AriamisEli
Full name:
Elijah River
Age:
20
Gender:
Male
Sexuality:
Bi, female preference
Personality:
Outwardly patient and easygoing, Eli is the kind that can entertain themselves for long periods of time with his internal life. That's not to say he's not personable, he's just a man of few words. He enjoys parties, especially when he gets to cook, and is quite adept at schmoozing potential clients in his gallery.
While normally he really is as cool and collected as he looks, he has small amount of paranoia and self doubt. Having used his powers so often in his art, he's had to bluff whenever someone asked how he achieved certain effects. This has lead to a feeling that he a fraud. His recent capture has not helped his feelings of paranoia, and can't help but react defensively when called out.
Appearance:
Eli is an average looking white man with wavy light brown hair. Neither fat nor thin, and just a hair over 5'10", the most distinctive feature about him is his rectangular glasses and freckles. He typically sticks with fancy graphic t-shirts and jeans.
Abilities: Material Manipulation
Eli can change the physical properties of a material. He can make metal soft as clay, plastic hard enough to cut stone, and glass stretch like rubber. So long as he can put his hands on it, he can intuitively make a material stronger,weaker, stretchier, harder, or any combination of similar things. This usually lets him shape materials in novel way with his hands, and the occasional sculpting tool. Additionally with extra effort he can reshape a material into complex shapes without working the material, instead 'encouraging' the material into shape with his mind. In practice, these two abilities have helped him in his life as an artist and sculptor.
However there are a few limitations to this. First, he must touch the object with his bare skin, preferably his hands. This means that he can't work his power on anything that he couldn't handle normally, like red hot metal. It normally takes a few moments for him to work his mojo, which means that he can't do things like make a baseball bat to the head feel like a whifflebat. Additionally he has trouble manipulating organic material like wood. So far the property changes are limited to only maintaining their effect while he is in contact with the material. They last at best 5 seconds after he lets go. He suspects that if he knew more about material science he'd be able make more permanent changes, but he's not so inclined.
Skills & Weaknesses:
- Artistic: Even without his powers, Eli is a good artist. In high school he used to get spending money by drawing caricatures at the mall. For a group of fugitives, this could mean the difference between ordering from the counter of a restaurant or eating from the dumpster behind it.
- Addicted: Eli has a tobacco addiction. He becomes irritable when he hasn't smoked in a while, and will go out of the way to get more if he runs out.
- Cook: He's nowhere near professional, but he's been able to cook full meals for himself and others for years.
- Handy: Between helping his father maintain an older house and working with a variety of sculpting materials, Eli has developed a knack for putting things together.
- Self-Disciplined: So long as he's not hankering for a smoke, he has incredible self control and can focus on a task for remarkably long periods of time or work through discomfort.
- Unskilled in Violence: Eli is not a fighter. His knowledge of gun use is "There's an end that bullets come out of, and trigger". The closest to fisticuffs he's ever done is Wii Sports Boxing, and the occasional wrestling match with his brothers.
- Needs Glasses: Exactly what it says. Without his glasses, Eli is extremely nearsighted and can't operate.
Background:
Eli was raised in a large town called Glennsbury, about an hour outside of Baltimore. He grew up as the youngest child of the middle class River family. For the most part, his childhood was happy and normal enough. It was his grandmother Robin that nurtured his love for art. They spent many an afternoon flipping through her collection of woodblock prints and visiting local artists. She joked that her refrigerator would need a bigger door to hold all his drawings.
By the time he reached high school, Eli was firmly on the way to becoming a professional artist. His room was wallpapered with sketches of everything and anything he felt the urge to draw, mainly ideas for new sculptures and woodcarvings. Some of the pottery he made in school was put on display in the local library. He took machine shop to learn how to work with metal. It was there that he first learned of his power. While he was marking a piece of steel stock to practice on the drill press, he noticed that he left a fingerprint in the metal.
Of course this piqued his curiosity, since he is not Superman. After much trial and error, he eventually figured out how to put his fingerprint in another piece of metal. It took him little time to start experimenting with the extent of his powers and applying them to his work. At first the extent of his manipulations only let him make changes and corrections to sculptures, but by the time he graduated from high school, he was able to use his powers to work materials into fine shapes. While he worked in a variety of mediums, it was his uniquely delicate ceramic and metal sculptures that earned him accolades. He took care not to expose his powers, mainly using his powers to do things that could plausibly be done with conventional techniques. But he must have slipped up somewhere. After all, how else did he get kidnapped?
