PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Ed
CONTACT: erossati or PM
HOW YOU FOUND US: I was born in the cbox and Riva is my mommy.
OTHER CHARACTERS ON THE SITE: Strong Guy, Blob (minor), Multiple Man, Mastermind, Rusty Collins
RULES CODE: Blackbird
CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE: (Links to sites you may have used to compose this bio)
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Jakob Dylan
BASIC INFORMATIONCANON OR ORIGINAL: Original
AFFILIATION: Morlocks
FULL NAME: Nicholas Tyler Sloan
CODENAME: Roadkill
NICKNAMES: Nick, Roadkill
CURRENT AGE: 26
DATE OF BIRTH: February 11, 1986
MARITAL STATUS: Single
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Heterosexual
BASE OF OPERATIONS: Morlock Alley
TIME AT INSTITUTE: [if applicable] A few months during Apocalypse when the Morlocks stayed there.
REGISTERED WITH SHIELD? No
HOMETOWN: New Orleans, LA
KNOWN RELATIVES:David Sloan (father)
Rebecca Sloan (younger sister)
PHYSICAL APPEARANCEHEIGHT: 5’10”
BUILD: Medium build-a little on the slender side
EYES: Completely Black
HAIR: Black
DISTINGUISHING MARKS: Nick has ears that are slightly larger and slightly more rounded. His eyes are deep black, and usually are hidden behind dark sunglasses (even in the depths of the shadowy Alley). The tips of his fingers have long and pointy black claws…but perhaps it’s his tail that is the hardest to disguise. Protruding off of his backside is a possum tail, a little more than three feet long and prehensile. With the assistance of hats, gloves, dark sunglasses and long coats, Nick is able to blend in fairly easily. Warm weather makes that a little more difficult to pull off.
CLOTHING STYLE: Nick generally wears casual dress, and isn’t overly concerned with appearances. For the most part he wears what is comfortable and practical. Jeans, T-shirts, loose fitting clothing. Maybe a flannel shirt or whatever he can ‘acquire’ on his visits topside.
UNIFORM: N/A
POWERSGENERAL DESCRIPTION:Enhanced Senses-It’s not too uncommon for a person who loses one of their senses to discover that the other senses have all become just a little
heightened as a result. Nick Sloan was born with macular degeneration, and it was at a very early age that he started to lose his eyesight little by little. By the time he was ten he was completely blind, and he had to learn how to interact with a world without the use of his eyes. When Nick’s powers manifested, they compensated for his body’s natural weakness, enhancing his other senses beyond what is natural for a human being.
Touch: This is Nick’s primary power, and by far the most potent one. Simply put, Nick’s skin is superhumanly sensitive. In many ways his sense of touch is like a very
powerful antenna. What might normally be thought of as insignificant things like small changes in temperature, barometric changes, sound waves or even light intensity changes actually give Nick a very clear and amazingly
vivid picture of what is going on in his environment as they wash over his body. This kind of ‘seeing’ is in many ways better (and truer) than someone who views the world simply through their eyes.
It works very similarly to echo-location, only with a much broader application. Example: if someone entered the room stealthily and reached into their vest to silently draw a gun to aim it at the back of his head, Nick would have long since known they were there. When they entered the room the slight gust of wind would have tipped him off. Then he could probably have ‘felt’ the heat radiating off of the individual and felt the sound waves as the perpetrator’s tendons and muscles moved. The stretching of tendons as the finger slid over the cool metal of the trigger would have been felt, and lastly as the tinny metal sounds of the gun ratcheting were felt, Nick would have had a few seconds to get out of the way before being shot.
The sharp sense of touch provides a few extra advantages as well. For one thing it gives Nick a heightened sense of balance and agility. He’s able to sense the balance of objects and with the assistance of his tail is able to climb, perch and balance very easily. It also gives him a pretty ‘nimble’ appearance in general.
Additionally, Nick can actually read printed text simply by running his fingers over it. This comes in handy since he has been blind most of his life.
Hearing: Nick’s ears have been physiologically altered. They are large, roundish, and cupped. This is part of what enables him to detect sounds that are at a greater distance, a smaller decibel and a broader range of frequency than an average human would be able to. Although his hearing is not on par with someone like Wolverine, he uses this only in conjunction with his sense of touch.
Smelling: This is not a dominant sense by any means, but Nick is able to pick up scents much better than an average human. Through this and pattern recognition he is somewhat good at tracking and picking up information from clues left behind that have any kind of particular scent.
