OOC: Character Questions Meme:
Gosh, this thing is long. It's 2:30 AM! I should be sleeping! But, since xmm_mystique started it, I may as well chip in too. Awesome way to procrastinate.
1) Go here and look at the questions: http://xmenmovieverse.com/charbuild.html
2) Answer as many as you can, for your character.
3) Post!
BASICS:
Where was your character born and where did they grow up?
Jean was born in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in a comfortable family home with ficus plants and a beagle or two. It's a sleepy little college town where nothing untoward really happens, there are a lot of old and established families, and the WASP population is dense indeed.
Who are the members of your character's family?
Jean has two parents, John and Elaine Grey, one sister named Susan who's 12 years her senior, a niece Rachel and a nephew we don't know the name of, and a smattering of cousins, second cousins, and other extended family members that she sees once every few years. She has a grandfather in his nineties, a dignified old gentleman named Christopher Grey, and a three year old son conceived in strange circumstances (And not by her.) called Nate Grey-Summers.
She also has an entire school full of people that she counts as family.
How old is your character?
Jean will be 36 (GASP) this November 5th.
Why is your character in New York?
She's lived at the Xavier Mansion since she was 11, with a few years away at college, medical school, and then a residency, plus a year away just last year while she finished her Ph.D., started a business, and WENT CRAZY.
What does your character do now (job, school, etc)?
Jean is Headmistress of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. She's also a doctor who specializes in mutant medicine and is called in to deal with weird cases (Too often, sometimes.) a political activist and mutant rights advocate (Not often enough!) and a member of the super-secret superhero team known as the X-Men.
What are the major events in your character's life?
There are many! I will pick only a couple:
1) Her mutant powers manifesting. Age 10, best friend gets pasted by a car, Jean gets trapped inside her head as she dies. This is traumatic. Even more traumatic is the fact that she can't stop getting into people's heads afterwards. Adult brains are no place for a little girl. She ends up catatonic in a psych ward until Charles Xavier appears and fixes her brain and makes the nasty voices go away. Her telekinesis also manifests, but this is less problematic. Unless you're a table lamp.
2) Her first boyfriend. He's a norm. They're in college. He's a *musician*. She tries pot, tries sex, and eventually lets him know she's a mutant, telekinetic to be exact. He's cool with this. He is not so cool later when he finds out she's a telepath. There is much freaking out, and a broken-hearted young Jean. Xavier takes care of it. Jean never asks how. Her first boyfriend is now a lawyer for the ACLU. He's still a musician. He has a different version of how they broke up in his memories. Odd, that.
3) Xavier's fix starts to weaken. The Brotherhood is attacking an understaffed and under-strength mansion in 2002. All of a sudden Jean's eyes start glowing funny colours, and her telekinesis jumps through the roof. For several months, she suffers crushing headaches on a daily basis, sudden unpredictable spikes in her power levels, and emotional moodswings from calm to lethally angry without real warning. Eventually, safely out in the middle of the Canadian wilderness on a mission with Logan, she stops holding it in and the Phoenix says hello. It then goes away again, as Jean is an adult with a neatly-formed psyche as is, and doesn't really need it. Honest!
4) Outed! Jean and Scott attend a pro-MRA rally in the hopes of keeping a lid on anything that gets out of hand. President Lowe attends the rally. Unfortunately, so do Mystique and some of the Brotherhood. They attempt to blow up the President. Jean Phoenixes out and stops this. Unfortunately, the cameras of the world are rolling. Jean gets a presidential medal, but loses the comfort of security and anonymity. The press goes wild.
5) DARK FEENIX. After infiltrating the Hellfire Club and getting Emma lethally irritated, Jean is driven mad by isolation, Jason Wyngarde's illusions and severe sleep deprivation over a long period of weeks, in addition to the burgeoning Phoenix sub-personality. She snaps, and as a coping mechanism, the Phoenix begins to take over whenever the main Jean is past the point she can cope with. Unfortunately, her morals and social conditioning are back with the rest of her. FEENIX needs none of that. Things get broken, including Shaw, the Brotherhood's island base, and Emma's telepathy. Eventually, she's found unconscious in her flat by Logan and Scott and taken back to Xavier's, where she's somehow forcibly reintegrated back together again.
6) Outed: Redux. As the Xavier school secret becomes increasingly leaky, Xavier and Jean decide to let the world know that here be mutants. Impact on Jean's life? To Be Determined.
What is your character's general outlook on life (optimistic, pessimistic, realist, idealist, etc)?
Jean would call herself an optimistic realist. Others would call her a starry-eyed idealist. The real answer is that pessimism and depression would likely be lethal options for her, she subconsciously knows this, on some level, and therefore is someone who is aggressively optimistic during the daylight and in public, because the watches of the night can be so damn' scary.
Jean is the sort of person who is, at heart, an active participant in her own life, rather than someone blown along by whatever winds of change show up. If Jean ever got to a point where she really, truly believed there was no hope for the future, that no matter her efforts, she would live, grow old, and die in a world of mutant discrimination, registration, internment, etc. and she could do nothing to keep her students and her loved ones safe and happy, she would, she feels, quite likely kill herself. One last, decisive action resting in her own hands.
For the most part, she can keep herself focused on the positives and the successes. When she doesn't, she tries to surround herself with her fellow optimists and idealists, trying to buoy her own mood off their own. This is not a good time to sit and talk with, say, Rossi.
What is your character's basic personality?
It depends on what era of Jean you look at. I blather!
From 11 to 32, she was very controlled, poised, smooth and untouchable on the surface, with a drive and passion more mind than heart. Compassion, passion and desires light and dark were present, but channelled safely and appropriately into socially-acceptable venues.
From 32 onwards, facets of her personality previously tucked away, accidentally or not, with the bulk of her access to her powers began to filter back in. Still controlled, poised, smooth on the surface, things began to shake up beneath it, desires and passions suddenly much more earthy, and occasionally much more violent. She's always had a temper if pushed too far, but 'too far' now came much sooner. She began to enjoy fights for more than just the saving and protecting of the innocent, or the technical challenge.
Dark Phoenix was the fully-fledged form of all those restrained and repressed passions and energies. Single-minded, it wanted to protect those it cared about, protect itself, and find final solutions for things, no matter the consequences. Want, take, have. Solve a problem so that it will never rear its head again, and the ends justify the means. And if someone or something hurts or threatens you, put it down -cold-.
Now Jean's been reintegrated. (Somehow. I don't know how. It just happened. There was an Xavier.) She now has to come to terms with the duality of her nature, the nurtured control and the instinctive passions. Balance is key. Balance takes time. Right now, she's wanting to skew back to controlled, to overcorrect in the face of what happened with Dark Phoenix, and to not want to talk about it to anyone who she's come to associate with control. Like, say, her best friends. Or her mentor. She slips, sometimes. She will for a while. Logan's helpful as an example of someone else working through similar things.
Who are your character's friends?
Jean has a lot of friends, so it'd take too long to list them all. I'll go with the big long-term ones just 'cause. And I will miss a few. Because.
First and foremost, Ororo Munroe. Best friends since the age of thirteen, she's the one woman who's been a constant in Jean's life. Their relationship has been strained lately by Jean's secrecy over what happened during the Dark Phoenix arc, over Jean's feelings for Emma after Storm ended up in an Emma suit, and over Jean's closeness with Logan, sharing things with him that Ororo hears second hand, or not at all.
