Returning post count: 470
IndividualCharacter's full name: Elizabeth Jane Sundance
Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Liz.
Gender: Female
Age: 27
Date of Birth: 5/13/95
Nationality/ Ethnicity: American with Irish descent.
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Jersey City, New Jersey
AppearanceHair color and style:Wavy blonde hair that stops partway down her back. It’s usually flowing free or done up in some fancy style.
Eyes: Soft brown.
Height: 5’3
Build: Liz has some curves and keeps fit through daily exercise.
Visible mutation: None.
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: Pierced ears, although she doesn’t wear earrings often. She has a diagonal scar from a knife cut on her left side.
Other features: She thinks her left ear is bigger than her right, but nobody else does. She almost never wears make-up.
Everyday clothing style: Liz will wear just about anything that isn’t very revealing. Dresses, jeans, blouses, t-shirts, flip-flops, tennis shoes, just about anything will work. She prefers wearing bright colors.
Uniform: N/A
Sleepwear: Normally an oversized shirt and lounge pants.
Miscellaneous clothing: Elizabeth has a giant sombrero and a wide assortment of sunglasses. She carries pepper spray and/or a stun gun with her everywhere she goes.
CharacterPersonality: Liz is quite the goody-two-shoes. She hates breaking rules and tries her best to abide by them. Despite that, she’s a very easy-going girl who never likes drawing much attention to her. She’s willing to try to get along with everybody but she draws the line at bullies. She’s pretty shy around new people and takes a long time to warm up to them. She gets embarrassed easily. Elizabeth is very optimistic and has a tendency to “forget” bad things, as if they never happened.
Over the years, Liz has changed. When dealing with unknown people or in uncertain situations, she’s developed a fight or flight mentality, with heavy emphasis on the “fight” part. She tends to be no-nonsense unless around friends and is not above threat or dominance displays if needed. She’s spent too much time in the minds of animals and dealt with too many of their instincts to not unconsciously (or consciously) channel them in her everyday interactions. Because of this, Liz is a lot freer with her emotions and after coming to grips with many things that used to cause her great fear, she’s learned to smile freely and genuinely. She’s become far more forceful and assertive when needed and isn’t afraid to stand up for herself or others. She also tends to flip quickly from one emotion to another.
Hobbies/ Interests:- Singing (to herself)
- Drawing
- Playing piano
- Playing with animals
- Self defense
- Helping others and volunteering
- Sunglasses
Job or part time job and description: She’s returning to the X-Mansion to teach Biology and general science. She has a side gig of training animals and specializing in police dogs.
Fears/ phobias/ concerns: Liz has a fear of getting burnt and has always thought that she’d die in a fire one day. She used to have other, lesser fears, but they gave way to the remnants of major traumas in her mid to late teenage years. As a result of frequent kidnappings and assaults,
Liz has a fear of being helpless and losing all control.
Special talents: Elizabeth is a decent ventriloquist, can speak and understand Spanish decently, can bake delicious cakes, and can come up with convincing lies on the spot. She’s a black belt in Krav Maga and is certified in CPR, First Aid, and police dog training. She’s also a pretty good shot with a handgun.
MoralityGood/ bad/ neutral/ other: She likes to think of herself as being Good. Even if sometimes she feels like a monster.
Mutations
Animal Possession
Mutation description: Elizabeth can separate her mind from her body and possess the mind and body of any animal within 15 feet.
Strengths: She can do anything the animal can, except voluntarily control its involuntary functions. Theoretically, Elizabeth could possess another animal through an animal, as long as they’re within 15 feet or return to her body from within the same range. If she attempts possessing an animal or returning to her body when out of her range, she will forcibly be returned to the animal. There is no limit to how long Elizabeth can remain in an animal’s body. When Elizabeth is possessing an animal, her real body is immune to anything that affects higher thought processes or voluntary functions (ex: mind control, telepathy, memory manipulation). She gains powerful mental resistance while in an animal’s body, due to the animal’s mind being there as well. Possessing an animal also gives the animal heightened mental resistance, especially against mind control or action influence, due to the animal not being in control of its body. As the animal gives her, Liz's mind in the animal's mind gives it higher resistance to telepathy.
Weaknesses: Elizabeth must be within 15 feet of the animal to possess it or to return to her body. When possessing, she has no control over her real body. She doesn’t even have any idea of what is happening to it. Her real body acts comatose, but without most brain function. The only thing her mind can do is keep the body alive through involuntary functions.
