[KittsMitts] Hazel Juniper Rhodes {New Mutants}

General Information

Full Name:
Hazel Juniper Rhodes
Codename or Alias:
Philyra, Paper GirlAnonymity:
Secret
Gender:
Female
Race:
Homosuperior - Mutant

SPOILER: Click to show

Actually a Parahuman

Age:
16
Place Of Birth:
Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Occupation/Status:
Student at Xavier’s
Alignment:
Hero
Factions:
New Mutants
Canon Or Original?:
Original


Powers/Abilities:
Paper Manipulation - Can control paper. She can create more paper out of the materials required, typically bringing scraps of paper with her everywhere she goes. She’s been bringing small journals, sketchbooks, and book books with her everywhere for most of her life anyways.

Applications - Origami, Projectiles, Changing the properties of some paper (harder, faster, stronger, sharper) ((the extent of this takes either more energy or more time.)) The factors to consider are: Size, Amount, Toughness/Sharpness, and Amount of Growth Required.




Blossoming Artist - Paint is her primary medium, she likes the lack of going back and the force to move forward and work with what you’ve put on the canvas. She also very much enjoys charcoal and chalk art. She gets an immense sense of satisfaction when she can get her hands dirty with the progress of her work. She mostly sketches figures, but her finished pieces are more often landscapes.

Writer - She writes poetry, lyrics, just little philosophical phrases. Her notes app on her phone is completely unorganized and indecipherable to the casual eye. She can find things, but no one knows how. And though she writes lyrics, she doesn’t like her singing voice, so they rarely go beyond the page.

Weapons/Items:
Paper
Journals, Sketchbooks, Sticky Notes, Business Cards, Receipts, Scraps of Homework, Individual papers shoved into a backpack sans binder or folder, Textbook, YA Fiction - etcetera. Hazel always has some kind of paper on her.

Art Supplies
Pens, Pencils, Charcoals, Pastels, Chalk, Paints, etcetera. She usually picks and chooses what to bring with her depending on her mood. Her more professional supplies are usually stored properly, but she has low-budget versions of some that live in her backpacks (one of which doubles as her purse)

Appearance
Image:

Physical Appearance:
Honestly, Hazel’s pretty adorable. She’s 5'6”, an average-looking slim, with skinny arms and most of her weight carried in her organ pouch, hips, and thighs. She’s become “lightweight” since her powers manifested, though her body doesn’t reflect that. She’s still a fairly average build, with dancer proportions of a shorter torso and longer limbs. If she wasn’t a little too tall, ballet might have been a good career path. Unfortunately her recent growth spurt, along with her powers making her physically lighter than she should be, have thrown off her sense of balance dramatically. She is far from graceful, and being more stick-like than average, she often feels like a gangly newborn giraffe around more petite or curvy feminine peers.
Her hair is long and a medium brown that goes from ash to warm depending on the light. Her eyes are only a few shades lighter brown than her hair, and she doesn’t particularly like them unless they’re catching the light. She does need glasses, but not that much, so she often goes without them or is actually wearing non-prescription lenses. Her face has a distinguishable jawline and a bit of a trapezoidal to square shape because of her strong chin. Part of why she keeps her hair long is she thinks she looks far too masculine with short hair. She doesn’t see her button nose or soft mouth - Hazel has a tendency to focus on the negatives of her appearance.
Clothing and Armor:
Hazel follows some modern fashion conventions. Pretty much all of her clothing is far too large for her and covers her pretty well. Some of it is very thick- it helps weigh her down and warm her up (she runs cold). She can often be found in a sweater and overalls, oversized dresses and cardigans, and often nice uniform-looking vintage shoes and socks. She often doesn’t tuck anything in, preferring to cover her shape as much as possible. When it gets warmer, she ventures into bolder territory like shorts and tank tops, but she has to get pretty warm before she gets to that point.
She hasn't decided on a costume yet, but the x-costume is fine for now. She thinks she might eventually go with sage green and white.


Personality


Bad Habits:
Not bad habits, but important to note as sources: Anxiety, Depression, ADHD
Sloppy, Cluttered, Messy, Untidy. Usually hates cleaning. Mom was a busybody so she’s not used to cleaning up everyday things. Not incapable, just feels like a waste of time.
Easily Overstimulated and snaps at others during episodes
Tries Too Hard™
Clumsy, “Bumblebutt,” Light on her Feet
Seeks Approval
Touch-Starved. Sometimes needs physical contact to anchor her, so can cling to those she trusts in times of stress, but sometimes push them away when it gets to be too much and can’t have anyone touch her
Antisocial, Introverted
Confidence Issues
Traumatized
TrUsT iSsUeS~

