James Tyrone Johansen

The easy S T U F F . . .

Name: James Tyrone Johansen
Nickname: JT, Ty
Age: Fifteen
Member Group: Student
Power(s): Magnetokinesis

• Scientific Explanation: Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that strongly affects gravitational force, Earth's orbit within the sun's gravitational field, and Earth's own rotational direction and velocity; it literally makes the world go 'round. JT has such a strong connection to Earth's magnetic field that he is actually able to create and control magnetic fields of his own. Using these magnetic fields, he is able to strongly magnetize various metallic objects and substances. While magnetized, a given target draws metallic objects and substances to it (via positive polarity) or repels metallic objects and substances (via negative polarity). By manipulating the polarity of his magnetic fields, he is able to control metallic objects and substances much as a telekinetic would manipulate anything else.
  
• Practical Description: Potentially, JT could wield his powers on a catastrophic scale, but he has a very long way to go before he can reach his full potential. Nonetheless, he can manipulate huge metal objects. Targets weighing over 10T (20,000lbs) cannot be completely controlled; they must be controlled in parts. For example, a Boeing 747 weighs well over 150T (300,000lbs); JT would only be able to control, say, the tail or nose of the plane – not the entire thing. Metallic substances that have low densities (e.g. mercury) can be manipulated on a much greater level; they can be formed into various shapes, magnetized and drawn together to make them denser, demagnetized to separate them (making them less dense), etc. One example of this would be the magnetization of mercury in the form of a large disc, which JT could then use as a sort of mobile table.
  
• Limits: Despite his immense potential, JT also has major disadvantages to over-use of his powers. He has yet to discover them, but they're there. For one thing, his deep connection to Earth's magnetic field means that pushing himself too far beyond his limits could literally tear his cells apart; his body would demagnetize, too unstable to hold itself together any longer. For another, his control is greatly compromised if he's trying to move while creating or controlling a magnetic field; this is because the creation and manipulation of a magnetic field requires his own internal magnetic field – or biomagnetic field – to be attuned to Earth's magnetic field (kind of like tuning to the right frequency and channel to pick up chatter on a radio). As far as his actual limits are concerned, moving tables is child's play for him. It requires quite a bit of effort to have a major affect on things such as planes, trains, buildings, and so on; it also takes quite a bit of concentration. He could lift a semi with a loaded trailer and drop it into the ocean if he wanted to, but doing so would push him to the very edge of his physical limitations; any use of his powers beyond that, no matter how minute – even unintentional attraction of metal – could severely damage his molecular stability.
  
• Control Issues: While JT is certainly powerful enough to move a big rig as mentioned above, despite the obvious drawbacks to such an overextended use of his magnetokinesis, he has very limited control at this point; at most, he could tear a building down only by ripping its supports out; he wouldn't be able to drag the building down as a whole. He could rip a ceiling or a wall apart, but he couldn't completely destroy an entire large room all at once. He could tip the wing of a plane or lift a train wheel from a track, albeit with great effort (due to the weight and related mass involved), but he couldn't control them as the pilot or engineer would without actually sitting in the cockpit or standing at the control panel and knowing what to do. As far as the above-mentioned semi and trailer are concerned, he'd be more apt to lift the hitch from the semi and tip the semi over than to actually try to move the two of them through the air.
  
• Side Effects: Even if JT did have the level of control necessary to tear an entire building apart at once, he would be burned out for a while. During burn-out, he is unable to use his powers. Or, he may only be able to attract small metal objects or small amounts of metallic substances (e.g. silverware, cups, mercury) to his body; but this would be painful to him, as it would put added stress on an already stressed body. In the case of mercury, for example from a thermometer, he wouldn't have the strength left to make the mercury break through the glass. Only with time to rest would Earth's magnetic field be able to restore his powers when so drained, and trying to use his powers while drained (as mentioned above) could severely destabilize his molecular structure. During a drained state, he might also have aches and pains throughout his body even without using his powers (much like someone who put too much of their back into manual labor).

Play By: Thomas Dekker

Let it F L O W . . .

I can't say I have the best memory. Who can, really? What I can say is that I remember what's important. I remember how I got here. I remember how I came to be who I am now. Most importantly, I remember how badly humanity can stain one's soul. My own soul has yet to be stained with blood...but sometimes, I wish it were.

