〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Tate
AGE: 26
EMAIL: troythetrekkie@gmail.com
PLURK: ACloudOfSnakes
RETURNING: Yes, I play Brendan

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Ezequiel Aloíso Endelela Omandaaxa
CHARACTER AGE: 14
CANON ORIGIN: Original.
CHRONOLOGY: October of 2016
CLASS: Hero/Hero Fanboy
HOUSING: Roommates would be cool

BACKGROUND: Ezequiel’s world has a historical trajectory similar to our own, with major world events still occurring in the same order. The one major difference is the existence of superpowers, which is genetic in his world. Starting in the early 1900’s, this gene ceased being fleetingly rare, with every major world conflict, army and strategy incorporating superpowered individuals into it. Different societies had different cultural reactions to this, from celebration to weaponization, but during World War Two, superpowered individuals became key pieces of propaganda in many countries. This had been done to limited effect in WWI prior, although mistakes were made, as superpowered people not agreeing with their country’s positions could create public mistrust and a single newspaper interview could sabotage any government plans to use their superpowered people’s clout. By WWII, the lesson had been learned: bribe your superheroes if/when they disagree with you or, if there’s no other option, make them vanish. Public morale and approval are too fragile to leave in individual’s hands otherwise.

Like many people his age, Ezequiel grew up admiring superheroes in comic books, novels based on their lives and radio dramas, but due to Africa and especially Angola’s complicated relationship with superheroes, he had never met anyone with superpowers. The white Angolans in control of the government had struggled to retain control of Angola during the Angolan War Of Independence in between 1961 and 1974 due to the presence of superpowered people on all five sides of the conflict, resulting in a much higher civilian death toll and soldier casualty rates all around than in our world – which, while not uncommon in Ezequiel’s world, is still something most people would like to avoid if at all possible. As such, it became necessary to find a way to manage the country’s superpowered population, even when what was left of it after the war was relatively small compared to other countries. Fortunately, thirteen years of war made worse by superpowered individuals internally made much of the civilian population willing to turn over people with powers to the government, who then made a cost-benefit analysis as to whether or not it was possible to turn a person to their side and if so, if it would be worth it to keep someone so dangerous around, as well as what the consequences of their death would be in terms of public opinion and political ramifications. One of the issues they ran into was that making people with superpowers die was neither easy nor a consequence free business, which was when they hit upon the idea of paying or convincing people in their employ already to get rid of people whose powers were too great a threat or who were otherwise driving up the death toll.

While this likely started from a good if ignoble place, as Angola moved in the Angolan Civil War, with repeated sustained periods of fighting, racial tensions on top of political ones (seven major factions were involved) on top of regional ethnic tensions made it impossible to keep superpowered individuals from either turning on each other, being convinced by their people to turn on someone or being motivated out of loyalty to a certain region to leave government control and try to protect a single area. The infighting that resulted kept civilian casualties an infrastructure damage on the rise, so in 1989 the MPLA’s government, being the closest to a ruling one that existed, turned to the one white hero (white Angolans make up only three to four percent of the population) they had and convinced him to kill other superpowered people, but under a mask and an alias, officially unconnected to any party. The rewards were cushy government jobs for everyone in his family, the safety of his friends, and of course, the reward of being a patriot who had helped save his country from ruin altogether.

This unfortunately went very well, and that man, Gláucio Feliciano Duarte Passos, went on to make his family exceptionally rich. During a stay in Angola’s capital, Luanda, he developed feelings for Kayela Edita Soares Endelela, a local auto mechanic who was worlds away from him in terms of income, religion, language and culture. She was the first person to make small talk with him that wasn’t the wealthy daughter of someone important doing so just to angle for proximity to power or money, and he fell for her instantly, but even though she returned his feelings, the reality was that his family wouldn’t stand for it. If he married her, it would have created too much bad will among his relatives, so he broke it off, neither of them aware she was pregnant at the time. She didn’t take it well, falling out of contact with him, and, when she discovered she was pregnant, marrying her best friend and teenage lover Edigio Iago Monteiro Omandaaxa so her baby would have support. And while the two genuinely were in love, Passos was never able to find someone to settle down with, so even as an unsteady peace settled over the country, he stood amongst the wealthy and powerful in Angola and fumed over what he didn’t have – what he couldn’t have, without upsetting his family and drawing unwelcome scrutiny onto himself by the press the Angolan government struggled to keep quelled.