Physiological Changes:When Nick’s powers manifested they imprinted themselves on the only living creature nearby. A small arboreal marsupial was rummaging through his bag while he slept on a park bench at night. When he woke up he had some pretty significant physiological changes that had taken place. (see history for full details)
Eyes: Nick’s eyes are pitch black orbs. He cannot see out of them at all, and for the sake of not freaking everyone out while topside he usually hides them behind a pair of black sunglasses.
Ears: Like a possum, Nick has large slightly rounded ears. They have many muscles in them and he is able to turn them sideways, flatten them like a cat, or rotate one at a time in either direction. These ears pick up a range of sounds unavailable to human ears and help him hear smaller sounds at a greater range.
Tail: Protruding from the Nick’s tailbone is a long, slender possum tail. This tail is prehensile and very strong. He can use it to grasp objects, help him climb and hang upside down with. He can also use it as a whip, causing welts and pain, but not really doing much significant damage. His tail also grants him even better balance, and increases his overall level of dexterity.
Claws: The nails on Nick’s fingers and toes are lengthened and fairly strong. They have proven to be fairly useful in a fight, but also help him in climbing. For the most part, Nick is able to scale most surfaces unless they are too slick. Working in combination with his sense of touch, Nick is able to find tiny finger holds and utilize them with his claws in order to scale up the side of brick walls, trees or any other textured surface very quickly.
Other: Though Nick is not considered super strong by means of comparison to other strength enhanced mutants, his muscular structure is far denser and he is by comparison to average humans much stronger. This helps primarily with his climbing, though it is useful in a fight as well. In addition, it lends to him having fairly quick reflexes.
WEAKNESS: Nick has been completely blind in both eyes since a very early age. Though his other senses more than compensate for his loss of sight, it is still a definite disadvantage to not be able to use his eyes.
On top of that, it is pretty easy to overwhelm Nick’s senses. Too much information directed at his sense of touch will over stimulate him, and too intense of any one kind of information tends to be painful. Nick has actually built up a high tolerance for pain to some degree since that particular power is constantly under siege by varying degrees of stimulation. Still, too much temperature change, sound barrage, or any other kind of stimulus will definitely cause him pain.
Another note on Nick’s weakness is his physical mutation. While it does offer him some unique benefits, he also has to ‘hide’ while in public-outside of Mutant Town. Sometimes this can be done by simply wearing hats and hiding his tail in his clothing, but sometimes that just isn’t either practical or possible.
Playing Possum: This could technically be either a weakness or strength, but I'm putting it in the weakness section for a reason. Under extreme situations of duress or if Nick is horribly frightened or threatened he has something of an automatic reflex that takes place. Much like a possum will collapse into a 'dead' state, Nick will fall to the ground immobile. His body goes into a kind of stasis when this happens and he even secretes a kind of odor that smells like death to those who have super senses. Checking vital signs and breathing will only confirm that by all appearances he's passed on. After an unspecified amount of time his vitals resume, he slips back out of the hibernation state and he wakes up.
The downside here is that Nick really doesn't have a lot of control over this. He can't make himself do it, and really has almost no control on whether or not it happens at all. The only thing he can do is try to keep his perspective. If his thoughts and emotions are cool, he doesn't do the whole hibernation/death thing.
PERSONALITYNick has a fairly laid back way of looking at life. Part of this is by design, and part of this is simply the way he is wired. He isn’t overly
reactive, especially to stress. He is often the calming voice, offering up rational solutions in place of knee-jerk reactions. Before he ran away from home at a fairly early age, his father always told him that it was better sometimes to do nothin’ than just to do anythin’. He might not have taken much from his old man, but that little jewel served him well over the years. He preferred to figure out what was the
right thing to do and to do that above anything else.
But not everything Nick picked up from his rough childhood was good. In fact, most of it was pretty debilitating. Nick has a
real hard time trusting people. Outside of the tight-knit Morlock family in fact, he honestly doesn’t trust anyone. For that reason he treats every non-Morlock with suspicion and veiled contempt. He might not be hostile or aggressive in any certain manner, but he also won’t be forthcoming or friendly.
