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[OOC] Character Background and Personality (WIP)
Codename: Voltage
Real Name: Maxwell Carson
Age: 14 – 18 (depending on canon point used)
Birthdate: 08/13/1997
Birth Place: Breaker Falls, Pennsylvania
Height: 5’6” – 5’11” (depending on canon point)
Weight: 195lbs
Designation: Superhuman
Rank: Level B (potential Level A)
PB: Marcus T. Paulk
BASIC INFORMATION:
Superhuman with the ability to siphon energy from other sources to boost his own powers and act as a walking battery pack. He is the youngest member of a special Omega Squad at only 17 years old working for the U.S. government to deal with supernatural and unexplainable threats on American soil. Max is a bit of a show off, but mainly because he gets stuck as back up all the time. He's the safety and no one wants him injured. So when he gets to do things, he likes getting to show he's just as competent as the rest of his team, only he lacks foresight and sometimes gets himself into more trouble than he should. He's loud, boisterous, and yet also knows how to calm any situation with a good joke. Despite being the youngest he's been working with the Omega Squad for almost two years.
ABILITIES:
Max’s body is capable of absorbing various forms of energy and altering it into other forms of energy that can be released by him at will (and sometimes accidentally). He can shape it into a form of electricity, lasers, or pure energy blasts. He also can use it to boost the energy/abilities of others by adapting his powers into a sort of "battery" and transferring his energy into them. He is only capable of doing this if he can borrow some of their energy first in order for his body to learn how to mimic it. Currently, he's also training to adapt his energy to speed up cellular formation and thus healing of major injuries in the field, but all the science and biology required takes time. This makes him a strong support member of the Omega Squad, but he hates being thought of that way. He wants to be on the frontlines, not in the background.
The more energy he expels through the day the bigger "boost" he needs, or he'll fall into a sleep similar to a coma until his energy levels are at a normal level--for him. Consuming large amounts of calories can help stave off this replenishing sleep, but he metabolizes food quickly and thus it's only a temporary fix. He's capable of also stealing energy from living things, but to protect others from himself he keeps an inhibitor band on his wrist that prevents his body from stealing energy from anything organic.
PERSONALITY:
Max is a happy guy for the most part. He hates focusing on the negative aspects of events and instead tries to put a positive spin on everything—to an annoying degree when it’s a serious situation. He also enjoys using sarcasm, bad puns, and horrible jokes to try and relieve the tension in stressful situations, such as when he had been shot in the leg while they were facing off against the gun-happy superhuman Merc and made his teammate Victoria cut open his leg to dig the bullet out. He chit-chatted and joked the entire time, no matter how much pain he was in and she punched him in the face (lightly) for joking about it, but in the end it had been just the distraction she had needed to keep her grounded while she did it.
Max is always in a better mood when he's almost "topped up" meaning he has energy in his body to spare. His powers react much like a TV that is plugged in, but turned off. He leaks energy in minute amounts throughout his day and without extra boosting of his energy, he will be sleepy and irritable (and rude, even angry, to the point of putting people off or scaring them) by bedtime--even sooner if he expels more energy throughout the day.
Because of his normal chatty and friendly personality and the tenuous control he has of his volatile abilities, people often to assume that Max came into the Omega Squad recently or that he’s led a fairly trouble free life. In most ways he did, in his opinion. No, he didn’t enjoy the medications he was on to control his behavior and mood swings, and he still feels a lot of guilt about what happened with his family, but again, he prefers to focus on how he’s turned his life around for the good. He will reminisce about his family with anyone who asks and brings up random anecdotes about his siblings. He loves remembering them. It doesn’t change the fact that he harbors a lot of guilt for what he did to them. Instead, he uses it as a reminder of why he’s on the Squad.
Sometimes Max’s optimism does get in the way of the team’s missions, but not intentionally. Whereas some members of the team, particularly Ricochet (Gavin Rackliffe) and Amalgam (Kali Ichinomiya-Perry), believe that some superhumans do need to be put down because their powers are too dangerous, Max believes that anyone can learn to control their powers—or at least find a way to manage them. If DELTA had not given him that opportunity he could be dead himself already and possibly hundreds or thousands of people with him. At the same time, if the order is given that the person is too dangerous and has every intention of using their powers to hurt people, Max will be the first one ready to put them down and protect others from them (this is also a sign of how he believes his team and DELTA should deal with him if it comes down to it, but it’s a topic he avoids discussing).
His optimism doesn’t mean he’s only happy all the time either. Max’s powers can cause major mood swings. When his energy is low, he’s cranky, irritable, fatigued, and can be more biting and less caring about what comes out of his mouth. He loses a lot of his normal motivation, too. He knows he’s not a pleasant person to be around when he’s like that so he tries to avoid other people as much as possible. There is a temptation to just take off the wristband and borrow a bit of energy from others to set himself to rights, because he hates how being low makes him feel, but there is also a reflexive revulsion and fear about what could happen if he started down that road.
Max is a natural extrovert. He loves being around people, talking to them, making friends, cheering up people who seem to be having a bad day, or even giving out less-than-savvy romantic advice. Being around people rejuvenates him in an emotional way even when his powers are blocked from siphoning energy. He’s not really a love guru likes he thinks (his last boyfriend was over four years ago when he was thirteen), but he considers his love of movies and television and popular culture to mean he has enough “experience” to help anyone looking for love. It’s just another side of how much he wants to help people with finding their happy ending in life, even though his help can come across as him just being nosy and intrusive.
POST CHICAGO INCIDENT
It's been a long 16 months for Max. He lost the only places he had left that he could call home. Cut off from the only family he had. He did get to travel even more and experience sides of the world he never would have seen under DELTA sanctioned missions. He got to see how other countries treat their Superhumans (some great, some horrific), and worked to do right by those in need when he could. He may have been on the run, but Max wasn't going to stand by and let people be hurt if he could do something about it. He may have had his life upturned, but at least he was still making a difference.
Then came the betrayal of having been turned in by one of his own former teammates. Sure, he and Gavin may not have always seen eye to eye on things, but he had never expected the resentment or bitterness or negativity to have been so deep that Gavin would call in the troops against him. And maybe if he hadn't spent five weeks being tortured and used as a battery for Weapons of Mass Destruction, he might have even been able to forgive him for it, because Max didn't used to be someone who holds grudges.
Max also didn't used to see himself as someone who had caused the deaths of over a thousand people. Things have changed. Max instead sees all the proof that he is exactly the very threat that he has always worried at the back of his mind that he would be. When he had all but begged them to kill him, he had meant it. The fact they had found another way around it didn't change the fact that in that moment, knowing what he had become, Max had been willing to die. He had thought he'd at least live to see his twentieth birthday before that happened, but life doesn't work out the way you want sometimes. Or in Max's case, a lot of the time.
Without the inhibitor band his powers have become a little more wild, less controlled, due to the immense nature of the overload, but Victoria told him that would settle again with time. He just needed to retrain himself. Whereas Max would rather never use his powers again ever because who knows when something like this will happen again and he kills more people? Maybe Gavin had been right. Maybe Max really was too big of a threat to leave alive when people would just keep dying around him.
Maybe he'd stop thinking about dying once his energy settles down and his equilibrium goes back to normal. Right now he's kind of numb and trying to sort out fiction from reality as he spent weeks watching everyone he loved die or and over again and isn't exactly sure who is dead or alive and how much of that fiction was truly a lie. They didn't break him completely, but there are so many cracks, Max isn't sure he can see the image of who he used to be when he looks at himself anymore.
HISTORY:
Max was born in a simple town called Breaker Falls, Pennsylvania, which ironically was named more for the amount of power outages which were common in the area before the mid-20th Century, rather than it being near any actual waterfalls or large rivers. His parents moved there when his older sister was a young girl because his father’s construction business had really taken off and they could afford to buy a larger house with more property to it. His powers manifested after his fifth birthday, with him siphoning energy from those around him or crashing due to lack of energy in ways that caused his behavior and moods to swing wildly enough for his parents to worry.
Because of the way his mood swings around due to his energy levels his parents at first believed that he was suffering from a personality or behavioral disorder. They took him to a therapist and then a psychiatrist, which thought he may be suffering from ADHD, or bipolar disorder, but couldn’t be sure of it due to his young age. He spent years on medications trying to control this, which had the side effect of suppressing his powers, but also left him with a suppressed personality. The medication prevented him from leaking energy or collecting any, and thus his level stayed low because if he used it (unconsciously), he had no way of recharging except through natural energy intake (eating, sleeping, etc).
By the age of fourteen the medications were doing more harm than good to his mental and emotional stability, but his parents weren’t willing to give up on him and wondered if maybe stress from school or something else could be causing it. So they decided to get away. They thought a three to four week road trip visiting important landmarks across the United States would be a great way to relax and learn some American history while they were at it. Max left his meds on his bedside table--on purpose, because he knew they wouldn’t be able to get a refill that easily while out of state.
Within a week he was feeling better, his energy levels were up and he was more active, happier, but then it continued from feeling better to feeling manic while his mother and younger brother were both feeling more exhausted. He was taking in too much energy and didn't even realize it. The family was on its way to the visit Tombstone, Arizona, when they were caught out during an electrical storm and Max's powers were activated on accident. He siphoned all of the energy out of the RV's battery and engine. They were trapped on the road in the middle of the desert and Max was becoming increasingly more active and wired as the lightning struck out in the area around them.
He became jittery and couldn't stay still, to the point that he ran out into the storm to get away from the walls of the RV and his family. His father ran after him, but Max tried to keep him away, as soon as he touched Max lightning struck them both, but the amount of power it had was enough to overload Max's body. He expelled it all in a huge burst, leveling everything within a mile of him--including his father and the RV his family was in. Max lost consciousness and woke up to find that he had been taken in by D.E.L.T.A. and had been quarantined as his powers had been active even while he was sleeping.
The Head of the Superhuman Supervision Subdivision (commonly called "S-Cube"…by Max anyway), Darron Moore (Chronos) came to speak with Maxwell and informed him that his family had been killed when he released all of the excess energy, except for his older sister who was now paralyzed from the waist down. He explained that the medication that Max had been taking had managed to suppress his abilities but once he stopped taking it and it has been flushed from his system, his body tried to forcibly balance itself out, which led to it consuming far more energy than it had before. His powers had increased as he had aged, hence why Max had to take stronger doses of the meds as he had gotten older.
