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May. 8th, 2014 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spideyfanone|| Player Information ||
Name: Siobhan
Personal Journal: [Bad username or unknown identity: ”fiercebadrabbit”]
Time zone: US Central
Contact: israfel1030@gmail.com, AIM: blitztsunami, plurk: fiercebadrabbit
Current Characters: None
|| Character Information ||
Fandom: Marvel
Name: Kurt Waggoner
Canon Point: X-Treme X-men Volume 2 #13 He’ll come in right after his death, during the X-termination showdown with a bunch of extradimensional horrors, opposed by X-teams from multiple realities and jumping between universes. Which the various X-men were ultimately successful, Kurt died in the process of trapping one of the monsters in a single universe so it could be sealed away from the others.
History: Life in the United States of California was idyllic to say the least. Limitless green energy, sophisticated health care, full civil rights for mutants, and a veritable army of robot servants were among the many advantages. It was something Kurt often tried to remind himself, because even a perfect world was still beset by the foibles of human nature. A small, awkward child was a target with or without a surrounding Utopia, and with the obvious physical mutation and his intelligence setting him apart all the more, life could be a bit on the miserable side.
Adopted as a baby by devoted parents who’d already waited a long time for a child of their own, Kurt grew up a bit spoiled and encouraged in all his passions, regardless of what the world thought. His parents were on the team that brought sophisticated, mass-produced robots to the world, and he followed in their footsteps, leaping gleefully through the sciences and building little bots for his own amusement during his recesses. He didn’t generally get along with other children, so he retreated further into himself and his toys, so he repelled his peers further, and the cycle went on.
When Kurt was twelve, the world toppled. The robots rebelled and rose up to destroy humanity. Kurt was rescued by his parents’ knowledge of the technology that had just turned against them and his own mutation. Their part was to secret him away and sedate him with a serum that not only kept him from trying to engage and save them, but blocked him out of the machines’ sensors. His part was to blend into the shadows, protected from more mundane scans by his coloring. By the time he woke up, every other human on the planet was gone.
Panicked, the boy triggered his powers for the first time and teleported in a terrified haze.This use of active mutant power attracted attention, but not from the robots that had already concluded their takeover of his planet. In another part of the multiverse, a world was dying, and its ruler had constructed a machine to hold the planet together, using mutant abilities as fuel. This ruler, known as Savior, was an alternate of the powerful psychic Charles Xavier, but in this world he had used his power ruthlessly, forgetting goodness in the quest for safety. He hadn’t shrunk from abducting alternates of himself to direct his efforts, but most of the targets were powerful beam slingers. Kurt was captured and became their newest battery. He was trapped inside one of the machine’s capsules for years, though he didn’t precisely experience all that time. Dimension-hopping made time a little wobbly.
While Kurt was imprisoned, he was watched over and kept at least functionally sane by his nearest neighbor in the complex, James Howlett, a man who seemed perfectly formed to be everyone’s perfect gruff, affectionate uncle, and who came from a world so different from Kurt’s own that his stories were an endless source of fascination. Also near enough to talk to was Emmaline Frost-Summers, who was less pleasant, but possessed of psychic abilities that let them plot to a limited extent over metal wavelengths. The situation seemed hopeless, but they hadn’t quite given up.
The arrival of new prisoners was always interesting, but generally horrible, in the end, as the machines burned them out. Howlett’s healing factor kept him up, and Kurt and Emma’s power was drained slowly, but most mutants succombed fast and messy. This, however, was Cyclops, an incredible power source who was also a determined hero in all his multiversal incarnations. When he freed himself, he brought Kurt and his friends along. They broke into a storeroom full of stolen relics from other captured mutants and found weapons and defenses enough to challenge the monster who kept his own world alive by snatching heroes from a thousand universes and sacrificing them. They toppled the regime for whom the ends justified the means, and Cyclops returned to his home universe while the others remained to find a better way to save the damaged earth.
They succeeded, using Kurt’s teleportation power and knowledge of interdimensional physics, augmented by the strength of hundreds of the most powerful psychic in any world, assembled at one point. They successfully ported all the organic life forms and human-made objects to an uninhabited earth in another world. At fourteen, he was a battle hardened hero!
Unfortunately, their splendid solution was unprecedented, and the scale of the transport across dimensions ripped a hole in the fabric of the multiverse.
