Post by mickey on Aug 16, 2006 22:48:42 GMT -5
(This is a massive corruption of the character, especially personality-wise, and I'm creating a lot where I didn't see anything, so someone let me know if I'm wandering too far off the beaten acceptable-modofications-to-canon path. I am shamelessly trying to make one of my favorite OCs fit into a canon hole, yes, I admit it. *shame* *has no spots* Oh, and I play Kitty, Jane, and Sam.)
Name: Michael (Mickey) Tork
Codename(s): Rainbow
Affiliation: Restored Human
Age: 20
DOB: February 13
Height: 5'7
Weight: 145 lbs
Hair Color: gray (brown)
Eye Color: gray (hazel/green)
Appearance: Mickey's appearance is malleable - at least, his coloring is. Due to his powers, which are as-yet untrained, he absorbs the coloring of whoever's within three feet. If no one's that close, he fades black-and-white, like an old movie. His skin is very fair with a small splash of tiny gray freckles across his nose and under his eyes, which are a soft, ash-colored gray that was once a sort of unremarkable half-hazel, half-green mix. His hair, straight-up dyed black without influence and a dark charcoal underneath, is coarse and frizzy from attempted straightenings and used to be brown and curly, cut short in an attempt to tame it, but the curls only tightened; they're just barely starting to hedge into mop status again now.
His nose… well, his nose is unfortunate. Not really unfortunate unfortunate, but kind of. It’s just sort of… where normal noses slope inwards, his slopes outwards. It’s a Roman nose, but it just doesn’t look good on non-Gladitorial guys. It’s beaky. He’s decent-looking, even kind of cute, maybe, in a funky way, but definitely nowhere near beautiful. He wears glasses sometimes – black Emo frames, rectangular and normal.
He generally wears black. Anything other than a grayscale makes his skin even stranger. His clothing style has faded pretty Emo of late, due to his usual state of vaguely pissy depression, and he can often be found in black slimline girls' jeans with an assortment of band-based t-shirts. He's of slim to average build; his chest is only slightly broader than his waist, but he's not fully lanky, more just un-built up.
He has gages, a tongue stud, a stud through his left nostril, two eyebrow studs in his right eyebrow (one barb and one silver ball), and a labret, though they're all rarely in at the same time (except the gages, which leave huge holes and are thus in all the time). He also has several tattoos, some picked up from other people and kept on basis of coolness; the ones he got himself were (1) an ankh on his thigh and (2) "ONLY GOD WILL JUDGE ME" across his shoulders. Yes, it was because he saw it in Charlie's Angels and thought it was awesome. He picked up (3) some nicely detailed barbed wire around his left arm from a girl in a bar and a (4) tattered black butterfly tramp stamp (base of spine) from another, then (5) a small spiderweb stretching across the soft skin under the ankle of his right foot and (6) three stars on each side his lower abdomen, over where his ovaries would be if he were a girl. He picked them up from a woman who'd had them removed. He just thought they were cool. He's also got weird patches of shiny skin where he had less-cool tatts removed. If you get close enough, you can read ERIC in cover-scars across his heart, plus various other shapes in other places, mostly hearts and stars and rainbows, clovers and blue moons.
Personality: Mickey is, basically, an argumentative loser. He doesn't try in anything he doesn't like and has no bones about this. He didn't really want to go to college, he doesn't want a steady job, and he doesn't want to make something of herself. After years of his parents' pushing and his continual failure, he's cultivated a healthy thirst for disappointing his superiors, though he still has a burning need not to let anyone he actually cares for down. He's naturally suspicious of those he meets for the first time and doesn't talk much unless they really piss him off, but if you get to know him it's hard to get him to shut up. He has a fairly dry sense of humor that he'll employ with those he trusts, but it can quickly turn acidic towards anyone he doesn't know well or doesn't like. He’s kind of a pissy bitch, but you get used to him, even if he does like to whine.
