[ PRELUDE ; info ]

Jan 01, 2000 00:00


Character: Iggy
Series: Maximum Ride (novels & manga)
Timeline: After volume 1 of the novel series.
Details:

APPEARANCES ➡ Iggy is fourteen, which he doesn't look at all, given his almost preposterous height of six foot two and his lanky build, all long limbs and wire-skinny frame stretched over with usually pale skin. Strawberry-blond hair cut ragged and messy almost covers pale-blue eyes -- perhaps all for the better, because that way it almost hides the faintly blank quality to his eyes. Being blind tends to do that to you. (He wasn't exactly born blind, but that's neither here nor now.) All this, combined with the single pierced ear and the slightly wry smile that he seems to be wearing all the time combine to make him look a lot older than he actually is.

And then there's the wings. Oh yeah. Long story, but he has them. Fourteen feet across and yellow-gold-brown-ish, it's fairly impressive when he unfurls them. Usually, he keeps them neatly folded behind his back, small enough to conceal fairly convincingly with any normal jacket or windbreaker, but in any dangerous situation, he can take to air almost immediately. Anatomically, of course, it's impossibly for a normal human to fly just because they have wings -- which leads to the fact that Iggy really isn't all human. 98% he is, sure, but that remaining 2% of his DNA is all avian, resulting in extremely light (and ever so slightly fragile) bones, extra muscles, altered internal organs, highly developed senses, and so on and so forth. He probably weighs about half of what he rightfully should, and it also probably contributes to his ridiculously lanky build.

Generally, he looks almost normal, save small differences. For once thing, place him in a strange environment and he'll naturally go stumbling around for a while (hey, he can't see, cut him some slack), but once he's grown used to any location, he can navigate purely by memory, lending a slightly eerie, automatic quality to his movements. And he's almost always light, springy -- just like a bird -- too used to living with his life on the line. But take a passing glance at him and hey, it's just some kid.

Right?

PERSONALITY ➡ In a nutshell, he acts neither blind, nor fourteen, at least on first glance. Growing up in a not-so-normal environment tends to do that to you, but more on that later.

On the one hand, he can be surprisingly mature at times, much more than you'd expect from someone at his age. The first sign of danger puts him in a act-first-think-later mindset, and no matter how dire the situation, he rarely panics. (Hey, it's hard to ruffle him after everything he's been through.) Despite his heavy disability, he's learned to adapt to it as best as he can, and he handles risk with efficiency, learning from experience at an extremely rapid rate and rarely making the same mistakes twice. Not to mention, he does his best to avoid making any mistakes in the first place. Far from naive, he's been hardened through experience, somewhat jaded due to his odd and cruel past. He trusts absolutely no one (save his small 'family,' whom he's deathly loyal to) and is cautious about revealing any information about himself, treating everyone as a potential risk unless they prove very much otherwise.

Not that he's a hardass, though. On the contrary, he actually has a fabulous sense of humor -- a very sarcastic one. Ask him what kind of special ability he has, and he'll answer, deadpan, that he has a "highly developed sense of irony." Which is quite true. Somewhat embittered by his past, he has a darker sense of humor than one would expect, capable of poking fun at many, many things, including his own blindness. Tell him to watch where he's going because he bumped into you, and he'll tell you, flatly, that he's sorry, he should have distinguished you from the big blanket of black he sees. It's not that he's cynical, not exactly, and he's not a pessimist, either, but he does know how to see the possible bad side of almost anything and take it in a humorous light. Hey, it helps him deal with everything.

But then again, when he doesn't have to be on guard, he's not. It's not much fun being cautious all the time, yeah? Give him a little bit of room to breathe, and you'll see that he hasn't quite matured all the way to the adult he often acts like -- he's still very much fourteen, inside. With a slight mischievous streak to him, he enjoys poking fun at everything, taking things as lightly as possible, kicking back and -- oh, making things blow up. With a surprising fondness for fire and explosions, considering his blindness, he still very much has that adolescent fascination with destruction that almost all teenage boys seem to have -- as well as the same sense of pride and hunger for action. Being blind hasn't blunted down his confidence any, and he'll still punch anyone who mocks him (or his family) too badly.