This hit Max hard and he spent weeks living in a containment cell in the S.S.S., allowing himself to undergo testing and different experiments on how to manage his energy consumption. He periodically received updates on his sister Joanne's recovery and even later on began communication with her through emails and text messages, but refuses so far to see her in person. They tried to train him in how to control his abilities but found it was too subconscious of a reaction to allow it to be left to his own will alone, so they designed a wristband that monitors his biometrics. It controls how much energy he intakes and prevents him from siphoning energy from organic matter (primarily he can’t take energy from skin-to-skin contact), but it cannot control how much he releases at once.
Director Moore forced him to go through six months of extensive physical training before allowing him to even shadow one of the reconnaissance teams, but it wasn’t long before he was placed on Omega Squad. Victoria Barnetti (aka Feed) was the first member he met and the longest standing member of the team. He immediately nicknamed her Vicksa and got a smack in the head for it. She’s been his pseudo-older sister figure ever since. He has a habit of kind of falling in with Big Sister figures (Vicksa, Kali, Cici, etc), but doesn't like to think too much about this since it makes him feel guilty of about his distant relationship with his Joanne.
He’s been on the team for almost three years, and one of the longest lasting members as they recover from a low point where D.E.L.T.A. had been threatening to disband and rebuild the entire thing from the ground up. A mission to observe and then extract a Super from Harvard University went very wrong. They didn’t realize he was a telepath who could use hypnosis and it ended up with one of his team members dead (Barricade), the field leader in a coma and temporarily paralyzed (Risk), and another leaving the team to join a different squad (Sidhe). Since then they added two new members (including a new field leader) and they’ve been working on rebuilding their reputation within the organization.
Recently he was approved to finish his last two years of high school at a D.E.L.T.A. approved public school in a suburb of New York City where his team is stationed. The last three years he’s been educated in a DELTA headquarters and so the chance to interact with more people his own age who aren’t other DELTA agents was a huge thing for him. He’s technically a year “behind,” because he should have been a senior this past year, but he’s okay going into the school as a junior. It gives him a whole extra year to get to know people and have the high school experience.
He had fun, got to make friends with a couple of people, joined the Media Club (extracurricular that did the morning announcements over the TVs in the school, also does music videos for the choir, band, and a Capella groups), wanted to go out for cross country, but had that turned down by Director Moore, and even managed to go on a date with a cute guy from his Calculus class. Only to find out said boy, Trev (Oscar Trevino), really just wanted him to help him pass the class with something better than a ‘D.’ It hurt that Trev couldn’t be honest with him and felt the need to lie, but after not speaking to him for a day and his newest BFF Frankie punching Trev in the face (after Max had already punched him hard enough to bruise his chest), Max felt justice had been served enough for him to forgive him. Since then they’ve been really good friends.
Things were strangely quiet over the summer. He knew Omega wasn’t getting as many missions as they used to after the Harvard incident, but it still felt like the calm before the storm. There were still reconnaissance missions they were doing to keep an eye on unregistered Supers who had been flagged recently, the team building stronger as Vickers took the reins and they all got to know each other better. They even managed to stop a crazed Super planning to use his combustion powers to blow up a city block in Manhattan after he’d been fired from the pizzeria there. Confidence has been building.
There were the accounts of missing Supers and potential (unregistered) Supers happening all over the country and in Canada, but there was no headway being made in that department. Something was happening but it was being kept so tight that D.E.L.T.A. couldn’t forsee who was doing it (although they had suspicions about M.A.R.K.O.’s intentions, despite lack of evidence. So the relatively quiet summer moved on into the school year and Max found himself settling into a strangely normal routine of school (real schooling, not just the tutoring and training at the DELTA facilities), work, and extra time on his hands. It’s been a while since he had that.
And then came Homecoming and Max’s first real school dance (he hadn’t gone to Prom the past spring due to a mission), and he hadn’t even gotten a date because he, Frankie, Desi, Xandra, and Trev were going to go as a group instead. It was going to be a fun group thing. In the weeks leading up to Homecoming there are events as usual, and Max has wondered if maybe all of the activity is making him a bit twitchy because he’s sure someone has been watching him. He hasn’t seen anyone outright watching him, but it feels like he’s had eyes on him for weeks now.
He tried to ignore it, ready to enjoy the Pep Rally that night when the nominees for Homecoming Court are announced. He was going to meet up with his friends on the bleachers only to get ran into by someone, a new guy named Payton who had just starting at the school at the beginning of the school year. He hadn’t really talked much with the guy, but they’d been friendly in the halls and they shared a history and government class. Payton ran right into him, knocking them both into the wall. Max managed to not drop the food in his hands, but Payton did spill his drink all over his arm. He apologized and helped him up. Max waved it off and just told the guy to watch where he’s walking next time. Payton nodded and wished him luck for Homecoming court.
Max took the food up to his friends on the bleachers and then ran back into the school to change his shirt. He wasn’t going to wear a sticky soda-covered shirt for the next two hours. But just the amount of time he spent around the filled stands left him feeling awkward, charged. He thought maybe he was just feeding off of the energy in the crowd figuratively because his inhibitor wasn’t showing itself as malfunctioning. He went on about his business.
But he couldn’t help but notice as the Pep Rally went on that people around him were looking tired and fatigued while he was feeling more and more wired. Frankie even told him to calm down, but as soon as she touched him she jerked away, feeling the crackle against his skin. Max jumped up and tried to get away from the bleachers, but every person he passed was showing signs of being affected by what he realized now was his powers going into overdrive. He was collecting too much energy too fast and he didn’t know why. All he knew is that he needed to get away from people and grab his communicator so he could call his Squad.
Frankie followed him and in his attempts to get away from her, he ran around the back of the bleachers towards the parking lot. She was asking him to calm down so that they could get him help. Since his friends didn’t know he worked for D.E.L.T.A (he hadn’t mentioned it yet), all he could do was worn her that he was getting too topped up and something bad was about to happen. She grabbed for his arm and his powers released blowing her backwards into a car, sending off all of the car alarms, causing the lights in the parking lot to overload and burst. Some of the cars even overloaded, batteries getting super charged, cutting the cars on without being touched. The shockwave went through the half the school campus, include the football field where the Pep Rally was being held, causing the lights to flicker then burn out and the radio system to be fried.
Max is so drained he collapses to the ground, but crawls over to Frankie, lifting her head into his lap to check her over. She had a head wound and he was pretty sure her arm was broken from the force of hitting the side of the SUV. He looked down and saw that his inhibitor had been completely overloaded, having gotten so hot it had burned through on one side, leave his arm bloody and scorched, but he hadn’t even been paying attention to the pain. And now that it was broken he felt like his body was somewhat under control again, no longer draining energy from all around him—too exhausted to do so.
He started calling for help, trying to keep himself conscious but eventually he passed out and woke up in a D.E.L.T.A. medical facility. Moore was there and told him that something had been done to his inhibitor, causing it to make his energy intake spike instead of restricting it. They were sure how it had happened or why but the news had not taken it kindly. Max just wanted to know that everyone was okay. Frankie was the only person suffering from more than fatigue, and energy drain sickness, and fear from not knowing exactly what happened. It was two days later that it was leaked to the press by someone unknown that the attack was caused by a Superhuman who had been at the event. They were lucky they had managed to put a gag order on his name being revealed, as he was no longer a minor, but this was not looking good for DELTA. The public wanted accountability.
Effective immediately, Max was pulled from school, was not supposed to have any contact with the people from the school and Omega Squad was once again on the chopping block. He lost all of the things he had gained over the last year and his entire team could pay for something that was known wasn’t even his fault. But since they didn’t know who or what to blame (besides suspicions that an anti-DELTA organization had done it to cause an uproar), Max was the only one left. Victoria and Kali had stood by him, refusing to let him get railroaded but he knew the unsaid ultimatum was there. Either he left the Squad or the Squad may not be there for him to leave. He didn’t know what to do.
And then one day he got a warning from Vicksa on their private channel. She told him he had to get out and fast. Someone had sent a team to “collect" him but they were not using normal protocol and didn't have normal frequencies for their radios. Something was wrong. So Max got the hell out dodge. He left the dormitory, snuck out of the base, and went to an OTG (off the grid) safe house that Victoria had set up for herself years ago. She wouldn't come to the house so as to not accidentally lead his pursuers there, but she left him everything he would need to get out of the country. He took the money, cards, and tech and took a plane ride to Atlanta before taking a greyhound to Florida then out of the country to the UK. From there he met up with a local acquaintance of Vicksa named Henson who drove him from England through France, Belgium and then on to the Netherlands.
It was in Rotterdam that Max collided someone who would change his life. He thought he was safe for now, had a chance to regroup and connect with his contacts. But he wasn’t, because as soon as he got close to the port that he was going to be leaving on a cargo ship from, he was attacked. The men were wearing black tactical gear and carrying inhibitor bands that would completely shut down his powers. He knew that they had to have been coming from whoever was tracking him as who else would know about his abilities and how to suppress them. They chased him through the docks and almost blew up the ship he was planning to take if he had not diverted the bomb. He was so weakened from the use of his energy he collapsed, but in was right into the arms of some person he ran right into. The young man used a flash grenade to distract his assailants and dragged him into his car before driving off into the city.
Max lost consciousness for a while, but when he woke up he was in another safe house that was owned by this young man whose name turned out to be Jacob Morán. Jacob wouldn’t explain how he knew how to find Max or how he got all of the technology to knock out and get away from the Tactical group tracking Max but he did explain that he had connections with some people inside DELTA and may have heard that something was going down in Rotterdam, but not exactly what. He thought it was a major extraction of a compromised operative, but it turned out to be them going after one of their own (or so they assume if the group truly was sent by DELTA). It was very surprising to him.
Max spends months traveling with Jacob, jumping from country to country, continent to continent. Sometimes he even helps Jacob on jobs when he pushed him enough to let him, and they needed to connections or benefits they would gain from the contracts Jacob picked up. They met new people, like a group of vigilante heroes who didn’t want to be part of DELTA, with one of the leaders of the group, Portal (Elisa Portsmith), providing them information about other young Supers who had been vanishing off the streets and in cities across the US. Most of their time was spent staying low and trying to investigate what was going on with DELTA and why Max was put on the Wanted List.
