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 | | Subject: Alistair Harrington Sun Aug 05, 2012 6:27 pm | |
| • Alistair • Phelan • Harrington •  Name: Alistair HarringtonNickname: ”Tesla”Age: 34Weight: 205Height: 6’1”Eye color: Silver-blueHair color: BrownRace: Human (Powered)Residence: (Where does your character live?)Nationality: AmericanAffiliation: Self-employedOccupation:Electrical Engineer, CEO and lead engineer for Apogee EngineeringFace Claim: Ryan Reynolds• all in the details • Appearance: Alistair is a little above average height, and has an athletic build – he carried over his training from his military days, and hasn’t cared to let himself backslide, so he has kept in excellent shape over the years. He has medium brown hair that is normally cut fairly short, and is usually clean shaven but has been known to let that slide at some times, particularly during the winter. He has little in the way of truly unusual features, though his eyes are an unusually pale shade of blue that is easily mistaken for gray or silver – just a family trait.Personality: Alistair is an intense, focused, and passionate person – it is far from uncommon for him to put his all into a project or activity to the exclusion of most else (sleep especially), and sometimes leaves his manners with a bit to be desired. This isn’t intentional, however, he simply has a tendency to overlook ‘less important’ things when something is on his mind. He is extremely curious as well and has a considerable thirst for knowledge; Alistair has never looked at something and not wanted to know how it worked, or been uninterested in a scientific pursuit. Beyond that, most people who know him would comment on his prominent moral compass. Alistair puts great time and effort into trying to do ‘the right thing’, however difficult or even impossible it might make things for him, and he’s put himself in danger more than once for this. It is that same quality and sometime refusal to accept a solution that falls too far into the gray area that caused him to split from Paladin a few years after the wall, despite having an excellent and highly-placed position at the company. Not the first time his morals have cost him monetarily or personally either, and likely not the last. Some settle for calling him the White Knight – and not without good reason.
Despite his history, Alistair is not generally on friendly terms with the military or military contractors, thanks to some deep personal issues and his own experiences toward the end of the war. Not to the point where he would shrug off his old friends or comrades in arms, but certainly enough to make him reluctant or even outright refuse to aid corporations or people with combat aims. He is not exactly nonviolent, however, and can sometimes be found in the city, helping those he finds. There is a small network he maintains where he and a few others he works with do what they can to help those who cannot help themselves… oftentimes against those with considerably greater resources.Abilities: Neurogalvanic Amplification: Alistair was born with the ability to amplify and control the electrical impulses produced by his body, an ability which mostly just allowed him to produce fairly low grade shocks and power some electrical abilities by touch, but which was refined and improved during his time with the military in the final years of the war. Years of practice and some biomedical modifications have allowed him to come into the full of his ability.
First, Alistair’s nervous system can use electrical current directly, allowing him to bypass the slower, chemical-based synaptic gaps that communicate between neurons in the bodies of most living creatures. By removing this weak link in the speed of the nervous system, Alistair’s effective perception of time can be increased considerably for short periods of time. How short depends on the level of increase – he can sustain factor of two for the span of a few hours, or a factor of ten for about ten minutes, for instance. The relationship is not linear, rather exponential, not unlike the way it takes four times longer to stop your car if you are traveling twice as fast, if Alistair doubles this speed factor he can only hold it for one quarter the time. This affects only his ‘speed of thought’ and reaction time, not the actual speed of his body – any apparent enhancement in his physical speed or agility is only due to his ability to process, plan, and react more quickly than normal. The greater neural control does allow him to fire every muscle fiber at need however, whereas the brain normally only uses a portion at a time to avoid damage. Because of this, Alistair can produce occasional bursts of speed or strength at peak human levels, but only for a matter of seconds, and he pays for it in minor muscle tears – the sort anyone who has truly overdone it lifting weights at the gym might be familiar with. Extended (or intense) use of this power results in powerful headaches and general pain to minor nerve damage. One of his modifications allows his body to recover from this, provided he does not push it to the point where severe damage is caused. Alistair could in theory die of a stroke if he should overuse this ability.
Second, Alistair can produce considerable amounts of electric power for offensive or defensive use. By using his increased bioelectric capacity, with focus he can produce vastly divergent electric potential regions on the surface of his skin and use them not unlike the terminals of a battery. Using his fingertips in this fashion, Alistair can produce an electric shock equal to or perhaps even greater than a military-grade taser weapon a few times a day, or a lower-grade shock (enough to cause pain or force someone to drop a weapon, perhaps) several more times. More commonly, he uses this ability to provide power and control to a number of devices and weapons he has produced for his own use, which he can do for extended periods (depending of course on the power needs of said device). In this way he can utilize many items normally limited by bulky power packs without having to carry said extra weight or bulk.
The most dramatic expression of his ability is something he can only do once – produce a true arc-flash event. Unlike what is often shown in the movies, or practiced by some mages who use magic to ease the current flow, Alistair’s arc flash is essentially the same as a serious fault in a power substation cabinet - thousands of amps of current, flashing the air along the ionized path to unbelievably hot plasma. Directing the current away as much as possible and producing a magnetic field to direct it allows him to shield himself from the worst of the blast, but his rare uses of this power in the war left him with severe burns on his hands despite protective gloves, and over-extended his power, leaving it unusable until he has had at least a day to rest. In return for his pain and exhaustion however, the arc flash is violent enough to produce an effect not unlike a flashbang, blinding and leaving a ringing in the ears for anyone looking or within fifty feet. Worse the projection of the heat produced by the arc can melt through metal and armor within about ten feet, and set clothes and other potential flammables afire within thirty. Within fifty feet, the effect is not unlike a bad sunburn – outside it, there is little effect at all.
