Basic Information Name: Samuel Clarke Nickname/Alias/Etc: Greaser, Poltergeist, The Renegade, Sam Gender: Male Age: 18 Height: 5’9” Position: New student Appearance Hair Color: dirty blonde, bordering on brown. Eye Color: dark blue Ethnicity: The SAT would define him as “caucasian”. Physical Appearance: Sam is a short, rather average-sized boy, thin and short. He is rather well-built (he works out for baseball), and is toned, but not overly muscular. He has long arms and skinny fingers good for playing guitar with. He has a strong jawline and a cleft chin. He has a thin, angular nose and a very small, crescent-shaped scar on his right cheek. It is not uncommon for him to have some stubble on his face, giving him a five o’clock shadow look, though he is mostly clean-shaven. He has a wide mouth that is often curved into a wry smile in the corner and slightly yellowed teeth from his smoking addiction. Sam’s hair is a dark blonde, and is normally worn slicked back with hair products in an Elvis-like hairdo. Attire: Sam dresses like he hitched a ride in Doc Brown’s Delorean when he went to the fifties. He is a lover of fifties culture, and his choice of dress shows it. Sam almost always wears a pair of jeans and a fifties-style leather jacket. His shirt is normally either a plain white tee shirt or a shirt with one of his favorite bands on it. He wears a pair of biker boots on his feet. There is always a pack of Marlboro cigarettes in the top inside pocket of his jacket, tucked away in a spot where he hopes teachers will be unable to find it. Next to this box is a metal lighter. Personality Outward & Innate Personality: On the outside, Sam is your average, countercultural rebel teen. He likes partying, drinks more than most adults do without getting drunk, and has nothing against drugs of any kind. He has a blatant disregard for authority, and doesn’t care about rules at all. Rules were made to be shattered in his opinion. He’s very extroverted, and easily makes both friends and enemies. He’s got a temper to him, though, and plucking the wrong strings will most definitely get him a stay in the detention center and you a stay in the hospital (or vice versa). If it isn’t obvious enough by the backstory, he holds grudges, and rarely ever lets them go. Though Sam holds onto grudges, he holds onto friendships as well, and can be very loyal. He is very pack-oriented, although he always wants to be the leader of the pack. Sam can be a very judgemental person, and first impressions are everything with him. To people that don’t know him, Sam can be rather caustic and aggressive. He has a sense of intuition, and if he identifies someone as being untrustworthy, he will become very defensive towards them. It is very hard to change his opinion on someone. He gets in fights often, and acts like he has something to prove (because he feels like he does). He is very tuned towards respect; disrespecting Sam is a great way to make him hate you. Internally, Sam is a much different person. His carefree attitude is really more of a defense mechanism than it is a demeanor. Where he’s from, showing weakness could get you killed or mugged. Because of that, he tries to always look strong and confident, when internally he could be terrified. It’s very hard for him to share his feelings. His external personality covers up the broken, scarred man inside. Hobbies/Interests: Fix cars, play guitar, listen to music, drink, smoke (both tobacco and marijuana). Let’s just say that his hobbies aren’t ones that the staff of The Academy promote. His favorite bands are Buddy Holly and the Crickets, The Beatles, The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Ramones, The Kinks, Bad Company, Elvis, The Four Seasons, and the Eagles. His favorite food is chicken Chesapeake, though he also is a fan of hot wings. He takes his coffee black. Skills/Talents: Sam is a really good guitarist (I mean, at least for a seventeen-year-old), and sings decently (he does a good Frankie Valli impression). He is very street-smart and knows how to fight very well (from experience, no doubt). He more-or-less knows how to use a gun, and is proficient enough with a knife to give somebody a bad time. He is proficient at lock picking, and can do it with many different objects. Prized Possession: His lighter, which was given to him by his big brother before leaving for Afghanistan. Quote(s): “You want a quote? How about you get the f*ck out of my way before I shove your teeth down your throat ya lowlife?!” History/Bio: It’s safe to say that Sam didn’t grow up in favorable conditions. He was born in a bad neighborhood in south