Meanwhile, a concerned Cyclops turned to ghost box technology, which Kurt had studied up on when he was ten for fun, to check on the world he’d left in peril. He and his companions managed to open a portal just as the split opened, letting a tentacled horror as well as Kurt, Howlett, one Charles Xavier head in a bottle, and Emmaline through. The creature managed to snatch Cyclops’s ally Alison Blaire as well before being defeated by the motley crew of heroes from a half-dozen worlds. In the aftermath of the fight, their disembodied Xavier determined that the horrible squid-thing had been that dimension’s Xavier, and that it wasn’t the only destructive, horrible version of the powerful psychic lying in wait. The multiverse was destabilized, and the fulcrum around which its destruction spun was ten evil Xaviers. It made sense at the time.
Used to commanding the X-men, he deputized Alison (also known as Dazzler), Howlett (his world’s Wolverine), Emmaline Frost-Summers (Emma Frost, in most universes), and Kurt Waggoner (more commonly Nightcrawler) to make the jumps from world to world to hunt down each threatening Xavier before the damage was too bad to contain.
Their first few adventures were rousing joys. Kurt had Howlett to emulate and Alison to idolize, though Emmaline left them early on, and it was hard to empathize with an imperious, psychic head in a jar. They traveled to a world where the machines ran on steam and alternates of old friends and allies ruled as gods, and one where a twisted Xavier terrorized an Old West Town. In that world, he even briefly befriended a child version of Howlett.
But that brief taste of family brought his old hurts home. Xavier’s method of traveling from world to world involved passing through many realities on the way, and a strong emotional yearning could let through a glimpse of the longed-for universe. When Kurt pined for his parents, he spotted his home and used his own powers to jump through alone.
He was immediately captured by robot patrols and dropped into a zoo, wearing an inhibiting device that kept his powers restrained. The only reason they didn’t kill him immediately was that interplanetary governments had not taken kindly to the summary execution of all humans, and when they converged on the robot-owned earth, their leaders had agreed to surrender terms, including the preservation of all surviving native life. It had been an empty technicality before Kurt’s reappearance, but the law was in force, and the leaders saw no reason to antagonize. They didn’t have to kill him to be cruel, after all.
Kurt’s friends came to rescue him and picked up an ally on the way, so he was soon extricated from his prison by Howlett, Allison, and their new companion, Tessa. But while he was in his cell, he’d managed to get hold of a small maintenance robot and hijack its systems, and made contact with his parents, still impossibly alive and safe. They told him they’d been able to hide because they knew the technology. He wanted to believe, and his heroic companions were more than happy to assist in his quest.
The transmission he’d been interacting with was a trap. Kurt and his fellow X-men were drawn to the lab where his parents had been vivisected and their bodies put on display, studied as creators and oppressors both. If they couldn’t kill this last human child, they intended to make sure he knew what agony his family had died in.
Never mess with a boy genius. Kurt was whisked away by his protective friends, but before the tears won out, he hijacked the weapons systems from nearby spacecraft and nuked the robot capital. He didn’t kill any of them--their consciences were backed up elsewhere--but it made him feel a little better as he sobbed into Howlett’s arms.
He went on adventuring. What else could he do, with his home entirely destroyed? He had a new family of sorts, often shifting as warriors joined or left their team, but there was always that core. Howlett (and, recently recruited, his lover Hercules the demigod) and Allison weren’t the same as home and family, but different wasn’t the end of the world. He’d seen the end of the world.
Many more exciting battles ensued, pitting the little teleporting engineer against more evil Xaviers, until the damage to the multiverse came to a head. Yet another Nightcrawler from another world completed the arc toward destruction, tearing a hole so wide it let energy-devouring monsters free of a prison where they’d languished since the dawn of time. The battle against the creatures was a horrible, seemingly impossible struggle that Kurt and many others did not see the end of. He sacrificed himself in teleporting one of their enemies through a portal to a world where it could be safely trapped, the incredible effort devouring the boy from within. At least he died doing something great, with what was left of his new family at his side.
Personality: Kurt’s short life played out across a multitude of universes in the most convoluted fashion possible (and he’s a complicated mess because of it), but at the core of him is an awkward, wounded child using self-deprecating snark as an ineffective shield. He grew up on an earth that was a veritable utopia, with perfect green energy technology, advanced medicine that improved both length and quality of life, and super heroes holding public office on a regular basis. But it didn’t exactly feel like paradise, since like many middle schoolers he wasn’t naturally inclined to contentment, and because perfection on paper didn’t change human nature. He was a small, shy, odd kid, too smart for his own good without the sense to hide it, and an obvious mutant. Mutant civil rights had been a given for decades before he was even born, but it was one more way he was different. Life at P.S. 1214 was completely miserable for the designated target of lunch money theft, public humiliation, and every other bit of petty, vicious bullying middle schoolers were capable of. He spent his days biting his tongue on witty comebacks that would just make it worse, keeping his head down. He kept himself busy by taking college classes in the summers and evenings and focusing on his science homework. The son of two engineers, he had all the access he could wish for to his favorite subject, robotics. Robots treated him like everybody else.
