withthebrotherhood: (shy)
[personal profile] withthebrotherhood
|| Player Information ||
Name: Siobhan
Personal Journal: [personal profile] fiercebadrabbit
Time zone: US Central
Contact: AIM: blitztsunami, email: israfel1030@gmail.com
Current Characters: Kurt Waggoner, Kit Baxter-Fenwick


|| Character Information ||
Fandom: Wolverine and the X-men
Name: Mortimer Toynbee/Toad
Canon Point: End of show
History: Born in Jersey (but the part that’s almost as good as New York, which is where he’d say he’s from), Morty was unlucky enough to be an obvious mutant from birth. His father walked out immediately after being handed a green baby and his mother only held onto him for a few years before surrendering him to the state. He wouldn’t have been a socially successful kid anyway, naturally awkward, neither physically coordinated nor academically inclined, but he went through childhood without the option of being ignored. It ain’t easy being green. He was picked on constantly and tried to pick back, though the more useful powers didn’t come through until puberty, and he didn’t have a lot of luck with defending himself. He got really good at pleading and cowering, at least, but as life skills went, that wasn’t much.

Which didn’t matter, because no one was going to give a scary-looking mutant a job anyway, especially for a kid with terrible people skills and no real prospects. After he dropped out of high school he worked at a garage for a little while, in the back, out of the way where no nice people could see him, and for nothing like minimum wage. If he’d complained he would have wound up on the street completely, and he did know how to shut up and deal with it.

He ran out of hope that it would get better when one of his boss’s friends spotted him and chucked a bottle at his head. He hadn’t really expected to be defended from the ensuing beat-down (that senator bastard had just been on the news raving about registration again and shit like this was going down everywhere), but when his supposed employer joined in, he ran and didn’t come back. He slept on the streets and ate out of trash cans for a few months, breaking up the monotony with petty crime, before another gang of stupid, scared humans looking for someone to blame caught up with him.

He wasn’t sure he’d have made it out of that one if the Brotherhood hadn’t intervened. He’d seen them on TV, the scary mutant terrorists who worked for Magneto and didn’t put up with human bullshit. He’d admired them and envied them and was shocked when he was offered a position on the team. Even when it turned out that they mostly wanted an extra body around and only really let him stick around because it was against their whole mutants-first ideology to cut him loose, he didn’t mind too much. It wasn’t like he was going to have real friends. Halfway tolerant coworkers of a sort who’d help him get away with spitting slime at MRD goons were the next best thing.

Toad joined the Brotherhood just in time for anti-mutant sentiment to really heat up. It had been there all his life, he more aware of it than most mutants (who could pass for normal), but now there seemed to be another angry diatribe on every morning news show, another hate crime reported every evening. The Mutant Registration Act stood a real chance of passing and the Mutant Registration Division went from a specialized law enforcement wing to a wholly militarized force unto itself, combining angry, stomping boots on the ground with sentinel robots and mutant-tormenting devices.

All of which seemed perfectly natural to Toad, making his lousy lot in life the law of the land officially rather than just generally agreed upon. He was with the Brotherhood every step of the way, targeting facilities and politicians, carrying out Magneto’s covert missions, doing his best to enrage every anti-mutant force out there… Well, no one would ever tell him any details. Or broad outlines. Or anything, generally, but making a pest of himself was better than doing nothing. He usually screwed up, but the Brotherhood believed in taking care of their own. That was the rule, the principle behind everything. Everything for the betterment of all mutantkind!

Then he discovered that there was a Toad-specific escape clause. Captured by the MRD for the fourth or fifth time, he was in his usual snit awaiting rescue, calling down disaster on everyone’s heads, when the boss arrived. And promptly told him he was staying where he was. Even Toad was a little taken aback when he realized Quicksilver had actually broken into a heavily guarded enemy facility just to tell him he wasn’t being rescued.

As it happened, he had a line on a powerful mutant in MRD custody who it might be useful to break out, and got himself rescued after all. But they’d still meant to leave him behind because he wasn’t useful enough, which quashed the fragile beginnings of trust and loyalty he’d begun to accept. He went back with them, because the world was more dangerous all the time and he didn’t have anywhere else to be, after all, but he didn’t really try much after that. Once more he was lonely and despised, and it was all the worse for that little while he’d spent thinking he might matter to someone.

