Germination [Flashback]

[Pamela Isley - Poison Ivy]

(OOC: I wrote this a long time ago on another site, but I thought that I'd add it in here because my Ivy here has the same background and I wanted to share it here.)

"Miss Isley? Miss Isley, are you awake?"

Pamela twitched at the sound of the voice, feeling it echoing around in her head at ten times the volume it had been uttered. Unfortunately that only encouraged it - that twitch was the first voluntary move that she'd made after over two weeks of being in a coma.

"Miss Isley, can you open your eyes?"

Yes, as long as it will get you to shut up, she thought as her eyes flickered open, but then immediately closed. Fortunately, the doctor sensed the problem and dimmed the lights, allowing her to open her eyes more fully. She was in a hospital bed, hooked up to all sorts of machines making obnoxiously loud beeping noises and flashing their glaringly bright lights. Or maybe her senses were just being oversensitive - it was hard to tell.

"Do you remember what happened?"

Blessedly, the doctor standing by her bedside and watching her carefully had guessed that the sensitivity of her eyes might also apply to her hearing and his voice was much softer this time. Still too loud, but an improvement. Reflecting on his question, it only took her a moment to remember - so many needles, so much pain... Physical and mental; pain of the body caused by the man she trusted most... "Yes," she said simply, her voice cracking because of disuse and her tone dispassionate. Now that she remembers what happened, she'd like nothing more than to forget.

"The police would like you to confirm..."

"Dr. Woodrue..." she starts suddenly, though she feels so weak and her thoughts are so disorganized that she finds it difficult for to speak. "Dr. Woodrue experimented on me," she says weakly, unable to inject the same venom into her voice that is now swimming around in her head. That man... he'd betrayed her.

"...That's what they thought, I'll tell them. They're still looking for him."

Pamela's fist clenched tightly at that. He'd betrayed her and gotten away!

"I hate to have to tell you this, but..."

She didn't need to listen as he explained her new condition. Or at least, those parts of it that a simple doctor could figure out by observation. She'd known what Dr. Woodrue had been working on - the man was clearly insane. But he was also a genius. She'd thought that, as his favorite student, she didn't have to worry about his grand plans for his research. She'd helped him, and he'd cared about her. Or at least, she thought he did. Instead he'd tried to kill her - or at least, done something that he thought would result in her death even thought that wasn't the real point.

The only real question on her mind now is why she's still alive. He hadn't been ready to do a successful test - she'd seen the flaws in his work herself. She should be dead now - he would have expected her to die from that. So why is she still alive? Her eyes drift through the hospital room, finally coming to rest on the small table by her bed. On it were a small collection of gifts: cards, candy, flowers... Murders! she thought as her eyes looked over cut flowers - the fact that they were supposed to convey sympathy and good wishes lost to her. But then her eyes rested on a potted amaryllis. At least someone out there knows her.

"...but if there's anything you need?"

Glancing back at the doctor as the question registers, Pamela says, "Give me that potted plant," she tells him, not expecting him to be able to identify which one she means otherwise, "And get rid of the rest of those things - I don't want them."

"...Are you okay, Miss Isley?"

"Yes," she lies, managing a somewhat stronger tone, "Now please, the plant. And I want to be alone."

"But your parents..."

"Alone!" she snapped.

Fortunately, her wishes were followed this time, though she could see that a nurse had been sent to keep an eye on her through the window just in case she needed anything. But she ignored that and instead turned her attention to the amaryllis, now placed beside her. Though she felt very weak, she lifted one to gently touch one of the flowers. "What do I do now, baby?" she asked it quietly.

[Pamela Isley - Poison Ivy]

"I'm sorry, Miss Isley, but you can't leave in this condition."

Struggling valiantly to keep her temper in check, Pamela states, "But I feel fine."

"I understand that, Miss Isley, but the poisons in your blood are still there and..."

"Don't you have a form I can fill out so that I can leave even though you think it's a bad idea?" she interrupts, knowing that they'll never be able to clean out what Dr. Woodrue put inside of her or figure out how she's alive - she knows full well that half the team assigned to her case is attempting one and half is the attempting the other. Useless - only a student of Dr. Woodrue's could hope to understand it, and she and Dr. Woodrue himself are the only ones who might be able to reverse it. If that's even possible. But she can't figure that out from a hospital room!

"Technically we do, but if you discharge yourself then you wouldn't be going home."

Frowning at that, Pamela can only ask, "What do you mean?"

"Your therapist has expressed enough concerns that we would be obligated to commit you to Arkham if you left prematurely."

There's a long pause as Pamela tries to comprehend the meaning of that, but after a moment of stunned silence she explodes, "You mean you think I'm a nutcase?!?"

"Please, Miss Isley, calm down. It isn't like that. It's just with these outbursts and your refusals to cooperate with your therapist... there is some concern that you aren't coping well with your situation."

Half a moment from snapping back at him, Pamela manages to stop herself as the words sink in. He thinks she's crazy for being angry? Who wouldn't be! No, he's just looking for any excuse to keep her in this hospital so they can continue their useless tests on her. But she can fake being okay about her situation if she has to in order to get out of here. If she's legitimately on her best behavior and her therapist gives her a clean bill of health then they'll have no excuse to threaten her with Arkham if she leaves, and she'll be free.

Lost in thought, she ignores the doctor until he leaves, no longer caring about anything else he may have to say. She can behave herself, but the problem would be convincing the therapist - whether they're putting him up to raising those concerns or whether he really has them, she has to bring him around to her side. But how? Pondering upon the problem for awhile, she suddenly hits upon a thought: she's beautiful and has little to lose, while he's young, not very passionate about his work, and too boring to get much attention from women - surely they can come to some sort of an arrangement that would please them both?

She glances over the amaryllis, now kept within easy view and reach on the nightstand by her hospital bed. Fingering one of the leaves, she whispers, "Don't worry, baby, we'll be out of here soon."

[Pamela Isley - Poison Ivy]

It felt strange to be move back into her parent's estate. But it has one thing that the lavish apartment she'd been living in during her time at the university doesn't have: space. If she was going to discover whether or not she can cure what Dr. Woodrue did to her, she's going to need a lab to work in and a greenhouse to grow the plants she'll need to harvest for their extracts. And that means that she can either move back home or somehow convince one of the top labs in Gotham to let her borrow their equipment, and this is something she'd rather do with a certain amount of privacy. What she didn't expect was the reactions of her parents.

"No, we will not help you pay to expand the greenhouse. While we understand that you've been through a lot lately and are happy to let you stay here as long as you need to, we're not going to let you sit around and give you everything you want. You have a doctorate, for Christ's sake; if you want anything extra you can get a job and pay for it yourself."

Her parents did have a point. She'd been less than a month away from getting her doctorate when Dr. Woodrue attacked her, and when she'd asked what to do about the rest of her education they'd decided to wave it due to the circumstances: she'd been one of their top students, after all, and clearly deserved her degree. And she would have no trouble finding a job between that and her already stellar reputation in the field.

But she wasn't interested in spending the kind of time it would take to earn enough money - not when she knew her parents had many times what she'd need just sitting in their account. It would be a lot faster and easier to simply collect her inheritance...

---

"I'm sorry for your loss, Miss Isley. If you'd like to talk to a grief counselor...?"

Doing a picture perfect rendition of shock, despair, and a barely successful attempt to keep the tears at bay, Pamela says, "No, I'll be okay."

"Well if you feel like you need to talk to someone, you can call the number on this card."

Nodding faintly to that as she accepts the card and closes the door, and the moment the door is shut her grief-stricken face is replaced by a triumphant smirk. It had all been so easy: slip dear old daddy a little poison just before her parents went out for the evening last night, and now they're gone and nobody's the wiser. Merely a matter of giving him something that would dissipate quickly when it was finished working. And daddy was always one to speed on the freeway; the police told her they were still trying to determine if the resulting accident was caused by him falling asleep or taking a sharp turn too quickly and, as she'd hoped, her mother had gone with him.

Such a small price to pay for the mansion and the money: the lives of two people who never really cared about her anyway. She feels like celebrating. Smiling at that idea, she grabs her purse and keys, deciding to spend the day shopping. If anyone raises an eyebrow at that, she'll simply tell them that she was so upset that she'd had to distract herself somehow. Besides, since leaving the hospital she's realized that her wardrobe is too... timid...

And once she gets home she can start planning how to put dearly departed mommy and daddy's money to good use, as well as tie up a few loose strings she's left at the hospital.

[Pamela Isley - Poison Ivy]

Once the money from her inheritance had come in, it didn't take long for her to arrange to have the greenhouse expanded and convert her father's lab into one that better suits her own needs. And now that she's had the opportunity to redecorate the mansion with potted plants as a running theme, the Isley estate now feels like it's truly hers and not her parent's. The most annoying part of the whole process was having to feign sadness all the time, not to mention the funeral.

But now that all of that has been laid to rest, she's enjoying having the entire place to herself. In particular, she greatly appreciates being alone as she browses through the results of her latest blood sample. "Dr. Woodrue, you bastard," she mutters, half in anger but half in awe. Is there a single molecule of her body that hasn't been changed somehow by his experiment? Every part of her body chemistry has been altered into something just a little more plant-like. Now that she sees the full scope of the change, she wonders even more how she managed to survive.

And yet, even as she examines the results, she has to pat herself on the back because she can already see how to reverse the process. Probably not all at once like Dr. Woodrue's experiment - that took a certain finesse that she hasn't developed yet, but she can make herself fully human again.

...Human...

Even as that thought crosses her mind she finds herself questioning it: why does she care so much about changing herself back? What's so special about being purely human that she's willing to put herself through another painful process to get it back? After all, it's not like she's really any different. In fact, she can see that she has several advantages this way: as she's now made out of many poisons in quite the literal sense, she's immune to them. And all those diseases that trouble humanity are simply not designed to work within her new body chemistry. And it's not like she objects to being more plant-like - it probably puts her a step ahead of the rest of humanity.

And it also lays the foundation of something else: as she gets used to the idea of what she now is, she realizes that with these changes to her body she now can use her knowledge of plant hybrids to change herself... But what to do with that? Something to ponder upon.

But in the mean time, she realizes that she has to worry about what those doctors found out about her while she was in the hospital. Or, more precisely, what records they had. She doubts that they came close to figuring out what was going on inside of her, but whatever they do know has to be erased. And she knows just the man to do it for her.

That psychologist she'd 'convinced' to ignore the more troubling aspects of her thought process had proven very easy to manipulate, and he'd have access to her records. She can simply 'convince' him to purge her records, and then make sure that he has an unfortunate accident - as long as she's sure to keep the fact that she's talking to him again a secret, then nobody should be able to trace anything to her. And what's another murder now, given that she's already killed twice. No, thrice - she's always forgetting that boyfriend in college...

[Pamela Isley - Poison Ivy]

After the 'tragic' and 'unexpected' deaths of her parents, Pamela has become a person of some consequence among Gotham's wealthy elite now that she's in charge of their millions. Perhaps she would have been sooner in her position as sole heiress, but the Isleys had been a rather unsocial family - she because of her previous shyness and her parents because of their focus on their work. But since leaving the hospital she's turned over a new leaf.

Though the Isleys didn't have very many friends, those that her parents had accumulated over the years have been quick to introduce themselves to their grieving daughter. The daughter who had always hidden herself from view has now proven to be a beautiful and intelligent young woman - someone that one wants one's friends to meet. She's found herself being introduced to many more 'important' people.

She despises every one of them.

However, in her life before she'd had occasion to practice and perfect the art of appearing one way while feeling another. It's just that instead of appearing to be sweet and polite while she was full of terror on the inside, now on the inside she feels only disgust. Still, it seems like every former acquaintance of her parents and their friends has a single son about her age, and all of them have been lining up to try to win her over.

She has to admit that she loves the attention.

However, every time one of them gets too close they remind her of Dr. Woodrue.

Even though she's decided to keep herself in the condition he put her in, that doesn't mean that she doesn't want to kill him. Even though she believes that the minor irritants associated with it are more than made up for by the benefits, he still betrayed her by putting her through an experiment that he had no reason to believe that she'd survive. However, his life has been inaccessible to her; nobody has seen him since the night he attacked her, and even knowing as much as she does about the man the trail would have gone cold if there'd been one to begin with.

With that desire unable to be fulfilled, she's found herself struggling with what to do with herself. Every evening anymore is spent at some party or benefit or dinner, but it's been difficult for her to know what to do with the rest of her time. Of course, being a socialite is an expensive activity, so eventually she began doing commission work for various companies by creating unique hybrid plants for them. Not that she couldn't spend her entire life burning through her parents money if she manages it properly, but it occurs to her that she may find a better use for it; money is a good thing to have.

But then, coming up with new hybrids is what gave her the first idea of how she could modify herself: pheromones. Almost nobody notices the faint floral scent that follows her around now, and those that do tend to mistake it for perfume. But then, a part of the reason that it isn't remarked upon is because anyone, male or female, who comes within arms length of her are unwittingly convinced that they ought to relax, forget about whatever else they were doing, and instead pay attention to the fascinating woman in front of them. And the men's attention is also attracted to the fact that she's a very fine example of someone of the female persuasion.

Because, again, she loves the attention.

And if she has to deal with so many rich people, at least she can do it while saying what she wants to say instead of pretending to listen while they blather on about something. But then, having her own way when it comes to the dinner conversation doesn't change who the people she's talking to are: industrialists, politicians, and other such easily despised people. And, since this is Gotham, half of them are bribing the other half of them to look the other way about something, and when that something isn't some sort of major criminal activity it's often to overlook violations to regulations. Such as the regulations against pollution and other blows to the environment.

Naturally, Pamela would like to kill them all.

Once the lab and greenhouse had served its initial purpose of providing answers about her condition, doing botany outside of what she needs to do to keep a little money flowing seems unimportant. Except, of course, when she starts to think about the people she spends her evening with - that tends to impart a certain sense of purpose to it.