( So, it’s still too early to start posting with Andy, but I figured I’d put his profile out there. It has already been approved, I’m just waiting to hit the 300-post mark. Also, it’s in several pieces because it’s long.)

Character's “real” name: William Andrew Richter, “Andy” to his friends, “William” to his family
Gender: Male

Codename/Alias:
Andy has gone through a couple of dozen codenames in the last few years, depending on his mood and what he’s been reading recently.
There was the comic/cartoon-inspired phase (“Flash”, “Quicksilver”, “Speed Racer”, etc.), the physics-text-inspired phase (“Velocity”, “Impulse”, “Delta-V”, “Accelerator”, etc.), the mythology/fiction-inspired phase (“Hermes”, “Mercury”, “Shadowfax”, “Seagull,” etc.), and many more.
The majority of these codenames didn’t actually last long enough for him to tell anyone about them.
Lately he’s been using “Speed”, which has actually lasted several weeks at this point and might be a keeper.

Age: complicated .
Andy was born at 2:13 AM (EST) on Nov 26 1993, which makes him 14 legally.
However, due to the time dilation associated with his mutation, he is physically and cognitively significantly older.
How much older is unclear. His mutation surfaced in January 2007. He started wearing a weatherproof calendar-watch full-time on February 12, 2007. As of 2:13 AM (EST) on Nov 26 2007 (his official 14th birthday) it read 7:14 PM (EST) August 18 2016, so he figures he’s almost 23 years old. This is consistent with his physical appearance, but he’s not sure how reliable it is.
Nationality/Ethnicity: first-generation American, parents are white South Africans
Birthplace: Boston, MA

Personality:
Andy is a genuinely decent guy who tries to do the right thing and is generally willing to help out people less fortunate than he is. He likes the idea of being a “superhero,” both as a way of doing good with his abilities and a way of making friends/becoming popular.

To outside eyes, Andy appears impulsive, easily distracted, inattentive – the classic ADD poster child. This is entirely an artifact of his mutation, however: his subjective time-rate is usually so accelerated that following a conversation (or the plot of a movie or TV show or other dynamic media) is extremely difficult for him.

In reality, Andy is unusually thoughtful and introspective, preferring to reason a topic through carefully before coming to a conclusion. If anything, his attention span is unusually long; he is accustomed to spending many (subjective) hours entertaining himself in various ways.

Because pretty much all of his friendships are maintained over email, IM, and similar media (because of the time mismatch issues above) Andy is almost always starved for physical affection (not sex per se, though that too, but friendly touch in general) and face-to-face social interaction with people, even though he finds it all extremely difficult to manage. He mostly manages not to be a nuisance about it, but it leaves him pretty gullible… he will pretty much roll over for anyone who is nice to him in person.

Related to the above, he tends to come across as an overeager puppy once you get past the whole speed-factor thing. He knows this is a problem and tries not to be too annoying, but he doesn’t have a lot of experience with normal social interactions and it isn’t easy for him. Fortunately for him, he does have a wicked sense of humor and is familiar with a broad range of conversational topics, which helps a lot.


Allegiance (Good, Bad, or Neutral):
Good. Seriously so. He really does think of himself as a superhero, in the classic four-color comic sense. He has heard of the X-Men and has an extremely unrealistic romantic notion of them as a team of mutant crime-fighting superheroes, and wants to join up.

Appearance

Even at rest, Andy is “speeded up” by a factor of 2-5, just as if you were fast-forwarding normal video. It’s pretty obvious if you’re paying any attention at all.

Everyday clothing: When not dressed up for some specific occasion, he’s either in exercise gear (jogging clothes or equivalent) or wearing nice jeans and a fancy brightly-colored shirt.

Uniform: Andy doesn’t exactly have a uniform… like his codename, he tends to experiment frequently with modifications to his “super suit.”
His current uniform is built around a skin-tight electric blue jumpsuit, navy blue running shoes, a pair of titanium bracers that cover his forearms, and a navy blue vest with lots of pockets. He also wears a domino mask (like Robin or Green Arrow) because it seems traditional, but he doesn’t seriously expect it to conceal his identity. The combined effect is unbelievably gay.
He generally wears the jumpsuit under his street clothes and keeps the other stuff in a backpack.

Pajamas: He usually sleeps in his underwear. (Brightly colored briefs.)

