[M&M 2e - RoD] Character Profiles

[Lady Aceworth]

For those in the game, please place your "public profiles" here. From this post on, this will be an IC thread since this deals with In-World matters.

[Long]

Ryu "Long" Hideyoshi

There is little public information on Long, most of it was either long buried, or totally erased.

What is known is that he seems to be a young man with a near cult following in Japan, as well as a habit for coming out of situations he shouldn't. He's been around over a dozen areas Stein units attacked, and has always managed to be one of the survivors. Some Scandal papers say he's the cause of them, officially he's not a suspect, though there are some now taking an interest in his wherabouts, just to keep emergency response units on standby nearby.

[Dash Carpenter]

Dash Carpenter

It was one of those days at Mrs. Betherby's house, where people in the upper classes of the British Empire collected in a small salon and found themselves with little to do in these waning days but gossip. Mrs. Johnson's niece Leila had just returned from a holiday lasting several long months, and thus was particularly curious when the chatter turned to that old black sheep, John Carpenter.

"Yes, you don't suppose he'll return from wherever he's been in time for the Annual?" She asked with the full curiosity of youth, seeing as John Carpenter, whatever he felt towards his estranged relatives and family friends, did come back for that event no matter what.

"Probably," Jeremiah remarked, sipping some tea, "and we'll see that boy with him bloody likely."

"What boy?" Leila inquired, pulled fully in now. "It was the Annual after the British Library went down dearie," Mrs. Betherby remarked, sadly in a moment's silence for that tragic event. "John came back, but with a lad of 13 roughly, though you knew right away that boy was going to be quite handsome once he was older. And there was certainly some closeness between them, though John always referred to him as 'my protege' or 'my ward'. We never got the boy's name."

"And it's not like that!" She added sharply, interpreting the change in Leila's expression correctly. "We know John Carpenter isn't that kind of man, whatever else he may have done wrong. And the boy, he stayed apart from everyone, but he was polite, though distant. And I can't help but remember how he seemed to observe everything like some textbook of some kind... rather frightening."

The Runner

Johnny Hammer, to the world's underworld, has always been an enigmatic though reputable hit-man, but rumors heightened when he brought in a teenage partner codenamed, The Runner. Young but handsome, The Runner has been Hammer's constant partner since first seen 3 1/2 years ago, and certainly is more than capable in a fight.

Like his older counterpart, The Runner is said by a few to be superhuman, though where Hammer is said to make paper a deadly weapon, The Runner can outpace cars and ignore bullets. Law enforcement and the clever know this is false, but the word continues. In addition, The Runner has been known for... unexpected quirks.

One story about The Runner holds that during negotiations, he met the daughter of Boss Rivaldo of San Francisco. She was completely smitten by him and literally attempted to jump his bones, frightening The Runner to the point where he broke the girl's arm, dislocated her shoulder, and inflicted other similar injuries. This story also holds that Johnny Hammer only mitigated Rivialdo's wrath by agreeing to perform the hit he was hired for for free, an element that has made this story generally disbelieved in the underworld.

Johnny Hammer never does anything for free, and neither does The Runner. Don't turn your back on either.

[Wyrd]

Nobody knows if John Smith is his real name, as he refuses to confirm or deny it, and also refuses to provide any identification which is not forged. What is known about him from numerous psych tests while he was in training was that apparently his childhood was not pleasant. His father was physically abusive and his mother was emotionally abusive, making her one of the few women beaten by her husband to deserve it, at least sometimes. She would deliberately provoke him to the point where he couldn't hold back just so she could hold it and his shame over losing control over his head later and threaten him with the law to further enrage him. It was a codependent cycle of doom whose real victim was their only child.

John withdrew more and more from everyone. He desperately wanted not to be noticed, not to be seen, to be someone, anyone else. And, at some point, he was. Slowly people stopped noticing he was there unless he wanted to be noticed. Teachers could never remember whether he had been in class or not, unless they were having a particularly interesting lesson, in which case he would shine so bright with almost palpable charisma that people wondered how they could forget he was there.

