Ankh
(Aaron Davidson Monroe)
PL 10 (146 pp)
Abilities: Str 12, Dex 12, Con 16, Int 10, Wis 16, Cha 10 [16 pp]
Attack: Melee +5 Ranged +5 [10 pp]
Defense: +5 [10 pp]
Initiative: +1
Damage: +1 melee, +5 Blast
Saves: Toughness +3 / +15 (6 Impervious) with Force Field
active, Fort +6, Ref +1, Will +10 [10 pp]
Skills: Climb 0 (+1), Computers 2 (+2), Concentration
8 (+11), Craft (structural) 11 (+11), Craft (artistic) 8 (+8), Disable Device
4 (+4), Drive 2 (+3), Escape Artist 0 (+1), Investigate 2 (+2), Knowledge
(art) 2 (+2), Knowledge (physical sciences) 2 (+2), Knowledge (technology)
2 (+2), Language (English, native), Language (Spanish), Notice 8 (+11), Pilot
2 (+3), Search 2 (+2), Sense Motive 0 (+0), Stealth 0 (+1), Survival 0 (+3),
Swim 0 (+1)
[14 pp, 56 ranks in skills]
Feats: Eidetic Memory, Favored Opponent 5 (constructs),
Improved Sunder, Improved Throw, Improvised Tools, Inventor, Quick Change
1
[11 pp]
Powers:
Telekinesis
10 (Extra: Area (shapeable), Power Feats: Indirect, Precise, Selective,
Alternate
Power 1 - Blast 5 (Extra: Linked to Trip, Power Feat: Indirect) *and*
Trip 5 (Extras: Linked to Blast, Knockback,
Power Feat: Indirect),
Alternate Power 2 - Snare 10 (Extra: Area (shapeable),
Power Feats: Indirect, Selective, Progression 1 (area, 20 5’ cubes total)),
Alternate Power 3 – Animate Objects 10 (Power
Feats: Precise, Progression 2 (up to five Animations at once),
Alternate Power 4 – Transformation 7 (any inanimate
matter to other inanimate matter of similar mass, a metal door to a pile of
dust, a destroyed car to a repaired car, etc, Extra: Continuous, Flaw: Touch,
Power Feat: Progression 5 (5,000 lbs total mass))
Force Field
12 (Partial Extra: Impervious 6, Flaw: Ablative, Power Feat: Selective,
Alternate
Power – Force Field 12 (Extra: Affects Others, Partial Extra: Impervious
6, Flaws: Ablative, Duration Concentration, Power Feat: Selective, Extended
Range 1 (can protect all within 5’ of self))
Healing 1,
Telepathy
2,
Communication
2 (speak to and understand objects),
Super-Senses
13 (Tremorsense, X-ray Vision (not through living tissue), Detect
(hardness / toughness), Acute (Detect Hardness, allows him to determine the
exact Hardness / Toughness rating of solids around him), Detect (mass), Acute
(Detect Mass, allows him to determine the exact weight of things around him),
Direction Sense, Distance Sense)
Speed 4
(100 MPH, surfing on rippling waves of solid matter, his feet don’t
actually move, he just stands still and lets the ground carry him to wear
he wants to go, Power Feat:
Alternate Power – Speed 3 (50 MPH, Partial Extra: Area 1 (allows him to bring anyone within 5’ of him along for the ride, at reduced speed),
Alternate
Power – Flight 2 (25 MPH))
[76 pp]
Drawback: Autistic (unable to use any Cha-based skills
at default) (-1)
Her child was born two months premature, with pronounced
signs of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and Shirley couldn’t bear the blame that
she felt was being assigned to her from David and the hospital staff, bundling
herself up and hopping a bus out of the city, trying to leave behind everything
that had gone wrong and hoping to start fresh somewhere else, in denial about
the fact that she could never escape the one person responsible for her life’s
troubles…
David, working construction at the time, and on unemployment
during the winter months (which netted him more money than he would make actually
working at a fast food joint), was left with a sickly and retarded son, and
enough hospital debt to beggar a much richer man. He nearly gave in to despair
as well, but parishioners from his church took up a collection for him and
managed to make a dent in his medical expenses, and, more importantly, came
through for him on other fronts as well, with one taking him into his home
for a time (as he could no longer afford even a meager apartment) and a middle-aged
Hispanic woman named Marie devoting significant time to helping him with his
son, watching him during the day, and putting him up in one of the rooms formerly
used by her six now-grown children. Life began to turn around for David, and
within five years, he had managed to land a union job at the local post office
distribution center, and now rented out a room from Marie (who housed his
son full-time, and ended up making some extra money from three of David's
new co-workers, becoming an unofficial ‘daycare’ of sorts). It took him years
to slog his way out of debt, and he watched with sad eyes his retarded son
sit listlessly in front of the television head bobbing along to some inaudible
rhythm.