If you were to ask someone what I was like as a kid, they probably couldn't tell you much. They'd say that I was that kid in the back of the class who was always doodling or daydreaming. They'd say I was that kid that always ate lunch alone, the one nobody ever bothered talking to. They'd tell you I was pretty much invisible, and then they'd speculate that maybe that's the way I wanted it. Maybe they'd be right.

Truth is, I never really got the whole point of socialization. It's not that I was anti-social; I wanted someone to chat with, someone to laugh with, someone to poke fun at the nerds with just like anyone else. But I never really knew how to interact with people. I never knew what to say. I didn't watch a lot of TV. I didn't really play video games much, either. I didn't read comic books; I read actual books. I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I read Treasure Island and Robin Hood. I read things like Oliver Twist, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty. Sometimes, I still think of myself as being a real-life version of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick – unable to move on because I can't get past what my one true enemy has done to me. But other times, when I'm angry, I'm a lot like Edmond Dantes or the king's brother in The Man in the Iron Mask: I'm trapped and I want out; I want to hurt the people that dared to think they could just throw me away like a piece of garbage. But back then, before I discovered my powers, I was mostly like d'Artagnan: a bit awkward, wanting to fit in, and trying to get by one day at a time.

My father left when I was three. I don't know where he went and I don't care; I don't even know or care why. If you're too much of a coward to stick around for your family even when things get rough, you ain't worth the air you steal from the rest of us. My mother wasn't much of a bargain. She drank constantly and the house always reeked of cigarettes. She wasn't a hooker, though; after her husband (my father) left, she swore off all men. I guess that's something to be thankful for, though she was a whore in other ways. Instead of bringing home men, she'd bring home failed job hunts and tell me it was all my fault. I was dyslexic, so I didn't have the best grades; we were both living off of disability, but she was spending most of the money. I ate breakfast and lunch at school; I rarely had dinner beyond some toast and jam. When I didn't get good grades, she'd lecture me for hours and scream at me if I tried to escape from her tiresome monologues. If I got Bs or better, she'd wonder why I didn't get As.

So, I didn't exactly have a decent life to begin with. But at fifteen years old, with only a used flannel shirt for a birthday gift, my life changed. Sometimes, I think it changed for the better; other times, I'm not so sure But at least I would soon be well away from my so-called 'mother'. I didn't know that then, though. So, as I sat that afternoon on that plastic swing at a local playground, the chains rattling above me, I thought more and more about how cruel a fate it was that my birthday was spent watching other kids jump around on the monkey bars and jungle gym. I thought about how cruel a fate it was that others got to have huge meals and two parents and ice cream cones in summer and I just got so freakin' pissed.

It took me a moment to realize what was happening. When the eight or nine kids on the jungle gym all started screaming, though, it didn't take me long to figure it out. My mouth must have been open fit to catch passing meteorites; I know my eyes were as big as my mother's kitchen table. I couldn't believe what I was seeing: the jungle gym had become a tangled mess of twisted metal bars and hard-plastic joints. Kids were trapped at odd angles, as though the entire thing had simply melted. And there I was, suddenly standing before it all, agape at what seemed to have happened before my apparently anger-blinded pupils. I realized something else then, too: I could feel...something. At the time, I couldn't explain what it was. But, it was almost like the jungle gym was my arm. You know how you can feel your arm even when you're not doing anything, if only because you know it's there and you're supposed to have feeling in it? It was kind of like that. Hard to explain, but...well, there it is.

No one knew how it happened, but it was all over the news and in every paper nonetheless. My mother told me it was probably my fault the day after it happened, though it was more an afterthought than anything else; still, for once, she got it right. It was my fault. But for some reason, I just didn't care. I found myself wishing the kids had actually been hurt by it, and then I found that I was ashamed of that. I got confused, wondering what kind of a person I was. Was I really that much like my mother? I didn't know then just how strongly, or how often, I would come to wish that very same thing over the next several days. Also, I didn't yet realize that it really WAS my fault. I did three days later, though.

