Application for xavier_institute

[ladyliberty]

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Leafy
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Yes
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: N/A
CONTACT: americas
CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Amelia Jones
CANON: Axis Powers Hetalia (Nyotalia)
CANON REFERENCE: Hetalia | Nyotalia
AGE: 23
GENDER: Female
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: Adjuct staff/X-Man/eater of all the food
APPEARANCE: Essentially the same as canon (link), but with dark brown bald eagle wings which join at her shoulder blades. She has about a seven and a half foot wingspan.

PERSONALITY: Amelia is the definition of an extrovert: she thrives on being close to people, being involved in social situations, recieving attention, giving attention, physical contact, anything that involves other human beings. She doesn't mind being on her own from time to time, as long as she knows that she is not truly alone. Situations which cut her off from people for extended periods of time make her moody and anxious. Amelia is a very friendly person, and generlly easy to get along with, although her bubbly, exuberant nature can be aggravating to those who prefer quiet and calm activities. She is passionate about team sports (particularly baseball), car racing, music, dancing, and gossip.

Despite her need for constant attention, Amelia is not good at opening up to others when things are bothering her. Her first instinct is generally to pretend that nothing is wrong and to distract herself with something fun to take her mind off the issue. If pressed, she will put up walls around herself, insisting that everything is fine, although her defensiveness and change in demeanor usually make it easy to tell whether or not she is telling the truth. She has very strong emotions, which often get the best of her in the end, whether happy or sad or angry or anything else.

Amelia also has incredibly strong opinions on topics she is passionate about. She will argue endlessly about a particular point, even sometimes long after her opponent has given up trying to provide a counterargument. Even when she is proven wrong, she will often continue to defend her position out of sher stubbornness, rather than admit that what she initially thought was wrong. She is strongly invested in social justice issues, such as feminism and mutant rights, although she often has trouble grasping the larger picture, and focuses instead on how these things directly affect her and her loved ones.

When the situation calls for it, she will also defend her positions physically against a variety of opponents. She is physically strong, and can hold her own well in unarmed combat, but she is not well-trained with weapons and lacks offensive power against others' mutant abilities. Despite this, she would gladly sacrifice herself attempting to hold off a foe rather than allow any of her loved ones to come to harm.

Although they are alike in appearance and general chipper personality, this Amelia is fairly different from her canon counterpart. Being twenty-three, she obviously lacks the life experiences of a nation, and is much more easily shaken by personal losses. She tries to keep herself informed on current events, but her own problems almost always take preference, so if something doesn't seem like it will affect her personally, it is often harder for her to get the motivation to take action against it. She is enraged by news reports about attacks on mutants around the country and the world, but she is only truly galvanized when someone she knows is hurt or disenfranchised. On that note, her personal circle is also obviously very much smaller than America's. While she does have very many friends, it is a small fraction of the sheer number that America feels personally defensive of. While America as well can be selfish and short-sighted, she can see when the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and when she must sometimes sacrifice personal feelings for the good of the entire nation. Amelia, if pressed, would much sooner save one friend than a busload of bystanders that she doesn't even know.

Amelia is also much more fragile-- physically, mentally, emotionally-- than America is. Amelia is quite strong for a young woman, but events such as her kidnapping or the deaths of one or two students hit her much harder than larger scale events that America has lived through. America knows that she will survive and must continue to be strong for her country-- Amelia has no such assurance. She's filled with a righteous rage about the state of things in her world, but not far below the surface she is only a scared young woman who just wants to hang out with her friends.

POWERS/ABILITIES: Amelia can manipulate the effect of gravity on an object (or person), either increasing or decreasing the downward force on that object specifically, making it heavier or lighter (without changing its mass). For most of her life she could only use the ability subconsciously, making her body light enough to be supported by her wingspan, but during high school she became aware of her latent ability and began to learn to control it. She can now alter gravity on multiple objects simultaneously, although the more objects she uses it on, the less she can change their gravity. So for example, she could make one large rock completely weightless, but only be able to make three smaller rocks a third their original weight. When altering gravity on multiple objects at once, they will all have the same gravity. She cannot make one thing very heavy and another very light at the same time.