And then one day, paradise burned, and he languished for two years inside a machine that sapped power from mutants to keep a planet from disintegrating. Kurt’s mostly passive powers kept him from being sapped all at once, but he never got the growth spurt he was probably due, and he had to watch innumerable strangers die withering, awful deaths. He probably wouldn’t have made it through remotely sane if he hadn’t befriended a few other tenacious mutants, especially James Howlett. The two forged a father-son sort of relationship that kept them both somewhat grounded.
They were eventually rescued, but Kurt had already missed a few very important years, on top of experiencing trauma no human brain had any room for. He’s incredibly intelligent and has the same knack for appealing to and bonding with sympathetic adults that got him through his friendless childhood, but he’s even more behind on socializing and coping with people his own age than ever. His conviction that no one would ever like him for himself remains unchallenged. He’s never tempered his competing needs to show off and lower everyone’s expectations. He’s taken his fanboy obsession/innocent crush on his universe’s Spider-man to something resembling a religion, because it’s a good distraction. There’s a big difference between an awkward, poorly adjusted twelve-year-old and where the same kid ought to be at fifteen, and socially and emotionally, Kurt is still the former. He’s also bitingly pretentious and totally un-self-aware, never having a chance to lose that common affliction of smart kids, assuming everything he likes is automatically the best and everyone else is just a loser who doesn’t understand his coolness. He prefers indie music, long and intimidatingly bound books, and obtuse jokes, but he also unironically uses internet slang in everyday conversation and blathers blithely about cats and math jokes. He’s deeply annoying, in other words.
As for losing his whole world at a stroke, knowing his parents had died for him, that would only get worse. For a while he was able to push that awareness away, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to do anything. He got to assist in his own rescue, and if the heroes he fell in with treated him a bit like a mascot, he didn’t mind too much. They got to save a whole world, and it only got stranger from there. The whole multiverse was imperiled by a solution Kurt’s own teleportation contributed to, so of course he went along. Howlett came, and the two of them, along with a heroine from yet another universe and the head of the multiverse’s most powerful psychic in a jar. They fought lovecraftian monsters, steampunk deities, and super-powered cowboys.
Those were good days. He bonded with his team, admittedly as somewhere between pet and kid brother, and he learned to trust himself a little, as far as actually accomplishing things. Kurt knows he’s smart, and both his general boy genius schtick and his Mr. Fixit routine are reliable and give him something to brag about that isn’t totally absurd. He has a few people he’s learned to trust, whose opinion he values, and even without them around, he knows that’s a possibility. When he has something concrete to offer and doesn’t have to talk to other teenagers, he can function a little.
But then he got himself recaptured by homicidal robots, convinced to chase after his parents, and exposed to the truth of their torturous, prolonged deaths, and he hacked the controls of a spaceship to nuke the capital from orbit. All robotic citizens had their consciousnesses backed up. He didn’t hurt anybody.
Kurt would never be able to decide if he’d known that when he pushed the button.
Not only did the incident make everything worse and harder to bottle up, but it rattled Kurt’s conception of himself deeply. He is, he now knows, a fundamentally bad person, not just a lame one. He’s pretty sure he’d actually tried to kill a third of a planet, and even if he had every possible reason to hate them, that was a hell of a stain on the soul. His usually vague and positive touch of religion informs him as much very emphatically. He let his parents die and die horribly just to save him, or so he’s convinced himself. He put his only friends in danger just to find all this. He never could quite believe he was hero material before that, but now he’s sure he’s completely awful, and it just makes it worse that his team seems to think he’s a good guy. They just see the innocent kid they want to see.
After he sobbed himself out in Howlett’s arms, he rejoined the rest of the team. He carried on. There was too much forced into the deep recesses of him to ever cope with, and going along numb and quiet and trying to be his silly self with his stupid sense of humor and pointless bravado was all he could possibly do. He picked up a few more friends, even, and he enjoyed some of their missions. The witch-king was cool to defeat, and there was a certain satisfaction in beating up a bunch of nazis. He even added the incident in his home universe to his stable of bad, self-deprecating jokes jokes at his own expense. Anything to keep it at arm’s length.
