IndividualCharacter's full name: Finn Robert Rocas
Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Crow
Gender: Male
Age: 21
Date of Birth: 10/12/1992
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Queen Charlotte, Graham Island, Haida Gwaii, BC, Canada
Nationality: Canadian
Ethnicity/ Cultural Heritage: Celtic-European mutt with multiple pre-grandparental Haida relatives
AppearanceHair color and style: Banded black and white, continuing his crow-markings
Skin Tone: Black and white in alternating pattern; see visible mutation
Eye Color: Moderate to light blue-grey
Height: 5'10"
Build: On the slim side of sturdy, and more squared than angular
Visible mutation: Under normal conditions, Crow's body is covered in crows. Alternating black and white, his skin holds a tessellated murder travelling from his left hand (which is white) to his right hand (which is black). The pattern shifts slightly on his face, and the crows are seen head-on with wings spread. It should be noted that he is human-shaped, just painted. He also has full-sized black wings and is physically capable of flight. Coordination and actual ability… not so much.
Images are good things.
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: His crows can sometimes be misinterpreted as a tattoo (and a sign of extreme obsession and dedication), but he has none. The crows obscure his scars to some extent, but there are two fresh splatters of scar tissue: one across the outside of his left ribs, just below his arm; and across the top of his left shoulder. Both are from being on the wrong end of an idiot's shotgun.
Other features: (if applicable)
Everyday clothing style: Given the… complication of breaking into a full murder of crows, clothing is awkward, even beyond the issue of having had everything he owned set on fire. Crow usually wears coveralls, and usually has to tie the arms around his waist for comfort. He
can compress his wings enough to squeeze into an oversized pair, if he has to, but it's difficult and painful and gives him cramps. It's horrible.
Uniform:n/a
Sleepwear: He currently possesses coveralls and boots. He makes do.
Miscellaneous clothing: A necklace of two slices of bone, carved and painted to look like eagle feathers, on a strip of raw leather.
CharacterPersonality: Crow's personality is a bit complicated, and his mutation certainly has an effect. When it comes down to it, Crow is really the summation of his murder (murder=flock of crows), the collective mind of all the crows that make him up. They aren't individuals, per se, but they are distinct enough to lead him to referring to himself in the plural, at least when speaking aloud, and to result in some interesting perspectives from being somewhere between a hivemind and direct democracy (but hivemind sounds cooler).
As an overall person, Crow is vocal, curious, and distinctly less fond of roadkill than might be imagined. He won't deny that he has eaten it, and that it in no way made him ill, but he does set his sights a bit higher than that. He is a particular fan of fish, and will probably do whatever you want if you offer him some. This mentality extends to other areas of his life as well, with a general refusal to deny truth and maybe a little too much enthusiasm about the things he likes or is some way passionate about.
So, things Crow is passionate about! Well, fish is one thing but it really isn't all that high on the list. The main thing that gets him up and out of bed is really his disgust with general society's bland neutrality. No one
cares about anything, and certainly won't bother exerting any effort to improve things. His ideas of 'improve' may not match everyone's - both 'good' and 'bad' - but at least he's willing to work for them.
Crow is sick and tired of people who take advantage of others, but has no problem taking advantage of people who give up and submit just because they're too lazy or pathetic to do anything else. Not everyone has to rise up to rule, but there's always something to give a life purpose, something to strive towards and
do. If you don't, well, you just drag everyone down and aren't worth keeping around. See, Crow could care less about the physical ability of any individual. Missing a few limbs? So what? Crow is ready to help any proud rats dying in the gutter to rise up, but a lion who can’t bother to keep himself in hunting shape isn’t worth saving. The moment someone tries to use their so-called inability as a crutch or excuse, though, he loses all respect for them and is quite happy to snap their neck.
Crow is also happy to remember past wrongs and go about his cheerfully vengeful way. He has no intention of righting past wrongs, no. He just wants to get even. Which is mostly why he is somewhat liable to clobber the next person he sees with a shotgun with his stick. And then maybe take their gun and shoot them with it. So long as the individual is similar enough to the person who wronged him Crow will be satisfied; he really doesn't distinguish (or care to) individuals well.
