Psychist
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| On duty outside Dark Astoria | |
| Psychist | |
| Player: @Sareini | |
| Origin: | Mutant |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Controller/Tanker |
| Security Level: | 50/11 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | James Gabriel Walker |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Human/Mutant |
| Age: | 17 |
| Height: | 5'8" |
| Weight: | 149lbs |
| Eye Color: | Blue |
| Hair Color: | Black |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Student; Licensed Super Hero |
| Place of Birth: | Tiffin, Ohio |
| Base of Operations: | Steel Canyon, Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Single (dating) |
| Known Relatives: | Scott Walker (Father); Vivian Walker (Mother, whereabouts unknown); Michael Walker (Brother, deceased) |
| Known Powers | |
| Mind Control, Kinetics, Psionic Mastery // Willpower, Energy Melee | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Hyper-enhanced metabolism, Flight via telekinesis | |
| Equipment | |
| Kinetic Channelling Gauntlets | |
| ' | |
Psychist was created as a combination of two incidental fictional characters – Harriman Gray of the TV series Babylon 5 and Jackknife, a Marvel Comics character. The idea was to create a psychic character who wasn’t confident with using their abilities and wasn’t terribly balanced as a result of them, rather than the overly-confident and serene experienced psychic types usually seen in comic books.
With the release of i11, and due to the evolution of the character, Psychist has been re-rolled as a Tanker (which is why there are now two sets of powers and ATs listed for him).
Contents |
Affiliations
Personality
James Walker is generally quiet. This is partly because he often still feels overwhelmed by the amount of psychic chatter around him that he is constantly trying to block out, and partly because, after several years of being a telepath, he has just gotten used to being a better listener than a talker. On the other hand, he does have a slightly strange sense of humour (which sometimes seems to surprise people), and has become more confident in himself and his abilities since he arrived in Paragon and took an active role as a hero.
When under severe stress, however, James does tend to act irrationally. This can be in the form of talking or muttering to himself, or performing what others would see as stupid or even suicidal acts in an attempt to protect others. When under stress he also becomes a great deal more emotional than usual, going to extremes of emotion where he normally might not have reacted.
He is loyal to his friends and supergroup, the Guardian Angels, almost to a fault, and there might be a touch of hero-worship still in there somewhere towards some of the team’s more powerful and long-standing members.
Recently, James has begun a relationship with fellow Guardian Angel Cherish Sanchez, which has led to further changes in his personality; he has grown more confident about himself and is no longer as quiet in social or combat situations.
Powers
James is a mutant whose powers are primarily psionic in nature. However, several years of being on various (and mostly unneeded) psychoactive and/or anti-psychotic drugs and sedatives have also reacted with his mutant metabolism, leaving him highly resistant to, and able to burn off quickly the vast majority of drugs and poisons.
Recently, while working for the organisation known as Ouroboros, James's powers took an unusual turn, however, augmenting his telekinetic abilities considerably while suppressing his telepathic ones. This has left him with several new abilities that he is slowly learning how to control, including enhanced strength through telekinesis and telekinetic shields that protect him from injury. He can 'switch' between his abilites, but it takes some time and concentration for him to be able to do so.
Mind Control
James’ primary mutation has given him strong psionic abilities – primarily telepathy, although he does also have some telekinetic abilities as well. He can read the minds of those around him, although he rarely does so deliberately or on more than a ‘surface thoughts’ level. After training with psychics from GIFT for several months, he also learned how to direct his telepathic abilities to control the minds of others to a certain degree, such as sending then to sleep or temporarily locking them inside their own minds. He can also cause hallucinations in the minds of others, causing them to attack their allies, or manipulate people’s emotions to such an extent that they become overwhelmed by them and unable to do anything else for a short period of time. He most commonly uses fear as the primary emotion for this; however, he is able to manipulate other emotions to a similar degree.
Kinetics
James also has a limited ability to affect the kinetic energies of people and objects around him, slowing them down or speeding them up as needed, as well as being able to drain a certain amount of a target’s potential energy to provide limited healing to himself and others around him. He can also create a 'shield' of energy around him that prevents anyone from coming too close to him, but can only maintain it for short periods of time.