Baltimore, the youngest of three children. Sam’s father was a mechanic that owned a body shop, and his mom was a purchaser at a welding company. When Sam was ten, his parents split up over his dad’s drinking addiction, and he, his sister, and his brother all went with his mom to a new house on the other side of town. Several times, Sam tried to run away and go back to his old neighborhood, but every time he got to his father’s house, his father sent him back home, saying “I don’t want you to grow up to be like me, Sammy.” But the more Sam’s father told Sam not to be like him, the more Sam wanted to. He adopted a lot of his father’s love for oldies music and classic cars, and drank his first beer at thirteen. That same year, his older brother, who was twenty, left to go fight in Afghanistan. Sam and his brother had a very special bond, both listening to the same music and both often planning together about running away and reliving the “good ol’ days” on the streets of South Baltimore. This started a major downward crash in Sam’s life. About a year later, when Sam was fourteen, something happened that would change his life forever. While at a party, Sam’s sister was raped. She was eighteen, and apparently a rather drunk fellow of age nineteen by the name of James Garnet beat her up and raped her. But there were no witnesses to the crime, and the police could not prove that he committed the crime, so they gave up on it. Such is modern rape culture. Now let’s backtrack a bit; since Sam was twelve, he occasionally caught himself flickering in a mirror, like he was a person in an old black-and-white movie. One time, when he was nine, he got up to go to the bathroom and found that he was completely invisible. He reappeared about twenty second later, and never told his parents. He told his brother once, but he told Sam that he was probably dreaming. He mostly passed off events like this after that night, assuming that he had an overactive imagination. But the night that his sister came home from court sobbing, claiming that the police had dropped the case, something inside him felt...different. That night, he looked in the mirror in his bathroom, and, in his rage, punched it, shattering the glass. His stepfather came running, but when the walked into the bathroom, she found it to be...empty. In reality, Sam was standing a foot or so away from her, cowering in the corner (his stepfather didn’t have a problem hitting her children for bad behavior). He reappeared after his stepfather left a few moments later, and quickly ran into his room. Over the next few days, he experimented with his newfound gift, and was soon able to more-or-less turn completely invisible for long periods of time. About a week later, James Garnet disappeared from his home in Columbia, Maryland. He was found a month later floating in a river, with seven stab wounds in his chest and abdomen and what appeared to be a burn mark made from a lighter on his forehead. There were no witnesses. Thus, the Renegade was born. Sam was a nervous wreck for months after the murder. He ate very little, he stopped playing guitar (he had been playing since he was eight) and his performance in school plummeted. He went from a B student to a D student in a few short months. He got into fights often, and sent one kid who bullied him to the hospital after slamming his head in a locker; the kid had to get over one hundred stitches. Sam was expelled from school. At age sixteen, Sam ran away again, once more travelling to the streets of South Baltimore. He picked up his smoking addiction during this time, and used a stolen credit card to pay for his expenses. He was there for about ten months, living in a ratty apartment in the projects. He was an outcast in that society, but his ability allowed him to travel without arousing suspicion. He stole a gun, a Browning .9mm pistol, from a neighbor’s gun closet. One night, his house was broken into. The crook thought he got away. He was found a week later in the Patapsco River with two gunshots in his chest and a burn mark on his forehead, made from a lighter. No connection was ever made between both of The Renegade’s victims. Eventually, after being evicted from his apartment, Sam’s father found his son sitting in an alley, cold and alone and starving. His dad brought him back to the auto shop, and nursed Sam back to help. A week later, Sam’s dad brought him back home. His mother was furious, but his father calmed him down. Sam began seeing a therapist, who he hated, but who made him feel a bit better. Still, he never told anyone else about the murders. One day, Sam decided that he had enough