OC Sample Applications
Rossi
June 2005
Subject: Rossi - OC
To: apps@xmenmovieverse.com
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CHARACTER'S FULL NAME: Christopher Lucius Rossi
CODENAME: None
ALIASES/NICKNAMES: AKA "Chris" AKA "Rossi"
SPECIES: Homo sapiens
GENDER: Male
AGE: 38
ORIGIN: Italian-Catholic, Brooklyn-born and -raised.
ORGANIZATION: NYPD.
POWERS: None.
HISTORY:
Christopher Lucius was born in October 30, 1970, the third of five children -- four boys plus one accidental, last-born and dearly cherished girl -- in a pious Italian Catholic family in the heart of Brooklyn. "Born and bred," he tells those who ask: with pride, and with some scorn for others not so fortunate. The entire Rossi clan has lived in New York City since its first glimpse of Ellis Island, now a familial legend, and New York is as much a religion to his family as Catholicism. But for the odd, errant scion who finds the city (and family!) more a prison than a bulwark -- one cadet branch took its rough-and-tumble urbanite selves to Utah in the 1980s, to the amiable chagrin of Cedar City Mormons -- all have remained there since their immigration from Italy in the early 1900s, squabbling, marrying, and breeding in the boroughs.
As the middle child in truth, Chris battled both older and younger siblings with the weapons at his disposal. Wit and a biting tongue served while his will to compete exceeded his body's capability; as was accepted custom within the brood of his family, siblings responded with like wit, or -- as frequently -- fists and sturdy blows. Resentments were quick to flare in the competitive atmosphere of his household, and just as quick to die after the glorious riot of a pitched battle. Perseverance and sheer tenacity gave the lightweight Chris victory in more than one family pile-on, more than might otherwise have been his due.
Puberty came late for the boy, and changed much for Chris in disconcerting and exhilarating ways. His growth spurt, long despaired of, made him the equal of his older brothers and a tower next to the sturdy bulldog of his father. Two years of confusion ensued while mind and body renegotiated a truce; at the end of them, he was a boy pitched into heady realization of his own power, housed in the body of a man in his prime. Emotional and mental maturity was slow in coming, overset by such long-awaited fulfillment. Memory of the years between puberty and the end of high school is still a source of burning embarrassment for the grown man.
Like many of the families that have bred New York into skin and bone, his has a tradition in keeping with their ethnic stereotype: firemen and policemen, with the women routed towards less bloody (if no less bruising) roles as family tyrants. Law and service are his inheritance by blood, though ambition was learned through a different route. His policeman father, Michael, clings stubbornly to the rank of sergeant, scorning advancement; likewise his older brother Paul and younger brother Mike Jr., both officers.
It is the other three children who have broken from nature and nurture. Second-born Gabe is a classical musician by training and trade: a cellist with the Met, to his father's consternation and mother Sonia's private delight. Daughter Julia eschewed safety and all its trappings to become a firefighter engineer in the Bronx -- and through some baffling parallel life, a competitive motorcycle racer -- to both parents' dismay.
Christopher has taken a middle road, part in, part out of the established pattern of their family molds. Defying familial expectation, he enrolled in NYU and graduated with an acceptable if not shining GPA and a BA in, of all things, religious anthropology. Family fears (or was it family hopes--?) predicted a swift dive into the seminary. After all, nobody could have been /such/ a delinquent in high school without some restitution due. From college, however, Chris made a pair of unexpected moves: to the Police Academy, where his much-vaunted degree did him absolutely no good; and away from the Catholic church, where he was becoming an increasingly confrontational and belligerent disruption.
Unlike his father and siblings, Chris quickly drove his career towards the rank of detective, defying his own physicality in favor of his lesser light, intellect. It is, in his perspective, a step up; from his family's point of view, it is a step down. Achieving the rank of detective has sufficed for the time being, satisfying whatever impetus drove him to thwart family tradition, and having grasped what was within his abilities, he has not attempted to reach further. For the past four years he has worked in homicide with his partner Detective John Beston, a veteran officer with over 20 years in the force. Under his senior's mentorship, he has matured into a reliable and somewhat respected detective, assured in his authority and competence.
PERSONALITY:
His zodiac sign: Scorpio. His Chinese zodiac: the Dog.
He's a physical beast, though he has his own intelligence. His instinctive preference is for the former, and it is in defiance of such unthinking prejudice that he deliberately subverts his instinct for his intellect. The result: suppressed violence battling the frustrations of a mind ill-suited for such repression. He has a passion for Justice, Law's bastard cousin, and he is as swift to hurl the weight of his anger against those he holds responsible for Law's failure as he is against those who have broken it.
His great faults are temper and pride, and an odd, edgy sensitivity to his own masculinity that sits at odds with his self-assurance. Intellectual maturity has found its place in his life, but emotional maturity lags still. Women and relationships rarely meet the kind of dedication that he expends so fervently on behalf of work or family; fortunate enough in love (if such a word could be used for his fleeting, shallow encounters) he is quick to take the easy road out: the initial dance of courtship and swift consummation -- for he is not a /patient/ man -- is as swiftly followed by fights that bubble towards violence, recriminations, and separation.
There lies in him the seed of the vigilante, a recklessness that wrestles with recognition of Authority and frets at its limitations. In his perspective there are but two sorts of people: Ours and Theirs, though the boundaries of each group shift and change at whim. These borders place themselves without regard for mutant gene or no; in theory he is a racist, and a homophobe, and a bigot, and sexist: in practice he is something else altogether. For all his claims of dislike for one group or another, his advocacy of the truth of this or that ugly stereotype, the immediacy of the moment overrides such concerns and proves them little more than verbal habit, turns of phrase that he has not yet outgrown.
