Post by Blurt on Oct 17, 2006 23:32:23 GMT -5
Anna here! I've had this guy's personality up my sleeve for a long time, and I've decided we need more kids and I need even more excitement in my life ; ). So here goes!
Name: Christopher “Topher” Lung
Codename: Blurt
Affiliation: X-Student
Age: 8
Height: 3’11” and growing
Weight: 54 lbs and growing
Hair Color: N/A, although his eyebrows and eyelashes are black, and his hair used to be the same
Eye Color: Very dark brown
Appearance:
Topher is a mostly normal-looking 8-year-old boy. He is Chinese-American, and has a round face and a cheesy grin, and a twinkle in his dark eyes. He is a bit short and slim for his age, but he’s fairly athletic with loads of energy.
Every mutant has their strange features, though, and Topher’s is particularly unsettling: you can literally see into his head. He has no hair on his scalp, and the skin and skull are milky and translucent; you may not notice it at first, because they’re not completely transparent (think frosted glass) but you can see his brain.
As he matures, the skin elsewhere on his body is slowly getting more and more translucent; it may all be the same milky color by the time he is fully grown. The same goes for the transparency of his bones. As his skin clears up – literally – he also loses the hair on it; something about the pigmentation reacting in the hair follicles. He will probably end up not even having eyebrows or eyelashes.
His skin and skeleton are no weaker or stronger than anyone else’s; they feel the same, act the same, work the same. They just don’t look the same.
He wears t-shirts and jeans and shorts – normal kid fare – and almost always wears a beanie on his head, because his scalp gets cold. His mother used to make him wear the hats because she didn’t like seeing into his skull, but he couldn’t care less about that.
Personality:
Topher is what most adults would term “a child that needs disciplining,” but they would say it without fully understanding who he is. He’s not cruel or bad-hearted, but he distinctly lacks social skills and does not seem to be able to learn them. This is largely because he has no ability to connect emotionally with others; he does not seem to feel strong emotions like pain or pride or fury or glee himself, and he has no sense of sympathy for people’s emotions. Combined with an outgoing nature and even worse, his powers, this can be socially dangerous. Topher will say almost whatever comes into his head, regardless of its effect on other people. He loves the sound of his own voice and does not seem to understand that other people’s thoughts are their property and should not be told to the world.
This being said, he is fairly obedient in other ways, very pleasant-natured and completely honest. He also has a good sense of humor; he may laugh sometimes at the wrong times, but it is only because he does not understand when people are hurting. He has above-average intelligence and will do schoolwork when he is forced to, although he’s lazy and would much rather play outside. He likes to climb trees and play soccer and other kid-activities, and indoors he likes video games and cartoons and Legos and sometimes a good book.
Powers and Abilities:
Toph is a low-level telepath, at this point in his development (once he hits puberty, his powers will no doubt expand quite a bit, and new ones will manifest). The only thing he can currently do is read the minds of people nearby, fairly easily and automatically. If they are farther away than about ten feet, or are intentionally trying to hide information from him, it is usually much harder; he has to really try, and that’s something he almost never does. At this point most of what he does is get involuntary glimpses into other people’s thoughts… which then, invariably, come out of his mouth.
History:
Christopher is the only son of Lung Li-Wei and Kung Xiao-Xiao, an upper-middle-class couple from Beijing. Li-Wei was a successful businessman and Xiao worked as a secretary at the Beijing branch of an international company. They had been married for a year and were planning to have a child, but Li-Wei’s growing disgust with the Chinese political climate and the physical environment in which their child would grow up made him decide to move them both to America.
They arrived in New York and were suprisingly successful at the American Dream. Both Li-Wei and Xiao knew some English, and Li-Wei had company connections that allowed him to keep a fairly high-level job. Xiao found a job also, and became pregnant.