Mickey also holds a strange sort of respect that can sometimes border on obsession for those that hate him. Not the people who just rather won't deal with him – they bore him. He loves talking to people who honestly hate him and will try to figure out why. He won't usually do anything to fix it; it's just entertaining.
He holds a quiet sort of disdainful dislike for anyone he sees as unworthy - most of the world, in fact, minus the very intelligent Speech Team or Chess Club types and possibly an artist or two and indie music elitists, with whom he enjoys as many arguments as he possibly can. He has a wide range of knowledge about various subjects useless outside of private schools and Jeopardy, but possesses an intrinsic cleverness which is what usually gets him through life. He loves Debate and the only sports he really enjoys are riflery and golf, as both give him the chance to test himself against himself, which he sees as his greatest foe – plus, he can’t really fight anyone else, due to the fact that unless he hits them with a three-foot pole, he’ll accept the wound. In any other class, he'll make somewhere between a B and a C, but lacks the motivation for As. He reads a LOT of philosophy. But he very, very good both at golf and shooting things, with most calibres of weapons, and has a small collection of vintage pistols and rifles at home. His favorite for general use is a Kalashnikov Vepr self-loading sniper carbine with a Starscope optical sight. He's a dead shot, and it, as he says, shoots pretty good too. He's never actually sniped anything; his dad just had a lot of land and liked taking his son down to the shooting range. It was a dude thing. He used to hunt, but gave it up as too dangerous - he doesn't know if he accepts gunshot wounds of cute little deer, too, and he can't be sure an animal's dead without taking its pulse.
He has a very low tolerance for a stubbornly closed mind, and can't stand people who make decisions on sight and won't change them. Not much will get him angry enough to blow up, but when he does it's quite a show. When Mickey blows up he starts to spout about how he's right and you're not, but he's a lot more eloquent than that - this is usually where his pointless knowledge of pointless things is employed. He's generally very convincing, but only because he'll research obsessively whatever he's going to argue about until he's dredged up every scrap of proof, not that he's naturally persuasive. He can build a case that will sound sensible to even the biggest skeptic, but it's hard for him to actually be persuasive, though he can do it when stressed. The thing Mickey always remembers is that he doesn’t actually have to be right – he just has to make you wrong. He’s an attack, not a defense, and that’s his biggest weakness, because that kind of argument can work two ways.
He takes a slightly sadistic pleasure in beating his enemies since he couldn’t most of the time, and will inform anyone he dislikes exactly how much he hates them to their faces, often in very creative and eloquent terms. Often times he'll rant for five minutes about exactly how much he hates you and exactly what he wishes would happen to you. He has a funny sort of insight that only really shows him other people's failings and insecurities. He's almost unaware of it until he gets mad, but at that point he's very aware of it.
He has begun to crave a family, and he believes strongly in the exchange of material goods as a sign of affection - at least on his part. He doesn't really need anything in return, but he loves to give to those few he cares about and even those he doesn't. For instance, if he sees you standing in front of a Coke machine without that last quarter he'll just hand it to you and walk off, even if he doesn't know you. It's not that he's terribly generous; it's just a habit. One of his traditions upon making a new friend is to take them to the closest shopping center and let them max out his mother's Gold Card, as his parents never gave him a limit and he needs to max it out every month anyway in order to keep it that way. He can live pretty cheaply by himself, but he doesn't want to be limited if he can avoid it.
He feels a strong need to be good enough for those he cares about; while his father and mother's disapproval no longer bothers him, that of his friends would torture him.
He loves ska, plus some random Frank Sinatra, some old alternative rock and even some Top 40 stuff from the forties and fifties and show tunes in general. Despite his dress sense, he doesn’t really like Emo or indie rock, except for a few random bands – Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy, Of Montreal, a couple others. No idea why; he just does. No Doubt is his favorite band of all time, and though Rock Steady was a bit of a letdown (poppy; still catchy, though) he's memorized every last one of their songs - minus the first album, which was just bad.
