minerva paige hawthorne

the basics

full name ♦ Minerva Paige Hawthorne
nicknames ♦ Minnie, Minnie Paige
age ♦ sixteen
birthday ♦ April 23rd, 2003
occupation ♦ student, volunteers at Monroeville
school ♦ Primrose
species ♦ Human
ability/power ♦ plant manipulation
how the ability works ♦
Minnie has the ability to grow or kill plants with impunity. It takes very little concentration to control a small area, but something like a giant oak is currently out of her wheelhouse. She could kill or revive sections of it but not the entire thing, and to do either would take a lot out of her, rendering her sick and dazed for a little bit. Mostly, she can induce growth or kill plants that are already planted or coax them to grow in certain directions, a skill which she is attempting to expand. She’s working on being able to raise something from nothing, but like overreaching with her power, this leaves her drained and feeling irritable. Being around places completely void of plants can have the same effect.

Her power is deeply tied to her emotions, and without an anchor, the results could be devastating around her. For this reason, she has a small plot of land both at home and in a greenhouse at Primrose that she has “bonded” with. Instead of killing random, nearby plants when she cries or causing overgrowth when she’s happy, she is able to connect to that controlled plot and affect whatever change happens from her powers. This could be anything from withering all the plants, only to grow them again, to growing new plants or pushing advance growth on the plants already there. If she’s feeling particularly overwhelmed, the flower bed can experience rapid change.

gender ♦ cis female, she/her
sexuality ♦ unknown

the appearance

face claim ♦ Joey King
height and weight ♦ 5’5” and 120 pounds
identifying features ♦ Her eyes are bright blue, and she likes them well enough to consider them identifiable.
overall appearance ♦
Minnie is just about average height but proportioned in a way that makes her seem a bit smaller. She tends to be compact, with more curves than she is currently comfortable with and considers t-shirts and jeans to be her best friends when not confined to a uniform. She has a typicality about her and keeps her naturally brunette hair cropped to near her shoulders, where it can frame her wide, circle, childlike face. Her full lips can give her a melancholy resting face, especially when she’s thinking or distracted.

the personality

likes ♦
❧ books and learning: “There’s so much to learn in the world, and besides, knowledge can never up and leave you.”
❧ unicorns: “I mean, I can make roses grow with a thought. Who is to say what’s out there in the world?”
❧ flowers and plants: “I always feel a little bit better when I’m outside in the gardens, not that I’m like some environmental freak or anything.”
❧ time to herself: “People are all right, I guess, but there’s nothing better than sitting in the grass or a tree and reading or just people watching.”
❧ the morning: “The earlier I wake up, the more I can get done in a day. It’s simple math.”

dislikes ♦
❧ people who are rude: “I just tried to talk to you; don’t bite my head off. And being a jerk isn’t cool.  It’s just sad.”
❧ feeling dumb or small/being wrong: “I try my best to make sure that is a rare occurrence.”
❧ failure: “I got a B- once. I cried so hard that I accidentally killed a crepe myrtle tree outside the dorm. History is just really hard, okay?”

strengths ♦
❧ intelligent: “Not to brag or anything, but I’m pretty smart.”
❧ outgoing: “I love to meet and talk to new people. The world is so big; you never know who you’re going to meet.”
❧ optimistic: “Sometimes things really, really, really suck, but they get better. They have to, right?”

weaknesses ♦
❧ arrogant and not very aware of it. She has little idea of how she comes off to other people.
❧ overly sensitive. Even though she tries to hide it, Min can be very sensitive about her feelings and those of others. It makes her empathetic but vulnerable. She cries at the drop of a hat, and she hates it.
❧ naïve and desperate to be liked. Though unwilling to change certain things about herself, Min wants to fit in and be liked. It’s easy for some but not her, and this often gets her into sticky situations.

dreams ♦
❧ to help people like her mother in some way, shape, or form
❧ to graduate with honors and get into an Ivy somewhere

fears ♦
❧ that she’ll end up like her mother
❧ that she'll never make a name for herself

overall personality ♦
Minnie has been considered an eager beaver for most of her life, which is just fine with her. She’s never been shy about who she is or what she does, and there are still times where she rarely meets a stranger. She’s not a chatty Cathy, but she does enjoy making new friends out of the people she meets. They are all a new experience, which she craves. This, of course, can make her extremely annoying to more reserved people who happen to be caught in her crosshairs. Add in the fact that her entire identity is pretty much built around learning and books with a dash of magic, and you have a person who can be very polarizing.

Minnie tends to take the lead in every group project and almost always ends up doing it on her own because 1) she’s very worried about her own grade but 2) maybe that could be her way to worm into someone else’s heart. When challenged, Minnie can be unduly stubborn, and the veneer of bubbly can begin to crack a bit. She’ll cry long before she turns into a mean girl, however. In fact, she’ll cry long before she does anything else. It doesn’t take much for her to do that, for everything from happy tears to sad tears to frustrated tears. Minnie tends to wear her feelings on her sleeve, much to her consternation. Most of the time, it’s fine. She’s perfectly happy to show herself being happy, but any time a negative feeling arises, it can feel like the end of the world.