Warren Worthington III is another of the First Students. He had an unrequited crush on Jean for a number of years, and she's always loved him like a brother. Lately, she wants to bounce him down Broadway on his pointy head after all the Hellfire Club mess. Because she loves him. He's a mopey emo prince with angel wings, but he's her friend, and he's been there for her at some pretty rough times.
Hank McCoy is Jean's big brother she never had. A fellow doctor and scientist, and far, far smarter than she or anyone else is, he's a good sounding board when she's geeking, or when she just needs advice. She, in turn, fusses over him when he's not eating, tries to cheer him up when he's (pun intended) feeling blue, and engages in a long-term and cheerful cold war over how the medbay's desk is organized.
Scott Summers. Friend, lover, friend, lover... friend again. She loves him and always will. At their best, he's an absolutely rigid moral compass for her, and steers a steady course through the most complicated political storms. He grounds her. She encourages him to open up. Sometimes, they work, but even when they don't, there's a very clear mutual affection and respect.
Kurt Wagner. Dude, he's Nightcrawler. The end. Useful for dealing with any appearances of Emo Jean or Discouraged Jean.
The kids! Rogue, Jubilee and Wesley are probably the three of Jean's students (now graduates!) that she's closest to. They get to see her as more than just Headmistress Dr. Grey, they get to see her as Jean the Person too. She very much wants to see Wesley succeed in his dream of being a fireman, and wants to help as much as she can. She wants to see Rogue happy, wants to find her a way to make the most of her mutation, and work around it as best as possible. She's not sure what Jubilee wants to do. She's not sure Jubilee knows what Jubilee wants to do. But she loves her like a little sister all the same.
And then there's Xavier. He's more family and father-figure than friend. Jean's currently in that uneasy phase of learning to stand on her own feet and have her own opinions, made more complicated by the fact that he's her boss, commanding officer and landlord all in one. Her relationship with him is a bit unsettled at the moment, and a touch superficial on her side as a result, with conversations focusing less on philosophy and more on concrete plans and bits of administrivia as she figures some things out, or tries to. She misses the ease she used to have with him. She wants it back.
What are your character's hobbies?
Ahahaha. Hobbies. Jean barely has time to sleep sometimes. But outside of work, school, saving the world, training, etc. she enjoys reading Sci Fi, Romantic-era and metaphysical poetry, riding horses, and various outdoorsy things like sailing boats. Yes, she is so preppy it hurts.
Is your character a mutant? If so, what are his or her powers?
Jean is an omega mutant: a telepath and a telekinetic to be precise. The Grey family has a long history of mild mental abilities, and the addition of a functional X-Factor kicked them through the roof. Her power levels are, surprise surprise, very much tied into her mental makeup. Fully Phoenixed out, she can skin a psychopath alive, rip nanites out of a terrorist leader and destroy his island base with her brain and fly herself home again, and completely lock down another powerful telepath's psionic center. She cannot devour stars. She's also had 20 years of training in her powers.
The Phoenix fully in check, she's a mid-level telekinetic with fine control, and a mid-level telepath who can juuuuust barely use Cerebro to find someone, and will then collapse with a bad headache after.
Trying to integrate the two sides of herself, she'll be slowly winding down from the OMG! levels of power, but will remain a high-order telekinetic and a slightly better telepath than before, but no longer capable of the great feats of the heydey of the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix. There will be jumps and dips in powers along the way, likely tied into her mental and physical state.
INTERMEDIATE
How does your character feel about his or her hometown? Why?
Annandale-on-Hudson is the kind of town you see pictured on the cover of L.L. Bean catalogues. To Jean, it's home. She's not so sure she fits in there any more, or could ever fit in there again, but it's nice to visit, and it's nice to spend at least a little time in a place where you're not Jean Grey, mutant and activist and media draw, you're just little Jean Grey, all grown up, one of a long line of Greys.
What sort of relationship does your character have with each member of his or her family? Why?
Christopher Grey: She rarely sees her grandfather these days, as he's rather frail, but it's through him that she has a legacy membership at the Hellfire Club. He was very proud of her when she was crowned the Black Queen, as he's just a regular Club member without the faintest clue the Inner Circle exists, or that Black Queen is anything more than a social position. She hopes he's not disappointed that she apparently resigned and never comes 'round the clubhouse anymore, but he obviously can't be told anything of what really happened.
John Grey: Jean is a huge Daddy's Girl. Some may see Charles Xavier as her primary role model and father figure, but John was there first, and will always be. She got her activist genes from him, and he's the one of her two parents that she can sit and talk for hours with. She used to shadow him to his lectures when she was a small thing, and hide behind the ficus plant in his den to listen, if he had colleagues over. He taught her to love learning and to love thinking, and he's always accepted her, mutant or no.
Elaine Grey: Elaine is everything that upper middle class WASP Jean feels she should want to be. Active with her church, matriarch of a neat little family, she helps the sick, feeds the poor, can make chicken salad with her eyes closed, and organize complex social gatherings with aplomb and many cucumber sandwiches. Jean loves her mother, but can't spend too much time around her without an argument starting. She feels she's a disappointment, somehow, that she didn't turn out right, and that her mother will never really understand her, or stop trying to fit her into a proper Annandale-on-Hudson mold. Elaine accepts her mutant powers, and even accepts the strange genesis of Nate, but Jean is forever getting the impression that Elaine wishes she'd just be -normal-. And married. And making more grandchildren for her.
Susan Grey: Jean's much-older sister, Susan was off at college by the time Jean was old enough to form real sequential memories of her. She's always been a distant but well-loved presence, who really only seemed tangible and close during her nasty divorce from Rachel and her son's father, and again when her daughter manifested the Grey genetic destiny of telepathy and telekinesis. They exchange emails and pictures.
Rachel Grey: Jean's niece, her sister Susan's daughter, who took her mom's maiden name after the divorce. Jean sees her as a younger, less troubled version of herself, and was very glad that she could be around to help Rachel over the rough spots of being a young telepath, help that came late in the game for herself. Rachel studied at the school for a few years, and is now currently taking music and performance at Julliard.
Rachel has a younger brother. We don't know his name, but he exists, is a teenager, a non-mutant, and sometimes plays with Nate at family gatherings. Jean buys him comics subscriptions for presents, and he's an avid fan of Magnetron's antics. After Jean's outing, he wanted to know if she was going to start a superhero team. Jean... changed the topic. She thinks he's a good kid, and wants to see what he grows up into.
Nate Grey-Summers: Jean and Scott's genetic child, created by Dr. Nathaniel Essex in a lab using a stolen ovary and a stolen, uh, DNA sample from Scott. Implanted into one Sabella Miller. Now in Jean and Scott's care after a lot of lengthy misadventures in the year 2003, he's the next step in mutation beyond Jean's power levels, and is doomed to die horribly in a series of massive strokes when his powers fully manifest, as a result -- he's already displaying low-level TK and TP at the age of three. Jean loves him, worries about him, worries that she's a horrible mother since she's so busy so often, and both hopes and dreads that a way can be found to stop his powers from manifesting. Above all, she wishes she could spend more time with him.
How does your character feel about New York? Why?
New York literally gives Jean a headache -- that many minds in that close proximity, with that many forceful personalities behind them... she goes in well-shielded, or she doesn't go in at all. But that many people can be energizing too, if the mood of the crowd is just right. New York is like it is for anyone, mutant or norm: noisy, crowded, brash, bold, appallingly confident, and above all, intoxicating. Only moreso. She loves the people of New York, even when they've got her reaching for her painkillers. The world in microcosm and concentrated, good, bad and ugly.