The next time something like that happened, I was poking at my food. I wasn't really hungry, but I'd taken some beans and a hot dog so that my mother wouldn't have a specific reason to yell at me; no sense in giving her ammunition. It was ironic, really. For once, I actually had an almost-decent meal for dinner and I wasn't hungry. I set the fork down and stared at it, wondering what kind of person I was again. I must have been pretty okay, right? I was no thief, liar, or rapist. I was no murderer. I didn't beat people up for fun. Yet I was the one that had gotten the shit end of the stick in life. And as I thought about this, I felt again what I had felt on the playground. The fork started to twist. I remember it turning into a useless lump of recycled tin in a matter of seconds. This time, though, the strange feeling I had – a tingling sensation, almost like hairs on the back of my neck rising, though still they did stand – was much stronger this time and it did not fade. As I looked over to the metal end table beside the ratty couch on which my mother sat watching some soap opera rerun (as if soap operas weren't bad enough the first time around), I wondered: had I made that happen? Had I twisted the jungle gym? No, that was impossible. I couldn't have. Yet I remember staring hard at that table and picturing my mother; I remember feeling angry – as always – when I thought of her.

I remember the table crumpling into a twisted lump of metal about the size of a basketball and my mother screaming. For once, I did something I hadn't done in a very long time: I felt myself smile. It was probably a wicked smile, for my mother looked at me and called me a demon child. I remember feeling it fade as I looked at her. I ate my dinner, and then I left the house. I didn't come back until well after dawn the next day.

By morning, I had figured out how to focus my powers. I just had to think of my mother. Soon, I was doing it without thinking about that stupid, greedy bitch. When I finally showed up, she was drooling on herself in her sleep. I remember looking at the knives and thinking, It would be so easy.

I wrestled with myself the rest of the day, from the time I showered and dressed to the time I got out of school. In less than a week, I had become a murderer in my mind. I had wanted my mother dead. I had even considered doing it that morning. I didn't know what was wrong with me, but I knew one thing for certain.

Someone was following me.

I didn't know who it was; no one seemed to be there whenever I looked around. But there was definitely someone following me. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end every time I thought I was alone, and that had nothing to do with my powers; I knew that much for certain. One afternoon, I was re-reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (one of my favorite books) when my mother answered a knock at the door. I couldn't help but glance up; who'd be stupid enough to knock my mother's door? Sure enough, before I'd finished that though, a brief and muffled conversation had turned into a slamming door. My mother stopped in my own doorway and demanded to know who I knew from some weird school in another state. I must have given her a funny look, because she yelled at me to quit inviting friends over or she'd tan my hide. Then she went to get herself a whiskey – her fourth of the day (unless I had miscounted; always possible). But whomever it was didn't give up. He knocked again and again until she answered the door to yell at him; she hollered that she'd call the police if she was bothered again. When he tried to reassure her that he wasn't trying to bother her, she threw a glass at him. I smirked; clearly, this guy didn't know who he was dealing with. Didn't he know the only thing uglier than his mother was her ego? I made damn sure she didn't know I was smirking, though.

It was the next day that I knew someone was following me for a fact. I let the school security guard know, but nothing much must have happened, because I stopped dead in front of the guy a block from home just an hour later. Ten feet away from him, I listened to the guy's casual conversation and interrupted the creep to ask what the hell he wanted. He got right to the point. I didn't really believe him, so I told him to buzz off or I'd call the cops. A school for people with powers? Ha! This wasn't Harry Potter.

But he showed up again the next day, and the next. He wouldn't let up. And come Monday, there he was again. By then, I was getting a pretty good feel for my powers. I didn't know what all I could do yet, but I do know that hassling me wasn't a good idea. When I went to confront him a second time, however, that's exactly what a couple of guys from the popular crowd did. They were snobbish socialite ass-wipes who had more money than they had brain cells, but they problem was that they had the muscle to go along with it. When they started pushing me, I pushed back. One of the pair threw a punch and I ducked it. Three seconds later, there would have been a fork in his eye – if not for the sudden appearance of Mr. Come-to-My-School. Angry at him for stalking me and the kids for daring to get on my bad side, I felt the table nearest me move. I didn't even think about it. It just screeched forward – and then went flying. If it weren't for my stalker, I probably would have murdered the kids in cold blood. I was tired of being a nobody on the ass-end of nowhere.