The situation with the MRD got worse. Political intrigue piled up in Genosha, the all-mutant island nation. Cosmic forces stirred and a dreadful future loomed. Toad didn’t care all that much. He just tried not to get shot and things worked themselves out more or less without any help from him. Seemed like the way things were always going to work.

Personality: Toad is disgusting, he messes everything up, and he always gets caught, in the expressly stated opinion of his immediate superior in the Brotherhood. While the description itself is apt, more telling is the fact that it came from one of the few people he’d consider a friend, and came while he was being left in the custody of the MRD by said friend, simply because he’d become too annoying to bother with rescuing. Toad is deeply, personally unpleasant, it’s true, but he’s also treated miserably by the universe, and the one follows the other in an endless cycle.

His actual personal failings are almost too numerous to list. He’s a coward, he’s a sneak, he’s aggressive and overconfident. He’s a creep to women and he frightens children (sometimes on purpose, not just because he happens to be physically mutated rather beyond the pale). He’s always insecure, has serious periods of depression, and hates himself more than anyone else really could. He picks fights he can’t possibly win. He’s a wretched excuse for a human, and he’s not even a very good mutant, with bottom of the barrel, shit-iter powers that have yet to really win him a fight.

If Toad has a redeeming feature, it’s that he knows all that. He’ll make ridiculous claims as a defense mechanism, but he understands himself, if not anybody else. He’s not nearly as dumb as he comes across, though he’s severely lacking the kind of boundaries and inhibitions that would let him actually apply or improve his talents. Being afraid of everything means that he actually deals fairly well with fear; when you’re going to panic about the slightest inconvenience (and yell about it), there’s nowhere to really go when the world starts ending. He’s just so used to fear and rejection and misery that it can’t register anymore. In a sense, he’s invincible.

When it comes to simple threats, anyway. All the self-awareness and resignation is great when he’s getting beaten on or attacked by anti-mutant forces of one kind or another, and while he never wins, he’s quite resilient. There’s not much you can throw at Toad that life hasn’t already. Where his armor fails him is dealing with people. A lifetime of rejection and mockery has left him both unable to trust anybody and desperate for… Well, ideally affection, but he’ll take attention, and negative attention is better than none. On the rare occasion he has tried to trust anybody, he’s been ditched or betrayed or used as cannon fodder. He’s thoroughly convinced he’s useless and fully aware he can’t really depend on anybody to defend him. It makes for defensive pessimism for the most part, but he can almost never resist trying for approval. Not ever having it work out for him once hasn’t resulted in making him want friends who actually like him any less, just made him more bitter and miserable.

That’s a big part of why he stays with the brotherhood. They don’t treat him much better than the general population, and they very nearly left him to rot in MRD custody, sure, but maybe if he works real hard, one day, they’ll actually like him. That and the whole mutant liberation thing. He’s cynical, and he’s all too aware that the beauty pageant contestants and the powerful mutants aren’t going to do much better by freaks like him than the humans would, but if he could imagine a better world, he’d want it to be one where there aren’t more kids like him.

And where the flatscans get what’s coming to them, of course. He’s not capable of being noble for more than half a thought, after all, as much by design as anything else. There is, deep down under layers of flailing, antisocial hostility, a core to him that’s well-intentioned, if not actually nice. He’d like to do right by somebody the way no one ever has for him, though he’d have no idea how, and if he could feel secure for a second, he wouldn’t mean anybody any harm. He hates violence, despite being surrounded by it constantly, which is part of the reason he’s never gotten good at hand-to-hand combat, relying on slime instead, and his tongue in a pinch. It’s the closest he can get to not having to put up with yelling and pain and all the other constants in his mess of a life.

Skills | Powers: Toad’s X-gene manifestation is extensive and, to his mind (and most everyone else’s) pretty useless. When he’s not being sized up against people who shoot lasers from their eyes or run fast enough to cross oceans on a whim, his abilities are certainly handy. His physiology is pretty removed from the human baseline (and not particularly Toadlike, but you gotta have a callsign). He’s much more comfortable in a crouch and can’t stand up quite straight even if he wants to, but he is very flexible with an excellent sense of balance and enhanced agility. He’s not graceful and he lands wrong a lot, but just because he looks like an idiot when he moves doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. His prehensile tongue is extremely sticky and extends a good ten feet out of his mouth, as strong as any of his limbs and highly accurate. He spits gobs of slightly acidic, strongly adhesive green slime, which he uses to enhance his climbing abilities or just spits at people he wants to inconvenience. Both hands and feet are webbed and clawed, giving him an advantage navigating in water and poking people really hard.

First Person Sample: [Panic-scowl is kind of Toad’s natural expression, but it’s stronger than usual as he stabs ineffectively at the tablet. HIs claws always make it hard to manipulate electronics. He’s hard on buttons.]

Man… Guys? Domino?

[Neena’s probably the best combination of willing and able to help him, if anyone remotely familiar has access to one of these things. A splash from the river makes him jump about three feet backwards.]

Ah, geeze, what was that? Whatever it was made gross, spooky noises. Why is everything spooky and gross? Spooky and grosser than usual. I think it’s gross and I think we can all agree that’s messed up.

[He twitches violently at another noise and charges about twenty feet further from the river.]

Yeahsoanyway, whoevers idea this was, I’m… I’m with the Brotherhood. Gonna be sorry. Yup.

[Trying to look resolute lasts about four seconds before he backs into the nearest shadow as best he can.]

Seriously, though. Pietro? Dukes?

Third Person Sample: Toad scrambled around the corner of an alleyway on all-fours, started to spring forward, and realized he’d hit a dead end. No way he had time to try for another hiding place. The stupid flatscans were close behind him. So he caught himself on the side of a dumpster mid-hop, unperturbed by the slimy, foul-smelling sludge on the side. That just softened the impact a little as he felt all the force of his weight and momentum on his fingers. Ow. Couldn’t stop, though. They were already at the mouth of the alleyway. He scrambled up the side of the dumpster no problem, but had to stop just for a second to spit on his hands. The building was newish bricks, nothing he could hold onto without the extra stickiness.

It was a second too many. Someone got hold of his leg and pulled. He tried to kick, but that just sent him sprawling. He barely avoided a faceplant onto the side of the building, twisting hard, and managed to get around to face them. Four guys, young, big, drunk, and angry. Mostly angry about their shitty lives, but they couldn’t punch bad luck or curb-stomp systemic obstacles, and here they had a freaky looking mutie to make them feel better.

He did his best to aim, but spitting slime was not an exact science, and he only nailed two of them. At least one of his hits was the one holding him, and when he reeled back, Toad got his feet under him and jumped for the wall, slapping his palms against the cool bricks and scrambling to distribute weight so he wouldn’t fall off again, bracing his heels shakily against the wall. Unfortunately, his springing escape’s less than ideal direction had left him facing outward, and even he might have trouble crabwalking blind up an apartment building.

Not that he had a chance to try. He’d only hit two, and while he was out of reach now, one of their non-slimed friends picked up a chunk of broken asphalt. “Aw, no, hey, not the--” Well, he got his wish, since the idiot missed his face, and the chunk smacked into his chest. He wheezed and decided he’d better get out of their immediate range a little more directly. Taking a chance, he pushed off as hard as he could and jumped for the building across the alley, this one an older brownstone with a more porous, irregular surface. By the time they figured out the trick and turned around, he was skittering sideways along the wall and jumping back into the open street.

He landed right in front of a woman he had no time to leer at or even resent for shrieking. She was a wall between him and them, and as the four losers rounded the corner, he snatched the stunned lady’s purse and hurled it at them. Confusing the hell out of people could be a great weapon, though it was damn unnatural to steal a purse and not keep it. He could have used dinner tonight, after all.

Without stopping to see what everybody made of his diversion, he went up the side of the building in a few hops, scrambling on window ledges and cracked stone, and when he reached the roof he jumped to the next one, then the next, until he was sitting in someone’s cute little rooftop garden a block away. He’d knocked over two pots in the jump, and pushed over one more to vent frustration before exhaustion caught up with him.

Since no one came up to investigate the thumping, he sprawled where he was. In the moment he’d had no one to bail him out and he’d had to keep running and flailing. Now came the shakes and the angry muttering and the little whimpers as he poked at his injuries, the persistent fragments of memory that would be replaying in his head all night, the shivering and the exhaustion.

Expressed with Toad’s usual grasp on oratory, of course. “Maaaan… Not cool.”

Marks: T for Thief on the side of his neck
T for Terrorist on the webbing of his left hand
C for Coward on the webbing of the right
This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

Profile

withthebrotherhood: (Default)
Mortimer Toynbee

October 2014

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
192021 22232425
262728293031 

Style Credit

  • Style: Unseelie for Ciel by nornoriel

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated May. 22nd, 2025 08:20 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios