Individual Character's full name: Mercury Icarus Fall
Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Gender: Masculine queer (will accept pretty much any pronoun, but introduces himself in the masculine and is generally read as flamboyant but still masculine)
Age: 24
Date of Birth: May 16 1992
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Darwin, Australia
Nationality: Australian (permanent USA resident)
Ethnicity/ Cultural Heritage: Mixed northern European on his mother’s side, father was probably south east Asian but even names are overrated yo (so says mom)
AppearanceHair color and style: Naturally ash blond but usually dyed multiple shades of blue; mid-back and loosely wavy when loose. Often twisted and tied up into a deceptively simple ponytail with assorted loose chunks escaping the elastic, plus his bangs refuse to be anything other than chaotic.
Skin Tone: Depends on where he’s been touring last! Pale for Mercury looks like a tanned classic European, and tanned-Mercury fits in very well with less-tanned folk of his probable paternal region.
Eye Color: Dark blue-green. Like kelp, really.
Height: 6’, occasionally with high heels too
Build: Athletic and professionally-guided toned
Visible mutation: Well, water kind of.... behaves... around him, and he very clearly associates himself with water, and also he’s moderately famous. Otherwise, though, no; he doesn’t glow or anything when he’s working.
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: Two frequently-changed piercings in each earlobe, plus a tongue stud he rolls around when concentrating. For tattoos, everything is related to water: a scattering of rain-on-glass shadows and ripples across his shoulders and upper back; and two knotwork anklets (left ankle, overlapping on the inside with both exposed on the outside) composed of waves and raindrops wrapped in rope.
Other features: (if applicable)
Everyday clothing style: Leather jackets are common, slacks never jeans. Shoes vary from sandals to thigh-high high-heeled leather boots, and from glitzy to subtle. Visibly cheap is rare, though.
Uniform: Depends on the show, but usually some variant of a tux jacket and evening gown skirt
Sleepwear: wouldn’t you like to know~
Miscellaneous clothing: Mercury keeps a small vial on a necklace on his most of the time: this hand-blown, vividly coloured little bottle is full of water he is pretty much always low-key manipulating, and serves as a back up way to boost his affinity with new water.
CharacterPersonality: So, want to get to know the real Mercury, do you? Well, that’s easy! Seriously, just pay attention. Mercury isn’t one to hide himself behind a façade. He puts himself on stage, both literally and socially, and has found that that is what sells! He loves being bubbly and bouncy and silly, and also that that makes him rather a lot of money. Well, not a lot after he pays for everyone his agent says he needs to hire, but they seem to do good work so he’ll keep paying them as long as he can.
Mercury revels in joy and pleasure, and would seriously like for everyone to be happy. That’s really his goal. It isn’t that simple, but that is the gist of it. Mercury likes happy and dislikes unhappy.
Now, Mercury might want everyone to be happy, but there are actually some groups that he puts more effort into making happy than others. He’s not particularly worried about the overall happiness of the status quo – and will cheerfully flip off people whose happiness is dependent on the unhappiness of others – but he is an energetic supporter of marginalized groups. Those groups vary; after all, he is a proud member of the mutant, LGBT*, and not-100%-white communities (although he doesn’t get to do much for the last, since he passes for white).
Now, Mercury isn’t going to do anything bad to privileged people or groups. He’s not that sort of guy! He has no reason to hurt anyone. He’ll just volunteer his time and finances towards other groups first, y’know?
That being said, he’s never been the direct target of extreme, personal violence on the basis on his minority statuses.
Hobbies/ Interests: Music, interesting patterns, cute fluffy things (dogs not cats), messing around with clothing and makeup. Also, flirting with strangers in alcohol-serving establishments, and occasionally bribing/seducing staff into playing his music
Job or part time job and description: Musical
phenomenon!
Fears/ phobias/ concerns: Who, Mercury? Naw! (but, uh, please actually keep little dogs away from him; he’s had too many run-ins with untrained, unsocialized toy dogs and lost too much skin. Also clowns are REALLY *****ING CREEPY HE WILL RUN AWAY)
Special talents: Mercury’s honestly a pretty good singer, and has developed quite a bit of skill in choreography.
MoralityGood/ bad/ neutral/ other: Naively, energetically GOOD
MutationsMutation description: A manipulator of water, Mercury can bend liquid dihydrogen monoxide to his will. As he is in control of a particular bit of water, he gradually gains a stronger connection to it, and becomes capable of greater power and finesse. Should that water leave his realm of influence, that connection fades over time. Mixing high-affinity water with low-affinity water averages the total resulting affinity.
Many of the details and limits of Mercury’s ability are tied to this idea of affinity. Water he works with frequently, or is always with him and passively receptive to his power, responds to his will more rapidly and at greater distances. It is more willing to do as he asks, and less likely to insist on other things – like gravity or the current of other fluids.
On the other hand, should Mercury walk up to a pond in a foreign country and insist that it explode into dancing swans and fireworks... well. If it’s a small pond and he’s lucky, he might get a grumpy flail and some spray. Mostly grumpy flail. A lot of water is really lazy, see. It wants to just sit there and chill. Moving water is easier to move, but harder to settle into a stationary figure. Working with the same water and building a relationship with it is much more efficient, but carrying water around doesn’t work so well either.
Not that that stops him from keeping two tanker trucks full of water in his touring caravan.
... or from using one as a swimming pool most days. But that’s Mercury, isn’t it?
Strengths: Ooooh, the
point of it all? The usefulness and extraordinary magic of it? The undeniable, immoveable, impenetrable power of his laziness incarnate?
Water is all of that. It is fluid, flexible, and accommodating, able to bend to whatever shapes press against it. Come at it wrong, though, and it’ll hurt just as much as a brick wall – if a brick wall could rear up and dash itself against your face on its own without showing any sign of it afterwards? Complete and total casual innocence.
Basically, water is awesome in ALL SITUATIONS EVER! It can cool in heat, and insulate against cold. It can grind and cut away things that seem invulnerable, and while just about anything can cut it with gentleness it goes entirely uninjured.
It can flow (with help) into intricate, beautiful forms, and also it makes
the best beds.
Mercury can control the location, shape, and flow of water, provided sufficient affinity, and can affect other traits like density indirectly, by confining the space and exerting willpower upon it.
Weaknesses and Limitations: Down to the nitty-gritty.
Mercury’s ability to manipulate water is primarily based on the concept of affinity for a particular body of water. The more he uses or is near it, the more affinity for it he gains. Conversely, if he leaves it behind and has nothing to do with it, he loses that affinity. Water within one metre of his body passively gains about 5% affinity per day; within three metres, 1% per day; this is an exponential loss rather than a linear gradient. Active manipulation of water gains affinity much faster: intricate, focused manipulation adds up to 25% affinity per hour, while gentle and more general manipulation adds up to 5% affinity per hour, but either way the affinity is only developed with the water Mercury is actually directly manipulating: cheating and only really working with the outer edge doesn’t develop affinity nearly as effectively.
Affinity is lost at negligible rates within three metres, but beyond that degrades exponentially if not in use. Between three and five metres, affinity is passively lost at 1% per day. Ten metres sees that jump to 5% per day, while fifteen metres spikes to
50% per day. This loss is temporarily negated when Mercury is manipulating the body of water in question: for each minute of manipulation, affinity is not lost for up to five minutes afterwards. Additionally, the longer the water has been at a high affinity, the more efficient this affinity-retention is: Mercury’s back-up water, kept on a necklace much of the time, holds the record for this, and remained as easy to work with after he once lost it for a full (panicked) day. Stronger relationships are more lenient to absences than budding ones. Unfortunately, it is not feasible to spend all of one’s time within reach of a large body of water, so even if Mercury were to work to get, say, a tanker truck to 100% affinity it would be completely unfeasible to maintain it like he does the little bottle at their neck.
Mercury can manipulate water at a distance of about half a metre for each point of affinity. By manipulating a ‘shell’ of higher-affinity water, he can roughly work with more water at a greater distance, but it is clumsy (the shell must always be perfect to contain the low-affinity water, which behaves as passively as water does for everyone else) and actually more tiring than working with the entire volume of water directly (if with sufficient affinity to manipulate it at the given distance, at least). Objects between Mercury and the water he is manipulating do not interfere with the available range.
There is no direct limit to the volume Mercury can handle at once, but it is a great deal more tiring to work with low-affinity water than with high-affinity water, and also very tiring to turn low-affinity water into high-affinity water. Working with 5% affinity water for one minute is about as hard as working with 50% affinity water for an hour, or 100% affinity water for an entire day – full-affinity water is really about as effortless as breathing, right out to near the 50 metre mark.
Water manipulation wears Mercury down like physical exertion. Exercise is tiring, and if overdone can lead to whole-body exhaustion, shaking, an inability to catch his breath, severe headaches, muscle cramps, and muscle sprains – or in this case, a sprained mutation that sends shooting pain through Mercury’s entire body if he tries to use it. Attempts to forcefully manipulate water beyond its available range is the easiest way to sprain the ability. He’s only sprained his mutation a few times in the past, and it generally takes between one and three days to effectively heal, with another week afterwards that is vulnerable to re-spraining. Physical healing from other mutants has no effect on this sort of injury, but psychic healing is possible. Naturopathic techniques related to relaxation have proven some degree of aid.
