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Hair color and style: Black, thick and wavy. He keeps it just long enough to run your hands through.
Skin Tone: Tanned
Eye Color: Brown
Height: 5’10”
Build: Naturally lean, but muscular due to upkeep.
Visible mutation: N/A
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: A tattoo on the back of his right arm. A thick, 6 inch scar on his left leg and small scars on the left side of his abdomen and back.
Other features: Strong jaw; consistent bit of scruff, but never a full beard.

Everyday clothing style: Jeans. Always jeans. Matt hates slacks and will have to undergo some heavy convincing to wear them. Usually, he pairs these jeans with a leather jacket and a button-up shirt or a cotton shirt.
Uniform: N/A
Sleepwear: Boxers and a white t-shirt.
Miscellaneous clothing: He still wears his wedding ring.

Personality: Matt is well known for being a grounded, steady person. Despite his issues with PTSD, he comes across as very genuine and trustworthy. He’s incredibly empathetic and understanding, as well as being a good mediator in times when this is a necessary role.

He’s also an extremely private person. Many people know of Matt, and he can easily hold a conversation or become the life of the party, but he opens up to very few people. Deep conversations with him usually require a few beers and either many years of relationship or a shared intense experience. Few people actually know his secrets or his history, and he likes to keep it that way.

Matt does have a temper, but it’s a quiet temper. His time in the military taught him to keep his emotions hidden deep down below the surface, so when something does really anger him, you know immediately. He doesn’t wait to react to it and will instead move forward with precision.

Very few things make Matt nervous. He’s an emotionally grounded person who can almost always be found at a base state of “calm”. Because of this, he makes a good person to confide in and trust. When something does make him nervous or uncomfortable, that’s when you know something is really off.

Despite not attending any sort of post-secondary school, Matt is very observant and well-read. He often surprises people with how much hew knows about various subjects and about people in general. Most of it from books and simply watching the people around him. He's a frequent people-watcher.

Good/ bad/ neutral/ other: Neutral. Matt’s seen lots in his life; been through lots. As a younger man, he would have cited himself as a good guy, but now he knows that there are far more grey areas than black or white. He’s just trying to live his life, good or bad.

General Physical Capabilities: Above average strength and stamina, mid-level speed, low flexibility.
Fighting Style: Matt is a trained fighter. He uses military tactics and is very skilled with both weapons and hand-to-hand combat.
Fighting Style Pros/Cons: He’s a very skilled fighter, but not to the same degree he used to be. He still feels the pain of his injuries and sometimes overestimates himself.

Matías Morales was born into a larger than life Guatemalan family. They had always lived in Panajachel. Always. His father was a doctor, and his mother stayed home taking care of their eight children. They were happy like this; they lived just outside of the town, where it was peaceful and they could control their own lifestyle. It was good.

Then came the death. Matías’s oldest sister had been playing outside one day when she was swept away by a river, never to be seen again. It was then that everything changed. Matías’s mother could no longer bear to live in the same place that her daughter had died, so they packed up their family and headed north to the US. Why? There was no real good reason, but his father was able to get a job there, so it worked for them. It wasn’t nearly as prestigious as in Guatemala, but things had changed for them and they all knew that they couldn’t go back to the way things were.

They lived in a small town in the Massachusetts, and it took them all a while to adjust to the cold of the winters there. None of them had seen snow before, and while the younger kids adjusted fine, Matìas’s parents found it difficult to get connected to the community around them. Still, Matìas, or Matt, as he was called by the kids who couldn’t say his name correctly, found that he had a good childhood there.

He made friends quickly, despite being the class trouble maker. He was always doing something wrong in school, despite being fairly intelligent for his age. His friends kept him going and kept him in classes, though - especially one in particular. Her name was Sophie, and he knew that their fates would be intertwined. It didn’t start as attraction, though. She was the younger sister of one of his closest friends, and she was just annoying at first. As time went on, though, he grew apart from that friend, and he and Sophie grew closer, even dating until he graduated.

By the time he was ready to graduate, Matt knew that he was done with school. He’d never found himself suited to that environment. So, he enlisted in the army, leaving behind the life he’d known.

The army was good for him. They taught him things like composure that he never knew that he needed. On weekends, he would go home and visit his parents and his hometown, finding that he was much better suited to being away. He was deployed two years later, and he loved it. The army was where he shone the brightest.

While overseas, Matt moved up the ranks and began to see himself in a military career. It was the best fit for him, he decided. He even started to date a fellow member of his unit, and it seemed like things were only looking up for him.

Five years in, someone made a wrong step. A stray landmine took the lives of four of his comrades and left him with dangerous shrapnel injuries. Haunted by what he'd seen and the months spent in a hospital recovering from injuries to his left leg and back, Matt was sent home on medical leave.

Matt was then honourably discharged and sent home to deal with the images of his friends’ bodies replaying as he slept. He had no direction, and nowhere that he thought of as home anymore. He went back to crash at his parents’ place, but it didn’t feel good. The one thing that came from it was that he reconnected with Sophie.

They hung out almost every night, just as friends at first. Then, the inevitable happened, and they started to date again. Four months in, there were plans for a wedding. Matt picked up a job as a general contractor and married the woman of his dreams.

Everything was good. They moved into New York and started a life for themselves, Matt as a construction worker and Sophie as a journalist. For the next three years, their life was picturesque. There were plans for kids, but they were young and in no rush.

Once again, everything came crashing down. A robbery in their favourite store left Matt and Sophie in a corner together, waiting for some sort of help to arrive. A man with a gun seemed to have dangerous thoughts that included ending the lives of the people in the store. A mutant who happened to be passing through ran inside, claiming that he would be able to shelter people, and he did. He really did. The forcefield aspect of his power was incredibly useful, all until he stepped near Matt. In a flash, his power stopped working and three people lay dead that day, including Sophie.

For the next year, Matt grieved and floundered. Once again, he had no direction and no purpose, and it felt like half of him had been ripped away. How on earth would he ever get past that? It didn’t seem like he ever would.

So, he travelled for the next while and then settled back in New York, working odd jobs. Eventually, he had something established that he tolerated: bartending and working small construction jobs. A life of mediocrity seemed like the best way to go through the motions, since it was whenever he let something good happen that it was all taken away from him.

“So tell me about your time in the army, then,” the man said, looking entirely nonplussed as he looked through Matt’s resume. No reaction, nothing given to say whether he was doing well or not.

Matt shrugged and cocked his head as he took a breath in. His hands moved across the arms of the chair he was seated in as he grounded himself to the situation. “I mean, how much is there to say? I was deployed for a few years, as I’m sure it says on there, and then I came home. My story probably isn’t that much different from everyone else’s, I guess. I saw some stuff that changed me and now I’m back here, trying to make a go of the real world.”

The man nodded, giving no indication of whether this was a good response or not. Absolutely nothing from him to go off of. “And how would you say that you’re finding the real world? Is it living up to your expectations?”

What the hell kind of interview question was that? Matt blinked at the man from across the way, unsure of what to say. “I mean,” he started, shifting in his seat as he adjusted the shirt he was wearing. F***, he was just trying to get a job at a bar. It really shouldn’t have been that extensive. “Does it live up to anyone’s? I’m just trying to make do, I guess.”

The man nodded, flipping the pages back to the front in a quick motion. He let out a breath as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk as he finally met Matt’s eyes. “Alright, I think I’ve got everything I need. We’ll be in touch.”

That was it. After all that. The job had better be worth it. “Thanks,” Matt said with a nod, shaking the man’s hand. With that, he was off. No more information than he’d had when he started.