It was originally believed that this ability was a rather unusual manifestation of telekinesis; however, further study revealed that James was actually manipulating bio-kinetic energy in its most basic form, using this energy to trigger reactions in himself or other people. He can temporarily hyper-accelerate a person’s metabolism to heal their injuries (although he cannot reverse fatal injuries) or ‘super-charge’ their adrenaline levels for a short time, causing them to move faster and maintain a high level of stamina. He can also slow the metabolisms of others in a similar way, reducing the amount of damage they can do, their reactions and even their endurance levels.
Recently, James has also begun to show some visible effects of his manipulation and channelling of bio-kinetic energy – sometimes crackles of excess energy flash across his body.
On the other hand, more success has been had in channelling some of the excess energy to be used in other ways (see Equipment below).
Additional Powers
Flight
James can use his telekinetic abilities to levitate himself in the air and fly, although this takes a lot of concentration on his part. He cannot carry anyone with him when he flies.
Fitness
James has a considerably faster metabolism than normal, which gives him a degree of resistance to drugs, sedatives and the like, as well as allowing him to heal from injuries slightly faster than normal. This also means that he seems somewhat thinner than someone of his age, height and 'career' should be. Part of the reason for his hyper-accelerated metabolism seems to be a reaction to the drugs he was given for the several years he was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and institutionalised.
Psionic Mastery
Recently James has been able to hone his psychic shields to the point where he can completely block other psychics from his mind for a short period of time, giving him protection from any attacks or attempts to read his thoughts during that time. He cannot maintain these heightened shields for very long, however. He has had more success with developing and sustaining a telekinetic shield around his body, however, by linking it with his bio-kinetic abilities, and can maintain these shields for as long as he wishes (providing he remains conscious).
James has also developed the ability to focus all his psionic abilities into a single large burst effect, which attacks targets on both a mental and physical level at the same time. There appears to be a link between this ability and James' emotional state, as the burst is considerably more destructive when he is angry or under stress.
Speed
James has very recently learned to trigger biochemical reactions in his own body, which allow him to effectively 'hyper-charge' his own metabolism for short periods of time. However, he is often left physically exhausted by this when the effects wear off, as his body attempts to balance the changes being made to his already altered metabolism.
Weaknesses and Limitations
James cannot affect robots or non-sentients with his telepathic abilities (they have no minds for him to manipulate). He can be easily distracted due to the constant psychic background noise in his head, and in stressful situations this can overwhelm him.
James also has times when he seems unusually naïve about the world around him – a side-effect of his institutionalisation for several years which left him socially and emotionally behind his peers. This could potentially lead to his being manipulated by others more canny than he is.
Equipment
James uses a set of specially designed gauntlets that capture and store some of the excess bio-kinetic energy that surrounds and bleeds off him. James can then use this energy to temporarily increase his own strength and launch brief but powerful melee attacks on his opponents.
Character History
James Walker’s life before his mutant powers developed was more or less a normal one. He was born and raised in a small Ohio town by his father, who did his best to ensure that his son did not suffer from his mother’s absence - Vivian Walker had left her family when James was six months old, unable to cope with the demands of being a new parent and the grief over the death of James’ identical twin brother Michael, who was stillborn. To this day neither James nor his father know where his mother currently is – something which does not bother James, as he feels no real bond with his mother.
When he was 12, however, things began to change. James began to ‘hear’ voices in his head that no-one else seemed to be able to, and ‘see’ things that no-one else could see. Scared and confused over what was happening to him, James tried to keep what was happening to him a secret, but the stress of this caused him to become withdrawn and he began to have trouble eating and sleeping. Eventually it all came to a head during a history test in school when, unable to cope any longer with the constant noise in his head, James started screaming at the ‘voices’ to be quiet and leave him alone – even though no-one else in the room was speaking. That day it took three teachers to restrain the hysterical and confused adolescent, who was taken to the local hospital for observation.
Unfortunately for James, his small town’s doctors did not have the necessary experience to correctly diagnose his situation – that he was a telepathic mutant whose powers had just started to develop. For his part, James was unable to accurately communicate what he was seeing and hearing either. In the end, James was diagnosed as suffering from adolescent-onset disorganised or ‘hebephrenic’ schizophrenia, as well as the mood disorder cyclothymia (a ‘milder’ form of bipolar disorder). The doctors’ suggested course of treatment was to keep James in hospital until they could stabilise his symptoms through drugs, and then release him to continue his treatment and recovery at home.