When Christopher was born, she barely took time off work to look after him, and as quickly as she could she started him in day care. Her nature was not nurturing, and although she did care for her son she was not too invested in him. It was Li-Wei who really doted on his little boy. He took Topher out on the weekends, brought him to work when he could, and their relationship grew strong while Xiao became more of a disciplinary force. Topher flourished under his father’s guidance, and they became nearly inseparable. If anything, this widened the divide between him and his mother; she was extremely devoted to Li-Wei and slightly resented the love and attention he gave his son. Still, these threads ran deeply under the surface, and generally they were a functioning and content family.
When Toph was six years old, they took a family trip to Beijing. They planned to spend two weeks in the city, introducing Topher to the place they had grown up in, and allowing Li-Wei to do some business work.
But an earthquake hit the city one afternoon, halfway through their trip. It began at a fault in an area outside the city, and thus would not have done too much damage were it small; but it was over an 8 on the Richter scale, and buildings in the city were built to withstand barely up to that level of power. The damage was swift and incredible.
Topher and his mother had taken a trip to the suburbs to visit a large park, while Li-Wei attended meetings in an office building downtown. The building was an old one and fell in the shock, along with many others. Topher and Xiao could only watch in helpless horror, safe in an open field, as great chunks of the city fell into ruins.
It was at this point that Topher’s abilities kicked in. He was able to hear the last thoughts of his father, and the thoughts of thousands of other people in the city. The trauma was incredible, and in fact he eventually blacked out and now retains no memory of the event.
He returned to New York with his mother, but he was a changed boy. The horror he experienced at his father’s death effectively snapped his emotional context, leaving him insensitive. His hair fell out and his mother discovered that he was a mutant; combined with her devastation at Li-Wei’s death and Topher’s newfound ability to read minds without respect for the consequences, she found herself barely able to cope with him. What little relationship they had plummeted.
She lasted barely two more years before she was pushed over the edge. Early one morning she drove by Xavier’s School and dropped him off at the gate with only a duffel bag, and instructions to tell whoever he found that he needed a good home.
This is where we will find him.
Sample Post:
Topher ran around the field as his mother sat on a park bench, looking on now and then. He had asked her to play catch, but she said she was tired and wanted to rest. So he was playing catch with himself.
He craned his head way back to watch the ball sail through the sky. He had thrown it too far behind him. He started to skitter backwards, watching it and trying to keep his balance. But he hit a tuft in the grass and fell over on his back.
He hit the ground with a thump, and all the wind was knocked out of him. His eyes widened with the impact, and he lay for a moment before he suddenly realized that he had not stopped moving. The ground was moving too. It grew stronger, until he was nearly bouncing off the lawn. He reflexively grabbed fistfuls of the grass to try to steady himself, but it didn’t help.
Why? Why was the usually dependable ground shaking so? Was he that heavy? He raised his head to try to see what was going on.
There in his line of sight was the great city of Beijing. Shuddering with him, the city traffic was grinding to a stop, and the great skyscrapers in the distance were waving as if in a hurricane wind. Waving, waving, and now breaking, and the faint sounds of screams were reached him on the breeze.
He shrieked. Daddy had gone into one of those buildings. Daddy had been in one of those buildings.
And suddenly through the screaming cut a voice. He paused, eyes and mouth wide, and listened to it.
oh God, the windows - I - can’t hold on - it’s broken! - we’re going to hit - Oh God, it’s over. It’s over. Xiao - in the park - God let them be safe - Topher - CHRISTOPHER! NO!
Topher threw himself upright, small fists clenching handfuls of grass and sod. “DADDY!”
Like a brick wall he was hit by a roar of internal noise. His eyes squinched shut in pain and he clapped his hands to his head, accidentally pulling handfuls of hair out by the roots, smearing dirt into his lightening scalp. Brain consumed by the onslaught, he rolled forward with the movement of the earth.
- my house - my furniture - my cat, my car - my arms - my wife, my children! - my family! I’m trapped! - in pain! - the walls are crumbling - the ceiling is coming down - the floor has opened, I’m going to Hell - to Heaven - to die! Oh God, I’m going to die! LAO TIEN, WO SE LE -
A thousand languages, a thousand voices, a thousand last thoughts. He saw stars behind his eyelids and tried to open them into the light, facing the city which was raising clouds of dust as the buildings came down one by one.
