[M&M 3e] Defying the Future OOC

[Quellian-dyrae]

Spoiler: Complications

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Researching a Better World [Motivation - Doing Good]: Even in her relative youth, Lily is a world-class biochemist with tons of academic potential. Her primary goal in life is solving world hunger, though she also works on developing and discovering new medicines for various diseases and ailments. She also has some occasional wild ideas about genetically engineering plants that can be more materially useful, like fast-growing plants, or trees with ultra-hard wood, or sometimes even weirder ideas, although those are more flights of fancy than anything she devotes serious time to.

While she has devoted her life to helping people, going out and fighting superpowered bad guys isn't really what Lily wants to do with her powers. She's actually super-interested in their applications for assisting her scientific endeavors. But it's kinda hard to get any good, high-quality scientific research done when your town is locked off from the rest of the world and overrun by aforementioned superpowered bad guys, especially when one of them kinda went on the warpath in your lab and changed you and all your coworkers from the [Humanoid] to [Plant] type and will probably come back and do worse if you started up work again. Also they're hurting people. And that's wrong.

So...Thirsty [Addiction/Weakness]: Lily's powers allow her to meet her dietary needs with mere sunlight. And while she still has to breathe, it can be occasionally convenient that she does it in the reverse of the normal way. But what she lost in need for food and air, she gained twice over in need for water. Lily needs to drink something like three times as much water as a regular person, and if she goes without water for long she'll be more hindered by the lack than most. She may also suffer increased effects from dessication, dehydration, and similar attacks if she fails to resist.

Bees [Disability/Phobia]: Yes, Lily's about halfway to being an anthropomorphic flower and she is both terrified of and cripplingly allergic to bees. So sad. Having only just acquired her powers, no over-the-top cliched bee-themed enemy has yet stepped forward to be her personal foe, but we all know it's only a matter of time! (Let's be honest Manchineel will probably end up creating one as a Punishment for her at some point.) In repairing the damage she's done to herself in the Herbicide downtime (including some experimenting with venom from the Last Vesper) Lily has modified her biology to no longer be especially susceptible to bee venom. Between that and her newly-supercharged confidence, her phobia is also gone.

Manchineel [Enemy]: Lily's a world-class biochemist who's trying to solve world hunger, and whatever diseases she can pick off on the way as extra credit. And hey, if she can bring into existence some manner of cool new plants that do useful things along the way, even better. Genetically engineered plantlife is kinda her thing, is what I'm saying. Specifically, genetically engineering plants to better serve as resources for the benefit and welfare of humankind. Let me make this very clear: it is one of Lily's core beliefs that nature, while certainly awesome in its own way, only has meaning and value because it allows humanity to flourish. This isn't to say she doesn't care about nature, or the health of the planet or anything - obviously, if nature is what allows humanity to flourish, it's in humanity's clear best interests to protect that. But it all cycles back to people - without intelligent, sapient life, everything else is superfluous.

So...yeah.

Lily got her powers when Manchineel attacked the lab that she worked at, because you know, they conducted genetic experiments on plants and stuff. She didn't kill them or anything, but she "gave them a taste of their own medicine"; they liked splicing random plant DNA into other plants, how would they like having random plant DNA spliced into theirs, huh? Lily and about half a dozen other scientists and lab assistants were transformed into various plant-people. One guy basically became a semi-humanoid mass of random vegetable matter and vines, one woman is more-or-less a dryad now, and so on. Lily was actually originally transformed into an actual full-on anthropomorphic flower; she didn't get her normal appearance back until she figured out how to use her powers to alter plant matter, and painstakingly (and painfully) used them to resculpt herself back to her normal appearance. With Manchineel defeated, this Complication is in abeyance.

[NEW] Well That Was Pointless [Identity]: After it became clear that Manchineel knew exactly who she was and could target her at any time, Lily stopped bothering with a secret identity, no longer perceiving it to have any protective value. This may have been premature, now that the rest of the League are taking the heroes more seriously. Since Lily's identity is known, the rest of the League could potentially strike at her directly.