Hobbies/ Interests: Crow likes fish. And fishing. And apparently continuing to fish despite it sucking up all his time and equipment. Shiny things are good too, but that’s really a given. Magpies don’t deserve to be content. Hm… you know, sometimes it’s really nice to just stretch out and crash in front of a big fireplace while the weather rages on drearily outside. With fluffy blankets and pillows. Yes. That.
Job or part time job and description: Job. He should get one. Ideally one that doesn't involve having to be nice to useless idiots. Bit more competition than he’s used to in the sense of jobs he can use his mutation effectively at.
Fears/ phobias/ concerns: Crashing. Because he can only fly as a bunch of crows, and has crashed horribly every time he's tried to fly with the wings he's had for so much longer. Idiots with guns concern him, but he's usually pretty cool about taking them out with a stick to the head. And magpies are curiously infuriating. But soooo much fun to torment.
Special talents: Losing tackle, and not replacing them with fish. But finding free tackle! … no, that might be because they're shiny. Shiny stands out to crows. So that cuts out his other talent…. extremely humorous crash-landings. Pity. He can also drink straight lemon or lime juice without twitching, but prefers lime.
MoralityGood/ bad/ neutral/ other: Um. By most people's standards, Crow is really leaning towards 'bad.' It doesn't bother him to beat rude idiots into messes, and if people don't exert themselves properly then they don't deserve to continue to possess their wallet. Individual crows are very good at picking up such things, even if it takes a few decoys flying in the victim's face to expose the target. But he's really not a nasty person. He has standards!
… mostly of how idiotic an idiot has to be to deserve attention of a positive or negative nature. But he does protect the people who get positive attention. Doesn’t that at least keep him out of the deep red?
MutationsMutation description:Murder of CrowsThere are multiple meanings to 'murder of crows' in Crow's situation; his skin is decorated with a murder of crows, which he can also break into, but in order to replace any injured birds of his flock, he has to kill wild crows.
He tries to avoid losing crows.
Crow's physical body is literally composed of individual crows, but when collected into a humanoid form he is human. Mostly. And maybe a bit prone to cross-crow injuries healing unevenly... See, injuries only affect the birds they first impact, and later things like swelling will not spread into neighbouring birds. Since each bird is, well, as easy to kill as any old crow, he has the curious condition of being equally susceptible to maiming everywhere in his body. No weak spots, no armoured areas.
If startled or desired, the birds that make up his body can take flight and appear to rip him into pieces. It can be rather disturbing to watch, but it gets the job done and usually keeps from damaging his clothing too badly. It takes a bit longer to reform again into his human shape, since each bird has to hop back into position for him to blur back into human structure. It should be noted that though some of the crow-markings on Crow's body are white, the individual crows that result are all black. They also have the same shade of blue-grey eyes that Crow-as-a-human does.
If a crow dies while separate from Crow, assembling the rest is a very bad idea. Each crow has a position, and if one is missing it leaves a pretty big hole. Instead, Crow can reform around the dead crow, and carry it until he can replace it. The injured area will reflect the cause of death, and will cause him pain until he can replace it with a new bird. If he reforms with an injured bird, that bird will be more likely to survive, as it is supported and protected by the rest, but heals no faster than a wild crow with the same injuries (barring delays due to reinjuring or infection).
If one of Crow's crows dies, there are two things that can happen. The first and most serious is actually the most pleasant, but is a horrible total pain at the same time. If Crow loses a bird and cannot recover its corpse, he has to stay in murder form long enough for two of his surviving birds to breed. They are fortunately not seasonal breeders in his particular case, and survivability is very high because he generally can stash the nest indoors, but his crows only lay one egg at a time. The egg will hatch in about two and a half weeks, but grow much faster than non-mutant crows after that. Curiously, his crows will only breed if there is space for one; he cannot produce extra crows.
Given the complications of staring out of a few dozen eyes for at least a week (he can incubate the egg from human form if the missing bird isn't in too critical a position, but up until then he’s quite limited), Crow really doesn't like having to do this, despite the unpleasantness of the trick he's found for managing a crow corpse: he finds another one, under an hour or so old and not splattered across a highway, and then jams every inch of his dead crow against the matching part of the new dead crow.