It was Marie who first put building blocks into the boy’s
hands, and witnessed what she could only describe as a miracle. He picked
one up, turned it over and over and frowned. He then placed it down and started
placing blocks at amazing speed, almost as fast as his hands could move, face
scrunched up and squinting in concentration, until a small medieval fortress
stood in front of him, the exact replica of a gargoyle-infested castle that
Marie had seen for a moment in a cartoon he’d watched that morning. She rummaged
through the books that her eldest daughter had collected, as she had loved
to read through travelogues and dream that she lived in far away places, and
the toys of her other children, digging out everything that could possibly
be used to built things, legos, linkin
logs, erector sets, girders and panels, whatever. Dropping them off, she turned
to a tour guide of
When David returned home, Marie’s living room was a miniature
city of buildings, with Marie waiting up to relate the tale. For the first
time in years, David felt his heart swell with hope and he woke Aaron up just
to hug him, tears streaming down his face at the realization that there was
something going on behind those dark eyes.
From that point on, David devoted his days off, and not
a few ‘sick days’ and vacation days, to running around the city talking to
experts and chasing down government programs and hitting up church groups
and co-workers for anything he could find that would give his son an advantage
in dealing with his handicaps. Special tutors and developmental specialists
were consulted, reading glasses were prescribed to eradicate his squint and
a bewildering array of new faces came into and out of Aaron’s life, interfering
with the time he would spend now working with blocks and legos.
His father took up a new collection at church, asking the parishioners if
any of them had any such toys that their own children weren’t using any longer,
and ended up carting home a half-dozen boxes of various building block toys.
Hesitant to dismantle his works, Marie set one of the ‘spare rooms’ aside
for him to play during the day, and it quickly became a bizarre shrine to
his creations, with every available surface graced with some architectural
reproduction.
At the age of eleven, while his father was trying to
get a shirt on him while he was single-mindedly trying to construct something,
he uttered his first words, softly, as if to himself; “I need more red blocks.”
David called in sick that day and drove around town depleting local toy stores
of red blocks, taking his son’s face in his hands and telling him forcefully,
“If you ask me for something. I’ll get it for you.”
From that point onwards, it seemed that Aaron’s mental
development hit a wall, and despite being able to form simple sentences, he
still couldn’t deal with multiple people talking to him at the same time (he
would look down, knot his hands in his lap and start rocking back and forth
when stressed) and didn’t seem like he would ever be able to really interact
with people. Still, David refused to give up, and would take him around the
city on his days off to walk in the park, or look at various buildings. It
was during one such outing, in the late afternoon, that they drove past
Dozens of people were filing out the doors, at the ends
of their workday, and the small boy dodged through them effortlessly, drawn
by some call only he could hear, reaching an elevator and stepping into it
just before the doors closed, leaving his father behind him shouting his name,
still pushing his way through the leaving office workers. He looked up at
the buttons on the elevator, and pushed the only ones that mattered in the
sequence they seemed obviously meant to be pushed in, descending into the
secret spaces beneath
David was talking with men from security, who were baffled
that the boy had somehow entered the elevator and then just vanished (as their
cameras didn’t cover the secret areas below the building). Sophia Cruz, on
her way home, was called back, and unlike her security staff, realized that
the boy must have found his way into a place where he didn’t belong. She sent
her men to search the building, room by room, for the missing child, and assigned
a few remaining staff to stay with David in the lobby, while she personally
stepped into a library and entered the private code to access the lower levels,
a code which only she knew.
