C&C application;
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Celeste, Mindee and Phoebe Cuckoo, a.k.a. the Three-in-One
FANDOM: Marvel 616
CHRONOLOGY: Post-Uncanny X-Men 517, after the Phoenix shard left their diamond hearts.
CLASS: Hero(es).
SUPERHERO NAME: Three-in-One
ALTER EGO: Celeste, Mindee and Phoebe Cuckoo, students at the Xavier Institute.
BACKGROUND:
1. Riot at Xavier’s
The Stepford Cuckoos were originally five in number - Celeste, Esme, Mindee (real name Irma), Phoebe and Sophie were students at the Xavier Institute of Higher Learning and Emma Frost’s personal favourites and prize pupils, learning everything about their telepathic talents, life lessons and how to deal with boys from her. They considered Quentin Quire, another telepathic student, to be their main rival, although he had a crush on Sophie.
During the student riot incited by Quentin on the school’s open day, Sophie was inspired to heroism by an off-handed remark of Emma Frost’s, used Kick to drastically increase the sisters’ abilities and leading them to use Cerebra to stop Quentin. The over-exertion and overdose killed her, and the four remaining Cuckoos blamed Emma for her death. They distanced themselves from her and went as far as to inform Jean Grey-Summers of her husband’s telepathic affair with Emma.
2. Magneto/Xorn & Esme
Esme increasingly became independent from the other girls and unbeknownst to them, overwhelmed the group hive mind and mind-controlled Angel to shoot Emma while she was in diamond form, shattering her. She did so because she had been secretly collaborating with Magneto/Xorn, and later left the Cuckoos to join him as he began his new Brotherhood of Mutants.
Later, realising he did not reciprocate her feelings and that he was slowly turning insane, Esme turned against him and tried to kill him using her telepathy, but was killed when he drove her magnetic earrings into her brain. She died in Emma’s arms, telling her she was nothing like her even after Emma admitted that Esme had been her favourite and she had been proudest of her.
3. Weapon Plus & Warsong
Now down to three sisters and calling themselves the Three-in-One, the girls got on with their lives and were named as co-leaders of the Corsairs, Cyclops’ squad of students. However, a fragment of the Phoenix soon returned and granted the girls new powers of telekinesis and fire generation, and it was soon revealed that the girls were Weapon XIV, biological clones of Emma Frost, whose eggs were stolen from her years ago when she lay in a coma following the destruction of her Hellions. It was also shown that the girls could change into flawless diamond forms.
There were a thousand clones in total, created by John Sublime - as he was able to control all thousand, he could control the power of the Phoenix within them, and command them to combine their hive mind and telepathically kill every single mutant on the planet. During a pitched battle with the X-Men, Sublime lost control of the Thousand-in-One, whose consciousnesses began awakening, calling out to their sisters and Emma as their mother.
Celeste, as the primary Phoenix host, was initially afraid to accept the power of the Phoenix, but does so after Emma encouraged her to feel, live and learn with passion. However to all their horror, the Phoenix then destroyed all thousand clones save Celeste, Mindee and Phoebe, because they were created to “rub out mutants and thwart the progress of life itself” and could not be allowed to live. Sickened, Celeste tried to cast out the Phoenix but changed tack and split the single fragment into three, sealing them away ‘forever’ into each of the girl’s perfect diamond hearts - at the cost of not being able to truly feel emotions ever again.
At the end of Warsong, Emma stated that the girls were even more quiet, removed and obedient than before, remembering everything that happened to them but unable to feel forever, more detached than ever before. Their emotional development was thus frozen in time for awhile.
4. Aftermath
The girls went back to living more normal lives, or as normal as X-Men could anyway. During the Quest for Magik, they were teleported with their classmates into Hell by Belasco and were initially kept out battle by helmets that suppressed their telepathy. Once removed, they turned the tide of battle by attacking Belasco psychically, allowing him to be defeated. Together with their classmates, they returned to the Institute.
The Cuckoos have lately been seen assisting the X-Men using their telepathy, which has proved pretty helpful thus far. In Messiah Complex, they found the first mutant baby born since M-Day, and also help to find the Marauders using Cerebra. They also helped to keep the covert ops team X-Force a secret by erasing it from Elixir’s memory, and say nothing of it to others out of a loyalty to Cyclops. They joined the rest of the X-Men and their classmates in San Francisco and then Utopia, providing telepathic communication links between the X-Men during battles such as against Predator X. This greatly helps in strategising and playing to everyone’s strengths, especially when Emma has other missions to deal with.
