Theophilus Litan Kholer

Individual

Character's full name: Theophilus Litan Kholer

Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Litan usually uses his middle name, and goes by “Lit” with friends. He tolerates being called Theo, but he hates being called by his full first name.

He has an internal debate about what codename to go for and whether to go for one at all.

Gender:  Male

Age: 17

Date of Birth: 25th May, 2002

Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Atlantis, Caribbean

Nationality: Atlantean

Ethnicity/ Cultural Heritage: Atlantean (Ancient Greek)

Appearance

Hair color and style: Litan has black hair, very close to a pitch black, with brown hints when it gets sun-bleached. He has a double crown, so his hair is naturally very messy at the back, which resists almost all attempts to control it. Combine this with his low level of care about his physical appearance, and his hair is always messy. His hair is a little wavy.

Skin Tone: Lit has a warm tan colour skin.

Eye Color: Lit’s eyes are a warm maroon-brown colour. They have a weird dappling  effect to their irises, which is very typical of an octopus and very unsettling on a human.  His pupils are slightly the wrong shape; a wobbly horizontal oval, rather than a circle. Octopus pupils are non-circular to scatter light and help them detect colour better in low-light environments, and this is part of Lit’s mutation too.

Height: Litan is 5’4”. He’s taller than most of his family as is, so he isn’t going to grow very much taller.

Build: At a distance, Litan has a reasonably normal sort of build for a boy his age, though obviously shorter. He doesn’t really stand out due to his build in any significant ways. His face is pretty round, which makes him look a little younger than he is.

 Visible mutation: Litan’s mutation is pretty visible. His abilities are linked to octopodes, and his physiology displays this very clearly. In order from least visible to most visible:

Litan was born severely deaf, as a result of his mutation. The change to the structure of his ears is obvious to anyone who gets to see inside them, although they probably won’t realise it’s part of a mutation. Now that he’s on the surface, he can use a hearing aid, but he very much has habits of signing rapidly in Atlantean Sign Language.

Litan’s blood looks dark blue, rather than red. Obviously this shows when he bleeds, but it also shows in situations where blood pools under the skin anyway, such as blushing, where his face goes blue.

Litan literally does not have bones anymore, thanks to his mutation. The only remaining hard surfaces of his body are his teeth (and his hearing aids). The spare space is mostly replaced with muscle, which allows him to support himself, and for this to not normally be blatantly obvious. However, if someone touches him on almost any part of his body – bar his stomach – there’s really no way to disguise the lack of hard tissue. He just squashes under physical contact. While this causes him no pain, it is disturbing to others. The other way this becomes obvious is when he becomes too excited, falls unconscious, or gets overly distracted, etc. In situations like these, he loses control of how closely he can imitate normal human physiology, and starts more accurately impersonating cartoon anatomy normally, but can also start to entirely lose clear form in body parts he’s not focusing on. Being a very cheerful and excitable person this happens frequently.  If you’ve been exposed to him for more than about five minutes, you’ve probably noticed this already.

Finally, Lit has four extra limbs, closely resembling octopus arms sprouting from his back. The suckers are extremely pale, looking just a tiny bit blue, but the main body of the limbs fades from his normal skin tone to a similar colour to his hair.

Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: He has a very thorough share of new scratches and scars from his time after his mutation emerged to when he managed to get to Xavier’s.

Other features: Lit has plenty of freckles.

Lit’s severely deaf, and can communicate in AtSL at the same speed as his speech, and has been learning ASL as fast as he can, too. He signs excitedly by default alongside his speech, as he’s had to rely on quick signing until very recently. Lit has a strangely accent-less voice thanks to how recently he got his hearing aids, and he struggles to distinguish several sounds (eg b and p or g and k), often mixing them up in speech. Lit is definitely capable of communicating without his hearing aid, through signing, through lip-reading, through the limited amount he actually can hear or through writing, so as long as there’s time for him to work out which route to use with someone, and he can take pauses if it’s getting hard to focus, he’s fine in conversations.

Everyday clothing style: Lit’s clothing style is “whatever he found in the wardrobe that didn’t smell awful yet and he can get on quickly”. His wardrobe is supplied with nerdy shirts and hoodies, now that he’s able to get them. He normally wears at least something he can fiddle with regularly most days, which can be the base of a looser shirt, the zipper on a hoodie, or the general existence of a hoodie. With arms sticking out his back, he cuts messy holes in his clothing that let his arms out to interact with the world.

Because his powers are limited by solid clothes he’s wearing, if anyone can persuade him to wear shoes, they’ll only ever be shoes he can get off quickly.

By Atlantean standards, him wanting to wear any clothing is already very conservative.

Uniform: Not yet applicable.

Sleepwear: Lit’s one of those people who seems to be able to remove any clothing he’s wearing if he gets too hot, so what he goes to bed in doesn’t indicate what he’ll wake up in. His route while he’s awake is to wear a looser shirt and underwear.

Miscellaneous clothing: Lit wears in the canal hearing aids pretty much constantly, bar for sleep, the battery running out, and some sorts of training.