Does your character enjoy his or her job? Why or why not?
Jean loves all her jobs in that they make her feel like she's actually doing something real and tangible to help out. A lot of people want to change the world -- she's in a position to actually do it, in a few small ways. She is, she'd like to think, mistress of her own fate. She loves being a doctor and a mutant researcher, and and activist too. She loves the puzzles in it, loves the races against time for high stakes. She's a bit of an adrenaline junkie, even when the high's cerebral rather than adrenal.
But the adrenal's definitely there. She's an X-Man, after all. Jean really loves the physical (Metaphysical? Paraphysical? Mutant powers are weird.) and hands-on aspects. She twitches hard against the 'vigilante' label just because she enjoys smacking FoH heads together, and feels on some level like there's something wrong with her, perhaps slightly sociopathic, for feeling that way. Really, I'd call it the thrill of being able to cut loose and pay back bridled frustrations and months of forbearance with interest, but it worries her.
There's the dark side to chasing the high of success, too. There's immense frustration in having to wait, in having to play damage control and stamp out fire after fire, patch wound after wound, and not be able to jump in ahead of time to circumvent the hurts. It leads to her losing perspective on the long game, leaving her caught flat-footed when she's finished one thing, only to find there are six separate ways she could go next, all with complex consequences.
This is possibly another reason for finding delight in the fights the X-Men get into. They're simple. She throws someone into a wall, they hit it, and the person they were trying to hurt isn't getting hurt any more.
Teaching... well, it's something that needs doing. She does it. She likes her students as individuals, but has no great and heartfelt love for the teaching profession as an ideal.
She probably derives the most quiet satisfaction from Gradient Genetech and her mutant mice. That's the one thing she does that she started completely from her own ideas, without outside influence or suggestion. It's her Ph.D. thesis made flesh and made profitable, which incidentally helps mutant research progress in a way that means actual humans won't be subjected to possibly harmful experiments. The downside there? It's in Lower Manhattan. She doesn't get to spend more than a day or two every couple weeks there, and now she's got a good quarter million dollars' worth of lab equipment to replace, thank-you-EMP.
What is your character's goal in life?
Jean has few clear-cut personal goals -- she's got her sights on lofty goals like integration and unity between mutants and norm humans, like laws governing and regulating things like telepathy instead of individual ethics. She wants a world her son can be safe in. She wants, some day, to be able to retire from the whole Poodle gig and focus on research, writing some books and papers, and actually coming up with some specific personal goals. And then make them happen.
How did your character's goals develop? Why does he or she want to be a teacher, an astronaut, or an actress?
Jean's goals tend to arise as extensions of things she's already doing, a way of actually utilizing book-learning in a tangible fashion. She excels at the biological sciences and they needed a doctor, so she went into medicine after doing her undergrad and doing some lab work under Moira MacTaggart's watchful eye. She's spent two decades working on first controlling and then refining her mutant powers, so she uses them as a member of the X-Men. She grew up getting a primer on political activism from her father, encouraged by Charles Xavier, so she speaks out on mutant rights.
Jean has a mind of her own, obviously, but she very much lets her goals develop as a response to others' needs as much as because of her own interests.
How did your character meet his or her friends?
The bulk of Jean's current close friends are as a result of being a student and teacher of Xavier's. Her oldest and friends are her fellow First Students, although she has colleagues in both the medical and scientific fields, the activist and mutant communities, and a handful of old friends and aquaintances from both her university days, and her father's position as a history professor at Bard College.
Is there anyone your character particularly dislikes or distrusts? Why?
Outside of Sinister, who Jean doesn't really think of as 'people' so much as evil incarnate, and outside of the obvious like Graydon Creed and the FoH, Sabretooth, etc. where it's fairly obvious why there'd be dislike and distrust, there are two people where the dislike and distrust are complicated enough to be interesting.
Magneto, well, at one point he was some sort of odd uncle and teacher rolled into one. She looked up to him, loved him... and then he had an ideological falling out with Charles and took off to go be a terrorist. He does horrible things, and yet he does them for arguably good reasons, or at least reasons she can see as reasons. He's the action and destruction to Charles' inaction and careful, measured road-building, and oh, does Jean ever understand the allure of just *acting*, and damn the consequences.
It makes it hard for her to keep a consistant opinion of him, or to be consistant in how she treats him, that grey ethical area coupled with a past relationship. When they aren't actively in opposition, or when they're in very clear-cut opposition, she can be civil to him. If they're both worn out and tired, and it's just them and no audience, she can even be oddly, sometimes exasperatedly, kind. It's when Jean's unsure of what way her moral compass is pointing with regards to him that she gets bitchy, snappish and unpredictable. When he's got the potential to sow seeds of doubt in what she's doing or fighting for, she gets all bristly and grar in what's nearly an automatic defense reflex at this point, whether or not he's actually interested in sowing those seeds. If she feels weak in her morals, she does her best to drive him away, push him out beyond where he can get at her and make that moral stance even weaker. He's a charismatic figure. This can be really, really scary if you're not sure what to think.
Emma Frost is probably the other obviously interesting nemesis of Jean's. Her dislike there may have rational seeds, but it went way beyond rational levels, long before the whole Dark Phoenix thing. Jean's hard on Emma because she sees in Emma the shadow reflection of herself. She offers no sympathy for Emma's background or what she had to do to survive, because the thought that she, Jean, might end up the same way under similar circumstances, that she might be the unrepentant antithesis of everything she's decided is ethical telepathy, well... let's just not think of that. Better to believe very firmly that Emma had a choice between right and wrong, and she chose wrong, rather than, y'know, choosing survival.
Jean wants to believe that most telepaths skew towards the good and the caring, given that they've got such a strong connection to other people. She wants to believe that Emma's an aberration. If she believes that, if that proves true, then maybe someday everyone else can be convinced of that. Maybe she won't have to hide the fact that she's telepathic, even after being open about her telekinesis. But here's Emma cheerfully disproving her theory. (Here's Xavier, too, she's coming to realize, but shhh, it's easier to say it's Emma's fault.) Here's Adel and Bahir disappearing into the self-centered intrigue of the Inner Circle. Clearly, Emma's corrupted and seduced them -- it can't possibly be that they have their own moral weaknesses and flaws! It can't possibly be that telepaths are human after all, with the capacity for good and evil of all humans. And it certainly can't be that maybe people, other mutants included, are understandable in their hating and fearing them.
No. Much easier to just blame Emma. She does enough questionable things that there's evidence there to extrapolate points from, after all.
Who Jean distrusts! Well, it's probably easier to talk about who Jean trusts with what. She trusts a lot of people to be good people, to do the right thing, to lead good lives, given the chance. There's a reason the school's horribly kept secret was kept as long as it was. (Well, besides OOC maneuvering.) She'll trust people to watch her back. She'll trust people to get things done. What she doesn't trust a lot of people with is herself, or, rather, the darker sides of herself. She'll say it's because she doesn't want to put her problems on others' shoulders, or that she can't show weakness if other people need her to be strong.
What she's actually afraid of is both being thought crazy (Even if she is. Or is recovering. Or whatever.) and being told she's wrong or unnatural to feel a certain way. The return of her wild side to her leaves her with a lot of intensity of emotion that she didn't have for a full two decades of life. Nobody seemed to notice it wasn't there. What if they liked her better without it? What if it wasn't an accident that it was locked away? What if they tell her she shouldn't enjoy a fight, shouldn't get quite so angry, shouldn't be so obviously passionate? She's not sure she can let everyone see what's underneath and not lose friends and lose respect because of it, since they've come to know her a certain way. She's withdrawn a bit as a result, except around a few like Logan and Sean, who've had to face their own darker, less civilized sides. It's starting to noticably affect her relationships with close friends like Storm, although it's not so noticeable to Jean.