Passos kept up the work of killing people with superpowers who opposed the government, but in peacetime that looked more like the actions of a supervillain than a hero to the public. With the mask and the coloration of his photokinetic powers, he maintained a double life and the supervillain name Centelha without any trouble. The thing about genetics is, if you make a concentrated effort to kill off everyone with a gene, after a few decades the problem sort of resolves itself. He ran low on people to kill with powers, so every now and again he was deployed against people who were too critical of the government or the president, winning easily since there wasn’t anyone left who could possibly be his match in a fight. He began to fight legitimate criminals when the government commanded it as well, and did some good, even if he was still a bitter, petty man longing for what he could have had underneath the wealthy businessman persona.

This is where Ezequiel comes in. Born to Kayela and only ever knowing Edigio as his father, he was part of Luanda’s struggling middle class, the ordinary son of a mechanic and a taxi driver, someone who had a relatively calm childhood spent playing games, reading about American and British superheroes and wishing Angola had people like that. A somewhat awkward and shy child, he had a handful of close-knit friends, a loving family, a small apartment with his mother, father and maternal grandmother, and blue eyes that his parents explained away as a recessive gene from a white ancestor generations back. They didn’t want him to know the drama and general unpleasantness that went into the ordeal with his biological father and he had no reason to question them until his superpowers manifested when he was twelve. When he was with his friend Inacio going to a lot where the local kids played soccer, they came across a robbery and Ezequiel’s distress made his powers flare up, allowing him to (accidentally) knock the burglar out with a shot of light to the head. What ensued was a quick fleeing of the scene since people with powers have a history of dying violent deaths in Angola, a lot of panic only calmed down by Inacio hauling him to their friend Ahamba’s apartment where they talked him down from a full on panic attack, and then confrontation of his parents when he went home. Superpowers being genetic and so very few people having superpowers as it was, photokinesis was a dead giveaway he was related to Centelha somehow.

The whole story came out, which was a rough patch for their family. A lot of talking, arguing, confusion and horror ensued. Only at that point did Kayela put together the man she used to love was Centelha, which shook her to the core, but she did her best to push her feelings aside and reassure her son she loved him. Edigio did his best to reassure his son that blood or not, he was his child and nothing could change that. It was a slow process, piecing back together the broken trust and the images they’d all had of each other, since while he was horrified that his parents had lied to him, they were terrified of what would happen as he got older. At some point, the government would try to cut him a deal that would probably be the end of his life as he wanted to live it. That was the best case scenario. The worst case scenario was that he could end up dead at the hands of a man who was, technically, his father. So as they struggled to settle back into a routine and the life they had known, Ezequiel’s parents were very clear to him about one thing: he was never to use his superpowers on purpose again, not when the risks were so high.

Ezequiel, though, was both a superhero fanboy and someone now afraid, even if he kept it to himself, that he was too much like his birth father. His fear of being a bad person or hurting others the way his father apparently had been doing for decades became a phobia, something that, combined with the recklessness of childhood and his own natural compassion, resulted in him using his superpowers more than a couple of times in order to help people. His two best friends helped cover for him, but he got in over his head attempting to stop an illegal arms dealer who, being a vocal opponent of the current president, was also on Centelha’s hitlist. When Centelha saw a kid manipulating light and darkness, he put two and two together, and when Ezequiel was shot, latent fatherly instincts kicked in. Sequestering his son away to a hospital his legal parents could never have dreamed of paying for, Passos fabricated a story for why Ezequiel was there and how he was injured in order to keep him from being on government records as someone with superpowers. He didn’t want to lose his son to the Angolan system of militarization of superheroes; he wanted to have the family he’d been obsessing over having since he was forced to leave Kayela. When Ezequiel woke up in the hospital and stared at him with his own eyes, Passos found whatever semblance of a heart he’d ever had was still there. He talked to Ezequiel about the bravery it took to run into a building knowing there were armed criminals in there, seeing in his son’s answer about stopping people from hurting innocent people himself at that age, naïve and unaware of how vicious and harsh reality was. If he could have, he would have done everything he could to improve every aspect of his son’s life to keep him that way, young and kindhearted, but when he called Kayela to tell her what had happened and her husband answered, it became clear that wasn’t to be. No matter how much they all wanted Ezequiel to have a better life, they weren’t about to relinquish him to someone who had that much blood on his hands. Even if they had been willing, it would have been a massive political scandal for a respected white businessman to have an illegitimate son he has never given any visible benefits to before.

