Application/ Character Sheet : Violet Baxter;
Name; Violet Marie Baxter
Alias; Eden
Age; 23 (dob 4.18)
Height; 5'10"
Weight; 145
Family; Neil Baxter (father), Joanne Baxter (mother), James Baxter/Spotlight (brother, deceased), Harris Baxter (brother)
Affiliation; none
Alignment; Neutral Good
Occupation; Manager of Baxter's Bouquets, Manhattan
Financial Status; upper middle-class.
Residence; Greenwich Village
Abilities; Plant Manipulation;
Violet has the ability to stimulate and accelerate the growth of plant life instantaneously as well as alter their growth patterns. She can "hear" them, and communicate with them, although it isn't so much talking as an additional sense to her normal five senses. She's aware when they detect shifts in temperature, weather, day, and the wind.
Ability Limits;
Violet can't alter the genetic code of any plant she's manipulating, and can only do things within the limit of what the plant itself is capable of (for example, she couldn't make a Dandelion sprout thorns) She also is unable to create a plant from scratch, and if she is in an area where the plantlife has all been weeded out, and there are no seeds in the soil or fragments of living plant, she can't use her abilities. She can only grow from seeds or already existing plantlife. (She compensated for this as Eden by sewing seeds into the sleeves of her costume)
Also, she can't bring dead plants back to life, if they're completely dead.
Personality; Violet is a fairly sunny individual at face value. She's a smiling face to anyone who comes into the store, and she's kind and very helpful. She laughs easily, has a good sense of humor, and is rarely offended by what people have to say. She can affect a sharp tone if someone is giving her a difficult time, but she'd rather sweet talk her way around being harsh. The only time when she'll flatly dismiss something, or someone, is if they're incredibly rude, or make offensive comments about mutants.
She is still very much affected by her brother's death, and completely blames herself for what happened to him. She tries not to dwell on it longer than a few moments each day, because she knows James wouldn't have wanted things to go the way they were. He wouldn't have wanted her to stop fighting for the greater good, and he wouldn't have wanted her to be sad at his absence. So she pretends she's not, and goes on like her life is fine and dandy, and whenever someone asks where she moved from, or about her family, she is as vague as she possibly can be while still being sincere.
Beyond her regret in her part of her brother's death, and her outward appearances, she is very accepting of people, mostly because her mother completely wasn't, and she'd promised herself when she left Pennsylvania that she'd never become anything like the woman. She is obviously very bitter towards people who are close-minded, and may try to pry their skulls open and knock some sense into them, but most of the time she'll just quietly disassociate herself with them.
History; Violet was the youngest of three children born to a very normal couple living in a suburb of Philadelphia. She was their first girl, which to her mother was an exciting hope for a break from baseball games and dirty clothes, although she was sadly disappointed in that respect. Violet grew up shadowing her brothers, and the only thing she liked more than hanging out with them was getting into her own brand of trouble. Her childhood was filled with broken bones and scraped knees, stray animals that her mother wouldn't let her keep and the tantrums that came after. She dreamed big, and made more friends with boys than with girls because she would rather pretend to be a prince than a princess sipping imaginary tea from empty teacups.
As she got older, her tastes in adventure altered, matured, and in a fashion dulled for the sake of growing up. Still she'd be caught in school sometimes daydreaming, drawing in the margins of her notebook, or reading something other than the assigned coursework during class.
When she was fourteen, her powers manifested, while she was having a fight with her mother about her continuing membership on the track team (her mother would much rather she took up something a little more "ladylike") in the middle of the flower store she owned. The fight ended abruptly when the arrangement that Violet's mother had been picking at before her daughter had shown up grew to the ceiling and lunged for Mrs. Baxter. When Violet ran to help her mother the malicious bouquet immediately tapered off, receding back down to its harmless size and shape.
Neither Violet or her mother ever spoke of the "incident" although her mother always seemed a little nervous about her daughter henceforth. She seemed to want to pretend that her daughter didn't provoke plants into violence, and Violet didn't really think it was a good idea to press it. Still, it didn't stop Violet from being very aware of the fact that she could provoke plants into violence, and she found herself spending increasing amounts of time in the woods behind their house. She felt a little awkward around her classmates from there out, because she wasn't sure how people would react to there being a mutant among their children. Deep in the woods, though, she was safe enough to learn more about her ability, and she started spending more time alone than with her friends. They noticed this, and tried to get her to go to movies and be more social, and she did, to an extent, although not nearly as much as she used to.
She kept to her spotty pattern of hanging out with her friends when they demanded it of her, and then slipping off to do other things by herself for about six months before she seemingly snapped out of it, and resumed her usual habits, just after her fifteenth birthday. The catalyst for this, was completely unknown to them, but they were just happy to have their friend back. Violet, however, was silently torn, because she'd discovered that her older brother, the eldest in the family, James, was also a mutant. He'd confronted her when he'd been home from college for the weekend, not because their mother had told him about her, but because he'd followed her when she'd climbed out her window, (using the ivy which had never really managed to stick to the wall before, but the side up to her room window was now thick with it) expecting to find her meeting with a secret boyfriend that he'd have to go Protective Big Brother on, but really discovering her entering a clearing where she'd planted a garden with seeds she'd taken from their mother's shop, so she could better test her powers.
He confronted her, because he didn't want her throwing away her high school years learning how to control something that was better left alone. She didn't really think that was fair, and that she could do something with her powers, like the superheroes in New York. Her brother pointed out that the news usually cast them in a bad light, and she couldn't really argue with him there, although she tried just the same.
They eventually came to a compromise. He'd work with her every weekend they came home, and they'd develop their abilities together, meanwhile, she'd act like a normal teenager again.
She'd always adored her older brothers, but she found herself looking forward to the weekends more than anything with that promise in mind. It was almost like when she was little again, with a new adventure awaiting her with each session. Sometimes he'd make her practice things besides communicating with the flowers and helping them grow. He made her rejoin track (she'd quit after the fight with her mother), go to the gym twice a week when he wasn't in town, and in addition he started teaching her more offensive ways of using her powers, in conjunction with the movements of her own body. She had a feeling there was something going on that he wasn't telling her, but she kept her mouth shut, and trained alongside him, because they hadn't been as close as they were now since they'd been little kids, him being five years older.
Finally though, when she was seventeen, and their training sessions had increased and she was stuck balancing her time with James and her time with her friends all with looking at college, she asked him what exactly they were trying to accomplish, with the different and exotic plants, and stretching them to their absolute limits. And he told her to wait another year.
She was annoyed with him for a good two weeks after that, but they eventually resumed their workout sessions, and she didn't bring it up again, until her eighteenth birthday. After the party her best friend threw, James explained to her that he'd been spending his nights since he was fifteen tracking down criminals and turning them over to the police. The vigilante lifestyle was a rush for him, but he hadn't wanted her to start patrolling the streets with him the second she discovered she had abilities. Then he told her it was her choice if she started fighting crime or not.
Once she hit college, she was Violet Baxter, a Botany student by day, and Eden by night. Her brother had picked the name, and while she'd thought it was overly biblical at first, she hadn't managed to come up with anything better (Plant Girl was blatantly shot down) and she grew into it. For four years they were a duo keeping Philadelphia's streets safer, and they kept carefully below the radar, until three months after Violet's graduation.
They were used to dealing with normal humans, not super villains, and the first super villain they cam up against, cost James his life while he tried to protect Violet. She hung up her costume after his death, and moved to New York on the request of her mother under the guise to open a second flower shop in the Baxter name, although before Violet had left, her mother had made it perfectly clear to Violet that it was because she couldn't bear to look at the mutant she had willingly let into the world that had killed her baby boy.
So Violet became the manager of Baxter's Bouquets in down town Manhattan, and tried not to think about the box in her closet that still held her past as Eden.