Hair color and style: Reddish-brown; he usually keeps it spiked in a slightly punkish cut, and wears a full beard which he keeps well trimmed.
Eye color: Blue
Skin color: Caucasian, pale. He doesn’t tan easily, but he makes a point of trying every year.
Height: 6’1”
Build: 180-190 lbs; lean and well-toned but not heavily muscled. Note that despite his chronological/legal age, he’s “really” in his early 20s.
Scars: Two relatively faint ones from when he broke both his legs jumping off a roof.
Tattoos: Three rather large ones (he went through a period of really liking tattoos, though he had to get them done in many installments because sitting still for them took too long from his perspective).
One is the bottom half of a stylized longbow along the right side of his chest and ribcage, firing a six-inch-long stylized arrow that runs along the inside of his upper right arm and ends at his elbow.
One is a fairly realistic snake with its tail wrapped around his left ankle and twining up his leg, with its head at his left hip.
The third is a pair of stylized wings on his shoulder blades.
Piercings: Two in his left ear, one in his right, one in his left nipple. He wears small blue sapphire studs in the ears and a silver nipple ring he got at the same time as the tats.

History of your character:

Andy's life until his mutation surfaced was unexceptional, albeit privileged. He attended fancy private schools, vacationed with his family all over the world, and generally lived the life of a wealthy American child.

A few months after his 13th birthday he started speeding up. At first, his parents thought he was simply hyperactive, but the true nature of his mutation became obvious pretty quickly. Once it became clear that there was no real treatment for his condition, his parents stopped trying to "fix" it and learned to live with it.

In objective terms, Andy went from being a precocious pre-teen to an early twenty-something in less than a year. At first his speed factor fluctuated uncontrollably, averaging around ten; this left him perpetually exhausted as well as utterly socially isolated. After a while he managed to get it somewhat under control, making it possible (but difficult) for him to interact with normal people.

Officially he is being home-schooled and privately tutored. In practice, he has long since given up on being educated by others, although he has had some success with distance-learning programs and Internet-based tutorials. (His parents are worried about the implications of this for his future career, but he tries not to think about it much... besides, he’s not convinced he’s going to live past his official 20th birthday anyway.)

After several subjective years of this he decided that he was sick of being treated like a freak, however compassionately, and decided to re-invent himself as a superhero. He’s heard about the X-Men, who seem to be the closest thing to a superhero group in the real world, so he’s come to Manhattan to join them.

Fighting style:
He’s basically a brawler, but his ability – even at low levels -- gives him the kind of precision and high-speed reflexes normally associated with highly trained martial artists. At high speed factors he can hit an opponent multiple times before they can even respond, which can be devastating.
However, he doesn’t hit any harder than a normal person, so against a well-armored/protected opponent that doesn’t help much. In those cases he would either look for weapons (e.g., smash them over the head with a chair, or something like that) or run away if he can, or try to think of something clever to do (trip them, tie them up, disarm them, spray paint their eyes, etc.)


Sample RP:
See Sonya…

Where did you learn about this site?:
Surfing the net

Description of ability

Andy is a speedster.
More precisely, he can accelerate the flow of time around his body so that he experiences time much more quickly than his surroundings. The ratio of personal time to objective time (aka his “speed factor”) varies. For example, a speed factor of 20 means that from an outside perspective he seems to move 20 times faster than his own perspective.
Even when unconscious or sleeping he floats between SF 2 and 5… he can’t get slower than that. His maximum SF is roughly 100, though he can’t keep that up for more than a few seconds (subjective).

His ability affects his body and anything he carries or wears.

When he interacts with objects in the world, objective momentum is conserved; this results in some counterintuitive effects.
For example, suppose he’s running what would ordinarily be a 6-minute mile (10 mph). If he boosts his speed factor to 10, it will take him 3 minutes to run a mile, so in a sense he’s traveling at 20 mph. But if he runs into something, the effect is exactly the same as if he had no speed factor, because objective momentum is conserved. So he can run into a wall at an objective speed of 100mph and come off with nothing but a bruised forehead… on the other hand, it means if he tackles someone at 20 mph he doesn’t hit any harder than a normal person.

