Gwendolyn Greene

original plant-based mutant, muse&mun 18+, may be NSFW

[greene--thumb]

Mind the Thorns

[xavierply1984-deactivated202002]

Charles just happens to be the one closest to the door when the doorbell rings and he walks over. he lifts his hand to the nob and opens the door, looking at the bush outside the door and then up at her “I assume that you did that?” He asks as he walks out and looks at the flowers that had come on the bush. “Your powers seem to be connected to your emotional state, we’ll have to help you work on that while you’re here.” Charles steps back and picks up two of her cases and moves into the house 

He peeks back over his shoulder to see if she is following and when he’s made sure that she is he starts talking to her “Welcome to Xavier’s School for the Gifted, I hope that you like it here and that while you’re here you learn how to control your powers better. You’ll have a schedule just as all the other teachers and in it you will have built in times for training and thing of that sort.”

Charles leads her up the stairs and to a room down at the end of the hall from the stairs “This will be your room and your room only, I would only ask that you not bring things up here so that you can cook for yourself because it isn’t considered safe, many of the children have powers that effect mechanical devices. All that is downstairs in the kitchen and eventually you will be expected to eat with us.” He cocks an eyebrow at her “Any questions that you have for me?”

[greene--thumb]

Gwen considered being offended briefly at the way the man spoke to her. Get her emotions under control, he said.

Had he tried being green? A freak? Locked away in a house with parents that smothered and reviled?

Gwen stopped the frown and clenched her fist as she saw the slightly drooping houseplant out of the corner of her eye. She was proving him right. Besides, she kind of liked the idea of "training", whatever that might mean.

Letting out a nearly silent sigh, she pulled a smile and listened to him speak as he led her through the mansion.

He said a lot as she followed behind him, thankful for his help as she toted her small box of personal items with which to decorate her room, which was mostly comprised of plotted plants. She listened and took it in. Xavier's School? Expected to join for dinner?

"Who is Xavier? Is he the mysterious benefactor?" she asked with a dark green-black eyebrow raised when they stopped outside her door. "Crochety old headmaster?" she smirked slightly. "Or is it just to sound cool?"

She was meant to be professional, an adult; but she was still reasonably young, all things considered. And while she had been taught the art of conversation, she had had only a very small audience on which to practice.

Gwen paused a little, shifting the box to free one hand. It was covered by a thin silken glove as it extended toward him, offering for a friendly shake. "I'm Gwendolyn Greene." She thought of the name her parents had called her, Gigi, but chose not to say it. "You can call me Gwen, if you like. Are you a professor here as well? And thank you, for helping with my bags."

She had been given almost no information about the school or the posting. She had very little idea of what she was signing up for, aside from a school that catered to and was run by "people like her", whatever that was supposed to mean.

[greene--thumb]

Grow Among the Stars

@guardian-rocket

As Gwen’s green eyes widened at the state of things around her, a strange phrase floated through her mind. Something about inalienable kindness.

She snorted in the relative silence, aside from the clank-clank and hum of the ship around her. This drew the attention of the space’s only other occupant, a humanoid octopus in a ridiculous facsimile of a seventh century Earth pirate get-up. Gwen opened and closed her mouth a few times when face with the visage of one Capitan Squiggly Legs and tried not to bark out a laugh when his sort-of mouth screwed up into what she thought was meant to be a scowl.

“Giiiiiii,” he groaned, a deceptively dry tentacle slapping against her green forearm, tied haphazardly to an antique Earth chair. This guy, she thought. He had the most bizarre obsession with Earth things. Herself, it appeared, included. “Gigi, why must you wound me?” He had affected a pretty pathetic attempt at a French accent, not at all helped by his beak-like hard ‘lips’.

He was paying too close attention to her face, to the way that the muscles beneath her skin shifted, to notice the thorns that slid from the skin on her wrists. Jagged little things that moved in and out of her skin to slowly, painfully slowly picked away at the frayed rope that held her captive.

“Wound you, Urri? I’m pretty sure I’m the one tied up, not the other way around. What imagined slight are we working with this time?”

His tentacle-arm slithered onto what was exposed of her thigh from a long-ago tear. The pants weren’t hers, or weren’t originally; she had had to borrow them several months ago after one of her few pairs had been singed to near ashes. They were the sort of brown cargo-like pants that had more pockets than not and, while they had seen better days, they were mostly intact. Her jacket was nowhere to be seen, for which she would owe El Capitan a good punch more likely than not.

She was more exposed on Urri’s ship than she had been on Earth for most of her life, although that mostly meant that any bit of her green skin was actually visible. She didn’t take much care to hide it those days, not when there were people like Urri to contend with for Weirdest Alien Ever. Most people just assumed she was from far-away planet of plant people rather than a mutant castaway from Earth.

“You took it,” he said, a suction cup pressing against the small slash of green bared above her knee. It felt like pinpricks there and he knew it.

“Dunno what you’re talking about, pal,” she force a sort of smile around her grimace. She needed just a little while longer with the ropes. “Spell it out for me, would you, Urri?”

Two more tentacles shifted, curling around her face. The pain intensified there, eyes welling with a green, syrupy sort of liquid that passed as tears for her. Her eyes widened, revealing the full appearance of her green sclera; her black pupils narrowed practically to nothing.

“The box,” he growled, red eyes narrowed in the squishy blue-black face. Squiggly Legs was no longer playing nice.