Mickey's fairly good at detecting the pleasant little white lies employed by higher society to pad conversation after years with his father and his buddies. That's not to say he's a human lie detector or anything; if you're any sort of experienced liar or if the lie's careful enough, he's just as gullible as the next guy. He just doesn't trust very easily and is used to being persuaded. Big lies are harder for him to detect.
He's also bisexual(ish; about a four and a half on the Kinsey scale, or 75% ghey). He's practically the posterboy for MySpace. No one was surprised or scandalized. He feels faintly ungratified about that, but, to his credit, he actually is bi, not just slutty, as so many MySpacers are. He prefers boys, generally speaking, but should the right girl come along... well, who knows? He doesn't tend to publish this fact around people he doesn't know very well, because, as he's learned, a large percentage of the population simply doesn't believe in bisexuality, and it's even less accepted than straight-up homosexuality, something that confuses him to no end.
He has a personal space thing, simply because he's terrified of picking up any more diseases than he already has. He's somehow managed to avoid any of the really lasting STDs, though he's had chlamydia more times than he can count and more gonorrhea than every girl in Delta Nu put together. He also picked up a heart murmur from someone at school, an aneurysm in his brain that he still doesn't know about, a couple benign tumors he's all had removed, some necrosis scarring in his lower intestine, and a persistent lower respiratory infection that develops into bronchitis every cold and flu season. The only thing that's truly serious (apart from the aneurysm) is chronic leukemia, which, despite its name, is less chronic than its other main form, acute leukemia. Because he's still producing relatively mature, though still abnormal, blood cells, the real effects of the disease haven't started showing up yet, though he does get the headaches and he's never really hungry.
Powers and Abilities: Mickey accepts coloring, sicknesses and a muted version of superpowers from those within a three-foot bubble. If he had practiced his ability and gained control over it, he would have been able to decide when to accept and when to reject the slight DNA signature that infiltrates his system and the wounds that come with it; as it was, he's barely learned to keep tattoos from transferring to his skin, though he's working on hair dye. He was a sort of healer - when the coloring of a person transferred to him, he'd take their wounds as well as their powers, but the wounds would actually completely move from their original owners to Mickey. He can't give them back or heal any faster than anyone else. Thankfully, he's naturally hardy. If he chooses, he can also import a person's entire lifetime's worth of memories, thoughts and feelings, but it's very dangerous: the few times Mickey has ever done it, he's always ended up unconscious, and once he went into neural shock. This is a slightly pointless ability unless someone has repressed memories/amnesia etc.
Weaknesses: He has the lungs of a forty-year-old smoker due to his own habit and the char he's picked up from people over the years. He also couldn't control his ability at all and has trouble with authority sources and most of the world in general. He's dying slowly of diseases picked up from others. He's developed quite the resistance to penicillin and even a few other antibiotics after having to be treated for hundreds of infections, especially STDs, he picked up from passing too close to others.
History: Mickey was born in a very high-class neighborhood in Copperton, Oregon, to Nathan and Allison Tork, whom he almost wishes were more boring. Although they were very normal, they were part of a very affluent neighborhood and they both came from money, which just opens the door to all kinds of dysfunction. His mother stayed at home while his father was the CEO of a large corporation with mob ties and was rarely home, though his earnings gave his wife and son everything they could ever ask. His mother had little to do, but after the trouble with Jackie, Mickey's sister, she laid off the competitive childrearing and let her son run somewhat wild at first. (Jackie killed herself while Mickey was still gestating, driven half-nuts by her mother's constant interference in her affairs and controlling personality. Jackie had become ultra-paranoid and believed, at the time of her death, that killing herself was the only way to escape from her parents, who wanted, in her mind, to kill her. Jackie believed she could escape from the funeral home and that the carbon monoxide with which she smothered herself would only stun her.)
