Jerry Mathias, Splash
(PL 10, 22 years old)
Splash: PL 10; Init +3
(+3 Dex); Defense 16 (+3 base, +3 Dex);
Spd 30 ft. (Fly 50-250 MPH); Atk
+6 melee, +8 with an Overrun / +8 ranged, Dmg +2
punch or +10 Corrosion Aura / by weapon; SV Dmg +14
(+11 is Impervious), Fort +3, Ref +3, Will +1; Str
14, Dex 16, Con 16, Int 13,
Wis 12, Cha 14.
[14 pp in +4 BAB / +3
BDB, 0 pp in Saves, 25 pp in Attributes]
Skills: Acrobatics 5
(+8), Balance 9 (+12), Bluff 1 (+3, +7 vs. someone who finds him attractive)
Climb 3 (+5), Computers 1 (+2), Concentration 2 (+3), Diplomacy 3 (+5, +9 vs.
someone who finds him attractive), Drive 2 (+5), Gather Information 1 (+3),
Jump 5 (+7), Language (Spanish), Notice 2 (+3), Perform (acting) 1 (+3),
Perform (dance) 3 (+5), Profession (landscaper) 5 (+6), Profession (modeling) 2
(+3), Repair 4 (+6), Survival 2 (+3), Swim 4 (+6)
[14 pp in Skills]
Feats: Attractive 1,
Benefit (Wealth), Connected, Attack Specialization 1 (Overruns), Favored
Environment 1 (on the water), Elusive Target, Move-By Action, Improved Overrun,
Endurance, Environmental Adaptation (underwater), Acrobatic Bluff, Equipment 1,
Second Chance (mind control)
[13 pp in Feats]
Powers: Flight 3
[6], Flight +1 (only in contact with a liquid or solid surface) [1],
Flight +1 (only in contact with a solid surface) [1], Protection
+11 (Extra: Impervious) [22], Super-Movement 3 (Permeate 3) [6],
Corrosion 10 (Extra: Aura, Power Feat: Selective, Effect: Fire damage
/ molecular disruption) [31], Immunities 4 (environmental cold, environmental
heat, need for sleep, can breathe underwater, hunger & thirst) [5],
[84 pp in Powers]
Equipment: Boogie-board connected to ankle. Two-tone wetsuit shorts. Dive Knife strapped to other ankle. Expensive waterproof watch / timer (a gift
from the company that makes them, so long as he wears
it visibly, they consider it free advertising).
Chinsy shell necklace (from a girl-friend,
estimated value, $2). Assorted
‘friendship bracelets’ (from other would-be girlfriends). Monster tan. Wind-breaker (rarely worn, generally thrown
on if anyone gives him flak about ‘no shirt,’ although he draws the line at
carting shoes around…). Cell-phone. Expensive
designer wrap-around photosensitive shades, complete
with dangling company logo…
[5 EP
worth of equipment, from Knife, Cell-phone and ‘Flash-goggles.’]
[Technically, the
surfboard could count as a water-going Vehicle, but he doesn’t really use it to
surf, just ‘flies’ on top of it, so I’m ignoring the cost for now.]
[150 pp total, with +14 damage save bought as a trade-off with +6
defense.]
Possible complications:
1) Famous (pandering to
fans, avoiding paparazzi, intrusive lack of privacy, having to ‘play to the
cameras’ in public, etc.),
2) Unresolved issues
with parents (father may want to cash in on his son’s fame, half-siblings may
be jealous of how ‘the maid’s kid’ gets all the press, etc.),
3) Ex-girlfriend is a
telepath / telekinetic / etc. and has issues (Neurotic issues. Not ‘flips out and eats planets’ issues. She could publish a not-terribly-flattering
tell-all book as part of her ‘getting over’ something.),
4) has
a few other superhuman friends that could show up or get involved somehow
(he’d go out of his way to help either his best friend Max (a flying wind/force-blaster),
his ex-girlfriend Keri (the telepath / telekinetic / ESPer) or the aquatic inhuman Sea Lion.),
Son of a wealthy SoCal businessman
and his immigrant Mexican domestic, Jerry is consumed by feelings of inadequacy
from a lifetime growing up in a house working for his half-siblings and
expected to never tell them of their relationship (since obviously his father
wasn’t supposed to be having a fling with the maid!). The words were never said and Jerry never
felt that he did anything worth his father coming out and saying to him or his
half-brothers who the ‘maid’s boy’ really was.
He never worked up the nerve to ‘out’ his father, but ran around
cleaning up after his brothers and maintaining their cars and boats and mowing
the lawn and cleaning the pool while what he knew festered within him. Since his mother was often busy and didn’t
have time to pay close attention to him, spending a lot of her time cleaning up
after another woman’s children, he snuck off regularly to spend time on the
beach, seeing in the ocean a place where his past didn’t matter. His entire high school experience consisted
of dozing off and daydreaming during class, and then running to the beach as
soon as he could, to catch the waves.
Rain or shine, he was out in the surf, riding a cheap board he’d picked
up with money gotten mowing lawns and fixing lawn-mowers.
He managed to get into an inexpensive college (although his
father snuck him money for this, he put it in the bank and went to the only one
that offered him a decent scholarship and was planning on working his way
through it with landscaping work on the side).
His plans changed when he became a local celebrity because of his
surfing skills, after an appearance on an extreme sports TV special, which
earned much respect among his shallow friends.
Soon he realized that he might actually be able to pay his way through
school with prize-money or endorsement stuff.
His picture has appeared in a few magazines for extreme sports
enthusiasts (sometimes modeling something, other times pimping a particular
board or surf wax, once just with a white mustache saying, ‘Got Milk?’). He’s no Tony Hawk, but anyone familiar with
that culture would know his name, and he was recognized on sight (particularly
in his traditional outfit, or while carrying a board).
