Codename
None
Real Identity
Jack Hawthorne
Age
18
Gender
Male
Role
None…yet
Appearance
Dominant Trait
Good friend
Peaceful, quiet, and genuine. Jack gives off the atmosphere of someone who is tired 24/7, when is isn't. He prefers spending time with small numbers of people, and using his head over his fists. Jack feels a sort of responsibility to the people that trust him. He is usually an easy going, laid back person that is good at keeping his head level and calm. Jack likes to think about people beneath whatever they're feeling, even monsters have emotions, after all, but if things get too tense, it's likely he'll try to find a way to stop whatever's happening. He can be counted on to be trustworthy and sincere, and to not be one to go behind your back or just give lip service to tell you what you want to hear. Jack doesn't fit the conventional image of a vigilante, by all accounts, he's still a kid who hasn't made a place for himself in the world. Some people are old as dragons, and they've had their whole lives to tell their own stories, but his has only just begun. What he does will shape who he becomes, as well as who he meets along the way.
He is at a crossroads in his life, part of him wants to find a meaning in what he is as a meta, the other wants to just live as he always has, but he feels like he can't do that forever. Eventually, everyone will see him as a meta, and that will change everything. Whatever happens, it won't happen any time soon. After all, everyone starts in the dark, at the bottom as low as Hel itself. The only way is forward.
Goal
PurposeSuperpower
Umbrakinesis
In simple terms, Jack controls pockets of space that are lacking any form of light. In complicated terms, he bends darkness alter its physical properties, or rather, make it actually have physical properties. This is done in a range of ways, such as stretch a shadow on a wall to a certain length and making it travel from the second dimension to the third, literally materializing nothingness, to sniffing out light. His powers are vague, saying you change the state of a shadow and then use how you see fit doesn’t paint a clear picture, and it doesn’t always make the most sense to Jack either, but it is a very difficult thing to get around if you’re not careful. There’s always a lamp to black out, always a shadow to touch. The inherent, and ironic obscurity of his powers make practice difficult, because it feels like his powers don’t have defined rules. Some metas can lift things with their kind, but not the earth, or of a certain weight. There are overarching rules to most powers that act as a universal checklist, but for him, it feels like everything has a different set of rules to work by.
Jack can theoretically change the state of darkness to anything he sets his mind to. Often when he was younger, he would give it density and mass to make a blade out of it. Imagine a foggy knife that appeared to be colored with vantablack paint that you can’t physically hold. The entire thing really only makes a decent amount of sense as Jack himself, and even then sometimes the physically impossible nature of it stumps him every now and then. He sometimes tries to rationalize it as “something that doesn’t have to make sense when it simply works.” The many forms the shadows seem to gravitate around include solid matter, fog, some form of viscous water, and more. At one point, it could feel like you're walking through a very thick smoke, the other, it might feel like hollow water brush past you, others, it's simply shadows that can be touched.
Thankfully, this makes the seemingly undoable apparent enough to write down, as he often does. For one, while it’s possible for Jack to snuff out a light source, he can only do this to particularly weak light sources. A lightbulb or a lamp, or the ceiling lights in a room, for example. He can’t simply black out the sun, as amazing as that would be. Even if he could, it takes constant, conscious effort to do such a thing. Next, shaping darkness depends on what he can work with. It’s almost like he makes darkness a tangible form of matter when he shapes it. If he makes a wall of darkness for example, it becomes solid, but a shadow big enough is necessary. The power Jack wields answers to a constant dynamic between sources of light and pockets of darknesses that can change constantly.
Even though Jack spends a lot of time experimenting with these powers, there are many things he still lacks the understanding of. Lots of metas have decades of training with their powers as well as years of practical experience, he only has a few of both. But even still, six years of experimenting no doubt has yielded some interesting results.
Most of his powers are vague and inconsistent in nature, but there is at least one thing that he knows for absolute certain. There is a connection between the capability of his powers, and his emotional level. In times of extreme stress, there is a risk that his powers will consume him, and he will drown.
It’s best if you don’t ask him what that means.
Other Skills
Slippery
Jack is good at getting away and keeping his head down, especially in places where visibility is poor
"Not sure why, maybe it’s because of what I was born with…"Power Control
Growing up in a safe home, Jack had plenty of time to figure out the way his powers work, more so than most his age.
”I was able to learn the ins and outs of what I could do because my parents are fine with it.”Empathy
Emotional intelligence is Jack’s strong suit. He knows how to connect to people by seeing things their way. He’s good at processing emotions, especially his own, he has to.
”You can fix a lot of things wrong with people just by figuring them out well enough. Sometimes it takes more than others, like for yourself.”History
"I have nothing serious to talk about. I'm still in high school for a month or two longer. I live with my parents, and lucky for me, they aren't humanists. I got lucky when my powers manifested. I was 12, and I saw a shadow on the wall start to shake, like it was made of water. I reach up, and it reached back. It scared me, badly, and it scared them too until they realized their son was born with the power to make shadows dance around. It was stressful for them, neither of them are metas, they had no idea how to raise a kid like me, but they tried. I never had to worry about getting kicked out, or anything like that, they weren't upset with me. It's just...I think they weren't ready for the chance it would happen. My mom and dad tried to see past it, and they did, but it was something they knew nothing about. They couldn't help me come to understand this power, so I spent hours alone figuring out myself. Still do. Turns out, there's a lot of rules I can break with this, and by rules, I mean rules like the one that says a shadow is nothing but a spot where light doesn't reach. I can make it more than that. It's useful, too. Once, I was helping my dad clean out the garage, and an 8 foot tall shelf fell over. I was fast enough that I made my shadow jump up and grab it. He probably would have been crushed otherwise, that thing felt heavy.
They're old, they were only a little older than I am when the humanists started organizing. I think they thought all the hate would have been wasted on them, because they knew that they'd have a kid who would be at the mercy of it all one day. They were right. Still, though, we don't always see eye to eye, but it's fine, they're trying. I talk to them a lot about vigilantes, and they disagree with the notion of that. I don't blame them since they come from a place without personal understanding. We metas don't have the same protections as my parents do, so we protect each other. They're patient enough that they're willing to actually think about that, but that takes time. They're trying to learn, and that's good enough for me. I don't tell them this, but sometimes I consider becoming one myself. They'd lose it if I said that to their faces any time soon.
There was this time a while back, when I walking home from school with a friend, since we didn't live far. Well, he's a bit more open about him being a meta than I am. We walked past a bunch of older looking guys who blocked us, because they recognized him. They started shouting a bunch of that humanist junk you hear, and one even pulled out a knife. I just reacted, next thing we knew, the shadows out from under my jacket snaked around my hands and made a weapon, like a pole or a stick. It wasn't much, since it was pretty bright out. Anyway, I swung for the fences, and he didn't get back up. The shadow in my hand broke over his head, the other two turned and ran. So did we. We made it off that street really fast in case we were spotted. That stuck with me. There aren't many metas around my age that can explore their powers as freely as me, and I have all this understanding built up...I feel like I could honestly write a book on this one meta ability, the thing is, I know how to use it, just not where. I want to find a way that this can be put to a good use, stopping giant shelves from falling over might keep my dad from getting smashed ribs, but there's so much more I can do if I knew what to do. I want to put it to good use, somehow. Looking out for others is something I was always good at, even if getting in metahuman fights is a bit different.
I'll figure it out eventually."