Relatedly, external forces accelerate him based on objective time, no matter his speed factor. This, also, results in counterintuitive effects.
For example, suppose he falls off a 80-meter building: he accelerates at 10 m/s^2 just like anything else, so it takes him 4 seconds to hit the ground with an objective velocity of 40 m/s. If his speed factor is 20, then it will seem to him to take 80 seconds, so he’ll feel like he floats down to the ground, light as a feather. At which point he will SPLAT against the sidewalk just like anybody else would, though he’ll have longer to feel himself dying.
(He did something like this once to experiment, though from a much lower height, and broke both his legs in the process.)

Limitations of ability

• Maintaining a speed factor higher than 5 or so is fatiguing; the higher the SF the more fatiguing it is.
  At low levels it’s roughly comparable to a brisk walk or jog, which he can keep going for quite a while. At higher levels it’s like full-out sprinting; he can keep it up for a matter of minutes at most. At really high levels he pretty much passes out immediately thereafter.
  
  
• Andy’s body follows the laws of physics (unlike many traditional comic-book speedsters).
  That means he can’t do things like run across liquid surfaces, run up the sides of buildings, fly by rotating himself like a helicopter, etc. etc. etc. As described earlier, he doesn’t hit any harder than a normal person, no matter what his SF. Rule of thumb: anything he couldn’t do normally, he can’t do while accelerated, it’s just that it takes him less time to do it.
  Relatedly, unlike many comic-book speedsters, he experiences his subjective time normally. So anything that he wouldn’t normally spend an hour doing, he won’t spend a subjective hour doing, even if it “only takes him a minute” objectively at SF 60. (Not to mention that simply staying at SF 60 for a subjective hour feels like running a marathon, never mind whatever he might do during that time.)
  
  
• The fact that his subjective time runs faster than normal is not an unmixed blessing.
  For example, his speed factor averages around 3 when he’s not actively using his power, so ordinarily he has to sleep for 2-3 hours every 8 hours or so, needs to eat every couple of hours, etc. This makes interacting with the normal world problematic.
  This is especially a problem if he’s poisoned or something; he has much less (objective) time to seek a cure than normal people would.
  The most dramatic effect of this is his age… in the year or so since his mutation surfaced, he has aged almost a decade. At that rate he’d be dead of old age by 2015; he’s managed to get his average speed factor down significantly since then but is still aging much faster than normal.
  Relatedly, because he can’t bring his speed factor lower than 2 no matter how hard he tries, and is usually operating between SF 2 and 5, he has a very hard time interacting with people – basically, everyone around him is moving in slow motion as far as he’s concerned, all the time, which makes them very difficult to interact with.

Hobbies:
Andy has an enormous amount of free time (subjective) on his hands and spends it doing a variety of things. He tends to pick up interests and obsess about them for a while, then move on.

• He reads a lot, on a wide range of topics – usually library books, since he’d fill up his apartment pretty quickly otherwise, and stuff on the Internet. He also spends a LOT of time posting on Internet sites about subjects that interest him… some of this he does using his real name, most of it he doesn’t.
  
• He’s very into physical exercise and outdoor activity (running, swimming, endurance hikes, camping, spelunking, etc.) but avoids anything that depends on gear (like bicycling, for example), as it tends to break or jam on him. He is adept at woods survival (Boy Scout type stuff) and once spent the subjective equivalent of three weeks living entirely off the land.
  
• He has tried for years to adopt a meditation practice, in the hopes that it will let him control his mutation. He’s had some success with it, but not very much. He keeps trying, though.
  
• He likes food. This is in part making a virtue of necessity, given the demands of his metabolism, but beyond that he enjoys experimenting with new cuisines, trying foods he’s never eaten before, etc. He’s no gourmet chef, but he’s a very competent amateur cook.
  
• He downloads a lot of porn. He’d be mortified if anyone found out about this.
  
• All of that said, his favorite hobby, without question, is superheroing. He patrols the streets at night like a comic-book character, looking for muggings and bank robberies and whatever. Most nights he doesn’t find anything, of course, but he enjoys looking and it gives him something to do when he’s bored.
  Along the way he tends to do miscellaneous good deeds… fixing broken car engines, bringing blankets and food to homeless people, that sort of thing. (Lately he’s been taking to leaving calling cards with the name “Speed” on them behind when he does this.)