of the therapist, and so got roaring drunk before he drove over for a meeting. He wrapped his mother’s car around a pole, but sustained only minor injuries. About four months later, Sam was out (he snuck out of his room), and by chance was caught reappearing by a rep from The Academy. The man said that Sam’s power was very interesting and unusual, and that The Academy would help him to control it better. Sam was greatly intrigued by the idea (anything sounds good to a grounded seventeen-year-old), but he didn’t want his family knowing about his power, on account that he was enough of a freak already without it. The rep understood, and contacted his mother as a representative of “The Dacious Academy”, a reform school in Alaska that claimed they could fix Sam’s problems. His mother was slightly suspicious, but she was desperate, and so two weeks later, Sam flew to San Francisco and boarded a cruise ship to The Academy. Family: Luther Clarke: Father Gael Rogers: Mother David Rogers: Stepfather SSgt. Ryan Clarke: Brother Maria Clarke: Sister Dominic Rogers: Stepbrother Relationships Relationships: Valjean Vesseal| antagonistic | Potential rival “The fuck did you just say to me you little bitch?” Vera Dubnin | Neutral | Friendly acquaintance "Well her hair looks like it was colored in by a four-year-old on acid, but besides that she seems cool." Henry Olin | Slightly scared of | Teacher "Please don't eat me." Vespera | Ew | Acquaintance (?) "She looks and acts kind of like something I swatted with a newspaper once." Abilities Power Class: Super-System 7 Power: Sam lovingly calls his power “true silence”, and this is not far off. You see, Sam has the power to disappear more completely than normal invisibility grants. He can firstly become invisible, along with any handheld object he touches. If he tries *really* hard, he could turn someone he’s touching invisible too, but it’s a big energy drain. In addition to conventional invisibility, Sam becomes invisible to all wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that things like thermal vision, radar, and x-ray detection don’t work on him either. They see straight through him like he’s not even there. When Sam turns invisible, he also becomes completely silent and scentless; he cannot be tracked. Even the most highly-trained bloodhound is useless when Sam decides to disappear. Sam is even able to disrupt supernatural forms of detection such as telepathy. Now don’t get me wrong; telepaths can still track him, but he’s much harder to track than your average human being. If he could lose himself in a crowd while invisible, then a telepath could have quite some difficulty finding him amongst other metas. Weaknesses/Limitations/Drawbacks: While Sam is impossible to see, hear, or smell, there are other indirect ways to track him. One hunting the Renegade must understand that he’s still there; he’s just near-impossible to sense. He still has matter and weight and still takes up space. So, while there are no ways to see him, there are ways to see what he is affecting, such as the diffusion of gasses. Gas or dust particles diffuse around solid matter, so a colored gas would in theory give you a perfect outline of Sam. It doesn’t have to be that difficult, though: things like dust, sand, flour, smoke, and steam will al diffuse around Sam, rendering him visible. Also, things like pressure plates can detect Sam, as he still has mass. Traps like trip wires still work on him as well. Secondly, Sam’s powers aren’t exclusive to everyone else. He can’t see, hear, or smell himself either. This means that when he is invisible, he needs to have very good kinesthetic awareness in order to not essentially lose himself. He’s become rather skilled at this, but is still working on it, and so while invisible his motor skills are significantly decreased. Thirdly, Sam’s power obviously drains energy. Being invisible for too long without taking a break causes him to temporarily lose his power, and because he cannot really feel being invisible, if he’s not paying attention he could reappear without knowing it. The longest he’s ever gone invisible is fifteen minutes in one sitting, but being permanently invisible in something like a fight when you can’t see yourself is very difficult. When Sam fights, he appears and disappears rapidly, making it appear almost as if he’s teleporting. But re-appearing or disappearing drains energy faster than maintaining does, so if he is fighting, Sam can only probably turn invisible for a grand total of maybe 5 minutes. Other: Theme song: [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww5GXbk58R0[/youtube]