athena griffin θ d6 θ fin

above all else, you are a chemist.

the bonds that bend and form and break to shape the whole world - you understand them. you create them.




your hair is a straw brown, with just a tinge of red when the sun shines right (not that your hair often sees the sun, locked away in a lab like you usually are), its tangles flowing down precisely 13.5 inches starting from your ears. you are all absolutes and clear definitions. it is usually tied up in a tidy bun. this is what is practical, and you are nothing if not practical, from your neatly trimmed nails to your suits and lab coats to your lack of jewelry. this is what you expect from yourself, and it is what everyone expects from you.

someone more sentimental may have described your eyes as emeralds, or perhaps jade or peridot if they were feeling creative, but to you they are merely methods of observation that happen to be green, no more and no less. your features are as sharp as your mind, cheekbones and jaw clearly protruding like daggers. you shoot towards the sky at 5 feet and 10.75 inches. you are thin, but there is no muscle in you. your body is weak, perhaps a compensation for your mind's strength.




you act old for your mere 17 years. you have never been the typical emotional teenager, preferring to suppress anything that could resemble an unwanted feeling. you have been told this is unhealthy. you pay that no mind. all you focus on is school and your lab and that is enough. there, you work incredibly hard, pushing the boundaries of what they say is possible. your mind runs at a mile a minute, processing information and churning out solutions so quickly some say it's robotic.

your social skills, too, are robotic. you have never quite been able to connect with people your age, and there is a part of you that pangs with jealousy when you watch children with their friends, playing without a care in the world. you tell yourself it doesn't bother you, and for the most part, you are able to believe it. your speech is stiff and formal, interspersed with the kinds of words you only learn from reading the oldest, most pretentious books you can find - which is what you do. books are easier to understand than people. they say only what they mean.

despite your lack of people skills, you are constantly in pursuit of validation from anyone who will give it to you. teachers, professors, other lab workers, it doesn't matter. you need to be told you are intelligent, that you are worthy, perhaps because you will never believe it yourself. some say you're stuck up, and it couldn't be further from the truth. you have a burning desire to change the world for the better. it's why you work with medicine. any way you can help others, you will take.




when you are eight, the world is beautiful.

you are at the top of your class, of course. it all comes naturally, from numbers to structures to letters, and your parents are behind you every step of the way. your mother is a physicist, working on developing the latest hovercraft for the capitol. she is the head of her team, so while you are not rich you are far from poor, and you live comfortably near the college, where your father teaches biology. he is not the head of his department, but he is well-loved by his students. he has a passion for his subject that is contagious, and that you have inherited into everything that you do.




when you are twelve, everything changes. it is an accident. you do not witness it, and you are not sure if you regret that or not. "we'll only be out for few minutes," your father tells you. "your mother and i are testing her newest hovercraft." you wait for them to return, for hours. a knock at the door lets you breathe a sigh of relief, but it is short-lived. a peacekeeper is at the door, politely informing you that your mother is dead and your father is barely holding on to some vestige of life, and that you are to stay at the community home until he gets better. (if he gets better.)




your father lives, in the technical sense. blood still flows through his veins, the neurons in his brain still fire, and his muscles still move. everything else is gone. there is no light in his eyes, no more fire in his heart, no more intelligence in his skull. they put him on morphling at the start, and he never quite leaves it behind. you move back home eventually, when you are 13 and two months, and everything is different and everything is wrong. it is all about getting his fix; you are no more than an afterthought. you throw yourself into your schoolwork to distract yourself, finding a lab technician position at 15 and eight months.

at 17 and three months, you are almost an adult, almost old enough to live on your own and become something for yourself. your days are greyscale, and monotony becomes its own object - if you can ignore, you can pretend everything is the same as it was. and that is what you do, what you always have done.

you toil.