So several incredibly uncomfortable conversations later, Ezequiel went home with a new insight into his father. His father was a violent hitman, sure, but he was human, he was kind, he was funny, they liked the same music and in spite of everything, his father seemed proud of him. He covertly paid for Ezequiel’s treatment as he recovered from his injury, sent packages anonymously to their apartment with things in it he would buy on impulse, and seemed desperate to reconnect to Kayela. He was human in a way Ezequiel hadn’t been prepared for a man with that many deaths to his name to be. As much as his family warned him away from the man, when Ezequiel’s continued efforts at playing superhero with makeshift cloth masks and homemade costumes went on, it was Centelha who would emerge from the shadows to help with the larger scale fights time and again. Over time Ezequiel began accompanying his father to his house in a beautiful, serene and luxurious gated neighborhood uptown, where they would spend late nights together. Even as his father disagreed with him, he would always be putting a plate of hot, fresh food in front of him and getting the first aid kit for his son’s injuries. There was genuine love there that kept them from having any fights that were too heated to walk away from or forgive.

They talked, they argued about the dubious morality of doing the government’s work, they butted heads time and again for a year and a half, but they never had to take a stand against each other until a superheroine from Kinshasa in the neighboring country of the Democratic Republic of the Congo came in. She was under orders to take Centelha out, since his powers were the most immense of any in Angola and there was real concern Angola’s government might order him to kill her. While Angola’s other superpowered people had mostly either gotten to an age where they weren’t active combatants or had retired to the private sector, Centelha was still an active liability to any country Africa had issues with, something that had gone unspoken in the superhero communities of Western Africa. She had not known or counted on him having a child who physically threw himself inbetween them, nor on Ezequiel trying to appeal to his father’s better nature. Now that the Congo had put together Passos and Centelha’s identities as being the same, his only option was to surrender for a trial abroad. If he killed a foreign country’s superheroine, it could trigger a war. If he tried to make the problem go away with money then even if Kinshasa’s superheroine accepted, if it got out to the public he would find himself facing a virtual mob in the form of the loved ones and supporters of every real hero he’d ever killed. “If you love me,” Ezequiel pleaded, “you’ll turn yourself in.”

His father replied, “I’m sorry you have to see this,” and attempted to murder Kinshasa’s heroine. Which he probably could have done, except for once, he was outnumbered, and he had to pull his punches with his son in the fray trying to stop him. Two to one, it took Ezequiel’s knowledge of his father’s wartime injuries and cheap shots to those injuries in order to subdue him, which was the most emotionally fraught thing he had ever done in his life. With promises from La Phantomme Sarcelle, Congo’s heroine, that his father’s wealth would buy him a way out of execution if nothing else, he took his father’s mask and slipped into the night, making the long trek back home.
In the wake of witnessing that some people can’t be saved, Ezequiel chose not to process that truth. It went against what he believed as a Catholic and what he wanted to believe as a fourteen year old who wanted his father to be the good person he showed glimpses of being. With his own name off of government records through his father’s meddling and poor masks in the past, though, he finally had the chance to try to be a legitimate superhero in Angola. He’d been attempting that before, but now he had gotten the worst supervillain his country had ever known arrested. It was the opening he had always been waiting for. Why did it hurt so much?

Bittersweet as the victory was, the incident did prove to his parents that they couldn’t keep him from fighting crime no matter how many times they sat down and talked it out with him. He was too hellbent on trying to make the world a better place, which wasn’t a worthless ambition, much as it worried them. With the fall of Centelha, the government now would have to scramble to find another person with superpowers they could deploy against young and upcoming people with superpowers, but so long as Ezequiel didn’t get involved with political opponents, he would have public opinion on his side. With the Angolan government as wary as it was of inciting another bout of public violence, being a superhero became possible under the circumstances. Not advisable, mind you, just not a death sentence. Thus began his true superhero career with his father’s repainted mask concealing his identity, his grandmother helping repair his outfit when necessary and his parents constantly torn between being proud and afraid of the work their son was engaging in. Given the blue tint to his light powers, the press dubbed him Centelha Azul, and despite the personal failure he felt in not being able to convince his father to do the right thing, in the eyes of the public, Centelha Azul was the first truly free hero they’d had in decades. While government controlled papers were much more ambivalent about him, at least he was having an impact, limited as it was.

Angola’s recovery from how it became with the original Centelha and the old government was never going to be anything other than a slow process, but some things were worth fighting for.

