Molly Hayes

Player Information
Your Nickname: Hiccup
OOC Journal: bellezza
Under 18? nope
Email/IM: artemisian at gmail ; [aim] troperific ; spellcoats
Characters Played at Singularity: n/a


Character Information
Name: Molly Hayes
Name of Canon: Runaways (Marvel 616)
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: canon
Reference: so growing up sucks
Canon Point: Vol. 2, ch. 23, after that big stupid jerk Iron Man kicks them out of their house

Setting:
Earth-616, the main continuity of Marvel comics canon and home to shapeshifting aliens, bioengineered superheroes, gamma radiation monsters, sentient robots, and mutants. The most important to Molly's story is Homo superior--mutants--evolved humanoids with all manner of supernatural powers and a frequent narrative prop used to represent oppressed minorities. Molly is a fangirl for mutants the way today's teenyboppers love Justin Bieber, except mutants are actually cool. While the rest of the world struggles with mutant prejudice, Molly papers her walls with posters of the X-Men and talks about marrying Wolverine when she grows up (though that she grows out of once she actually meets him). Anti-mutant prejudice is something no one from Earth in Marvel-616 can be unaware of, but it's matters very little to Molly--perhaps because her parents themselves were secretly mutants.

Earth-616 is long, terrifying, convoluted--and, thankfully, largely irrelevant to the characters of Runaways except as a distant backdrop. While New York deals with alien invasions and super villains by the boatload, out on the west coast things are much more peaceful. Sure, there's crime--mostly of the petty variety--but costumed villainy is much rarer. Los Angeles there is home to six notable families: the Wilders, the Steins, the Yorkes, the Deans, the Hayes, and the Minorus. Just your average wealthy couples with their average only children living their average lives, largely unaffected by things like intergalactic wars, mad scientists, and human-mutant conflicts, right?

Wrong.

The truth is that supervillainy thrived in the west, and those same six married couples were a team of supervillains known as the Pride. They just ran a ship so tight and ran their show so well that the big heroes in NYC never noticed. Gathered together by six biblical giants called the Gibborim, the six couples were tasked with freeing the giants at the cost of one soul a year. Once freed, the Gibborim would cleanse the earth by wiping out all of humanity and remaking the land into an idyllic paradise; as a reward, six of the twelve members with places in the future utopia. Eventually the couples agreed to each have one child and forfeit their places in paradise to their children.

Once a year the Pride would gather and sacrifice the soul of an innocent to the Gibborim during the Rite of Blood, and they continued in secret until Alex, the Wilders' son, secretly observed the ceremony. In secret Alex uncovered his parents' motivations and admired them as heroes, so when he learned that the Deans and the Hayes, the only non-human members of the Pride, planned to betray the others to usurp the seats in utopia for themselves and their daughters, Alex hatched a plan to act. The next year, feigning no knowledge, Alex led his friends to spy on their parents. Karolina and Molly weren't present, so Molly didn't see her parents assist in the murder of an innocent girl. The others did, and in their horror they decided to leave home and find evidence to put their parents away for their crimes. It was during this time Molly learned for the first time that she was a mutant, something not even her parents had known, and likewise they had kept their mutant powers a secret from her. After the events of M-Day, when the Scarlet Witch decimated the world mutant population by stripping them of their powers, this made Molly one of less than two hundred mutants in the entire world, and the only one on the team.

But getting their parents shut away was more difficult than they thought it would be: the Pride effectively owned every institution, public and private, in the Los Angeles area and had agents throughout the rest of the United States. Attempts to seek aid from SHIELD and the Avengers failed: first because of the messy world of adult bureaucracy, then because the adults who promised to help them never made good on their word. Alex, Nico, and Gert were framed for Molly's "kidnapping," all of the kids were wanted by the police, and they had to sneak and struggle just to get by. Alex's ultimate betrayal and death of the team when they finally defeated their parents cut them further off from the rest of the world, and afterward when SHIELD finally did show up to help, they simply cleaned up the aftermath and shunted the kids into the social services system. Molly was sent to the X-Corporation, where she felt excluded and lost among others who didn't understand her experiences.

They ran away from that too, setting a pattern for how they continue to live into the present. They've clashed heads with SHIELD on multiple occasions, been kicked out of their house by Iron Man, shunned by the rest of society who saw them as their parents' children, and eventually get unwillingly dragged into the adult heroes' civil war over heroic registration. At one point Molly was abducted by a criminal called the Provost who coerced children to steal for him. Life as a Runaway isn't easy, though Molly and the others have it better than most: they at least can take shelter in their parents' old hideouts. But for everything else they have to scrape just to make ends meet. Money is always short, and they always have to be conscious of the attention they draw to themselves lest the authorities split them up and put them in homes again. They're just a blip on the radar to the system whose hopes and wishes don't matter because they're children. This is reality as Molly knows it: being a kid is tough in a world where adults screw everything up for you.

Personality:
Unlike most of the others', Molly's home environment was clearly a happy one: her parents doted on her, loved her dearly, and treated her as precious. She is outgoing and energetic, very much an extrovert, and likes being the center of attention. She has a very forceful and sometimes outright domineering personality, pushing people around when she can. Around less forceful people she is quite bossy, but around her older friends and adults she will act very much like a child. She whines. She cries. She throws temper tantrums. But beneath that she's sharp and perceptive, and she notices more of what's going on than most people give her credit for.

Being a mutant is actually the least of Molly's worries; on the contrary, she loves it. This is a girl whose dream used to be growing up to marry Wolverine. Although her parents hate humanity for the oppression they've suffered, Molly holds no such feelings. She doesn't, in fact, seem to even distinguish much between human, mutant, alien, and robot, and when they're later joined by a transsexual shapeshifter Molly quickly learns to accept Xavin too. It's not "blindness"; on the contrary, Molly is very well aware of prejudice. It's simply that her view of the world is incredibly flexible, in part because of necessity and her age, but also because that's just how Molly is. As a mutant she is utterly self-assured and self-aware; it was never a shock so much as a really awesome surprise to get excited about, just another part of the adventure.

