App for xi_rpg
- PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Kitty
AGE: 22
PRONOUN OF CHOICE: she
EMAIL ADDRESS: iwillactuallycheckthisATgmailDOTcom
AIM SCREENNAME & MAIN PERSONAL LJ ACCOUNT: hulkkeysmash, quipquipquip
OTHER CHARACTERS: N/A
- CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Thomas "Toro" Raymond
CODENAME: The Flaming Kid
SERIES/SOURCE: Marvel
AGE: 18
GENDER: Male
ROLE: Student
BACKGROUND: Toro is what happens when Mom and Dad spend too much time doing research with radioactive material. Born to Nora and Frank, a woman deathly ill from experiments with radium and a man equally sick from asbestos poisoning, Toro came out of the womb mutated. His powers were kept quiet by his parents, who knew that he would be ostracized for it; this never lasted long, so the Raymonds skipped town whenever Tom's friends turned sour and tongues started waggling. He was heat resistant, able to pluck hot potatoes straight from a campfire without so much as a wince. His mother, when explaining his powers to the Human Torch, said that he basically "ignored" heat when it got too hot for a normal person.
Frank's research into asbestos caught the eye of a villainess who specialized in the stuff: the Asbestos Lady, a tough-dealing woman who wanted nothing more than to bring Frank Raymond into her criminal fold. The Raymonds were saved by the Human Torch, but they fled soon thereafter, not wanting their son's powers to fall into the hands of a villain. The Asbestos Lady and her gang got to the Raymonds, crashing the train that they were on. The papers said that there were no survivors, but there was one---young Toro. The eight year old had pawed desperately through the flaming wreckage, trying futilely to save his parents. A pair of circus performers---fire-eaters, as luck would have it---saw the boy's struggle and realized that his unique gifts would be a boon to their act. They took him in, cared for him, and taught him to eat fire.
Toro's life might have gone on peacefully that way if the Human Torch hadn't caught wind of him still living. The Torch came to see him, and his mere proximity caused Toro to burst into flames for the first time. Realizing that this boy had the same powers as he did---and was human, not an android---Jim took him from the circus and taught him to use his powers for good. Technically only a handful of years old himself, the Torch adopted the boy and made him his sidekick.
When WWII broke out, their country needed the Torches. Led by a star-spangled super soldier, the newly-dubbed Invaders were a group of super-humans fighting for freedom in the darkest corners of wartime Europe. Captain America, Bucky, the Human Torch, Namor the Sub-Mariner and Toro brought the fight to Hitler himself. By the time he was eighteen, the war was coming to a close---and it was looking like the Allies were going to come out on top. In April of '45, Bucky and Steve went MIA, but Jim and Toro kept up their end of the battles. The Human Torch and his sidekick were the ones who got rid of Hitler once and for all.
In August of 1945, Toro was given a mission to watch over a B-52 carrying some kind of super payload to the Orient. The Enola Gay dropped the bomb and ended the war and plucky little Toro was in the middle of ground zero when it dropped. The radiation hit him in unexpected force, sending him into a spiraling mess of sickness and loss of control. His x-gene reacted to a combo of the radiation and a further mutation from the Human Torch's plastid cells, causing him to overheat to the point of being a danger to himself and everyone around him. As a marvel, he was on a tenuous relationship with the government to begin with. When it became obvious that the Raymond boy was going to be a growing problem, steps we taken to preserve him to such a time as research could be done on his changing mutation.
Toro was put under in an experimental deep freeze. He stayed in an augmented cryogenic state for a long, long time. Until, as fate would have it, another 1940's throwback was found who started asking questions about his old pal. Since the technology existed to dampen his heat, Toro was revived---and found himself shipped off to school for the first time since the eighth grade, told that he'd be re-learning his powers right alongside a whole slew of special kids just like him.
PERSONALITY: Toro is a good kid. That is, at the heart of it all, the kind of person he is. He's just a kid who tries to do right, no matter what, though sometimes his efforts are a little too much or too precocious to be any help. In the wartime comics that highly exaggerated his life, he was the plucky kid who'd take a bullet for his best friend in one strip and accidentally out the Invaders to the Nazis in another.
He fights the good fight because it's the good fight---though he's not strictly old enough to be a soldier, he fights in WWII right alongside the adults. Though he does what he can, he's still a teenager. He goes into things too quickly, without thinking, and for all the right reasons---and that combo is what lands him in water-and-oxygenless tanks in enemy hands, sadly. As a performer from a young age, he tends toward being an extrovert. He's still green and not as hard around the edges as Bucky, though he's around the same age as Cap's partner.