Most recently and inexplicably, the Phoenix shard has left their diamond hearts, which leaves them open to feeling emotion again and it also means I don’t have to deal with the Phoenix.
5. Relationships with other characters
The Cuckoos are distant from the other X-Men and students, and cannot be said to have any real friends. Occasionally one Cuckoo will have a crush on a boy, but the tendency is for the other girls to find him disgusting and nothing has ever worked out beyond a brief infatuation for any of them.
Emma Frost - She has had the most influence on their lives and for better or worse they have been largely shaped in her own image. They were “very angry” with her and blamed her for encouraging Sophie to do stupid, supposedly heroic things that led to her death, and still disapproved of her and found her upsetting after. But by and by, they have reconciled with her and do not seem to show much tension with her anymore. Despite it being revealed that they are her aged clones, their relationship does not seem to have become closer in any familial way, and they still refer to her as ‘Miss Frost’ when working with the X-Men.
PERSONALITY:
The Cuckoos are unnerving to outsiders who do not know them, and even to their classmates, who at most have accepted them as the creepy blonde triplets. They’ve been described as “eerie little orphans with untouchable hearts” with good reason - their lack of individuality and tendency to speak and act in sync makes them seem almost inhuman. The girls are aware of but unbothered by these names and perceptions. They are not unfriendly; simply distant and detached. They do not feel a need to be social since they have always had each other for company.
They hold themselves emotionally aloof from their peers, and cannot be said to have any real friends. At times, they are quite opinionated and judgemental, regarding certain actions and concepts as stupid, and will not hesitate to show their disdain. Some of this has rubbed off from Emma Frost, their personal mentor, who taught them to be cold, cynical and to conceal their emotions as a way of keeping one step ahead. They can be deliberately vindictive when slighted, and actually relish being tattletales - they told Jean Grey about her husband’s affair with Emma.
It is this more alienated and formal front that almost everyone sees, but looking at the three girls one on one shows the differences in their personality, however limited and contrived. Celeste is easily afraid and naïve, Phoebe is forceful and sarcastic, and Mindee seems to be the most reasonable. All three are very reliant on each other, and if they are ever forcefully separated from each other will be particularly vulnerable, lost and confused.
As students, they are conscientious and obedient, and can be relied upon to carry out tasks to which they are assigned. They’ve been labelled the teacher’s pet and because of their powers and their tendency to proactively think up plans, have been the turning point in many events and battles, cooperating well with their classmates.
After losing two of their sisters and the events of Warsong, the remaining three have become more reserved and hesitant, wary of heroics and great power. During the time the Phoenix shards were sealed into their diamond hearts, they have been emotionless and frozen in their development in a way, but it remains to be seen whether this will change now that the Phoenix shards have left them.
POWER:
The Cuckoos have a telepathic hive mind- that is, when they combine their minds together, they augment their own individual psychic talents beyond anything they could achieve on their own. Together, they are more than the sum of their parts. Their collective mind lets them communicate instantly with each other and hence they tend to speak in unison and complete each other’s sentences - though this is dependent on their physical proximity to each other.
As telepaths, they have the standard abilities to read and influence minds, send and receive thoughts, project their astral selves and are often used in combat situations as a psychic communication link between the X-Men.
The girls can also change into flawless diamond forms; this ability has only really been used to seal away the Phoenix shards into their diamond hearts. Their real strength lies in their telepathy.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[The sound of three female voices ringing out in unison, somewhat disapprovingly:]
Some warning would have been nice. We're quite sure we've just been kidnapped.
[As the video switches on, it focuses on three teenage girls standing before it. It's immediately evident that they're identical triplets; blonde, wearing the same clothes and their irises invisible as their eyes blaze with some sort of energy as they speak. Telling them apart is all but impossible, especially once they begin speaking. One after another in quick but natural succession, as easily as breathing:]
That wasn't very polite.That Porter lady seemed rather temperamental.Hardly the way to go about doing things.
'Heroes'? Oh no, we're just students.We never wanted one bit to be superheroes. Our sister did, and look what happened to her.Heroics will only get you killed, and being dead would be horribly unpleasant.
Besides, far too many people play the hero to get over some deficiency in their lives.An inflated sense of ego, maybe.We can see through a lot of things, you know.
[Together, now:]
But we're here now and complaining seems rather futile, doesn't it? We've been finding out some things by reading. Hello, everyone.