Despite his faults and the cynicism that flourishes in the fertile ground of his training and experience, he retains that most inconvenient of traits, an idealistic faith in those people who have chosen to stand in loco parentis to the young. Priests, teachers, parents -- he has a child's belief in their perfect altruism, setting standards for them no reality could attain. In his line of work, it is only inevitable that he will see their tragic failures; unreasonable though it may be, the grown man feels the hurt of the disappointed child when they betray the failings of normal humanity, and reciprocates their failures with savagery.
Witch hunts, Beston calls them. /He/ has no such prejudices: to the veteran's jaded eye, there are no innocents. Will he or won't he, Chris still lacks the ability to place such distance between himself and the youngest, most forlorn of the victims that cross his path. He casts himself as their hunting dog, past reason, past Law, and harries his targeted quarries beyond the pale.
MISCELLANEOUS:
In practice, he rides the cusp between career suicide and job security, teetering dangerously towards the former more than prudent for a man wanting a future. His partner, John, likewise plays a balancing game: he is no wide-eyed rookie, afire with the idealism of inexperience. More than one Internal Affairs investigation has probed the veteran detective, and by association, Chris -- for, it should be noted, good reason. John's visible peccadillos are relatively innocuous, as police corruptions go -- the free lunch, the 'favors' for friends -- but they are, nonetheless, signal of less palatable sins taking place beneath the currents. Chris rides in his partner's train, partaking equally in the free lunches without concern for consequences; they are his right as a police officer, and one of the privileges of his position.
As for Beston's other faults, if Chris is aware of them, he toes the blue line with the same single-minded intent he directs towards his cases, willing and ready to forgive and (conveniently) forget as needed. In this he betrays an all too human inconsistency; the failures he would condemn and pursue in another, he is eager to overlook and excuse in his fellow cop. After all, who else could better understand the temptations and trials experienced by a cop but another brother in blue?
By association, he is tainted with the brush of corruption, though it does not concern him overmuch. His philosophy is that familiarity with the vices he hunts makes him a better hunter. Vice would indeed be a dangerous route for him, pregnant as it is with temptation; he is aware of it, and so has avoided at least one invitation for a transfer into that department.
He is close to his family, in that he visits them often. Of his parents, he is closest to his mother, though there is still that inevitable gap between parent and child. Of his siblings, it is his youngest sister that is his best friend, with his youngest brother a distant second. Art and all its glory is a closed book to him. Motorcycles, on the other hand--
Jeremy
September 2005
Subject: Jeremy Wallace - OC
To: apps@xmenmovieverse.com
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CHARACTER'S FULL NAME: Jeremy Wallace
CODENAME: None, at the moment. He may develop one later, I dunno.
ALIASES/NICKNAMES: He just goes by Jeremy.
SPECIES: Homo sapiens superior.
GENDER: Male.
AGE: 15
ORIGIN: Portland, Oregon. As for derivation, he is an American muddle; a little English, a little Irish, a little French, a little Austrian, a little Cherokee.
ORGANIZATION: Citizen; however, I am aiming him rather plainly at Xavier's.
POWERS:
Jeremy's powers are inextricably tied up with his emotional state at the moment, which is not very pleasant as he is in puberty. He creates very small air pockets in his general vicinity, in which the pressure rapidly increases until the strain grows too great and they explode. He has no control over the placement of these pockets, which occur anywhere within square meter of his location, nor their size; they vary between microscopic to about three centimeters in diameter. The resultant explosions vary accordingly in scope.
HISTORY:
Jeremy is the middle child: he has an older sister, Cora, and a younger brother, Kelly. Cora is 19 and in college at the University of Montana; Kelly is 8. His father owns a family-style restaurant in Portland called Samantha's, after Jeremy's grandmother; his mother worked from home, a writer of supernatural fiction (occasionally people in the right circles will make the connection and ask if Jeremy is related to Nancy Wallace; it doesn't happen that often, though). he grew up normally, pleasantly, with a few close friends: Jim, Peter, Lisa.
He played second base in Little League and developed an extreme antipathy to his elder sister's boyfriend, Mike; he tried to chew tobacco on the playground on a dare when he was ten years old and found it wholly repugnant. He liked camping and fishing with his father and uncle Leroy. He liked reading and playing Magic cards and video games. It was a relatively simple life. Sure, it had its ups and downs, but in general, it was okay.
Puberty hit late for Jeremy Wallace, and it hit with a bang. Literally. When he was under stress - as you often are, in high school - there seemed to be a strange feeling, deep in the pit of his stomach, building and building like something awful was going to happen … and then, horribly, something awful did. In the course of the first week since the manifestation of his powers, Jeremy has had seven or eight explosions of varying size occur in his general vicinity. The most traumatic thus far involved the splattering death of his gerbil, Samwise.
PERSONALITY:
Jeremy has something of a shy streak, which he has a tendency to overcompensate for with long strings of nervous babbling. A little insecure? Yes, and something of a nervous little thing. He is very sweet and nice, and kind of wishy-washy; he is also, however, somewhat emotionally volatile and inclined to panic (especially recently, what with the startling advent of all this explosions popping out of the woodwork for no apparent reason). He has something of a clownish streak; he likes to make people smile. He is also rather easily intimidated. And kind of geeky; he's never been the popular sort. But not the kind to stun everyone with huge brains, either; although not stupid, he is not really all that bright either.
MISCELLANEOUS:
Jeremy is inclined towards pudge and shortness of breath, especially during the off-season when there is no baseball to keep him trim. He stress eats.