Character

Personality: Lit is naturally pretty smart, on grounds typical to most students who maintain top of the class sorts of grades in more than one subject, but definitely not on super-genius types of grounds. He’s got solid critical thinking skills, and can easily apply things he knows to new situations. He’s very experimental. He enjoys learning, and has a very kinaesthetic learning style. He has ADHD, which affects his personality in significant ways.

Lit is easily distracted, and while he can maintain focus on a task alright if he actually wants the results of that task, getting him to focus on things like his classwork is difficult. He’s prone to interruptions, he’s impulsive, and impatient, and with all four of these factors considered, he spends almost as much time in detention as out. His interruptions are rarely intentionally rude, more expressing enthusiasm, but that doesn’t stop teachers deeming it rude, especially when combined with him liking trying to apply his knowledge to new places and interrupting regularly with random vaguely relevant things he already knows. Concentrating on deciphering the meaning of unfamiliar sounds is also hard, so he often ends up doing something entirely different from what the teacher wants during class.

Litan is a massive fiddler, constantly wanting to play with things, and with three pairs of arms, he’s always moving somehow. He’s also very tactile with other people, often offering physical contact as a means of comforting others or showing affection and so on and is disappointed whenever anyone doesn’t want a squishy octopus hug, and when people’s personal space doesn’t make greeting them by touch a desirable thing. He often investigates things deeply with touch, and with his powers, this often means sticking an octopus arm into things to see how they function. Many devices have been broken by him poking an arm inside and fiddling to see how they work, and been broken worse while he’s tried to fix them without looking. Where all the broken computers have come from is a mystery to most students.

He really, really struggles with organisational tasks, or any tasks that depend on having a decent sense of how time works. He looks chaotic, he acts chaotic, and his stuff looks chaotic too, if he even managed to remember any of the things he was meant to have with him in class.

Lit is the sort of person who hides his negative emotions by pretending everything is fine. As he almost always acts bright and cheerful in front of others, it’s extremely difficult for anyone else to work out if he’s actually going through anything bad, even if they ask him, especially as his default mood is bright and cheerful anyway. No matter how bad he’s feeling, excitement from Lit is never feigned. Lit likes talking and meeting new people, and always chooses to come off as cheerful as he can manage, even if he’s struggling to understand. If he’s finding speaking too hard, he’ll normally pull out something to write on instead… if he remembered it.

For all the chaos he causes in class, it’s clear he is, ultimately, a good kid. His first solution to anyone else being upset is to bring them something he enjoys to cheer them up, and then to hear them out (nodding slowly when he doesn’t understand). While he’s deeply self-conscious of his mutation and his sexuality, he will support others in whatever ways their identity calls for. Hugs are great for greetings and for emotional support. He acts very differently since his secondary mutation activated, and he’s deeply aware of the differences, but he is still definitely the same person.

For Lit, absolutely nothing is above criticism and questioning, and no time is inappropriate for those discussions. That said, he has very little ability to stick up for his own opinions when he disagrees with people, and tends to back down from confrontation quickly, even if he has really good criticism, until he’s specifically asked about it.

Although he is generally very sweet and kind to other people, he is still a teenage boy, and still has the maturity one should expect from that, with the added feature of grounding not achieving anything. He also has a lot of buried resentment from his past, particularly from his parents. Lit doesn’t tend to get sad or nervous when he’s emotional; he gets angry.

Hobbies/ Interests: Lit has always loved maths when he got to learn any. He genuinely enjoys learning, he just hates having to sit still for more than a few minutes. He likes reading, and drawing, but he almost compulsively has to pace and to be fiddling with other things too.

There’s a lot of new surface things he’s being exposed to for the first time now, such as computers and dry books and TV and playing cards… and Lit both finds all this new stuff baffling and amazing. Getting him to understand exact rules rather than just coming up with strange explanations for things himself is a challenge in a lot of games.

He loves all the new foods on the surface, and has a definite hierarchy for things he likes and dislikes. Sugary food and dairy food are his two favourites, and ice-cream is a good intersection of these. Trying out new foods, while so many are still new, is a definite interest of his.

It’s not just entertainment that he’s excited about! Him being deaf was recognised very quickly, and his getting hearing aids happened very quickly too, before he could be introduced to the school. This means experiencing sounds with any clarity behind them at all is still a very novel experience to Lit. He likes being able to hear things, although he legitimately struggles to understand a lot of the sounds he’s exposed to until he sees how the sound is caused. He likes hearing music as something other than just feeling vibrations in his chest. It’s important to note that he was severely, not profoundly deaf, meaning that he could hear that there were sounds around him generally, but they’re quiet and indistinct, and it’s hard for him to hear anything higher pitched without outside help (like a hearing aid).

Litan is learning both verbal English and ASL in his spare time to help him communicate as efficiently as possible. His ASL is going better. He can read and write English fine. It’s the speaking English that’s the challenge.

Lit loves exploring new places, and he doesn’t much care whether he should be exploring them – good luck physically constraining him or getting him to pay attention to warning signs.