When I got home that afternoon, my mother was huddled in a corner asleep. I looked at her and just wanted to cry, mostly out of anger. I wanted to scream and throw things and bash her head in. But I didn't. Instead, I shifted his gaze to the filthy floor, the third-rate furniture, the nearly-bare cupboards, and the trash scattered around the place: beer bottles, empty cigarette packs over-flowing in the trash can, receipts and dishes piled up on the table with more mold than plastic. The place was disgusting, it was filthy, and it was small. My own room was barely big enough for my bed; it was actually supposed to be a den, but it was more cramped than it probably should have been. It was also probably the only place that didn't look like the store room of Bubba's Cat House. I shook my head and was about to head into my room when I stopped suddenly. Someone was in there. Someone was touching MY library books. Someone was in MY room, going through MY things. I almost tore the bed apart, especially when I realized who it was, and wrapped around the ass hole. I was tired of this prick following me.

He made that stupid offer again. This time, though, he told me to stop and think about what I was likely about to do. He told me to look around, to take stock where I was living. Did I really want to live there any longer? I couldn't honestly say yes, and frankly, I didn't want to. I...I admit, if only to myself, that I was ashamed. I was angry, too. I was angry because it was my mother's fault I was some kind of freak. I was angry because of the shithole she made me live in and the way she treated me. I was angry because this guy was stalking me, and because I had about as much of a real life as Robinson Crusoe had on that damn island. The bed frame fell apart then, and the guy had to step away. I stopped it, though it was hard; I didn't want to stop it. I wanted to rip the house apart and drop it on my mother like Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz. I'd even pondered going the way of George Bailey on that bridge in It's a Wonderful Life at one point, but not for a while. I wasn't really suicidal; I was just pissed the fuck off.

So I said yeah, fine. Gimme my damn books – discards from the library due to their worn condition – and some clothes, let me get my jacket, and I'd be gone from this stinking pit of eternal doom. On the way out, I almost dropped every knife in the house into that bitch's gut; the guy stopped me, saying she'd get hers soon enough. My final words as I left that whorehouse wannabe: “She better.”

Behind the M A S K . . .

Name: Wicked or Nails
Age: Twenty-Six
RP Experience: Over six years.
How did you find us?: RPG-D

Show your S K I L L S . . .

Boy...talk about a cool dream. Well...JT thought it was cool, anyway. This is sorta how it went:

He could feel the iron in the blood slowly oozing across the cracked tile of the kitchen floor. Was she dead? Was the Queen Bitch of the Universe finally dead? Ding-dong, the witch is dead! The knives protruding from her abdomen were six in number, and still they quivered as though trying to draw themselves to the twelve-year-old standing with an angry gaze over his mother's not-yet-fetid corpse. The look of terror on her eyes, the scream she didn't have time to utter plastered across her lips, the fingers still gripping one of the wooden hilts...

She was dead. If there was any life left in her liquor-stinking hide, it was minimal at best. She was dead.

There were sirens in the distance. No...not in the distance. Less than a block away. He could feel them. He could feel the magnetic pull of several two-thousand-pound piles of steel rushing toward him at over forty miles per hour. Five. There were five cars altogether. No, not cars. One was an ambulance. Someone had seen the boy standing over his mother through the window. They had dialed 911.

He moved as if in slow motion. He had to get out of here. The cops would be looking for him. They wouldn't understand. Even if he'd never touched her, she was dead. Everyone would know he killed her. He'd have to live on the run. Well, he had his powers. He could use them whenever he wanted, however he needed. As he packed his stuff, he knew he'd be gone forever. He'd never see this damn town again. But really, that was all right in his mind. He never really liked this place anyway.

He ducked out the window. There was no one around, so he darted down the alley and onto the sidewalk at the other end. The cop cars flew by just another kid with a backpack, so intent were they on reaching their destination. He kept his head low and made himself invisible. He was good at making himself invisible. He even put the hood on his jacket up and buttoned it; if he was going to hide, he might as well look like any other high-schooler. Thus began his life on the run. Thus began his freedom. And hey, the more he thought about it...how could this get any better? He was finally free of that stupid bitch. Time to go play with his freedom.