James spent the following four years in hospital while the doctors attempted to treat him. Every drug they tried to control his ‘schizophrenia’ failed, and in the end they were forced to just pump him full of sedatives in an attempt to keep him calm – and even then the sedatives always seemed to wear off much quicker than they should have. It was only by chance that the truth about James’ condition came to light – a visiting paraphysician from Paragon City was touring the mental institute where James was committed, and was shown his records as one of their more ‘interesting’ cases. The doctor immediately suspected that there could be more to James’ ‘voices’ than simple schizophrenia, and arranged for genetic and psionic testing to be performed on the now-16-year-old-teen. When the results confirmed that he was a mutant, James was finally released from the mental institute that had been his home for nearly four years, and he and his father moved to Paragon City so that James could get better training in controlling his telepathy.
At first, however, moving to Paragon seemed to have been a bad move, as the telepathic 'noise' from the city was so much more than James had been used to before, and he still only had the barest of ideas about how to deal with it all. James refused to leave the apartment for anything other than his sessions with GIFT's psychics, and barely spoke to anyone, including his own father.
A chance encounter with a pair of Skulls attempting to mug a woman outside his apartment block one night, however, showed James a way to deal with the constant noise and pressure in his head. He instinctively launched a telepathic attack on the Skulls, and found that, when he used his telepathy in an offensive rather than purely passive way, he could quiet the voices for a short time. Creating a makeshift superhero costume from clothes in his closet, he went out to begin his hero career.
When his father found out about this, he was not happy at first, but gradually relented when he saw that, for the first time in a long while, his son was actually out and interacting with others (albeit not exactly in a way he might have liked). His only caveats to allowing James to continue as a hero were that he register officially with the city and he find others to work with, for his own safety. James joined the Guardian Angels shortly thereafter, and has remained with them since.
Cherish and James
After several months of working alongside her and considering her a close friend, James confessed to having a crush on his teammate Cherish Sanchez (partly because Cherish was attempting to set him up with their newly-sentient computer at the time). To his amazement, he discovered that his feelings were reciprocated, and the two began a relationship, moving quickly to the point where they became mind-linked. Their relationship, when it became publically known, caused some tension between James and Deathspider, Cherish's father, but the two are slowly working through things, much to James' relief.
Ouroboros
Most recently, James travelled back to the point at which he made the decision to become a hero while working with the mysterious organisation knows as Ouroboros. While there he began to notice several changed to his powers; his telepathic abilities began to fade, to the point where he could only 'hear' thoughts within a much more confined area, and not project his thoughts onto anyone, while his telekinetic and biokinetic abilities began to grow considerably. As a result of this, his hero licence was temporarily revoked while GIFT and SERAPH worked to try to find out what had caused this. Not wanting to sit around waiting to see what would happen, James promptly re-applied for a new licence and set out learning how to use his new abilities.
GIFT and SERAPH eventually surmised that, when James went back to that particular point in time, him mind was faced with a momentary overload of quantum flux as it tried to process the concepts of his time-travel and the possiblity of the past being changed. This caused his powers to re-manifest in a different, yet still potentially possible, way, and these new powers remained with him when he returned to the present. With this new knowledge, James is now able to 'switch' between his telepathic and telekinetic abilities, although it is not a quick process, usually taking an hour or so of concentration and meditation to do so.
The only constant between his different abilities is that his mind-link with his lover Cherish Sanchez remains regardless - when he is using his 'telekinetic-prime' powers, she is the only non-telepath he can 'speak' to with his mind.
Trivia
- James is vegetarian as, due to his altered metabolism, he can no longer digest red meat properly.
- His birthday is February 28, 1990.
- He suffers from dyscalculia, or numerical dyslexia.
- Because of his accelerated metabolism and his telepathic powers, James is an insomniac and can only sleep for two or three hours at a time.
- Most people seem to think James is gay when they first meet him. James really isn't sure why this is.
- James would be played by a young Jared Leto in a live-action movie.
