[000] Profile
Basics
Character Name: Jean Grey
Codename: Phoenix
Age: 39 / Acting Headmistress
NOTE: Jean also teaches a psychology class - something minor that she can teach without having it interfere with her other work. She also acts as a substitute for teachers who get called away on recruiting missions or for other reasons.
Powers
Jean is a very powerful telepath/telekinetic who has had her powers for more than half her life. She worked very closely with Professor Xavier in order to use her powers without abusing them, and though she had a few scares in her late teens and early twenties, Jean was eventually able to master her abilities and use them without fear of the 'flare ups' that she experienced when she was younger. In general, Jean doesn't use her powers in the presence of the students: she wants them to think of her as Ms. Grey and not as Phoenix. When it's just her and the other faculty members and X-Men alumns, though, she tends to revert to her lazy teenaged self and use telekinesis all the time.
Telekinesis: This is Jean's primary ability and the one she can do the most with. She has a lot of raw power (easily several tons) but she's also capable of performing involved tasks with her telekinesis. Everything is relative when she uses her powers: force and detail are the factors that determine how long she can perform a task. For example, lifting a desk is a simple task that she could do for maybe an hour if she wanted to. If she wanted to lift the desk and have it spin in a circle counter-clockwise while all of the drawers opened and closed in a set pattern, it would knock down the duration to maybe a few minutes. If the desk had a CAR on top of it, that would also knock the duration down. The easiest things for Jean to do are things that she would normally do with her hands: opening doors, lifting and moving objects and other simple tasks can be done pretty much for an hour or more, provided they aren't too taxing.
Flight: Technically a side effect of telekinesis, this is Jean's ability to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Her top speed is 60 miles per hour and she can only achieve that if she uses some of her telekinesis to create a shield to protect herself from the wind. She can carry equipment and passengers with her if she sacrifices speed and length of time. Flying herself around at a leisurely pace wouldn't be too taxing on Jean and she could manage an hour or so if she really wanted to.
Shield: Jean can create a concentrated wall of telekinetic energy to protect herself (and anyone that happens to be with her) from harm. Sometimes these are one directional shields to protect from specific attacks like something being thrown at her. Other times, the shield is a dome or sphere that protects more completely against things like collapsing buildings. Jean can protect against as much force as she could exert against something else, so it's measured in the region of tons. It's easier for her to defend against something larger like a thrown bottle or an oncoming car - Jean has yet to successfully stop something as small and fast as a bullet.
Telepathy: Like with telekinesis, the strength of Jean's telepathy is dependant on what she does with it. She can scan a person's surface thoughts with relative ease, and with time and concentration would be able to read their deeper memories. This can be hindered by a shield - either a telepathic defense or even something as simple as mental conditioning or dementia. Jean has her own mental defenses which mostly serve to keep the surface thoughts of others from leaking into her mind and making her, you know, go crazy and possibly kill people. Less invasive telepathy is easier to handle: Jean can telepathically speak to anyone she can see who doesn't have a defense up. If she's familiar with someone's mind, she can contact them even if she can't see them and at a greater distance depending on how well she knows them - up to five to ten miles depending on her connection to a person. She can also link up several minds at once, which has come in handy during missions in the past. Still, one on one communication is the easiest for her to maintain.
Plot Device: During her years as an X-Man, Jean demonstrated some truly astonishing uses of her telepathic and telekinetic abilities. She's protected herself and her team from building collapses, flown dozens of people away from the site of a diaster, created mass illusions to disorient a hostile group and even shut down someone's motor control for a day and a half. She can punch her way through poured concrete, bend steel and alter the trajectory of a missile using her telekinesis. Jean was trained by the world's greatest telepath, Charles Xavier. Given close contact and lots of time with a target, she could enter their dreams and examine their entire psyche; with the help of Cerebro, she could limit or suspend somoene's ability to access their memories or their mutant abilities. These, however, are things that she would only attempt if there was no other option available. Aside from being highly unethical, they are extermely dangerous, not only to the target but to Jean herself. In terms of game mechanics, they are things that will only be used as a plot device with approval of the mods and consent of the players involved.