For the most part Nick prefers to just keep to himself, that is unless he is looking out for some of the younger (and more impulsive) Morlocks. With regard to them, he does his best to sort of ‘bring them up’, and keep them out of trouble…which is not as easy as it sounds. Callisto has a certain way of looking out for them, and his devotion to her is unquestionable. They have always had a casual sort of friendship, and he trusts her judgments implicitly. For the most part he suspects she feels the same.
But despite the low-key and laid back attitude that Nick typically sports, there is something about him that is almost frightening in its ferocity. Like a cornered animal he has been known to almost go ‘feral’ if he feels that he or his Morlock family is in danger. When this happens he almost has a deadly
rage that clouds his mind, and he’s been known on more than one occasion to do some pretty significant damage when in that state of mind.
In all reality this is partially due to his feral state, but made even worse by the way he was mistreated as a child. To make a long story short, Nick is devoted to very few. Being an artist of sorts, he comes off as mellow. But ultimately beneath that misleading veneer is a steely and inflexible core.
As far as ‘morality’ is concerned, his views are a little muddy. Living on the streets of New Orleans for years he became pretty accustomed to stealing and conning people out of money. In The Big Easy, it was pretty much an expected way of life. In New York, he continues that lifestyle, playing guitar for money at times, and hustling, jiving and stealing for whatever else he ‘needs’. He’s a very adept pick-pocket, and after all, nobody honestly suspects the meek and mild blind musician of any sort of misdeed.
HISTORY: PRE-APOCALYPSE Nick was born in Biloxi, Mississippi into a very poor family. He grew up in what was considered a fairly big city in what was essentially a very ‘podunk’ area. If he had stayed in Biloxi he would have attended a fairly good sized high school. As for his parents, they were too busy making ends meet to really pay too much attention to him. When they did, it was usually to tell him what was wrong, and usually was accompanied by a backhand to the face. Due to all of this, Nick grew up with a morose streak a mile wide and gaining.
His eyes worked fine in the early years of his life. It wasn’t until he was around 8 years old that he heard the doctor telling his parents that the reason he was starting to see things sort of blurry was because of something called ‘macular degeneration’. Whatever the case was, it quickly took its toll on him. Within a few years he was completely blind, and having to learn how to do things all over again. This strained things even further at the Sloan household.
Friends were few, but one was all Nick really needed. He grew up with a friend who shared his love of music and the two of them started playing guitar together at the young age of 12. For Nick it was a passion beyond passion. Some of the older folk in the outskirts of the city would sit on the porch at night with their guitar. Though Nick couldn’t see them, or possibly because of it, he’d sit close by and just listen. When you don’t rely on your eyes your body and hearing really tune in, and it was listening to those soulful cries of the blues that Nick really started to hear things. It carried over into his daily life and Nick began to perceive the world differently. Part of this was because music speaks a little differently to people who don’t have use of their eyes.
Around that time his powers started to kick in. It didn’t happen all at once. In the beginning it was subtle, and Nick began to really start to
feel different. Sounds and feelings began to deepen for him, and he really started to get a feeling for his surrounding world through them. When it became too much to bear, he hit the road with his friend. At the age of fifteen, the two of them headed to the only place where they thought they could make a living doing what they loved: The Big Easy. New Orleans lived up to its name, and during the peak seasons, Nick and Lou would sit wherever they could make do without getting kicked out by the regulars and crank out some serious blues.
Nick was really starting to feel the music by this time as his powers began to amplify. Sounds and other sensations made him feel unlike anything he had ever even imagined. It lent a depth to his music that was almost otherworldly, and he started to draw a following in a staggeringly short period of time. To some of his fans they said it was like being turned inside out.
Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any better, they got decidedly worse. One night while Nick was sleeping on a bench in the park by the river, his powers
really manifested. Whereas previously it had been like power trickling slowly from a charged battery, all of the sudden it was as if the gates were opened and
true power started rushing in with powerful surges. In the onset his powers lashed out and imprinted themselves on the only sizeable living creature in the area, a possum that was helping itself to a granola bar at Nick’s feet.
Copying the possum’s traits, they signed them into Nick’s power, and he immediately began to physically transform. His ears elongated and sprouted out of his kinky curls, his eyeballs turned pitch black, his nails grew long and toughened, and a long tail sprouted out of his back side. It was agony for Nick and he woke up writhing on the ground while people nearby watched without so much as asking if he needed help.
