Post by Myrtle Giberti on Nov 26, 2016 19:49:15 GMT
Myrtle Dolores Giberti
FACE CLAIM: Lydia Graham
♦ THE BASICS ♦
AGE: 17
GENDER: Female
ORIENTATION: Who knows?
POSITION: Student♦ THE ABILITY ♦
POWER: Plant Communication and Ecological Empathy
Plant communication. Gibs is able to “communicate” with plant life through touch. She is able to gain a sense of the feelings and “thoughts” of the plant while simultaneously sharing her feelings and thoughts with the plant. Although she personally wouldn’t refer to it as “manipulation”, these communications can lead to changes in the plant (such as blooming/growing/wilting) if the plant is willing to listen and work with her.
Ecological empathy. Gibs is able to “feel” the status of nearby nature, mainly relating to the health of the ecosystem and its components. It can be thought of as akin to being a human empath, but instead of human emotions, Gibs is in tune with the feelings of the environment.
LIMITATIONS:
- Ecological empathy only works over a short distance (at most, in a very interconnected ecosystem, about a half mile) and extends only as far as the ecosystem extends. For example, her range in a vibrant ecosystem like a rain forest would be farther than her range in a spaced-out, weaker system like a city park.
- She is only able to communicate with plants that she can directly touch. Even then, communication is extremely difficult and is usually harder with younger, immature plants than with older plants (think grass versus a tree).
- Ability to communicate doesn’t always equate with fruitful communication. If a plant does not want to talk or work with her, there isn’t anything she can do to physically force it.
- Communicating with plants takes a lot of energy and usually results in headaches, exhaustion, and a recovery period in which it is difficult to communicate at all with anything (human or plant).
- Once something is dead, it is dead. She can’t talk to or feel anything in places that are devoid of plant life or where the plant life is dead. These places also tend to leave her emotionally vacant.
SIDE-EFFECTS:
- Environmental shifts disturb her greatly and she is very emotionally sensitive to any harm that comes to an ecosystem or individual plant. For example, seeing someone pick a flower can cause her great distress (think sobbing fits).
- When she is around an unhealthy ecological system, she begins to get depressed, suffers from headaches, tiredness, or pains, almost like her health is reflecting the health of the ecosystem.
- She has trouble relating to and talking with people and animals and tends to have a slower, steadier thought process than most people. Therefore, she has a lot of trouble socially and academically.
- Being dissociated from any sort of nature turns her into a robot. She loses her ability to connect with anything at all and falls into a non-responsive depressive state. She needs contact with healthy plant life to stay happy and healthy herself.
- She has a lot of trouble morally justifying to herself her need to eat plants and animals. This leads to long periods of time where she just doesn’t want to eat or refuses to eat.
♦ THE CHARACTER ♦
HEIGHT: 5'5
HAIR COLOR: Black
EYE COLOR: Blue-green
MISC: N/A
PERSONALITY:
Gibs is a little slow on the uptake, but she doesn’t let it drag her down. She takes her time with everything she does, and all her movements feel very deliberate and purposeful. She always tries to keep a smile on her face and an open, honest perspective on the world, but she’s very, very sensitive. It’s pretty easy to say the wrong thing to her and get her in a downward spiral of why-am-I-so-silly-I’m-so-sorry. She’s the wallflower type, not one to make waves. She’s never had many close friends, but she would be very, very steadfast and loyal to them, through thick and thin.
Personally, Gibs enjoys spending time outside in nature and in quiet spaces, usually reading or enjoying a television show or music. She doesn’t like loud parties or lots of activity. She can become very reserved when left to her own devices and often finds it hard to relate to people on a personal level. She usually ends up saying odd things, not replying at quite the right time in conversation, or generally making it pretty hard to get to know her. Hopefully, now that she’s among other people who are used to not fitting in, she can figure out how to relate to other “freaks.”
SECRET(S): She usually tries to keep her first name a secret. God forbid people latch onto “Myrtle the Turtle” again.♦ THE HISTORY ♦
Myrtle grew up in a small apartment in New York City, an only child to a research scientist and a lawyer. She went to a private daycare, preschool, and elementary school and from a young age, big things were expected of her, considering the success and intelligence of her parents. From the start, she was a bit of a disappointment. She was late to talk, to walk, and to read. She had trouble concentrating in school and her attention was difficult to hold for any period of time. She was quiet, enjoyed spending time on her own doing her own thing, and rarely associated with other children. Her parents were continuously concerned with her delayed development and sent her to many specialists, but no diagnoses seemed to fit. Eventually, her parents and her teachers resigned themselves to the simple fact that Myrtle was “a pleasant child, but a little slow.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t like people or she didn’t try her best. It was just that things that seemed so easy for other people took her a lot more time to get to. This was fine in elementary school, but when she entered middle school, her peers began noticing her quirky, detached, and slow demeanor. She was given the moniker “Myrtle the Turtle” by some particularly cruel classmates and it stuck. Once her parents realized this bullying was going on, they attempted to move her to a new class, get teachers involved, but it was too late. She was “Myrtle the Turtle” in her own mind too. Although she tried to remain optimistic and happy, the ostracization and constant disappointment in the classroom and for her parents wore her down.
Her parents sent her to a private high school, separate from most of her classmates in middle school. Here, Myrtle began going by her last name, Giberti, which eventually was shortened to Gibs. Instead of being actively teased and excluded, she decided it was easier just to keep to herself and become a wallflower rather than an active participant in the social hubbub of the school. Her parents attempted to interact with her, but Gibs became increasingly walled off, content and happy with just her own company.
Something changed when she turned 17 and everything quickly went downhill. She began skipping school from exhaustion, which was never something she’d done before. She fell into a depression that had never afflicted her before, even when the teasing had been at its worst in middle school. She was listless, unhappy, and uninclined to move unless forced.
After about two weeks of this, her mother forced her to go out of her room one weekend to take a walk around Central Park. As soon as she came close to the grass and the trees and the squirrels, she seemed to come back to life. She could feel the grass growing and the trees drinking in the sunshine, feel the whole complete circle of the parts working together to form the whole little ecosystem. In awe, she placed her hand on a tree and fell to her knees with the wealth of knowledge and wisdom that came pouring from the core of the birch. It wasn’t long after that that she was recruited and brought to Bellefonte.
She’s excited to begin her journey here and cautiously optimistic that perhaps her peers will be kinder and more understanding here than at her other schools.♦ THE PLAYER ♦
USERNAME: Femur
AGE GROUP: 20
EXPERIENCE: Off and on for 6ish years?
WHERE DID YOU FIND US? Oh man, that's ancient history.
