she may act like it doesn't bother her and she's used to it, honestly every unnerved, frightened or disgusted look hits her like a physical blow. She'll be thrown for a loop by the very different reception she'll get in Baedal, anti-xenian discrimination notwithstanding, but a little acceptance after years of persecution isn't nearly enough to smooth over her issues. In terms of personality, Megan feels like she doesn't measure up to anybody. She's not funny enough or nice enough or smart enough or witty enough -- she constantly measures herself against every woman around her and finds herself coming up short, even if it's not actually objectively true. As a result, she throws herself at anyone who shows her the least sign of attention and clings to them as much as she can because she thinks she'll never get another chance. She tends to cycle through boyfriends like some people go through clothes because once they get what they want from her and move on, she has to replace them immediately.
Object:
The suitcase she's been living out of -- it contains some of her belongings (clothes, jewelry, toiletries, etc), her bicycle helmet, and her purse, which contains her wallet, keys, cell phone, and a bottle of pink pepper spray.
Reason for playing:
I LOVE MEGAN she's defs one of my favourite Marvel characters because she is so ridiculous, but canon Megan skews too young for Baedal and also I would have weird playercest issues. This Megan I made for a game on IJ -- I had never paid attention to her before but someone wanted her in game and suggested that someone could play her much darker than canon and I was like, "HMMMM. Wheels turning..." Then I read the issues she was in in the comixs and thought she was cute as hale. I dropped for Reasons and thus had to quit playing her before I was ready to, which made me sad, because I really liked this take on a character a lot of people think of as being really fluffy and shallow and only good for comedy relief. I also really wanted to play a character who actually socializes ever /dead eyes...
Gods:
Carme, because she's a party animal and a ~deviant.
Misc
Other:
Super relevant Youtube link that explains everything...