They became very close, Max and Jacob. To the point that Max even felt like he might be developing feelings for Jacob, but there was always a barrier between them (and some random freebies Max picked up himself because he can’t stay back if he sees someone else in trouble or in need). Jacob couldn’t be honest about his own past or how he had gotten tangled up in Max’s. A lot of secrets. Still, he trusted him. After a year of them working together with barely any contact from anyone Max knew (except for very very brief, very very sporadic communications with Vicksa, who Jacob still would not explain how he knew), how could Max not trust him? He’d be dead or worse without him.
Then came Rio de Janeiro. Jacob had gotten a tip that something would be going down there that involved MARKO, which they had been slowly gaining information as being a lot less clean and upstanding a company than Max had thought it was. Sure, DELTA didn’t always get along with the CEO and founder, but it still seemed mostly legitimate. As much as any mega-corporation can be.
Max didn’t expect to run into Converse and Ricochet there. Sean and Gavin were there not for a mission, but for Carnival, as the team had been disbanded after Max went AWOL. They had been taking time off since the fall out. Max and Gavin had never completely gotten along, too many differences in opinion, on how more dangerous Supers should be handled. It turned out that Gavin also was really bitter about how things had gone down with Max being the cause of the team being disbanded. Max hadn’t even realized just how much the team meant to Gavin, considering how he acted most of the time.
Sean was a lot less aggressive and accusatory, but in the end, Gavin sold Max out. Even though he contacted Jacob and they tried to get out of town, it turned out to be too late. The same type of tactical team that came for him in Rotterdam showed up in Rio, but they were far more prepared. They were able to take out Jacob, blowing up the boat they had been on, and capture Max. And while they claimed they were DELTA and were taking him in for going AWOL, Max knew something it was all a lie.
That lie was proven when he woke up hours later in a transport vehicle, restrained with a total-inhibitor brace around his neck. It wasn’t any DELTA facility he knew of that he was taken to and the people there definitely weren’t wearing DELTA IDs or anything like that. He was transferred into a machine that hooked into his arms, legs, with a helmet that covered the top of his head and eyes. When the inhibitor brace was removed he tried to use his powers only to have the energy be absorbed by the machine.
He tried again and the same thing happened. He realized that was the purpose of the machine and stopped, but the people he couldn’t see—scientists and engineers, he assumed—told him to keep going, to expel as much energy as he could. Max refused. So they tried to force him by inducing energy surges in him. First by using the visor on the helmet as a type of virtual reality, feeding him repetitive scenarios of people in need or himself in danger or his team dying where he would be need to use powers. He realized these weren’t real, but it was hard to not get caught up in them. They felt real enough. It went on like this for weeks, with him being pushed to the limits of what energy he had and how they could extract and utilize it. How they could manipulate his mind into altering the energy into various forms.
But it wasn’t enough. So they decided to increase his output by increasing the input. They hooked a specialized generator to the machine, feeding his body more and more energy, which he would then expel as a different form of energy. Until finally he went nuclear.
They pushed him until he expelled almost all the energy in his body in one massive burst, then used one of the machines they had created to redirect it, using it like a weapon that could be focused on whatever they wanted and then released. The place they chose to release it on was an underground DELTA base in outside of Chicago that was used as a training facility for Supers. It took out five whole blocks, and half the underground base. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured and/or killed.
And it didn’t stop there. Max kept expelling energy. All kinds of energy. He overloaded the machines restraining him, exploded the generator, and kept going. He couldn’t cut it off. The facility he was trapped him was breaking, structural damage causing evacuations. Everyone valuable was ordered to get out before he exploded again others scrambled to try and save themselves.
He stumbled through the building trying to find a way out, no one able to get near him, all bullets and other weapons deflecting off the energy barrier swirling around him or being absorbed into it. People who got too close collapsed as their own energy was sucked out of their bodies, either comatose or dead. Then Jacob was there, yelling his name and telling him that help was coming. That Max just needed to get his shit together for long enough until they could get there. How had he managed to get inside this facility? Ya girl Portal, that’s how.
Max asked them to kill him, to find some way to just stop him, so he wouldn't hurt anyone else. But Jacob didn't have that kind of power and Portal couldn't get close enough to use her own powers without interference from his. Max would have to get control of himself somehow.
Finally, Max managed to focus enough to realize what was happening, but he knew he couldn’t stop entirely. There was still too much energy in his body and he couldn’t seem to stop. So he tried to redirect it instead. He focused it into his own hands, making it into a ball of swirling energy that was wrapped up in itself. It became a small ball of devastating energy and the mass destructive going on around him finally stopped, but he was tired and strained and didn’t know how long he could hold it for.
He asked Portal if she had any kind of images in her mind of somewhere far away from people. Far, far far away. Thankfully she did, but she wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. Jacob told her to just try and so of course she opened up and Portal to outer space. That immediately began to suck everything around it inside and they had to act quick or someone was gonna get to become an astronaut the unconventional way. Max threw the ball through the portal, and it exploded almost immediately, but thankfully Portal managed to close her gate just in time. In the sky above them it looked like a star had exploded, but it was far enough away that it didn’t seem to hurt the Earth…as far as they knew.
Max collapsed on the ground and could barely breathe. Jacob tried to help him but he told him to stay back. He couldn’t touch anyone. He didn’t know what would happen if he did. Thankfully that is when the help arrived in the form of Victoria and Yul. They slapped an inhibitor on his neck, cutting off his powers, and then Max passed out.
When he came to, it was in a secured safe house, Vicksa vetted, that she had been slowly reinforcing on the down low ever since Max went AWOL. It took a while, since she was under surveillance due to her connection to him, but like someone with her powers couldn’t handle “surveillance.” They told Max about the infiltration of DELTA by a group connected to MARKO and that Jackson Young was definitely behind it all. And MARKO had somehow managed to get the mainstream news media to blame DELTA for the attack on its own facility, claiming some disgruntled Super must have decided to get revenge, at the cost of so many lives.
1,071 so far and counting.
And what Max doesn't even know yet is that the energy core design was actually invented by his sister, Jo, although she had created it to be a never ending battery that could power wheelchairs, prosthetics, and other machines and tools for people with disabilities, much like her own.
FAMILY
Max’s immediate family is his parents and two siblings, an old sister and younger brother. His father had three brothers, one of which died while in the military, the other two he was estranged from before the accident, his youngest brother and his wife took in Max’s sister. His mother was an only child who had been born to an older couple.
JOSEPH SAMUEL CARSON
Max’s father, owner of Carson Construction Company. Veteran, hardworker, and devoted to his family. Despite choosing construction (because he wanted to help build and rebuild communities), he also has a master’s in robotic engineering. He might look intimidating, but he was usually the softie of the family, wanting to give his kids things he never had growing up poor and raised by a single mother, who his kids knew as Gran (real name Maxine). The kids knew if they wanted something going to dad first and pleading their case would most likely get it and then he would find ways to smooth it over with their mother. Despite spoiling them, he also encourages a strong work ethic and for them to apply themselves so they wouldn’t have to work as hard as he did. Died in the accident when Max lost control of his powers during a big lightning storm. Had three brothers, Peter, Isaac and Solomon (the youngest). (PB: Chi McBride)
VIVIAN LEKE-CARSON
Max’s mother, a part-time history professor at Penn State, and (now former) director of the local branch of the Allegheny Historical Foundation. She’s strict and would not budge when it came to education and extracurricular activity, wanting her children to be well rounded and not spend all of their time on video games and television. Max got around this often by way of the effects his medications had on him, but his mother would even turn the average blockbuster action film into a study of pop culture and its influence on present day history. She wanted their minds turned on at all times. At the same time, she encouraged them to only do things they love or might be interested in and to stick with it as much as possible. “Quitters aren’t people who stop doing something they don’t enjoy, they’re people who stop trying anything.” Died in the accident when Max lost control of his powers during a major lightning storm. Had no siblings and both of her parents have passed on from old age, having had her when they were straddling their forties. Quentin and Karina Leke were a career-focused couple who decided on children late and struggled to have one because of it but eventually succeeded. (PB: Lalah Hathaway)
JAYDEN CARSON
Max’s little brother. He was an active kid, happy, a little bratty due to how spoiled he was, but he and Max got along more often than not. A bit of a math whiz, to the point he was completing calculus and trigonometry equations with a special math tutor as his parents weren’t sure they should skip him a grade for math alone. Four years younger than Max. Died in the accident that also killed his parents. Jayden was named by Max and Joanne as their parents gave them naming rights for any third child that might come along. Both liked the name because it meant he could be nicknamed J.D. (PB: Philip Bolden)
JOANNE CARSON
Max’s older sister by over five years. Kind, outgoing, very active. She loves sports and a variety of hands-on activities and was involved in a different one each school season, but also has her father’s architectural and engineering talents. Got into college on an athletics scholarship. She tended to tease Max and was less relaxed with him than she was with their little brother, Jayden, but mainly because she felt he needed that structured and set lifestyle with everything going on. She still made certain to spend time with him whenever she came home on the weekends from school and encouraged his interests. She was paralyzed in the accident when Max lost control of his powers. She spent a year in a medical facility recovering before moving in with her Uncle Solomon and his wife Tonya. Since then she’s moved out on her own, thanks to the sign-on bonus she got when she was hired by M.A.R.K.O.’s medical technology division. She knows Max is a Superhuman and works for DELTA, talking with him through text, email and even phone calls, but she hadn’t had a chance to tell him about her new job. (PB: Shanice Banton)
SCHOOL FRIENDS:
Since enrolling at Fillmore High School, Max has made friends with a lot of people. It was the first time since before the accident that he’d had friends who were normal. People who weren’t Supers or other agents working for D.E.L.T.A.
