INTRODUCING MIN JIWOO, OUR NEWEST STUDENT WITH THE POWER OF AGROKINESIS
WELCOME TO GUMI INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FOR THE POWERED.
WHO ARE THEY?
PERSONALITY
(+) PERCEPTIVE jiwoo is a highly perceptive person and once she knows someone well enough, it can be very hard to fool her. she tends to remember everything people say to her, even the smallest things. INTELLIGENT her high levels of intelligence are something that she inherited from her scientist father, perhaps the only good thing he ever gave her. she’s good at analysing situations and coming up with a good attack plan for just about anything. COMPASSIONATE despite being closed off, to put it bluntly, jiwoo still can’t seem to ignore her instinct to help others, even after all the wrong that has been done to her by the man she was supposed to love them most. (–) ECCENTRIC despite being classified as an introverted by the many personality type quizzes she’s taken thanks to the fact that she’s often off in fairy land, jiwoo can come across as a rather eccentric thanks to the way she acts, especially ( if not solely ) because of the fact that she tends to talk to the plants on campus more than the people. CLOSED OFF after what happened with her father, jiwoo has become rather distrustful of people. despite still having a good heart and wanting to see the best in all people, she can’t find it in herself to do it so she tends to keep people at an arms length. BLUNT she has a habit of stating the facts, sometimes brutally even, and it can be a tad uncomfortable for those around her.
BACKGROUND
tw; death, murder, torture, abuse
SCENE I, PART I the sound of something breaking, i awake from my dreams
this is how the world ends… not with a bang, but with a whimper.
it’d been the author t.s. elliot who had written those immortal words in his book of poems entitled ‘the hollow men’ and it was times like this, as her lithe fingers moved over said words in the aforementioned poem book, that jiwoo couldn’t help but ponder their meaning.
she was far too young to be reading books this grim, her caretaker, aurora, had stated sadly once upon a time. she had said that jiwoo was supposed to be playing in the gardens of her parent’s manor, making friends and scraping her knees, reading books about fairy tales and running from boys and their supposed cooties — not sat locked away in her room with her eyes glued to a book and her ears covered with earphones while her father did his experience and her mother was out shopping.
she shopped a lot, or at least that’s what jiwoo gathered each time her father would brush of her questions of her mother’s location before he shoved her into her room and ordered to keep her earphones on.
thinking back on it now, now that she was older and knew about what kind of a man her father had been, she truly wondered just why she had so blindly trusted in him.
SCENE I, PART II
the sound is full of unfamiliarity, so i try to cover my ears and go back to sleep
min jiwoo hadn’t been born a mutant, no. she’d just been born an ordinary human, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about her, really. well… except maybe her chipmunk like cheeks. born to a scientist for a father and a former nurse as a mother in a manor brought with her father’s extensive amounts of money in the new zealand countryside, jiwoo spent the majority of her childhood alone; her father was always in the basement of the manor working on his experiments and her mother… well, she was never around much either.
her father had always had an unhealthy obsession with mutants, all his paperwork that jiwoo had read in secret had alwaysalwaysalways been about mutants and what made them tick. he had always been determined to make a mutant out of an ordinary human, and that should have been her first red flag, but no… jiwoo had always just thought it was an innocent obsession just like her obsession with plants, she never thought that he’d ever actually try and do what he dreamed.
and that was where she had gone wrong.
jiwoo had been ten years old when she first made the mistake of removing her earphones in the dead of night, irritated by the way they were pressed against her skull as she laid against her pillow. it’d been the first and only time that jiwoo would hear the screams resonating from the basement of the manor, the basement that she was forbidden from entering without her father by her side. but she had been too scared to even move, the high pitched screams seeming to rattle jiwoo’s very bones and all the young child could do was roll over, plug her ears up with her earphone again, and pull the covers up over her head.
that was all she could do… right? right.