When he finally stood up they saw his tail and ears and screamed, running away from him. The
sounds of the screams crashing against his hyper-sensitized flesh caused tremendous amounts of physical agony, and soon enough Nick collapsed to the ground into unconsciousness. When he woke up he was in a dimly lit house that he didn’t recognize. Another mutant had found him and taken him back to his small house just outside of the French Quarters.
The mutant who found him was something of a precog, and spent the majority of their days in the Square, primarily divining the future for tourists. In a vision, the precog had witnessed Nick’s manifestation, and had been there to help him back to the house immediately.
Unfortunately for Nick this wasn’t a long term relationship of any kind, but more of a stay here until you can handle the pain and then hit the road. The host was kind enough, but refused to even give Nick his first name.
After that Nick was more or less ostracized from New Orleans. Too many people knew
what he was now, and even his childhood friend Lou seemed a little weirded out by the whole thing. Reluctantly, they went their separate ways, and Nick took to traveling the countryside however he could manage. Providence took him as far north as New York and he’s been there ever since. It has been more than ten years since that fateful day in New Orleans. Nick has tried to make the most of life in the big city, though it’s decidedly more difficult in New York than it was in New Orleans.
But he did what he needed to survive. He played his guitar on the streets of Mutant Town at night, and made up for the rest of what he needed to survive by running a small-time pickpocket racket. It was during this period of time that he met a woman named Callisto. She reminded him a lot of some of the ‘gutter punks’ that lived in New Orleans by the way she spoke. There was something about her crass directness that made him smile, and whenever she would stop by when he was out on the street he took the time to talk with her until she moved on.
This way of life went on for a while, until one day Nick made a mistake and picked the wrong pocket. He was slipping an expensive wallet out of a pocket as he had done a thousand times before when a strong hand clamped down hard on his wrist. He tried to get away, but the man’s ‘bodyguards’ had him firmly pinned up against a wall before he had a chance.
And then the beatings began.
Nick was unsure of how many hits he took, but his hat had fallen off (exposing his ears) and when the thugs got a look at his black eyes it seemed pretty evident that they intended on killing him and being done with it. Consciousness started to fade for him when he heard the heavy sound of bodies hitting the floor. What he ‘saw’ as the sound waves reverberated off of the walls and bounced off of his skin was a figure standing in front of him. The last thing he remembered saying before collapsing was ‘Callisto’.
The road to recovery was a little slow for Nick. In the attack he suffered several broken ribs, two broken fingers and had lost a pretty significant amount of blood. Callisto had taken care of him, and when he came to he was first made aware of an underground world that he didn’t even know existed. It broke his heart to hear that his guitar had been destroyed in the attack, but as he got stronger he determined that he would stay with Callisto and do everything he could to be there for her. As more and more of the lost and abandoned mutants began to join the ranks, Nick found a new purpose outside of music that compelled him.
For the first time in his life he started to really understand what
family meant.
DURING APOCALYPSE (April 7th through April 12th, 2009) The barrage of attacks on New York hit Nick especially hard. Even beneath the ground the tremors and sound waves crashed against his skin with a ferocity that left him somewhat paralyzed in pain. After so much of it, he somehow reached a new threshold and was able to find the strength to follow a bulk of the Morlocks to a temporary refuge at a school called Xavier’s Institute. Though he wanted to assist in getting some of the stragglers to a different temporary boarding house, unfortunately his overloaded senses rendered him nearly useless.
Despite the fact that he had so much genetically in common with the residents at Xavier’s, he felt isolated, judged and scorned. Whatever the X-Men were, and whatever their motive for helping the Morlocks, Nick didn’t trust it, at all.
As soon as they were able, Nick and the others left the X-Men, and headed back to a slightly ravaged version of the city home they had left behind.
POST-APOCALYPSE The world the Morlocks returned to was very much changed from the one they had left. Not only was the city in shambles in the aftermath of the attacks, but there was a renewed tension in the air with regard to humanity versus mutantkind. Now more than ever, the Morlocks felt compelled to stay hidden beneath the streets of the city. It seemed even more important than before that they keep a low profile and try not to attract any unwanted attention.
This was easier said than done. Some of the people in the group didn’t seem to understand it, and though Nick could have easily written some of that off to the foolishness of youth, it was something they couldn’t tolerate. One wrong step could wind up killing them all, and so he did his best to keep an eye on the younger bunch.