FRANCESCA BARTELLI
17 years old. Head of the Media Club, star of the Martial Arts Club, step-sister of Alexandra, and head journalist for the Fillmore Feed, the high school news channel. Very driven, knows what she wants and will do what it takes to get it. Fiercely protective of friends, sometimes to the point she takes things too far. If there is something bad going down, Frankie wants to be there to expose it. Her father and mother divorced when she was a baby and her dad ended up with primary custody. She still sees her mother once or twice a year, spending a few weeks with her in the summer in Florida, but they’re more like casual friends instead of mother-daughter. Her goal in life is to grow up to be an overseas correspondent for a renowned media group. Max’s BFF since his first week at the school. She and Trev have been friends since they were in elementary school, but it wasn’t until the fake-date with Max that she found out his own issues with his mom and they’ve become a lot closer since then. Injured when Max’s inhibitor was tampered with. PB is Hailee Steinfeld.
ALEXANDRA MIKHAIL
18 years old. Captain of the Debate Team, part of the Cultural Alliance, a volunteer at the local Innocence Project, and she does chior. Already voted most likely to become a Supreme Court Justice. Dating Desmond. Also loves fashion and showing athletic women can be physical and elegant (so she likes dressing up her stepsister). She and Max spend a lot of time teasing each other and Max hits on her boyfriend Desi because he knows it makes her possessive (and he knows Desi likes that but is kind of shy about admitting those things to Xandra). Xandra has Goals in life and she’ll do what she has to in achieving them. Her father died when she was 6 and her mother remarried Frankie’s dad when she was 11. As much as she and Frankie get along (and fight along), she still has trouble seeing her father as her own “dad” because he’s taken pains to avoid trying to replace her dad. She calls him “Ray” because his name is Ramone. PB is Imaan Hammam.
OSCAR TREVIÑO
17 years old. Friend Max made on his first day of school in Advanced Calculus class. Asked Max out on a date so he could try to pump him for information to pass the class because his dad was threatening to ship him back to his mother on the other side of the country if he couldn’t “apply himself better.” Considering his mom didn’t really want him in the first place after the divorce and was happy in her single globe-trotting lifestyle, Trev really didn’t want to live with her. He was tempted to pay someone to do his Calculus work for him, but then Max blew into school and he thought, oh hey, a cute guy who is super smart. He hadn’t meant to ask him out originally—at least not like that—but it’s what came out of his mouth. And to prevent himself from looking dumb since Max seemed into the idea, he ran with it. Of course this led to him getting punched by Max when he figured it out, and then again by Frankie like days later. He felt really bad about it, since he liked Max and tried to make it up to him. He even promised him Super BrainFreeze Ultra Slush every day for a month. It worked. They’ve been super close friends since, but Trev isn’t about to tell anyone he still has a crush on Max, especially since Frankie promised to rip his balls off and pin them to the school bulletin board. PB is Vini Uehara.
DESMOND WALLACE WHITMORE III (DESI)
17 years old. Son of one of the Big Money Families in New York State. The money is old. He loves football and swimming, but had some major anger management issues in junior high and freshman year of high school at a very prestigious and exclusive private academy upstate. Desmond is also hiding the secret that he is a Superhuman as he's very afraid of it getting back to his parents, who have nothing kind to say about Supers. He has the ability to see people's emotions are colorful auras around them. When he was younger it made it hard to focus and to trust people as the people closest to him often had very negative colors around him and this bled into his view of himself. He was under a lot of pressure from his parents to excel and to “make good on their investment” in his education. Desi couldn’t handle it so he avoided it instead by sneaking out, getting drunk, going to huge parties, and not paying attention to his schooling outside of acing all of his tests.
He got caught with drugs on his possession and was suspended for three days and it turned out that the boy who gave him the drugs was the one who ratted him out to avoid getting into trouble with his own parents. After three days of dealing with his parents talking about what a failure he was and how he wasn’t going to amount to anything, Desi went to school and punched the boy out in the hallway for joking about getting away with it. This led to his expulsion from the private school and in hopes of punishing him enough with the shame, his parents sent him to a public school instead. An open enrollment public school that was a 90-minute drive away. But instead of floundering and begging for an out, he ended up flourishing there. Suddenly he had people around him who bled positive colors and emotions. He made friends who encouraged him to do better and be better and Alexandra became a real North Star for him, helping him to want to get back on track, not just to please her, but because she made him believe he deserved it for himself. When his parents saw how well he was doing they thought he had turned himself around and were planning to send him to another private school. He managed to convinced them that it would be much better optics for his father’s budding political career if they saw his son attending a public school as a way of proving to the middle class he was “down to earth” and supported education reform. Max teases and flirts with him because he figured out that Desi likes it when Alexandra gets possessive and commanding with him, but Desmond is too embarrassed by how much he likes her taking charge (boy is thirsty for his girl, yo) to ever admit it out loud. He still hasn't told his friends about his empathic ability because he's afraid they'll think he's been invading their privacy, even though he can't help it. PB is Alexander Ludwig.
OTHER FRIENDS/IMPORTANT PEOPLE
Max has other people who are important to him but aren’t family, friends, or coworkers. Some of these people have a great impact on his life. Anyone of significant relevance will be mentioned below.
JACOB MORÁN (BIRTHNAME: JACOB ALEXIS GALLAGHER)
20 years old. He met Max in Rotterdam when he was saving his life from a tactical group that have been sent to capture him. Originally his plan was to help max out as a favor to someone working in on the inside and then collect on that favor later on but when he realized Max’s abilities he insisted on traveling with him to make sure that he got to his next location safely, implying he knew more about it than he was saying. Unfortunately that location was compromised but they managed to get away safely without either of them being noticed. Because of this, Max ended up traveling with Jacob for an extended amount of time, getting to know him and connecting with him. They had a lot of common interests and spent most of their time bantering back-and-forth, teasing each other. Jacob doesn’t like to talk about his past or how he gained all of these skills and knowledge that he has about the inner workings of the US government and the DELTA programs, but it’s obvious that he knows something from someone. He has no advanced special abilities but Max does believe that he might be a Level D superhuman considering his skills, reaction times, and level of training. Jacob isn’t confirming or deny.
Jacob is average height, 5'10", black hair, and hazel brown eyes. He is skilled in the use of firearms, hand-to-hand combat, engineering, hacking, and knows his way around a book of classic literature (he is a huge book snob, but also quotes classics at random when he’s feeling playful or thoughtful). He can be very grumpy and dismissive at times, but he also shows he cares for people who are in need. For all the snarky and witty remarks, his primary focus seems to be on helping those who need it and taking down those who abused others with as much prejudice as possible. He can be brutal and bloody to the point that Max sometimes has to step in and stop him from killing, but Max never feels in danger when he’s with him. He sees a good person in Jacob and part of the reason he hasn’t tried to contact more of the people Vicksa gave him is because he doesn’t want to split from him just yet. He wants to know more about him and maybe help him with whatever demons he’s running from like he’s helped Max. PB is Jake T. Austin.
MISCELLANEOUS:
OMEGA SQUAD:
Freefall: Montgomery C. Vickers (aka Monty) | Field Leader - manipulation of gravity
--A bit stiff and considers himself a professional, but has a weakness for detective movies. Is having trouble with insecurity about living up to "replacing" the previous Field Leader.
Voltage: Maxwell Carson (aka Max) – energy absorption and manipulation
Amalgam: Kali Ichinomiya-Perry (aka Kali-Kali-Ichi) - shapeshifter
--A very snarky girl who wishes people would stop assuming just because she's half-Japanese that she knows everything Asian. Let her enjoy her black cats and animal documentaries in peace, kthnx. Also one of Max's Big Sister Horde that he collects.
Feed: Victoria Samantha Barnetti (aka Vicksa) – electronic communication and data stream manipulation
--Tough, direct, professional woman in her late 30s who tends to look after the rest of the team, but isn't the most gentle about it. Team coordinator. Has a hang up about blood and other bodily fluids. Max considers her the Team Mom.
Ricochet: Gavin Rackliffe – telekinetic energy shields and barriers
--A dick. But a well-intentioned dick who puts his foot in his mouth and doesn't realize how poorly he comes across. He takes a bit to get used to, but is very loyal and overprotective (drives Kali's cat Amaru nuts).
Converse: Sean Thompson – size shifting (molecular manipulation)
--The resident geek. He has a thing for Converse sneakers, sci-fi, and conspiracy theories.
Pygmalia: Thalia Véga – animation (life-force manipulation)
--A bit on the shy side, but she's got a lot of personality (more open and opinionated) when you get her going. She loves art and the theater.
Former Members:**
Barricade: John Archers – impenetrable skin and super strength
--Big lumox of a guy who was really too gentle for his own good. A little clumsy, but friendly (unless he's angry).
Sidhe: Felicia McCready – wings and the ability to shoot out her feathers as energy shards. They grow back within minutes.
--Pushy, domineering, flirtatious, but also easy-going and friendly. A bit of a schemer/prankster. Very little rattles her.
Risk: Yul Walken – Ability to alter probability, causing unlikely things to happen or likely things not to happen | Former Field Leader of Omega Squad
--A little on the wild side, willing to throw himself into situations and take risks for his team. Also fun, bond-oriented kind of guy who was big on the team being a family as well as co-workers.
Tap: Seth Mars – psychometry, limited ability to see a person’s past or future through touching of an object they’ve handled recently. Can only see through the eyes of the person who touched the object.
Screen: Bobbi Jameson – invisibility and full cloaking (loss of scent, footprints, etc) while invisible.
Mason: Adam Hiram – golem creation. Can use earth-based materials to create animated golems/dolls that look and would pass for human. He controls them telepathically.
Beamer: Denice Malkovich – light manipulation, usually in the form of energy beams and cloaking abilities (reflecting light to give the appearance of invisibility)
**Only includes those who have been on the Squad during Max's time with the Omega Squad
Real Name: Maxwell Carson
Age: 14 – 18 (depending on canon point used)
Birthdate: 08/13/1997
Birth Place: Breaker Falls, Pennsylvania
Height: 5’6” – 5’11” (depending on canon point)
Weight: 195lbs
Designation: Superhuman
Rank: Level B (potential Level A)
PB: Marcus T. Paulk
BASIC INFORMATION:
Superhuman with the ability to siphon energy from other sources to boost his own powers and act as a walking battery pack. He is the youngest member of a special Omega Squad at only 17 years old working for the U.S. government to deal with supernatural and unexplainable threats on American soil. Max is a bit of a show off, but mainly because he gets stuck as back up all the time. He's the safety and no one wants him injured. So when he gets to do things, he likes getting to show he's just as competent as the rest of his team, only he lacks foresight and sometimes gets himself into more trouble than he should. He's loud, boisterous, and yet also knows how to calm any situation with a good joke. Despite being the youngest he's been working with the Omega Squad for almost two years.