His favourite thing is getting to know new people. He doesn’t care that he doesn’t understand everyone very well at all. Do they judge him? No? Do they enjoy ice cream? Good! They are friends now!

Job or part time job and description: Litan is a student at Xavier’s Mansion. He’s there as a boarding student. He’s focusing first on communicating better before he worries about getting a job, although that will be one of the first things he tries to get once he no longer has regular issues in purely verbal conversations.

Fears/ phobias/ concerns: Lit grew up in an extremely religious household, with his parents both supporting rhetoric about removing gorgons from the earth – and similar for LGBT+ people, or members of other religions or religious fervours, etc. He’s terrified of having to go back to his family. He hates hearing references to his father, although leaving Atlantis makes this unlikely to happen. He’s terrified that someone like that will get into a position of power over him in some form.

He’s terrified of what his parents say constantly about what should happen to LGBT+ people, to disabled people, to the non-religious, and, most of all, to gorgons.

He’s wary of most religious practice due to this background, until someone can prove that it's nothing aggressive. While he’s not automatically wary of mutants with non-visible mutations, he’s wary as soon as they show any sign of disapproval of his abilities or appearance. Lit’s wary of telepaths.

Lit hides it with a usual happy manner, but he’s scared of people rejecting him for how obvious his mutation is, and scared of them acting against him somehow because of it.

Litan is very aware of how he’s changed since developing his secondary mutation. While he was always impatient, disorganised, and impulsive (and so on), those traits have grown significantly stronger since. He’s scared that any future mutations will further impact his mind, and that other impacts might be more obviously negative in future. He’s scared that his mutation might grow more disturbing in various ways, which is not an unfounded fear, considering octopi behaviour.

Special talents: Litan’s a maths whizz. He’s seriously amazing at maths in class, and this carries over to being near or at the top of the class in science classes in general. While Lit does terribly in most assignments during class, he normally does fairly well in exams or final coursework for subjects which he was exposed to in Atlantis. He does horrendously in subjects that he had no exposure to before.

Litan has a skill for being able to figure out how things work by observing how other people achieve them and is a very quick learner if he can soon practice whatever skill he’s observed. He’s not very good at remembering a skill if he couldn’t try it out himself shortly after.

Lit is very, very skilled at sneaking around and working out how to get out of places. He’s learned how to avoid making sound while moving, even around his deafness, he’s learned how to quickly slip into any spaces around to get out of – and keep out of – sight.

Litan is able to keep up the pace on his sign language compared with normal speech very easily. If anything, he’s faster at sign language, because speaking his primary form of communication is so new to him. Admittedly, he’s speaking Atlantean Sign Language rather than ASL, but learning ASL too is a major aim of his. Lit is well practiced in lip-reading. While lip-reading obviously still leaves huge amounts of information out, and relying solely on it still results in him missing things, it does help enormously when he’s struggling to work out what’s meant by just listening. He finds it easier to process sounds when he can see what’s causing the sound, so lip reading is actually helpful for him to be able to hear what other people are saying, strange as that seems.

Lit can read and write fluently in both Ancient and modern Greek.

Morality

Good/ bad/ neutral/ other: Overall good but incredibly chaotic.

Lit grew up in an extreme fundamentalist religious household, and is now a very firm atheist. He sometimes acts in ways that people don’t expect from what he says about his moral code, thanks to the discrepancy with his upbringing. He also has a lot of internalised prejudice, although he’d never act on this to anyone else. Mostly he just acts, without any thought about whether what he’s trying to do will achieve the outcome he wants, but he always has good intentions.

He firmly believes that the best way to deal with any super-criminal is to offer them free food, preferably ice-cream (a new favourite food he has discovered), because no one is mad at free food, and you can’t hurt people or destroy property if your hands are occupied. Then, once they’re distracted with food, you just talk to them, like a normal person. They can’t be hurting people if they’re focused on a conversation. Most people just want to talk out their problems, anyway, right?

He does not care at all about having to break rules to get to an outcome he sees as being better.

Mutations

Mutation description:

Primary Mutation: Octopus senses and amphibious lungs; Lit has had this level of mutation since his birth.

Lit has octopus-style senses and sensory organs. Octopus hearing is generally horrendous, while their vision is very good in various ways, including that they have visual receptor cells in the skin across their whole bodies. Octopi also have chromatophores, or pigment cells, in their skin that can change reflectivity, colour, and opacity. Lit doesn’t have the ability to turn transparent from chromatophores, but otherwise, he had these traits since birth. Litan has also always been able to breathe underwater.

Lit also has an octopus-style sense of smell; that is, absolutely no ability to smell on land, and a very sensitive sense of smell in the water.

Strengths: Litan has really good visual acuity, being able to pick out tiny details in things even at a distance. He has roughly twice as much acuity as most humans. Due to the way that his pupil shape causes light to scatter against his pupils, he has very good night vision and needs very little light to be able to see in full colour (although some light is obviously still needed).