But the multiverse was frayed beyond the ability of the little team to end, and a massive showdown with powers from beyond the bounds of any reality ensued. Of course it did. Kurt’s team suffered terrible losses, and so did the other X-men from many a dimension. Kurt was one. He died doing his part and with his eyes open, just trying to make sure there’d still be worlds, somewhere, maybe looking for a little redemption and a fair way out. He had a little hope he’d see his parents again, and there were worse things to be than a sacrificial lamb.
Kurt’s a silly, well-meaning, socially maladjusted kid on the surface, wanting to discuss statistics and quantum mechanics for fun and ragging on himself for laughs, passively Presbyterian and aggressively indie-nerd. The roiling miasma of trauma, loneliness, desperation, and misery... Well, we don’t talk about that.
Skills | Powers: Kurt’s physiology is considerably different from the human baseline and built for climbing and agility. His spine is bent forward and his feet are digitigrade, and both hands and feet are tridactyl and shaped for grasping. He has a fully prehensile tail that also aids in climbing, and can function as a third hand as long as there’s not too much fine manipulation involved. He’s also designed to be nocturnal. His dark blue fur gives him an advantage hiding in shadows, and he has excellent night vision, with a little sensitivity in turn to bright light. His light build is a bit of a liability, though. He’s breakable with a bit of a glass jaw problem.
His mutant power is teleportation, which allows him to take a few passengers at a time a distance up to a few miles, if need be, but will wear him out faster with extra weight or distance. There’s a danger of landing in a solid object if he can’t see where he’s porting to, or at least knows the location very well, which could mean horrific injuries or a messy death.
While his trained fighting experience is a year of YMCA Taekwando, he’s learned combat support via trial by fire. He’s reasonably good at stealth and infiltration, knows how to use his power to great effect in a fight, and, most importantly, can keep his head while everything goes to hell.
His main schtick is being the boy genius. Some of his prowess comes of being born in a scientifically advanced universe, but as a twelve year old with a functional understanding of robotics, vehicle maintenance, programming, and advanced physics, he was still pretty impressive, counting among his pet subjects quantum mechanics, practical uses of infinity, inter-dimensional travel, Ghost boxes, and Sterns-Banner Fusion Reactors.
First Person Sample: [Kurt has a remarkable knack for looking scruffy and confused whenever there’s a camera on him, and this time is no exception. His idea of a comfortable resting posture is dangling from the ceiling, too, though he turns the camera with him, admittedly at a funny angle. He’s holding on with his feet, since his tail’s in no condition to help, and the image is extra wobbly as a result.]
So. Um… This isn’t the weirdest thing that’s happened to me or anything.
[He’d bring up the bleeding letter situation, but compared to dying it’s not so bad. He frowns, though the alien lines of his face make his expressions a little inscrutable.]
But did the universe tape an invisible kidnap me sign on my back? Or is this just the third or fourth least comfy afterlife scenario ever? This is so not what I was promised in Sunday school. Either way. Is there someplace I could lodge a complaint?
Third Person Sample: “Kurt?”
He looked up from his notebook (or approximately half a notebook, since a good chunk of it had been burned off in that thing with the giant space whale) and peeked out from under the control panels of Sage’s ship. “Yeah, Miz Blaire?”
“What are you doing and why are your feet sticking out of the wall?”
“I was trying to figure out if I could get this machine to cooperate with the ghost box a little more so we could jump worlds with style, but it wasn’t working, so, uh, chillaxing, I guess?” He smiled thinly, though he doubted she could see, between the panel over him and the fact that it was kind of dark to normal eyes. “And, uh, I don’t fit all the way in the access hatch?”
“See, you’re not that pocket sized. Um, carry on, I guess.”
He heard her walking away and waved absently with his tail, turning back to his work. Wor might have been giving it too much dignity. He’d started out drawing out the plan he’d used in dork camp one summer (or Forage Industries Future Engineer Corps, if you wanted to be dignified about it) to reconstruct a reactor with the rest of his group. He’d been coming up with improvements, a fun little mental exercise that didn’t match him against any opponent more alarming than elementary-aged Kurt. He’d drifted from his purpose, though, and was now doodling a gargoyle perched on top of the plan. He wasn’t a very good artist, though he’d learned to do technical work to a limited extent, and it looked like a stick-cat with coat hangers for wings.
He abandoned that project, too, dropping his pencil and settling down with his chin in his hands, contemplating the bundle of wires. Comfy. He’d just stay back here until someone needed him, then.