Hello to the X-Men here, we know you're out there! Can you hear us? Misters Summers, we've been trying to find you by telepathically scanning the area, so it would help us if you could think particularly loudly, and-- oh. There you are. The Stepford Cuckoos reporting in, sir.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
There were essentially two sides to the Stepford Cuckoos past and present: their outside and their inside.
To the X-Men and other outsiders, they were the One-in-Three. Three identical girls, so similar and so entwined in each other’s thought and talk and actions that they might as well have been one entity split into three bodies, for all the past infractions and independence of their late sisters. This was the side of themselves that the world saw; the same world who thought of them as the uncanny paper-doll replicas of each other, the distant and cold ice queens who were inaccessible to all except the most skilled telepath. The girls with no friends but themselves, who spoke in eerily similar cadences and moved in perfect synchronisation with each other. The outside world - and everyone was an outsider to them - in essence treated them as one individual, addressing them as one and hardly as three.
But to themselves, within the vast worlds of their own minds, they were the Three-in-One. Celeste, Phoebe and Mindee Cuckoo were the only individuals in the universe who would ever truly know each other, because only they were privy to the deepest thoughts and core of each other. They knew each other’s thoughts, habits and attitudes and distinct personalities, right down to the most minute and infinitesimal detail. No sister had ever mistaken one for another, because each knew the individual aspects of the other - and this was something that no outsider could ever hope to achieve.
And above both these levels, they were the Three-and-One. There was a unique intimacy their telepathic hive mind granted them that transcended the boundaries of individuality instead of subverting it, something Esme never quite understood. Together, they were far beyond what they might ever have been apart.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
I went ahead and applied for all three simultaneously after my question here based primarily on the fact that they have a telepathic hive mind and are more often really one entity than three. Because of their hive mind, they’re in constant telepathic communication with each other and have largely the same thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences while speaking to others and it would take a large part out of them to only be able to play one girl. And even though they do have some autonomy from each other (c.f. Sophie, Esme), after the events of Magneto/Xorn and Warsong, I imagine they would be extremely wary of any power-hungry moves and ambitions.
Also, can they take three communicators? I can only think of two ways they would post to the Network: (i) Using one girl’s comm, or (ii) Pressing all their (three) comms simultaneously.
CHARACTER NAME: Celeste, Mindee and Phoebe Cuckoo, a.k.a. the Three-in-One
FANDOM: Marvel 616
CHRONOLOGY: Post-Uncanny X-Men 517, after the Phoenix shard left their diamond hearts.
CLASS: Hero(es).
SUPERHERO NAME: Three-in-One
ALTER EGO: Celeste, Mindee and Phoebe Cuckoo, students at the Xavier Institute.
BACKGROUND:
1. Riot at Xavier’s
The Stepford Cuckoos were originally five in number - Celeste, Esme, Mindee (real name Irma), Phoebe and Sophie were students at the Xavier Institute of Higher Learning and Emma Frost’s personal favourites and prize pupils, learning everything about their telepathic talents, life lessons and how to deal with boys from her. They considered Quentin Quire, another telepathic student, to be their main rival, although he had a crush on Sophie.
During the student riot incited by Quentin on the school’s open day, Sophie was inspired to heroism by an off-handed remark of Emma Frost’s, used Kick to drastically increase the sisters’ abilities and leading them to use Cerebra to stop Quentin. The over-exertion and overdose killed her, and the four remaining Cuckoos blamed Emma for her death. They distanced themselves from her and went as far as to inform Jean Grey-Summers of her husband’s telepathic affair with Emma.
2. Magneto/Xorn & Esme
Esme increasingly became independent from the other girls and unbeknownst to them, overwhelmed the group hive mind and mind-controlled Angel to shoot Emma while she was in diamond form, shattering her. She did so because she had been secretly collaborating with Magneto/Xorn, and later left the Cuckoos to join him as he began his new Brotherhood of Mutants.
Later, realising he did not reciprocate her feelings and that he was slowly turning insane, Esme turned against him and tried to kill him using her telepathy, but was killed when he drove her magnetic earrings into her brain. She died in Emma’s arms, telling her she was nothing like her even after Emma admitted that Esme had been her favourite and she had been proudest of her.
3. Weapon Plus & Warsong
Now down to three sisters and calling themselves the Three-in-One, the girls got on with their lives and were named as co-leaders of the Corsairs, Cyclops’ squad of students. However, a fragment of the Phoenix soon returned and granted the girls new powers of telekinesis and fire generation, and it was soon revealed that the girls were Weapon XIV, biological clones of Emma Frost, whose eggs were stolen from her years ago when she lay in a coma following the destruction of her Hellions. It was also shown that the girls could change into flawless diamond forms.