SCENE I, PART III
the pain in my throat is getting worse, but i’ll try and hide it
her mother died on the 10th of december, 2007 and jiwoo could still remember the day that she woke up to find her father sobbing hysterically over the woman’s cold corpse.
she’d died of a heart attack according to both her father and the coroner, but it still left ten year old jiwoo dumbfounded. how could her mother have died so suddenly when she had been perfectly fine the day before? she and jiwoo had played soccer together and danced to her mother’s favourite song, they’d laughed and had fun and jiwoo had felt loved again for the first time in a long time… how could that be ruined so quickly?
the last jiwoo had seen of her mother that night had been when she had spotted the woman and her father entering the basement of their manor.
…those screams that she had heard the night of her mother’s death… they couldn’t have been her… right?
jiwoo could remember shaking her head free of those thoughts, not wanting to even think about what it meant if those screams had been coming from her mother.
the funeral had been a private event, hosted on the grounds of the family manor (which, in itself, felt wrong because jiwoo knew how much her mother hated how closed off from the world they were on the manor grounds) with close family and friends. her mother’s grandparents had been enraged at the sight of of jiwoo staring soullessly at her mother’s casket, but they didn’t understand.
no one did, no one ever would.
SCENE II, PART I
again, i don’t have a voice. today, i hear the sound again
when she was seventeen, her father would miraculously pull himself out of the slump that he had been in for the past seven years. after her mother’s death, her father had completely given up on his love for science, he’d stopped going down to the basement as much as he once had, and, honestly? jiwoo was beginning to believe that he had been more depressed over his failed experiments than the death of her mother, his wife.
when her father started spending more time with her in her garden, something that her mother had helped her to grow because her mother had known just how much jiwoo loved plants and all things related to them, jiwoo knew she should have been worried. but no, she’d ignored her gut feeling (for what was perhaps the upteenth time in her life) she welcomed him back into her life with open arms.
that night, when she went to bed, she heard the basement generator turn on for the first time in months.
SCENE II, PART II
it’s ringing again, that sound. a crack has appeared on the frozen lack
the first time jiwoo ever entered her father’s basement was on her 18th birthday, a promise to show her around the room that she had never seen in her life to honour her becoming a woman.
the things that happened in the following moments had been etched into jiwoo’s memory for eternity; the memory of her father playfully asking her to lay down on the metal slab in the middle of the room and the feeling of anxiety that had rushed through her veins when he had strapped her ankles and wrists to the metal with the leather restraints was something that jiwoo would never forget. he’d just been playing around… he would never do anything to harm her right?
wrong.
it was with her dark eyes following the man as she anxiously pleaded with him to remove the restraints and let her go that she watched him turn on the multiple computers that sat atop on of the many desks in the room. but her pleads would fall on empty ears as her father turned around, looking at her with such a look that jiwoo was left wondering just where the hell her father had gone.
“your mother was a failure, but maybe you will make my dreams come true, my darling briar rose.”
SCENE II, PART III
i dumped myself into that lake, i killed my voice for you
the things that jiwoo had been forced to endear over the following months in that cursed basement was something that she would never wish on even her worst enemies. in those months, she had been forced to all different forms of torture; oxygen deprivation, abuse, if you could name it, she had probably been through it.
all in order for her supposed mutant gene to awaken.
in those months, jiwoo finally put two and two together. her father’s obsession had never been an innocent thing, it was a deadly thing that had torn their family apart, something that had killed her mother who, like jiwoo, had been subjected to the torture that would supposedly set of the mutant gene that lay dormant in all humans. “she gave herself over to me in order to save you,” her father had told her from the other side of the basement door. “that stupid woman. if she had just let me at you, she would still be alive now.”
that had been the first time jiwoo would cry over her mother’s death, she had cried herself to sleep that night. the truth of her mother’s death weighing too heavily on her young mind, the truth of what her mother had done for her.
it had all been too much.
