Name: Atticus Finch

Age: 18

Alias: Talon

Appearance: [img]http://www.poetryfoundation.org/uploads/articles/3566edbd60/448x/xradcliffe-ginsberg-processed.jpg.pagespeed.ic.t8Xdl_tBY7.jpg[/img]
He wears the glasses for show; the lenses are nonprescription, but he sees being underestimated as an advantage.

Abilities: Atticus has extremely keen eyesight, hollow bones, enhanced reflexes, and the leg strength to leap much farther than a normal person. What gives him his alias, however, are the claws protruding from each finger like a hawk's talons. They are retractable, but whenever he feels threatened, they pop out instinctively and he must calm himself or find a safe environment before he can retract them, or simply eliminate the threat.

Skills: Atticus is very acrobatic, able to leap across rooftops with ease, and his talons lend themselves well to climbing, allowing him to scale even brick walls, albeit with some difficulty. His eyesight allows him to see incredible distances and also notice small details in appearance and body language, making him a skilled navigator, and this ability combined with his instincts and increased processing speed allows him to read people fairly accurately after observing them for a relatively short time. Growing up on the streets as he did has given Atticus an acute sense of self-preservation, and as such he is resourceful and frugal, and able to maintain stealth when necessary. He also learned some Russian during his three years with Katrina, but is by no means fluent.

Personality Traits:
Cautious, observant, pragmatic, withdrawn, deferential, thick-skinned

Backstory:
Atticus was born to an Irish immigrant girl when she was 16. He never met his father, he only knows that he was Greek and he was named after him, perhaps in the vain hope that he would hear the name in some bar one day and it would catch his attention, leading to a reunion with his father. When Atticus was four years old, his mother fell ill, and fearing that she wouldn't live to see his fifth birthday, she took him to an orphanage. A few years later, the orphanage fell to the pressures of the Depression, and at the age of six, Atticus was on the streets. His X-gene, though he didn't realize it, manifested when he was quite young, due to the stress and pressure of growing up on the streets, and he soon realized he was more agile and better at noticing things than any other 8-year-old. He used his increased aptitude to eke out an existence, and when he hit puberty, his mutation manifested fully, and violently. On a police patrol through the slums, he noticed a fellow urchin being threatened. Before he had a chance to think it through, he leaped to the girl's aid, catching the cop off-guard and pouncing on him, knocking him onto his back. Atticus started hitting him, and after awhile, he realized his hands were wet. And that the cop had stopped moving. He looked at his hands, now stained red, and noticed the claws for the first time. Terrified, his instincts took over, and he bolted, the girl forgotten.

After that unforgettable incident, he laid low for awhile, terrified of being caught and arrested, or worse. He avoided many of the other urchins, assuming they'd be afraid of him, even though none of them saw what had happened to the cop. After a month or two, he ran into the girl again. He tried to hide, but she walked over to him, showing no sign of fear. Instead, her eyes held gratitude, and curiosity. They were also yellowish-green, with catlike pupils. She introduced herself as Katrina, speaking with an Eastern European accent, and said he was "like her". She took his clawed hands in hers, and looked them over with wonder and appreciation, and it was then that Atticus noticed that her ears were pointed and tufted with... fur? And they seemed to twitch and move as though picking out individual sounds from the low background din of the city. For the next three years, Atticus and Katrina were inseparable, and Atticus was genuinely happy for the first time in his young life, enjoying a friendship and even the beginnings of a romance with the female mutant. Then, two nights after their first kiss, they were running along a rooftop when gunshots rang out, and more a few seconds later from another direction. A stray bullet struck Katrina in the temple, and she fell from the rooftop. Atticus dove after her, their fall miraculously broken by several bags of garbage. But it was too late. As Katrina's blood mingled with the filth from a broken garbage bag, her life left her while in Atticus's arms. He had no time to mourn her loss, however. Footsteps indicated that gunmen were approaching, and they might not think twice about gunning down some kid in the alley. So he took Katrina's body, slung it over his shoulder, and bolted.

In his years scrounging and thieving with Katrina, he had saved as much as he could, and he spent all of it to give Katrina a proper burial, in a cemetery and everything. He was the only one at her funeral, but it was more than most street kids got. He spent the next three years picking up odd jobs, not caring what he did or who he did it for, as long as he could keep himself going. He stole, sabotaged, even killed a few people, all so he could make enough money to pay rent on a small apartment and eat proper meals. One of his employers tasked him with stealing from a man named Charles Xavier. On the night he went to execute the job, after breaking into Xavier's house, a voice, surprisingly calm, sounded in... his head? "I know why you're here. You can take what you wish, I won't stop you. Or, you can listen to what I have to offer, and learn to be better. I know what you are. I can help you." Atticus decided to listen to what the man had to say; after all, if he was powerful enough to get inside his head, he'd be able to track him back to his employers and it would be all over, and there was little point in running. He decided to take Xavier's offer and begin learning at the Xavier Institute.