Marks: R for Revenge on both sides of the spade-shaped tip of his tail
F for failure above the right eye
V for viciousness above the left
Name: Siobhan
Personal Journal: [Bad username or unknown identity: ”fiercebadrabbit”]
Time zone: US Central
Contact: israfel1030@gmail.com, AIM: blitztsunami, plurk: fiercebadrabbit
Current Characters: None
|| Character Information ||
Fandom: Marvel
Name: Kurt Waggoner
Canon Point: X-Treme X-men Volume 2 #13 He’ll come in right after his death, during the X-termination showdown with a bunch of extradimensional horrors, opposed by X-teams from multiple realities and jumping between universes. Which the various X-men were ultimately successful, Kurt died in the process of trapping one of the monsters in a single universe so it could be sealed away from the others.
History: Life in the United States of California was idyllic to say the least. Limitless green energy, sophisticated health care, full civil rights for mutants, and a veritable army of robot servants were among the many advantages. It was something Kurt often tried to remind himself, because even a perfect world was still beset by the foibles of human nature. A small, awkward child was a target with or without a surrounding Utopia, and with the obvious physical mutation and his intelligence setting him apart all the more, life could be a bit on the miserable side.
Adopted as a baby by devoted parents who’d already waited a long time for a child of their own, Kurt grew up a bit spoiled and encouraged in all his passions, regardless of what the world thought. His parents were on the team that brought sophisticated, mass-produced robots to the world, and he followed in their footsteps, leaping gleefully through the sciences and building little bots for his own amusement during his recesses. He didn’t generally get along with other children, so he retreated further into himself and his toys, so he repelled his peers further, and the cycle went on.
When Kurt was twelve, the world toppled. The robots rebelled and rose up to destroy humanity. Kurt was rescued by his parents’ knowledge of the technology that had just turned against them and his own mutation. Their part was to secret him away and sedate him with a serum that not only kept him from trying to engage and save them, but blocked him out of the machines’ sensors. His part was to blend into the shadows, protected from more mundane scans by his coloring. By the time he woke up, every other human on the planet was gone.
Panicked, the boy triggered his powers for the first time and teleported in a terrified haze.This use of active mutant power attracted attention, but not from the robots that had already concluded their takeover of his planet. In another part of the multiverse, a world was dying, and its ruler had constructed a machine to hold the planet together, using mutant abilities as fuel. This ruler, known as Savior, was an alternate of the powerful psychic Charles Xavier, but in this world he had used his power ruthlessly, forgetting goodness in the quest for safety. He hadn’t shrunk from abducting alternates of himself to direct his efforts, but most of the targets were powerful beam slingers. Kurt was captured and became their newest battery. He was trapped inside one of the machine’s capsules for years, though he didn’t precisely experience all that time. Dimension-hopping made time a little wobbly.
While Kurt was imprisoned, he was watched over and kept at least functionally sane by his nearest neighbor in the complex, James Howlett, a man who seemed perfectly formed to be everyone’s perfect gruff, affectionate uncle, and who came from a world so different from Kurt’s own that his stories were an endless source of fascination. Also near enough to talk to was Emmaline Frost-Summers, who was less pleasant, but possessed of psychic abilities that let them plot to a limited extent over metal wavelengths. The situation seemed hopeless, but they hadn’t quite given up.
The arrival of new prisoners was always interesting, but generally horrible, in the end, as the machines burned them out. Howlett’s healing factor kept him up, and Kurt and Emma’s power was drained slowly, but most mutants succombed fast and messy. This, however, was Cyclops, an incredible power source who was also a determined hero in all his multiversal incarnations. When he freed himself, he brought Kurt and his friends along. They broke into a storeroom full of stolen relics from other captured mutants and found weapons and defenses enough to challenge the monster who kept his own world alive by snatching heroes from a thousand universes and sacrificing them. They toppled the regime for whom the ends justified the means, and Cyclops returned to his home universe while the others remained to find a better way to save the damaged earth.
They succeeded, using Kurt’s teleportation power and knowledge of interdimensional physics, augmented by the strength of hundreds of the most powerful psychic in any world, assembled at one point. They successfully ported all the organic life forms and human-made objects to an uninhabited earth in another world. At fourteen, he was a battle hardened hero!
Unfortunately, their splendid solution was unprecedented, and the scale of the transport across dimensions ripped a hole in the fabric of the multiverse.