The Name Is Floral [Obsession]: Lily's been underestimated a lot in her life. She's always been the baby of her family, coddled and protected. Despite her genius in her field, more than a few scientists have looked at her as mainly just a pretty face. And now that she has powers, what are they? Mutating into a flower girl. Her big move is smelling really good. No. Bar that. Lily has power now, and she's going to prove it.

Solar Powered [Power Loss]: Lily's actual combat capabilities require three things to come together. Her basic plant transmutation power is what allows her to create the actual plant materials she uses (and her phytomorphic body provides a convenient source of them). Her world-class knowledge of biochemistry is what allows her to use that capability to produce things like acids and poisons and so on. But the reason she can throw them around with Power Level 10 force is pure shining power straight from the sun! Lily stores excess solar energy, so she doesn't need constant sunlight to power her abilities, but if she goes without it for a few days, her powers may degrade. Likewise, if she is forced to make extensive use of her powers without the opportunity to recharge, they can start to rapidly fade.

Featherweight [Power Loss]: All of Lily's combat stats fundamentally depend on her powers. Even her base attack and effect bonuses come from having a sort of limited phytokinetic control over her own body and the ability to use her stored solar energy to strike with enhanced strength and speed in short bursts. Her Defense relies on using her limited phytokinesis and perhaps some tactical transmutation to absorb attacks. Her Resistance comes reinforcing her cells with absorbed solar energy, plus the fact that her flesh is about as resilient as wood baseline. And similar things when it comes to different attack modes, like her plant physiology improving her resistance to Physiological attacks, the touch of the supernatural on her giving her the "metaphysical mass" to defend against and resist Mystical attacks, and being able to counter Transformative attacks with her own transmutation powers, etc. If she loses her powers, she's basically reduced to a PL 0 scrub, combat-wise.

The one exception is her defenses against Mental and Tactical attacks. Lily has a genius intellect, a burning sense of personal pride, and a formidable will. Her mind is capable of taking on whatever attacks get thrown at it, no powers on call.

The Nose Knows [Power Loss]: Although it's not really part of the main three pillars of her actual heroic power, Lily's sense of smell is a fairly important Required Secondary Power. Its Analytical nature is how she receives sensory feedback on what she's actually doing when she manipulates vegetable matter at a cellular level. If Lily is rendered Olfactorily Unaware, while she can still use her powers just fine, she'll lose a lot of her finesse and precision. This doesn't generally cause her powers to fail outright, especially for more standard functions that she's more comfortable with, but it can cause penalties or cause certain functions to fail or be replaced with something else as she gets the cellular structure importantly wrong, especially when she's doing something highly complex and specific. Of course, the effect is most pronounced when she's using powers that involve manipulating her own scent.

[NEW] Overconfident [Quirk]: Lily considered Manchineel to be the most dangerous member of the League and they beat her! More than that, Lily was able to use foreknowledge of her weaknesses, tactical cunning, and psychological warfare to basically stand toe-to-toe with Manchineel through most of the fight and come out of it virtually untouched. This has only reinforced her belief in the power of human intellect to overcome any obstacle and solve any problem. And it wasn't like Lily really had much of a deficit of personal pride in the first place. All together, she is now riding on a confidence high. This Complication has a very limited scope, because no amount of confidence will make Lily act foolishly. However, she will tend to slightly underestimate the remaining League members and their minions and overestimate herself and the other heroes, and she will speak significantly more confidently than a situation might warrant, perhaps coming off to others as more foolhardy. All else being equal, she will tend to behave more aggressively rather than more cautiously.

Plant Scent [Quirk]: Plants use scent as a form of pseudo-communication, and it's no different for Lily. The flowery smell she gives off changes in accordance with her emotions. People who know her may come to recognize the correlation between her scent and her feelings, and even those who don't know her might be able to figure it out. This could penalize Lily's Deception checks or reveal additional information to people using Insight on her, when it comes to getting a sense of her feelings.

The scent Lily gives off is also quite a bit stronger and clearer than most scents produced by humans. Olfactory senses may be enhanced against her. In particular, a character with an Olfactory Detect (Emotions) sense can share any Senses effects that apply to it with their normal sense of smell, and vice-versa, since her scent carries much more distinctive emotional data (so like, a character with a Ranged Acute Accurate Extended sense of smell and a Ranged Acute Analytical Olfactory Detect [Emotions] would treat both senses as Ranged, Acute, Accurate, Extended, and Analytical against Lily).