Despite the facade of maturity he puts on during hard times, he's still essentially a teenage boy, and has the entire maelstrom of emotions associated with being at such an age. Underneath that ironic way he pokes fun at his own blindness, he often rues this weakness of his; despite his rational way of dealing with danger, he still feels anger and fear and unease at all the appropriate times; and despite the way he puts everyone at a cautious distance, he still likes the idea of having a friend, of having someone to trust. Basically, he's a kid forced to grow up a little too fast, and he's adapted as best as he can. Which is admirable enough, isn't it? He's trying his best, he really is -- and he's a good kid inside.

HISTORY ➡ Eh, his past is something of a dramatic sob story, and he doesn't like thinking (or talking) about it much. Though he doesn't remember it, he was taken from his parents at the age of four months (real name James Griffith, though he doesn't know that) and tossed into a scientific facility ominously named only "The School." It was there that his DNA got messed around with, two percent of it extracted and swapped out with avian DNA, various implants fudged around his body, leaving him winged and awkward. It was somewhere in this process that he lost his sight, too. He used to be fine, really, but during an attempt to forcibly enhance his night vision through surgery, the scientists messed up, leaving him completely blind. As far back as he remember, he grew up in a cage, along with several other children (all of them in seperate cages) -- the six of them had been subject to the same experiment, leaving them bird-human hybrids. Constantly tormented with experiments and tests, he has only dark memories of his time at the School -- the memory of it is enough to make him shudder just from the thought.

Eventually, though, one of the scientists from The School, a man named Jed Batchelder, kidnapped him and the five others out of the facility, granting them the first taste of freedom in their young lives. Though Jed disappeared after two years of taking care of them, the six of the 'flock' managed to live in peace, alone up in the woods, surviving only thanks to the fact that no one knew about them.

Or so they thought. Being an extremely expensive and unusual experiment tends to always come back and bite you in the ass. The School eventually dispatched its agents (werewolf-type hybrids called Erasers) to retrieve one of the flock -- and this eventually ended in a long-winded rescue mission, a brief length of time back in the School's control, a second break-out and -- so on and so forth. To put it simply it's a sort of long-term war for freedom (complete with a "save the world" prophecy) against their creators that the flock is fighting, and Iggy's just one of the kids involved. The end of the long fight finds him and his family freeing all of The School's unfortunate menagerie of experiments and fleeing the facility.

And then he ends up here. (Great.)

ABILITIES ➡ Well, it's nothing that great, really. He can fly, for one thing. (Duh.) And he makes up for his blindness by having extraordinarily developed senses in all other aspects. His sense of touch, especially, is of note, as he can identify people simply by memorizing the texture of their skin (or feathers, in the case of his winged family), or alternatively, by the sound of their footsteps. Send a chopper flying by and he can pinpoint its direction even after it's long gone out of sight. And he's smart, too, able to memorize the layout of any location given some time and maneuver around through memory -- and able to make snap decisions in any dangerous situation. (Oh, and he likes making bombs, though he needs a little help doing that. Knowing all of the wire configurations and chemical compounds is good, but it kinds sucks when you can't see what you're doing.)

Despite his bone structure which should, in all rights, make him relatively fragile, he's also fairly sturdy, and will fight fiercely when given a good reason to. Stronger than your average human adult, and, of course, several times faster, he can easily evade any danger that a normal person imposes -- it's only when faced with gunfire or other similarly advanced dangers that he starts growing worried. Though he's not a master at combat, he's been trained enough to defend himself decently in hand-to-hand combat, even blind. So yeah, it should take a surprising effort to bring him down. Don't underestimate him just because he can't see.

Oh, and he can cook. Surprise, surprise -- you'd be amazed at how well he can manage a frying pan and knife once he gets some time to get used to a kitchen.
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