AU HISTORY: Amelia was abandoned in her infancy by her non-mutant birth parents and taken in by a mutant woman named Elizabeth who raised the child as her own.

Elizabeth worked hard to be the mother she thought Amelia deserved, fiercely protective of the girl, raising her with a careful wariness of humans that was the only way she knew to keep her truly safe. Amelia, however, as she grew, began to resent this mindset and the isolation that she lived in, and began finding ways to escape her mother's overprotective hold and explore the wider world on her own. Elizabeth grew stricter, and Amelia grew craftier. The friction between the two of them often exploded in fights. In addition to the strictness, Elizabeth was much more reserved than the very emotionally open (some might say overdramatic) Amelia, which led Amelia to frequently refer to her as 'cold-blooded.' Certainly Elizabeth didn't lack for love of her daughter, but she struggled to express her affection in ways Amelia could understand, leaving the girl feeling somewhat neglected.

However, despite her mother's warnings, and her birth parents' rejection, Amelia found humans fascinating and worthwhile. Learning to hide her wings as best she could (some of the lessons had stuck, after all), she frequently took to visiting human cities close to home. The hustle and bustle of city life was much more stimulating than the relatively simple life she lived in the countryside, and in the crowds she found the warmth and companionship she was lacking from her mother. Of course, these excursions weren't always positive. There were occasions when she was discovered, more frequently over the years as she-- and her wings-- grew. Though sometimes the humans were accepting, and other times she discovered other hidden mutants, she often ended up in fights, or, even more frequently, huddled on some semi-secluded roof, starving and cold.

However, despite her mother's righteous anger after these incidents, her nervousness would eventually wane again, and she found she could not keep away from the cities for long.

When Amelia was old enough to enter the Xavier Institute, it was a welcome relief for both her and her mother. Here Amelia could finally spread her wings (literally and figuratively), learn to train and focus her powers, but, most importantly, make friends and socialize with other mutants her own age. Meanwhile, her mother didn't have to worry quite so much about what her daughter was getting up to out of her sight.

Amelia quickly made friends at school, her gregarious, bubbly personality making her fairly popular among her class, although plenty of others were turned off by her brashness and willingness to start fights over petty disagreements. Overall, though, even though she didn't love classes, attending the Institute was like finding where she'd always belonged.

Outside the school, political tensions were mounting between mutants and humans, including a group that would create a list of mutants and their powers as a matter of national security (called the Mutant Registration Act) and a group calling itself The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, which opposes not only non-mutants and governmental oppression, but also mutants who are not anti-human (namely, Professor X and his school).

The political powderkeg explodes when the Brotherhood attacks an anti-registration protest in Manhattan, killing many and injuring even more. Though Amelia wanted to attend the protest, she ended up staying home with a stomach bug. Meanwhile, her best friend Maddie, who had attended, was injured in the attack, leaving Amelia kicking herself for not being there. Though Maddie pleads with Amelia not to attend any protests or political demonstrations, should there be any more, Amelia's determination is only doubled by her desire to protect Maddie and her other friends from any future harm.

During the middle of her junior year, things really started to go downhill for Amelia. She was taken hostage by a group of thugs, looking to barter the kidnapped mutant children for ransom money or to sell on the black market, whatever is more lucrative. It was a harrowing experience for Amelia, whose physical mutation makes her a prime candidate for illegal trading and experimentation. The kidnapped students are eventually rescued by a group of students, but not without a good deal of physical and mental trauma from the experience.

Upon returning to the school, Amelia immediately set about pretending that everything was back to normal and that nothing is wrong. She threw herself wholeheartedly into any and all social events, because as long as she was distracted, she didn't have to think about it. She started spending less and less time in her own dorm, preferring to spend the nights with any friends who would have her (fortunately, this is a large number).