What types of movies does your character love? What does he or she like about them?
Jean likes good, speculative sci-fi and action movies with planes in. Romantic comedies are for watching with Storm and popcorn. Working on the cutting edge of science herself, she likes seeing where writers think it will go next. Romantic comedies are because she has ovaries, and they're pleasant escapes into worlds where all problems are solved within 2 hours, and a sudden appearance at an airport as someone leaves alone will fix any and all relationship problems. And the planes? Well, that's Top Gun, and Jean was 16 in 1986. Once upon a time, Tom Cruise was hot and not crazy.
What types of books does your character read? What does he or she like about them?
Jean doesn't often have a lot of time to read for leisure -- when she does, it's usually because she's planned it ahead of time. As a result, she reads a lot of assignments to grade, and books she's sussing out for use in her curriculums, in addition to a myriad of scientific papers and talks, and many, many news sites. When she does read for fun, she tends to either go for the old classics of English Literature she was brought up with, or Sci Fi as long as it's got a strong list of characters in addition to spiffy technology. She read the Harry Potter books after being compared to Professor McGonagall a few times too many.
What type of music does your character listen to? Why?
Classic rock and punk, a lot of U2, and trance while she's head-down in the lab. Why? For the first 2, she's an 80s child. For the latter, that's what her grad students listen to.
How did your character develop an interest in his or her hobbies?
Horses and riding are because every little girl of her strata in Annandale learns to ride horses. Piano is much for the same reason. Sci Fi is because she's a geek. A stylish and socially adept geek, but a geek nonetheless.
What sorts of things does your character dislike? What does he or she find particularly annoying?
Jean doesn't like casual skin-to-skin touch out of the blue. She likes hugging and being hugged, but as skin to skin contact heightens telepathic awareness, and as most non-TP people have very leaky mental shields, if they have any at all, a casual touch of her cheek or a pat of her hand or arm if she's not expecting it or doesn't know the toucher very well can result in an involuntary twitch.
She's happy to hug Rogue. She knows Rogue's going to avoid skin to skin contact too, albeit for different reasons.
She has a love/hate relationship with large crowds. If the general mood is good and upbeat, they leave her energized. An angry, bored, restless or upset crowd can drain her reserves dry in short order.
She loves playing the hero, but she's annoyed by perpetual victims of many sorts, ranging from the mutant teenager foolish enough to keep going back to FoH territory to the woman who swears her boyfriend loves her, and he'll never hit her again. She's a lot more critical of willfully helpless women than of men, sort've a "Quit making the gender LOOK BAD" thing.
Also, chicken salad. It thwarts her at every turn.
Pick three or four major events in your character's life and describe how they affected him or her. Try things like the death of a pet, a graduation, the manifestation of mutant powers, the death of a grandparent, or a break-up with a boyfriend.
(Aaaah, too long! Will do this later!)
If your character is a mutant, how did he or she discover this? How does he or she feel about it?
See above. :P Jean's powers manifested when she was ten, couldn't be turned off, and landed her in a psych ward with apparently a very strange case of schizophrenia. Hearing voices, and all. Eventually, she fond out that a retreat into catatonia would make the voices go away, resulting in a rather freaky little private room where a sleeping little girl was surrounded by randomly floating objects. Xavier found her parents and helped Jean find herself again.
A quarter century down the road, Jean's still coming to terms with the rest of her brain, but she's pretty much accepted her status as a mutant. The fact that her father is somewhat proud of what she can do is a great comfort. She wholeheartedly loves being telekinetic, but has decidedly mixed feelings about telepathy. On the one hand, a constant connection to the world. On the other hand... it's the power most likely to be feared by everyone, including other mutants. It gives her crushing headaches on a regular basis that have led to a mild chemical dependency on painkillers. It's given her way more information than she's ever wanted to know about the sex lives and fantasies of her teenaged students. But it's also a way of communicating that can fit so much more than mere words.
If your character is a mutant, how has he or she developed, tested, or ignored the powers? What does he or she know about their extent or limitations? If your character is a mutant, what /are/ the extent of his or her powers? Even if your character is unaware of them as of yet, you the player should certainly know.
Jean has spent 25 years under the best possible teachers in the field of mutant research. She's now at the point where she's trying to develop her own ways of refining things, currently focused on applying telekinesis as a part of basic medical techniques. Her powers have been tested both physically and biologically. So far, she's limited to what can be visualized with images drawn from the naked eye to give context with her telekinesis, and with upper weight ranges of a couple tons. She could throw a bus, if she had to, albeit not too far beyond that. And not two busses in quick succession. Telepathy is much harder to pin down. She has a maximum range of sensitivity of about a mile in radius around her, with shields fully dropped. This rarely, if ever happens. Shields dropped allows all local minds to stream into her head and confuse things. This is, obviously, a bad thing.
At this point in time, refining her powers further is at somewhat of a plateau. An omega mutant, she retains the potential to some day get some screaming, traumatized atom action going, but the sort of Magneto levels of fine control are best left to someone like Magneto, with somewhere around 50 years' training and refinement. Jean's no slouch, but sans the massive subconscious upwelling of the Phoenix, she's good, but she ain't -that- good. Perhaps in time. Jean intends to live to the biological limit if nobody kills her first, thank you very much.
She's also very much a sprinter -- the higher the power output, the less time she'll be able to keep it up. She can stop a bullet or five, sure, but if someone comes along 15 minutes later with another rifle? So screwed. Expend enough energy unwisely, and she'll collapse 'til her brain can talk with her pancreas and get her blood sugar levels smoothed out again.
What are your character's morals? How does he or she feel about stealing, lying, cheating, murder, etc? Why?
Don't steal, you're just hurting someone else further down the line. Try not to lie, and don't lie just to make yourself more impressive, but if it's to protect someone or something critical, then lie like a Persian rug. Cheating... well, just don't play a telepath at poker. She's pretty darn honest, although will occasionally playfully cheat at cards in a group where she knows they'll know she's just playing. And don't you dare 'cheat' in another fashion. She herself would never, despite the amounts of angst the Logan/Jean/Scott love triangle serves up. Murder? Bad thing. Deaths of people in a combat situation? Absolutely horrible, unfortunately likely, and she feels a great deal for the grieving families.
How does your character feel about mutants? About humans? Why?
All Jean is saaaaaaaying is GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. She truly believes that not only can norm and mutant live in harmony, they have to if any are going to survive. She does get royally grumpy when faced with news reports of a young mutant doing something flashy, attention-getting and stupid. Again, it's the "Quit making us look bad!" coupled with mild bemusement at some of the stunts pulled.
What type of guy/girl is your character usually attracted to? What type does he or she avoid? Why?
Jean is attracted to alpha males. She likes her men determined, decisive and capable, who aren't afraid to grab her and drag her into a broom closet if the mood's right, or slap her upside the head with a dictionary if she's doing something stupid. She tends to avoid the ones with obvious baggage -- or at least baggage that doesn't complement her own. A lack of a spine is also problematic.
What are your character's politics? Why?
Jean is a bleeding-heart liberal on mutant issues. Integration, tolerance, anti-discrimination lawsuits, opposition to hawkish new bills that would impact mutants... She's not a dyed in the wool Dem -or- Republican, but she -does- believe the system must be fixed from the inside, not out.