“DADDY!” he screamed. Over and over and over. “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!!”
Name: Christopher “Topher” Lung
Codename: Blurt
Affiliation: X-Student
Age: 8
Height: 3’11” and growing
Weight: 54 lbs and growing
Hair Color: N/A, although his eyebrows and eyelashes are black, and his hair used to be the same
Eye Color: Very dark brown
Appearance:
Topher is a mostly normal-looking 8-year-old boy. He is Chinese-American, and has a round face and a cheesy grin, and a twinkle in his dark eyes. He is a bit short and slim for his age, but he’s fairly athletic with loads of energy.
Every mutant has their strange features, though, and Topher’s is particularly unsettling: you can literally see into his head. He has no hair on his scalp, and the skin and skull are milky and translucent; you may not notice it at first, because they’re not completely transparent (think frosted glass) but you can see his brain.
As he matures, the skin elsewhere on his body is slowly getting more and more translucent; it may all be the same milky color by the time he is fully grown. The same goes for the transparency of his bones. As his skin clears up – literally – he also loses the hair on it; something about the pigmentation reacting in the hair follicles. He will probably end up not even having eyebrows or eyelashes.
His skin and skeleton are no weaker or stronger than anyone else’s; they feel the same, act the same, work the same. They just don’t look the same.
He wears t-shirts and jeans and shorts – normal kid fare – and almost always wears a beanie on his head, because his scalp gets cold. His mother used to make him wear the hats because she didn’t like seeing into his skull, but he couldn’t care less about that.
Personality:
Topher is what most adults would term “a child that needs disciplining,” but they would say it without fully understanding who he is. He’s not cruel or bad-hearted, but he distinctly lacks social skills and does not seem to be able to learn them. This is largely because he has no ability to connect emotionally with others; he does not seem to feel strong emotions like pain or pride or fury or glee himself, and he has no sense of sympathy for people’s emotions. Combined with an outgoing nature and even worse, his powers, this can be socially dangerous. Topher will say almost whatever comes into his head, regardless of its effect on other people. He loves the sound of his own voice and does not seem to understand that other people’s thoughts are their property and should not be told to the world.
This being said, he is fairly obedient in other ways, very pleasant-natured and completely honest. He also has a good sense of humor; he may laugh sometimes at the wrong times, but it is only because he does not understand when people are hurting. He has above-average intelligence and will do schoolwork when he is forced to, although he’s lazy and would much rather play outside. He likes to climb trees and play soccer and other kid-activities, and indoors he likes video games and cartoons and Legos and sometimes a good book.
Powers and Abilities:
Toph is a low-level telepath, at this point in his development (once he hits puberty, his powers will no doubt expand quite a bit, and new ones will manifest). The only thing he can currently do is read the minds of people nearby, fairly easily and automatically. If they are farther away than about ten feet, or are intentionally trying to hide information from him, it is usually much harder; he has to really try, and that’s something he almost never does. At this point most of what he does is get involuntary glimpses into other people’s thoughts… which then, invariably, come out of his mouth.
History:
Christopher is the only son of Lung Li-Wei and Kung Xiao-Xiao, an upper-middle-class couple from Beijing. Li-Wei was a successful businessman and Xiao worked as a secretary at the Beijing branch of an international company. They had been married for a year and were planning to have a child, but Li-Wei’s growing disgust with the Chinese political climate and the physical environment in which their child would grow up made him decide to move them both to America.
They arrived in New York and were suprisingly successful at the American Dream. Both Li-Wei and Xiao knew some English, and Li-Wei had company connections that allowed him to keep a fairly high-level job. Xiao found a job also, and became pregnant.
When Christopher was born, she barely took time off work to look after him, and as quickly as she could she started him in day care. Her nature was not nurturing, and although she did care for her son she was not too invested in him. It was Li-Wei who really doted on his little boy. He took Topher out on the weekends, brought him to work when he could, and their relationship grew strong while Xiao became more of a disciplinary force. Topher flourished under his father’s guidance, and they became nearly inseparable. If anything, this widened the divide between him and his mother; she was extremely devoted to Li-Wei and slightly resented the love and attention he gave his son. Still, these threads ran deeply under the surface, and generally they were a functioning and content family.