Skills: As a former soldier, Alistair is a more than competent shot, and has always been at least fair in close combat. His military experience and other various experiences have sharpened this ability, though his ability is what makes him truly dangerous in a fight, allowing him to fight on par with most creatures to some degree. His intelligence doesn’t hurt with that either – he is often able to find a way to use the environment coupled with a small application of his power to his advantage.
Most of all, Alistair is an engineer. Between his natural talent, schooling, and experience with the human Navy in the war, Alistair can repair and modify most sorts of technology both pure and coupled with mana-based components. Beyond that, he is a prolific inventor with dozens of minor patents to his name and a series of significant ones, most prominently a series of magrail-based firearm technologies currently employed as frontline weapons in the Terran Guard. He is renowned as one of the foremost experts in the fields of electromagnetics and mana-electric interaction, and his work (as well as the products of his company) reflect this high degree of expertise and a unique insight into such things born partially of his power – but even more from a sharp and intuitive mind.
Since his departure from Paladin four years ago, Alistair has stopped producing weapons and combat equipment and focused on commercial communications and medical equipment primarily, with dabbling in most fields involving complex electronics… though he has not stopped coming up with ideas for these systems entirely, and has produced a few for his own personal use.• the tale of a lifetime• History: Like most humans, Alistair was born into a world with an uncertain fate. Locked for years in a battle that seemed it would be to the death with the Others, he grew up knowing that one day he would end up in the military, but like most he made the most of what he could. He excelled in school from an early age, rising to the top programs quickly despite considerable turmoil in his family life, with parents often on the verge of divorce – an issue they did eventually resolve before the birth of his baby sister, seven years his junior. Given their age difference, there was never much rivalry between them, and Alistair always doted on Marina… even as difficult as she occasionally made it on him.
When he graduated high school at seventeen, like most young men at the time, Alistair was pressed into the military, and became one of the junior technicians on the battlecruiser Agincourt , where he earned a string of minor commendations for valor and skill (some of his fellow sailors had been known to remark that Alistair sometimes kept the ship afloat by his stubbornness alone). That is not to say that every bit of his deployment went well of course, in particular one battle near Alaska where an elf threw him overboard, tied to a heavy toolkit and leaving him to sink to the bottom.
And that, as it turns out, was where he met Nerissa.
The Ondine had only just been broken free of the ice by the violence of the battle, and though without memories or knowing what he was, she saved him and took him back to his ship, where he barely survived hypothermia brought on by his exposure to the icy water. He spent most of the return voyage in the infirmary, imagining that he would never see the creature again, until she showed up on the beach one day. The two remained in contact for the rest of the war, with her trailing the ship and appearing sometimes when he found a private moment, as well as through his years in college. Alistair earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a bachelor’s in metaphysics in just four years before moving on to work at Paladin, where his talents earned him relatively steady promotions.
Nerissa did not stay, however – she left in the night two years after his graduation, leaving a note of apology but little real explanation… something that pains Alistair considerably to this day, though is also something he learned to deal with. Not that the world planned on being any easier, as a rogue military automaton, accidentally powered up and unleashed on the town where he grew up, killed both of his parents. While he had no hand in the design of the weapon itself, he had been working on similar devices for Paladin, and in addition to sending his little sister off on a journey of her own (from which she remained entirely out of contact with him for over a year) Alistair lost his passion for the work he was doing.
No longer convinced that what he did would be worthwhile enough to outweigh the risks if it was misused, Alistair resigned from Paladin, and a few years later founded his own development company. Still small, boasting little over a dozen employees but with some of the most advanced fabrication and prototyping equipment known, Alistair’s company develops specialized solutions and components for civilian enterprises, as well as serving as consultants on larger projects. Despite their small size, they have made a name for themselves, and the company does well enough to keep Alistair and the others in modest wealth… and to fund some of his less above-board activities.
Along with a small subset of off-the-books employees, Alistair provides more than just engineering solutions to those in need, dealing with rogue elements and hampering the efforts of less scrupulous corporations to step on the less wealthy and powerful. Not exactly a thriving business, but one Alistair feels he has managed to do some good with… and whatever he can manage will have to be enough. It can’t all be up to one person, but there’s always something to be done - even if his methods sometimes are less than what one might expect from such a group. Their tactics simply match the undertaking…Notes: Alistair’s personal technology is varied, though there are a few prominent pieces. His VCS (Variable Combat System) is a relatively small device that fits over his left arm. In its collapsed size, it is small enough to be hidden under a long-sleeved coat (like the armored duster coat he often wears), but deploys to something the size and shape of a small shield. The outer skin is made of an extremely high density, spell-reinforced armor, and contains a small-scale barrier projector similar to those used by the military (though much more compact) for deflecting magical and physical attacks. The rest of the components vary depending on what he might need, though the most common modules include a short vibroblade, a particle projection cannon (a type of beam weapon, less violent than a pulsed laser, but powerful enough to burn through layers of armor given time), and a spool of extremely fine microfilament wire, with a thread of myomer running along it. The wire is highly conductive, giving him some ability to use his shocking power at range, and the myomer thread can tighten on application of specific voltage, giving him some ability to control its path once thrown. It is strong enough to support approximately 250kg without breaking. When he anticipates the possibility of combat, he always wears it, along with his coat and a set of gloves with an extremely high thermal resistance, to shield him against the worst of his own power – especially his arc flash.Is this a Canon?: No Is this your second character, and if so, who is your first?:Nope! Melantha and Kale are my others.
Last edited by Alistair Harrington on Mon Aug 06, 2012 10:50 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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