Character's real name: Kevin Rice
Codename/Alias: Downshift
Gender: male
Age: 24
Nationality/Ethnicity: African American (fairly light-skinned)
Birthplace: Mobile, Alabama
Personality: serious by situation, not by choice. He tries to be a good person and not think too hard about the hypocrisies or he gets a little depressed.
Notes (Hobbies, Phobias, Worries, etc.): wants to do a good job, but hates being treated as a freak or a traitor. He hates being given advice or orders about things that he considers ‘his business’, like how he uses his mutation, or his health. He doesn’t have any crippling or highly irrational fears, but he is generally afraid of fire (and similar stuff like plasma) and will do his very best to avoid dealing directly with mutants who produce or control it.
He does his job because he believes he’s helping the good mutants by locking away the bad mutants and clearing the name of mutants as a group. He runs when he needs to let off steam or stop thinking deep thoughts. He’s a movie buff, too. And he wears contacts. No, those facts aren’t related.
Allegiance (Good, Bad, or Neutral): Good, since he always tries to follow his code of ethics. Bad, since he’s willing to capture mutants and send them off for the government to do who knows what to them. Neutral, then.
Everyday clothing: light colored Dickies and a blue button-up long sleeve shirt with an undershirt and a solid pair of sneakers.
Uniform (Optional. Required if eventually becoming part of the X-Men): Black with a light-blue pentagon (home plate shape) on his chest. It has pockets for little gadgets like a walkie-talkie and flash bombs. It’s lightly bullet-proof, too.
Pajamas: the day’s undershirt and boxers
Hair color and style: dark brown, curly, and very short
Eye color: brown
Height: 5’8
Build: fairly slight, but with built-up leg muscles
Scars: a semi-circular red/white burned patch 2 inches in diameter on his right shoulder
Tattoos: none
Piercings: none
Description of abilities:
Partial teleportation – although he can’t teleport his entire body, he can teleport any part of it (up to about half of his mass) to another location within half a mile or so. So far he has managed to teleport only two separate parts of himself at a time, either to the same location or to different locations. To the outside viewer this looks like splitting his body parts off, but it’s not – the parts appear instantly where he wants them and can’t fly. Also they’re still attached to him – if his separated hand gets wet the water will drip down to his arm, even though it’s across the room from his hand, for example.
He has two ‘levels’ of PT. The lazy way is ‘loose’ – the ported part moves with his body just like it was still attached. If he steps back, his hand moves back too (toward the wrist, whatever angle it’s at). If he concentrates slightly he can keep it ‘tight’ – the part stays exactly where he put it even if he moves around. If it’s tight the part won’t change positions at all without him porting it again.
Space anchor – he can, by teleporting partway, anchor himself or anything (or anyone) he touches to the fabric of space itself. The anchored part (the exact part he touched, if it’s not his own body) is completely stuck still until enough force is exerted to break it free or until Downshift loses consciousness. When he does this, things are anchored to space itself and so they can be in mid-air or even in a vacuum and still be immobilized.
Cons (weaknesses) of abilities: Partial porting – he can’t teleport all of himself, so he can’t use the power to escape or get around quickly. If he teleports his parts out of his line of sight he can’t see what he’s doing with them. Also, he sometimes accidentally activates his power. To make matters worse, he can’t feel it when his power is active – if he doesn’t see that a part is separated he may not notice at all.
Space anchor – he can only anchor exactly what he touches – if he touches someone’s shirt it’s that stretch of the shirt that’s anchored, not the person inside. Also, the anchoring can be broken. If he anchors a normal adult’s hand he or she will be able to yank it free. (If it’s a neck, though, the person will have to work to get up enough leverage). On top of that, the anchoring is extremely unforgiving and he has to be careful with it – if he anchors his elbow and his (unanchored) arm is hit it will probably break before his elbow gives. Also, he can only anchor two to four things at a time (depending on the size) or he starts to tire out fast.
He can’t use both powers on the same part at the same time. He can anchor something else with a ported hand, though.
Fighting style (if any): government-trained defensive maneuvers (mostly based on karate)
History of your character: Kevin was the youngest child in a family of five. His dad was a construction worker and his mom worked part-time at the cleaners. When he was 13 his older brother Sam revealed that he could make things disappear just by touching them. He started to show off with the power, and later he started to use it to steal things. At first Kevin was in awe of his brother and his fantastic ability, but over time he came to think that Sam shouldn’t use it to do bad things. About six months after his brother first showed off his ability the cops came to their house and tried to arrest Sam for theft. Sam ran after using his power to send away one of the cops and steal the gun of another. Kevin was terrified, mostly for Sam but also, he had to admit, of him. A week later they got a call saying Sam had been shot by the cops. They raced to the hospital but he was already unconscious by the time they got there. He died twenty minutes later.
