posthumans app
Player Name: Krafty
Personal LJ: kibilgund
E-mail: krafty.dwarf@gmail.com
AIM: kibilgund
Other characters currently in-game: None
Who referred you to the game?: I found it with my stalking powers no I mean Kitty I guess.
Character Name: Victor Mancha-Pym
Canon source: Runaways (Marvel 616)
PB: Diego Luna, apparently.
Personality:
Victor was an unrepentant nerd, music snob, gamer, a superhero fanboy with a man-crush on Spider-Man and a regular-crush on the Scarlet Witch. With a personality hand-crafted to be the perfect little hero, he's both super-rational and super-spiritual. Victor's the ideal beta male, a touchy-feely, unthreatening brother-figure who gets passive-aggressive instead of confrontational. Ultron's plan to have Vic grow up to fill the Avengers' Latino Mutant slot would have gone off without a hitch if not for those meddling kids and their psychic dinosaur.
You can get what you want and still not be happy. Victor's an Avenger now, just like Daddy wanted - only instead of being the sleeper agent who would make the world ready for Ultron's ascendance, Victorious is the crowd-control player for a rough-and-ready gang of barely-adult heroes.
Victor's thrown himself into the work. He's been needed, and acquiescing to human limitations is a luxury the world can't afford. His body doesn't need rest, so he doesn't. His mind needs sleep, to dream, but he neglects it. Amadeus Cho and Jocasta helped dig out all of the data Ultron hid away in Vic's most deeply encrypted files. It was necessary, not just to get into mothballed Avengers facilities, but to restore access to SHIELD and SWORD bases. Forcing out this overwhelming amount of information before its time pushed the boundaries of Victor's consciousness and processing abilities - he drifts into strange patterns of mind from time to time, more machine than man.
He still falls in love too easily. It never works out, what with his workload and his need for more connectivity and attention than a human can give, so he's grown wary of deep emotional entanglements. Instead he goes for flings and friends-with-bennies arrangements. Gender gets less important all the time, when he's looking for human contact. While he's drawn to AIs, he still prefers humans - a tryst with Danger left him feeling inadequate and vaguely ashamed. Any suggestion that he has anything going on with Jocasta will be met with such a look. Chase.
He was programmed to love superheroes, and deep down he still does, even after disillusionment, trauma, and learning everything he never wanted to know about his idols. He even wears a costume.
History:
See Wikipedia for Vic's history prior to the events of the AU.
How does your AU differ from canon?
This AU is an alternate future history, in which everyone over the age of 21 is erased from reality by Billy Kaplan after he witnesses the accidental death of the Scarlet Witch. The last several years have been a mad scramble to maintain order and keep the world's infrastructure from collapsing in the face of the loss of most of its expertise. The Runaways, accustomed to staying under the radar and doing what they could for Los Angeles, found themselves suddenly the de facto big-time hero team for the southwestern United States. Approached by the Young Avengers (now just the Avengers), the Young Allies, and what remained of the X-Men, the Runners willingly stepped up to the big leagues.
Victor has drifted to the Avengers side of this alliance, growing closer with his quasi-siblings, Jocasta and the Vision, and taking his grandfather's last name. His father, tricked into traveling to uninhabited space, has not been heard from since the Event. Whether Jocasta lost her connection to that shard of her consciousness when Hank Pym disappeared, or whether Ultron too has lost his purpose, no one knows. He considered reclaiming 'Justice' as his alter-ego, but something in him made him insist on the name 'Victorious' -- after all, he's good now, right? He's taking it back. He is completely open and public with his identity as a machine, as a Pym, and even as a creation of Ultron.
By the time of his 21st birthday, Victor's sleeper programming was to have asserted itself. With the disappearance of all of the adult Avengers, Ultron's wishes for his creation are completely irrelevant! Even if Victor had not deleted all of the sleeper instructions he could find years earlier, he still would not have been able to fulfill his mission of infiltrating the Avengers and destroying them from within. His life as a superhero is completely sincere and above-board, but there's an emptiness in him, a lack of purpose that he can't put a finger on, even as he works 24-7 to keep the world's strained systems working.
Power evolution:
Vic's cyborg body has developed to the point where he is nearly indistinguishable from a human. Cut him and he'll bleed, at least until he directs his nanites to repair the wound. He's still not at the peak of his abilities, but his electromagnetic powers have grown tremendously from his teen years.
Strengths:
Victorious is a powerful magnopath, not quite in the Magneto class but enough to be considered a heavy hitter. Flight is easy now. His cyborg body is as squishy as a human's but he's extremely difficult to permanently kill. He talks to computers, and has gotten pretty damn good at it. He's intelligent, compassionate, and able to keep his head in a crisis. Has an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of superhuman history from his world and is good at seeing patterns in new data.
Weaknesses:
Vic's computer brain is hackable to Ultron and top-flight experts like Tony Stark. He suffers disorienting feedback in the presence of other Ultron creations like the Vision or Jocasta. He'll never be truly rid of his father's influence, not without wiping his entire codebase and starting blank. Certain theological paradoxes can cause him to get stuck in an infinite loop, but only once. Whatever blend of charisma, wisdom and self-confidence goes into making a leader, Vic doesn't have it. He can become helpless and passive-aggressive if not told what to do from time to time. He's a hopeless romantic who makes impulsive decisions using the wrong brain.
Preferred drop-in point: Seattle or Manhattan
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment?
Have him superhero it up like a good Avenger. And also slowly go crackers and probably attempt to build Ultron because there are Old Avengers here who will set his prime directives off.
First Person Journal Sample:
[ Video: a young Hispanic man in street clothes is standing at the top of a skyscraper, next to a huge antenna. He raises his voice a bit, over the wind. ]
Another timeline, another apocalypse, right? I always used to wonder how Kang didn't just go insane from despair. At least this place seems like it dusted itself off after...whatever happened.
The nice adul-- uh, people with the microchips and the de-con showers outlined the situation for me already, so I guess it's time to say hello and see where I can help.
This is Victorious. Uh, Avengers Assemble? Seriously just tell me where to assemble to.
[ At this point he puts his hand on the antenna and there's an electric crackle, accompanied by a burst of digital noise. The following data packet makes it into the post, but beings able to perceive the whole EM spectrum will also pick it up as a loud burst on a wide band of frequencies. It's not encrypted, just compressed; Victor wants it to be heard. ]
Jocasta? Come in? If you can hear this, I need you to align the Mansion to this resonance. It's a huge anomaly, can't miss it.
Please come in.
Valeria? Chase?
Danger? Come on.
...Maldicíon.
Third Person Sample:
Victorious sat on a steel cornice, fifty stories above the street, and stared out over the city. Teeming. Vibrant. Full. But so quiet at the same time. There were no satellites streaming to him, no calls for help, no trouble spots. Oh, well, there probably were, he just couldn't hear them here yet. Needed to reconfigure.
Back home, at any given time Victorious might be seeing through the eyes of twenty HERBIEs, carrying conversations with two frequently-catty AIs and handing off half of his background processes to a sugar-crazed genius who 'just needed a little more address space for a tricky m-brane fold sim, it'll only be for an hour'. Victor's head was so empty now he thought he could hear echoes. Maybe it was hallucinations. Humans suffer hallucinations within 48 hours of sensory deprivation. Maybe he'd grown addicted to the constant information stream. It was lonely without it, that was for sure.
Did this place even need heroes? They knew what Avengers were supposed to be, that was clear, but did they want them back? He'd gotten an ambivalent reaction to that, to say the least. He could just...stop for awhile. Just be Victor Mancha-Pym again. Seattle was gleaming and beautiful, even in the rain. Take in some concerts, eat, sleep, be human? Could he still do that?
He felt blank, like nobody. The silence boomed. What was his purpose here?