I'll do advanced and the one skipped intermediate question... at some point soon.
1) Go here and look at the questions: http://xmenmovieverse.com/charbuild.html
2) Answer as many as you can, for your character.
3) Post!
BASICS:
Where was your character born and where did they grow up?
Jean was born in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in a comfortable family home with ficus plants and a beagle or two. It's a sleepy little college town where nothing untoward really happens, there are a lot of old and established families, and the WASP population is dense indeed.
Who are the members of your character's family?
Jean has two parents, John and Elaine Grey, one sister named Susan who's 12 years her senior, a niece Rachel and a nephew we don't know the name of, and a smattering of cousins, second cousins, and other extended family members that she sees once every few years. She has a grandfather in his nineties, a dignified old gentleman named Christopher Grey, and a three year old son conceived in strange circumstances (And not by her.) called Nate Grey-Summers.
She also has an entire school full of people that she counts as family.
How old is your character?
Jean will be 36 (GASP) this November 5th.
Why is your character in New York?
She's lived at the Xavier Mansion since she was 11, with a few years away at college, medical school, and then a residency, plus a year away just last year while she finished her Ph.D., started a business, and WENT CRAZY.
What does your character do now (job, school, etc)?
Jean is Headmistress of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. She's also a doctor who specializes in mutant medicine and is called in to deal with weird cases (Too often, sometimes.) a political activist and mutant rights advocate (Not often enough!) and a member of the super-secret superhero team known as the X-Men.
What are the major events in your character's life?
There are many! I will pick only a couple:
1) Her mutant powers manifesting. Age 10, best friend gets pasted by a car, Jean gets trapped inside her head as she dies. This is traumatic. Even more traumatic is the fact that she can't stop getting into people's heads afterwards. Adult brains are no place for a little girl. She ends up catatonic in a psych ward until Charles Xavier appears and fixes her brain and makes the nasty voices go away. Her telekinesis also manifests, but this is less problematic. Unless you're a table lamp.
2) Her first boyfriend. He's a norm. They're in college. He's a *musician*. She tries pot, tries sex, and eventually lets him know she's a mutant, telekinetic to be exact. He's cool with this. He is not so cool later when he finds out she's a telepath. There is much freaking out, and a broken-hearted young Jean. Xavier takes care of it. Jean never asks how. Her first boyfriend is now a lawyer for the ACLU. He's still a musician. He has a different version of how they broke up in his memories. Odd, that.
3) Xavier's fix starts to weaken. The Brotherhood is attacking an understaffed and under-strength mansion in 2002. All of a sudden Jean's eyes start glowing funny colours, and her telekinesis jumps through the roof. For several months, she suffers crushing headaches on a daily basis, sudden unpredictable spikes in her power levels, and emotional moodswings from calm to lethally angry without real warning. Eventually, safely out in the middle of the Canadian wilderness on a mission with Logan, she stops holding it in and the Phoenix says hello. It then goes away again, as Jean is an adult with a neatly-formed psyche as is, and doesn't really need it. Honest!
4) Outed! Jean and Scott attend a pro-MRA rally in the hopes of keeping a lid on anything that gets out of hand. President Lowe attends the rally. Unfortunately, so do Mystique and some of the Brotherhood. They attempt to blow up the President. Jean Phoenixes out and stops this. Unfortunately, the cameras of the world are rolling. Jean gets a presidential medal, but loses the comfort of security and anonymity. The press goes wild.
5) DARK FEENIX. After infiltrating the Hellfire Club and getting Emma lethally irritated, Jean is driven mad by isolation, Jason Wyngarde's illusions and severe sleep deprivation over a long period of weeks, in addition to the burgeoning Phoenix sub-personality. She snaps, and as a coping mechanism, the Phoenix begins to take over whenever the main Jean is past the point she can cope with. Unfortunately, her morals and social conditioning are back with the rest of her. FEENIX needs none of that. Things get broken, including Shaw, the Brotherhood's island base, and Emma's telepathy. Eventually, she's found unconscious in her flat by Logan and Scott and taken back to Xavier's, where she's somehow forcibly reintegrated back together again.
6) Outed: Redux. As the Xavier school secret becomes increasingly leaky, Xavier and Jean decide to let the world know that here be mutants. Impact on Jean's life? To Be Determined.
What is your character's general outlook on life (optimistic, pessimistic, realist, idealist, etc)?
Jean would call herself an optimistic realist. Others would call her a starry-eyed idealist. The real answer is that pessimism and depression would likely be lethal options for her, she subconsciously knows this, on some level, and therefore is someone who is aggressively optimistic during the daylight and in public, because the watches of the night can be so damn' scary.
Jean is the sort of person who is, at heart, an active participant in her own life, rather than someone blown along by whatever winds of change show up. If Jean ever got to a point where she really, truly believed there was no hope for the future, that no matter her efforts, she would live, grow old, and die in a world of mutant discrimination, registration, internment, etc. and she could do nothing to keep her students and her loved ones safe and happy, she would, she feels, quite likely kill herself. One last, decisive action resting in her own hands.
For the most part, she can keep herself focused on the positives and the successes. When she doesn't, she tries to surround herself with her fellow optimists and idealists, trying to buoy her own mood off their own. This is not a good time to sit and talk with, say, Rossi.
What is your character's basic personality?
It depends on what era of Jean you look at. I blather!
From 11 to 32, she was very controlled, poised, smooth and untouchable on the surface, with a drive and passion more mind than heart. Compassion, passion and desires light and dark were present, but channelled safely and appropriately into socially-acceptable venues.
From 32 onwards, facets of her personality previously tucked away, accidentally or not, with the bulk of her access to her powers began to filter back in. Still controlled, poised, smooth on the surface, things began to shake up beneath it, desires and passions suddenly much more earthy, and occasionally much more violent. She's always had a temper if pushed too far, but 'too far' now came much sooner. She began to enjoy fights for more than just the saving and protecting of the innocent, or the technical challenge.
Dark Phoenix was the fully-fledged form of all those restrained and repressed passions and energies. Single-minded, it wanted to protect those it cared about, protect itself, and find final solutions for things, no matter the consequences. Want, take, have. Solve a problem so that it will never rear its head again, and the ends justify the means. And if someone or something hurts or threatens you, put it down -cold-.
Now Jean's been reintegrated. (Somehow. I don't know how. It just happened. There was an Xavier.) She now has to come to terms with the duality of her nature, the nurtured control and the instinctive passions. Balance is key. Balance takes time. Right now, she's wanting to skew back to controlled, to overcorrect in the face of what happened with Dark Phoenix, and to not want to talk about it to anyone who she's come to associate with control. Like, say, her best friends. Or her mentor. She slips, sometimes. She will for a while. Logan's helpful as an example of someone else working through similar things.
Who are your character's friends?
Jean has a lot of friends, so it'd take too long to list them all. I'll go with the big long-term ones just 'cause. And I will miss a few. Because.
First and foremost, Ororo Munroe. Best friends since the age of thirteen, she's the one woman who's been a constant in Jean's life. Their relationship has been strained lately by Jean's secrecy over what happened during the Dark Phoenix arc, over Jean's feelings for Emma after Storm ended up in an Emma suit, and over Jean's closeness with Logan, sharing things with him that Ororo hears second hand, or not at all.
Warren Worthington III is another of the First Students. He had an unrequited crush on Jean for a number of years, and she's always loved him like a brother. Lately, she wants to bounce him down Broadway on his pointy head after all the Hellfire Club mess. Because she loves him. He's a mopey emo prince with angel wings, but he's her friend, and he's been there for her at some pretty rough times.