She stepped into the Scarab’s lair to find Aaron standing
surrounded by Egyptian artifacts, bathed in a soft glow from the treasures
of gold around him. He turned as she entered and she called for him to come
with her, and he turned and took her hand, but the glow reflected off of the
reflected golden artifacts remained in his eyes for a few moments after he
had turned away, and she privately swears that the light in the room dimmed
when he left… After reuniting father and son (explaining to her baffled security
men that she had lucked out and found him on the way to her office in a hallway),
Sophia attempted to offer the resources of the Rhodes Foundation to help with
Aaron’s ‘special needs,’ but David was too ragged and stressed out by that
point to want anything more to do with these people. Sophia graciously had
them escorted out, and apologized for the frightful time they’d had in their
visit to the Plaza, and then went back to her office and used her connections
to the various charitable organizations that were working with Aaron’s case
to step up direct work with this special child, behind David’s back.
Aaron is now seventeen years old, and while fetal alcohol
syndrome has left him shorter than some boys his age, only five foot, five
inches (his father is just over six foot, and presumably he would have been
as well), his body is lean and well-muscled, despite never actually exercising,
primarily a side-effect of the constant state of tension he lives in, being
unable to really relax in a world that is a source of constant stress. His
father keeps his head shaved, initially as a convenience (he would be forever
getting things in his hair, or even start tugging on it and end up hurting
himself), but over the years enjoying sitting down with his son and spending
this time tending to him. His skin is quite dark, with both his mother and
father being of undiluted african-american ancestry,
and his eyes are large and brown. He is usually dressed in sneakers, jeans
and a T-shirt, wearing inexpensive glasses, but when he is threatened, his
clothing mystically transforms into an Egyptian-style headdress, loincloth,
sandals and golden jewelry (pectoral covering his neck and upper chest, arm
bands and bracers). In his left hand, a measuring rod appears, and in his
right, an ankh, but neither does anything, and he tends to tuck them away
in his sash (although either can be used as a makeshift club, and they appear
to be made of some indestructible form of gold, but vanish if they leave his
person). Because of his ancient Egyptian-style outfit, and the nature of his
powers, the press nicknamed him ‘Met Jr.’ assuming him to be somehow related
to Doctor Metropolis. When asked his code-name by his new team-mates, he just
held up his ankh, and that’s what they call him, Ankh.
He has learned to speak, but rarely does, and even less
since his mental gifts have awakened. His true gift is telekinetic manipulation
of matter, and when he feels threatened, it seems as if the very city leaps
to his defense, with loose items flying about him to shield him from harm,
and flinging themselves at things that frighten him. His intelligence has
grown, but he lacks any sort of social skills, and isn’t able to communicate
effectively, making his actions inexplicable to his new ‘friends’ in Young
Freedom. He is far more prone to just acting on the information his special
senses impart, seeing things beyond walls, or detecting weak points in surrounding
structures.
When faced with combat, he erects his force field as
a Free Action, which manifests as a swirling barrier of trash and loose items,
all marked with glowing golden hieroglyphic scripts. (Even in an area with
no such loose material, stuff just appears and interposes itself between himself
and danger, degrading away as it is damaged.) Depending on the situation,
he might start with an area effect Snare effect, or use his transformation
power to ‘build’ a humanoid construct that he will Animate
on the following round. (If cars, etc. are already available, he might skip
that part and just Animate them as they are, to drive
into people.) He will protect civilians with his Affects Others Force Field
if necessary, and uses his Blast / Trip attack to throw foes off-balance if
they get too close, rising into the air to stay out of hand to hand reach
if threatened by land-bound attackers. Items that he lifts telekinetically,
or animates, including the items that seem to appear and disappear as the
special effect of his Blast attack, are similarly marked with glowing hieroglyphic
patterns, and similar glowing patterns form in the air around his hands when
he uses many of his matter-manipulating talents. He tends to use his abilities
in a blunt force manner and doesn't always react well in a confusing situation,
and has to be reminded sometimes to fly out of reach of a ground-bound threat,
or heal an injury, which frustrates him and often results in a surly "I'm
not stupid!" comment...