ABILITIES:
Max’s body is capable of absorbing various forms of energy and altering it into other forms of energy that can be released by him at will (and sometimes accidentally). He can shape it into a form of electricity, lasers, or pure energy blasts. He also can use it to boost the energy/abilities of others by adapting his powers into a sort of "battery" and transferring his energy into them. He is only capable of doing this if he can borrow some of their energy first in order for his body to learn how to mimic it. Currently, he's also training to adapt his energy to speed up cellular formation and thus healing of major injuries in the field, but all the science and biology required takes time. This makes him a strong support member of the Omega Squad, but he hates being thought of that way. He wants to be on the frontlines, not in the background.
The more energy he expels through the day the bigger "boost" he needs, or he'll fall into a sleep similar to a coma until his energy levels are at a normal level--for him. Consuming large amounts of calories can help stave off this replenishing sleep, but he metabolizes food quickly and thus it's only a temporary fix. He's capable of also stealing energy from living things, but to protect others from himself he keeps an inhibitor band on his wrist that prevents his body from stealing energy from anything organic.
PERSONALITY:
Max is a happy guy for the most part. He hates focusing on the negative aspects of events and instead tries to put a positive spin on everything—to an annoying degree when it’s a serious situation. He also enjoys using sarcasm, bad puns, and horrible jokes to try and relieve the tension in stressful situations, such as when he had been shot in the leg while they were facing off against the gun-happy superhuman Merc and made his teammate Victoria cut open his leg to dig the bullet out. He chit-chatted and joked the entire time, no matter how much pain he was in and she punched him in the face (lightly) for joking about it, but in the end it had been just the distraction she had needed to keep her grounded while she did it.
Max is always in a better mood when he's almost "topped up" meaning he has energy in his body to spare. His powers react much like a TV that is plugged in, but turned off. He leaks energy in minute amounts throughout his day and without extra boosting of his energy, he will be sleepy and irritable (and rude, even angry, to the point of putting people off or scaring them) by bedtime--even sooner if he expels more energy throughout the day.
Because of his normal chatty and friendly personality and the tenuous control he has of his volatile abilities, people often to assume that Max came into the Omega Squad recently or that he’s led a fairly trouble free life. In most ways he did, in his opinion. No, he didn’t enjoy the medications he was on to control his behavior and mood swings, and he still feels a lot of guilt about what happened with his family, but again, he prefers to focus on how he’s turned his life around for the good. He will reminisce about his family with anyone who asks and brings up random anecdotes about his siblings. He loves remembering them. It doesn’t change the fact that he harbors a lot of guilt for what he did to them. Instead, he uses it as a reminder of why he’s on the Squad.
Sometimes Max’s optimism does get in the way of the team’s missions, but not intentionally. Whereas some members of the team, particularly Ricochet (Gavin Rackliffe) and Amalgam (Kali Ichinomiya-Perry), believe that some superhumans do need to be put down because their powers are too dangerous, Max believes that anyone can learn to control their powers—or at least find a way to manage them. If DELTA had not given him that opportunity he could be dead himself already and possibly hundreds or thousands of people with him. At the same time, if the order is given that the person is too dangerous and has every intention of using their powers to hurt people, Max will be the first one ready to put them down and protect others from them (this is also a sign of how he believes his team and DELTA should deal with him if it comes down to it, but it’s a topic he avoids discussing).
His optimism doesn’t mean he’s only happy all the time either. Max’s powers can cause major mood swings. When his energy is low, he’s cranky, irritable, fatigued, and can be more biting and less caring about what comes out of his mouth. He loses a lot of his normal motivation, too. He knows he’s not a pleasant person to be around when he’s like that so he tries to avoid other people as much as possible. There is a temptation to just take off the wristband and borrow a bit of energy from others to set himself to rights, because he hates how being low makes him feel, but there is also a reflexive revulsion and fear about what could happen if he started down that road.
Max is a natural extrovert. He loves being around people, talking to them, making friends, cheering up people who seem to be having a bad day, or even giving out less-than-savvy romantic advice. Being around people rejuvenates him in an emotional way even when his powers are blocked from siphoning energy. He’s not really a love guru likes he thinks (his last boyfriend was over four years ago when he was thirteen), but he considers his love of movies and television and popular culture to mean he has enough “experience” to help anyone looking for love. It’s just another side of how much he wants to help people with finding their happy ending in life, even though his help can come across as him just being nosy and intrusive.
POST CHICAGO INCIDENT
It's been a long 16 months for Max. He lost the only places he had left that he could call home. Cut off from the only family he had. He did get to travel even more and experience sides of the world he never would have seen under DELTA sanctioned missions. He got to see how other countries treat their Superhumans (some great, some horrific), and worked to do right by those in need when he could. He may have been on the run, but Max wasn't going to stand by and let people be hurt if he could do something about it. He may have had his life upturned, but at least he was still making a difference.
Then came the betrayal of having been turned in by one of his own former teammates. Sure, he and Gavin may not have always seen eye to eye on things, but he had never expected the resentment or bitterness or negativity to have been so deep that Gavin would call in the troops against him. And maybe if he hadn't spent five weeks being tortured and used as a battery for Weapons of Mass Destruction, he might have even been able to forgive him for it, because Max didn't used to be someone who holds grudges.
Max also didn't used to see himself as someone who had caused the deaths of over a thousand people. Things have changed. Max instead sees all the proof that he is exactly the very threat that he has always worried at the back of his mind that he would be. When he had all but begged them to kill him, he had meant it. The fact they had found another way around it didn't change the fact that in that moment, knowing what he had become, Max had been willing to die. He had thought he'd at least live to see his twentieth birthday before that happened, but life doesn't work out the way you want sometimes. Or in Max's case, a lot of the time.
Without the inhibitor band his powers have become a little more wild, less controlled, due to the immense nature of the overload, but Victoria told him that would settle again with time. He just needed to retrain himself. Whereas Max would rather never use his powers again ever because who knows when something like this will happen again and he kills more people? Maybe Gavin had been right. Maybe Max really was too big of a threat to leave alive when people would just keep dying around him.
Maybe he'd stop thinking about dying once his energy settles down and his equilibrium goes back to normal. Right now he's kind of numb and trying to sort out fiction from reality as he spent weeks watching everyone he loved die or and over again and isn't exactly sure who is dead or alive and how much of that fiction was truly a lie. They didn't break him completely, but there are so many cracks, Max isn't sure he can see the image of who he used to be when he looks at himself anymore.
HISTORY:
Max was born in a simple town called Breaker Falls, Pennsylvania, which ironically was named more for the amount of power outages which were common in the area before the mid-20th Century, rather than it being near any actual waterfalls or large rivers. His parents moved there when his older sister was a young girl because his father’s construction business had really taken off and they could afford to buy a larger house with more property to it. His powers manifested after his fifth birthday, with him siphoning energy from those around him or crashing due to lack of energy in ways that caused his behavior and moods to swing wildly enough for his parents to worry.
Because of the way his mood swings around due to his energy levels his parents at first believed that he was suffering from a personality or behavioral disorder. They took him to a therapist and then a psychiatrist, which thought he may be suffering from ADHD, or bipolar disorder, but couldn’t be sure of it due to his young age. He spent years on medications trying to control this, which had the side effect of suppressing his powers, but also left him with a suppressed personality. The medication prevented him from leaking energy or collecting any, and thus his level stayed low because if he used it (unconsciously), he had no way of recharging except through natural energy intake (eating, sleeping, etc).
By the age of fourteen the medications were doing more harm than good to his mental and emotional stability, but his parents weren’t willing to give up on him and wondered if maybe stress from school or something else could be causing it. So they decided to get away. They thought a three to four week road trip visiting important landmarks across the United States would be a great way to relax and learn some American history while they were at it. Max left his meds on his bedside table--on purpose, because he knew they wouldn’t be able to get a refill that easily while out of state.
Within a week he was feeling better, his energy levels were up and he was more active, happier, but then it continued from feeling better to feeling manic while his mother and younger brother were both feeling more exhausted. He was taking in too much energy and didn't even realize it. The family was on its way to the visit Tombstone, Arizona, when they were caught out during an electrical storm and Max's powers were activated on accident. He siphoned all of the energy out of the RV's battery and engine. They were trapped on the road in the middle of the desert and Max was becoming increasingly more active and wired as the lightning struck out in the area around them.
He became jittery and couldn't stay still, to the point that he ran out into the storm to get away from the walls of the RV and his family. His father ran after him, but Max tried to keep him away, as soon as he touched Max lightning struck them both, but the amount of power it had was enough to overload Max's body. He expelled it all in a huge burst, leveling everything within a mile of him--including his father and the RV his family was in. Max lost consciousness and woke up to find that he had been taken in by D.E.L.T.A. and had been quarantined as his powers had been active even while he was sleeping.
The Head of the Superhuman Supervision Subdivision (commonly called "S-Cube"…by Max anyway), Darron Moore (Chronos) came to speak with Maxwell and informed him that his family had been killed when he released all of the excess energy, except for his older sister who was now paralyzed from the waist down. He explained that the medication that Max had been taking had managed to suppress his abilities but once he stopped taking it and it has been flushed from his system, his body tried to forcibly balance itself out, which led to it consuming far more energy than it had before. His powers had increased as he had aged, hence why Max had to take stronger doses of the meds as he had gotten older.
This hit Max hard and he spent weeks living in a containment cell in the S.S.S., allowing himself to undergo testing and different experiments on how to manage his energy consumption. He periodically received updates on his sister Joanne's recovery and even later on began communication with her through emails and text messages, but refuses so far to see her in person. They tried to train him in how to control his abilities but found it was too subconscious of a reaction to allow it to be left to his own will alone, so they designed a wristband that monitors his biometrics. It controls how much energy he intakes and prevents him from siphoning energy from organic matter (primarily he can’t take energy from skin-to-skin contact), but it cannot control how much he releases at once.
