| NAME(S): |Eric Rockwell
| NICKNAME(S): |None
| ALIAS(ES): |Rhizome
| D.O.B.: |July 10th 1993
| AGE: |22
| SEX: |Male
| SEXUALITY: |Hetero
| APPEARANCE: |Without his mother to keep him stuffed with three meals a day, Eric lost a substantial amount of weight when he went to college. "You look like a ghost!" she said when he came home for winter break during his freshman year. Now, towards the end of his education, he has evened out a bit, gaining some of the weight back. At his height, most would still describe him as gaunt at 6'2" and 135 pounds. His bright green eyes are the most striking thing about his appearance, and other than that he's relatively plain. Long wavy dark hair is usually pushed behind his ears or pulled into a ponytail. His angular face is always covered in overgrown scruff. As far as a fashion sense goes, he's unaware that one of those is necessary. His usual outfit is an ill-fitting t-shirt and worn pair of corduroy pants.
| ABILITIES/SKILLS: |Root manipulation
Eric has the ability to create roots and rhizome networks that he can control willfully. Theoretically, he can will the roots into any shape or thickness he wants. As of now, these powers are fairly limited. This requires him to be physically touching the substrate that he is creating the roots through. This means that he must be barefoot or have his hands on the ground to create roots that grow through the ground. The roots grow very quickly, but once he is severed from the root, he can no longer control it. On the other hand, he can manipulate previously occurring roots and root systems to create larger root webs more quickly as well.
(I could add some prospects for future upgrades if you want, as I have loads of ideas)
| BACKSTORY: |Born an only child to an average mother and father in the suburbs of a city in western New York, Eric Rockwell was a nobody all his life. Not an outcast, people didn't dislike him, just a nobody. As he drifted through his youth with no close friends, naturally he fell into hobbies like comic books and video games. He was never unhappy, always content to spend his time alone. Being alone gave him more time to think about things, which he liked. He liked to ponder difficult questions, whether it was in philosophy, math, or anything else. He was even working on one of the Millennium problems, but he didn't get very far as he wasn't classically trained in the field of math that the question dealt in. School came as second nature to him and he enjoyed learning, so his GPA never wavered from a 4.0. When it came time to decide what route to take for a college education, he decided he wanted to go into a challenging field. Eric's father Chuck worked in a nursing home and hadn't taken the more complicated subjects in school seriously. "Well it sounds very interesting buddy," he had mumbled over the morning paper when Eric told him that he wanted to be a biotech major. His mother Martha was more enthusiastic.
Eric had always been intrigued by the stories that his father used to tell him about the Mavericks, and still couldn't believe that they had been so close to where he lived in the northeast. There had just been a new campus added to the Grimm University of Nature and Science, and they had a state of the art biotech lab as well as a great program with some pioneers in the field teaching classes. He thought it might just be exciting to be near to the place that the Mavericks had actually called home. Maybe they would even come back one day and he'd get to see them in action. Eric's parents weren't thrilled about his choice; they had been following the steady rise in crime in Larissa and found it terribly sad. Eric assured them that he'd be well out of danger in New Alexandria, and added that a full ride to a university like this was not to be passed up.
The fields of science that Eric studied during his undergraduate years excited him to no end. He let his work envelop him, and he pored over books of all kinds in the school library. There were nights that Eric would read a book on a topic that he had discovered that day, and fall asleep with his face in the pages, only to be woken by students arriving early in the morning. He went to his professors' office hours to talk to them about recent events in contemporary science. He had developed an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Naturally, his grades never wavered, but his health faltered slightly. He forgot to eat sometimes, and realized that that was unhealthy, but quickly got caught up in the next molecular biology research paper and forgot again. On his first visit home, Eric was noticeably skinnier, and his parents had a talk with him. His mother started calling each week and checking on him, which didn't bother Eric. Plus he ended up discovering a café that he had never noticed on campus before that had great buffalo chicken wraps.
In the spring of junior year, Eric landed a position working in the tissue culture lab with his genetics professor, Guy Dupont. Most of the work was menial, but he found experimental biology interesting, and his professor moved him to a more assistant-like position fairly quickly. Eric worked in the lab, helping his professor on his research, and surprisingly landed some grant money to do his own research in his senior year. "Start small, but be creative. And do not overshoot your objective, that is a common mistake of young researchers like you," Guy told him in his uneven french accent. Eric was sure his professor was right, but wanted to do something amazing. He decided to hold off until his graduate research for that though.
Having a paper already pending publication and a GPA of 4.0, Eric was obviously accepted into the graduate program at Grimm. He continued working in the tissue culture lab with Guy, but wanted to take a more experimental route with his thesis research. He had been reading about cancer treatment research when the idea began to take form. Guy had talked in his sophomore Genetics I class about GMOs and the struggle with the worldwide hunger crisis. If he could create a totipotent plant cell that would grow uncontrollably, it was possible that he could make a significant dent in worldwide hunger...
The idea that Eric would be helping people with his research motivated him greatly. Over the course of the next year, he spent all of his time labs around campus. He sequenced numerous genomes, ran PCRs to try to find a gene that he could use, but ended up piecing a gene together by hand. He spliced the gene into his totipotent corn embryo cell, and placed it in the gel he synthesized that held all the necessary nutrients for the plant. Reluctantly, he went back to his dorm, knowing that it would do his nerves well to get some rest.
Rest hadn't done much for his nerves. The next day, Eric woke early and nearly ran to the lab, viciously gnawing at his cuticles all the way. Twenty-four hours should have been enough to see noticeable growth if it worked correctly. When he got to the lab, Eric rushed to the sterile hood he had placed the sample under, and noticed something not necessarily plant-looking in the gel. He grabbed the petri dish without thinking, his index finger finding the almost gelatinous looking green substance had run over the side of the dish. As Eric felt the sting of the goo running over his open cuticles, he realized he hadn't put gloves on. He rinsed his fingers off and stretched a pair of clear latex gloves over his hand before taking a swab of the goo and putting it under a high-powered electron microscope. It was just cells. Just a mass of identical totipotent corn embryo cells. The cells hadn't differentiated the way he wanted, but this was a start. To get this much growth in one night was astounding. He wanted to continue his work in the lab, but realized he had an exam later that day, so he replaced the sample under the hood in a larger beaker. After the exam, Eric retired to his dorm, content to let the cells grow another night before starting the next phase of experiments and problem solving.
The next morning, Eric woke to a power outage. Worried that something may have happened to his sample, he hastened to the lab yet again. When he checked under the hood, his sample was still there, but it had changed. The mass of green cell goo was replaced with a tangled web of roots...
| MOTIVATION/OBJECTIVE: |Eric wants to help solve world hunger with his research. He sees this as just the first conquest in his scientific career with many more to come.
| SUPPORTING CAST: |Parents: Martha and Chuck Rockwell
Genetics Professor and Mentor: Guy Dupont
| REFERENCE POST(S): || NOTES: |Kind of left the backstory hanging on a place that's easy to pick up from.