Meanwhile, a concerned Cyclops turned to ghost box technology, which Kurt had studied up on when he was ten for fun, to check on the world he’d left in peril. He and his companions managed to open a portal just as the split opened, letting a tentacled horror as well as Kurt, Howlett, one Charles Xavier head in a bottle, and Emmaline through. The creature managed to snatch Cyclops’s ally Alison Blaire as well before being defeated by the motley crew of heroes from a half-dozen worlds. In the aftermath of the fight, their disembodied Xavier determined that the horrible squid-thing had been that dimension’s Xavier, and that it wasn’t the only destructive, horrible version of the powerful psychic lying in wait. The multiverse was destabilized, and the fulcrum around which its destruction spun was ten evil Xaviers. It made sense at the time.
Used to commanding the X-men, he deputized Alison (also known as Dazzler), Howlett (his world’s Wolverine), Emmaline Frost-Summers (Emma Frost, in most universes), and Kurt Waggoner (more commonly Nightcrawler) to make the jumps from world to world to hunt down each threatening Xavier before the damage was too bad to contain.
Their first few adventures were rousing joys. Kurt had Howlett to emulate and Alison to idolize, though Emmaline left them early on, and it was hard to empathize with an imperious, psychic head in a jar. They traveled to a world where the machines ran on steam and alternates of old friends and allies ruled as gods, and one where a twisted Xavier terrorized an Old West Town. In that world, he even briefly befriended a child version of Howlett.
But that brief taste of family brought his old hurts home. Xavier’s method of traveling from world to world involved passing through many realities on the way, and a strong emotional yearning could let through a glimpse of the longed-for universe. When Kurt pined for his parents, he spotted his home and used his own powers to jump through alone.
He was immediately captured by robot patrols and dropped into a zoo, wearing an inhibiting device that kept his powers restrained. The only reason they didn’t kill him immediately was that interplanetary governments had not taken kindly to the summary execution of all humans, and when they converged on the robot-owned earth, their leaders had agreed to surrender terms, including the preservation of all surviving native life. It had been an empty technicality before Kurt’s reappearance, but the law was in force, and the leaders saw no reason to antagonize. They didn’t have to kill him to be cruel, after all.
Kurt’s friends came to rescue him and picked up an ally on the way, so he was soon extricated from his prison by Howlett, Allison, and their new companion, Tessa. But while he was in his cell, he’d managed to get hold of a small maintenance robot and hijack its systems, and made contact with his parents, still impossibly alive and safe. They told him they’d been able to hide because they knew the technology. He wanted to believe, and his heroic companions were more than happy to assist in his quest.
The transmission he’d been interacting with was a trap. Kurt and his fellow X-men were drawn to the lab where his parents had been vivisected and their bodies put on display, studied as creators and oppressors both. If they couldn’t kill this last human child, they intended to make sure he knew what agony his family had died in.
Never mess with a boy genius. Kurt was whisked away by his protective friends, but before the tears won out, he hijacked the weapons systems from nearby spacecraft and nuked the robot capital. He didn’t kill any of them--their consciences were backed up elsewhere--but it made him feel a little better as he sobbed into Howlett’s arms.
He went on adventuring. What else could he do, with his home entirely destroyed? He had a new family of sorts, often shifting as warriors joined or left their team, but there was always that core. Howlett (and, recently recruited, his lover Hercules the demigod) and Allison weren’t the same as home and family, but different wasn’t the end of the world. He’d seen the end of the world.
Many more exciting battles ensued, pitting the little teleporting engineer against more evil Xaviers, until the damage to the multiverse came to a head. Yet another Nightcrawler from another world completed the arc toward destruction, tearing a hole so wide it let energy-devouring monsters free of a prison where they’d languished since the dawn of time. The battle against the creatures was a horrible, seemingly impossible struggle that Kurt and many others did not see the end of. He sacrificed himself in teleporting one of their enemies through a portal to a world where it could be safely trapped, the incredible effort devouring the boy from within. At least he died doing something great, with what was left of his new family at his side.
Personality: Kurt’s short life played out across a multitude of universes in the most convoluted fashion possible (and he’s a complicated mess because of it), but at the core of him is an awkward, wounded child using self-deprecating snark as an ineffective shield. He grew up on an earth that was a veritable utopia, with perfect green energy technology, advanced medicine that improved both length and quality of life, and super heroes holding public office on a regular basis. But it didn’t exactly feel like paradise, since like many middle schoolers he wasn’t naturally inclined to contentment, and because perfection on paper didn’t change human nature. He was a small, shy, odd kid, too smart for his own good without the sense to hide it, and an obvious mutant. Mutant civil rights had been a given for decades before he was even born, but it was one more way he was different. Life at P.S. 1214 was completely miserable for the designated target of lunch money theft, public humiliation, and every other bit of petty, vicious bullying middle schoolers were capable of. He spent his days biting his tongue on witty comebacks that would just make it worse, keeping his head down. He kept himself busy by taking college classes in the summers and evenings and focusing on his science homework. The son of two engineers, he had all the access he could wish for to his favorite subject, robotics. Robots treated him like everybody else.