Director Moore forced him to go through six months of extensive physical training before allowing him to even shadow one of the reconnaissance teams, but it wasn’t long before he was placed on Omega Squad. Victoria Barnetti (aka Feed) was the first member he met and the longest standing member of the team. He immediately nicknamed her Vicksa and got a smack in the head for it. She’s been his pseudo-older sister figure ever since. He has a habit of kind of falling in with Big Sister figures (Vicksa, Kali, Cici, etc), but doesn't like to think too much about this since it makes him feel guilty of about his distant relationship with his Joanne.
He’s been on the team for almost three years, and one of the longest lasting members as they recover from a low point where D.E.L.T.A. had been threatening to disband and rebuild the entire thing from the ground up. A mission to observe and then extract a Super from Harvard University went very wrong. They didn’t realize he was a telepath who could use hypnosis and it ended up with one of his team members dead (Barricade), the field leader in a coma and temporarily paralyzed (Risk), and another leaving the team to join a different squad (Sidhe). Since then they added two new members (including a new field leader) and they’ve been working on rebuilding their reputation within the organization.
Recently he was approved to finish his last two years of high school at a D.E.L.T.A. approved public school in a suburb of New York City where his team is stationed. The last three years he’s been educated in a DELTA headquarters and so the chance to interact with more people his own age who aren’t other DELTA agents was a huge thing for him. He’s technically a year “behind,” because he should have been a senior this past year, but he’s okay going into the school as a junior. It gives him a whole extra year to get to know people and have the high school experience.
He had fun, got to make friends with a couple of people, joined the Media Club (extracurricular that did the morning announcements over the TVs in the school, also does music videos for the choir, band, and a Capella groups), wanted to go out for cross country, but had that turned down by Director Moore, and even managed to go on a date with a cute guy from his Calculus class. Only to find out said boy, Trev (Oscar Trevino), really just wanted him to help him pass the class with something better than a ‘D.’ It hurt that Trev couldn’t be honest with him and felt the need to lie, but after not speaking to him for a day and his newest BFF Frankie punching Trev in the face (after Max had already punched him hard enough to bruise his chest), Max felt justice had been served enough for him to forgive him. Since then they’ve been really good friends.
Things were strangely quiet over the summer. He knew Omega wasn’t getting as many missions as they used to after the Harvard incident, but it still felt like the calm before the storm. There were still reconnaissance missions they were doing to keep an eye on unregistered Supers who had been flagged recently, the team building stronger as Vickers took the reins and they all got to know each other better. They even managed to stop a crazed Super planning to use his combustion powers to blow up a city block in Manhattan after he’d been fired from the pizzeria there. Confidence has been building.
There were the accounts of missing Supers and potential (unregistered) Supers happening all over the country and in Canada, but there was no headway being made in that department. Something was happening but it was being kept so tight that D.E.L.T.A. couldn’t forsee who was doing it (although they had suspicions about M.A.R.K.O.’s intentions, despite lack of evidence. So the relatively quiet summer moved on into the school year and Max found himself settling into a strangely normal routine of school (real schooling, not just the tutoring and training at the DELTA facilities), work, and extra time on his hands. It’s been a while since he had that.
And then came Homecoming and Max’s first real school dance (he hadn’t gone to Prom the past spring due to a mission), and he hadn’t even gotten a date because he, Frankie, Desi, Xandra, and Trev were going to go as a group instead. It was going to be a fun group thing. In the weeks leading up to Homecoming there are events as usual, and Max has wondered if maybe all of the activity is making him a bit twitchy because he’s sure someone has been watching him. He hasn’t seen anyone outright watching him, but it feels like he’s had eyes on him for weeks now.
He tried to ignore it, ready to enjoy the Pep Rally that night when the nominees for Homecoming Court are announced. He was going to meet up with his friends on the bleachers only to get ran into by someone, a new guy named Payton who had just starting at the school at the beginning of the school year. He hadn’t really talked much with the guy, but they’d been friendly in the halls and they shared a history and government class. Payton ran right into him, knocking them both into the wall. Max managed to not drop the food in his hands, but Payton did spill his drink all over his arm. He apologized and helped him up. Max waved it off and just told the guy to watch where he’s walking next time. Payton nodded and wished him luck for Homecoming court.
Max took the food up to his friends on the bleachers and then ran back into the school to change his shirt. He wasn’t going to wear a sticky soda-covered shirt for the next two hours. But just the amount of time he spent around the filled stands left him feeling awkward, charged. He thought maybe he was just feeding off of the energy in the crowd figuratively because his inhibitor wasn’t showing itself as malfunctioning. He went on about his business.
But he couldn’t help but notice as the Pep Rally went on that people around him were looking tired and fatigued while he was feeling more and more wired. Frankie even told him to calm down, but as soon as she touched him she jerked away, feeling the crackle against his skin. Max jumped up and tried to get away from the bleachers, but every person he passed was showing signs of being affected by what he realized now was his powers going into overdrive. He was collecting too much energy too fast and he didn’t know why. All he knew is that he needed to get away from people and grab his communicator so he could call his Squad.
Frankie followed him and in his attempts to get away from her, he ran around the back of the bleachers towards the parking lot. She was asking him to calm down so that they could get him help. Since his friends didn’t know he worked for D.E.L.T.A (he hadn’t mentioned it yet), all he could do was worn her that he was getting too topped up and something bad was about to happen. She grabbed for his arm and his powers released blowing her backwards into a car, sending off all of the car alarms, causing the lights in the parking lot to overload and burst. Some of the cars even overloaded, batteries getting super charged, cutting the cars on without being touched. The shockwave went through the half the school campus, include the football field where the Pep Rally was being held, causing the lights to flicker then burn out and the radio system to be fried.
Max is so drained he collapses to the ground, but crawls over to Frankie, lifting her head into his lap to check her over. She had a head wound and he was pretty sure her arm was broken from the force of hitting the side of the SUV. He looked down and saw that his inhibitor had been completely overloaded, having gotten so hot it had burned through on one side, leave his arm bloody and scorched, but he hadn’t even been paying attention to the pain. And now that it was broken he felt like his body was somewhat under control again, no longer draining energy from all around him—too exhausted to do so.
He started calling for help, trying to keep himself conscious but eventually he passed out and woke up in a D.E.L.T.A. medical facility. Moore was there and told him that something had been done to his inhibitor, causing it to make his energy intake spike instead of restricting it. They were sure how it had happened or why but the news had not taken it kindly. Max just wanted to know that everyone was okay. Frankie was the only person suffering from more than fatigue, and energy drain sickness, and fear from not knowing exactly what happened. It was two days later that it was leaked to the press by someone unknown that the attack was caused by a Superhuman who had been at the event. They were lucky they had managed to put a gag order on his name being revealed, as he was no longer a minor, but this was not looking good for DELTA. The public wanted accountability.
Effective immediately, Max was pulled from school, was not supposed to have any contact with the people from the school and Omega Squad was once again on the chopping block. He lost all of the things he had gained over the last year and his entire team could pay for something that was known wasn’t even his fault. But since they didn’t know who or what to blame (besides suspicions that an anti-DELTA organization had done it to cause an uproar), Max was the only one left. Victoria and Kali had stood by him, refusing to let him get railroaded but he knew the unsaid ultimatum was there. Either he left the Squad or the Squad may not be there for him to leave. He didn’t know what to do.
And then one day he got a warning from Vicksa on their private channel. She told him he had to get out and fast. Someone had sent a team to “collect" him but they were not using normal protocol and didn't have normal frequencies for their radios. Something was wrong. So Max got the hell out dodge. He left the dormitory, snuck out of the base, and went to an OTG (off the grid) safe house that Victoria had set up for herself years ago. She wouldn't come to the house so as to not accidentally lead his pursuers there, but she left him everything he would need to get out of the country. He took the money, cards, and tech and took a plane ride to Atlanta before taking a greyhound to Florida then out of the country to the UK. From there he met up with a local acquaintance of Vicksa named Henson who drove him from England through France, Belgium and then on to the Netherlands.
It was in Rotterdam that Max collided someone who would change his life. He thought he was safe for now, had a chance to regroup and connect with his contacts. But he wasn’t, because as soon as he got close to the port that he was going to be leaving on a cargo ship from, he was attacked. The men were wearing black tactical gear and carrying inhibitor bands that would completely shut down his powers. He knew that they had to have been coming from whoever was tracking him as who else would know about his abilities and how to suppress them. They chased him through the docks and almost blew up the ship he was planning to take if he had not diverted the bomb. He was so weakened from the use of his energy he collapsed, but in was right into the arms of some person he ran right into. The young man used a flash grenade to distract his assailants and dragged him into his car before driving off into the city.
Max lost consciousness for a while, but when he woke up he was in another safe house that was owned by this young man whose name turned out to be Jacob Morán. Jacob wouldn’t explain how he knew how to find Max or how he got all of the technology to knock out and get away from the Tactical group tracking Max but he did explain that he had connections with some people inside DELTA and may have heard that something was going down in Rotterdam, but not exactly what. He thought it was a major extraction of a compromised operative, but it turned out to be them going after one of their own (or so they assume if the group truly was sent by DELTA). It was very surprising to him.
Max spends months traveling with Jacob, jumping from country to country, continent to continent. Sometimes he even helps Jacob on jobs when he pushed him enough to let him, and they needed to connections or benefits they would gain from the contracts Jacob picked up. They met new people, like a group of vigilante heroes who didn’t want to be part of DELTA, with one of the leaders of the group, Portal (Elisa Portsmith), providing them information about other young Supers who had been vanishing off the streets and in cities across the US. Most of their time was spent staying low and trying to investigate what was going on with DELTA and why Max was put on the Wanted List.
They became very close, Max and Jacob. To the point that Max even felt like he might be developing feelings for Jacob, but there was always a barrier between them (and some random freebies Max picked up himself because he can’t stay back if he sees someone else in trouble or in need). Jacob couldn’t be honest about his own past or how he had gotten tangled up in Max’s. A lot of secrets. Still, he trusted him. After a year of them working together with barely any contact from anyone Max knew (except for very very brief, very very sporadic communications with Vicksa, who Jacob still would not explain how he knew), how could Max not trust him? He’d be dead or worse without him.