Her outgoing nature hides a set of inner and unchecked biases. She is, after all, a student of Primrose, and as such, her view of the world is defined by those ivory pillars. She has a vast empathy for all people, but empathy is only so personal and only goes so far. She can still find herself in situations where her need to help and be liked is not wanted or appreciated or, conversely, entirely conditional upon who the other person is. For all of her talk, Minnie is concerned about fitting but with the right kind of people.

the history

father ♦ Bertrand Hawthorne, 54, Real Estate tycoon
mother ♦ Eleanor Hawthorne (nee Bradford), 52, socialite
siblings ♦ Lucius Hawthorne, 19, big brother
Andromeda Hawthorne, 19, big sister
important people ♦ none
hometown ♦ Chicago, IL
overall history ♦
No one needs a second daughter, not really. One boy, one girl, one mother, one father. That’s the nuclear family, and some people should quit while they’re ahead. But no. Your parents had to push it, and although you’re grateful for being born, you can’t dispute the fact that maybe you were one over the allowed limit. You were never oblivious to the fact that your mom was…different from other mothers. That didn’t mean you loved her any less, but you felt like she never felt anything at all. She just seemed like she was there, in the background, colored with muted colors. Lifeless. She was like a magnolia, bruised and dying by rough handling. No one said they blamed you, at least not to your face, but you could feel it in the early years. You had never known any different, but your siblings had memories of your mother from before. Then you came and things changed. It was logical that something was your fault. Maybe you broke something on the way out.

You tried to be close to your sister and brother, but it seemed to take them a while to come around to you. In the meantime, you turned to books, to the ones your mother seemed unwilling to read to you. From the moment you learned enough to actually read instead of memorize, you read everything you could get your hands on, but fairytales were your favorite. You always felt like you lived one, as though you were a princess with a cursed queen mother. You stopped praying to God and started trying to call a fairy godmother that could bring back the life to your house. Even as you graduated to chapter books then more full-fledged fantasy novels, even as you learned to separate what was real from what wasn’t, you still kept the secret hope that some magical cure could be found for your family.

Your mother had a garden once. It was a small, two-foot by four-foot plot of land sectioned off by bricks and looping iron arches, each one carefully placed by her in the time before she was…the way she was. You could never understand it. You couldn’t imagine her taking care of something like that; you couldn’t imagine her having a passion for anything in life. For as long as you could remember, the garden had stood full of detritus and weeds. But then you turned 13 one April, and you spent a lot of that spring sitting by the garden, reading and trying to imagine what your mother had been like.

You cried once, then twice, then thrice. Like a fairytale, the third time was the charm. The weeds in the garden withered, slowly at first, before falling in on themselves. They returned to the land, and in their place, new blooms began to poke up, much too quickly to be natural. You knew it! You were a princess with powers, and your tears, like all princess tears, were magical. Coneflowers split the earth and rose high, almost to your shoulder, in a matter of minutes. But just as quickly as they reached their preternatural heights, they wilted and snapped under their own weight. After a few more minutes, the flower patch was dead once more. But you had seen it change, and though you didn’t know exactly how, you knew you did it.

It took you nearly a month, but you figured out how to make yourself do it again and again and again. The landscaper was shocked to see the patch in growth once more, but you made sure he didn’t touch it. It had been your mother’s, but now it was yours. In the year before you could be sent to Primrose to join your siblings, you worked with that plot of land, watched it cycle through emotions and stages with you, watched the blooms last past their natural life, even peeking through the heavy snow of a Chicago winter. Leaving that plot of land was harder than leaving your parents.

Primrose was a different beast entirely. Your sister and brother already had their place, but you were new and had no niche. You had your books, a need to make new friends, and nothing much else. But most of friendship is a war of attrition, and if you’re nice enough, you can try to make friends with anyone. So that’s what you tried, to mixed reactions. But sometimes it did work, and even if it didn’t, you had your studies to focus on. You tore through curriculum with the same voracity you tore through the books you read for fun. Your studies and the little plot in the Primrose greenhouse were all you had; the least you could do was do right by both. You were content at Primrose.

But the family curse came back for your sister, and the fear and sadness was heavy in your heart. You sat at the end of her hospital bed when she slept and kept the get-well blooms in her room vibrant and alive, pouring all your heart into them even when it hurt and your head pounded in time to it. You loved her; you didn’t understand what happened. You understood the mechanics (after all, you are smart), but you didn’t understand. There were so many things you didn’t understand and didn’t know how to process, and there are still so many things. Sometimes you feel like you’re right back where you started.

But life went on, and you grew up. You’re still growing up, a fact that you like to remind everyone of. Sometimes you’re just a little sister, and that frustrates you. You are Minerva Paige Hawthorne, and you’re a name in your own right. Before you leave Primrose, you just want everyone to know that.

the role player

alias ♦ bree
age ♦ 54
pronouns ♦ she/her
code ♦ ADMIN EDIT
other characters ♦ so many