However, Mickey's father, who needed a son to take to work functions and show off and eventually marry to one of his friends' daughters, didn't approve. He gave Ally (Mickeys’s mom was the kind who whore pink velour jogging suits and called herself things like “Ally”) strict orders on the boy's upbringing and, when she didn't obey him totally, there were often dire 'consequences'. Though Mickey never picked up on it because of its rarity, his father had a habit of beating his mother senseless when she disobeyed him. To this day, Mickey doesn't know.
Mickey was exposed to everything as a child; higher mathematics, great works of literature, art, sports, horseback riding, music - you name it, he was in lessons for it. But, no matter how hard Ally tried, her son remained mediocre; though he retained all the information, he never excelled at anything but golf and shootin' stuff. Ally was desperate. She couldn't leave Mickey like this. Nathan would kill her.
At home, Ally was a monster against her will. She drove Mickey in the absence of his father, never pausing except to deliver screamed insults where she felt they were needed. Mickey learned early that success was security and that the only way to get his mother (and father, who was much worse, at least when he was home) off his back was to win everything - but he couldn't. Mickey was mediocre in most subjects naturally, and hours of study never got him grades much past a barely-scraped 92. He was never especially talented at anything but arguing, riflery and perhaps golf (if only because it was the only thing he liked other than arguing), and this absolutely killed his mother and forced her to drive Mickey harder than ever, though Mickey's grades and morale only got steadily worse - along with Ally's carefully-hidden bruises.
At long last, Mickey got tired. He was tired of always feeling like a second-class citizen and giving his father all the glory for the only three things he could actually do. His entrance into high school marked his debut on the Debate team, and he was immediately in love with it, with argument, with doing something he actually liked and winning for once. He didn't want to give any more to his parents. Unfortunately for Mickey, his mother didn't take kindly to this and, fearing for her own survival, drove him harder.
After one too many fights with his father over joining Debate rather than football, Mickey stomped up to his room, locked the door, and abruptly noticed when he went to change (Ally had thrown her glass of wine on his shirt) that he was no longer a brunette, but a charcoalette. He ran down the stairs to the downstairs mirror over the mantel and ran into his mother, immediately turning a streaky tan color with bleached-blonde hair and shiny blue eyes.
He disappeared to his room for all of the next day, not emerging even for meals. His mother, convinced that she was just tired and had been seeing things, took a Sominex and went to bed; Mickey’s flounce-outs were not uncommon. He'd be fine in the morning.
Of course, Mickey wasn't fine.
He was homeschooled when his parents finally resigned themselves to his new state, until he legally dropped out of high school when he achieved his majority. He barely left the house except at night, when he couldn't be seen, until he was eighteen, at which point he made friends with a few of the local "bad crowd," who weren't as picky as most of society would've been about his coloring.
He briefly became involved in drug culture – he’s off pot now and was never really hardcore addicted to anything, even the coke, but he still can’t give up cigarettes, and the one time he ever tried acid still gives him nightmares. Mickey’s kind of a lightweight.
His parents found out one night when they went up to his room on his nineteenth birthday to call him down for cake and found him climbing out his window with a dime-bag in his pocket. Ally was shocked and disappointed; Nathan was incredibly dramatic about the whole thing and, later, vicious; Mickey needed killing. He sulked for days and bitched at everyone who came near him. In short, he made himself insufferable, the effects of which are still lurking just beneath the surface.
The Cure was announced barely seven months later and Mickey was the first in line - well, one of the first. Closer to twenty-fifth or so. But he was there, and he came home brown again. His mother wept. His dad was on a business trip.
But his mother tried, again, to reintroduce him to society now that he was "normal" again, and Mickey'd never been comfortable with that kind of world. After a few months, he moved out of the house, telling his parents he was getting an apartment in New York City. For a while, he even lived in the space he'd rented, but he felt alone - almost as though he'd lost something when he'd given up his power. He heard about Rogue's Place from his cleaning lady, whose son was a mutant and had heard about it from a friend. He decided to find it, even if it was in Mississippi (ew), and see if he could get back what he'd lost there, with others like him.