Still in his freshman year at college, he was surfing at
night, drunk on his newfound freedom, local fame and, yes, booze,
too, when Jerry grayed out from one too many jello-shots
and rode a curl straight into a dock pylon.
And through the dock pylon and out the other side, and his speed kept
increasing as he rode through pylon after pylon and into the cliff-face beyond
and out the crest of the beachside hill into the night sky.
He blacked out completely at this point and his next
conscious though was why he was a half-mile away from the water with a wetsuit
on and a surfboard beneath him with a bunch of his party-goer
friends gathered around him looking concerned, claiming that he’d fallen from
the sky…
While ‘outed’ as a mutant among
his community of surf-rats, it seemed that the most common reaction is that it
made him even more ‘radical.’ There was
some muttering about him maybe cheating at the surf-competitions he’d been in,
but since he hadn’t actually won any of them, it never grew beyond a few sour
comments.
He was contacted within the month by another student he’d met
at parties, Max Caldwell, who’d gotten a nibble about a community-sponsored
local super-team. The next few months
were a blur, and he’s not sure he actually agreed to any of it, but ended
up signing all sorts of stuff that Max talked him into and over the next two
years was part of the short-lived sensation called ‘The Beach Patrol,’
a Huntington Beach-based superteam that seemed to
spend all of it’s time hawking merchandise, showing up for PR events and occasionally
actually stopping a crime, but mostly just ‘being seen’ in the area’s hot
spots (supposedly to help keep the peace, a sort of ‘visible presence’ but
really just to exploit them for all they were worth to the tourist industry).
The Beach Patrol consisted Jerry and four others;
Max Caldwell, AKA Ballistic, an apparent mutant with
wind / force-manipulation powers that shielded him from harm, allowed him
to fly and let him throw bolts that struck for significant force and throw
people back, a hard-partying eternal teenager with an-apparently limitless
capacity for ‘babes and brewskis,’
Keri Waters, AKA Lancer, a fairly shy telepath / telekinetic
with an assortment of other lesser psychic gifts (a touch of healing, precognitive
and postcognitive vision, ESP, etc.) who ended up
dating first Max, and then Jer, and finally attempting
suicide, as neither were mature enough to give her the sort of emotional stability
/ adult relationship she needed,
Sea Lion (no other name known), a seeming half-seal,
half-man hybrid, with good strength and command of sea mammals, who caused
the public disbanding of the team after admitting that he was more attracted
to ‘his own species’ than human women (the SPCA was not amused at the idea
of this ‘mutant’ using the California Sea Lion community as his own personal
harem) and
Carina St. Tropez (assumed to be a fake name) AKA L.A.Doll, eight inches of barely-repressed fury, her
full mass compacted permanently into her tiny frame, giving her fantastic
superhuman strength and resistance to injury, who served as a spokesperson
for Barbie ™ until losing that gig as a result of her public displays of temper
and profanity.
It was Keri who explained to Jerry how his powers likely
worked, theorizing that he could slide between the molecules of matter, robbing
it of inter-atomic energies that he could use for propulsion. Thus he could effectively ‘fly’ by stealing
momentum from the air, or ‘surf’ the ground or water at a far faster rate since
there was so much more inter-atomic energy for him to tap. He could also concentrate and take all of the
interatomic energies (or at least try to) and
effectively ‘melt’ anything he passed through!
After a combination of factors (Keri’s floating into a
gunfight without bothering to defend herself and getting shot, Sea Lion’s
retreat to the ocean to get away from ‘crazy humans’ and L.A. Doll’s violent
and expensively destructive quitting of the team because they weren’t
‘effective’ (read, violent) enough), Jer found
himself at loose ends, toying with Max’s suggestion that they reform the Beach
Patrol with new recruits. One week after
the ‘new recruits’ got recruited, Max was already sleeping with one of them,
and had also ‘recruited’ her into his band, where he was spending most of his
time, leaving Jer and the other two new recruits
holding their cheese.
Jerry finally left the oversized house he and Max had been
sharing, to find a more meaningful life far from the glamorous and fake
Hollywood ‘lifestyle’ that he’d been sucked into. He ended on the ‘Right Coast,’ and he
thoroughly despises the ocean here, but since his mutation, he’s felt out of
place, and even somewhat unwelcome (despite great public shows of enthusiasm
for his presence) at the surf exhibitions and competitions that used to be his
own little slice of heaven.
Unlike most of his team-mates, Jer’s
own feelings of abandonment have led him to pay actual attention to his
‘fan-club.’ Back in the days when the
team was officially endorsed and sponsored, their handlers had designed
web-sites for them and he has learned just enough to log onto his and update it
fairly regularly. At least once a week,
he logs on and picks two or three names from the registered users / fan-club
members (there are still over a thousand active members, he was pretty
popular!), and based on their bios, records a private video-message to them,
telling them how much he appreciates their support and trying to give them
encouragement in whatever interests they’ve got listed in their user
information. He doesn’t read reply mail,
unless forwarded to him by the moderator / head of his fan-club (his mother,
having ‘retired’ from the maid work, got greenlighted
through the whole application for citizenship process (a favor from his city
employers, back in the day) and, to his utter bewilderment, working with
computers…). He’s only personal with the
fans on *his terms.*
Jer doesn’t have to use a
surfboard to glide along (or through!) the ground (or water, or air), but he
just liked the idea of surfing down streets and sidewalks, and he is quite able
to ‘phase’ his ‘boogie board’ along with his clothes, watch, necklace and
dive-knife. With practice, he hopes to
be able to carry another person in this state, but he hasn’t yet mastered that.