Then he just smells like dead crow for a week, and it generally takes at least that long for the new crow to settle in properly anyway.
Strengths:Crow’s pretty hard to kill, if only because he theoretically has to lose every single one of his crows in order to die permanently, and he can recover from injuries that would otherwise be permanent by replacing a dead crow, as well as the whole all-crows-are-equal thing. It would be weird going around without a face, though, since he
does look out of those eyes and two eyes are way easier to deal with than however many he can have…
He also scores well in terms of mobility and agility, particularly when his murder is spread across the sky. One crow is normally not too hard to take out – strength and constitution are not his strong points – but a few dozen crows with shared awareness and direction sure can be. You thought raptors were hard to sneak up on? Try following a murder of crows that can actually see everything each and every other member can see. As his crows are individually
him rather than controlled externals, distance between them isn’t really an issue, though extreme distances will mess him up.
The assembly of lots of tiny brains has an interesting effect on information computing: if he can manage to concentrate, he is
capable of processing a lot of information. However, that does tend to require cooperation, and he is quite prone to distraction. Chances are that he’ll remember things, though, if you give his brains a chance to distribute the query.
Someone in the flock’s got to remember, right?
Weaknesses and Limitations:Ever smelled a dead crow? Yeah.
The primary distraction, if not entirely a weakness, is that the collection of crows that makes up Crow don’t always get along. They all have more or less the same character – each is, essentially, Crow – but that hardly stops them from disagreeing and squabbling. And occasionally pulling each other’s feathers to get their point across. The fact that the Crow most people interact with is the collective hivemind, so to speak, of all of those not-quite-individual-entity birds means that he’s not quite as consistent as most people in behaviour, although he is also less prone to extreme irrationality.
There isn’t really an energetic cost to Crow splitting or reforming, but there is a certain mental cost, especially to the latter. Forcing all of his birds to get back into their rigid, superficial positions requires a lot of arguing with and yelling at himself unless there’s some giant, overriding reason that has actually managed to impress itself upon each and every one of his crows. They’re usually pretty happy to split apart, but if it’s cold and dark out they may be more reticent.
At distances of a few kilometers, there is no noticeable discomfort to the physical separation of Crow, though he has little to no relative sense between them and has to navigate by the physical senses of each bird. Past five kilometers or so, he starts to become disoriented. Separation distress affects all birds equally. With extreme shows of coordinated will, he can hold out to somewhere over ten kilometers, but with extreme disorientation, headaches (literally plural!), reduced coordination, and eventually unconsciousness if the mental strain becomes too great. If he does fall unconscious due to this, his various parts will gradually weaken and perish, beginning with those birds most distant to any others. Should he chain his birds, so that no one bird is particularly distant from any others, he can extend his reach, but mental strain sets in if the chain grows too long.
Crow might be able to replace dead crows (either over a very long, boring period of time or by stinking for almost as long no matter how many times he showers), but if he can’t get around to it, he can take a lot longer to heal than others might. His particular body also complicates healing by others, such that most healing mutants are best limiting themselves to working on one bird at a time.
Besides, have you ever
tried to fly? I mean, really. Just because you shove wings out through a guy’s back doesn’t mean he can just float off the ground like a proper crow. Please.
Physical AbilitiesGeneral Physical Capabilities: Crow isn't small, as humanoids go, and he hasn't been sitting at a desk all his life. He's no athlete or bodybuilder, though, and it does kind of show. He's not spectacularly strong, or fast, or agile, although his ability to split into his composite crows does mimic agility a bit.
Fighting Style: Crow possesses a large stick. It enjoys meeting idiots' skulls.
Fighting Style Pros/Cons: Large sticks do a fair amount of damage when they come into contact with living tissue at reasonable velocities. Not very fancy, though. The fancy part is when it doesn't work, and Crow has to shatter himself and make a run for it.
History Of Your CharacterCrow, born Finn Rocas, had a pretty normal remote-community childhood. He was born in a town called Queen Charlotte, on the northernmost island of a small chain that used to bear the same name. These islands lie off the coast of BC, Canada. Finn was an only child and had an absent father to enhance the limitations of the location and his mother’s simple job.