He'd barely been there for a week, schlumping around pretending to get a job, before the Cure reverted.
i21.photobucket.com/albums/b298/spamisnumba1/emoboy2-1.jpg
At about 17, the one time he ever bothered to get his hair straightened.
Name: Michael (Mickey) Tork
Codename(s): Rainbow
Affiliation: Restored Human
Age: 20
DOB: February 13
Height: 5'7
Weight: 145 lbs
Hair Color: gray (brown)
Eye Color: gray (hazel/green)
Appearance: Mickey's appearance is malleable - at least, his coloring is. Due to his powers, which are as-yet untrained, he absorbs the coloring of whoever's within three feet. If no one's that close, he fades black-and-white, like an old movie. His skin is very fair with a small splash of tiny gray freckles across his nose and under his eyes, which are a soft, ash-colored gray that was once a sort of unremarkable half-hazel, half-green mix. His hair, straight-up dyed black without influence and a dark charcoal underneath, is coarse and frizzy from attempted straightenings and used to be brown and curly, cut short in an attempt to tame it, but the curls only tightened; they're just barely starting to hedge into mop status again now.
His nose… well, his nose is unfortunate. Not really unfortunate unfortunate, but kind of. It’s just sort of… where normal noses slope inwards, his slopes outwards. It’s a Roman nose, but it just doesn’t look good on non-Gladitorial guys. It’s beaky. He’s decent-looking, even kind of cute, maybe, in a funky way, but definitely nowhere near beautiful. He wears glasses sometimes – black Emo frames, rectangular and normal.
He generally wears black. Anything other than a grayscale makes his skin even stranger. His clothing style has faded pretty Emo of late, due to his usual state of vaguely pissy depression, and he can often be found in black slimline girls' jeans with an assortment of band-based t-shirts. He's of slim to average build; his chest is only slightly broader than his waist, but he's not fully lanky, more just un-built up.
He has gages, a tongue stud, a stud through his left nostril, two eyebrow studs in his right eyebrow (one barb and one silver ball), and a labret, though they're all rarely in at the same time (except the gages, which leave huge holes and are thus in all the time). He also has several tattoos, some picked up from other people and kept on basis of coolness; the ones he got himself were (1) an ankh on his thigh and (2) "ONLY GOD WILL JUDGE ME" across his shoulders. Yes, it was because he saw it in Charlie's Angels and thought it was awesome. He picked up (3) some nicely detailed barbed wire around his left arm from a girl in a bar and a (4) tattered black butterfly tramp stamp (base of spine) from another, then (5) a small spiderweb stretching across the soft skin under the ankle of his right foot and (6) three stars on each side his lower abdomen, over where his ovaries would be if he were a girl. He picked them up from a woman who'd had them removed. He just thought they were cool. He's also got weird patches of shiny skin where he had less-cool tatts removed. If you get close enough, you can read ERIC in cover-scars across his heart, plus various other shapes in other places, mostly hearts and stars and rainbows, clovers and blue moons.
Personality: Mickey is, basically, an argumentative loser. He doesn't try in anything he doesn't like and has no bones about this. He didn't really want to go to college, he doesn't want a steady job, and he doesn't want to make something of herself. After years of his parents' pushing and his continual failure, he's cultivated a healthy thirst for disappointing his superiors, though he still has a burning need not to let anyone he actually cares for down. He's naturally suspicious of those he meets for the first time and doesn't talk much unless they really piss him off, but if you get to know him it's hard to get him to shut up. He has a fairly dry sense of humor that he'll employ with those he trusts, but it can quickly turn acidic towards anyone he doesn't know well or doesn't like. He’s kind of a pissy bitch, but you get used to him, even if he does like to whine.
Mickey also holds a strange sort of respect that can sometimes border on obsession for those that hate him. Not the people who just rather won't deal with him – they bore him. He loves talking to people who honestly hate him and will try to figure out why. He won't usually do anything to fix it; it's just entertaining.