Problems With Authority [Quirk]: Authority figures just kinda rub Lily the wrong way. Gonna be honest there's probably some unresolved familial issues there. Finding school kinda interminable and deadly boring didn't help much either (Lily was always a curious child and loved learning; school was the problem). And if that wasn't enough a few years working in a lab where she was smarter than all her bosses pretty much sealed the deal. Lily's perfectly happy to listen to reasonable argument and follow a well-considered plan. But if someone tries to order her around, her natural instinct is to oppose them out of pure spite.

Family Ties [Relationship]: Lily's family is fairly close-knit, although she's in some ways the black sheep (or perhaps the better term would be "runt of the litter"). Her father Ralph is a high-powered federal attorney who has put away some of the worst criminals in the country. Her mother Sarah is a traveling doctor and medical genius in her own right who has fought epidemics on five continents. Her older sister Hannah is a police detective and SWAT sniper, and a fairly brilliant investigator in her own right. Her older brother Andrew is a Navy SEAL who is recently returned from his third tour of duty (and since Watcher's arrival has basically been working alongside Hannah to help the Forester's Bay police); he kinda acts like the "dumb muscle" in the family, but he's got an eclectic knowledge base and is extremely clever when it comes to matters of tactics, strategy, and logistics. Her family loves her, and they have tons of respect for her academic and scientific achievements - even by their standards, she is unquestionably and obviously the smartest person in the family, although her mother comes close - but they are rather overprotective of her and even with her new powers, don't really see her as capable of handling dangerous situations.

"What Are You Gonna Do, Smell Good At Them Really Hard?" [Reputation]: No matter how strongly the answer to that question is YES, WITH GUSTO, the nature of Lily's powers doesn't really help her earn much respect from, well, much of anyone involved in dangerous situations - law enforcement, emergency rescue, budding superheroes, etc. She's more likely to get filed away as a healer, at best sent to support the real combatants, rather than shown respect as a hero in her own right - at least, until she gets a chance to show just how effective her powers can really be. The fact that after her first couple forays into heroics the media immediately codenamed her Flower Girl, and the name has stuck no matter how hard she insists on Floral, is just salt in the wound. Now that the Heroes of Forester's Bay have defeated Manchineel, it's no longer really plausible that Lily might encounter these sort of reputational issues.

[NEW] Heroic Example [Responsibility]: Lily now has more confidence in herself as a hero, and it's more a part of her self-image. But that means more than just fighting the bad guys, or even protecting people. It means setting an example, making sure people know that they are protected, that the town will get through this, that the league will be defeated. Lily considers it an important part of her duties to keep up morale and serve as an example and inspiration to the people of her town, and help them through these troubled times. After all, she's the one who can smell it when they're feeling terror or despair.

...Yeah, It's A New Perfume [Secret]: Manchineel wasn't exactly paying close attention to the half dozen or so scientists and assistants she transformed in her attack on Lily's lab. And, you know, she certainly wouldn't be expecting any of them to still actually look like a human, because oh man did they ever not do that when she got through with them! I mean, boy howdie. But Lily's heard of what happened to people who Manchineel felt had "escaped" their punishments, and she's not keen on becoming a cautionary tale. Besides, she has a family to protect, however much they may think that job is reversed.

Lily's family knows about her powers, but she otherwise keeps them secret, doing her heroics in the costumed identity of Floral. She hasn't seen (and has been intentionally avoiding) her former coworkers since the attack, but obviously if they saw her they'd have questions. Lily had a generally positive working relationship with them, but she wasn't especially close to any of them, and couldn't be sure they'd be able to keep her secret under pressure (and a couple of them have had some jealousy issues with her before; if they knew she had not only gotten her human appearance back but also snagged some super-cool powers out of the deal while they're still running around as anthropomorphic freaks, it might not take pressure for them to reveal her identity). Lily stopped keeping a secret identity once it became clear that Manchineel knew who she was.