Lit has light sensitive cells across his skin, that allow him to have a basic sense of vision across his whole body. These don’t see in colour at all, and the image is very blurry, but they give a good sense of movement, and of where things are in relation to him. Unless something has a very unique shape, he will not recognise it like this, just where it is and if it’s moving.

Litan’s nose is adapted with aquatic olfactory sensors. They only work in contact with water, meaning he has no sense of smell on land at all. However, they’re very sensitive in water, meaning he can pinpoint the locations of close-by objects exactly by only using their scent.  Essentially, if he can currently reach the object, he knows exactly where it is by smell.

Litan has amphibious lungs, being able to breathe in or out of water alright. It can take a few seconds for him to adjust how he’s breathing to fit this, but the worst case is something equivalent to hiccups.

Octopus skin contains chromatophores, which control skin pigmentation at will. Lit can change the colour and reflectivity of his skin, including being able to change to different colours in different parts of his body and imitate basic patterns. Lit’s hair changes to match the colour of the skin around the follicles. He can make it so that different parts of his body follow different patterns, although this poses greater limits on what he can copy in any area. Lit doesn’t need to be around something to imitate a pattern or colour, and can spontaneously mimic the colourations of things. Turning random colours in random areas of his body is easier than carefully controlled colours.

Weaknesses & Limitations: Lit was born severely deaf as a result of his octopus senses. While he’s not the sort of person to let this hold him back any more than it physically has to, it undeniably does have impacts on how he can interact with others. Even now he has hearing aids, he struggles to understand what a lot of noises actually are, especially quieter noises, which he has never been exposed to at all before.

Enhanced vision has all the usual downsides you’d expect, of course, except a little more extreme than many have it, thanks to him being able to see across his whole body. While closing his eyes will get rid of the worst impacts, very bright lights or extreme patterns and so on still affect him through his skin. He literally has no way to escape overly bright lighting without removing the light entirely. Dark lighting also won’t stop any impacts from bright patterns, as he can still perceive colours in low lighting.

The vision through Lit’s skin is very blurry and can’t see in colour, making determining what he’s seeing difficult. While very useful for determining if there’s something there, that knowledge is normally useless without knowing what is there. One of the few things he can consistently tell is if it’s a person behind him, but he can’t then tell who it is, so it’s still not very useful.

Lit is very sensitive to powers that require eye contact, as, functionally, his whole body is an eye.

Paying proper attention to visual output from your whole body is almost impossible while doing anything else. This adds to how distractible he is, as when he’s paying full attention to all visual input he’s getting he struggles to process how to actually act. He tends to only pay attention to this input if there’s a sudden movement or he’s trying to check his surroundings subtly.

While enhanced smell might be good in the ocean, the way his work leaves him with a second incapacitated sense on land. The sense of smell is the least useful sense, and really the worst impact from this in Lit is that you should not, under any circumstance, allow him to cook for you.

Lit takes a few moments to switch over how he’s breathing to being aquatic, and if he has to spring into action immediately in water and can’t do this, he gets something very similar to hiccups that lasts until he switches which medium he was breathing in again.

Lit’s eyes do not ever change colour using chromatophores, so if he wants to camouflage well, he has to forgo most of his visual abilities. Initially, Lit had absolutely horrendous control with his colour-changing, with it happening pretty much instantaneously whenever he was stressed, and causing a completely random patch work of colours across his body, and being completely useless as anything other than a signal that he was hiding something. He has more control now. Without immense concentration (something Lit rarely has), the colour he turns is determined reflexively by the visual cells on the opposite side of that body part. As only his eyes detect colour, this means that – without the deep concentration needed to control specifically which body parts turn which colour – he turns a random hue with the matching brightness. For instance, if he’s pressed against a white surface, his front half might actually turn white, but it has an equal chance of turning neon green, or even a random mix of other high-brightness colours. The combination of needing to have his eyes open to see what colour he should turn, and his eyes not being able to be disguised makes it very hard for this to be useful. He still shifts colour whenever he gets emotional, and it’s still a sign he’s hiding something.

Lit is limited to copying fairly basic patterns in his camouflage. While he often accidentally scatters colours entirely randomly, with no pattern at all, focused patterns are harder. Things like stripes or dots are fairly easy, but he’s not going to manage blending in against something like tartans. Copying more random sorts of patterns is easier as errors can be made without it being obvious.

The difference between camouflage and invisibility is also very important to note. While Lit can change his colourations, he is definitely not invisible, even if he manages to hit the right colours. Anything more than a cursory glance will reveal him, as long as the other person can see in that light level.

Finally, Lit’s skin is incredibly sensitive to damage, both in the sense of being more fragile, and new cuts impacting his abilities in significant ways. Containing two extra types of cell across his whole body increases the necessary blood flow to his skin, which means it’s easier to cause more severe injuries to it. Things like sunburn also really harm his mutant abilities and are easier to cause.

Secondary Mutation: Octopus physiology; this activated during a stressful event in the middle of puberty.

Lit lost his bones as his secondary mutation triggered, with them being quickly replaced with muscle tissue. The muscle is needed to hold his shape, so has no impact on what strength he can exert, and can be used to change his shape, by contortion, by increased flexibility, or by stretching.