Hank McCoy is Jean's big brother she never had. A fellow doctor and scientist, and far, far smarter than she or anyone else is, he's a good sounding board when she's geeking, or when she just needs advice. She, in turn, fusses over him when he's not eating, tries to cheer him up when he's (pun intended) feeling blue, and engages in a long-term and cheerful cold war over how the medbay's desk is organized.
Scott Summers. Friend, lover, friend, lover... friend again. She loves him and always will. At their best, he's an absolutely rigid moral compass for her, and steers a steady course through the most complicated political storms. He grounds her. She encourages him to open up. Sometimes, they work, but even when they don't, there's a very clear mutual affection and respect.
Kurt Wagner. Dude, he's Nightcrawler. The end. Useful for dealing with any appearances of Emo Jean or Discouraged Jean.
The kids! Rogue, Jubilee and Wesley are probably the three of Jean's students (now graduates!) that she's closest to. They get to see her as more than just Headmistress Dr. Grey, they get to see her as Jean the Person too. She very much wants to see Wesley succeed in his dream of being a fireman, and wants to help as much as she can. She wants to see Rogue happy, wants to find her a way to make the most of her mutation, and work around it as best as possible. She's not sure what Jubilee wants to do. She's not sure Jubilee knows what Jubilee wants to do. But she loves her like a little sister all the same.
And then there's Xavier. He's more family and father-figure than friend. Jean's currently in that uneasy phase of learning to stand on her own feet and have her own opinions, made more complicated by the fact that he's her boss, commanding officer and landlord all in one. Her relationship with him is a bit unsettled at the moment, and a touch superficial on her side as a result, with conversations focusing less on philosophy and more on concrete plans and bits of administrivia as she figures some things out, or tries to. She misses the ease she used to have with him. She wants it back.
What are your character's hobbies?
Ahahaha. Hobbies. Jean barely has time to sleep sometimes. But outside of work, school, saving the world, training, etc. she enjoys reading Sci Fi, Romantic-era and metaphysical poetry, riding horses, and various outdoorsy things like sailing boats. Yes, she is so preppy it hurts.
Is your character a mutant? If so, what are his or her powers?
Jean is an omega mutant: a telepath and a telekinetic to be precise. The Grey family has a long history of mild mental abilities, and the addition of a functional X-Factor kicked them through the roof. Her power levels are, surprise surprise, very much tied into her mental makeup. Fully Phoenixed out, she can skin a psychopath alive, rip nanites out of a terrorist leader and destroy his island base with her brain and fly herself home again, and completely lock down another powerful telepath's psionic center. She cannot devour stars. She's also had 20 years of training in her powers.
The Phoenix fully in check, she's a mid-level telekinetic with fine control, and a mid-level telepath who can juuuuust barely use Cerebro to find someone, and will then collapse with a bad headache after.
Trying to integrate the two sides of herself, she'll be slowly winding down from the OMG! levels of power, but will remain a high-order telekinetic and a slightly better telepath than before, but no longer capable of the great feats of the heydey of the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix. There will be jumps and dips in powers along the way, likely tied into her mental and physical state.
INTERMEDIATE
How does your character feel about his or her hometown? Why?
Annandale-on-Hudson is the kind of town you see pictured on the cover of L.L. Bean catalogues. To Jean, it's home. She's not so sure she fits in there any more, or could ever fit in there again, but it's nice to visit, and it's nice to spend at least a little time in a place where you're not Jean Grey, mutant and activist and media draw, you're just little Jean Grey, all grown up, one of a long line of Greys.
What sort of relationship does your character have with each member of his or her family? Why?
Christopher Grey: She rarely sees her grandfather these days, as he's rather frail, but it's through him that she has a legacy membership at the Hellfire Club. He was very proud of her when she was crowned the Black Queen, as he's just a regular Club member without the faintest clue the Inner Circle exists, or that Black Queen is anything more than a social position. She hopes he's not disappointed that she apparently resigned and never comes 'round the clubhouse anymore, but he obviously can't be told anything of what really happened.
John Grey: Jean is a huge Daddy's Girl. Some may see Charles Xavier as her primary role model and father figure, but John was there first, and will always be. She got her activist genes from him, and he's the one of her two parents that she can sit and talk for hours with. She used to shadow him to his lectures when she was a small thing, and hide behind the ficus plant in his den to listen, if he had colleagues over. He taught her to love learning and to love thinking, and he's always accepted her, mutant or no.
Elaine Grey: Elaine is everything that upper middle class WASP Jean feels she should want to be. Active with her church, matriarch of a neat little family, she helps the sick, feeds the poor, can make chicken salad with her eyes closed, and organize complex social gatherings with aplomb and many cucumber sandwiches. Jean loves her mother, but can't spend too much time around her without an argument starting. She feels she's a disappointment, somehow, that she didn't turn out right, and that her mother will never really understand her, or stop trying to fit her into a proper Annandale-on-Hudson mold. Elaine accepts her mutant powers, and even accepts the strange genesis of Nate, but Jean is forever getting the impression that Elaine wishes she'd just be -normal-. And married. And making more grandchildren for her.
Susan Grey: Jean's much-older sister, Susan was off at college by the time Jean was old enough to form real sequential memories of her. She's always been a distant but well-loved presence, who really only seemed tangible and close during her nasty divorce from Rachel and her son's father, and again when her daughter manifested the Grey genetic destiny of telepathy and telekinesis. They exchange emails and pictures.
Rachel Grey: Jean's niece, her sister Susan's daughter, who took her mom's maiden name after the divorce. Jean sees her as a younger, less troubled version of herself, and was very glad that she could be around to help Rachel over the rough spots of being a young telepath, help that came late in the game for herself. Rachel studied at the school for a few years, and is now currently taking music and performance at Julliard.
Rachel has a younger brother. We don't know his name, but he exists, is a teenager, a non-mutant, and sometimes plays with Nate at family gatherings. Jean buys him comics subscriptions for presents, and he's an avid fan of Magnetron's antics. After Jean's outing, he wanted to know if she was going to start a superhero team. Jean... changed the topic. She thinks he's a good kid, and wants to see what he grows up into.
Nate Grey-Summers: Jean and Scott's genetic child, created by Dr. Nathaniel Essex in a lab using a stolen ovary and a stolen, uh, DNA sample from Scott. Implanted into one Sabella Miller. Now in Jean and Scott's care after a lot of lengthy misadventures in the year 2003, he's the next step in mutation beyond Jean's power levels, and is doomed to die horribly in a series of massive strokes when his powers fully manifest, as a result -- he's already displaying low-level TK and TP at the age of three. Jean loves him, worries about him, worries that she's a horrible mother since she's so busy so often, and both hopes and dreads that a way can be found to stop his powers from manifesting. Above all, she wishes she could spend more time with him.
How does your character feel about New York? Why?
New York literally gives Jean a headache -- that many minds in that close proximity, with that many forceful personalities behind them... she goes in well-shielded, or she doesn't go in at all. But that many people can be energizing too, if the mood of the crowd is just right. New York is like it is for anyone, mutant or norm: noisy, crowded, brash, bold, appallingly confident, and above all, intoxicating. Only moreso. She loves the people of New York, even when they've got her reaching for her painkillers. The world in microcosm and concentrated, good, bad and ugly.
Does your character enjoy his or her job? Why or why not?