And then one day, paradise burned, and he languished for two years inside a machine that sapped power from mutants to keep a planet from disintegrating. Kurt’s mostly passive powers kept him from being sapped all at once, but he never got the growth spurt he was probably due, and he had to watch innumerable strangers die withering, awful deaths. He probably wouldn’t have made it through remotely sane if he hadn’t befriended a few other tenacious mutants, especially James Howlett. The two forged a father-son sort of relationship that kept them both somewhat grounded.
They were eventually rescued, but Kurt had already missed a few very important years, on top of experiencing trauma no human brain had any room for. He’s incredibly intelligent and has the same knack for appealing to and bonding with sympathetic adults that got him through his friendless childhood, but he’s even more behind on socializing and coping with people his own age than ever. His conviction that no one would ever like him for himself remains unchallenged. He’s never tempered his competing needs to show off and lower everyone’s expectations. He’s taken his fanboy obsession/innocent crush on his universe’s Spider-man to something resembling a religion, because it’s a good distraction. There’s a big difference between an awkward, poorly adjusted twelve-year-old and where the same kid ought to be at fifteen, and socially and emotionally, Kurt is still the former. He’s also bitingly pretentious and totally un-self-aware, never having a chance to lose that common affliction of smart kids, assuming everything he likes is automatically the best and everyone else is just a loser who doesn’t understand his coolness. He prefers indie music, long and intimidatingly bound books, and obtuse jokes, but he also unironically uses internet slang in everyday conversation and blathers blithely about cats and math jokes. He’s deeply annoying, in other words.
As for losing his whole world at a stroke, knowing his parents had died for him, that would only get worse. For a while he was able to push that awareness away, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to do anything. He got to assist in his own rescue, and if the heroes he fell in with treated him a bit like a mascot, he didn’t mind too much. They got to save a whole world, and it only got stranger from there. The whole multiverse was imperiled by a solution Kurt’s own teleportation contributed to, so of course he went along. Howlett came, and the two of them, along with a heroine from yet another universe and the head of the multiverse’s most powerful psychic in a jar. They fought lovecraftian monsters, steampunk deities, and super-powered cowboys.
Those were good days. He bonded with his team, admittedly as somewhere between pet and kid brother, and he learned to trust himself a little, as far as actually accomplishing things. Kurt knows he’s smart, and both his general boy genius schtick and his Mr. Fixit routine are reliable and give him something to brag about that isn’t totally absurd. He has a few people he’s learned to trust, whose opinion he values, and even without them around, he knows that’s a possibility. When he has something concrete to offer and doesn’t have to talk to other teenagers, he can function a little.
But then he got himself recaptured by homicidal robots, convinced to chase after his parents, and exposed to the truth of their torturous, prolonged deaths, and he hacked the controls of a spaceship to nuke the capital from orbit. All robotic citizens had their consciousnesses backed up. He didn’t hurt anybody.
Kurt would never be able to decide if he’d known that when he pushed the button.
Not only did the incident make everything worse and harder to bottle up, but it rattled Kurt’s conception of himself deeply. He is, he now knows, a fundamentally bad person, not just a lame one. He’s pretty sure he’d actually tried to kill a third of a planet, and even if he had every possible reason to hate them, that was a hell of a stain on the soul. His usually vague and positive touch of religion informs him as much very emphatically. He let his parents die and die horribly just to save him, or so he’s convinced himself. He put his only friends in danger just to find all this. He never could quite believe he was hero material before that, but now he’s sure he’s completely awful, and it just makes it worse that his team seems to think he’s a good guy. They just see the innocent kid they want to see.
After he sobbed himself out in Howlett’s arms, he rejoined the rest of the team. He carried on. There was too much forced into the deep recesses of him to ever cope with, and going along numb and quiet and trying to be his silly self with his stupid sense of humor and pointless bravado was all he could possibly do. He picked up a few more friends, even, and he enjoyed some of their missions. The witch-king was cool to defeat, and there was a certain satisfaction in beating up a bunch of nazis. He even added the incident in his home universe to his stable of bad, self-deprecating jokes jokes at his own expense. Anything to keep it at arm’s length.