When Toph was six years old, they took a family trip to Beijing. They planned to spend two weeks in the city, introducing Topher to the place they had grown up in, and allowing Li-Wei to do some business work.
But an earthquake hit the city one afternoon, halfway through their trip. It began at a fault in an area outside the city, and thus would not have done too much damage were it small; but it was over an 8 on the Richter scale, and buildings in the city were built to withstand barely up to that level of power. The damage was swift and incredible.
Topher and his mother had taken a trip to the suburbs to visit a large park, while Li-Wei attended meetings in an office building downtown. The building was an old one and fell in the shock, along with many others. Topher and Xiao could only watch in helpless horror, safe in an open field, as great chunks of the city fell into ruins.
It was at this point that Topher’s abilities kicked in. He was able to hear the last thoughts of his father, and the thoughts of thousands of other people in the city. The trauma was incredible, and in fact he eventually blacked out and now retains no memory of the event.
He returned to New York with his mother, but he was a changed boy. The horror he experienced at his father’s death effectively snapped his emotional context, leaving him insensitive. His hair fell out and his mother discovered that he was a mutant; combined with her devastation at Li-Wei’s death and Topher’s newfound ability to read minds without respect for the consequences, she found herself barely able to cope with him. What little relationship they had plummeted.
She lasted barely two more years before she was pushed over the edge. Early one morning she drove by Xavier’s School and dropped him off at the gate with only a duffel bag, and instructions to tell whoever he found that he needed a good home.
This is where we will find him.
Sample Post:
Topher ran around the field as his mother sat on a park bench, looking on now and then. He had asked her to play catch, but she said she was tired and wanted to rest. So he was playing catch with himself.
He craned his head way back to watch the ball sail through the sky. He had thrown it too far behind him. He started to skitter backwards, watching it and trying to keep his balance. But he hit a tuft in the grass and fell over on his back.
He hit the ground with a thump, and all the wind was knocked out of him. His eyes widened with the impact, and he lay for a moment before he suddenly realized that he had not stopped moving. The ground was moving too. It grew stronger, until he was nearly bouncing off the lawn. He reflexively grabbed fistfuls of the grass to try to steady himself, but it didn’t help.
Why? Why was the usually dependable ground shaking so? Was he that heavy? He raised his head to try to see what was going on.
There in his line of sight was the great city of Beijing. Shuddering with him, the city traffic was grinding to a stop, and the great skyscrapers in the distance were waving as if in a hurricane wind. Waving, waving, and now breaking, and the faint sounds of screams were reached him on the breeze.
He shrieked. Daddy had gone into one of those buildings. Daddy had been in one of those buildings.
And suddenly through the screaming cut a voice. He paused, eyes and mouth wide, and listened to it.
oh God, the windows - I - can’t hold on - it’s broken! - we’re going to hit - Oh God, it’s over. It’s over. Xiao - in the park - God let them be safe - Topher - CHRISTOPHER! NO!
Topher threw himself upright, small fists clenching handfuls of grass and sod. “DADDY!”
Like a brick wall he was hit by a roar of internal noise. His eyes squinched shut in pain and he clapped his hands to his head, accidentally pulling handfuls of hair out by the roots, smearing dirt into his lightening scalp. Brain consumed by the onslaught, he rolled forward with the movement of the earth.
- my house - my furniture - my cat, my car - my arms - my wife, my children! - my family! I’m trapped! - in pain! - the walls are crumbling - the ceiling is coming down - the floor has opened, I’m going to Hell - to Heaven - to die! Oh God, I’m going to die! LAO TIEN, WO SE LE -
A thousand languages, a thousand voices, a thousand last thoughts. He saw stars behind his eyelids and tried to open them into the light, facing the city which was raising clouds of dust as the buildings came down one by one.
“DADDY!” he screamed. Over and over and over. “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!!”