In March, Project Wideawake seemed to come to a head with the introduction of the Sentinel Project, aka giant robots programmed to attack mutants, which even the X-Men were unable to fight against. The government claimed that Sentinels would only be deployed against mutant criminals, but no one was fooled. The atmosphere at the school became tenser than ever, with staff and students all turning their focus to what could be done against this new threat to mutantkind. Amelia continued to pretend as though everything was fine, distracting herself with boys and friends and dances, but her facade was slowly crumbling as things began to look bleaker and bleaker.

Finally, toward the end of April, it's Maddie who decides that she's had enough of the fear, and that she will be moving back to Canada until the situation in the States improves. Amelia immediately and unwaveringly says she'll go with her, come hell or high water, even if it means leaving her home country, her mother and her other friends. The two of them begin making plans to head north.

Maddie and Amelia, along with Maddie's boyfriend Kaito, begin making a life for themselves in Canada, but Amelia was failing to thrive. Though she loved Maddie with all her heart and had made a promise to stay with her, she was lonely without the rest of her school friends and frustrated by the relative isolation they were living in. She attempted to make friends with any other young person she could find, but among the general population, especially in a small town, it was very hit or miss on whether anyone wanted to be seen hanging out with a mutant.

After the Phoenix Incident, when the situation in the states seemed to have settled down somewhat (and as the Canadian winter was starting to creep in), Amelia made the decision to return to the Xavier Institute to finish out her tuition. She initially tried to bring Maddie back with her, but Maddie felt much more at home in her home country, and Amelia eventually agreed to leave her there with Kaito on the condition that they would visit each other absolutely as much as possible.

It was a great relief returning to Xavier's and resuming her social life, where all her old friends were very happy to see her back. With a greater appreciation for the support network in place for her at the school, after months relatively on her own, Amelia threw herself into training and working to learn about and control her powers. She signed up for as many X-Men training missions as they would let her, and steadily began to master the use of her powers not only to fly, but as an offensive tactic.

After graduating, Amelia didn't feel the need to continue on her academic track, but she did remain at the school, eventually becoming a full-fledged part of the X-Men team. She did briefly attempt to act as a teaching assistant to the younger students with flight powers, but that quickly crashed and burned, as she turned out not to be very good with instruction. She occasionally helps out the professors with odd jobs.

SAMPLES

NETWORK SAMPLE: Technically not a network post, but works better as a voice sample than introspection.

LOG SAMPLE: Amelia looked over her charges, looking tiny and nervous lined up in front of her. Had she been so tiny when she'd started school? It was hard to believe. There were three of them, two boys and one girl, only one of whom even had wings. She'd signed up to teach the extracurricular flight class thinking it would be a piece of cake. She'd been doing it all her life, after all. But she was starting to realize that maybe doing and teaching weren't exactly the same thing.

"All right kiddos, how many of you have flown before?" she asked. Three hands went up.

"And how many of you have done it on purpose?" Two of the hands went down.

"We've got a lot of work to do then." Amelia put her hands on her hips, spreading her wings out. "I want you all to watch me closely." She kicked off from the roof and did a quick circle. "Now you try.

There was some shuffling, but nobody moved. Amelia pointed to the boy with the wings.

"How about you, c'mon, give it a shot."

The boy flapped his wings, enough to get a few inches off the ground, but he quickly dropped back to the roof, looking a bit embarrassed. Amelia scratched her chin.

"I'm stumped. No!" She snapped her fingers. "I got it. C'mere." She reached out to the little girl, picking her up under her arms and beginning to carry her toward the edge of the roof. The girl squirmed.

"Miss Amelia, I don't wanna--!"

"C'mon, you'll be fine. I'm not gonna let you fall. This is how I learned."

She had almost reached the edge of the roof when a sharp voice came from the direction of the stairwell. "Miss Jones!"

Amelia put the girl down and turned around sheepishly to wave at the other teacher who had just come out on the roof.

"I promise, sir, they're totally safe. I swear I was gonna catch 'em."