Character:
Code-Name: Vorpal
Real Name: Tyrone McCray
Ethnicity: African American
Sex: Male
Age: 26
Relationship Status: Single
Team Affiliation: Xavier
Position at the School: Professor of Culinary Arts
Appearance:
Hair: Shaved
Eyes: Liquid black
Skin: Dark Chocolate
Weight: 202
Height: 5’11”
Other: (physical defects/mutations, overall appearance)
Date Of Birth: 1984
Place Of Birth: Baltimore, Maralynd
Citizenship: USA
Information:
Personality: “Never trust a skinny chef.”
When Ty was younger, he might have aspired too be the next Chris Rock. Big mouthed, self deprecating, loving the sound of his own voice almost as much as the sound of others laughing. But, like Chris Rock, there were offbeat but reasonably obvious insights too much of his humor.
Through his upper years in college and a few tours in the X-men, his humor has both matured and been tempered. He now affects a quite demeanor, listening too people and often weaving absurd humor with into meaningful answers that layers of insight can be picked out of for days by those so inclined.
Background: Born in Baltimore’s inner city to a mutant family, Ty always new how bad humanity could be. But he grew up in a restaurant next to a community college, with his father a part time kung fu instructor. He knew something else with equal intimacy. The only way out of a sewer is to pull yourself up by your boot straps. For some, that means hard work and an education. For others, that means flushing the coke down the toilet and putting the gun away.
Working in the restaurant, Ty’s powers developed gradually, first with elevated appetite and a tendency to cat nap. Then when working in the kitchen, while getting drowsy, he sometimes forgot to pick up a knife before he started cutting. The first sign others in his family had was the finely chopped vegetables and the micro slashes in their cutting boards.
His parents actually managed to get in contact with Xavier’s before anything disastrous happened, and the hard working young man made his way through the school and achieved his ambition to join the X-men before discovering how viscerally traumatized he was by the shedding of human blood.
It was clear too him within two years that he couldn’t take the heat, and he asked Xavier for this post.
Mother:
Name: Tanya McCray
Race: Mutant: Minor prehensile hair.
Father:
Name: Chester McCray
Race: Mutant: Heightened Metabolisim
Other Relatives:Little Sister: Candice McCray (22) Mutant: Combination of her parents powers.
Little Brother: Corry McCray (19) Mutant: Skates without skates.
Powers and their Limitations: Major: Vorpal Gravity Planes
Ty creates localized fields of distorted space time in the shape of knives, from as small as scalpels to as large as butcher knives.
According to the physics professors, this is an effect based on the same curvature of space time that causes gravity. It is nearly infinite in sharpness, but doesn’t have much weight behind it. He has laboriously mastered these weapons with great precision, too the point where he can throw them and pierce a flying beer bottle at thirty paces.
Minor: Relative Gravity Planes
“I just sort of pretend that instead of the floor being down, the wall is down. When I step onto it, I put a kind of wrenching into it, and the wall is down for me. Then I walk up too the ceiling and pretend that the ceiling is down. I put some umph into that, and step onto the ceiling. Down changes again. I can’t do it for anyone else. Even if I’m carrying them, I have to deal with what they think ‘down’ is.”
Ty can walk on walls and ceilings by changing his personal definition of “down.”
Minor: Heightened metabolism.
“I mentioned you should never trust a skinny cheff, right?” Ty grins passing out platters, leaving three for himself. Ty loves eating almost as much as he loves cooking. This is a good thing given that he needs almost three times as much food as a normal man too keep up with the rate at which his body functions. Besides keeping him thin, it also results noticeably faster than normal speed and reaction time and the ability to heal in days what others would heal in weeks. He has had his left index finger reattached twice and it is still good as new.
He also favors cat naps with longer siestas at highsun and fulldark over full nights of sleep and full days awake.
Vorpal Gravity Planes
They can cut up normal people pretty badly, and even wound people like Colosus and Metalica with a little work. Fortunately, Ty is extremely serious about the X-men code against killing on both an intellectual and emotional level. The sight of human blood gives him terrible post-combat shakes the way raw steak never could. He is quite happy to have retired from active duty to become a teacher. (Would have been satisfied to work in the school kitchens.) He’s more than willing to defend the school, but he will attack weapons before dealing carefully placed flesh wounds too attackers if it comes to that.
A further limitation of the gravity blades comes into play in a situation when they seem like they should come into their own. Many purely artificial antagonists are
big. He has yet to produce a knife longer than a foot, which can be a severe handicap in a battle against a Sentinel or a tank.
Compared to Wolverine, the Canadian’s claws aren’t as sharp, but the ole’ canucklehead can put a lot more force behind them. Wolverine’s blades are a little longer but cannot be thrown. In a parrying situation, neither of their weapons can be destroyed, even by the other’s weapons, however Vorpal can be momentarily disarmed, Wolverine cannot.
Relative Gravity Planes
Tyler can only change his personal definition of down. Even if he is carrying someone, he has to respond to the way that gravity is pulling them.
He cannot establish ‘down’ without a surface too fill the roll of ‘ground’ in his mind. It could be a wall, a sentinel’s back, or a cliff face, but he can’t just look up at the sky and start falling up. Likewise, if he tries to use this to reach a ceiling 5 stories up, he’s going to take quite a beating when he hits it.
Heightened Metabolisim:
Ty can suffer distracting hunger pains in 12 hours, damaging dehydration in 18. The hallucinatory effects of fasting hit him in 3 days rather than a week, and he could die of starvation in under two weeks.
Hobbies and Interests: Accents and Impressions
Acrobatics and Gymnastics (Acrobatics mostly as a spectator.)
Comedy
Cooking and Eating
Philosophy and the Humanities
Track and Field
Kung Fu and Kung Fu Movies (He speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese with a degree of proficiency.)
Wild Cherry Pepsi
OOC Ons and Offs: