Post by thetypicalgoon on Jan 9, 2024 13:27:18 GMT
General Information
Full Name
Xanaya (Zah-Nai-Ah) Martinez.
Codename or Alias
'Mirage' - a name she was given shortly after becoming a student at Xavier's School for Gifted Children. The name stuck.
Anonymity
High. She is not a big, universal name, but she has gained a bit of notoriety for her powers when they have slipped out of her control.
Gender
Female.
Race
Mutant.
Age
19.
Place Of Birth
Rochester, New York.
Occupation/Status
Student. Lives in a dorm at Xavier's School for Gifted Children.
Alignment
Neutral. She doesn't feel much of a desire to be anyone's hero, but she doesn't want to be the cause of anyone's suffering either.
Factions
Xavier's School for Gifted Children.
Canon Or Original?
Original.
Powers/Abilities
Mirage
Whenever someone is looking at her, they will not be able to see her clearly. She will appear distorted, perhaps even multiplied, and either closer or more further away than she really is. Additionally, that person will start to feel emotionally conflicted. Meaning, they might start to feel sad or angry or happy or jealous or all of these at the same time and not understand why. But the reason for it has to do with the strength and complexity of Xenaya's passive state of being. Even when calm, she cannot help but influence the people around her. Coinciding with this, it's possible that the person looking at her may start to see her as being something completely different due to what that person is feeling and the associations that person has with that feeling. For instance, maybe someone was bitten by a dog as a child and has an intense fear of dog-like creatures. So, looking at her, they receive an intense fear and thus she begins to appear as a dog-like creature that seems real to the viewer but, in reality, is just an illusion/trick of the mind.
Aura
Xenaya's emotions are extremely powerful. For example, if she were to go off the emotional rails and into a rage, everyone in the area will feel this rage building up inside themselves and, if not emotionally intelligent, they will need to release that rage through violence. To put this simply, she can become the embodiment of an emotion, literally becoming that emotion in totality. This is not something she has learned to control. She cannot simply become happiness at a moment's notice. It's something that happens when the situation forces it to happen and if she is ever in this state, it is generally not a good thing for her. It means she is completely physically incapacitated.
Emotional Field
There is a non-physical plane of emotion that Xenaya has access to. When she is up and cognizant, she cannot fully delve into this plane, but when she is asleep, incapacitated, or otherwise 'not in her body,' she is fully on this plane. This plane is not limited by time or space or objects. She can travel it freely and pick up on emotions anywhere in the universe and at any point in time. However, due to the sheer amount of information, it can be difficult for her to parcel out what is what. Usually, this ends up with her in an emotional nightmare of sorts as she gravitates to emotional signatures that are familiar to her, including the negatives ones such as the emotions surrounding the car accident.
Gaze Sensitivity
She has the uncanny ability to immediately know when she is being looked at or focused upon. When someone directs their attention, their energy and emotions, onto her, she can feel it.
Empathy
She knows exactly what every living thing around her is feeling at any given time, from fungi to people. This being the case, she intuitively knows when someone is lying or 'beating around the bush.' She does not need to see the person or creature for her to feel their emotions. For example, if an angry man with a gun is coming down the street, she will be able to feel this rage from several blocks away. Because this ability is tied to feelings, it is not always tied to a living body. A house in which a person was murdered, for example, will have a dark feeling to it. She can read this and discern what happened from the feelings 'in the air.' For Xenaya, the world is a field of emotion that she has to navigate. Oftentimes, she loses track of the physical world as she is intimately aware of and existing on the emotional plane as well. She often doesn't see people in terms of their physical selves, but rather in terms of their unique emotional signature. She sees people for what they actually are, versus what they appear to be.
This ability cannot be turned off, but it can be reduced through the special blend of tea she makes.
Emotional Manipulation
Xenaya can subtly influence/control another person's emotions just by feeding particular feelings towards that person. This is very dependent on who she is attempting to influence because someone who is extremely sad, for example, cannot simply be made happy. It's a poking and prodding, a puzzle of sorts that she has to figure out in order to first work that person back into neutrality and then into happiness. The closer they are to that neutral point, the easier it is for her to manipulate them. It takes time and patience and control to work with emotions. They are essentially a secret language that only a handful of people, Xenaya included, can 'speak' fluently.
Weakness:
Her powers are contingent upon her own emotional stability. If she does not have control over her own emotions, she can easily lose control of herself and spiral into an emotional cataclysm where she is unable to do anything at all or she is completely out of her own control. Though she has a high degree of control and perception of emotions outside of herself, she has an extremely difficult time managing her own. Additionally, she quite literally cannot help feeling other people's emotions when they come into her presence. She feels everything palpably. Thus, if there are too many emotions, she will not be able to facilitate them all and will crash-out as stated above. Finally, those who are very aware of their emotional state or who feel very little (or perhaps even not at all) are much harder to affect or can't be affected at all.
Weapons/Items
Crystal necklace
A necklace made for her by another mutant. This crystal necklace prevents her 'Mirage' from happening and dampens her aura. She wears this so she can have normal interactions with people and, if she does 'explode,' the effects are severely lessened.
Smartphone
Gotta have a phone, right?
Black Backpack
Carries her art supplies, books, tea, and other miscellaneous items
Appearance
Physical Appearance
Height
5'3.
Weight
125 lbs.
Skin Color
Light honey.
Eyes
Brown with a reddish hue.
Hair
Wavy, chest-length, dark-brown.
Scars/Tattoos
She has a thick, monstrous scar starting just underneath her left breast which travels in a jagged, diagonal line down to her right hip. Also, she has cutting marks from her right elbow down to her right wrist.
Jeans and loose shirts, sweatpants and hoodies, long-sleeved shirts and shorts. Oftentimes these clothes are ripped or have splotches of paint on them. Xenaya dresses in a way that is simple and almost careless at times. Her colors are generally dark - blacks and grays and dark purples. She shies away from vibrancy primarily because she wants to limit her own exposure to other people due to the nature of her abilities. Coinciding with that, she is not one to show skin, particularly because of her scars. If she were to go to the beach, she would wear a long-sleeved dark shirt over her bathing suit. Her wrists are usually adorned in crystal bracelets and she generally wears a set of emerald earrings.
Sexual Orientation
Heterosexual.
General Personality
Xanaya is a quiet, almost solemn girl and has been this way ever since she lost her twin brother as well as a close friend of hers in a car accident. Not only does she have a fear of connecting more than superficially with anyone for the reason that she does not want to experience that sort of loss again, but she is averse to spending even cordial time with people because of her abilities. As such, she generally comes across as curt and to-the-point in conversation so that she spends the least amount of time around people. However, she does not dislike people and she is never intentionally rude. She just understands that she has a limit and this limit can be reached quickly, especially if she is not under the sedative effects of her tea. She does not want to end up on the middle of the floor, curled in a ball and screaming in pain.
Xanaya is a quiet, almost solemn girl and has been this way ever since she lost her twin brother as well as a close friend of hers in a car accident. Not only does she have a fear of connecting more than superficially with anyone for the reason that she does not want to experience that sort of loss again, but she is averse to spending even cordial time with people because of her abilities. As such, she generally comes across as curt and to-the-point in conversation so that she spends the least amount of time around people. However, she does not dislike people and she is never intentionally rude. She just understands that she has a limit and this limit can be reached quickly, especially if she is not under the sedative effects of her tea. She does not want to end up on the middle of the floor, curled in a ball and screaming in pain.
Coming from an eclectic family full of creatives, she's extremely artistic, loving to draw and paint and even dance within the confines of her own living space. For her, art is a way to release the complexities of her emotional state, which is in high-gear nearly all of the time. Generally, when she is not in-class, she is in her room with candles lit and music playing as she works on one of her many creative crafts. Following this, Xanaya appears to be extremely disorganized and even unclean at times. She spends so much time internally that she tends to forget to take care of things outside of herself. Some might think her lazy, but it's more-so a lack of energy as most of her energy is spent trying to keep her emotions in check. Sometimes this keeps her up for days. It's not uncommon to see her with rings around her eyes, which she attempts to cover-up with makeup when she has the energy to bother with makeup.
Despite her uniqueness, Xanaya does not think of herself highly. She blames herself for the deaths of her brother and her friend. On one occasion, shortly after their deaths, she overdosed on antidepressants and would have died if not for the timely arrival of her brother. She tried to kill herself because she could not handle the pain anymore. She felt the fear and pain of her twin and her friend as they died as if it were her own fear and pain. Xanaya thinks that having emotions, in general, is a curse, and that being able to feel everyone else's emotions is an even worse curse. Because she views her abilities as a burden, she drinks her tea like an addictive drug to quench her powers as much as possible. She hasn't been able to understand why she is so perceptive of everyone else's emotions and yet cannot figure her own out.