There really wasn’t anything spectacular about anything until Finn was fairly newly eighteen. He had been a curious kid, but there were only so many people around in his age group and he wasn’t especially close to any of them; wandering the beaches looking for pretty shells had always been much more his speed.
Anyway, Finn started feeling sick one normal-seeming day in late spring. Initially lethargic, sore, and generally miserable, he let his teachers know and crashed in his bed for a few days. He’d had the flu before; he’d get over it eventually.
Except he didn’t. The aches got worse until he couldn’t move his back without searing pain, he hardly had the energy to drag himself to the bathroom for water, and then, within a week of his symptoms setting in, even that exertion was beyond him.
Fortunately, that was when his mother returned from an extensive shopping trip on the mainland. She came in looking for him when he didn’t answer, and immediately bolted for the community doctor. The blood-soaked wings spread limply across his bed might have had something to do with her panic.
This proved to be a very good course of action. The doctor was mutant himself, though not publically (and not visibly), and clued into the situation quite quickly. He rigged up an illusion of Finn’s (wingless) corpse, smuggled the boy to his own house, and kept him there while he recovered and the community all went to his funeral.
Once Finn was strong enough, the doctor got him to the ferry and gave him enough money to get to Prince George, the nearest real city. He recommended that he try to find his way to a larger city, something farther south and more tolerant, but islanders aren’t rich folk, even doctors.
Fortunately for the very nervous and easily tired Finn, the weather was still cool enough for a heavy coat to not look out of place. Once off the ferry, he limped through Prince Rupert, the port city that originally was going to get all of Vancouver’s business – until the port proved to be little more than mud flats – to the train station. The train ride was awkward, since he still couldn’t so much as brush his young wings against the seat back without them twinging, but no one bothered to do more than stare and few cared even that much. There was certainly nothing unusual to the trip, and he made it to Prince George without issue.
Once there, Finn found a shelter willing to take him in and connect him with a program to finish his high school. He started looking for a job as soon as he received his dogwood, but employer after employer turned him away for being a mutant, especially a visible, useless one. He had wings but couldn’t fly – he’d been bedridden for a week the one time he’d tried, thanks to nearly breaking a wing – and all he did was advertise the presence of freaks. No one wanted to buy from a company that used freak labour.
Potential employers weren’t the only ones facing societal pressure against mutants in that town. What with the time he spent going to and from the shelter on the way to job interviews and applications, people started to notice where he lived. The shelter started getting complaints, and eventually gave in and suggested that he move to a mutant-only shelter in another part of town.
Finn went. He was attacked on the way. In broad daylight, a number of men young and old surrounded the young mutant, tripped him, kicked him, punched him. He went down. They kept at him. One of them hit his head. Somewhere after that, he shattered into crows.
It took close to a week for Finn to realize what had really happened and recall all his birds, and most of a day of constant effort to shove them all back together. When he stood as a winged human again, though, his skin was iridescent black and pearly white. It turned out that the only external pigmentation that hadn’t changed was that of his irises, but then again, they had been crow-acceptable before.
Finn was, understandably, angry when he finally limped to the new shelter. He sat in a corner and glowered at everything for a while before he decided to get on with his life – and with getting even.
That was a confusing summer, overall. His personal awareness shifted, and he couldn’t feel like a single entity anymore no matter how hard he tried. The new shelter helped him get a job at a local warehouse before fall hit, and by winter he had enough money to find a tiny, mutant-tolerant apartment. Being able to honestly assure the landlord that he was no more capable of accidental damage than any human helped a great deal in getting the lease. The job itself was interesting, in that it was intended to be nothing more than low-paying hard labour but changed as soon as a coworker connected the concept of Finn’s murder of crows and the horribly ineffective inventory system. It was this same person who deemed Finn to be Crow, and cheerfully refused to use any other name with him.
Crow really wasn’t a bad name. It was certainly accurate, and less confusing that the more accurate Crows would be. So Crow spent most of his shifts as a bunch of crows flying all around a dusty old warehouse, finding packages and boxes and pallets that had been shoved in exactly the wrong place by a previous shift. Sometimes he even found things that had been lost for years. Those were interesting days, if filled with extra paperwork. All in all, it wasn’t a bad gig.
