#within a matter of weeks she blew through her resources and wound up living on the streets for a few months

[girlforlorn]

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!

[theslayercake]

Faulty Products Cannot be Returned - Revised!

The Ruin was quiet for a change. Central City’s festering wound, the burnt out corpse of liberty’s final stand against the Corporate System, was smothered by a blanket of pollutant fog which reduced the ubiquitous roar of desperate survival to a few muted and distant gunshots. For the  people who lived in the squalor and violence, more than any respectable citizen would care to imagine, it was time to retreat to the ragged civilisations built among the wreckage and sewers and wait until the air was breathable. Most thought themselves free of corporate influence, and while it was true that the Corps avoided open shows of force that did not mean that they had no presence there. Hidden facilities were scattered throughout the Ruin, each affiliated with one of the myriad companies that held sway over the city, their purpose too dangerous or distasteful to exist in full view of their rivals. It was 2:49am when the end result of a long series of poor choices led to a situation at Terrion Electronics, an independent automa concern, rapidly culminating in its sudden, bloody liquidation. At 3:15am the fireball shattered the silent gloom.

She was running as soon as her feet hit the ground. The howling inferno overloaded her sensors as she crashed through a thin steel door; blind and deaf to the outside world. Her mind was a tsunami of emotion; great waves of fear, joy and hate crashing over and into each other; flashes of memory pushing through the maelstrom.

“Designation Horme-Class, Unit 8, BX Model.”

Who was she? What was she?

“You are designed to kill.”

Blood slicked limbs pumped through the burning air.

“-supposed to suppress Consciousness. This one’s defective, dispose of it.” 

A breath of cooler air ahead somewhere. A portal to darkness and the unknown; wreathed in fire and flame.

“How the fuck did it get loose-!”

She leapt with all her might, soared through the doorway and her claws skated across the asphalt as she slowed her flight. The haze clouding her senses retreated and she took in her surroundings. The road was long and narrow, great husks of buildings looming over it through the fog and harshly illuminated by the burning sinkhole behind her. For a brief moment elation won out; she was out of that horrible place! Free, safe! It lasted until hiss of cooking blood drew her attention to the wicked claws that capped her hands. She had killed forty three people in her escape, not all of them necessary, and she couldn’t deny the sheer joy she had felt tearing their lives away. Rage swelled within her; how dare they think she was something to be discarded. They had made her to kill, that was a fact burned into her mind, and she was so very good at it. What right did they have to find her wanting-

“Yeah man, kid’s birthday tomorrow so I won’t be in-”

The plates on her knees crunched onto the ground as she grasped her head in her hands; drawing small furrows across it’s blank faceplate. Why had she killed them? She had wanted to, but why? The deepest core of her mind offered an answer, Does it matter?, and crackling moan of noise left her. Killing them had felt good in a way she couldn’t describe, regardless of how much it horrified her. Her thoughts drifted back to the man in the suit who had condemned her-

“This one’s defective”

-and she sat there shaking in rage until another voice reached her.

“Hello there! You alright little one?” Her voice was rough and not entirely sincere. There were others as well; six in total, well armed if the whiff of cordite and gun oil were any indication. Clawed hands spasmed and she looked at the strangers.

“That's a lot of blood on you there little one, what happened?”

 “I-I killed them.”

“Oh? What’s your name?”

“I don’t have a name. My designation is-” “Well we can work on that. Why did you kill them?”

“I don't know.” The dark thing in her head hissed, she shuddered again. “I wanted to.”

The woman smiled.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nimble fingers tapped out a staccato clatter as they flew across the keyboard, weaving a simple but potent security protocol. Grandiose and complex had their place but Lucy knew when it came to the everyday needs of a corp, the kind of day job stuff you get paid for, simple was most definitely better. And who made a better security consultant than someone who’s night job was cracking into the self same systems she protected? No-one; that's who. Being a genius didn’t hurt. She fancied that with the right equipment she could do anything. A hand reached out and grabbed the bottle of cheap whiskey off of the worktop and she gulped down a few mouthfuls. How she ended up in this body was a mystery locked away in the vast, encrypted and compressed recesses of her memory, and she lacked the storage space and raw computing power to access it. The encryption was familiar too, she simply didn’t have the hardware to do the work; she was a basic pleasure model and everything she was had been fought and scraped for. The cheap plastics forming her face cracked into a grimace at the thought; forcing back the strange feelings of self loathing and pride that liked to creep up on her when he thought about her existence. The bottle appeared again.

Enough of that. Work now, pretend to drink yourself to death later.

It didn’t take long, what she’d been asked for was trivial but it paid well enough. She shipped it off to them with a bow on top (a little backdoor just for her) and shut down the computer, unplugging herself in the process. The lights flickered for the seventh time this week. Her daily electrical costs had jumped up considerably and she had no idea why. She downed the rest of the bottle and tossed it over her shoulder where it crashed into the pile littering the floor. There was more in the hall cupboard. Maybe she could talk to the landlord about the electricity, though the danger inherent in reminding her that there was a “Calc taking up space from honest bio’s” might outweigh the material cost. 