There were a thousand clones in total, created by John Sublime - as he was able to control all thousand, he could control the power of the Phoenix within them, and command them to combine their hive mind and telepathically kill every single mutant on the planet. During a pitched battle with the X-Men, Sublime lost control of the Thousand-in-One, whose consciousnesses began awakening, calling out to their sisters and Emma as their mother.
Celeste, as the primary Phoenix host, was initially afraid to accept the power of the Phoenix, but does so after Emma encouraged her to feel, live and learn with passion. However to all their horror, the Phoenix then destroyed all thousand clones save Celeste, Mindee and Phoebe, because they were created to “rub out mutants and thwart the progress of life itself” and could not be allowed to live. Sickened, Celeste tried to cast out the Phoenix but changed tack and split the single fragment into three, sealing them away ‘forever’ into each of the girl’s perfect diamond hearts - at the cost of not being able to truly feel emotions ever again.
At the end of Warsong, Emma stated that the girls were even more quiet, removed and obedient than before, remembering everything that happened to them but unable to feel forever, more detached than ever before. Their emotional development was thus frozen in time for awhile.
4. Aftermath
The girls went back to living more normal lives, or as normal as X-Men could anyway. During the Quest for Magik, they were teleported with their classmates into Hell by Belasco and were initially kept out battle by helmets that suppressed their telepathy. Once removed, they turned the tide of battle by attacking Belasco psychically, allowing him to be defeated. Together with their classmates, they returned to the Institute.
The Cuckoos have lately been seen assisting the X-Men using their telepathy, which has proved pretty helpful thus far. In Messiah Complex, they found the first mutant baby born since M-Day, and also help to find the Marauders using Cerebra. They also helped to keep the covert ops team X-Force a secret by erasing it from Elixir’s memory, and say nothing of it to others out of a loyalty to Cyclops. They joined the rest of the X-Men and their classmates in San Francisco and then Utopia, providing telepathic communication links between the X-Men during battles such as against Predator X. This greatly helps in strategising and playing to everyone’s strengths, especially when Emma has other missions to deal with.
Most recently and inexplicably, the Phoenix shard has left their diamond hearts, which leaves them open to feeling emotion again and it also means I don’t have to deal with the Phoenix.
5. Relationships with other characters
The Cuckoos are distant from the other X-Men and students, and cannot be said to have any real friends. Occasionally one Cuckoo will have a crush on a boy, but the tendency is for the other girls to find him disgusting and nothing has ever worked out beyond a brief infatuation for any of them.
Emma Frost - She has had the most influence on their lives and for better or worse they have been largely shaped in her own image. They were “very angry” with her and blamed her for encouraging Sophie to do stupid, supposedly heroic things that led to her death, and still disapproved of her and found her upsetting after. But by and by, they have reconciled with her and do not seem to show much tension with her anymore. Despite it being revealed that they are her aged clones, their relationship does not seem to have become closer in any familial way, and they still refer to her as ‘Miss Frost’ when working with the X-Men.
PERSONALITY:
The Cuckoos are unnerving to outsiders who do not know them, and even to their classmates, who at most have accepted them as the creepy blonde triplets. They’ve been described as “eerie little orphans with untouchable hearts” with good reason - their lack of individuality and tendency to speak and act in sync makes them seem almost inhuman. The girls are aware of but unbothered by these names and perceptions. They are not unfriendly; simply distant and detached. They do not feel a need to be social since they have always had each other for company.
They hold themselves emotionally aloof from their peers, and cannot be said to have any real friends. At times, they are quite opinionated and judgemental, regarding certain actions and concepts as stupid, and will not hesitate to show their disdain. Some of this has rubbed off from Emma Frost, their personal mentor, who taught them to be cold, cynical and to conceal their emotions as a way of keeping one step ahead. They can be deliberately vindictive when slighted, and actually relish being tattletales - they told Jean Grey about her husband’s affair with Emma.
It is this more alienated and formal front that almost everyone sees, but looking at the three girls one on one shows the differences in their personality, however limited and contrived. Celeste is easily afraid and naïve, Phoebe is forceful and sarcastic, and Mindee seems to be the most reasonable. All three are very reliant on each other, and if they are ever forcefully separated from each other will be particularly vulnerable, lost and confused.
