OOC
GAME: Neopolis
DESCRIPTION: Freeze-rays and monsters and magic and superpowers, oh my!
DATE: June 2009
PB: Emily Browning
JOURNAL: ofhorrors
IC
Name: Cynthia Victoria Mushnik
Age/Birthdate: 18 / March 3rd, 1991 (PISCES)
Sexuality: Heterosexual
Alias/Codename: Chlorophyllia! The first time someone pointed out that it sounded like a Neopolitan flora-porn star name, she cried. But she still likes the alias and has stubbornly stuck to it.
Concept: The underwhelming daughter of underwhelming E.L.E-aspiring parents, Victoria Mushnik — alias Chlorophyllia, Mistress of Flora! — spends most of her lab-time drawing dreamy hearts around the Teen Wolves' names, wishing she could revivify things with electricity, weeping over Gothic literature, and shuffling around in unwieldy dresses with bustles. She thinks they make her look dignified and elegant and maybe a little bit like Dean Lethbridge! (They just make her look silly.) Vicky's tendency for waterworks and romanticism aside, she's still a brilliant bio-geneticist in her own right — in addition to creating various biting spores and small plants, her crowning glory is a crossbreed of butterwort and Venus Flytrap. She's still far off from creating a walking, talking Audrey II, but it does eat meat and small rodents. Someday, it will eat every bully who ever heckled her at Fenris Academy. Or maybe just gnaw on them a little.
Faculty: Science
Year: Second
Skills: BIOENGINEERS KILLER PLANTS. Which she often uses to get back at people in snippy little passive aggressive ways. It's a modern science, too, which drives her crazy; Victoria is a whiz kid with microscopes and careful gene splicing, but can't reanimate a dead corpse to save her life (lol). Which means she … sucks at the old school science her parents rock at. As of right now, her homicidal flora repertoire looks like the following, though she's always expanding the menu:
- Biting spores. Small floating spores which she can release with the help of a handheld fan, usually through her enemy's window. They have teeny tiny teeth and are, frankly, rather terrifying.
- Itching pollen. Exactly what it sounds like. Immensely uncomfortable and long-lasting. Very effective when scattered in an enemy's bed.
- Containment vines. Strong, elastic vines which will slither out and encircle a foe, rendering them immobile.
- Audrey II. Her pride and joy, the carnivorous Venus Flytrap. It's sentient enough to hunt rodents and snap unpleasantly at disliked hands, but Victoria's still trying to perfect it to the ultimate achievement: a larger size and independent mobility. At which point the entire world will rue ever having crossed Chlorophyllia!!!
Alliance: Evil League of Evil, thanks much.
Personality: First off, Victoria's image is a complete and total sham. Her real name is actually the horribly drab Cynthia Mushnik, and she went by "Photocynthia" throughout most of high school (a pet name bestowed by her father), until the monicker almost drove her stir-crazy and she decided to radically revamp her identity. She was tired of being bullied and having her ceramic pots shattered! She was going to reclaim her right as the daughter of the (not so) initimable Dr. Fell! So by the time she got to Fenris Academy, she was calling herself Victoria (evoking an old-fashioned sense of style and grandeur, she thought) and when it came to codenames, she took on CHLOROPHYLLIA, MISTRESS OF FLORA! It would make people think of dark mystique and sexiness, she thought.
… Not so much. The girl would like to believe she's a gothic femme fatale of the utmost sort — worthy of swooning in her corsets and being dramatically whisked off by vampires and dark, brooding anti-heroes — but the honest truth is that Vicky bursts into tears an awful lot. She doesn't cut a very intimidating figure, is easily hurt and takes things personally more often than is healthy — but people do have a tendency to underestimate her true capabilities, which are actually fairly impressive. She ends up internalising most of her wounded pride until these feelings explode in a messy fit of passive aggressive rage, usually accompanied with petty revenge and the creation of a long-standing grudge. Until that moment happens, however, Victoria is a shrinking violet and a bit of a pushover, simply trying her best not to be yet another science wallflower. Too much compassion and sentimentality in her personality has turned her into a total satire of the fainting damsel in distress.
—Which still doesn't stop her from still idealising that way of life. Victoria's nightstand is stacked with gothic literature and she thinks vintage things are totally chic. She has a phrenology skull and posters of old-fashioned anatomical drawings all over her room and shuffles around the lab in impractical dresses. She thinks old sciences are absolutely fascinating, despite their redundancy in today's superscience labs — get her started on phrenology, physiognomy, vivisection, revivication, Odic forces and mesmerism, and Vicky will geek out.
She idolises the gothics and wishes to Frankenstein that she could be in that faculty instead. There's even a werewolf plushie under her pillow. Wide-eyed and naïve, Victoria has a tendency to attach herself to werewolves/vampires/demons/other beasties like a weepy little limpet, no matter how abrasive and horrid they might be — because she is always, without fail, convinced that there's ~something better~ underneath. This innocence carries through into her obnoxious political campaigning; the girl is a fierce (though rather irritating) activist for gothic rights. You betcha she'll be knocking on your door with informational literature.