Note that Mercury has no true special senses related to water, but can vaguely feel where his will is interacting with water. Higher affinity water has a clearer and more defined feel, but sight is very important for him.
Physical AbilitiesGeneral Physical Capabilities: Mercury is in fairly good shape, but likes tasty food (and alcohol) too much for his personal trainer to actually succeed in making him fit. Also, lazy.
Fighting Style: YELL FOR HELP
Fighting Style Pros/Cons: Finesse not required!
But, uh, success? Hope you weren’t counting on that.
History Of Your CharacterMercury actually has a fairly straightforward past. He was born in northern Australia to a single mother who flouted most of the nation’s conservative restrictions, from her punk rock band to her relationships, which were as queer as what she did in them. In that glorious, free swirl of chaos, her single child arose.
Mercury never knew his biological father, and grew up without putting much stock in lineage anyway. His mother was often alienated outside of her small, diverse, frequently-changing circle, and her son got a front-row seat once he began attending school. His classmates ranged from subtle fascination to outright animosity towards his only parent, and their parents made it clear where the negativity came from. Comments about Mercury being an accident – an inevitable one at that – rather than the fully conscious choice April Fall had actually made, questions about if she’d ‘settled down’ or ‘found the right man’ or ‘grown up’ yet, simple looks of disgust.
Attempts to draw Mercury into the conservative frame of mind that guided them – which were generally received with laughter on Mercury’s part and slippery evasion.
As he grew older, closer to his mother than to anyone with whom he went to school, he hung out with her band and found himself helping out as a backup singer. He ended up enjoying it a tremendous amount, and took what vocal courses his school offered.
He, er, also found out that he wasn’t entirely human. One rainy season, when he was fifteen, on a super casual day, his water bottle started falling over while he was singing. He’d put it up, balance it against things, he even surrounded it with books for support!
And it still flopped around. It was so frustrating!
And then he realized that he could make it move when he wanted it to move. Not when it was empty, no, but if it was full he could move it around. He started playing around, encouraged by his mother (who was delightedly putting videos on the internet), and found it was simply water that he could rearrange at will.
What he could do with it, though, was definitely not simple. All sorts of patterns, motions. Whatever he wanted, really, and his mother was all for giving him more interesting challenges. Which... she then filmed and put on the internet.
The summer after his graduation, he participated in a local music competition. His music was too ‘alternative’ for the judges – probably had something to do with his watery visual effects – but it caught the ear of a music producer’s scout. The producer had a range of international connections, and thought Mercury could do well in America.
Seemed like a scam, but the producer also knew his mother and was mostly willing to pull a few strings to get her offspring into the fold before anyone else discovered him. April was happy to see her kid move up in the world, and have a chance in a more accepting area, but was still in love with Darwin herself. So Mercury packed up and boarded an airplane!
The producer, Altwave Records, set Mercury up with two trainers to start: one for voice and general music stuff, and one for control and general mutation stuff. When he debuted, using his mutation as much as his voice to entertain people in a socially accepted medium, his array of hired assistants grew.
And grew even more when he started touring. Not especially attached to any one part of his current country, Mercury has been on tour for several years solid now, dragging a veritable convoy in his wake.
RoleplayWhere did you learn about this site?: I SHALL NEVER FADE AWAY
Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: Aiden, Memo, and assorted retirees
Sample RP:This city was
crazy on edge. Mercury had never seen anything like it, though his agent (and H/MU, and costume designer, and choreographer, and bassist) all made it sound like it was going to keep being a thing, and be a thing in more and more places.
He didn’t like seeing people look so stressed when he snuck out and went wandering the streets. Not at all. That was why he was still here, actually. When most other artists were pulling out, avoiding the city until there were fewer... outright riots... Mercury was scheduling more last-minute shows. And not expensive ones either: no, the one scheduled for tomorrow night was priced to pretty much just cover costs, and that was with an awesome deal on the venue because they were panicking at having their previous booking back out on such short notice. Minimal ticket prices plus donations! And any profits beyond paying everyone and all that were going to go to support a local organization. His PR agent had dug it up: apparently they were helping find housing for people who had had their homes damaged by riots, or who had lost their homes thanks to the really nasty mutant/human tensions.
They’d been even happier when Mercury had invited their staff and a couple of their most disadvantaged families to come watch the show.
So why, exactly, was Mercury ambling along a street still bearing scorch marks, bullet dents, and broken glass?
He wanted a fancy coffee, and there was a fancy coffee place on this street. And it was still open! Ha!
But, uh, success? Hope you weren’t counting on that.