Jean loves all her jobs in that they make her feel like she's actually doing something real and tangible to help out. A lot of people want to change the world -- she's in a position to actually do it, in a few small ways. She is, she'd like to think, mistress of her own fate. She loves being a doctor and a mutant researcher, and and activist too. She loves the puzzles in it, loves the races against time for high stakes. She's a bit of an adrenaline junkie, even when the high's cerebral rather than adrenal.
But the adrenal's definitely there. She's an X-Man, after all. Jean really loves the physical (Metaphysical? Paraphysical? Mutant powers are weird.) and hands-on aspects. She twitches hard against the 'vigilante' label just because she enjoys smacking FoH heads together, and feels on some level like there's something wrong with her, perhaps slightly sociopathic, for feeling that way. Really, I'd call it the thrill of being able to cut loose and pay back bridled frustrations and months of forbearance with interest, but it worries her.
There's the dark side to chasing the high of success, too. There's immense frustration in having to wait, in having to play damage control and stamp out fire after fire, patch wound after wound, and not be able to jump in ahead of time to circumvent the hurts. It leads to her losing perspective on the long game, leaving her caught flat-footed when she's finished one thing, only to find there are six separate ways she could go next, all with complex consequences.
This is possibly another reason for finding delight in the fights the X-Men get into. They're simple. She throws someone into a wall, they hit it, and the person they were trying to hurt isn't getting hurt any more.
Teaching... well, it's something that needs doing. She does it. She likes her students as individuals, but has no great and heartfelt love for the teaching profession as an ideal.
She probably derives the most quiet satisfaction from Gradient Genetech and her mutant mice. That's the one thing she does that she started completely from her own ideas, without outside influence or suggestion. It's her Ph.D. thesis made flesh and made profitable, which incidentally helps mutant research progress in a way that means actual humans won't be subjected to possibly harmful experiments. The downside there? It's in Lower Manhattan. She doesn't get to spend more than a day or two every couple weeks there, and now she's got a good quarter million dollars' worth of lab equipment to replace, thank-you-EMP.
What is your character's goal in life?
Jean has few clear-cut personal goals -- she's got her sights on lofty goals like integration and unity between mutants and norm humans, like laws governing and regulating things like telepathy instead of individual ethics. She wants a world her son can be safe in. She wants, some day, to be able to retire from the whole Poodle gig and focus on research, writing some books and papers, and actually coming up with some specific personal goals. And then make them happen.
How did your character's goals develop? Why does he or she want to be a teacher, an astronaut, or an actress?
Jean's goals tend to arise as extensions of things she's already doing, a way of actually utilizing book-learning in a tangible fashion. She excels at the biological sciences and they needed a doctor, so she went into medicine after doing her undergrad and doing some lab work under Moira MacTaggart's watchful eye. She's spent two decades working on first controlling and then refining her mutant powers, so she uses them as a member of the X-Men. She grew up getting a primer on political activism from her father, encouraged by Charles Xavier, so she speaks out on mutant rights.
Jean has a mind of her own, obviously, but she very much lets her goals develop as a response to others' needs as much as because of her own interests.
How did your character meet his or her friends?
The bulk of Jean's current close friends are as a result of being a student and teacher of Xavier's. Her oldest and friends are her fellow First Students, although she has colleagues in both the medical and scientific fields, the activist and mutant communities, and a handful of old friends and aquaintances from both her university days, and her father's position as a history professor at Bard College.
Is there anyone your character particularly dislikes or distrusts? Why?
Outside of Sinister, who Jean doesn't really think of as 'people' so much as evil incarnate, and outside of the obvious like Graydon Creed and the FoH, Sabretooth, etc. where it's fairly obvious why there'd be dislike and distrust, there are two people where the dislike and distrust are complicated enough to be interesting.
Magneto, well, at one point he was some sort of odd uncle and teacher rolled into one. She looked up to him, loved him... and then he had an ideological falling out with Charles and took off to go be a terrorist. He does horrible things, and yet he does them for arguably good reasons, or at least reasons she can see as reasons. He's the action and destruction to Charles' inaction and careful, measured road-building, and oh, does Jean ever understand the allure of just *acting*, and damn the consequences.
It makes it hard for her to keep a consistant opinion of him, or to be consistant in how she treats him, that grey ethical area coupled with a past relationship. When they aren't actively in opposition, or when they're in very clear-cut opposition, she can be civil to him. If they're both worn out and tired, and it's just them and no audience, she can even be oddly, sometimes exasperatedly, kind. It's when Jean's unsure of what way her moral compass is pointing with regards to him that she gets bitchy, snappish and unpredictable. When he's got the potential to sow seeds of doubt in what she's doing or fighting for, she gets all bristly and grar in what's nearly an automatic defense reflex at this point, whether or not he's actually interested in sowing those seeds. If she feels weak in her morals, she does her best to drive him away, push him out beyond where he can get at her and make that moral stance even weaker. He's a charismatic figure. This can be really, really scary if you're not sure what to think.
Emma Frost is probably the other obviously interesting nemesis of Jean's. Her dislike there may have rational seeds, but it went way beyond rational levels, long before the whole Dark Phoenix thing. Jean's hard on Emma because she sees in Emma the shadow reflection of herself. She offers no sympathy for Emma's background or what she had to do to survive, because the thought that she, Jean, might end up the same way under similar circumstances, that she might be the unrepentant antithesis of everything she's decided is ethical telepathy, well... let's just not think of that. Better to believe very firmly that Emma had a choice between right and wrong, and she chose wrong, rather than, y'know, choosing survival.
Jean wants to believe that most telepaths skew towards the good and the caring, given that they've got such a strong connection to other people. She wants to believe that Emma's an aberration. If she believes that, if that proves true, then maybe someday everyone else can be convinced of that. Maybe she won't have to hide the fact that she's telepathic, even after being open about her telekinesis. But here's Emma cheerfully disproving her theory. (Here's Xavier, too, she's coming to realize, but shhh, it's easier to say it's Emma's fault.) Here's Adel and Bahir disappearing into the self-centered intrigue of the Inner Circle. Clearly, Emma's corrupted and seduced them -- it can't possibly be that they have their own moral weaknesses and flaws! It can't possibly be that telepaths are human after all, with the capacity for good and evil of all humans. And it certainly can't be that maybe people, other mutants included, are understandable in their hating and fearing them.
No. Much easier to just blame Emma. She does enough questionable things that there's evidence there to extrapolate points from, after all.
Who Jean distrusts! Well, it's probably easier to talk about who Jean trusts with what. She trusts a lot of people to be good people, to do the right thing, to lead good lives, given the chance. There's a reason the school's horribly kept secret was kept as long as it was. (Well, besides OOC maneuvering.) She'll trust people to watch her back. She'll trust people to get things done. What she doesn't trust a lot of people with is herself, or, rather, the darker sides of herself. She'll say it's because she doesn't want to put her problems on others' shoulders, or that she can't show weakness if other people need her to be strong.
What she's actually afraid of is both being thought crazy (Even if she is. Or is recovering. Or whatever.) and being told she's wrong or unnatural to feel a certain way. The return of her wild side to her leaves her with a lot of intensity of emotion that she didn't have for a full two decades of life. Nobody seemed to notice it wasn't there. What if they liked her better without it? What if it wasn't an accident that it was locked away? What if they tell her she shouldn't enjoy a fight, shouldn't get quite so angry, shouldn't be so obviously passionate? She's not sure she can let everyone see what's underneath and not lose friends and lose respect because of it, since they've come to know her a certain way. She's withdrawn a bit as a result, except around a few like Logan and Sean, who've had to face their own darker, less civilized sides. It's starting to noticably affect her relationships with close friends like Storm, although it's not so noticeable to Jean.
