Tefé Holland

CHARACTER NAME: Tefé Holland
CHARACTER SERIES: Swamp Thing (Vertigo/DC New Earth canon)

[OOC]

Backtagging: Yes
Threadhopping: It's fine!
Fourthwalling: I'm open to this, let's chat.

[IC]

Physical affection: Obviously going to depend on the relationship between characters; she's a temperamental sort, but she's still open to a hug from the right people. Worth noting though: she's younger than she looks, so I'm not open to any kind of stuff.
Fighting with this character: Sure! If it's going to get serious, best to chitchat about details, but I'm down for it.
Mind reading: Go for it! She has no defences against mind-reading.
Spiritual information: Although she has a human body, Tefé's spirit was born from the collective consciousness of the plant world, which might seem weird to anyone who spiritual/soul sensing type powers!
Warnings: Although it's not likely to come up, there is some bad stuff in her background including body horror and child abuse -- I'll be sure to CW if it should come up. And although her powers in Acatalepsy are much more limited than in canon, they still allow for some low-key body horror. If anything every makes you uncomfortable, please just let me know and I'll put the kibosh on it right away!
Other: Animals don't like her, and tend to either act aggressive or run away -- if your character is animal-y, feel free to feel a bit threatened for some unknown reason or just ignore!

NAME: Skai
AGE: >21
CONTACT: nanomachinesson
CHARACTERS IN GAME: None.


CHARACTER NAME: Tefé Holland
AGE: ~12-13 (but appears to be in her late teens)
CANON: Swamp Thing (DC New Earth/Vertigo)
CANON POINT: Several months after the end of the Swamp Thing (2000) series.
HISTORY:

There's a halfassed summary here but let's go over the whole thing properly from the start.

Since time immemorial The Green, the metaphysical and spiritual home of all plant life, has existed. And since animal life crawled from the oceans, The Green has chosen defenders to protect its primary interest: the survival of all plant life. In the modern age, that defender was Swamp Thing, a creature of vegetation imbued with the power of The Green and personality imprinted with mind of the deceased scientist Alec Holland. But when the Parliament of Trees, sovereigns of The Green, thought that he had been destroyed, they felt it was time to create a new champion.

Tefé began life as the "Sprout", a bodiless spirit born deep within The Green. But when it was discovered that Swamp Thing was alive after all and had merely been lost in space and time for a while, the Parliament decided that the Green didn't need two defenders. They commanded him to kill the Sprout, since it was no longer needed, but Swamp Thing would have none of it, refusing to kill this new life. Unfortunately this turned the Green against itself as the Sprout, finally born into the world as a spirit, went searching for a body to inhabit and caused chaos in its wake. As a way to save it, Swamp Thing borrowed the body of his long-time acquaintance Constantine, to do what he couldn't as a plant creature and impregnate his wife Abby, making a new and human form for the Sprout to inhabit. They named their child 'Tefé', after the place in the rainforests of Brazil where the Parliament of Trees lived.

Unfortunately, housing the powerful spirit of an elemental in the body and mind of a human baby caused a lot of problems. With no knowledge of right or wrong and little control over her own powers, baby Tefé inadvertently murdered people and animals, created monstrous half-animal/half-plant 'toys', and destroyed her own body while trying to imitate Swamp Thing, among other terrible events. The trauma from these repeated horrific incidents (and Swamp Thing's own frequent absences from the household ) eventually caused Abby to leave Swamp Thing, and the Parliament of Trees to take Tefé from him, promising that she would be properly trained under their care.

During those years she was gone, the Parliament did teach her to use her powers, but they also sent her on missions for the Green, convincing her that the human world was a mistake and needed to all be destroyed for the good of the planet. But when a heavenly being called The Word came to them, seeking to kill Swamp Thing for his latest presumptions at becoming a god of the world, a planetary elemental, the Parliament shared how to kill the Word with Tefé and held him off long enough for her to escape. In the end, she saved her father by unmaking the Word, but by this point, he held the power of all elemental realms and had no more use for the trivial attachments of this world. Becoming a planetary elemental, he left her behind, shredding her before his departure.

Of course, that's not enough to kill an elemental. Effectively abandoned by both her parents, both merciless elemental and horrified mother, Tefé spent over a year wandering in The Green before returning to the physical world. But the things she did when she came back were so horrific and violent, once again seemingly out of control, that Swamp Thing and Abby, unsure what to do, turned to Constantine for advice. He proposed a way to magically wipe her memory and exchange her with another young girl who was supposedly about to die anyway. Reluctantly, her parents agreed. Tefé spent three years as "Mary Conway", an ordinary suburban teenager, before breaking free of the spell and regaining her memories. In light of what they'd done to her, Tefé faked the death of "Mary Conway" and ran away. Feeling completely rejected by her parents, she went in search of answers, trying to find where she fit in the world and her purpose.

Eventually finding out that she was still alive after all when an assassin from part of the Green turned up on their doorstep, her parents sent Constantine to go search for her, and he eventually led her father to meet her -- an encounter that left her almost as confused about her place in the world as when she started, but with one last goal: to find the Tree of Knowledge for true insight and to find her purpose in life. She found it after a long journey in Africa, but the two outcomes shown to her where she sided fully with either plant or animal life were ultimately unacceptable, and she chose neither, deciding that the only thing she could really do in the end was live for herself and find her own way to try to help the plant and animal world coexist.


PERSONALITY:

For all of her elemental powers and grand-scale history, Tefé is, fundamentally, just a teenager. She struggles to deal with her parents and and isn't entirely sure of her place in the world. She's bratty, impulsive, and sometimes irrational, but loyal to her friends and tries to do the right thing, even if it's completely misguided at times.