He holds a quiet sort of disdainful dislike for anyone he sees as unworthy - most of the world, in fact, minus the very intelligent Speech Team or Chess Club types and possibly an artist or two and indie music elitists, with whom he enjoys as many arguments as he possibly can. He has a wide range of knowledge about various subjects useless outside of private schools and Jeopardy, but possesses an intrinsic cleverness which is what usually gets him through life. He loves Debate and the only sports he really enjoys are riflery and golf, as both give him the chance to test himself against himself, which he sees as his greatest foe – plus, he can’t really fight anyone else, due to the fact that unless he hits them with a three-foot pole, he’ll accept the wound. In any other class, he'll make somewhere between a B and a C, but lacks the motivation for As. He reads a LOT of philosophy. But he very, very good both at golf and shooting things, with most calibres of weapons, and has a small collection of vintage pistols and rifles at home. His favorite for general use is a Kalashnikov Vepr self-loading sniper carbine with a Starscope optical sight. He's a dead shot, and it, as he says, shoots pretty good too. He's never actually sniped anything; his dad just had a lot of land and liked taking his son down to the shooting range. It was a dude thing. He used to hunt, but gave it up as too dangerous - he doesn't know if he accepts gunshot wounds of cute little deer, too, and he can't be sure an animal's dead without taking its pulse.
He has a very low tolerance for a stubbornly closed mind, and can't stand people who make decisions on sight and won't change them. Not much will get him angry enough to blow up, but when he does it's quite a show. When Mickey blows up he starts to spout about how he's right and you're not, but he's a lot more eloquent than that - this is usually where his pointless knowledge of pointless things is employed. He's generally very convincing, but only because he'll research obsessively whatever he's going to argue about until he's dredged up every scrap of proof, not that he's naturally persuasive. He can build a case that will sound sensible to even the biggest skeptic, but it's hard for him to actually be persuasive, though he can do it when stressed. The thing Mickey always remembers is that he doesn’t actually have to be right – he just has to make you wrong. He’s an attack, not a defense, and that’s his biggest weakness, because that kind of argument can work two ways.
He takes a slightly sadistic pleasure in beating his enemies since he couldn’t most of the time, and will inform anyone he dislikes exactly how much he hates them to their faces, often in very creative and eloquent terms. Often times he'll rant for five minutes about exactly how much he hates you and exactly what he wishes would happen to you. He has a funny sort of insight that only really shows him other people's failings and insecurities. He's almost unaware of it until he gets mad, but at that point he's very aware of it.
He has begun to crave a family, and he believes strongly in the exchange of material goods as a sign of affection - at least on his part. He doesn't really need anything in return, but he loves to give to those few he cares about and even those he doesn't. For instance, if he sees you standing in front of a Coke machine without that last quarter he'll just hand it to you and walk off, even if he doesn't know you. It's not that he's terribly generous; it's just a habit. One of his traditions upon making a new friend is to take them to the closest shopping center and let them max out his mother's Gold Card, as his parents never gave him a limit and he needs to max it out every month anyway in order to keep it that way. He can live pretty cheaply by himself, but he doesn't want to be limited if he can avoid it.
He feels a strong need to be good enough for those he cares about; while his father and mother's disapproval no longer bothers him, that of his friends would torture him.
He loves ska, plus some random Frank Sinatra, some old alternative rock and even some Top 40 stuff from the forties and fifties and show tunes in general. Despite his dress sense, he doesn’t really like Emo or indie rock, except for a few random bands – Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy, Of Montreal, a couple others. No idea why; he just does. No Doubt is his favorite band of all time, and though Rock Steady was a bit of a letdown (poppy; still catchy, though) he's memorized every last one of their songs - minus the first album, which was just bad.
Mickey's fairly good at detecting the pleasant little white lies employed by higher society to pad conversation after years with his father and his buddies. That's not to say he's a human lie detector or anything; if you're any sort of experienced liar or if the lie's careful enough, he's just as gullible as the next guy. He just doesn't trust very easily and is used to being persuaded. Big lies are harder for him to detect.