Gwen, Gwendolyn, Gigi – Big Greene – smiled slowly as her hands slid free of the binds he’d placed on her. She didn’t even need to, not yet; the big idiot had forgotten to tie her legs to the chair.

“Hey Urri, there’s something on your radar,” she jerked her head in the direction of what functioned as a navigation panel. It was a mess of wires and buttons half-off the board. Captain Calamari squinted at her before he tore his tentacles from her and jerked around to look at the phantom blip. Gigi gritted her teeth against the removal of his pads as it seared her skin.

As soon as he turned his back on her, she hoisted her legs up as close to her body as she could and kicked him low in the back. He twisted, falling and flailing. Had he been expecting it, he could’ve used his tentacles to grab onto anything – but, fortunately for her, he hadn’t been. He fell face first into the control board and knocked himself out.

Gwen smirked as she removed herself from the chair, moving around to make sure the guy was still breathing. “Big guy?” she asked, poking him with one foot as she grabbed her jacket from draped across the back of his captain’s chair. He didn’t say anything but as she turned around, she could see the erratic rise and fall of his chest.

Shrugging, she murmured ‘good enough’ to herself as she set about binding her captor. She wouldn’t make it too hard to get out; just hard enough so that she could make her getaway.

[greene--thumb]

Mind the Thorns

@brckentelepath

Gigi’s life was, more or less, a comedy of errors. Born to the wealthy Greene family which had long had a hand in massive, expensive car production, no one thought it was funny when her skin shimmered the same color as her namesake in the sunlight at the age of three. By the time she was five, Gwendolyn was not allowed out of the house without layers of expensive cover-up, gloves, high-collars, and sunglasses. Going from a cherubic child with blue irises to a green-skinned, dark-haired freak with her full sclera the color of moss and only black pupils denoting where her vision truly hailed from was the least of it. Along with her interesting appearance came the eruption of powers that she could neither control nor understand.

The first time the powers manifested, Gigi thought she was dying. She woke one morning covered from dark-haired head to green-nailed toes in flower blooms. They had burst through her pajamas, as if searching for the light and they ached from the very center of her. She cried for what felt like days, although with the transition she had gone through tears were in short supply.

She was lucky, all things considered; although her parents refused to look at her without the mask she was forced to wear to appear in front of any other person, they provided for her the best tutors. It was much too risky to allow her out and about with enough regularity to attend school but they wanted her to have as many advantages as they could provide her.

The problem with something akin to the Kensington system, as they soon discovered, was that it left something to be desired in the development of her personality. With no one to talk to about what she was going through, no one that could provide any true level of understanding, and parents that couldn’t meet her eyes for fear of what they looked like, Gigi grew resentful. First and foremost of the childlike nickname that sounded like poison when either of her parents uttered it.

Gwen, then.

Gwen excelled in the fields of math and science – little did she know, it broke her father’s heart to know she could’ve been a doctor if she wasn’t so afflicted –  but had no real place to put her skills to the test. Years passed and the public grew more and more aware of what they called mutants, more emboldened by every time one of the popped up. Things had always been tense in the Greene household since Gwendolyn’s mutation was discovered but it all came to a head around her twenty-fourth birthday.

“it’s dangerous,” her mother hissed from the other side of the wall; Gwen had been practicing the piano for her customary two hours before her fingers began to ache for the sunshine. With a privacy fence that kept the light out for most of the day because of its height, Gwen was allowed into the yard at the very least. She wore the caked-on concealer from the moment she woke up until it was time for her to lay her head to rest. It made her itch, not unlike the gloves that covered her elongated fingers.  Resting her head delicately back against the ivy vines along the brick wall behind her, she tugged at the glove.

Releasing her hand into the sunlight, she wondered at the strange pigments that glittered beneath the green.

“It’s dangerous for her to keep her here, Margaret! We’ve kept her practically caged like an animal for the last twenty years. What kind of life is this for her?”

“What kind of life would that be? Teaching.” Margaret Atwood-Greene scoffed and Gwen could imagine that she was pressing her delicately pale hand to her delicately pale forehead with a pained look pulling down her lips. Gwen grimaced at the mental image. “They can’t possibly provide for her the way we have, Gerald!”

“Are you listening to yourself? You know exactly the life she has had here. It’s just as hard for you as it is for me. We can’t keep her here any longer, for the sake of everyone here.”

Gwen had long since stood from her position outside the massive sliding glass door that would lead into the kitchen from the ornate deck. Sliding the door open wider, she looked up to catch her parents’ red faces. She had removed her hat, her glasses; unbuttoned the high collar of her shirt to reveal green collarbones and did her best to scrub at the peachy cover-up on her cheeks.

“Wherever it is, I’ll go.”

And go she did; not two days later, with all of two suitcases and one small box, Gwendolyn left her parents’ home for what she assumed would be the last time. She was covered, as always, from head to toe. When she emerged from the town car outside the front door of Xavier’s School for the Gifted, she looked mostly normal.

Her father knew a man who knew another man who had heard that the school existed – that was all she needed. She promised to tell her parents how it went but had immediately decided she would tell them whatever she needed to so that they wouldn’t come looking for her.

She was free, whatever that meant.

The driver unloaded the suitcases and box, looking at Gwen for a long moment before he was waved off. With a heavy heart and a gloved hand, Gwen lifted her hand to press her finger into the doorbell. Beside her, the bush absolutely bloomed with nervous-looking little yellow flowers that didn’t quite look like they belonged.