The second thing that happened as his secondary mutation triggered was that he gained octopus arms from his back. These arms are, in almost every sense, exactly what you would expect from octopus arms, including high sensitivity, high dexterity, and suction cups, except that they’re not clustered around his mouth, to which Lit is eternally grateful. The skin on his arms has the same traits as his skin elsewhere. The octopus arms contain neuron clusters that control how they act when Lit isn’t taking conscious control of them, and relay signals to Lit’s actual brain if they’re dubbed important or interesting enough, and are functionally, most of the time, additional really moronic companions to Lit.

Strengths: Lit is immune to a few types of injury thanks to his boneless physiology. He can’t suffer broken bones or dislocations. Grappling holds or martial arts moves that rely on the opponent having bones in one way or another have no real impact on Lit.

Thanks to being boneless, Lit is lighter than his build would suggest, which has advantages in some situations, such as him making very little noise while walking, other people requiring less muscle strength to hold his weight up, and being easier to remove from dangerous situations he lost consciousness in. It also, when combined with the powers that his bonelessness allows, means he is incredibly agile in a fight.

Lit is extraordinarily flexible, being able to bend his body into strange shapes at will, without the limitation of bones. His flexibility means that, as long as he was expecting an impact to happen, Lit can pretty effectively move his body so that the force of any injuries doesn’t hit on vital organs and so on. This relies heavily on him expecting the impact, though.

Lit can twist the shape of his body in highly contorted ways, completely ignoring the normal limits on human physiology in regards to how tightly any body part can squeeze. He is only limited in what he can get his body through by the few hard materials in his body – namely his teeth (and his hearing aids). His arms can get through miniscule gaps, even down to a few millimetres.

Combining his flexibility and contortion skills means that Lit can fit in incredibly small spaces, down to a cube of about 45cm on each side with no physical impact on his well-being, and right down to about 35cm if he’s willing to sacrifice some degree of safety. His absolute minimum would be a little over 30cm, but that would be extremely dangerous to pull off. This shape does not have to be regular at all, and could be almost any type of shape, as long as it has enough volume for him to fit inside.

The combination of how small he can get individual body parts, and how small a gap he can get his whole body through means that Lit is incredibly hard to contain in one place. If there are air-holes to breathe through, Lit can probably get out.

Lit can stretch out his limbs away from his body. It’s easiest for him when using his octopus arms, but it can work with any of his limbs.

Functionally, Lit has 5 dominant hands. While it’s a niche usage, it’s definitely still useful to never run out of hands to achieve what he wants. By default, the octopus arms are a little longer than his actual arms, by a measure of about one extra hand length. Controlling his arms consciously is roughly analogous to consciously controlling breathing or blinking; it’s not something Lit does automatically, but it doesn’t take any effort, and they can function fine without conscious input.

The strength of Lit’s suckers depends on whether they or the surface they’re attaching to is wet, and the external pressure on his suckers. While they’re always at least a little sucky, they range from being mildly useful for gripping onto objects (when dry in low-pressure environments) to being able to just support his weight between his arms (when both he and the surface he’s touching is wet) to being like cement (when deep underwater).

Because of how simple the neuron clusters in Lit’s arms are, they are resistant to some types of telepaths. Normally this mostly applies to suggestion-based mind-control, where the arms are unaffected. They have just enough processing power to understand something wrong has happened and to try to snap Lit out of it. Telepaths who hear thoughts as though in speech are also normally not going to manage anything from Lit’s arms. Telepaths who can detect minds nearby can normally detect his arms, but how they detect the arms varies. They are also more resistant to things that would normally affect how a brain functions, such as alcohol, and to Lit-specific things that affect how a brain functions, such as being squeezed fitting through narrow gaps.

The neuron clusters don’t need to sleep in the same way as an actual brain does, so retain some level of alertness when Lit loses consciousness. While this won’t be enough to entirely defend him while unconscious, being able to viciously slap Lit in the face if they sense danger will, and slapping anyone approaching is normally enough to put them off. As long as he’s not sedated – or being physically controlled – this continues to work.

 Weaknesses & Limitations: Lit has no protection whatsoever from various types of injuries, and is also more vulnerable to several injuries too. For instance, while most people have actual ribs to prevent permanent damage from impacts to their chests, and can fall onto their chest with no repercussions at all, Lit would be falling directly on an unprotected heart from the same impact, and almost certainly be incapacitated temporarily, maybe needing hospitalisation depending on the impact. His lighter weight means throwing him around in dangerous situations is really easy, and he’s likely to suffer this sort of injury if anyone gets a solid hit on him that he wasn’t expecting. There’s also a few types of injury which are probably unique to Lit that he can get, most of which revolve around his brain being unprotected.

Because he relies on raw memory to work out how to hold himself, and to work out where his organs should go, Lit is incredibly vulnerable to anyone who can turn off mutations. If he remembered the right placements, which is unlikely at any point, having his bones suddenly return is extremely painful but ultimately has no long-term impact once his mutation returns. If he remembered the wrong placement, he’s extraordinarily lucky if the worst that happens is him spontaneously getting 24 lung punctures; most organs won’t work well if they’ve suddenly have a bone appear in the middle of them.