Then came Rio de Janeiro. Jacob had gotten a tip that something would be going down there that involved MARKO, which they had been slowly gaining information as being a lot less clean and upstanding a company than Max had thought it was. Sure, DELTA didn’t always get along with the CEO and founder, but it still seemed mostly legitimate. As much as any mega-corporation can be.
Max didn’t expect to run into Converse and Ricochet there. Sean and Gavin were there not for a mission, but for Carnival, as the team had been disbanded after Max went AWOL. They had been taking time off since the fall out. Max and Gavin had never completely gotten along, too many differences in opinion, on how more dangerous Supers should be handled. It turned out that Gavin also was really bitter about how things had gone down with Max being the cause of the team being disbanded. Max hadn’t even realized just how much the team meant to Gavin, considering how he acted most of the time.
Sean was a lot less aggressive and accusatory, but in the end, Gavin sold Max out. Even though he contacted Jacob and they tried to get out of town, it turned out to be too late. The same type of tactical team that came for him in Rotterdam showed up in Rio, but they were far more prepared. They were able to take out Jacob, blowing up the boat they had been on, and capture Max. And while they claimed they were DELTA and were taking him in for going AWOL, Max knew something it was all a lie.
That lie was proven when he woke up hours later in a transport vehicle, restrained with a total-inhibitor brace around his neck. It wasn’t any DELTA facility he knew of that he was taken to and the people there definitely weren’t wearing DELTA IDs or anything like that. He was transferred into a machine that hooked into his arms, legs, with a helmet that covered the top of his head and eyes. When the inhibitor brace was removed he tried to use his powers only to have the energy be absorbed by the machine.
He tried again and the same thing happened. He realized that was the purpose of the machine and stopped, but the people he couldn’t see—scientists and engineers, he assumed—told him to keep going, to expel as much energy as he could. Max refused. So they tried to force him by inducing energy surges in him. First by using the visor on the helmet as a type of virtual reality, feeding him repetitive scenarios of people in need or himself in danger or his team dying where he would be need to use powers. He realized these weren’t real, but it was hard to not get caught up in them. They felt real enough. It went on like this for weeks, with him being pushed to the limits of what energy he had and how they could extract and utilize it. How they could manipulate his mind into altering the energy into various forms.
But it wasn’t enough. So they decided to increase his output by increasing the input. They hooked a specialized generator to the machine, feeding his body more and more energy, which he would then expel as a different form of energy. Until finally he went nuclear.
They pushed him until he expelled almost all the energy in his body in one massive burst, then used one of the machines they had created to redirect it, using it like a weapon that could be focused on whatever they wanted and then released. The place they chose to release it on was an underground DELTA base in outside of Chicago that was used as a training facility for Supers. It took out five whole blocks, and half the underground base. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured and/or killed.
And it didn’t stop there. Max kept expelling energy. All kinds of energy. He overloaded the machines restraining him, exploded the generator, and kept going. He couldn’t cut it off. The facility he was trapped him was breaking, structural damage causing evacuations. Everyone valuable was ordered to get out before he exploded again others scrambled to try and save themselves.
He stumbled through the building trying to find a way out, no one able to get near him, all bullets and other weapons deflecting off the energy barrier swirling around him or being absorbed into it. People who got too close collapsed as their own energy was sucked out of their bodies, either comatose or dead. Then Jacob was there, yelling his name and telling him that help was coming. That Max just needed to get his shit together for long enough until they could get there. How had he managed to get inside this facility? Ya girl Portal, that’s how.
Max asked them to kill him, to find some way to just stop him, so he wouldn't hurt anyone else. But Jacob didn't have that kind of power and Portal couldn't get close enough to use her own powers without interference from his. Max would have to get control of himself somehow.
Finally, Max managed to focus enough to realize what was happening, but he knew he couldn’t stop entirely. There was still too much energy in his body and he couldn’t seem to stop. So he tried to redirect it instead. He focused it into his own hands, making it into a ball of swirling energy that was wrapped up in itself. It became a small ball of devastating energy and the mass destructive going on around him finally stopped, but he was tired and strained and didn’t know how long he could hold it for.
He asked Portal if she had any kind of images in her mind of somewhere far away from people. Far, far far away. Thankfully she did, but she wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. Jacob told her to just try and so of course she opened up and Portal to outer space. That immediately began to suck everything around it inside and they had to act quick or someone was gonna get to become an astronaut the unconventional way. Max threw the ball through the portal, and it exploded almost immediately, but thankfully Portal managed to close her gate just in time. In the sky above them it looked like a star had exploded, but it was far enough away that it didn’t seem to hurt the Earth…as far as they knew.
Max collapsed on the ground and could barely breathe. Jacob tried to help him but he told him to stay back. He couldn’t touch anyone. He didn’t know what would happen if he did. Thankfully that is when the help arrived in the form of Victoria and Yul. They slapped an inhibitor on his neck, cutting off his powers, and then Max passed out.
When he came to, it was in a secured safe house, Vicksa vetted, that she had been slowly reinforcing on the down low ever since Max went AWOL. It took a while, since she was under surveillance due to her connection to him, but like someone with her powers couldn’t handle “surveillance.” They told Max about the infiltration of DELTA by a group connected to MARKO and that Jackson Young was definitely behind it all. And MARKO had somehow managed to get the mainstream news media to blame DELTA for the attack on its own facility, claiming some disgruntled Super must have decided to get revenge, at the cost of so many lives.
1,071 so far and counting.
And what Max doesn't even know yet is that the energy core design was actually invented by his sister, Jo, although she had created it to be a never ending battery that could power wheelchairs, prosthetics, and other machines and tools for people with disabilities, much like her own.
FAMILY
Max’s immediate family is his parents and two siblings, an old sister and younger brother. His father had three brothers, one of which died while in the military, the other two he was estranged from before the accident, his youngest brother and his wife took in Max’s sister. His mother was an only child who had been born to an older couple.
JOSEPH SAMUEL CARSON
Max’s father, owner of Carson Construction Company. Veteran, hardworker, and devoted to his family. Despite choosing construction (because he wanted to help build and rebuild communities), he also has a master’s in robotic engineering. He might look intimidating, but he was usually the softie of the family, wanting to give his kids things he never had growing up poor and raised by a single mother, who his kids knew as Gran (real name Maxine). The kids knew if they wanted something going to dad first and pleading their case would most likely get it and then he would find ways to smooth it over with their mother. Despite spoiling them, he also encourages a strong work ethic and for them to apply themselves so they wouldn’t have to work as hard as he did. Died in the accident when Max lost control of his powers during a big lightning storm. Had three brothers, Peter, Isaac and Solomon (the youngest). (PB: Chi McBride)
VIVIAN LEKE-CARSON
Max’s mother, a part-time history professor at Penn State, and (now former) director of the local branch of the Allegheny Historical Foundation. She’s strict and would not budge when it came to education and extracurricular activity, wanting her children to be well rounded and not spend all of their time on video games and television. Max got around this often by way of the effects his medications had on him, but his mother would even turn the average blockbuster action film into a study of pop culture and its influence on present day history. She wanted their minds turned on at all times. At the same time, she encouraged them to only do things they love or might be interested in and to stick with it as much as possible. “Quitters aren’t people who stop doing something they don’t enjoy, they’re people who stop trying anything.” Died in the accident when Max lost control of his powers during a major lightning storm. Had no siblings and both of her parents have passed on from old age, having had her when they were straddling their forties. Quentin and Karina Leke were a career-focused couple who decided on children late and struggled to have one because of it but eventually succeeded. (PB: Lalah Hathaway)
JAYDEN CARSON
Max’s little brother. He was an active kid, happy, a little bratty due to how spoiled he was, but he and Max got along more often than not. A bit of a math whiz, to the point he was completing calculus and trigonometry equations with a special math tutor as his parents weren’t sure they should skip him a grade for math alone. Four years younger than Max. Died in the accident that also killed his parents. Jayden was named by Max and Joanne as their parents gave them naming rights for any third child that might come along. Both liked the name because it meant he could be nicknamed J.D. (PB: Philip Bolden)
JOANNE CARSON
Max’s older sister by over five years. Kind, outgoing, very active. She loves sports and a variety of hands-on activities and was involved in a different one each school season, but also has her father’s architectural and engineering talents. Got into college on an athletics scholarship. She tended to tease Max and was less relaxed with him than she was with their little brother, Jayden, but mainly because she felt he needed that structured and set lifestyle with everything going on. She still made certain to spend time with him whenever she came home on the weekends from school and encouraged his interests. She was paralyzed in the accident when Max lost control of his powers. She spent a year in a medical facility recovering before moving in with her Uncle Solomon and his wife Tonya. Since then she’s moved out on her own, thanks to the sign-on bonus she got when she was hired by M.A.R.K.O.’s medical technology division. She knows Max is a Superhuman and works for DELTA, talking with him through text, email and even phone calls, but she hadn’t had a chance to tell him about her new job. (PB: Shanice Banton)
SCHOOL FRIENDS:
Since enrolling at Fillmore High School, Max has made friends with a lot of people. It was the first time since before the accident that he’d had friends who were normal. People who weren’t Supers or other agents working for D.E.L.T.A.
FRANCESCA BARTELLI
17 years old. Head of the Media Club, star of the Martial Arts Club, step-sister of Alexandra, and head journalist for the Fillmore Feed, the high school news channel. Very driven, knows what she wants and will do what it takes to get it. Fiercely protective of friends, sometimes to the point she takes things too far. If there is something bad going down, Frankie wants to be there to expose it. Her father and mother divorced when she was a baby and her dad ended up with primary custody. She still sees her mother once or twice a year, spending a few weeks with her in the summer in Florida, but they’re more like casual friends instead of mother-daughter. Her goal in life is to grow up to be an overseas correspondent for a renowned media group. Max’s BFF since his first week at the school. She and Trev have been friends since they were in elementary school, but it wasn’t until the fake-date with Max that she found out his own issues with his mom and they’ve become a lot closer since then. Injured when Max’s inhibitor was tampered with. PB is Hailee Steinfeld.