Siblings
She has two half-brothers that are older than her (32 and 29) and a twin brother who tragically died in a car accident. Her oldest living brother is a soldier and the other lives a quiet life as a librarian.
Mother
A professor of aesthetics and a fashion designer.
Father
A world-famous painter.
Other Family
Her aunt, who is a herbalist.
History
Truthfully, Xanaya could not have asked for a better childhood. She lived in a nice house in a nice community with a loving mother and a supportive father, both of whom were open-minded, adventurous folks that took their children all around the world. Her parents attended to her every need while maintaining discipline and a close sense of family.
Being a twin, she and her brother were naturally extremely close to each other. If you seen one, you seen the other. Their parents put them in the same activities - piano lessons, clay-modeling, dancing, drawing, soccer, etc. They did everything together. Her life, up until her sophomore year in high school, consisted of vacations and learning different skills. Her parents held the philosophy that their children should be introduced to as many different things as possible so that they would have a better idea of what they like and don't like. For Xanaya, she took to her father, favoring art, and worked on her craft whenever she had time.
When Xanaya was 15, she, her twin brother, and two close friends were all in a car on the way to a concert. As they were driving, a drunk driver ran a red light at nearly 100 miles per hour and T-boned their vehicle. The impact immediately killed one of her friends, who was sent flying from the windshield. Her other friend, the driver, lost the use of her legs for life but lived. Xanaya's brother, however, was impaled by a piece of metal that slit Xanaya's midsection open before embedding itself into her brother. She watched her twin brother bleed to death just as she herself was bleeding out.
After passing out from a lack of blood, Xanaya woke up in the hospital to find that what had happened had not been a dream. At that moment, emotions surged through her so strongly that she put herself into a coma.
Her body spent 2 months in this coma, but she was 'awake' on the emotional plane the entire time. And she was lost. She had no conception of her self and her emotions. When she finally came back to her body, a miracle in itself, Xanaya could scarcely function. She couldn't talk and would shake and hyperventilate and cry or smile or yell at random. She had no control over her own emotional state. When she was released from the hospital, school was completely out of the question. She spent all of her time in her room, shifting in and out of reality. In this time, she began to cut herself. After a few weeks of this, Xanaya swallowed two dozen of the antidepressants she'd been prescribed in a serious attempt at ending her own suffering.
Fortunately, Xanaya's oldest brother, who'd been on military leave so that he could help with the situation, was there and found Xanaya convulsing on the floor, foaming at the mouth. He called the EMTs who pumped her stomach and nursed her back to a stable condition. After this happened, her parent's thought the best thing for Xanaya's well being would be to for her to leave Rochester and start anew. Xanaya's aunt, a woman who she'd met a few times throughout her life but knew very little about, agreed to take her in and care for her.
Xanaya's aunt is a woman who surrounds herself with life - plants, crystals, and good energy. In her presence, Xanaya was able to calm down enough to start to form a kernel of herself again. She was able to have a structured thought again. She began to attend high school once again and slowly replaced cutting with drawing and painting. During this time, Xanaya started to become aware that she had powers of some kind. She started to understand that she could see emotions. That she could speak in them. She said nothing to anyone about this because she hated herself for it. She wanted nothing to do with emotions and tried her best to stop them. So, using a bit of knowledge that she gathered from her aunt, she created her own unique blend of tea in an attempt to quench her abilities. This tea worked well-enough for others' emotions, but not her own.
As such, school soon overwhelmed her. Having to deal with the drama of other girls, the pestering of boys, and the struggles of having to see counselors and do school work became too much for her. She felt as though no one understood her and she couldn't find her place in this school. One day, she exploded in an emotional outburst of fear and sadness and anger that put nearly her entire high school into emotional distress. Some of the other students and even a few teachers have never recovered from this and live their lives with PTSD, paranoia, and anxiety. Directly after this, she developed her 'Mirage' ability and could no longer interact with anyone. Because of the event at her school and the circulating news of a girl who 'couldn't be looked at,' she was put on the radar of Xavier's School for Gifted Children who sent a recruitment team to her aunt's house.
After a lengthy conversation, Xanaya packed her belongings, hugged her aunt, and became a student at Xavier's School for Gifted Children at the age of 17 in order to learn how to manage her powers and cope with her trauma. She has been there since.
Role Play Sample