He's also bisexual(ish; about a four and a half on the Kinsey scale, or 75% ghey). He's practically the posterboy for MySpace. No one was surprised or scandalized. He feels faintly ungratified about that, but, to his credit, he actually is bi, not just slutty, as so many MySpacers are. He prefers boys, generally speaking, but should the right girl come along... well, who knows? He doesn't tend to publish this fact around people he doesn't know very well, because, as he's learned, a large percentage of the population simply doesn't believe in bisexuality, and it's even less accepted than straight-up homosexuality, something that confuses him to no end.
He has a personal space thing, simply because he's terrified of picking up any more diseases than he already has. He's somehow managed to avoid any of the really lasting STDs, though he's had chlamydia more times than he can count and more gonorrhea than every girl in Delta Nu put together. He also picked up a heart murmur from someone at school, an aneurysm in his brain that he still doesn't know about, a couple benign tumors he's all had removed, some necrosis scarring in his lower intestine, and a persistent lower respiratory infection that develops into bronchitis every cold and flu season. The only thing that's truly serious (apart from the aneurysm) is chronic leukemia, which, despite its name, is less chronic than its other main form, acute leukemia. Because he's still producing relatively mature, though still abnormal, blood cells, the real effects of the disease haven't started showing up yet, though he does get the headaches and he's never really hungry.
Powers and Abilities: Mickey accepts coloring, sicknesses and a muted version of superpowers from those within a three-foot bubble. If he had practiced his ability and gained control over it, he would have been able to decide when to accept and when to reject the slight DNA signature that infiltrates his system and the wounds that come with it; as it was, he's barely learned to keep tattoos from transferring to his skin, though he's working on hair dye. He was a sort of healer - when the coloring of a person transferred to him, he'd take their wounds as well as their powers, but the wounds would actually completely move from their original owners to Mickey. He can't give them back or heal any faster than anyone else. Thankfully, he's naturally hardy. If he chooses, he can also import a person's entire lifetime's worth of memories, thoughts and feelings, but it's very dangerous: the few times Mickey has ever done it, he's always ended up unconscious, and once he went into neural shock. This is a slightly pointless ability unless someone has repressed memories/amnesia etc.
Weaknesses: He has the lungs of a forty-year-old smoker due to his own habit and the char he's picked up from people over the years. He also couldn't control his ability at all and has trouble with authority sources and most of the world in general. He's dying slowly of diseases picked up from others. He's developed quite the resistance to penicillin and even a few other antibiotics after having to be treated for hundreds of infections, especially STDs, he picked up from passing too close to others.
History: Mickey was born in a very high-class neighborhood in Copperton, Oregon, to Nathan and Allison Tork, whom he almost wishes were more boring. Although they were very normal, they were part of a very affluent neighborhood and they both came from money, which just opens the door to all kinds of dysfunction. His mother stayed at home while his father was the CEO of a large corporation with mob ties and was rarely home, though his earnings gave his wife and son everything they could ever ask. His mother had little to do, but after the trouble with Jackie, Mickey's sister, she laid off the competitive childrearing and let her son run somewhat wild at first. (Jackie killed herself while Mickey was still gestating, driven half-nuts by her mother's constant interference in her affairs and controlling personality. Jackie had become ultra-paranoid and believed, at the time of her death, that killing herself was the only way to escape from her parents, who wanted, in her mind, to kill her. Jackie believed she could escape from the funeral home and that the carbon monoxide with which she smothered herself would only stun her.)
However, Mickey's father, who needed a son to take to work functions and show off and eventually marry to one of his friends' daughters, didn't approve. He gave Ally (Mickeys’s mom was the kind who whore pink velour jogging suits and called herself things like “Ally”) strict orders on the boy's upbringing and, when she didn't obey him totally, there were often dire 'consequences'. Though Mickey never picked up on it because of its rarity, his father had a habit of beating his mother senseless when she disobeyed him. To this day, Mickey doesn't know.