What types of movies does your character love? What does he or she like about them?
Jean likes good, speculative sci-fi and action movies with planes in. Romantic comedies are for watching with Storm and popcorn. Working on the cutting edge of science herself, she likes seeing where writers think it will go next. Romantic comedies are because she has ovaries, and they're pleasant escapes into worlds where all problems are solved within 2 hours, and a sudden appearance at an airport as someone leaves alone will fix any and all relationship problems. And the planes? Well, that's Top Gun, and Jean was 16 in 1986. Once upon a time, Tom Cruise was hot and not crazy.
What types of books does your character read? What does he or she like about them?
Jean doesn't often have a lot of time to read for leisure -- when she does, it's usually because she's planned it ahead of time. As a result, she reads a lot of assignments to grade, and books she's sussing out for use in her curriculums, in addition to a myriad of scientific papers and talks, and many, many news sites. When she does read for fun, she tends to either go for the old classics of English Literature she was brought up with, or Sci Fi as long as it's got a strong list of characters in addition to spiffy technology. She read the Harry Potter books after being compared to Professor McGonagall a few times too many.
What type of music does your character listen to? Why?
Classic rock and punk, a lot of U2, and trance while she's head-down in the lab. Why? For the first 2, she's an 80s child. For the latter, that's what her grad students listen to.
How did your character develop an interest in his or her hobbies?
Horses and riding are because every little girl of her strata in Annandale learns to ride horses. Piano is much for the same reason. Sci Fi is because she's a geek. A stylish and socially adept geek, but a geek nonetheless.
What sorts of things does your character dislike? What does he or she find particularly annoying?
Jean doesn't like casual skin-to-skin touch out of the blue. She likes hugging and being hugged, but as skin to skin contact heightens telepathic awareness, and as most non-TP people have very leaky mental shields, if they have any at all, a casual touch of her cheek or a pat of her hand or arm if she's not expecting it or doesn't know the toucher very well can result in an involuntary twitch.
She's happy to hug Rogue. She knows Rogue's going to avoid skin to skin contact too, albeit for different reasons.
She has a love/hate relationship with large crowds. If the general mood is good and upbeat, they leave her energized. An angry, bored, restless or upset crowd can drain her reserves dry in short order.
She loves playing the hero, but she's annoyed by perpetual victims of many sorts, ranging from the mutant teenager foolish enough to keep going back to FoH territory to the woman who swears her boyfriend loves her, and he'll never hit her again. She's a lot more critical of willfully helpless women than of men, sort've a "Quit making the gender LOOK BAD" thing.
Also, chicken salad. It thwarts her at every turn.
Pick three or four major events in your character's life and describe how they affected him or her. Try things like the death of a pet, a graduation, the manifestation of mutant powers, the death of a grandparent, or a break-up with a boyfriend.
(Aaaah, too long! Will do this later!)
If your character is a mutant, how did he or she discover this? How does he or she feel about it?
See above. :P Jean's powers manifested when she was ten, couldn't be turned off, and landed her in a psych ward with apparently a very strange case of schizophrenia. Hearing voices, and all. Eventually, she fond out that a retreat into catatonia would make the voices go away, resulting in a rather freaky little private room where a sleeping little girl was surrounded by randomly floating objects. Xavier found her parents and helped Jean find herself again.
A quarter century down the road, Jean's still coming to terms with the rest of her brain, but she's pretty much accepted her status as a mutant. The fact that her father is somewhat proud of what she can do is a great comfort. She wholeheartedly loves being telekinetic, but has decidedly mixed feelings about telepathy. On the one hand, a constant connection to the world. On the other hand... it's the power most likely to be feared by everyone, including other mutants. It gives her crushing headaches on a regular basis that have led to a mild chemical dependency on painkillers. It's given her way more information than she's ever wanted to know about the sex lives and fantasies of her teenaged students. But it's also a way of communicating that can fit so much more than mere words.
If your character is a mutant, how has he or she developed, tested, or ignored the powers? What does he or she know about their extent or limitations? If your character is a mutant, what /are/ the extent of his or her powers? Even if your character is unaware of them as of yet, you the player should certainly know.
Jean has spent 25 years under the best possible teachers in the field of mutant research. She's now at the point where she's trying to develop her own ways of refining things, currently focused on applying telekinesis as a part of basic medical techniques. Her powers have been tested both physically and biologically. So far, she's limited to what can be visualized with images drawn from the naked eye to give context with her telekinesis, and with upper weight ranges of a couple tons. She could throw a bus, if she had to, albeit not too far beyond that. And not two busses in quick succession. Telepathy is much harder to pin down. She has a maximum range of sensitivity of about a mile in radius around her, with shields fully dropped. This rarely, if ever happens. Shields dropped allows all local minds to stream into her head and confuse things. This is, obviously, a bad thing.
At this point in time, refining her powers further is at somewhat of a plateau. An omega mutant, she retains the potential to some day get some screaming, traumatized atom action going, but the sort of Magneto levels of fine control are best left to someone like Magneto, with somewhere around 50 years' training and refinement. Jean's no slouch, but sans the massive subconscious upwelling of the Phoenix, she's good, but she ain't -that- good. Perhaps in time. Jean intends to live to the biological limit if nobody kills her first, thank you very much.
She's also very much a sprinter -- the higher the power output, the less time she'll be able to keep it up. She can stop a bullet or five, sure, but if someone comes along 15 minutes later with another rifle? So screwed. Expend enough energy unwisely, and she'll collapse 'til her brain can talk with her pancreas and get her blood sugar levels smoothed out again.
What are your character's morals? How does he or she feel about stealing, lying, cheating, murder, etc? Why?
Don't steal, you're just hurting someone else further down the line. Try not to lie, and don't lie just to make yourself more impressive, but if it's to protect someone or something critical, then lie like a Persian rug. Cheating... well, just don't play a telepath at poker. She's pretty darn honest, although will occasionally playfully cheat at cards in a group where she knows they'll know she's just playing. And don't you dare 'cheat' in another fashion. She herself would never, despite the amounts of angst the Logan/Jean/Scott love triangle serves up. Murder? Bad thing. Deaths of people in a combat situation? Absolutely horrible, unfortunately likely, and she feels a great deal for the grieving families.
How does your character feel about mutants? About humans? Why?
All Jean is saaaaaaaying is GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. She truly believes that not only can norm and mutant live in harmony, they have to if any are going to survive. She does get royally grumpy when faced with news reports of a young mutant doing something flashy, attention-getting and stupid. Again, it's the "Quit making us look bad!" coupled with mild bemusement at some of the stunts pulled.
What type of guy/girl is your character usually attracted to? What type does he or she avoid? Why?
Jean is attracted to alpha males. She likes her men determined, decisive and capable, who aren't afraid to grab her and drag her into a broom closet if the mood's right, or slap her upside the head with a dictionary if she's doing something stupid. She tends to avoid the ones with obvious baggage -- or at least baggage that doesn't complement her own. A lack of a spine is also problematic.
What are your character's politics? Why?
Jean is a bleeding-heart liberal on mutant issues. Integration, tolerance, anti-discrimination lawsuits, opposition to hawkish new bills that would impact mutants... She's not a dyed in the wool Dem -or- Republican, but she -does- believe the system must be fixed from the inside, not out.
I'll do advanced and the one skipped intermediate question... at some point soon.