| Freerunner |
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Joined: Sep 11, 2009
Posts: 956
Location: STL
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FINALLY! ^.^
I was actually pleasantly surprised that the second rewrite took noticeably less time than the first. And it was more of a rewrite. Huh.
General Information
Name: Caden Joseph Howard
AKA: C.J.; “Chee”
Gender: Male
Age: Twenty-seven
Place of Birth: Chicago, IL (well, Chicagoland; actually Joliet, IL)
Hometown: Marana, AZ (just outside Tuscon)
Inoculated: Yes, a king cheetah with voltage-based powers
Personality:
If you had to describe Caden in five words or less, it would be “soft but certain/strong”. He is naturally a very agreeable person, and likes being as helpful as he can be. He never raises his voice, but despite being softspoken, he has the air of someone who knows exactly who he is and what he’s doing.
He has a fairly conservative set of ideas, from simple living issues, such as how he spends & saves money to how he dresses, to more political/social issues, such as abortion (it’s wrong, there’s always adoption) and sex (shouldn’t explicitly be on TV or in movies, shouldn’t happen before marriage, etc.).
However, he also firmly believes in the idea of intellectual debate, and the right to disagree. If your opinion differs from his, you can either expect an engaged (but not heated) discussion or a simple “okay” accompanied by a shrug that basically continues his sentence “okay, I guess we disagree, and that’s fine”. In fact, this may be the only way to get into a good discussion with him, through a disagreement (whether it be by political issue, or something as mundane as “how should this report be written?” or “what’s the best movie of the past year?”) as an offshoot of him being agreeable and softspoken is he’s quiet to a fault in social situations.
Looking at how he’s made his friends is a good way to see this – everyone either spent a lot of time around him by default (most all of his college friends are from his freshman floor) or was introduced to him through another friend. He just doesn’t make friends easily on his own. He also rarely makes enemies, as he’s not disagreeable and he’s never excelled at anything enough to get people frustrated at him for being better than them. In fact, the only people who actually dislike him are those who get frustrated that he doesn’t get angry at them or that he doesn’t get brought down by their teasing. Then again, there are a lot of people who know (about) him and just have no opinion. Because, honestly, there isn’t anything really remarkable about him.
History:
Caden was born in Chicago and lived there for the first nine years of his life before his dad, a professor, got a job at the University of Arizona. Besides the occasional excursion to Navy Pier, he doesn’t remember much about living in Chicago, and thus doesn’t miss much; hence why he considers Tuscon his hometown.
He went from only child to the oldest of four by the end of middle school, getting a little sister in fifth grade and twins, boy and girl, in seventh. Thus, for most of high school, he was in charge of taking care of the three of them while his parents were at work. Being busy with them made it hard for him to be involved in school activities at all, though he did have enough time to be on the track/cross country team – he was never quite good enough to win anything, but he enjoyed the company of the “runner” crowd. He wanted to join a couple clubs, such as the anime club or the recycling club, but having to be home for his siblings prevented any of that.
Not that he really viewed it as a burden, though. He adored Leslie, Benjamin, and Taylor. He at first liked the idea of having the responsibility, and by the end of his high school career, hanging out/playing with them let him feel like a kid again at a time when adulthood loomed in his near future, at least in his head. He also got both of his nicknames from his siblings, based on his initials, though “C.J.” started sticking amongst his friends starting the summer before his junior year, when he took up lifeguarding at a local pool.
He graduated fifty-second out of a class of about four hundred, then went to the University of Arizona and majored in geosciences. This basically kept him out of any classes his father taught – by coincidence, not avoidance; the two of them would meet once every week or two to catch up as Caden decided to live in the dorms instead of at home. College life was a huge release for him, given him vast amounts of previously unheld free time that allowed him to join almost every club he wanted, as well as make lots of friends and enjoy the social scene - at least as much as his personality let him.
At the beginning of junior year, he finally took a required writing class, and the timing was great – he met Cassandra Roberts, a dual veterinary science/music major. Though graduation split them up physically, they kept their relationship going through technology and frequent visits, Caden even using savings he learned from his job to at least help pay for Sandy’s veterinary school (or, rather, her apartment in Davis, CA). In return, he got the occasional original song, which helped keep him sane while he worked in seismology and took a position in the Arizona Geological Society.