For someone so young, Molly displays astonishingly strong ethical attitude toward the use of her powers, and after punching the Punisher in the face without realizing he couldn't take a blow from someone with superhuman strength, Molly has vowed to never to use her powers on "normals" again. Part of this comes from lessons the others have taught her--and around others, Molly is fond of repeating those lessons: Chase has warned her never to use her powers for evil lest she become like her parents, and Gert has taught her to always do the opposite of what an adult says (another indication of the group's deep-seated distrust of adults and something Molly takes to with glee when adults irritate or anger her). She has a very simplistic view of good and bad, another thing that points to her relative youth compared to the others.

Molly is the youngest of the Runaways, and this shows in her personality: in many ways she is the most childlike, even in spite of her rapid loss of innocence. It takes her longer than the others to accept that her parents are supervillains--she frequently forgets it at first--and even now she still thinks of them as people who loved her and so weren't wholly evil. Of all the group she shows herself to be the least inhibited by shyness or mistrust: Molly takes quickly to strangers and is usually first to incorporate new group members. She's more willing to ask questions, too, and extends her trust more easily--or at least in part. Like the others, she's been burned.

Cut off from the world, the runaways had no one to trust but each other, and authority figures disappointed them time and time again. They went from a collection of teenagers who barely liked one another to the only family they had. They've all had to grow up faster than they should, and each of them is highly self-aware of that fact. It's clear what roles in their surrogate family they play, and Molly is the baby--a position she hates, but she acts like a spoilt baby because she craves the attention. And like the child in the family, Molly is left coping with Gert's death on her own with no guidance because none of the big kids know how to cope either. All she can do is try to honor Gert's memory by being true to what Gert taught her.

Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: Molly's mutant ability is superhuman strength; she is capable of lifting over 100 tons, moderately invulnerable, and her eyes glow when she uses her power. Luckily her ability comes pre-limited: using it exhausts her quickly, and afterwards she falls asleep, often for several hours.

Inventory: The clothes on her back and the hat on her head.

Appearance: Here. Molly is 4'11" with green eyes and brown hair reaching down just past her shoulders. Her trademark is wearing hats.

Age: 11


Samples
Log Sample:
They manage to make a run for it in the Leapfrog, and Karolina says it's probably because Iron Man doesn't want to shoot a bunch of kids out of the sky. Because that would be bad and he wouldn't look like such a super hero if he did that. Personally, Molly has always felt that Iron Man wasn't much of a super hero anyway, not like Iceman and Shadowcat. Though she'd never tell Chase or Vic that; they might think it's a putdown of regulars or machines.

(She sure would like to punch Iron Man in his iron face, and that's not against the rules so long as he's in the suit.)

Molly falls asleep soon after they get off the ground, even while they're still trying to shake SHIELD pursuit. Her parents used to say she'd be able to sleep through an explosion. Once Molly might have grinned at that, proud like it was some stupid talent. Now a part of her wonders if she wouldn't have slept through it because her parents would have used their powers to force her to stay asleep. She dreams of playing Monopoly with Gert while Gert rants about the oppressiveness of capitalism or something. It leaves Molly feeling sort of empty when she wakes up because in their group now cares about those things enough to teach her about them.

They've set down somewhere she doesn't recognize: out the window Molly can see tall cliffs surrounding them with cold, dark shadows. The sky is lightening in a way that hints at the hour, but everyone is asleep. Everyone but Chase, who slouches in the pilot's seat with Old Lace resting her great big scaly head in his lap. It's lucky for Chase Lace doesn't drool, or he'd probably look like he peed his pants. Molly wraps herself in the blanket someone--Karolina or Nico, probably--had draped over her and pads towards the front. Without ceremony, she walks up to Chase and punches him in the arm.

He shoots her a sullen look and rubs his arm. Molly knows he's faking because she hadn't even used her powers. "What's your problem, Molly? Go back to sleep."

"That was for being a giant freaking butthead, you moron," Molly hisses. She tries to keep her voice low because of the others, but in the copilot's chair Victron twitches. Whatever. He's a cyborg, he really can sleep through anything.

Chase looks away, his face blank but his eyes guilty. Molly knows because she's watched them all to see what faces they make. "Sorry," he says.

What would Gert say? Just the right words suffused with sarcasm and humor to let Chase know he's not alone. Maybe she'd tell him she'd love him, because that's how Gert and Chase were. But she's not Gert, she's Molly, and the right words to make everything better won't come. Instead Molly throws her arms around Chase's neck and pulls him into the tightest hug she can manage. "Don't you ever go away again or I'll stick you in one of those zoo cages where they keep the dumbest monkeys."

Chase tenses against her, then rests a hand on her head, pressed awkwardly against his shoulder. If he ever went away, nothing would be fun anymore.

"I'm not going anywhere, Mol."

"Promise?" She can't lose Chase any more than she can lose Nico or Karolina or Victor, or even Xavin now. Losing her parents was bad enough. Losing Gert was unbearable. Losing Chase… She'd never be able to stand it.

"Promise."


Network Sample:
Just because I'm a kid doesn't mean you can just get away with this. Kidnapping is illegal and I can--I can beat up the Juggernaut with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back! Also, Chase is totally going to sic his dinosaur on you. So let me go!

[ the sobbing settles down to quiet sniffles. ]

hic. …Vic, you can hear this, right? K? Nico?

[ sniffles again, then loud, hysteric, little girl sobbing ] I WANNA GO HOME!