Mickey was exposed to everything as a child; higher mathematics, great works of literature, art, sports, horseback riding, music - you name it, he was in lessons for it. But, no matter how hard Ally tried, her son remained mediocre; though he retained all the information, he never excelled at anything but golf and shootin' stuff. Ally was desperate. She couldn't leave Mickey like this. Nathan would kill her.
At home, Ally was a monster against her will. She drove Mickey in the absence of his father, never pausing except to deliver screamed insults where she felt they were needed. Mickey learned early that success was security and that the only way to get his mother (and father, who was much worse, at least when he was home) off his back was to win everything - but he couldn't. Mickey was mediocre in most subjects naturally, and hours of study never got him grades much past a barely-scraped 92. He was never especially talented at anything but arguing, riflery and perhaps golf (if only because it was the only thing he liked other than arguing), and this absolutely killed his mother and forced her to drive Mickey harder than ever, though Mickey's grades and morale only got steadily worse - along with Ally's carefully-hidden bruises.
At long last, Mickey got tired. He was tired of always feeling like a second-class citizen and giving his father all the glory for the only three things he could actually do. His entrance into high school marked his debut on the Debate team, and he was immediately in love with it, with argument, with doing something he actually liked and winning for once. He didn't want to give any more to his parents. Unfortunately for Mickey, his mother didn't take kindly to this and, fearing for her own survival, drove him harder.
After one too many fights with his father over joining Debate rather than football, Mickey stomped up to his room, locked the door, and abruptly noticed when he went to change (Ally had thrown her glass of wine on his shirt) that he was no longer a brunette, but a charcoalette. He ran down the stairs to the downstairs mirror over the mantel and ran into his mother, immediately turning a streaky tan color with bleached-blonde hair and shiny blue eyes.
He disappeared to his room for all of the next day, not emerging even for meals. His mother, convinced that she was just tired and had been seeing things, took a Sominex and went to bed; Mickey’s flounce-outs were not uncommon. He'd be fine in the morning.
Of course, Mickey wasn't fine.
He was homeschooled when his parents finally resigned themselves to his new state, until he legally dropped out of high school when he achieved his majority. He barely left the house except at night, when he couldn't be seen, until he was eighteen, at which point he made friends with a few of the local "bad crowd," who weren't as picky as most of society would've been about his coloring.
He briefly became involved in drug culture – he’s off pot now and was never really hardcore addicted to anything, even the coke, but he still can’t give up cigarettes, and the one time he ever tried acid still gives him nightmares. Mickey’s kind of a lightweight.
His parents found out one night when they went up to his room on his nineteenth birthday to call him down for cake and found him climbing out his window with a dime-bag in his pocket. Ally was shocked and disappointed; Nathan was incredibly dramatic about the whole thing and, later, vicious; Mickey needed killing. He sulked for days and bitched at everyone who came near him. In short, he made himself insufferable, the effects of which are still lurking just beneath the surface.
The Cure was announced barely seven months later and Mickey was the first in line - well, one of the first. Closer to twenty-fifth or so. But he was there, and he came home brown again. His mother wept. His dad was on a business trip.
But his mother tried, again, to reintroduce him to society now that he was "normal" again, and Mickey'd never been comfortable with that kind of world. After a few months, he moved out of the house, telling his parents he was getting an apartment in New York City. For a while, he even lived in the space he'd rented, but he felt alone - almost as though he'd lost something when he'd given up his power. He heard about Rogue's Place from his cleaning lady, whose son was a mutant and had heard about it from a friend. He decided to find it, even if it was in Mississippi (ew), and see if he could get back what he'd lost there, with others like him.
He'd barely been there for a week, schlumping around pretending to get a job, before the Cure reverted.
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At about 17, the one time he ever bothered to get his hair straightened.