A few months ago, Sandy finished her education, and came back to Tuscon to take a lead position at a local animal hospital. At graduation, she got something else with her degree: a ring. The wedding – a small, semi-formal affair in Reid Park – is set for September 22nd.
Every July, Caden would go to this one geophysics conference, a tradition that started in college, and continued to the point where he was one of AGS’s representatives there. This July, when he was the highest on life he’d ever been, was no different – until he got to the airport. The last thing he remembers is walking into one of the bathrooms and, as he walked past one of the stalls, feeling a sharp blow to the back of his neck.
Physical Information
Visual Appearance:
Picture is two or three years old. From L to R: Leslie, Caden, and their cousin Michelle. - - Caden's new cheetah form.
Physical Appearance:
Caden is pretty much your average Joe. He’s somewhat lanky, has big hands and feet, and has short, straight, brown-ish hair (though it often looks blond-brown in the sun). His face is round and somewhat tall, with light freckles. Besides being lanky, his body structure is relatively square, and he has enough muscles to look strong without looking ‘sculpted’ at all – think lacrosse player.
In cheetah form, he’s basically what you would expect – deep chest, thin waist, spindly legs, “tear-streaks”, and long tail. He has short, coarse fur that is covered in simple spots. He’s not quite your average cheetah, though – a recessive gene gave him a unique coat pattern, so unique it was originally thought to be a different species of cheetah when it was first observed in the wild. The “king cheetah” has “stripes” that run from the back of its head all the way to its tail, and its spots are a bit bigger and blotch-ier than a regular cheetah’s. It also has a more of a “mane” than a regular cheetah does.
Clothing and Armor:
Caden dresses a bit conservatively, but not incredibly formal. As long as the shirt has long sleeves or at least two buttons, it’s perfectly fine to wear. The occasional T-shirt at home or at, say, a pool, is okay as well. He only wears shorts in the summer, usually preferring khakis. He owns almost no demin – just one pain or jeans and one pair of jean shorts. He also owns no exercise clothes, or tennis shoes.
At the time of his abduction, he was wearing a simple short-sleeve blue polo over khakis, with brown loafers.
Caden naturally likes cotton, due to how soft it is, so transformation won’t be a problem. Despite his conservative nature, he also does wear a necklace, a simple white-gold chain he got from Sandy – it’s big enough that it still fits on his cheetah form, albeit a bit snugly (thankfully, a cheetah’s “cervical circumference” is also noticeably less than a panther’s).
Weapons
None, especially in human form. Cheetahs can’t retract their claws, but the structure of their legs really doesn’t make it easy to scratch, and their bite pales in comparison to other predators.
Inoculated info
Alternate Form (King) Cheetah
Abilities Voltage creation
Caden can create a voltage difference between any two points in space. The higher the voltage, the less likely it will work (resulting in a bit of a self-shock) if one of said points is not somewhere on his body. At the time of inoculation, the voltage he can supply is very small (think a double-A battery), though with time/training/experience/etc. his threshold will increase – i.e. with sufficient (LOTS of) training he could eventually create voltages large enough to warrant one of those “danger – high voltage” signs, deadly high power stuff. But that’s a LONG way off.
The intensity of the voltage he’s creating also determines how long he can hold that supply and how long it takes for him to ‘recharge’. In terms of duration, it’s an inverse relationship; he could pretend to be a small battery for well over ten hours, but only create one of those deadly-high-voltage scenarios for maybe a split second. Also, if he gets close to his “time limit”, for whatever voltage power he’s supplying, he runs the risk of blacking out. For recharging, it’s the opposite. Two ten-hour shifts pretending to be a battery could be split up by ten or fifteen minutes, while he would need at least a day to recover after unleashing a several-thousand-volt attack.
Lastly, he can only supply one voltage at any given time. That way, he can’t run your flashlight and your camping stove and your mini-radio at the same time, nor could he provide the power for a laptop and provide jolts of current in the right directions in the right order to effectively use said laptop.
Other Information
Faction: At the moment, just a test subject
Bonus Section: I hope the idea of the abduction is okay. I haven’t yet seen a char bio where the character didn’t at least talk to/confront an employee of Stark (or Ovid) before being brought to the facility, but considering the plot says McFarland ‘recruited’ across the country, (emphasis on the quotation marks,) I thought it would work okay. Does it work for you guys?
Last edited by CyMoahk on Fri Jul 16, 2010 3:30 am, edited 2 times in total.
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