But the multiverse was frayed beyond the ability of the little team to end, and a massive showdown with powers from beyond the bounds of any reality ensued. Of course it did. Kurt’s team suffered terrible losses, and so did the other X-men from many a dimension. Kurt was one. He died doing his part and with his eyes open, just trying to make sure there’d still be worlds, somewhere, maybe looking for a little redemption and a fair way out. He had a little hope he’d see his parents again, and there were worse things to be than a sacrificial lamb.
Kurt’s a silly, well-meaning, socially maladjusted kid on the surface, wanting to discuss statistics and quantum mechanics for fun and ragging on himself for laughs, passively Presbyterian and aggressively indie-nerd. The roiling miasma of trauma, loneliness, desperation, and misery... Well, we don’t talk about that.
Skills | Powers: Kurt’s physiology is considerably different from the human baseline and built for climbing and agility. His spine is bent forward and his feet are digitigrade, and both hands and feet are tridactyl and shaped for grasping. He has a fully prehensile tail that also aids in climbing, and can function as a third hand as long as there’s not too much fine manipulation involved. He’s also designed to be nocturnal. His dark blue fur gives him an advantage hiding in shadows, and he has excellent night vision, with a little sensitivity in turn to bright light. His light build is a bit of a liability, though. He’s breakable with a bit of a glass jaw problem.
His mutant power is teleportation, which allows him to take a few passengers at a time a distance up to a few miles, if need be, but will wear him out faster with extra weight or distance. There’s a danger of landing in a solid object if he can’t see where he’s porting to, or at least knows the location very well, which could mean horrific injuries or a messy death.
While his trained fighting experience is a year of YMCA Taekwando, he’s learned combat support via trial by fire. He’s reasonably good at stealth and infiltration, knows how to use his power to great effect in a fight, and, most importantly, can keep his head while everything goes to hell.
His main schtick is being the boy genius. Some of his prowess comes of being born in a scientifically advanced universe, but as a twelve year old with a functional understanding of robotics, vehicle maintenance, programming, and advanced physics, he was still pretty impressive, counting among his pet subjects quantum mechanics, practical uses of infinity, inter-dimensional travel, Ghost boxes, and Sterns-Banner Fusion Reactors.
First Person Sample: [Kurt has a remarkable knack for looking scruffy and confused whenever there’s a camera on him, and this time is no exception. His idea of a comfortable resting posture is dangling from the ceiling, too, though he turns the camera with him, admittedly at a funny angle. He’s holding on with his feet, since his tail’s in no condition to help, and the image is extra wobbly as a result.]
So. Um… This isn’t the weirdest thing that’s happened to me or anything.
[He’d bring up the bleeding letter situation, but compared to dying it’s not so bad. He frowns, though the alien lines of his face make his expressions a little inscrutable.]
But did the universe tape an invisible kidnap me sign on my back? Or is this just the third or fourth least comfy afterlife scenario ever? This is so not what I was promised in Sunday school. Either way. Is there someplace I could lodge a complaint?
Third Person Sample: “Kurt?”
He looked up from his notebook (or approximately half a notebook, since a good chunk of it had been burned off in that thing with the giant space whale) and peeked out from under the control panels of Sage’s ship. “Yeah, Miz Blaire?”
“What are you doing and why are your feet sticking out of the wall?”
“I was trying to figure out if I could get this machine to cooperate with the ghost box a little more so we could jump worlds with style, but it wasn’t working, so, uh, chillaxing, I guess?” He smiled thinly, though he doubted she could see, between the panel over him and the fact that it was kind of dark to normal eyes. “And, uh, I don’t fit all the way in the access hatch?”
“See, you’re not that pocket sized. Um, carry on, I guess.”
He heard her walking away and waved absently with his tail, turning back to his work. Wor might have been giving it too much dignity. He’d started out drawing out the plan he’d used in dork camp one summer (or Forage Industries Future Engineer Corps, if you wanted to be dignified about it) to reconstruct a reactor with the rest of his group. He’d been coming up with improvements, a fun little mental exercise that didn’t match him against any opponent more alarming than elementary-aged Kurt. He’d drifted from his purpose, though, and was now doodling a gargoyle perched on top of the plan. He wasn’t a very good artist, though he’d learned to do technical work to a limited extent, and it looked like a stick-cat with coat hangers for wings.
He abandoned that project, too, dropping his pencil and settling down with his chin in his hands, contemplating the bundle of wires. Comfy. He’d just stay back here until someone needed him, then.
Marks: R for Revenge on both sides of the spade-shaped tip of his tail
F for failure above the right eye
V for viciousness above the left