Personality
Jean Grey was pretty much born to be a den mother. Even though she was the younger sister at home, she had no problems taking younger and newer students under her wing during her time at Xavier's. She's been there from the start, and has done her best to make everyone who has walked through its doors - in California AND in New York - feel welcome and like they had a place to feel safe and secure. As a younger girl, Jean was always there to listen to the problems and confessions of friends and teammates - always there to offer advice and a helping hand whenever she could. She was a goody-two-shoes of sort, but would bend the rules for a friend if she had to
Now that she's in a position of authority at the school, she does less rule bending and more rule enforcing. She tries to understand that 'kids will be kids' but her primary concern is for the safety of the students and faculty of her the school and she will lay down the law if she has to in order to ensure that the Xavier Institute remains - as always - a safe haven for mutants everywhere. Oh, and as far as that 'headmistress' thing? Temporary. Absolutely. She's just going to keep the place running until Charles Xavier returns: at which point he will resume being in charge of the school and Jean will teach English and maybe coach Field Hockey. She would like to be McGonagall, thank you very much: NOT Dumbledore.
Although 'Phoenix' retired when the Liberty Bell was signed, Jean spent decades training to use her powers in a team setting, and that isn't something that ever really goes away. Like all of the former X-Men, if a crisis happens, she can flip on that switch in her brain that starts talking formations and perimeters and all those other things designed to keep people safe. And while Jean Grey is sweet as can be and very personable, you do NOT want to be in the path of an angry Phoenix who's trying to defend civilians or protect young mutants. She isn't violent, but she (and her powers) can be very destructive if the situation calls for it. Students have learned that you don't really want to make Ms. Grey angry - nor do you want to step too far out of line during certain parts of the month because her PMS may actually get someone killed one day.
With friends and former teammates, however, Jean shows a much softer side. She still does her best to maintain a confident air, of course, but she's more willing to let her hair down and joke since she doesn't have to be 'In Charge' with a bunch of her friends. She's got a close bond with her former teammates, especially guys like Hank who have been there from the start. This Inner Circle of people are the ones she's likely to really open up to - and the only ones who are likely to see the doubt and insecurities that she feels while in charge of the Institute. She knows that a good leader won't let these things be seen by the people they lead, but deep down Jean is terrified that something will happen to the school or that she'll just plain be a bad teacher and won't be able to help the kids who come to the place trusting that they'll be educated and protected.
Of course, for as much as Jean looks for help from her fellow faculty members and former teammates, she's still surprisingly resistant to change. She knows how things are done at the mansion - how they have been done for years and years. And she's not exactly a fan of people coming in to change things up. She may go along with it eventually, but it will always require a certain amount of arm twisting and case-making before Jean will agree to change things at Xavier's Institute.
A note about romance: that's really a great theory. Trouble is: Jean's a busy woman and she hasn't exactly got time for it. Plus, most of the men in her life are guys she has known since she (and they) were just past puberty or still in their awkward Young Adult years. Jean is still something of a tomboy with her former teammates - after all, that early team had more guys than girls on it, and Jean had to relate to them like 'one of the guys.' (Of course, she will be the absolute last to admit that she's used her feminine wiles in the past to win arguments with them - she has no idea what you're talking about and resents the implication, thanks very much.) Those who speculate (and let's face it, there probably aren't meny) probably assume that Jean's just waiting for the right guy to come along, and they'd probably be right. But as for who that guy is or might be? That's something that Ms. Grey is keeping under SERIOUS lock and key.
History
Before she was the confident and powerful Phoenix, she was the bubbly breath of fresh air known as Marvel Girl - but before any of that, she was just Jean. As a young girl, Jean has the perfect life: her parents were loving and attentive and she and her older sister lived in comfort at the upper regions of upper middle class. All that changed when Jean was ten and started hearing voices. Her parents were understandably freaked out and Jean was facing a dismal future filled with rubber rooms and antipsychotics when Charles Xavier came into her life. He assured Jean's parents that her condition was not the result of insanity, but of something called mutation and promised that he could help Jean return to her normal life.