Sexual Orientation:
Demisexual, Panromantic

General Personality:
Sweet and Kind
A little naive
Is on like the verge of being confident but just can't quite get over the threshold
Falters and stumbles a lot in social situations
Most at home by herself, but is also comforted by being around people as long as they're not talking to her
She can ease into social situations, but she's clumsy about it and always feels like she's saying the wrong things
Better when she has time to think, and so can sometimes come across as a ditz
Which is why she likes journaling her feelings and painting
They force her to slow down when she's in a panic and going too fast
Oh, also add and hyperfocus
Overstimulation
Clever
Goofy when truly comfortable
She has a thing for theatrics, but only for the laughs
Dramatic, more than she'll admit
A lot of blossoming that hasn't happened yet
Bookworm, loves fantasy and sci-fi in particular, starting to get into poetry
She does art like painting, drawing, sketching.
Loves flowers but can't keep grass alive.
Awkward and tries too hard or not enough.
Currently very off-balance and wobbly as she tries to figure out what the core parts of her are and what she wants to grow into, and what she's doing for the approval of others.
Likes to sing, and isn't amazing at it or anything but has a lot of heart when she's confident.
She has the anxiety/depression/adhd cocktail.

Anything Else
She enjoys other types of crafting, and generally enjoys intricate work she can do with her hands. And she misses her cat.


Character's History

Siblings:
Linden, older brother by 6 years
Gemma, older sister by 4 years
Mother:
Nina Rhodes, née Hendron
Father:
Peter Rhodes
Other Family:
Extended family, those who make it for holidays. Grandmas, Aunts and Uncles, Cousins, etc
The family is closer to the maternal side of things, they stopped spending as much time with the Paternal side when Pete’s parents died




History:
CW: Sexual Abuse, Gun Violence

Birth
Hazel was born as the third and final child of Nina and Pete Rhodes. A planned pregnancy as the pair were approaching 30 and decided they wanted another child before they got too old and wouldn’t have the energy to take care of one. She was born on September 13th, a healthy baby girl with no complications in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. With a population just under 4000, this nature-filled, charming suburb of the Cleveland-Akron-Canton metropolitan area was exactly the kind of place the Rhodes wanted to settle down and raise a family.

Young Childhood
Life with two other siblings significantly older than yourself could get hectic sometimes. As the smallest you were always in the middle seat or the back when you all went somewhere, or the one to retrieve something that went under the bed, or into a hole in a fence or through some trees to discover some new place while walking through the neighborhood ditch. Your brother was still the only one brave enough to go down the storm drain to get the dog when she got out and fell inside. You’d come home from a field with burrs all over the hem of your dress and socks. Or get a sunburn walking to and from the second nearest park because it had a splashpad. The collective disappointment when the place you usually fished became private property. The feeling of wind on your face as your hair whips around you, your eyes squeezed just barely open so you could still look at all the trees as you ride in the back of a truck with a neighbor’s children on a dirt road through the woods. Catching tadpoles in the small pools at the park, and sneaking them home in water bottles and plastic bags before letting them go once you realize you can’t feed them. Flushing your carnival-won goldfish so it could have a better life because you were convinced the cat would eat it, (and convincing everyone else the cat had eaten it). Stabbing yourself in the palm with a pencil after accidentally stabbing your best friend with the same pencil to apologize, and having matching scars for life.

Memories of being hooked up to an asthma machine. Never wanting to wear clothes or brush your hair. Crying when your mother made you cut your hair too short and you looked like a boy. Easter egg hunts in every family backyard. Every backyard of your childhood. Your mother, father, grandpa, uncle, aunt, anyone with the camera at some point. Especially holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, even all the birthdays and Fourth of July. You’d travel to towns even smaller than yours where farmers were still the primary population. Playing games in every room of every family member. Still being the youngest, you were “It” pretty often, and the boys could throw you around like a very small potato sack, and enjoyed practicing wrestling moves on you. Thankfully always onto a soft surface. Helping her parents cook, and her grandparents and sister bake as she got older.



Trauma in Youth
However, things weren’t always idyllic. No person or family is perfect, and the Rhodes were no exception. While Hazel was a happy and active child, she also had a problem with anxiety from a young age, which was sometimes mistaken for simple shyness. Her mother had OCD tendencies, and an anxiety that centered around driving, plus a combination guilt and persecution complex obtained from her own youth. She was the main contributor of microaggressions due to her own neuroses. Her father was always working and could barely focus on more than one thing at a time, including his children. He rarely raised his voice, but when he did it scared Hazel a great deal. Her brother had anger issues that he couldn’t process verbally, so he processed them by throwing things, hitting walls, and throwing her around, doing anything he could to scare her in his overstimulation. Her sister was the closest thing to her rock, but she had her own problems because she’d been forced to mature and become a family mediator of sorts, so to escape she was often out with friends. They were functionally dysfunctional - as her mother often put it: “People wonder how we get to town and back.”

These problems continued with extended family. They got along best with her maternal relatives, some of her paternal ones being very conservative or simply not great with her more centrist to liberal family. Her aunt was exuberant but sometimes infantile and had dealt with much death in her life, her uncle was funny but had lived as a bachelor his entire adult life and often had the air of feeling like the smartest person in the room. Her grandma and grandpa were loving and strong, but had grown up in a very different time, and showed evidence of that often. One of the only cousins who lived close enough for Hazel to play with started playing inappropriate games with her at a young age. He’d reached puberty and she was still a child, younger than she can remember. This went on for years, and though it started small, it grew more manipulative and intense as the years went on. There was no dramatic confrontation that ended this. Sometime around when she was eleven, she told him no, and it never happened again. Not that she hadn't done so before, but it stopped as inexplicably as it had started. She doesn't tell people about this, and no one in her family knows.

And she learned early that no matter how much you love someone, no one goes through this life without mistakes. She still loves her family, as complicated as her relationship with them feels the older she gets.

Tween Diagnosis
Hazel was still a fairly normal kid. Well, she was weird, but she wasn’t disliked among her peers or anything. If anything people would take advantage of her kindness or not approach her because she was weird and chubby and impressively average looking. She did manage to find her own clan of weirdos wherever she went, and had many best friends throughout the years. But when she entered middle school, things started to pile up and become more stressful, and hormones were added into the mix. She started being consistently late for school, not doing her work, and letting things pile up to the point where she would have panic attacks and lash out at home. That was when her parents realized that medication might be a necessary step to help. They had tried adhd medication with her siblings to little success, but they were fairly certain it was not the same problem. Though Hazel had been diagnosed with ADHD for years, now she was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder (meaning she was anxious all day, every day, and would probably be for the rest of her life), and mild depression.


Pills and complications
They tried several medication combinations, with varying success. One made her basically zombie-like and just contributed to her lack of motivation. One made her lash out physically as well as verbally and caused these episodes to happen more often than before. She ended up on an anti-anxiety medication that was also an anti-depressant and a focusing medication that was in and out in usefulness, but at least didn’t make things worse. She is still on the antidepressant medication to this day, but dropped the adhd pills after moving out and insisting they didn’t make her feel any different.


Mutation! More complications
When she was fifteen, only a few months from sixteen, Hazel had been sent inside the bank lugging a jar full of rolls of coins with a big sticker reading “RAINY DAY FUND” on the front. She’d painted the jar with clouds and waves years ago, and it was finally full, so her mother decided it was time to deposit it. She was waiting in the car - it was summer so Hazel was free, but it was a weekday, so Nina could still get work calls. Hazel had made it midway through the line, adjusting her grip on the large jar against her hip, when a man a couple people behind her in a hood put on a mask and pulled out a gun. Two other men she hadn’t noticed in different areas also pulled out different firearms and started telling people to get on the ground. Already feeling her panic raise, Hazel squatted down, clutching her jar so hard her fingers turned red. The first man tried to move up to the counter, but stumbled over Hazel, who was not all the way down. Seeing this, he shoved her down hard and made a point of stepping on her hair as he went over her. She tried to stay quiet, but couldn’t help the gasp of pain and fear that escaped her.

Two of the men were for the door, and the other two were getting money from the various tellers up front. There were about five manning the long counter, and three of them were still up with their hands up when they weren’t putting money into bags. The men were looking around wildly, erratically. They were readying themselves to leave when a siren started out of the door, and a police officer had a man on the hood of his car that appeared to have come from the men’s getaway van parked just outside now. Two more vehicles were close behind, and it was evident there were more working to block the exits. The men cursed, loudly, and the apparent leader grabbed an older man on the way to the door, holding a gun to his head and the man in front of him so that the police couldn’t get a clear shot. Hazel looked up from the floor, in a daze, trying to do anything but sit there, paralyzed in fear. Her panic driving her to move, even a little bit. What she didn’t see was the other robber coming up behind her as she put one leg up under her. She didn’t know he was there until his gun made hard contact with the back of her head. Falling to the ground a second time, she couldn’t help the groan of pain yet again, cursing herself for drawing attention. She noticed she was shaking and mused that she probably wouldn’t have been able to stand even if she tried. All four men looking outside now, she crawled and directed some of the other people moving to get behind the counters. If they started shooting, the police may well fire back. As she was looking around wildly, trying to get others to safety and hoping there would be room for her, she locked eyes on her glass jar on the floor just as it shattered to a bullet. Glass flew, she wasn’t sure how far, but she felt pricks on her face and hands. The men had tried to walk outside with their human shields and had fired on police, but one of the hostages had gotten loose. Hazel cried out as she saw the man run and then saw him drop with the sound of a car backfiring. Her vision was blurry now, and she crawled under a nearby table as the police returned fire, hoping the leg and glass top would be enough to shield her. She shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears as the popping continued. She felt more pricks and cuts on her face, and realized there was some glass in her sleeves. From the jar? From the now shattered doors? She couldn’t be sure, but she couldn’t bring herself to take her hands away. The pressure was the only thing keeping her intact. Her heart was beating erratically, she was hyperventilating now, and her body felt like it was on fire and at the same time like she couldn’t feel anything at all. Like she’d been set on fire and then dunked in ice, or vice versa, and neither act had negated the other. She didn’t know how long she sat there, her hands unable to cover the screaming and crying of her fellow hostages and yells of angry men.

Those sounds started to fade in what was probably only minutes, and she heard loud, heavy footsteps coming up the stone steps, onto the tile. She looked up, finally daring to open her eyes, and saw a cloud of white and green. She blinked once. Twice. She couldn’t see anything past it. Slivers, sometimes, of wall and window, but then they’d be gone again. It was… money? Money, and paper. Looked like professional papers. Envelopes. She couldn’t read anything, they were moving too fast. Wait, why were they moving? She broke out of the immediate shock and looked around her to find the same thing. She was surrounded by… paper? She was so surprised she couldn’t process what was happening, or what had just happened. Until she heard a gun cock. Was it… the police? She saw through a sliver, a black dress shoe and navy pant leg. Pointed at her. A balding blond head. Part of a face. All pointed at her. She leaned forward the slightest bit, and her hands started to lower. Only to feel one of the papers go by and slice the back of her hand. She gasped in shock, and the torrent picked up speed and intensity. “Help!” She started, realizing once she tried to speak that her voice was hoarse and thick with crying. Once she noticed she was crying, the sobs started in earnest. She just kept saying “Help, help,” over and over. She felt so strange. She felt someone try to get close and could’ve sworn it got a little bigger around her. No, she wanted them to help. As she thought this, it got smaller again. It was… listening to her? ‘Stop.’ It slowed. ‘Please stop.’ The papers stilled. She reached out and found it didn’t cut her this time. Instant relief washed over her, and as soon as she felt that release, the papers fell in a spiraling pile around her. This small, gangly girl was met with six officers, two of whom had their guns drawn and pointed at her, others on radio or appearing to talk. The rest of the bank was empty. They’d gotten everyone else out, but they couldn’t get to her. The men, surprised at her appearance, let their guns down. And the sobbing that had stuck in her throat when she’d seen them came back in earnest. She just sat there on the floor, crying, surrounded by strange officers who had no idea what to do with her. She didn’t even notice the table she’d been under before closing her eyes had been pushed ten feet away and laid on its side.

After the medical treatment for her cuts from the glass and paper, making sure she didn’t have a concussion from her head injury, shock blankets, and official statements, her mother took her home. She’d been spoken to by the officers about the cloud of paper they’d witnessed. And she didn’t know what to make of it. As the weeks passed, she tried to forget the body bags and bullet littered lawn. But what she couldn’t get past most of all was herself. What she had done, and this weird feeling that wouldn’t go away. Eventually her parents sat her down and told her they were concerned. They’d talked to some people, and it looked like she may be a mutant. So they’d found a school, or a school had found them while they were searching. They were sorry she wouldn’t be going back to school with her friends, but they really thought it was best that she get the kind of help she couldn’t get here. She couldn’t help but feel they were glad to not have to deal with this part of her. And as much as she couldn’t blame them for that, it still stung. She hated to admit it, but it felt natural. She’d been studying origami in her room, and she could make simple patterns just by looking at something hard enough. She didn’t understand it yet, and she wasn’t sure she wanted this, but she had it.



Xavier’s
Hazel has been at Xavier’s for a short period of time, just over two months now, and still spends most of her time in her room. She’s still adjusting to the intense change of environment and life, as well as her new standing as an apparent “mutant.” She hasn’t made any close friends yet, though there are people she wants to get to know better. She’s not bad at being personable, but she is a more withdrawn person at first, and she’d just left behind friends she’d known since literal diapers. She still facetimed her best friends, but they were starting to get a little distant now that school had started to pick up. They had lives. Lives she was no longer a direct part of. And she’d had no say in that.

Secrets.