SCENE II, PART IV
over the winter lake where i drowned, a thick ice has formed
it was on the 27th of september that her father’s dreams finally came true, on the same day that he died.
after months, weeks, days, hours and minutes of torture, jiwoo’s mind finally snapped. the sound that her father had let out when the computer let out a piercing beep, alerting him to a sudden change in his daughter’s very DNA, was another thing that would haunt jiwoo’s sleepless nights but his elation hadn’t last long, not long at all. for at the exact moment that the alarm set off, the very ground rumbled with jiwoo’s anger, resentment and pure, unadulterated hurt.
he hadn’t even looked scared as vines from her beloved garden broke through the basement walls to strangle him, to steal his breath from him just like he had her mother. he had laughed, screamed that his calculations about there always being an active mutant gene in third generation children being true, he had looked insane… more insane than he ever had in the past months.
he had laughed up until the moment he couldn’t laugh no more, up until the moment where his neck snapped and his body went limp in the vines that obeyed jiwoo’s ever command.
SCENE IV, PART I
even in my dreams, my pain is the same
she was eighteen when she moved to south korea to live with her grandparents, a few months after her families manor had burnt down in a ‘supposed arson attack’ and her father’s body was found burnt to the crisp.
nobody would ever know that she had set it on fire in fear of people finding out what she had done… what she become.
she felt so many new things, she could feel everything the plants around her felt, she could feel death when the plants in her grandparents house were being ignored, she felt it all…. and it scared her.
it didn’t take jiwoo long to hear about gumi international, she’d heard whispers other mutants that could be found if you knew where to look. her grandmother had been the one to tell her about it, tell her that it was a school in incheon for gifted children to go and hone their talents, she had told her of the mutants that went there and their abilities that scared some and frightened others. and god, how jiwoo wanted to be amongst them.
but the question is… would they accept her? someone who hadn’t been born a mutant but had had her abilities forced on her.
it was then that jiwoo would decide to fabricate a new life for her own. one that would completely cover up her old one and the trauma that she had been through.
one that would, hopefully, never be questioned.
SCENE IV, PART II
have i lost myself or have i gained you?
her name was briar rose min, she was twenty one, and student at gumi international while working a job as a florist on the side.
as far as the other students knew, briar rose had never had a family, she’d been raised in an orphanage in new zealand and moved to seoul when she was 15 after being adopted by an elderly couple and had gotten into gumi on a scholarship for photography, placing her in hellion.
min jiwoo was no more, she only returned when it was just her and the plants. the plants who knew everything, the plants who were jiwoo’s only true self.
or when it was late at night and she was, yet again, forced to face her demons. but that she could deal with personally and on her own, just like she did everything.
________
this is how the world ends… not with a bang, but with a whimper.
…let’s test that theory, shall we?
WHAT CAN THEY DO?
DEFINITION
POWER: agrokinesis (plant manipulation) DESCRIPTION: also known as botanokinesis or just plant manipulation, agrokinesis is the ability that allows holders to grow, destroy or just plain manipulate any and all plants, as the name suggests.
BOTANICAL COMMUNICATION: the user can communicate with all plant life either telepathically, through verbal speech, or through touching the plant physical. through her telepathic communication with plants, jiwoo is also able to order plants to physically move if she so desires.
PLANT EMPATHY: the ability to sense the overall well being and conditions of plants.
PLANT GENERATION: the holder can generate plants whether by drawing them from already existing plants or by manifesting them anywhere they want.
PLANT GROWTH: the user can influence and accelerate the growth of plants.
CHLOROKINETIC COMBAT: the user can utilize plant manipulation with their physical combat. can also use plants as a means of defence in combat, as well as being able to move plants through her plant telepathy.
WEAKNESSES
POWERLESS in areas devoid of plant life
highly susceptible to mutants with FIRE or ICE MANIPULATION mutations.
TIME LIMIT: jiwoo can only use her mutation in physical combat for a total of twenty minutes before she becomes physically and mentally fatigued from controlling the plant matter.
WEAKNESS: along with being susceptible to the elements of fire and ice, ordering plants to move telepathically is extremely mentally taxing and causes jiwoo to be rendered defenceless quicker than she would like to admit.
RANGE: jiwoo is only able to control and use plants within a 30 foot radius whilst in combat. outside of combat, she is only able to communicate and empathize with plants within a ten foot radius of her.
DID YOU KNOW?
jiwoo was not born a mutant, it was through tortorous experiments that she became one.