For several years, Charles Xavier would visit Jean once a week to help her cope with her abilities. He placed blocks on her telepathy to keep her from being overwhelmed and he helped her when her her telekinesis began to emerge. Jean was one of the first mutants that Charles Xavier had found, and it's possible that he learned as much from her as she did from him. Over time, as Jean's powers continued to develop and more mutants appeared, Xavier created the Xavier Institute and Jean became one of his first students. At the school, she learned to control her abilities and along with the other students she learned that those abilities came with a certain responsibility to protect those around her.
At first, they didn't understand why the Professor had them engaged in training simulations that seemed rather military. After all, they weren't fighting a war. Soon, though, the realized that all the preparation was not only necessary: it might not be enough. While Xavier had been gathering young mutants who could serve as a positive example to the rest of the world, there were others who were gathering mutants for much more nefarious ends. Who knows what would have happened if Xavier had gone public first - it's possible that mutants would have been viewed as a positive thing. But instead, the bad guys struck first and suddenly mutants went from being the stuff of supermarket tabloids to being the most hated thing in the nation.
Jean was one of the first X-Men, taking on the codename of Marvel Girl. Though she'd only just recently gotten her undergraduate degree, she had already decided to dedicate her life to making the world a safer place, and to showing the world that ALL mutants shouldn't be hated and feared. It was a difficult time filled with many dangers and trials, and Jean grew to learn a lot about herself and her friends and teammates through it all. Her parents weren't exactly thrilled with the idea of their daughter risking her life, but they also knew that it was something that meant a lot to her and they did nothing to stop her from doing it.
That all changed when Jean was 27. The X-Men were going up against a group of hostile mutants that had taken a group of people hostage and were trying to defuse the situation before anyone - including responding law enforcement - got hurt. In the chaos that followed, Marvel Girl was hit - not by a hostile mutant but by a bullet from one of the cops on the scene. She was rushed to the local hospital and after hours of surgery (during which Jean was actually dead on the table for nearly a full minute) she was saved and would eventually make a full recovery. The shooting was written off as 'friendly fire' but there were some who viewed the act as a sign of human hostility against mutants and there are several sources that cite the 'death' of Jean Gray as the event that sparked a spike in membership numbers with the Brotherhood and similar militant pro-mutant/anti-human organizations.
For Jean, it meant a serious re-evaluation of her life. Her parents urged her to sever all ties with Xavier and his X-Men, but Jean refused. She did, however, retire from the team for a period of a few years while she went back to school and got a teaching certificate. During this time, she remained at the Institute in order to mentor and train younger students, much to her parents' chagrin. Just 3 years after being shot, Jean returned to reserve and then active duty with the X-Men, this time under a new (and appropriate) codename: Phoenix.
Jean's return to the team also marked another important role for her: that of teacher. Jean began teaching English and Psychology classes at the Institute. Given her longstanding relationship with Xavier, Jean took a very active role in helping when the school was relocated and began helping on the administrative side of things as well, learning the day to day operations of the school as well as dealing with things like recruitment and meetings with parents. Jean finally felt like she was accomplishing something good for mutants - not only a a hero, but as a member of the mutant community.
When the decision was made to disband the X-Men, Jean was not-so-secretly relieved. She was getting a little too old to be parading around in a body suit, thanks very much and the idea of down time after nearly two decades of fighting (and a bullet to the lung) was a welcome one. With the increased funding from government grants, the school was facing a surge of new enrollments, and the fact that Xavier chose that time to leave the school made many people - Jean included - rather nervous. Jean was chosen to step up as Headmistress, a role that she accepted reluctantly, and only as long as she could consider herself to be 'Acting Headmaster' - preserving the school for such a time as Charles decided to return.
Timeline
1969 - Jean Grey is born in California.
1979 - Puberty hits and Jean starts hearing voices. She meets Charles Xavier, who helps her control her powers.
1982 - At age 13 Jean enrolls at Xavier's school for mutants.
1990 - Shortly after earning her college degree, Jean joins the X-Men as Marvel Girl.
1996 - 27-year-old Jean is shot by friendly fire and leaves the X-Men, though she stays at the school as an advisor to young mutants.
1999 - A recovered Jean returns to the X-Men as Phoenix and begins teaching full time at the Institute.
2005 - Jean helps the Professor as he relocates the school across the country and begins handling administrative duties at the school.