A year or two later, when Kevin first started to show his power, he was scared of it. He pretended it didn’t exist and he refused to tell anyone about it, not even his best friends. He managed to get through almost all of high school without anyone figuring it out, despite a few incidents - he accidentally sent various body parts off without noticing and once he fell off a bridge and anchored his leg in space, badly breaking his knee and forcing him to hang upside for a little while. He was a good runner and was looking forward to getting an scholarship to college for track and field, but it wasn’t to be.
In his last semester in high school he saw a piece on the news about a group of kids (the news called them a gang) that was knocking over stores, including some in his neighborhood. The thing was, one of them had a mutant power he used to make himself look like Tinman, totally metal all over. Thinking about his brother, he decided one day to stop the gang and Tinman in particular. He asked around and tracked them down. Then he followed them for a bit, until they went to rob a gas station. He used his powers to touch Tinman and anchor him in the gas station. The others ran and the cops came and took Tinman away. Unfortunately for Kevin, the cops didn’t treat him as a hero, but as a freak. They arrested him and held him for a day until they realized they had nothing on him and let him go. After that reporters came to interview him and everyone everywhere suddenly knew about him and his freakish powers. His parents, terrified that he would end up the same as Sam, made him swear to never ever use his power again and live normally, like a normal human. He did, but people still wouldn’t leave him alone. He didn’t get into any of the colleges he applied for (one college even backed out after already accepting him). He was having a hard time getting a job. His friends stopped hanging out with him. Finally the government came around, and after thinking about it for a week or so, he agreed to work with them. He moved to D.C. and took the name Downshift. They trained him and he started the job he is still doing – tracking and holding mutants until they can be neutralized or arrested.
He was recently assigned a partner (or an assistant?), Flagman, and he’s been given the leadership role. Unexpected, but he’s warming up to it.
Sample RP:
He had thought, going in to this job, that snatching would be terrifying. He was wrong. Snatching couldn’t be terrifying – Life or Death was decided in 3 seconds flat usually. There’s just no time for terror or anything else besides but the laser clarity of full-on fight or flight instincts taking over.
Now leading up to the snatching, that’s when the terror hits you. When Flag sights the target with his finger. “30 yards.” First it’s always that little sideways feeling, that ‘Well isn’t that fair – Flag found ‘em, and I put my life up for grabs snatching ‘em.’ Then the terror hits. It always takes longer than it should, the gap between sighting them and the actual snatching. It stretches.
So here’s everybody. There she is. It’s a clear shot. Too bad. She’s a blaster. There’s nothing to like about blasters. She’s also just a kid. Thirteen. She’s tiny, too. Could be eleven. She’s spotted us. Time to get fried. Yellow-red-blue crackling energy goes by. Jump to the right, duck. Three seconds. No time for fear.
Both hands. Approach from the side, over the arms, out of the range of a sudden twitch of the blasting hands. Grab both wrists. Anchor. Up to the head. Down the back. Pinned. Just three seconds.
After the 3 seconds is when everything catches back up, and you feel the thumping in your chest and your own heavy breathing. There’s still blasts exploding out of her, turning crates into splinters. There’s still a little girl shrieking, trying to run. Jerking like a fish caught in a net. It should be over. So what to you do? You finish it quick.
You forget pretty much everything else during a snatching. He forgot they had company on this one until the guy ran up to the girl. He hit her with a disruptor and slapped a bracelet on her. Her shrieks got louder, faster. Before it was fear, now it’s pain. There’s nothing nice about that sound.
“Shut it down; she’s an energy builder!” The soldier should know that. He did know it, and slapped the bracelet on her anyway. He did shut it down again, at least. He was just putting some fear into her, he’d probably say. Downshift let her go. She struggled. A little girl against a monster of a man. The man led her away, put her in the van.
Downshift dragged his feet behind, with Flag. He was shaking his head. Shaking and shaking. His heart was back down. All back together. No more crackling energy in the air. Everything should be normal.
“You know why we do this,” said Flag, anticipating his question. Flag for you. “It really does help us. It helps the good ones.”
“Good ones… She was a bad one?”
“You rather she fry your head?”
“Why’s it even come down to that?”
“Ask her that.”
“I plan to.” If they even gave him a chance. Would she disappear without a trace? Sometimes they did. It was hard to tell which ones would disappear and which ones wouldn’t. They just had to wait and see.Where did you learn about this site?: Google
Other accounts on MRO: None
**Don't miss Downshift's partner
Flagman.**
