AVERY LOWELL
EARTH ◼ MAY 6TH (17) ◼ MALE
"What's good, my P-words? Wait. I can say it now, right?"
Avery is, by all visual accounts, a pretty unremarkable teenager. Standing at only 5'9" with a slightly thin build that speaks to an unexceptional athleticism honed in gym class alone, he's certainly not possessed of an imposing stature. His hair is a sandy blond, his eyes are the kind of brown that look nice in direct sunlight but bland otherwise, his glasses are among the most generic black frames one could find, and he has just enough of a babyface that he's unlikely to be confused for a young-looking adult; nothing that would particularly draw the eye in a crowd. He wouldn't say it was something to complain about, but shouldn't an all-powerful wizard be a bit more grandiose?
Contrary to recent events in his life, Avery's tale is one of mediocrity. He grew up in a quaint Maryland suburb in a comfortably average middle-class family, complete with two kids, a dog, and even the white picket fence (okay, technically a white vinyl fence, but still). His grades were decent, if rarely exceptional, he never got into trouble, and his parents' biggest complaints were that he was lax on chores and stayed up too late playing video games. (He swore his mother was way too smug at the optometrist after years of the "you'll ruin your eyes that way" speech.) Avery could've been thrown in any given family sitcom in America and fit in swimmingly, and in his opinion there was nothing wrong with that.
Long nights of avid media consumption brought with them childish fantasies, and action-filled depictions of primalists or primalist-analogues left Avery daydreaming about shooting fire from his hands and saving entire cities from freak tsunamis and all the other comic book crap every teenager believes he'd totally do with superpowers. Of course, he'd never actually met a primalist and they may as well have been fictional as far as he was concerned, but he wasn't delusional; he knew deep down the real purpose was entertaining himself. Even if that meant making fire noises with his mouth while he danced around his room in a way that gave his younger brother secondhand embarrassment.
Maturity dimmed Avery's flights of fancy in favor of the everyday mediocrity he existed contentedly in. He had friends to hang out with, a family to cherish, and a nice community to enjoy; plenty to keep him entertained. It's why Avery stayed oblivious when the dreams started. Plenty of people probably dreamed about the Grand Canyon. Even if he'd never seen it. And he wasn't sure it was the Grand Canyon. And the rock warped into strange, alien shapes as he walked through it. And then there was the one where he was buried alive, but in his defense, that one wasn't scary - it was actually kinda comfy once he was sealed in. His waking hours likewise became haunted by a sense of unease soon after. Some kind of restlessness thrummed within him, which wasn't entirely out of character - he'd always been a little squirrelly - but Avery found himself increasingly antsy without really knowing why, like something was building that he wasn't sure how to release.
With such blatant disregard of the warning signs, it's a blessing that Avery's awakening was responsible only for some property damage rather than a tragedy. Avery found himself perched on a park bench on a sunny Saturday afternoon, waiting for his chronically-late friend to arrive. The antsiness hadn't subsided; in fact he pitched the idea to meet up with his friend at a park precisely because he felt like he had too much energy and he thought messing around outside might help. He was half right. While he sat, Avery bounced his knee as restless teenagers were wont to do, only to find the very ground beneath his feet vibrating along with the motion. His subsequent panicked steps as he shot from his seat shattered the sidewalk and dredged up the earth beneath, creating even more unstable footholds as roiling rivers of dirt replaced solid ground. When the tremors subsided, the other parkgoers found Avery knocked down on his ass in a rubble-strewn circle of what used to be a sidewalk, bruised and dirty but feeling more alive than ever before. Nobody even fell off the monkey bars!
The fallout was less exhilarating. Avery lived in a fairly progressive area, but a primalist was not something that could be easily written off. Word spread fast, and what followed were wary stares and subtle ostracization - and that was before the government suits showed up. The Lowells were told in no uncertain terms that their son would be enrolled at the Merryweather Institute in the interest of public safety, like he'd killed a man and not a slab of concrete. It should've been harrowing, leaving everything he'd ever known behind to be forced into something only a few steps above a prison, but Avery took it with a positive outlook. After all, every kid wants to be special. All he had to do was master this magic stuff and he'd be cleared to leave, then he'd be a superhero or something. He hadn't thought that far ahead, but he'd figure it out. Surely.
Avery is all bright smiles and boyish enthusiasm, cheery in the thought that he's either about to become a powerful force of nature or can write this whole chosen by Gaea thing off in a few years and go back to being normal, at least superficially. He's good-natured and encouraging about it, wanting nothing more than to nerd out with his fellow students about the amazing feats they're all newly capable of and entertains no negativity in that regard. Such positive excitability can make him appear airheaded and oblivious at times, which are both definitely true, but he's an idealist at heart and stands by his glass half-full stance regardless.
Despite the exuberance of his personality, Avery's a bit of a homebody. While he has no aversion to socializing, and he's certainly not shy in any sense of the word, he'd much rather be slumped down on his couch in front of a gaming console, doing nothing. It didn't help that his friends got all weird on him after word got out that he was a primalist, either. This results in him being a bit harder to coax out of his shell than one would expect, given his upfront friendliness and general tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve.
A B I L I T I E S / S K I L L S:
Avery can shape and manipulate stone, from levitating a few pebbles to ripping chunks of rock straight from the ground. Though, the seismic byproducts of the latter have generally dissuaded him from practicing it.
C H A R A C T E R N O T E S:
Idk what to put here but this cast needs some sunshine to balance the edgelords.