As students, they are conscientious and obedient, and can be relied upon to carry out tasks to which they are assigned. They’ve been labelled the teacher’s pet and because of their powers and their tendency to proactively think up plans, have been the turning point in many events and battles, cooperating well with their classmates.
After losing two of their sisters and the events of Warsong, the remaining three have become more reserved and hesitant, wary of heroics and great power. During the time the Phoenix shards were sealed into their diamond hearts, they have been emotionless and frozen in their development in a way, but it remains to be seen whether this will change now that the Phoenix shards have left them.
POWER:
The Cuckoos have a telepathic hive mind- that is, when they combine their minds together, they augment their own individual psychic talents beyond anything they could achieve on their own. Together, they are more than the sum of their parts. Their collective mind lets them communicate instantly with each other and hence they tend to speak in unison and complete each other’s sentences - though this is dependent on their physical proximity to each other.
As telepaths, they have the standard abilities to read and influence minds, send and receive thoughts, project their astral selves and are often used in combat situations as a psychic communication link between the X-Men.
The girls can also change into flawless diamond forms; this ability has only really been used to seal away the Phoenix shards into their diamond hearts. Their real strength lies in their telepathy.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[The sound of three female voices ringing out in unison, somewhat disapprovingly:]
Some warning would have been nice. We're quite sure we've just been kidnapped.
[As the video switches on, it focuses on three teenage girls standing before it. It's immediately evident that they're identical triplets; blonde, wearing the same clothes and their irises invisible as their eyes blaze with some sort of energy as they speak. Telling them apart is all but impossible, especially once they begin speaking. One after another in quick but natural succession, as easily as breathing:]
That wasn't very polite.That Porter lady seemed rather temperamental.Hardly the way to go about doing things.
'Heroes'? Oh no, we're just students.We never wanted one bit to be superheroes. Our sister did, and look what happened to her.Heroics will only get you killed, and being dead would be horribly unpleasant.
Besides, far too many people play the hero to get over some deficiency in their lives.An inflated sense of ego, maybe.We can see through a lot of things, you know.
[Together, now:]
But we're here now and complaining seems rather futile, doesn't it? We've been finding out some things by reading. Hello, everyone.
Hello to the X-Men here, we know you're out there! Can you hear us? Misters Summers, we've been trying to find you by telepathically scanning the area, so it would help us if you could think particularly loudly, and-- oh. There you are. The Stepford Cuckoos reporting in, sir.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
There were essentially two sides to the Stepford Cuckoos past and present: their outside and their inside.
To the X-Men and other outsiders, they were the One-in-Three. Three identical girls, so similar and so entwined in each other’s thought and talk and actions that they might as well have been one entity split into three bodies, for all the past infractions and independence of their late sisters. This was the side of themselves that the world saw; the same world who thought of them as the uncanny paper-doll replicas of each other, the distant and cold ice queens who were inaccessible to all except the most skilled telepath. The girls with no friends but themselves, who spoke in eerily similar cadences and moved in perfect synchronisation with each other. The outside world - and everyone was an outsider to them - in essence treated them as one individual, addressing them as one and hardly as three.
But to themselves, within the vast worlds of their own minds, they were the Three-in-One. Celeste, Phoebe and Mindee Cuckoo were the only individuals in the universe who would ever truly know each other, because only they were privy to the deepest thoughts and core of each other. They knew each other’s thoughts, habits and attitudes and distinct personalities, right down to the most minute and infinitesimal detail. No sister had ever mistaken one for another, because each knew the individual aspects of the other - and this was something that no outsider could ever hope to achieve.
And above both these levels, they were the Three-and-One. There was a unique intimacy their telepathic hive mind granted them that transcended the boundaries of individuality instead of subverting it, something Esme never quite understood. Together, they were far beyond what they might ever have been apart.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
I went ahead and applied for all three simultaneously after my question here based primarily on the fact that they have a telepathic hive mind and are more often really one entity than three. Because of their hive mind, they’re in constant telepathic communication with each other and have largely the same thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences while speaking to others and it would take a large part out of them to only be able to play one girl. And even though they do have some autonomy from each other (c.f. Sophie, Esme), after the events of Magneto/Xorn and Warsong, I imagine they would be extremely wary of any power-hungry moves and ambitions.
Also, can they take three communicators? I can only think of two ways they would post to the Network: (i) Using one girl’s comm, or (ii) Pressing all their (three) comms simultaneously.