[UPDATED] Heart Is An Awesome Power! [Temper]: In case it isn't clear by now, Lily's sick and tired of being treated like some harmless little research assistant. Sure, her powers might not be as cool and flashy as, say, super-strength. Or fire control. Or telekinesis. Or...look it's not exactly a short list is what I'm saying. Nonetheless, she's determined to prove she has what it takes to be a hero, and belittling her powers is a good way to set her off. She is also extremely proud of her intellect, and will take insults to her intelligence far more seriously and personally than she should.

You're Standing In The Way Of Progress [Temper]: Lily takes science...seriously. She's a true believer in science as the driving force behind all of humanity's progress, and the key to unlocking the future. People who willfully propagate ignorance, who refuse to accept hard-won scientific knowledge, and who obstruct scientific progress tend to earn her ire.

Although to be fair, they don't get it half as bad as the people who explore paths of research that could pave the way to catastrophe, who treat Science as a bludgeon they can wield against those who disagree with them when the actual truth is not yet known, who wield the bureaucracy of modern scientific institutions to obstruct actual progress, and who otherwise misuse science for their own ends.

The Other Side of Super Senses [Weakness]: Lily's incredibly keen sense of smell is not without its drawbacks. Scent based attacks are often more effective against her, imposing a -5 penalty on her Resistance checks against them, and even overpowering natural scents may hamper her in some way. Note that this Complication comes from a Weakness that is offsetting immunities, so it doesn't actually award Hero Points unless it has effects beyond the baseline -5 Resistance (such as causing her to suffer detrimental effects from an otherwise harmless effect, or additional effects to the ones she receives).

Plant-based Biology [Weakness]: Lily's biology gives her profound resistance to many ailments that would trouble humans, and even outright immunity to minor ones, but she is not just susceptible, but more susceptible to attacks that are specific to plants, taking a -5 penalty to Resistance against them. This generally means powers that are specifically Limited to Plants (as opposed to merely being capable of affecting plants due to descriptors, Features, or the Affects Objects extra) or have enhanced effects when used on plants. It can also mean things like plant-specific diseases, parasites, toxins, and so on. As above, this Complication is tied to a Weakness offsetting immunities, so it doesn't actually award Hero Points unless it has effects beyond the baseline -5 Resistance.

Sensitive Wings [Weakness]: Lily's petal wings are quite fragile and very sensitive. Damage to them that be incredibly painful for her. On a lighter (though still potentially detrimental) note, this also means they are incredibly, even debilitatingly, ticklish.

Spoiler: Description

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Lily is sparsely over five feet tall with a slim build. She has pale green eyes, light blond hair that hangs past her shoulders, and her shoulders are almost constantly covered with dandruff. She is twenty-three years old. She typically wears light, loose clothes, preferring soft fabrics that won't irritate her wings when she tucks them in her shirt. She always gives off a sweet, flowery smell. When appearing as Floral, she dresses in a sleek though not quite form-fitting kinda leotard-like green outfit. It covers pretty much everything except her arms and shoulders, and she wears a skirt over it consisting of of several dangling pieces of white fabric that looked kinda like oversized lily petals. No cape, but her wings are fully visible in costume. Her insignia - a yellow stylized sun symbol with pink flower petals alternating between the triangular "rays" going around it, so it looks like the sun was the flower's pollen - is displayed prominently on the center of her chest.

Spoiler: Backstory

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Lily has had a fondness for science ever since childhood. While everyone in her family is highly intelligent, she was a prodigy from a young age, and had a particular gift in science in general and chemistry in particular. She might have shot through school like a dart, but the thing was, her mother had also been something of a prodigy as a child, and her own parents had pushed her extremely hard to excel as a result. While this undeniably paid dividends (she became a medical doctor at age twenty-one), looking back on it she felt it had largely cost her her childhood. She didn't want that for her own daughter, so she held Lily back from advancing as fast as she could, only letting her skip one grade in elementary school and a second in middle school.

If Lily's honest, there's a part of her that to this day doesn't forgive her mother for that.

Unfortunately Sarah Woods had both overcorrected from her own parents' mistakes, and underestimated just how far ahead her daughter really was. Lily trudged through school in abject boredom, only to get home and absolutely devour any books and websites she could find on the topics of her interest, science in particular (and in fairness, at home her mom often taught her about scientific and medical topics, was always happy to get her new and higher level textbooks to read and so on; her parents always enthusiastically supported Lily's drive to learn, they just didn't want to push her to advance too far too fast). To Lily, school wasn't where she went to get an education - it was an obstruction to it, a place where she had to sit and listen to lectures on topics she already knew, regurgitate the answers the teachers wanted, and let the hours drain uselessly away with no knowledge gained.

She still got perfect grades, mind, partly because she was so far ahead that she practically couldn't help but do so, and partly out of sheer spite, treating every test and assignment as just one more way to say, "There is nothing that this grade level or the next three above it can do to present even the slightest hint of a challenge to me." Her parents were always thrilled to see her perfect report cards and evidently never got the hint, or at least so it seemed to her.

Finally, when she was eleven years old and mid-way through her freshman year of high school (which was just a nightmare), Lily's patience with the educational system broke. She demanded to be allowed to go further, to stop wasting her time on classes that taught her nothing among students two years older than her who couldn't even keep up the other end of an intelligent conversation and teachers that she had to correct at least once a week. Literally quivering with indignant fury, she told her parents that if they didn't get out of her way, she would read every legal book on her father's bookcase, become a better lawyer than him, and sue them for emancipation. And she would win.

Coming from an eleven year old it was a kinda adorable threat, but no less serious for all that. And let it not be said that Sarah Woods couldn't learn from her mistakes.

Literally three months later, Lily was taking college level courses. Two years after that, graduate level. She had earned a PhD in biology by the time she was eighteen, and another in chemistry by twenty. Even her parents were shocked.

Lily went into work at a lab at the Forester's Bay Community College, occasionally teaching some biology and chemistry courses there. It wasn't a prestigious job considering her talents, but the lab was in her home town and doing interesting work on the genetic engineering of plants, and in Lily's book interesting work trumped prestige any day of the week. It also had interesting implications for agriculture, offering possibilities for improving crop yields, making edible plants more resistant to disease, and allowing them to last longer with less need for preservatives. When Lily was seven years old she had been asked what she wanted to do when she grew up and had promptly replied "end world hunger". Considering matters from an adult perspective, she found that she could not come up with any compelling reasons to change that.

Unfortunately, the job didn't live up to Lily's vision of it. She was hired on as a "junior researcher", which in practice meant she was rated just barely above the research assistants who were all basically just grad students. There were two senior researchers running the lab. The first, Nate Clifford, was a prestigious scientist who knew his game and did good work, but was also super arrogant, mildly chauvinistic, and tended to both underestimate and largely dismiss her skills and intelligence, often assigning her to less significant tasks. The second, Kimmie Leung, was much more cognizant of the value Lily brought to the team, encouraging her ideas and theories, and even mentoring her a bit. The problem was that she was largely too busy with things like writing grant proposals, getting articles published into prestigious journals, and playing academic politics to actually, you know, spend too much time doing actually important science.

So, not what she had hoped. Still, she put up with it, and work did get done. Over time, Lily got a bit better at finagling things so that the incentives of doing the actual work aligned better with the incentives of academia. And she also got enough chances to prove herself that even Dr. Clifford had to start developing some respect for her skills as a scientist (also she got better at delegating the more menial tasks he assigned her to the assistants, which helped a lot). The lab started growing more productive, and some real progress was made. They were starting to think a major breakthrough was in sight within just another year or two, very plausibly a Nobel-worthy one.

And then the Watcher came to Forester's Bay.

And shortly after that, Manchineel came to their lab. The plant-controller had learned of their work, subjecting poor, helpless plants and trees that were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing to their strange scientific experiments, trying to pervert the natural order for their own gain, subvert the flora of the world to the parasitic needs of humanity. She told them they would see how it felt, to have their DNA randomly spliced and altered with that of other plants. One by one, she transformed them, turning them into vaguely human-like plant creatures. There was nothing any of them could do to stop her.

Lily was transformed into an anthropomorphic flower. Like, stamen for a body, roots for legs, leaves for arms, petals and pollen for a head, and all that. Nature's vengeance achieved, Manchineel left the scientists to live out their new lives.

Obviously, the lab closed down. Lily despaired. Her family supported her as best they could, but she didn't know what she could do, how she could possibly live a normal life as some sort of freakish flower-monster. She might have given up entirely.

Except three nights after her transformation, when her mother brought her dinner (Lily had basically shut herself into her old room at her parents' house and refused to leave) she kinda wanted broccoli instead of carrots...and the carrot on her fork turned into a piece of broccoli.

Apparently, some of Manchineel's transformative powers had rubbed off on her.

Lily was a scientist, so of course, the very next thing she did was start experimenting. If she had powers of her own...maybe she could do something. Maybe she could fight back! Ever since the Future League had arrived, her sister Hannah's job had grown exponentially more dangerous. The police were doing what they good - her brother Andrew had even offered his assistance, bringing his tactical and military skills to the table - but they were simply outmatched by the superpowered criminals, only able to blunt the damage they did.

What Forester's Bay needed was superheroes!

But it turned out Lily's new superpowers included the ability to transform about two pounds of vegetable matter per second into other forms of vegetable matter, a much sharper sense of smell, the ability to photosynthesize really well, the power to talk to plants, and literally nothing else.

A superhero, she was not.

Or she wouldn't have been, had she been practically everybody else. But after that spark of hope had come back into her heart, Lily wasn't willing to give it up so easily. Her body was vegetable matter now. Her powers were precise down to the cellular level, and her nose was keener than the best electron microscope back in the lab at the college. And according to her experiments and calculations, she was absorbing a phenomenal amount of solar energy. She had to be storing it in her cells. Which she could transform with her powers. If she could just use that...!

It took her almost a week of testing and practice and theorizing, trial and error, but Lily started getting the hang of her powers. It was genetic engineering, is what it was. Cellular alteration. But far faster and more precise that anything they could do in the lab. And with orders of magnitude more energy available in the process. Plants were capable of a stunning variety of helpful, harmful, and hampering effects; she learned how to produce them. Deadly poisons, regenerative serums, debilitating drugs, allergenic pollen, medicinal salves, razor-sharp thorns, nauseating scents...

...A variant on citric acid so powerful it ate a hole in her bedroom floor, the couch beneath it, the living room floor beneath that, the concrete foundation under the house, and about six feet into the earth below that.

...A pheromone so intense that when her brother let her test it on him, she found him unthinkingly obeying her every command.

Backed up by Lily's biochemistry knowledge, plus a nice heaping helping of pure solar energy, it turned out her powers were kinda terrifying.

Which was exactly what she needed.

The final step was her own body. She had found that using the plant matter that made it up as the basis for her transmutations had some significant advantages. Her power worked by touch, but since it was part of her body, she was technically "touching" it even if say she shot it at an enemy as a thorny dart, or spread a bunch of flower petals around that she wanted to transform into something dangerous all at once, or something. It took her several painful hours over the course of three days, but she managed to sculpt her body back into her normal human shape, more-or-less (she still had flower petals crowing from her back; they were so sensitive that every time she tried to transform them gone it just hurt too much and her concentration broke).

So she had her normal form back, she had a combat capable slate of powers diabolical twisted uses for otherwise pathetically weak powers, and with a brief shopping spree for some 100% plant fiber clothes and a bit of artistic transmutation later she even had a costume. Next time her siblings stopped by their parents house, she came out of her room, fully costumed, and announced to her family that she was ready to help her siblings and the police in their fight against the villainous Future League as the superhero Floral!

When as an eleven year old, Lily had spoken with conviction about her desire to move forward faster academically despite her parents concerns, they had taken her words to heart, understood her position, and agreed to allow her to set whatever pace for herself she wanted.

This time wasn't like that.

Her father thought it was way too risky, completely outside of her experience, not her job at all. Her mother was already terrified enough for Hannah and Andrew and told her not to even consider it. Andrew tried to spin it as like, "Don't worry about us, we've got this" and so on, but he made it pretty obvious he didn't think she was anything like combat-capable, and he might have also made the mistake of saying "It's our job to protect you" out loud.

Hannah gave it to her worst. By the end of things the discussion had devolved into a screaming match between the two of them, and finally Lily stormed out of the house, furious.