History:
- Admittedly rather not-too-intimidating daughter of one Philip Mushnik (DR. FELL), a low-rate League wannabe with an antique lab. As an aspiring young and tweedy scientist, he was officially diagnosed with Malign Hypercognition Disorder — the mad scientist's disease. Philip's been attending bi-weekly therapy sessions in an attempt to shake the disorder, but he just can't quite shake those persistent and irrational delusions of grandeur.
- Victoria's mother is Deirdre Mushnik, a henchwoman codenamed ABSINTHE: a ruthlessly efficient manufacturer of all sorts of wacky poisons. Twenty-and-some years ago, Absinthe was cast adrift after disengaging from her latest master, and found herself going to a local Neopolis fortuneteller for some spiritual guidance re: her next assignment. To her great delight, she was told her she'd meet someone tall, dark, and handsome — to her disappointment, when Philip turned up, he wasn't at all what she'd expected. He was scrawny and rather underwhelming, but oh well — at least there was a twitchy sort of endearing quality to him. She signed on as Hench(wo)man #3, but the other two soon petered out once they realised Dr. Fell wasn't going anywhere special despite all his big talk. Rather bemused by his professional persistence, however, the third minion stayed on, and ended up becoming wife in addition to henchwoman.
- Philip creates patchwork creatures and chimeras. They're innovative ideas, certainly, and would be rather terrifying in their own right — but most of them die off the slab, thus rendering his plans a moot point. Dr. Fell is little more than a failed Dr. Moreau, and whenever one creatures does survive, it's usually because of Absinthe's sly influence behind the scenes, pushing and prodding her husband in the right direction and supplying the animal with proper bio-veterinary chemical care. To be honest, she's the brains behind the family outfit — she could have been much greater than a henchwoman, but rather enjoys their comfortable existence in the antiquated lab with their only daughter and their pet foxwolf.
- So between the old-school mad scientist daddy (complete with crackling lightning and outdated devices) and henchwoman mommy, Cynthia herself looked like prime ELE fodder — as long as she took after her mother's behind-the-scenes efficiency. Unfortunately, she didn't. Scatterbrained Philip bonded most with their daughter and Cynthia was an absolute daddy's girl, and despite her early scientific flair for biology and genetics, she was still absolutely heartbroken to discover she didn't even have Philip's sub-par skills in old-school science. Cynthia can't resurrect a corpse to save her life, and most of her lightning-related experiments only manage to short-circuit the laboratory. Even her father's better at Frankensteining than she is.
- She did, however, find her niche in plants — with much thanks to her mother for nudging her in the right direction, having noticed her daughter's aptitude early on. By the time Cynthia reached high school at Fenris Academy, however, she'd experienced her pubescent identity crisis and stubbornly started calling herself Victoria — a highstrung teenage phase which she never quite grew out of. The family couldn't afford tuition for the Insidious Institute, and so instead sent their daughter to the Cunning Conservatory, a slightly cheaper League-leaning trade school with a focus on science. This marked the first year that she was successfully accepted as "Victoria" instead of "Cynthia", and it looked like she was finally on her way towards a fresh start and some more popularity.
- The Mushniks made a tolerable living running The Fell Beastarium, which caters towards selling pets both exotic and domestic: harmless cross-breeds from Philip's experiments, magical dogs, lab rats, the occasional canary marketed for trolls to snack on, etc.
- Despite their daughter's slowly-improving academic record, the Mushniks' marriage has been strained recently. Ambition is ruining them; after Captain Hammer's inglorious fall, Philip got it into his head that he should try out for the ELE for real. But he's never even gotten into the demonstration phase of the application process, and the constant rejection letters are starting to take its toll on him. Deirdre tried her best, but can't protect his ego if he keeps stepping out to get it bruised like this — consequently, the two have been slowly drifting apart. Unbeknownst to anyone in the family, she now has a lesbian lover on the side. Looks like Philip and Cynthia Victoria aren't the only ones going through identity crises.
- Victoria is intent upon helping her dad attain the ~glory~ he's still striving for. She's aware she's a bit of a stylistic disappointment — a genius, yes, but in entirely the wrong spheres! But she wants to make up for that! She wants to help her dad! They weren't born into greatness, after all; they have to struggle for it and earn it.
- As of four years ago, Victoria signed up for The Stoker Foundation, a gothic-rights liberation group, and became an active and engaging member.
Played-By: Emily Browning
fun questions!
Aspirations: To perfect the Venus Flytrap and other breeds, to see her father rich and successful and her parents reunited, to be seduced by one mysterious stranger, and maybe animate one corpse. Maybe.
What would be the title of the comic book starring your character? MISTRESS OF FLORA. She's like a younger Poison Ivy, but minus the powers and plus more science. When not being a supervillainess and wreaking havoc on Band, Chlorophyllia delves into scientific advancements and uses the products from her plants for great medicinal purpose, including attempting to find a natural cure for Malign Hypercognition Disorder and other unusual Neopolitan diseases.
Classes (Trimester Two):
- Personal Development
- History of Art
- Advanced Microbiology
- Poisons & Antidotes
- Working Through It: Harnessing Radioactivity
- Intergalactic Life
- Seminar: Life & Undeath: Redefining Reanimation