During his stay at Xavier’s Nick became even closer friends with a fellow Morlock named Ink. Though they came from vastly different backgrounds the two of them became pretty close friends, bonding over a variety of things. Later, when Marrow brought Ink along to join the group, this bond included the fact that they were among the minority of males in an estrogen dominant Morlock family. Out of necessity they formed a pact to help each other out when feminine hormones routinely threatened to rain down death and destruction in the tunnels. Ink had come along quite a bit later, and Nick had a strong suspicion that he was sort of hanging around only until something else came along. But he didn’t let that get to him too much.
And for a time that did not feel nearly long enough things went back to a sense of ‘normalcy’. The subterranean group settled into routines and life went on in the best way that it could. During this period of time, Ink and Nick made a special topside visit one night and procured a replacement guitar. Nick had not played music in years, and as the soul-wrenching sounds washed over him again, echoing off of the tunnel walls, it actually brought tears to his eyes.
Unfortunately it wasn’t too long before trouble found its way to the tunnels again. Callisto had returned from Chicago in what felt very much like a panic to Nick. They were more or less ordered on lock-down and began preparing for some kind of hyper-religious attack from some zealots who called themselves the Purifiers. The Purifiers had one goal-to purify the gene pool by eliminating the impurity of the mutant gene.
At least that was how Nick saw it.
Eventually the Purifier troops infiltrated the tunnels, led by someone named Mr. Clean. Nick helped in the defense, finding out just how dexterous and agile he really was as he leapt from the walls to the ceiling, lashing out with claws and snapping guns out of hands with his tail. It was a group effort, and one that unfortunately led to the death of one too many Morlocks that he’d come to appreciate, but in the end the troops were dead and Callisto had finished off Mr. Clean Morlock style.
And once again Nick set about to help pick up the pieces. The more this kind of thing happened, the more he was convinced that the Morlocks could not be put down. No matter what, they would always bounce back.
SAMPLE RP POST:It was always safest to come out in the evening.
Roadkill had discovered a certain part of the town that he found almost always quiet. Heading down the tunnels, he came to the main drainpipes and lit a cigarette as he slowly walked. He was down to his last few smokes, and had hit a brick wall with everyone that he usually bummed cigs off of. Someone had to go topside for a few essentials.
Looked like it was his turn.
At the end of the road he stopped, his ears twitching beneath the wide brimmed hat as he heard something going down up top. He didn’t need to concentrate to feel the footfalls on the pavement overhead echoing down on him like raindrops, and he didn’t need to close his eyes to focus. Sound hit his body and it painted a vivid picture for him of what was happening topside.
There were several individuals; one of them was pacing back and forth nervously, while two others seemed engaged in some sort of business transaction.
Drug deal. He waited it out while finishing his cigarette. Sensing it was going to be a little while, Nick clenched the cigarette in pursed lips and leaped up to the ceiling of the tunnel. He used strong hands to climb silently along pipelines until he found a spot to perch that was conveniently situated right next to the exit. Repositioning himself, Nick pocketed his hat, coiled his strong tail around the pipe, and let himself hang upside down for the remainder of his smoke.
Something was wrong with the deal. He couldn’t say
how he knew it exactly, but when he heard the sharp sounds of objecting voices and
felt metal ratcheting in such a way that only a firearm could produce, Nick knew that someone was about to breathe their last. He flicked his cigarette down, hearing it hiss in a puddle of liquid below just about the time that the sharp report of the gun blasts railed against his flesh like bits of molten shrapnel.
He ‘saw’ the man on top collapsing onto his side in a very unnatural position. The heavy sound of footfalls showed him which way the others had went and Rusty contorted his body, swinging up and exploding out of the manhole violently. The heavy iron cover bounced off of the sidewalk as Nick landed low to the ground with his tail sticking straight up in the air.
Instinctively he sniffed the air, smelling the acrid gun smoke and his ears twitched in search of anyone else who might be in the area. Though he couldn’t see the body, he knew right where it was, and with motions that weren’t altogether human, Nick made his way over to the thug remains. He tried the pockets, finding a few bills. Running his fingertips over the ink in the corner of the bills he was happy to find that they were hundred dollar increments.
“Looks like shopping is on me tonight,” he said to the immobile body as he slid the bills in his shirt pocket. With the sound of scuffing feet on the concrete behind him, Nick made a quick getaway. Bounding up to a brick wall, he used his claws to dig in to the mortar and pulled himself up quickly up and over the side of the building before anyone could see him.
Help
Search
Members
Calendar