But she wasn't willing to give up. If her siblings didn't want her help, fine. She was the one with superpowers. She'd protect her hometown herself, if that was what it took!

For the past couple of weeks, Lily has been doing just that, as best she can. In some ways, it was thrilling. She took down half a dozen of Lockdown's Bronze Links when they tried to mug a guy on the street, disabled a Suneater who was trying to animate a golem from the sandbox at a local playground, pheromone-controlled a...random thief who actually didn't have anything to do with the Future League at all but had been burgling the wrong house at the wrong time to turn himself into the police, and used her acid to melt a few of Dr. Proxy's Helper bots to slag when they tried to rob two teacups from a small china shop for reasons nobody has been able to determine.

In other ways...well, let's just say the media and public started by immediately ignoring her introducing herself as Floral in favor of naming her Flower Girl, and things went downhill from there. Lily had been aiming to give Floral a kinda "badass warrior scientist" aesthetic, but most of the stories around her seemed to center on her rather cutesy powers. The thing was, to outside appearances, Lily in combat was mainly about...producing strong smells that debilitated her enemies, or splashing them with poisonous or drugged nectar, or covering them with pollen. She had...kinda shied away from, you know, melting any giant gaping holes into anybody with her acid, and such, aside from the Proxybots and nobody but the shop's owner had actually seen that fight (it had been a slow day at the china shop, business was down due to supply chain issues). And obviously she wasn't going around throwing fire or dispensing a superpowered beatdown with her fists or telekinetically chucking cars at people or stuff. And her enemies hadn't...exactly been significant foes (the mage...miiiight have in fact been an apprentice who wasn't actually very good at magic. Like, I'm not saying he could only cast three low-level spells per day or anything, but I am saying that after casting his third spell he had swapped to a handgun, so...) It wasn't that her reception wasn't generally positive. People liked Floral well enough. But more in a "Aw look, the little flower girl is trying to help. She's adorable. Can we keep her?" sort of way than in a "There's a new hero in town!" sort of way. Also the police seemed to be trying with varying levels of gentleness to convince her that she was technically a civilian and should leave this sort of thing to them, which Lily was sure was her siblings' faults.

So...that was annoying.

But it didn't actually change the need, so Lily's keeping at it, doing what she can to protect and maybe one day free her city from the league of villains that have taken it over.

Spoiler: Lily Scent/Emotions Reference

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Calm: Lilies.
Rage: Fresh baked bread.
Love: Roses.
Hate: Lemons.
Hope: Daisies.
Fear: Honey.
Joy: Poppies.
Pain: Cinnamon.
Faith: Jasmine.
Doubt: Mint.
Pride: Sunflowers.
Shame: Maple syrup.

EDIT: As far as knowing each other, I'm cool with it, although I'm not coming up with much as far as ideas for it.

Flint's relatively new to town so while I definitely see lots of potential for interesting interactions between he and Lily (although oddly enough I could also see Lily relating to Sara pretty well; she can commiserate with the whole "baby sister with overprotective older siblings" thing) I imagine they don't know each other. Not impossible that Floral and Helios could have crossed paths in their heroic activities, but my sense is given Floral's "Did things just heroic enough to make the wrong name for herself" and Helios's "Has access to the Suneater's plans and reliably shows up to foil them" they probably wouldn't have ended up crossing paths much.

Lily and Kel I could imagine crossing paths some, although my understanding is Kel is also somewhat new to town, albeit not as new as Flint. They both have jobs somewhere in academia (actually I thought I had Lily doing some teaching on the side, but going back through her backstory I didn't see it, so I might just be thinking of a previous incarnation of her, so that's less of a possible connection than I thought). At the very least I imagine part of Lily's shopping spree to restart her wardrobe from scratch using 100% plant fiber clothing probably brought her to Dimetria's store at least a few times, because that's the sort of thing that amuses me.

Lily and Remy are at least both Forester's Bay natives (if I didn't fail my reading comprehension check, anyway), but they don't seem to have really moved in the same circles or have all that much in common. So they could totally know each other randomly for some reason, but an actual connection doesn't spring out to me.