Although she spent several years brainwashed into believing she was a human teenager and having perfectly normal highschool teen experiences through that time, her whole life before that was pretty unusual, to say the least. While she has some idea of modern culture, she misses out on some human sayings and pop culture references, and plant jokes ("Let's make like a tree and leave") get an icy 'what's that supposed to mean' kind of reaction. By normal person standards, she always seems to be just a bit odd in terms of her words and reactions to everyday occurrences.

In confrontations, Tefé is nearly fearless, overconfident and not backing down for better or for worse. Courage is good on its own, but combined with her own impulsive actions and the unusual morals she was raised with, it can lead to bad decisions being made; thinking things through to their eventual consequences and understanding how normal people will react is not always her strong suit.

While Alec and Abby tried their best, it's hard to raise a child with her powers, and Tefé grew up with them desperately trying to impress seemingly complex morals on her from a young age -- followed by her father's shift in temperament and indoctrination by the Parliament of Trees. None of it worked out well for Tefé, and as a result, she has a serious problem with authority and parental figures. Even being shown her own best and worst possible futures by the Tree of Knowledge itself wasn't enough for her -- rejecting both, she's a girl out to try to find her own path to making things right in the world. She may listen to people, but it's the people she chooses, not who anyone else thinks she should listen to.

In fact, her relationship with her parents is pretty complicated. Although in a lot of ways she's still desperate for their approval, and still wants to make them proud... she still doesn't fully understand how to do that within the greater context of the world and everything in it, complicated even further by her father's own changes of heart and cryptic lack of guidance -- and she feels like she's been betrayed so many times that it's easy to lash out, even at them, with hurtful remarks.

So much of her life has been about deep metaphysical conflicts and the nature of, well, nature, that she's not a very light-hearted person in general. She does want to do good, but her moral education growing up was either completely absent or all over the place, leaving her to struggle with what good really is.

See, make no mistake, she's still a bit temperamental and sensitive to what she sees as wrongs against plant life and nature -- and at the same time sometimes naive and insensitive to the needs of the human world and the people in it, with wild swings in the extremity of her reaction to perceived injustices. In conflicts between nature and humanity, her perception of an injustice certainly used to be dramatically different from what a normal person would expect.

But in her search for the Tree of Knowledge and the visions that came from eating its fruit, she's gained a little more perspective, and although she still has a bit of that bias towards plant life remaining, she's doing her best to accept that things are more complicated than she used to think. Finding real balance between the plant and animal worlds used to seem utterly impossible, but now with some of her new-found thoughts on trying to help the two coexist, perhaps just incredibly difficult. She's working on it.

For the time being, she's decided that she doesn't want to kill anyone innocent, and developing some sort of conscience in respect to humanity is at least a step in the right direction for her, compared to her more youthful years where she'd straight-up murder without a second thought. Although it's not always asked for, she's curious and good at sticking her nose into situations where she thinks she can make a difference for the better, and has mellowed in her approach considerably (although that's not hard when compared to before....) Although she still has a vicious streak under certain circumstances, she's far more likely to prevent harm than actively cause it now, and she's even found people that she would call friends and that she cares about and wants to protect on the human side of things.


CANON POWERS:

Earth Elemental: Originally a Sprout from the Parliament of Trees, overseers of the plant kingdom on earth, Tefé has full earth elemental powers -- sensing nearby plant life, communicating with plants, causing them to grow or shrink in size, turning her own limbs into branches or twisting plant life into whatever shape she would like. All she needs to survive is light and water, and she doesn't need to sleep (although she can still do both). She can also abandon her physical body and travel into The Green, the metaphysical realm that connects all plant life, as well as travel through it to other places in the real world.

Flesh Manipulation: Born into the world as a hybrid, a flesh body with a plant's spirit, Tefé acquired more powers than just the ones she had as the Sprout. The Red, the force that connects the animal world, allows her to manipulate flesh much the same as she can manipulate plant matter. This can be used to heal or to harm, melting others' flesh together, making herself look like whoever she wishes, or pulling corpses from the ground as her puppets. She has the ability to enter The Red (the metaphysical realm connecting all animal life) and mould the shapes of animals to her liking as well.

Both of these powers, connected to life as they are, can lead to some odd and grotesque synergies. As a small child, Tefé created flower-like animal/plant hybrids as little toys/pets. Her effective "teleportation" using The Green as a medium always leaves a horrible husk of a corpse behind when her soul leaves its body, and to re-form in a new location she needs a dead body to build new flesh around and inhabit. Although the exact reason is unclear, animals seem to sense that there is something wrong about her, prompting a fight-or-flight response. Also worth noting is that her powers can also be nullified by special technology designed to isolate her from the natural world.

OTHER: Even without all her elemental powers nerfed out, I'd really enjoy it if animals can sense and still act stressed-out around her strange human/plant-ness -- but it's fine if that's not okay too!


CRAU INFO: None!
MAGIC ABILITY:

Growth

Echoing her old powers a little (with, perhaps, the joke being that she's grown a lot in her life but could still stand to have a bit more personal growth), Tefé can now make any living thing grow at her touch, in whole or in part. A small example would be making a flower blossom, or healing a tiny scratch, or hatching an insect egg. The bigger and less natural the change, the less permanent it is; a sapling grown into a full-sized tree in moments might only stay that way for an hour or two, whereas a small cut might stay healed thanks to the body's natural healing processes. She can also cause excessive growth: an extra finger on a person, more wings on a fly, roots from branches. But these take more effort the stranger the change is (something major might even make her pass out), and revert back to normal very quickly. She cannot actually control movement of the tissue (plant or animal) like she could with her old elemental powers, only cause it to grow.

ANY WEAPONS/MAGICAL ITEMS?: Nah.
ANY PETS?: Nah.


LINKED SAMPLE: Here!