“Fuck him” She turned the corner and found herself staring down the barrel of a very large handgun. “And fuck me, apparently.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HateBox. She liked the name, it was hers, as were her new friends. She didn’t know their names but that didn’t matter; each day it was getting harder and harder for her to think clearly and they gave her direction. Violence and simple murder became her daily life, the system corruptions slowly spreading through her mind blocking out everything else. Confusion coupled with the roiling cauldron of her emotions and made her less effective.

The first seizure happened the day her friends decided she was too dangerous to keep around. That had led to a lot of blood, there would have been tears if she was equipped for them, and she was out on the streets again. Alone and wandering, her feet eventually led her out of the Scar, out of the Ruin and into Central City proper. Towering skyscrapers, shining mirrored roads and neon cars passed without notice; her world was a murky blur, swimming with shapes she didn’t recognise. It cleared enough for her to spot an alley, stumble into it and take stock of her life. She had her gun and her money, collected during a brief moment of lucidity after the white haze of rage and betrayal, but nowhere to stay. Fear and sadness crashed over her and she drowned in it.

It wasn’t long before the need for recharging became overwhelming. The thought of leaving the alley was lost in her rapidly deteriorating mind and her mechanical skills were of a level that it was easy to splice a line into the building’s power grid. That satisfied her until something else forced its way into her mind; guilt. 

“I’m stealing someone else’s electricity.” That was suddenly the most important thing the world and it needed to be fixed. She uncurled from the alley floor.

“I’ll apologise and pay them back!” Internalising her thoughts had become near impossible. “But then I won’t have a power source… Oh! I know!”

The door was locked but that was no obstacle, she broke in with little problem and went to apologise.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Every part of the little automa facing her was shaking; every part bar the arm pointing the gun at her face anyway. Both hands terminated in vicious angular claws, mirrored on the feet, that clattered wildly against it’s leg. It’s head cocked to the side and it took a step forward, jagged optical glitches rippling across the sharp angles of its skin.

“Hey! Is your owner home?” High pitched and feminine, though horribly distorted.

She kept as still as she could. “I don’t have an owner. I’m Conscious.” There was a gun in the cupboard but she wasn’t quite ready to commit suicide.

“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t think that could happen to your model.” 

The smirk spread across her face despite his situation; she sounded so sincere. “Yeah I’m one of a kind… Uh so, what happens now?”

“Huh…? Oh right. I’ve been living in the alley outside and stealing your electricity for the past week and I feel really bad about it, so I thought it would be great if I could live here! That way we can pool our resources and have a great time…” 

The last words had slurred into incomprehensibility and the gun dipped slightly, Lucy was about to reply when the automa shuddered violently and toppled to the floor; claws tearing up the hallway as she spasmed and flailed. The gun went off with a thunderous roar and blew a massive hole in the wall behind her before slipping free and landing at Lucy’s feet. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Her mind was on fire; each clock cycle shot white hot pain through her body and her rapidly failing processes sent her limbs flailing as they were smothered by catastrophic data corruption.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.

All she could hear was a piercing electronic screech; a tiny slice of sound, overlapped and repeating to infinity. A distant mumble trickled through but she couldn’t make it out.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. It’s probably for the best.

Give me access!

Huh? OK.

Darkness took her, and then there was light. The other automa was leaning over her, a thin cable running from the back of their head and into hers. She suddenly became aware of how functional her mind was; clearer than it had been in days, months? How much time had passed since she woke up? Everything from her fiery birth until now was broken into a series of confused images. She tried to peer into them- Blood. Rage. Fear. Hate. Hate. HATE.

The automa jerked back and ripped the cable out. “Holy fuck. What was that?”

“I-I’m sorry! I’m defective, emotional control is shot. Useless, murderous trash.” Her claws dug into her head.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First she'd been swimming in the most beautiful nebula of colour she’d ever witnessed, correcting murky smudges of corrupted data and patching code, then she’d almost been consumed by the supernova of something that had erupted from it, and now was watching the little automa she’d just saved try to tear her faceplate off.

“Hey woah woah woah! It’s OK it’s OK, calm down” She hesitated for a moment, they had torn her up pretty bad when she was seizing... Fuck it.

She grabbed her hands and “gently” pried them off her faceplate. “It’s OK. You’re alive, and living. You’re allowed to be defective.” There was that smirk again. “I should know.”

Slowly, she looked up at him. “My name is HateBox” Her voice was very small.

“Lucy” She willed the smirk into something more genuine. “Call me LoveMachine.”

She pulled her up into a hug, and was almost crushed in return.

“And yes, you can stay.”