* Ghost Form 2 (Liquid or gaseous form; take and inflict no damage with physical attacks. Can't pass airtight barriers.) (2pts)
* Boost Brawn 1 (+1 to Brawn to Soak damage and knockback.) (1pts)
Description
Adam is normally a six foot tall blonde-haired teenager. He wears veteran clothes that were bought at a thrift shop.
He settles on an outfit that resembles a quasi-terrorist. Above the waist, he wears a black fleece turtleneck, dark-colored bicycle gloves, a black ski mask, and black Ray Bans. Below the waist, he wears olive green BDU pants with combat boots. Around his waist, he has a multi-pocketed fanny pack filled with first aid materials and a flashlight.
Origin
Adam Storn’s life changed on a Boy Scout camping trip five years ago when he was thirteen. His troop was hiking along a trail following a river. Adam headed into the woods to heed the call of nature and stepped into a pool of quicksand. His frantic struggle to breathe sucked him under the water quickly. Then, something extraordinary happened. He lost consciousness and awoke a mile away the next day unfortunately naked. He scrambled back to camp and got dressed before the search parties returned. Adam said he got lost. The relief of his return outweighed the aggravation of his disappearance, and the event was forgotten relatively quickly chalked up to youthful distraction. The other useful thing to this story that Adam remembers of this time was a local news report of a chemical spill into the river where he was hiking a month before his trip.
Since then, Adam developed an aversion to swimming. Even his showers are quick and precise. When inundated with water, he feels odd as he struggles to hold himself together. Plus, he now sinks like a stone in water. While he can simply walk on the bottom of the body of water, he greatly fears getting stuck or lost.
In addition, he discovered that his heart stopped beating and his lungs stopped breathing, fortunately his diaphragm continues to automatically cycle, so he doesn’t look dead. Although, by most medical tests, he is dead. If something would normally make him bleed, instead his true form reveals the mud under his skin.
Beyond that, the next four years continued relatively normally for a suburban Caucasian kid in the upper middle class. His parents were both engineers and his older sister led the family’s drama. He coasted in school avoiding sports and doctors.
Then last year, another event altered Adam’s life. Walking home from school, he ran into traffic to save a young girl who had fallen from her bicycle. While he managed to push the girl to safety, Adam was hit by a truck and run over. Although unconscious, he was pronounced dead on arrival to the hospital. That night, he awoke in the morgue and walked home. His family was overwhelmed with relief to see him alive after grieving his death hours earlier. The doctors were flabbergasted. A week later, the government arrived. Men in black suits spoke seriously to his parents and convinced them to allow Adam to finish his last year of high school at a government facility to study his condition.
Adam gradually realized that he was in trouble. On the way to the facility, his escorts refused to describe their destination, and he became treated increasingly like a prisoner. As he was being transferred to a military jet when things went strange. A red and yellow blur knocked two of the agents off their feet. A white blur knocked two more off their feet. Then a dark haired woman in black leather appeared out of nowhere, her face covered in a black cat makeup. She picked up Adam, and before he could use his powers, the world shifted, and she was on top of the jet, and then the world shifted again, and she was on top of a hanger, then it shifted again, and again, and again, and again, until he was nearly sick to his stomach.
Eventually, the shifting stops, and the woman is joined by a woman in a white suit, and a woman in a red and yellow suit. The woman in black grins through her makeup. "Put your jaw back up, kid. You're too young for us... well, maybe not for Blur."
The girl in white, with a strong Irish accent, responds. "Hey! He's maybe 16, I'm 19."
The woman in red chuckles. "Close enough girl. Anyway, we have to get you out of here, unless you want to spend the rest of your life in a lab being poked and prodded."
The three get him out of town, and he spends a few weeks in training, although once they realize he can control his powers, they offer to resettle him or let him help them save others, and also capture others who abuse their abilities.
Mud spends the next three months working with a few different people, getting an idea of how to do what these people do. Mostly it involves watching out for weirdness, getting tips from psychics, and generally keeping a low profile. Over the months, he has embraced the expression, ”my name is Mud.”
Finally, he's assigned to work with a girl named Replicate, who's part of setting up a new team in New Orleans, where things are heating up recently with regards to Meta activity.
Replicate is using her own money to restore an old mansion south of New Orleans, a place where some of the Metas with less than human features can move about in relative safety. Mud has been there for a week when the new group shows up.