Lit is limited to stretching about 5 metres with his limbs at any point. While he can physically stretch further, if he goes beyond this point, he starts to significantly lose both strength and control in them. More than about 7 metres and his arms are about as useful as spaghetti in terms of control and can no longer support their own weight.

Because when he stretches, his muscles are occupied with keeping the limb at the right angle and length, etc., his strength decreases the further his arms extend. While he’s not particularly strong normally, he is laughably weak when he stretches his limbs out significantly. Even his suckers typically can’t help much with that.

Being able to use flexibility to twist important body parts away from potential danger can only even possibly be applied if there’s enough warning of it being needed. While Lit can activate his flexibility how he wants very quickly, it does still need some time. The time for basic feats can be roughly compared to the time it would normally take for someone to bring up their arms to cover their heads, while more complicated moves can take several seconds.

Lit’s ability to fit through small gaps is limited by the size of hard objects on him. Biologically, this just means his teeth, but most objects require far more space to fit through, meaning Lit has to carefully consider what gaps he can get through before trying to take objects with him, or they’ll simply be left behind.

Litan’s organs are squeezed as he makes his way through small gaps. While he can survive the intentional squeezes he produces himself, more extreme squeezes impact his health. Getting through a bicep-sized gap requires little squeezing from most organs, and therefore causes no real impact, even if he’s stuck. Smaller gaps will start to impact his organs, eventually causing them to stop working if squeezed too hard; he can survive his organs stopping if they stopped due to his mutation. If it’s only a short distance and he can go through quickly, even extremely small widths (such as being just big enough for him at all) won’t cause harm. If he has to pause, or if it’s a longer space, this builds up to huge impacts on him very quickly. Take, for instance, his brain being squeezed. Being trapped in a small space for a matter of a minute will leave him mildly confused, but able to recover within a few hours. Being trapped for a few minutes leaves him significantly confused, struggling with physical coordination, and taking several hours to recover. If he was trapped for an hour, he’ll have absolutely no recollection of what he was doing before, not remember much of the several previous days, need help with incredibly basic tasks, have trouble forming new memories for a while, and could take months to recover fully. The impacts vary with what organs were worst affected, but the scaling of impacts is similar for most cases.

In the case of being stuck in a small space, his brain is even more of a weakness than most organs if they’re squeezed too tightly to continue normal function, as he can no longer think of new ways out of the situation, and has to rely on the neuron clusters in his arms to problem solve. They are not good at problem solving.

Controlling eight limbs requires a surprising amount of mental focus, something which Lit does not have an abundance of. It’s hard for him to perform precise tasks with all of them at once. While he can do dexterous tasks with his extra arms, trying to do multiple at once is hard.

Lit sometimes finds it hard to control the suckers on his arms, with them activating accidentally or to a different extent than he wants, which combined with how tactile both he and his arms are, often results in very awkward situations. He’s constantly breaking or damaging things due to this.

Even if Lit has a really good grip on a damp object, as soon as it starts drying off, his grip will loosen. While his suckers are stronger than most humans’ grips without the level of dampness, they can easily be pried off most objects, and, even if they’re not, you don’t need a lot of super strength to overcome his grip strength.

The neuron clusters in Lit’s arms are roughly as intelligent as an especially dumb puppy by default. If he’s sufficiently distracted, his arms will start to act independently, which normally results in them trying to experiment with things behind him and causing mayhem he’s not aware of until they signal that something bad happened to him. He’s also been known to have his arms drop things from his school bag on the floor without him knowing about it, only adding to his disorganisation. They’re also far too excitable, and will trigger basically anything as being interesting, or as them not having enough to do. His arms are largely to blame for how bad his ADHD is.

When he’s not consciously controlling them, his arms are all controlled by different neuron clusters, none of which have direct communication with each other, instead having to rely on Lit. They’re aware of the others through the blurry sight Lit has on his skin, but aren’t coordinated. This can lead to awkward situations for Lit where they all start reacting to the same stimuli in different ways, or start hyper fixating on one particular object, etc. It’s especially awkward when the object they fixate on is a person.

Each of the neuron clusters in Lit’s arms have different personality traits behind them when Lit’s not taking conscious control. While that’s not an issue necessarily, his arms do sometimes end up in strange disagreements with each other. He’s not as aware of how they act independently as most others are, so has less idea of this than he probably should.

Physical Abilities

General Physical Capabilities: Lit is ultimately pretty typical in terms of physical ability. Obviously, due to his mutation, he’s very flexible and hard to hit, and reacts very quickly to things from behind him, but he’s otherwise around normal speed and strength. He has distinctly below-average stamina.

Fighting Style: Litan has had no formal training in combat upon arriving at Xavier’s School. Even if he had, it would be pointless, thanks to his mutation. Most martial arts depend on having hard surfaces on your body, in one way or another.

Lit thus has to depend on his own ingenuity in a fight, using his surroundings to his advantage, and do his best to dodge as often as possible. He normally works on manoeuvres that trip or grapple opponents when he switches from evasion.

Fighting Style Pros/Cons: While Lit is hard to actually hurt in a fight thanks to his mutations, he poses very little threat in a direct fight for the same reason.

Lit’s lack of bones means that he doesn’t suffer from injuries such as broken bones and is immune to most grapples, and is immune to martial arts like Judo or Aikido that rely on biomechanics to work. However, he is far weaker to fighting styles such as karate that rely on making actual impacts, as he has absolutely nothing protecting his internal organs, when their practitioner can make a solid hit.  He’s also more vulnerable to things like friction burns.

Because Lit is very inventive and creative, and has little sense of what’s actually a good idea, he can be very unpredictable to fight, which works to his advantage in most cases. He pays a lot of stock to surroundings and potential ways to gain advantages. He’s distractible – making hitting him a lot easier than most would be with his powers – but also means that if there’s an opportunity, he’s almost certainly going to spot it and make attempts to use it (even if it’s a bad opportunity).

Lit has an advantage in very varied areas compared to in more plain areas, as he can easily reclaim the element of surprise. He also likes being able to spring out at someone he’s creeping out after vanishing into a small spot. In plain areas, him looking for opportunities that aren’t there almost guarantees a loss.

Lit has a big advantage on most opponents in an aquatic environment.

History Of Your Character

Lit was born under the reign of King Atlan. His parents were genuine supporters of the regime, not needing the mind control foisted on them, being classified as Demigods. They fostered rare demigods who were born among gorgons in the Necropolis, believing there should be no mixing, even between family, once it could be avoided. Litan was the youngest of twelve siblings, including four foster siblings. His parents were extremely religious and extremely prejudiced, even by Atlantean standards. His father was a local religious leader and was well known for his extreme views on various topics.

The powers that his parents typically passed on were standard sorts of power, but useful to the guard system, meaning most of his genetic siblings were heavily involved in maintaining the system.

Meanwhile… Lit was born deaf and born reacting very strangely to light. He was deemed a disappointment child, from his disability, and from his only practical ability he had at that point being so hard to control. Without the technology in Atlantis to make hearing aids, and Lit’s hearing being sufficiently bad that he couldn’t speak clearly, combined with him developing extremely conservative clothing habits for his society from his mutation and his parents constantly wanting to know where he was, he struggled a lot with relating to peers. He developed skills sneaking out regularly to experience social interaction, consistently being over-excited to interact with others. When he was being too closely supervised for this, he would fidget constantly while vaguely attempting to use reading and drawing as forms of entertainment, resulting in him getting a solid knowledge of Atlantean academics, eventually gaining enough knowledge to grow sceptical of (and later entirely dismiss) his parents’ religious views. As they used religion to justify many of their prejudices, this was the start of a process for Lit of growing less prejudiced.

His family structure didn’t immediately change much based on the X-Men’s coup. His parents got more prejudiced, and it was hard to ignore increased racial and class tensions, to avoid the prejudice anyone who stuck out socially would suffer – including Lit. Ignoring systematic prejudice against gorgons was almost impossible, in almost every aspect of life. With a power vacuum from so many guards retiring from roles they never wanted, crime rocketed upwards. Fewer employed guards meant less money being pumped into the economy regularly, causing a huge recession and further crime and unemployment. Perhaps attempts to overcome prejudices between gorgons and demigods would have gone better if more guards had been employed willingly. Surely any good ruler would have had the foresight to predict a power vacuum if guards are being forced to work, but Atlan was not a good ruler.

And, of course, instead of blame falling on Atlan, many citizens blamed gorgons for existing and daring to leave The Necropolis, for them disobeying the gods by allowing gorgons in, for the X-Men for starting the coup… Conspiracies ran about, and tensions between differing views.

The desperate economy meant more efforts had to be made to get everyone in Lit’s family earning money. There was a cute demigod boy at the business Lit earned employ in, of similar age. Over a few months, they started dating, openly flirting, even with Lit working in the back.

Of course, eventually, the rumours of him being so open with his boyfriend reached one of Lit’s siblings and got back to his parents.

Yelling started once Lit got back from work. He worked out he was at least getting kicked out quickly, and not being the sort for good decisions, decided to yell back about how their prejudice was entirely unfounded. The situation escalated over a couple of hours, until stress triggered his secondary mutation, and octopus arms erupted from his back. The sudden emergence of his mutation shocked Lit… largely in terms of his actual sensations, feeling like acid surging through his body. In pain already, removing him from the house was all the easier.

Lit hobbled to his boyfriends’ house, hoping to lodge there, but his boyfriends’ father spotted the mutation, realised he was a gorgon, and forbade Lit to contact his son.