And then, a few years later, the business was targeted by a local anti-mutant group and set on fire. Crow was on shift at the time, but was able to escape unharmed. Many of the other workers weren’t so lucky. Some were trapped. One escaped the blaze, only to be caught and bludgeoned to death by the little mob.
That had been the guy who had named Crow.
Crow followed the mob back to their base of operations, an old church in one of the roughest parts of town. Then he went and gathered all the angry mutants he could find, and led them straight to the murderers.
Things didn’t even start peacefully. Most of the mutants didn’t have particularly offensive abilities, but even a slug-whisperer can get creative with rage. Someone may have drowned in slugs that night.
And then someone pulled a gun. A shotgun, of all things, from somewhere on the dais. Crow tried to stop them, but took two shells before he made it across the room. Bleeding badly from the side and shoulder, he nevertheless got the gun away, and it fortunately proved to be the only one. Most of the anti-mutant mob fled shortly after that, and Crow was carried back to the mutant-only shelter that had once housed him.
Two of his crows died, having been hit square. A number of crows next to each of the corpses were injured, but they healed. The dead crows just stayed numb and empty. There was neither life nor any of him left in them.
People started suggesting courses of action, of course, for both fixing the crows and society. He had plenty of help in trying to catch live crows, but that didn’t go anywhere. Someone eventually found a freshly dead crow, and Crow prodded it for a while before giving up and throwing a dead self-crow at it in frustration.
A part of him twinged at the contact, and startled him enough that he tripped and landed right on top of the dead crows.
He’d never sat on himself before. He couldn’t recommend it to anyone. He also couldn’t really recommend rebuilding oneself out of dead crows either, because everyone made it quite clear how badly he smelled and for just how long.
Before he could work on an alternative and less foul method, though, a much larger group of anti-mutant humans rose up against the ‘mutant murderers.’ They razed the shelter, a number of mutant-tolerant businesses, and half a dozen apartment buildings known to allow mutant tenants. Crow’s was one of them. A lot of good people died.
Crow left Prince George after that, with nothing but a pair of coveralls, his boots, and a large, solid stick with a classic cloth bag of food tied to the top. It was a long way from nowhere.
RoleplayWhere did you learn about this site?: No clue anymore, but Alli did bring me back at one point
Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: Aiden Killian
Sample RP:No place this far south had any right to be this cold. Crow tried to draw his legs up closer to his chest so he could wrap his wings overtop everything better, but bending any more messed with his precarious balance on the bench. He reluctantly straightened out again.
Drunken laughter disturbed his rest, such as it was, even further, and he twisted his head out of his meager nest to glare at the handful of men far rougher than he. They were quite pleasantly gathered around an old oil drum, and its warm glow taunted him so. When he had tried to join their revelry – one of them had managed to come across some cheap alcohol of one sort or another – however, they immediately started throwing whatever they had to hand at him, including their saliva. One of them almost threw the bottle in his hand, but his companions were fortunately aware enough of the situation to catch him before he ruined their good mutant-free fun.
Crow had been too cold to pick a fight. Surely a bench would serve him just fine on this clear autumn night. He’d managed all the nights up to this one, had he not? He would survive this one as well.
A sudden crash changed his mind, though. Apparently chasing off the mutant was only enough while there was still liquor to be ingested. Crow was less than pleased with this turn of events, but he held still as they approached, feigning sleep despite the clear drunkenness of their footsteps.
Their first move was probably just a warning shove, but Crow burst apart on contact, his more exposed crows beating their wings in the three drunkards’ faces to give the rest a chance to work their way out of his clothing. His feet always had the hardest time wriggling free. By the time everyone was out, though, the trio had broken and were running. Back to their little circle of warmth? Oh no, they’d had their chance, and now he was cold and irritated in every body.
He let a few birds stay back to collect his belongings as the remainder of him swarmed after the three men, cawing and screeching and battering them with wings and beaks and claws. The three kept running, and Crow triumphantly alit on the nice warm barrel, shifting his feet to keep from scorching them.
And that is what you get for messing with us, he thought to himself, pleased, and found himself entirely in agreement for once. He should probably rearrange things over here, though. He was about to have fried birds as well as frozen ones.
