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Running: 21", 42" noncombat
Swimming: 5", 10" noncombat OCV: 6 DCV: 6 ECV: 5 |
Total Points: 88 + 134 = 222
Experience Points Spent: 0 |
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William David Thorndyke never liked his mother. She divorced his father
when he was less than two years old and he always felt that she gave his two
sisters preferential treatment. That was why he turned away from women by
age five and became a closet homosexual by age fifteen. If he hadn't left
his home in Akron, Ohio the instant he reached eighteen, he would have grown
outright misogynistic.
Upon arrival in Los Angeles, he wrote a nasty letter to his mother telling her that he thought she was unfair to him and that he was a homosexual. At least he had three-fourths the width of the country to armor him against his mother's reaction. |
It took him about a year to finally give up looking for a permanent lover. That was when, quite by accident, while working in an off-beat bookstore, he met Joe. They found out about each others' homosexual preference soon thereafter, hit it off quite well, and were boyfriends within a week.
Two months later, Bill was watching Joseph walking the final approach to greet him at his latest job (as a boxboy) when he saw a tan VW Vanagon pull up beside him, a white-with-a-blue-stripe sleeved arm jut out, and his lover accelerate away down the street. He was the only witness to this kidnapping and decided to do something about it. Before the van had left the block, Bill was in his blue '78 Nova (which he'd bought used at age sixteen) and in pursuit.
He followed them through the center of West Los Angeles to Downtown to the warehouse district. This made him a little worried, as warehouses were the favorite places of experimental, and sometimes supervillain, criminal activity. What the Vanagon finally stopped in front of and Joe was dragged into, though Bill didn't know it at the time, was an experimental base operated by T.H.E.M., The Harbingers of Eternal Mankind.
Trailing behind far enough so the white-satin-with-blue-trim suited figures couldn't see him, he made his way up to the warehouse and peeked inside. Joe and six others were seated, quite dejectedly, right in front of the business end of some unspeakable device. He saw glassy-eyed people in the background and a couple of soberer operatives discussing the mass mind control device, how much better it was than the conventional brainwashing they'd undergone, and the possibility of transmitting control through a whole city. He had seen and heard enough; he found the front door and bolted inside, determined to save his boyfriend.
He ran into the device's area of effect just as it turned on. Instinctively, his hands shielded his face. Since his mind wasn't prepared ahead of time for the procedure (like the subjects behind him were), the neural onslaught caused far deeper effects than mind control. He became aware, both inwardly and outwardly, of things more than he'd ever been before. For an instant, everything was profoundly simple. And then, that instant was gone; T.H.E.M.'s device had been shut off.
But it left a residual awareness, a tiny sliver of that total oneness, with one thing: water. The compound most basic to organic life. He was completely in contact with every instance of water — liquid, frozen, or gaseous — in his surroundings. When he removed his hands from his face, he was covered from head to heel with a thin layer of ice. Baffled, the T.H.E.M. operatives could do nothing to prevent Bill from using his new-found powers to release Joe and make good their mutual escape.
Joe regained his senses a few minutes later and found himself on an ice slide frozen from the water in the air, and some new ice-armored super hero holding on to him.
Water-and-Ice man had come to the rescue.