He wasn’t close enough to anyone in the surface city to have anywhere else to go, once known prejudices from family contacts were known. His last option was the Necropolis. He had enough of his prejudices left to react very obviously in surprise towards many gorgons. Even for gorgons, the Necropolis had become very risky. Lit knew well enough that there was a shelter for young gorgons with nowhere else to go, and he made his way there, settling in and realising his lack of possessions. He took several days to learn enough about how his abilities worked to feel like he’d worked out what he could now do (though really hadn’t worked out how) before he started using his abilities. Octopus powers are great for stealing food off market stalls, especially after you get fired due to prejudices against your mutation.

When the X-Men came on a regular trip to check how many gorgon kids needed somewhere safe to live and somewhere to train their abilities without prejudice, Lit took up the offer with no hesitation.

Roleplay

What’s your OOC alias?: Hijara

Where did you learn about this site?: Google’s my friend

Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: Nope!

 Sample RP: Hiding his arms to avoid being spotted as a gorgon was certainly a difficult target. Litan had tried on a previous attempt to hide his arms by wearing the baggiest piece of clothing he could find, and keeping his arms coiled beneath, but the dark and full fabric didn’t achieve much for subtlety. In Atlantis, a citizen wearing heavy clothes was far more conspicuous than even a gorgon.

He was back again, in the market area near the centre of this district, still feeling miles off the mark of actually blending in. Choosing to wear more than a bare minimum (nothing) was already enough to stick out, but with his arms wriggling behind his back he really had no chance of blending in.

Apparently his awareness of this wasn’t strong enough, as random passers by kept feeling the need to slam into him with their shoulders just to remind him. He was sure that those sorts of treatment hadn’t hurt so badly before. It was the same action, the same force, the same impact, but the look on their faces was different. Lit kept finding himself meeting eyes, and forcing himself to look away.

The impacts pushed him back occasionally as they were made and working through streets near the peak of daytime traffic was always a challenge, even with lowered purchasing power from normal. He had a distinct advantage now over most of the times he’d been here getting through, thanks to his new-found flexibility, and eventually he reached the stall that had always been his target.

“Ello!” Lit called to the street vendor, coming up close. The vendor turned to look at him, eyeing him over very quickly. Lit could pin-point the exact moment where his mutation was noticed, which came just before the moment of confusion at his voice. This was probably the only time where that judgement was likely to be useful. ”What are our prices?”

It didn’t matter much how vague his question was, and maybe was even an asset, needing more time for the conversation. Between the question and the quickly waving hand movements, Lit knew where the attention would be focused.

By his hip, one octopus arm opened the bag that he had slung over one shoulder, while a little mental nudge to subtly grab fruit from the stall and slip them into the pouch. While the stall vendor spoke (a little too fast for Lit to be able to understand everything, but he got the gist), his octopus arms slowly collected enough to provide food for the gorgon kids at the shelter for now.

The conversation was nearly at its close, when Lit felt a sudden signal of panic from one of his arms. His eyes opened wide, as he felt the apple fling out of his grasp. Two of them had been wrestling over the same piece of fruit.

The sudden movement behind him caught the vendor’s attention, and no amount of hand waving and declarations of wanting to buy rare fruits was going to draw it back. Without thinking, two arms – one human – came up to rub the back of his neck. Lit tried for an innocent smile… and felt another apple brush against the back of his neck.

Lit’s skin started to shift tone to a dark blue.

There was no way that had gone unnoticed. Lit shuffled backwards a step, making to turn around and slip away, quickly flicking his attention around as rapidly as he could manage. He switched focus momentarily to include all the available visual inputs and… great, Lit couldn’t have guessed he was surrounded by people. There was space under the stall but that really wasn’t going to cut it…

Oh! There was a building only a few rows of stalls over that he could climb up to get away. Lit twisted his body around entirely, ready to head over, ducking smoothly under the arms of the closest person, sliding past bronze armour. He wasn’t deft enough to get around the next person and slammed into their legs awkwardly instead. Lit stopped, wincing, uncurling to a more normal shape, and bringing up his hands to rub the impact his head had made on polished metal. It wasn’t as painful as Lit was used to that sort of impact being, but it was just as disorienting.

It was as he straightened up that he could see who he’d bumped into. There was no mistaking the red and bronze uniforms of five guards. Perhaps this also explained why his arms had started a dispute.

Lit puffed a half-breath through his nose and removed the bag from his shoulder, letting it skid away across the floor, and broke out a wide smile.

”It’s a kreat day, right?” There were the confused looks again. ”It’s kood to see ow the kuards are, uh… recofering?” His voice didn’t rise at all with his uncertainty, mostly because he had no idea voices were meant to do that. ”I love seeing the market this full!”

Lit didn’t catch the muttering between the guards – they were facing side-ways to him – but he could see their furious facial expressions, and he knew what those meant. The guards prepared their various responses to potential thieves.

”Well. Kood to meet ou all!” He finished his signing with a hand-wave and a half-salute. ”But maybe it’s pest if we don’t meet akain.”

Guards were so predictable. The two behind him were spaced a little ways apart, and weren’t doing anything to block the gap between their shins. Even with the limited control he’d managed to acquire thus far, it was an easy gap to duck through, and he was away, slipping into the crowd before the guards could understand what had happened, and heading, with his newly recovered bag, straight to a different stall