Side effects of possessing an animal or returning to her body without physical contact may include: nausea, fainting, blackouts, migraines, headaches, disorientation, confusion, temporary memory loss, stumbling, temporary synesthesia, and/or inability to move. The effects increase the farther away her mind was, possibly to the point of death, but that would be from very far away (too far for her, at least for now). Physical transferring is harmless and completely safe. All transferrings require physical energy so extensive use can become quite draining. Distance also affects energy drain. Does not work on false animals (shifters, shifted people, animals created by other mutants)or humans. Any other real animal is fair game, including animals that other mutants may have influence over. Smart animals may be aware of Elizabeth and can impede her efficiency if they fight her.
Animal EmpathySecondary mutation description: Elizabeth passively receives emotional feedback from animals within a radius of about 200 feet. It takes specific concentration to actively send emotions to one or more animals or to stop receiving them.
Strengths: She can calm some of the wildest beasts or she can turn a group into an angry horde. She always knows the moods animals are in.
Weaknesses: Unless she stops them, Elizabeth can become overwhelmed or influenced by the emotions she receives. When under a lot of stress or experiencing a strong emotion, Elizabeth may accidentally broadcast the emotion to every animal in her range. Sending to specific animals requires seeing it for the best results. It takes much more concentration to actively use while possessing an animal. Emotions are weaker the farther out they are, to the point of being unnoticeable.
Zoopathy [Power Growth 9/6/20]Growth description: Elizabeth can sense thoughts, intentions, desires, and sensory information from animals within a radius of about 200 feet. She can also project her own thoughts, sensory information, and impressions on animals. The power is always on, although fairly weak unless she’s actively focusing on it and using it.
Strengths: She can read an animal’s mind or communicate her thoughts to it. She can tell what your cat is really thinking about you right now or plant an image of your face in the mind of every pigeon in a flock. She can also tell what your animal is seeing, hearing, smelling, etc.
Weaknesses: Animals think differently than humans, so while she can implant ideas in their heads, that doesn’t mean they’ll understand them. A trained dog might understand the idea of “stop” but a housefly won’t. Liz’ brain also isn’t wired like an animal’s. Just because she can receive a live sensory feed or a stream of consciousness from them doesn't mean she has the ability to make sense of it, especially if it’s outside the range of her natural human abilities or the animal is not intelligent enough to string thoughts together logically. It’s also difficult to make sense of sensory information or even thoughts coming from multiple animals at once and this will cause headaches and confusion.
Zoopathy isn’t mind control, it’s communication. To make an animal do what she wants, she’ll have to trick, train, or convince it to do it. Hopefully it’s smart enough to figure out her own goals. She knows what that dog is growling at, but she can’t
make him stop growling or even look away. At best she can project images of dog bones to it and hope that appeases it. She also only reads what is currently going through the animal’s mind and/or what it’s actively thinking about.
Smart animals may sometimes recognize her thoughts are not their own. If Liz isn’t aware of it, a particularly clever animal or a bunch of animals with a similar desire can subtly influence her behavior and cause her to do things unconsciously. As with her empathic abilities, sending to specific animals requires seeing it for the best results and It takes much more concentration to actively use while possessing an animal. Thoughts are weaker the farther out they are, to the point of being unnoticeable.
Animal Oversoul [Power Growth 2/22/22]Mutation description: Liz generates a psychic network that connects her to all animals within 200 feet as if all are part of a single organism and a single mind, with herself as the leader. Animals begin acting and behaving in sync with her desires, moods, and thoughts, as well as working in coordination with each other.
Strengths: Liz and all animals in range gain an instinctive sense of where they’re all at relative to herself and each other, what they are, and what each one wants. This allows them to home in on her or each other as desired, allowing advanced coordination without the need for physical detection. She can suppress this effect if desired.
Animals take on her mentality as well. They react to things and people as Liz would, treating them as hostile, allies, etc. They instinctively understand her and what she wants and they abide by her wants automatically, just as one's own body instinctively does what the mind wants. As long as she can visualize it, the animals can do it, even if it involves multiple animals of different species working together for a single task. She can also assign animals abstract goals for them to work toward however they see fit.
At any given point, she knows every animal within range as well as they do. She’s acutely in tune with everything they think and feel about everything at the moment. She knows what they know and can instinctively interpret their senses and memories. Normally this is just background noise, but an animal that experiences a strong reaction to something (like a rabbit seeing a hunting hawk) will draw her attention, just just jamming your toe against a table leg will get your attention. Animals will not voluntarily harm her in any way, nor will they harm each other while under her influence, unless she expressly wants them to.
Because she’s nominally inside the minds of all animals around her at all times (unless she deliberately excludes specific animals or suppresses her power completely), and because her own psychic powers keep growing, Liz is now extremely difficult to mess with psychically. On the slight chance anything does affect her, she’s usually able to shake it off quickly or launch an extremely aggressive counter-offensive backed by the minds of all animals around her.
Weaknesses: Very simple tasks don't require much thought or coordination, but more complex actions that are above the intelligence level of the involved animals require direct attention to coordinate. The more attention she has to pay to any one or more animals, the less attention she can give to others. Similarly, she can give out many different simple tasks to various groups of animals, but the more complex of ideas, the fewer she can manage. There’s also the risk that animals might interpret more vaguely defined goals differently than Liz, which can lead to unintended effects. It's a sliding scale from crowd control to micromanaging.
Liz has access to a vast amount of data at any time, varying based on the amount of animals around. Unless she blocks it out, she can get overwhelmed by access to all those minds and runs the risk of being spread so thin or becoming so consumed with an animal that she’s unaware of what’s going on around her own body.
This power is always on, at least to a small degree, and takes effort to suppress, which means Liz has to constantly pay attention to even her slightest whims and fancies to ensure animals aren’t carrying out idle fantasies. Sure, she may not like you, but that doesn’t mean she actually wants every animal around to viciously assault you. This means that it takes even more self-control and rest to stay on top of her game. She also has to make sure that she’s not endangering any animals or putting them through undue stress. Animals will do everything they can to obey her, until involuntary functions or an external force stops them, requiring more focus from her to monitor them. With greater power, she has to reach for even greater responsibility.
Elizabeth’s control and commands over animals only last as long as they’re in range. As soon as they’re out of range, they’re free to do whatever they want.
Fighting StyleExplanation: Liz used to be well-versed in basic damsel-in-distress-jitsu (slapping, kicking, scratching, screaming for help, etc.) but has taken pains to overcome this. She’s a black belt in Krav Maga and is almost always armed with a stun gun and pepper spray. She has no problems channeling any alarm or aggression from surrounding animals and now tends to fight brutally and viciously until there’s an opening to escape. After a few years of training with Cold Steel and Serena, Liz has picke dup some Aikido, Judo, and a smattering of other martial arts as well.
Pros for fighting style: Liz fights like a cornered animal, no-holds-barred, and has no problem with excessive force or liberal use of pepper spray and her stun gun.
Cons for fighting style: Liz specializes in self-defense and fights enough to get away or at least make her attackers think twice before pursuing her. In anything prolonged or against people who aren’t taken by surprise, she can be overwhelmed, especially by those much bigger than her.
Faction AllegianceUnaffiliated
History Of Your CharacterElizabeth was born to two hardworking parents, Jeremy and Amanda Sundance. She was raised with strong morals and an inner strive to do her best. She never caused any major problems and never got very sick. Her little sister, Allison, was born four years later.
Throughout school, Elizabeth flew under the radar. She was always in the top of the class but she never bragged about it. She had a small circle of friends; she had no need to be popular or anything. She never got in trouble (at least, trouble that counted). She became very active in her church’s youth group and in school functions, wanting a beneficial way to spend her evenings and summers. Life was pretty good for Liz.
One day during the summer when she was twelve, Liz returned home from volunteering at a soup kitchen. Her parents ruined her day with the worst news of her life. Her little sis…was dead. She’d died in a car accident when her friend’s mom was taking Allison and her daughter to the park. The friend and the mother were unscratched.
When she heard the news, Elizabeth fled to her room and barricaded herself in with only her little grey kitten. She cried for hours, well until midnight. When her tear ducts were empty, Liz cuddled her cat, trying to soothe herself by soothing it. As she talked to The Fuzz, her mutant power first manifested itself, instantly isolating her mind from all physical things, then transplanting her into The Fuzz’ mind.
As her mind automatically asserted control over the little feline, Liz freaked out over the explosion of sensory data and the recent sensory deprivation. Then she saw what she thought was herself slumping against the bed, looking for all the world like a dead person. She screamed and moved back when she realized…she wasn’t herself anymore. Heart pounding faster than normal, especially because of her fright, Elizabeth looked around wildly and discovered how everything looked…different. Instead of having a panic attack, she forced herself to calm down.
It was then she realized that she was The Fuzz. She was a cat! She could feel foreign thoughts in her mind and she could sense things she’d never before. She had a tail!
Then her parents knocked on the door, obviously concerned about the cat scream they had just heard. When there was no response, they all but knocked the door down. Her mother fell upon her real body in a heartbeat, somehow knowing something was wrong without ever assuming that Liz was merely asleep.
Before anything else could happen, Liz acted. With a single leap (and a huge thrill), she landed on her body. Utilizing her knowledge from all the sci-fi books and movies she read or watched, and by frantically trying to duplicate what she had just done, she touched her own skin. And concentrated.
Just like before, for a split second that lasted forever, she lost all sensory data and gained a feeling of loneliness and emptiness. Then, it ended. Liz jerked up with a start, startling both her herself, her parents, and her terrified cat.
Fifteen minutes later, Liz had managed to convince her parents not to call the police or hospital, got them to calm down, and (somehow) calmly explained to them (herself included) that she was a mutant. The three Sundance’s agreed that, in exchange for forgetting the whole incident and not grounding her forever for the scare, Liz would promise and swear to never use her ability again or reveal to others that she was a mutant.
The agreement was fine and dandy for several years, during which Elizabeth started high school, made many friends, and basically did the same stuff she did before, minus possessing an animal’s body. The Fuzz never quite forgave her for that. Due to her cat’s intense distrust of her, Elizabeth’s parents bought her a parrot for a new pet.
The agreement broke near the end of her freshman year in high school when Liz’s secondary mutation manifested and she started feeling and sensing the emotions of all the animals around her, from the tiniest ant to the largest elephant at the zoo. Her parents decided that they would have to enroll her in a special school, one for mutants just like her.
Life at the mansion was hectic. After a series of kidnappings, muggings, and being the victim of several miscellaneous assaults and other attacks, Liz began developing a fear of leaving the mansion’s ground without a companion, typically that cute gryphon-boy Carrick that she fell head over heels for.
That relationship became strained after witnessing Carrick’s newest ability to transform into a demonic creature, a form that haunted her. Fear began consuming her and dedicated too many of her choices. Around that time, she left for college and she left New York, trying to leave the past behind.
Liz started to move on with her life. She attended Ohio University and got degrees in Biology and Education, working as a pet groomer and trainer the whole time. She also began working on herself. No longer content to be the damsel that always needs rescuing, Liz took up Krav Maga and virtually every self-defense class she could find.
Earning a black belt just after graduating, Liz got a job as a high school biology and general science teacher. She also got involved in Police K9 training, becoming certified in the summer of graduation and teaching classes during the summers when school was out and offering non-standardized training at her local precinct. It was there that she began dating Lance, a K9 handler, who also helped her learn how to use a gun and how to dance the tango. She occasionally consulted for the police in a few unique cases, in which she testified on behalf of animal witnesses.
Finally, Liz felt confident in herself and decided it was time to face her demons. She was no longer the uncertain teenage girl dealing with traumas and physical threats. She was a successful woman with a balanced life who no longer feared walking down a street alone. The turning point came when, once again, she was nearly mugged. Nearly. She left him on the ground as she walked on, her head held high and with nary a hair out of place.
Now Liz is returning to New York, to prove to herself that she’s not a scared teenager anymore and to give back to the community of the X-Mansion, who were always there for her. Now that so many have de-aged, Liz feels that it’s her turn to help this new crop of teenagers.
And throughout the years, Nico, the African Grey Parrot, remained as ornery as ever. And he never forgot the Irish curses a certain gryphon-boy taught him.
RoleplayWhere did you learn about this site?: A Google search for an X-Men role-playing site.
Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: Nope.
Sample RP:Elizabeth strolled down the pet store’s aisles with her friend, Emily, aiding her in the search for a special dog food for Em’s dog. “What about this?” she said, pointing at a generic bag lying on the floor. “It says it has peas and carrots added and is vitamin fortified!” Then her eyes latched onto a nearby display of cat toys.
“Oh no, I can’t do that! Baloney’s allergic to peas!” Emily said in an exasperated voice. Elizabeth smiled to herself at the thought of a dog being allergic to peas. Of all things, peas. Then she felt a hand close around her wrist and pull. “C’mon!” Em said, “You’re supposed to be helping!”
“I am!” Liz protested. “But I was just taking a break. I was thinking about buying a fake mouse for The Fuzz, you know, to soften him up and get him to like me. I honestly don’t know why he stopped.” Liz hated lying to her friend like that. But she wasn’t ready to reveal that she was a mutant. And she didn’t want to break her vow with her parents. Besides, Emily wasn’t especially known for keeping secrets.
“Yeah, well, we can do that next. First, we’re buying Baloney some food,” Liz’s raven-haired friend said matter-of-factly. Sighing in defeat, Liz went back to scanning the aisle for the cheapest and best brand of special food that Baloney apparently really needed.
After a couple more minutes and several bags picked out by Liz that either contained stuff Baloney was allergic to or just hated with a passion, Emily finally found the right stuff. “Can we go now? My feet are starting to hurt!” Elizabeth whined good-naturedly. For some reason, she was beginning to get antsy. When Emily bought the food, Liz practically dragged her out of the store, never even noticing the boy tormenting a bunch of gerbils near the front of the store.
Nice character!!!