Toro wants to help who he can, whenever he can. He's the self-appointed morale booster of the Invaders, cheerful as can be when the situations are the hardest. He can't stand passivity, and has a habit of playing with his hands---and sometimes his flame powers, by extension---when boredom hits. Toro's quick to anger but quicker to forgive, fire-like in his temperament and stubborn as his namesake to boot. If you're a friend of his, he'll go to bat for you 110% of the time, even if he'll squabble with you the whole way. He knows his limits well enough to ignore them when he needs to, throwing himself headfirst into a fray if it means fighting beside either the Torch or his rival-cum-best friend, Bucky Barnes.
APPEARANCE: Toro's fairly muscular, with very little body fat---the heat of his system literally burns calories faster than he can keep them on. He's reached his adult height of 5"11, but still has some filling out to do. His shaggy black hair isn't cut to regulation and it's oftentimes falling into his blue eyes.
If you don't have at least one joke to make about his bootyshorts and knee-high boots coupled with his codename, you don't have a soul.
POWERS: Generating flames with his body via combustion of individual cells, controlling/absorbing flames with a low level of pyrokinetics, being impervious to heat, flight, accelerated healing and metabolism
ANYTHING ELSE?: Given that he feels that it's still 1945, many of Toro's views on the world and speech patterns will be INCREDIBLY dated. Also, he's a functional illiterate, having been pulled from school by the second grade. He can read, but not terribly well. Does Xavier's has a special class? :D
- RP SAMPLES
First-person sample: So, I've got a question for you all. Or, a coupla questions! See, I ain't exactly from this time, so I'm a little slow when it comes to the marvels of this century of yours. The fella in charge of this school said to leave a message here if I had any questions, and boy---have I ever got 'em. I tried watching television the other day, just to see what types of things you future-people watch, and hell if it didn't make a lick of sense to me.
Sure, I'll admit that I didn't pay too much attention to it at first 'cause I was so surprised that it was all in color. Coulda been the real deal in there if I didn't know better. But it was all so queer that that thought didn't last too long.
Lemme make a list of stuff I didn't quite get.
One! What in the name of God's green earth is a Snuggie? If you turned a robe around it'd do the same gosh darn thing, y'know.
Two! Why do they call it reality tee-vee? Nothing real about it.
Three! People don't really buy all those things they have in the ads, do they? If they do, I'll bet it's 'cause they feel bullied. I've never seen anyone be as loud and obnoxious as those fellas selling their wares.
Four! There were these shows on during the afternoon that kinda reminded me of the pictures back home, but they were real dramatic. They had me right 'til one of the ladies' evil twin sister came back from the dead. That sort of stuff don't really happen, right?
Also, I dunno why anyone would wanna be that Paris girl's best friend. She just ain't natural lookin'.
Third-person sample: Toro didn't know how cold cold could be until Russia. The soldiers gave him all kinds of flak for his shivering---his Russian was good enough to know when someone was calling him a sissy, fellas---but he was too cold to react to their ribbing. Besides, Pappy had taught him that being on fire wasn't excuse enough to be a hothead.
The only problem was, being on fire didn't mean that he was warm. Russia wicked all the warmth straight out of his bones. It was harder to ignite, harder to keep alight, harder still to not want to curl up into an anguished, shuddering ball in the wet snow. He hated, hated, how people kept asking why he was cold---he was on fire, wasn't he?
Jim kept close, radiating more heat than was strictly needed. Being an android, he didn't feel the cold quite like a flesh-and-blood human did---but he still had the human care and compunction to make sure that he could help his young charge. His Pappy was a swell kind of guy, Toro thought as he hovered just inside the aura of his heat wake. The moment he turned the flame off, he was a teenage boy in nothing but boots and shorts in the middle of a Siberian winter. Toro would've liked to see the soldiers and all their heavy layers do the same and then still call him a sissy.
Russia was bad. In all, probably the worst so far. Toro was two shakes from freezing to death every other day and Bucky kept losing weight. Even though he needed more calories daily than the Captain's partner, Toro lost a third of his rations and most of his emergency chocolates to him in thrown games and bets. Bucky's face didn't look quite as gaunt after that, which made the gnawing hole in his belly worth it. The hunger and the assurance that he was doing what he could to make sure he had a friend alive at the end of the war kept him awake, and that kept him burning.