PERSONALITY: At his core, Ezequiel is someone with a good heart. He’s kind, he’s empathetic, he gets depressed by terrible news in the paper, and he has a strong desire to make some kind of positive difference in the world. Even before he found out his biological father was a supervillain, he wanted to help people. He’s the first to volunteer to help with things like raising funds for textbooks or helping his grandmother do her shopping and he has no real limit on what he’ll do for other people. He feels best when he’s making someone else happy, a people-pleaser from the start, which is why his relationship with his parents was able to survive such a massive betrayal of trust. Even though they had lied to him, more than anything his biggest concern was that his father might not care about him as much as he thought he did growing up.

Being a people-pleaser and wanting to do the right thing made the initial decision to be a superhero incredibly complicated. On the one hand, he didn’t want his parents to worry about him. On the other, his empathetic nature made it impossible to ignore the suffering going on around him. Luanda is a city with wealthy districts and poor ones, of luxury penthouses and homes cobbled together from discarded scrap metal. The police prioritize the rich, so the only hope some people have is him. The original Centelha might be sent in to take out criminals who also happened to have political agendas, but the average person had no hero before Ezequiel stepped into that position. He was and is way too young to fully comprehend how far in over his head he was getting by taking on the role, which is a major facet of his personality. He’s very childish in the sense of not understanding one person can’t save the country. He wants to fix the world he lives in, wants to make a better future, and has no grasp on the limits of his actual reach. So he both feels guilty for doing what he does, as it worries his parents, and feels guilty for not doing more.

This perfectionist fix-the-country-or-go-home mentality applies to most aspects of his life. He agonizes over grades most of his classmates would be thrilled to have, he can only see the flaws in his sports abilities when he’s actually a very good soccer player, and he has what his friend Inacio refers to as a ‘phobia of awkwardness’. He replays moments in his head where he messed up over and over again, thinking over how he could have handled a situation better or said something different. While not necessarily an awful personality trait, this in combination with his general impatience results in snap decisions, some of which are ridiculous. Being a superhero is ridiculous, not just at his ludicrously young age but in a country where that hasn’t worked out well for anyone throughout all of history. It’s the kind of bold, brave decision making that most people in his position would dream about, but he doesn’t want to dream, he wants to do, and he wants to do the most he can, the best he can, to help as many people as he can.

Somewhat surprisingly, this lends itself to him being somewhat reserved in social situations. He’s not great at reading people and he doesn’t want to offend anyone with his opinions, so he’ll hang back, listening more than speaking. His momma’s boy nature tends to get him some teasing, which he takes in stride since he’s aware he is, genuinely, a momma’s boy. He’s very family oriented, close to both of his parents and his grandmother, and wanted a bond with his biological father badly enough to overlook some major differences in values, morality and actions. A born optimist, he wanted so much for his father to change his ways and be a good person not just due to being related to him, but due to his belief that people are born good. He doesn’t think anyone is really born evil or that people ever hit a point where they can’t change and make amends. All he thinks someone needs is a chance. It’s a testimony to the strength of this belief that even his father trying to kill La Phantomme Sarcelle in front of him didn’t break it. He still thinks there’s hope for his father – he thinks there’s hope for absolutely everyone, no exceptions. His friends are well versed in his ability to see a better future and encourage them to hope for the best, as once he’s made a bond, be it friendly or familial, it’s more or less forever. He may not be the most verbose when it comes to topics like politics or girls, but if someone is down, his shyness turns into gentleness as he offers help, a shoulder to cry on and hopeful words. In spite of everything he’s seen on the streets and in the news, Ezequiel cares about and values people.

POWER: At its' core, Ezequiel's power is really not a series of them but one, that one being photokinesis. While the term photokinesis is often used to mean the generation of light, it more properly means the control of it, as such covers both light generation and reduction. It is inaccurate to say he has control over two separate elements, it just often appears that way from the outside looking in. For the purposes of M.O.M., photokinesis includes:

• The ability to increase the brightness of a relatively small area into a blinding mass and direct it in a general direction. This can range in hardness from merely distracting (easiest) to hard enough to knock someone over and blind them (hardest). As light is connected to heat, being hit by one of these feels hot, enough to provide some sensory distraction, but light being what it is, these are possible to deflect with reflective surfaces.
• By altering the light around him, Ezequiel is able to become invisible. This is not as useful as it sounds as he is still subject to being heard and it becomes harder to maintain the more he moves. The longest he has ever stayed invisible was three minutes, and during invisibility he cannot access any of his other powers without breaking his cover.
• The ability to decrease the light around a small, palm sized area to a visibly darker patch and direct it at someone, this too has a range from merely being distracting to being physically damaging. It feels significantly colder to be hit by one of these, which can have a stunning effect if aimed at the head or joints, although obviously hitting a moving target there is a bit of a crapshoot. He has arguably had the most practice in this since he's been using this longest.
• In order to see while using his powers, his eyes have developed to include both night vision and the ability to see in blinding levels of light. Abuse of this, however, can give him killer migraines. One of the giveaways to his parents that he's been out at night again is that he's nursing a headache the next morning. If he were to push it past an hour of constantly using this, he would begin to get nauseated and have to stop.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: TDM

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: [Maurtia Falls was quiet, which could not possibly mean anything good. Every time he had been in a bad neighborhood back home, quiet was merely the quiet before the storm. Here, though, he kept to alleys and kept his mask off for the moment. It was easier to blend into the stragglers who were making their slow way home if he was in civilian clothes. The lack of mask or gloves made him think of walking back to his biological father's home after a long night of fighting crime, weary and yet on alert, waiting for Luanda's unending supply of crime to flare to life again. If he could have, he would have fought every battle back there.

Here, with no one to haul him back into the safety of his too-nice apartment that reminded him painfully of the original Centelha, he could finally pursue justice in the way he always wanted. He slipped in and out of alleys, silent, lurking, a shadowy figure seeking other shadowy figures. If he kept trying, he would find crime here every night. He could fight it, endlessly. These people who lived in such fear were not that much different from the people back home. They shut their blinds tightly and shushed each other just like people back home, afraid, aware no one was going to come save them if something went wrong.

No one, that was, except him. Even if they'd given him a cold welcome, that was only because they had such a rough life so far. That would change. As he heard a scream pierce the night, he slipped his mask on and ran as he tugged his gloves into place, determined to win the fight before he saw it. It was time to give these people a reason to hope again.

And he wasn't exactly ideal for that, but he was here, and just like back home, that was enough for him.]

[OOC]
Backtagging: Yes!
Threadhopping: Of course.
Fourthwalling: Sure.
Offensive subjects (elaborate): No non-con or dub-con.

[IC]
Hugging: Absolutely.
Kissing: He will be flustered and his brain might break, so I absolutely encourage this.
Flirting: Go for it, but he's kind of terrible at this so expect more hilarity than shipping to ensue.
Fightingr: Assuming you've read the powers post and are not godmodding, have at it.
Injuring this character: I'm fine with this, but if it's a broken bone or something bigger, please contact me so we can work out the details.
Killing: Talk this out with me beforehand.
Mind reading/telepathy: Yes, they will work on him. I would appreciate a heads-up that it's happening, though.

[SHIPS]

Orientation: Pansexual and panromantic, albeit with a low sex drive and preference for hand holding and minor affectionate touching over kissing.
Interested: Open to anyone within his age range - ideally no older than 18, as he is a minor. As he hasn't realized his orientation yet, M/M ships will take longer to develop since he assumes, based on his first crush, that he is straight. Open to cross-canon and fellow OCs.
Not Interested: Villains, although if you think there's a way to do it that could result in a solid happy ending, I'm open to plotting that out in theory.
Limits/Hard No: Irredeemable villains, 19+ characters, anything with an extreme power imbalance, and dubcon.

[GEN]

Wanted: Superheroes of any kind, both those that are older that he might be able to establish a student-mentor relationship with, and those his own age whom he could befriend.
Interested: Civilians/people who are not superheroes that are in his age group. Religious characters, particularly those of an Abrahamic faith, could also make for very good CR, as his faith (Catholic) informs much of his morality.
Not Interested: Excessively dark characters or characters whose storylines or content is heavily based in anything demon-related.
Limits/Hard No: Any villain whose shtick is cannibalism, gore, or other such topics that serve no purpose other than to be shocking for their own sake.

Warnings: Expect there to be a lot of comic book style violence and battles in the backstory, as well as some uncomfortable discussions of racial dynamics given his biological father is a wealthy white man and his mother and (true) father are working-class black people in a country where income inequality is at a record high. Discussion of nearly dying once, in true comic book hero fashion, might happen. For the most part he tends to censor himself so as not to upset people, but CR can always bring up the past.