Other Notes:

• His parents (Barry and Linda) are wealthy white South African immigrants.
  While Andy does not have direct access to that wealth (being legally a minor child) he nevertheless does not have to worry about money. He is very close to his parents, and generally tells them what’s going on in his life; they aren’t entirely thrilled with this “superhero” thing of his but their basic attitude is that he has to do something worthwhile with his life and his mutation makes a number of more traditional choices unavailable.
  He lives in a Manhattan condo that his parents own, into which he moved fairly recently. He used to live in Boston but he’s heard there’s more of a mutant community in New York.
  
• His primary language is English but he speaks reasonably fluent Afrikaans and a smattering of German.
  
• He was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and more generally identifies as Protestant, although he doesn’t attend services and has grown alienated from the church because of its position on the Mutant Registration Act and mutants in general.
  
• He has two older brothers: one 17 (Nathan), one 21 (Barry, Jr.). Of course, they aren’t really “older” anymore. He gets along with them OK, but they aren’t really close.
  
• He is largely ignorant of television, theater, movies, and most other dynamic media… they just aren’t worth watching in slow motion.
  When he knows he likes a particular performer or show or whatever he obtains digital recordings and then plays them at very high speeds, but this is enough of a pain that he rarely bothers.
  Music, on the other hand, is not a problem – he downloads everything to a portable MP3 player which he carries around and thus operates on his subjective time.
  
• He does not keep his mutation secret, and in fact will often bring it up in conversation.
  A halfway diligent Google search will discover it, and it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that “Andy Richter” and “Speed” are the same person. He’s never actually admitted to it in a public context (it just doesn’t feel right), but he doesn’t really expect it to be a secret. He even participates in a number of Internet forums using “speed” as a handle.
  He registered as a mutant when the MRA was passed, but his parents pulled some strings to keep him out of the camps. He feels vaguely guilty about this, now that he knows what went on in the camps.
  
• He really likes snakes; they’re his favorite animal. Mostly this is because He owns several.
  
• His favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip, his favorite pizza toppings are mushroom and pepperoni, he loves cheese and hot mustards and Portuguese sweet bread.
  
• He has a serious fanboy crush on Charlize Theron.
  He owns high-speed digital copies of everything she has ever appeared in (including cutting-room outtakes and various other things not normally available) and runs a Charlize Theron fan site (which he maintains in both English and Afrikaans), he got a personal response to one of his fan letters once, which is one of his prized possessions. He does think she’s silly for being part of PETA, but would be willing to overlook that should she ever come to her senses, dump her boyfriend, and ask him out.
  He’s not insane or stalkerish about it or anything, but he does border on the creepy. Still, cut the kid some slack, it’s not like he has many real friends. This too shall pass.
  
• He is absolutely convinced he can learn to use his mutation to fly, and experiments with this on a regular basis, thus far with no success. (I don’t ever intend for him to succeed.)

Proposed Attributes
Physical Strength = 7 (normal human who exercises a lot)
Agility = 25 (some acrobatic/gymnastic skill, but mostly it’s his mutation making him much, much, MUCH faster than a normal human)
Mental Strength = 3 (somewhat below average… he is smart, but easy to manipulate)
Stealth = 3 (he can’t sit/stand still for long)
Senses = 10 (his mutation lets him study things for subjectively longer than normal, so he tends to spot things a normal human wouldn’t)
Mutated Strength = 0 (all his powers fall into the above categories)
Mutated Control = 2 (he can increase and decrease his speed factor, but he can’t turn it off or affect its range)

I've said it once and I shall say it again: I enjoy this chara.

Very interesting character.

So, I'm going to be introducing Andy some time soon, and want to do an intro scene where he shows up at the ruins of the Mansion in the hopes of finding the X-Men, which he totally no-really honest-to-god golly-gee-whillikers wouldn't-it-be-great-if wants to join.

I'd sorta prefer to do this _with_ someone, since RPing by myself isn't so much fun, and I'd especially love to have Andy actually meet one of the X-Men, or at least one of the Mansion residents.

Are there any PCs who are (a) X-men or reasonable fascimiles, (b) not stuck in the Camps, (c) active, and (d) interested? If so, PM me?

Caveat: Andy is, at least at first, going to be (IC) somewhat difficult to communicate with, what with the uncontrollable superspeed. Think in terms of having a conversation with someone being fast-forwarded by a factor of two or three... he tries to talk...
really...
slowly...
so...
people...
can...
understand...
him...

, but, well, you know how it is. If you think this would be frustrating for you, you have been warned!

He sounds fun Sonya. Maybe I can race him sometime.