His first shapeshift, at least that he was aware of, apparently happened during a particularly... erotic... daydream involving a couple of classmates. It didn't take him long to figure out how to mimic other people's forms or design new forms from his imagination, though at first he stuck to purely human forms. Assured of his ability to sustain himself, he left home and never looked back. His therapists suspect that he is so reticent to give any specifics about his childhood to avoid having someone decide to track down his parents for his own good.

John was spotted shoplifting at a convenience store by a telepath with sufficient powers to overcome the 'notice-me-not' field he projected(later termed SEP by some Douglas Adams fans). Intrigued by the teen's abilities, she recruited him to the Library.

What followed where years of training and tests. It took a long time for the scientists in charge to figure out the nature of his talents, though they couldn't be sure of their source. His powers seemed to be based on a telepathic effect that extended down to the cellular level but no higher than the subconscious, combined with an amazing level of adaptability. Through these powers, he could alter his shape at will, but only if he believed that he could assume the new form. It took years of training to break the psychological blocks that prevented him from being a full shapeshifter, and even now he isn't all that good with the more advanced aspects of his powers.

What made the nature of his powers so hard to discover is that they tended to react to tests the way the researcher expected them to. Even sending the sample to a completely independent person for tests only resulted in inconclusive results. The top two theories for his power source are some sort of quantum manipulation, generated possibly by a natural mutation, or some form of magic, as both are known to respond to the expectations of observers. Two less popular theories were that he was an alien sent to infiltrate humanity with a sleeper program designed to activate at some later date, or that he was a faerie(this researcher got laughed at a lot for this one) because he so closely resembled many of the legends of changelings. He doesn't have a vulnerability to iron, but it is possible that he has just been surrounded by it so much throughout his life that he has become inured to its effects.

He can shapeshift part of his mass into equipment, such as clothing, but is very limited in his ability to do so safely. Essentially, he carries a mass of excess skin cells that he can morph into whatever form he desires. This quantity of excess mass can handle most styles of clothing and a small piece of equipment or two, such as a knife or wire cutters. To create more than this requires that he use living cells, which is quite painful and takes a while to regenerate. Also, should he remove the clothing he has created rather than reabsorb it, it leaves him hypersensitive to touch, as if someone had come along and removed all of the dead skin cells from his epidermis. He claims that this is quite a benefit during sex, but very distracting at other times.

To his own chagrin, he is not bisexual, but he is very good at pretending to be interested in men, and has done so when the mission required it. Other missions where he gets to impersonate a lesbian really help to balance out the less pleasant memories. His adaptability means that he could likely change himself to become physically attracted to men, but he is wary of altering his own mind. Curiosity about the parts of humanity he has yet to explore may one day drive him to try it despite his misgivings.

He has at this point been trained very effectively as an infiltration and espionage expert, though he occasionally gets bodyguard work as well, especially when the person being guarded doesn't particularly want to be guarded. With a great deal of practice, he has learned to mimic super powers at a very low level, but only if they are biological in nature. A super who can bend space with his mind to fly could be mimicked, but one who had bones laced with a special mineral that allowed him to leap great distances could not. With sufficient practice, he can learn skills he has mimicked from others, but since this takes months of relatively close proximity to the source while that source is using their powers, he is pretty much limited to permanently copying the abilities of those willing to let themselves be studied.

His telepathy allows him to read a targets reflexes and mannerisms, making his impersonation of them nearly perfect. It also allows him to pick up what those around him expect from him, giving him a major advantage in infiltration, as someone who is suspicious will often ask a trick question that only the target would know the answer to--the target and them, of course. To date, he has never been spotted on an assignment since completing his training.

In combat, if he spends a moment focusing on a particular individual, he can predict their reactions, making it nearly impossible to dodge his attacks. This also gives him a very slight but tangible bonus to reactions. If someone near him starts to glow green and everyone around him knows to dive for cover, he too reacts just as fast. He also avoids overreacting when he can tell that the reaction to the people near him to the sound of a klaxon is 'mmmm, lunch,' not 'warning, intruder.'

He now goes by the codename Everyman, and was most recently assigned as a back-up guard for Sakurako's team as they installed their monitoring equipment. He often wears a watch that goes counter-clockwise. When asked if it does anything 'special,' he only smiles enigmatically.