ALEXANDRA MIKHAIL
18 years old. Captain of the Debate Team, part of the Cultural Alliance, a volunteer at the local Innocence Project, and she does chior. Already voted most likely to become a Supreme Court Justice. Dating Desmond. Also loves fashion and showing athletic women can be physical and elegant (so she likes dressing up her stepsister). She and Max spend a lot of time teasing each other and Max hits on her boyfriend Desi because he knows it makes her possessive (and he knows Desi likes that but is kind of shy about admitting those things to Xandra). Xandra has Goals in life and she’ll do what she has to in achieving them. Her father died when she was 6 and her mother remarried Frankie’s dad when she was 11. As much as she and Frankie get along (and fight along), she still has trouble seeing her father as her own “dad” because he’s taken pains to avoid trying to replace her dad. She calls him “Ray” because his name is Ramone. PB is Imaan Hammam.
OSCAR TREVIÑO
17 years old. Friend Max made on his first day of school in Advanced Calculus class. Asked Max out on a date so he could try to pump him for information to pass the class because his dad was threatening to ship him back to his mother on the other side of the country if he couldn’t “apply himself better.” Considering his mom didn’t really want him in the first place after the divorce and was happy in her single globe-trotting lifestyle, Trev really didn’t want to live with her. He was tempted to pay someone to do his Calculus work for him, but then Max blew into school and he thought, oh hey, a cute guy who is super smart. He hadn’t meant to ask him out originally—at least not like that—but it’s what came out of his mouth. And to prevent himself from looking dumb since Max seemed into the idea, he ran with it. Of course this led to him getting punched by Max when he figured it out, and then again by Frankie like days later. He felt really bad about it, since he liked Max and tried to make it up to him. He even promised him Super BrainFreeze Ultra Slush every day for a month. It worked. They’ve been super close friends since, but Trev isn’t about to tell anyone he still has a crush on Max, especially since Frankie promised to rip his balls off and pin them to the school bulletin board. PB is Vini Uehara.
DESMOND WALLACE WHITMORE III (DESI)
17 years old. Son of one of the Big Money Families in New York State. The money is old. He loves football and swimming, but had some major anger management issues in junior high and freshman year of high school at a very prestigious and exclusive private academy upstate. Desmond is also hiding the secret that he is a Superhuman as he's very afraid of it getting back to his parents, who have nothing kind to say about Supers. He has the ability to see people's emotions are colorful auras around them. When he was younger it made it hard to focus and to trust people as the people closest to him often had very negative colors around him and this bled into his view of himself. He was under a lot of pressure from his parents to excel and to “make good on their investment” in his education. Desi couldn’t handle it so he avoided it instead by sneaking out, getting drunk, going to huge parties, and not paying attention to his schooling outside of acing all of his tests.
He got caught with drugs on his possession and was suspended for three days and it turned out that the boy who gave him the drugs was the one who ratted him out to avoid getting into trouble with his own parents. After three days of dealing with his parents talking about what a failure he was and how he wasn’t going to amount to anything, Desi went to school and punched the boy out in the hallway for joking about getting away with it. This led to his expulsion from the private school and in hopes of punishing him enough with the shame, his parents sent him to a public school instead. An open enrollment public school that was a 90-minute drive away. But instead of floundering and begging for an out, he ended up flourishing there. Suddenly he had people around him who bled positive colors and emotions. He made friends who encouraged him to do better and be better and Alexandra became a real North Star for him, helping him to want to get back on track, not just to please her, but because she made him believe he deserved it for himself. When his parents saw how well he was doing they thought he had turned himself around and were planning to send him to another private school. He managed to convinced them that it would be much better optics for his father’s budding political career if they saw his son attending a public school as a way of proving to the middle class he was “down to earth” and supported education reform. Max teases and flirts with him because he figured out that Desi likes it when Alexandra gets possessive and commanding with him, but Desmond is too embarrassed by how much he likes her taking charge (boy is thirsty for his girl, yo) to ever admit it out loud. He still hasn't told his friends about his empathic ability because he's afraid they'll think he's been invading their privacy, even though he can't help it. PB is Alexander Ludwig.
OTHER FRIENDS/IMPORTANT PEOPLE
Max has other people who are important to him but aren’t family, friends, or coworkers. Some of these people have a great impact on his life. Anyone of significant relevance will be mentioned below.
JACOB MORÁN (BIRTHNAME: JACOB ALEXIS GALLAGHER)
20 years old. He met Max in Rotterdam when he was saving his life from a tactical group that have been sent to capture him. Originally his plan was to help max out as a favor to someone working in on the inside and then collect on that favor later on but when he realized Max’s abilities he insisted on traveling with him to make sure that he got to his next location safely, implying he knew more about it than he was saying. Unfortunately that location was compromised but they managed to get away safely without either of them being noticed. Because of this, Max ended up traveling with Jacob for an extended amount of time, getting to know him and connecting with him. They had a lot of common interests and spent most of their time bantering back-and-forth, teasing each other. Jacob doesn’t like to talk about his past or how he gained all of these skills and knowledge that he has about the inner workings of the US government and the DELTA programs, but it’s obvious that he knows something from someone. He has no advanced special abilities but Max does believe that he might be a Level D superhuman considering his skills, reaction times, and level of training. Jacob isn’t confirming or deny.
Jacob is average height, 5'10", black hair, and hazel brown eyes. He is skilled in the use of firearms, hand-to-hand combat, engineering, hacking, and knows his way around a book of classic literature (he is a huge book snob, but also quotes classics at random when he’s feeling playful or thoughtful). He can be very grumpy and dismissive at times, but he also shows he cares for people who are in need. For all the snarky and witty remarks, his primary focus seems to be on helping those who need it and taking down those who abused others with as much prejudice as possible. He can be brutal and bloody to the point that Max sometimes has to step in and stop him from killing, but Max never feels in danger when he’s with him. He sees a good person in Jacob and part of the reason he hasn’t tried to contact more of the people Vicksa gave him is because he doesn’t want to split from him just yet. He wants to know more about him and maybe help him with whatever demons he’s running from like he’s helped Max. PB is Jake T. Austin.
MISCELLANEOUS:
- The tragedy that killed his parents (Joseph and Vivian) and younger brother (Jayden) occurred only three weeks before Max’s 14th birthday. He sped that day in a containment cell at D.E.L.T.A. headquarters after a transfer from Arizona for security reasons.
- Max has been in two relationships, one of which he swears doesn’t count because he was 10 and they considered playing video games and eating pizza together “a date” at the time. His second relationship was when he was 13 and it lasted all of eight months before the other boy, Ricky, ended up moving away.
- Max eats twice as much as the average person on a normal day because of the energy his body requires but on a low day he can eat up to as much as four times as much.
- Max lives at the main HQ for DELTA in a dormitory for underage agents and those displaced or only in the area temporarily. His room is in the longterm wing, but he’s considering moving out after he graduates high school. He lives in a single room so he can take off the inhibitor band when he sleeps at night without worrying about any threats to a roommate.
- Max keeps a generator in his room to keep his energy level stable and especially for days when he’s really low from expending energy during missions or training. His inhibitor keeps him from taking in energy from organic matter but not from using the gas generator.
- Max has a habit of doodling on himself. His parents weren't in favor of tattoos until you were old enough to "think about the consequences and benefits" of having them so as a kid he took to doodling on his arms instead. Temporary skin art was a big trend and he kept up with it. A line of pens even came out that were safer on the skin but lasted longer. His artistic skills on skin are pretty good, but he's developed the skill on himself, less on others.
OMEGA SQUAD:
Freefall: Montgomery C. Vickers (aka Monty) | Field Leader - manipulation of gravity
--A bit stiff and considers himself a professional, but has a weakness for detective movies. Is having trouble with insecurity about living up to "replacing" the previous Field Leader.
Voltage: Maxwell Carson (aka Max) – energy absorption and manipulation
Amalgam: Kali Ichinomiya-Perry (aka Kali-Kali-Ichi) - shapeshifter
--A very snarky girl who wishes people would stop assuming just because she's half-Japanese that she knows everything Asian. Let her enjoy her black cats and animal documentaries in peace, kthnx. Also one of Max's Big Sister Horde that he collects.
Feed: Victoria Samantha Barnetti (aka Vicksa) – electronic communication and data stream manipulation
--Tough, direct, professional woman in her late 30s who tends to look after the rest of the team, but isn't the most gentle about it. Team coordinator. Has a hang up about blood and other bodily fluids. Max considers her the Team Mom.
Ricochet: Gavin Rackliffe – telekinetic energy shields and barriers
--A dick. But a well-intentioned dick who puts his foot in his mouth and doesn't realize how poorly he comes across. He takes a bit to get used to, but is very loyal and overprotective (drives Kali's cat Amaru nuts).
Converse: Sean Thompson – size shifting (molecular manipulation)
--The resident geek. He has a thing for Converse sneakers, sci-fi, and conspiracy theories.
Pygmalia: Thalia Véga – animation (life-force manipulation)
--A bit on the shy side, but she's got a lot of personality (more open and opinionated) when you get her going. She loves art and the theater.
Former Members:**
Barricade: John Archers – impenetrable skin and super strength
--Big lumox of a guy who was really too gentle for his own good. A little clumsy, but friendly (unless he's angry).
Sidhe: Felicia McCready – wings and the ability to shoot out her feathers as energy shards. They grow back within minutes.
--Pushy, domineering, flirtatious, but also easy-going and friendly. A bit of a schemer/prankster. Very little rattles her.
Risk: Yul Walken – Ability to alter probability, causing unlikely things to happen or likely things not to happen | Former Field Leader of Omega Squad
--A little on the wild side, willing to throw himself into situations and take risks for his team. Also fun, bond-oriented kind of guy who was big on the team being a family as well as co-workers.
Tap: Seth Mars – psychometry, limited ability to see a person’s past or future through touching of an object they’ve handled recently. Can only see through the eyes of the person who touched the object.
Screen: Bobbi Jameson – invisibility and full cloaking (loss of scent, footprints, etc) while invisible.
Mason: Adam Hiram – golem creation. Can use earth-based materials to create animated golems/dolls that look and would pass for human. He controls them telepathically.
Beamer: Denice Malkovich – light manipulation, usually in the form of energy beams and cloaking abilities (reflecting light to give the appearance of invisibility)
**Only includes those who have been on the Squad during Max's time with the Omega Squad