Astonishing Next Generation (OOC/Superhero)

[Rupudska]

Before I move on, how many of you really care about the nuts-and-bolts class-to-class details of American high school life?

[Lancearc]

Before I move on, how many of you really care about the nuts-and-bolts class-to-class details of American high school life?

Truly the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to relive in my life

Proceed as you will, I couldn’t care less about those details.

[Reverend Norv]

(SHEPARD, T.)

+++Name: Professor Thomas Owen Shepard. Shep to his friends. He has, over centuries of life, accumulated too many military and academic titles to list.

+++Age: 475 years old. Shep looks somewhere in his forties, though there's an ageless quality that makes it hard to tell.

+++Gender: Male

+++Physical appearance: Shep was born in the sixteenth century, when men were smaller. At five feet ten inches and about 155 pounds, he was tall and muscular for his time; today, he is of average height, and counts as rather slightly built. There is a certain indefinable weatheredness to him: skin tanned and finely creased like worn leather; more old white scars from blade or bullet than any one man could accumulate in a single lifetime; short dark hair flecked with grey and sun-faded to the color of ash. It is disconcertingly hard to place his age; he looks anywhere between thirty-five and sixty-five. The face is fine-boned, handsome and intelligent, dominated by a high forehead and deep-set green eyes.

+++Identifying Marks: Shep is fairly nondescript: a man of average height and slim build, with neutral-colored hair and blandly handsome looks. He is old-fashioned in his clothes; he almost always wears a suit and tie, albeit frequently rumpled in a way that reveals that they are everyday rather than formal wear. The average observer would notice only two subtly disconcerting things about Shep. The first is his ageless, weathered quality. And the second is the way he moves: with a swift and minimalist grace that suggests that he knows, from long experience, exactly how most efficiently to accomplish any given goal. There is no wasted time or effort, and the result is an almost imperceptibly disquieting precision.

* * *

+++Ethnicity: English on his father's side, Welsh on his mother's. But he has lived so long in so many different countries that any sense of conventional ethnic identity has long since been attenuated.

+++Religion: It's complicated. Shep believes in a higher power, in some kind of benevolent Providence. His religious language remains deeply shaped by the Puritanism of his childhood and youth, and so he is more Christian than he is anything else. But he has spent many normal lifetimes studying and practicing all kinds of religions, from Judaism and Islam to Congolese animism and Taoist philosophy. He has a deep respect for all, and sees much value in each. Mostly, Shep's religion is a commitment to the idea of religious truth itself: to the idea that there is a fundamental order to the universe - a purpose, a moral valence, a current of love - and that the most important things are those we cannot see or touch or prove.

+++Birthplace: Cambridgeshire, England

+++Criminal History: Many offenses, in many countries. He was wanted by Philip II of Spain for piracy and by his Inquisition for heresy. Both Charles I and Charles II of England issued warrants for his arrest for sedition, insurrection, and murder - as did Louis XVI and Charles X of France. Various Indian rajas considered him a pirate, war profiteer, and racketeer. He has been unsuccessfully prosecuted for tax fraud in Britain, France, and the United States on seven occasions: an inevitable result of faking inheritances to explain his longevity. His abolitionism saw him convicted of conspiracy in antebellum South Carolina, though he escaped; he was almost executed for treason amid the collapse of the Paris Commune. He was wanted for espionage in Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia, and actually convicted of it in the Soviet Union, though he escaped the Siberian gulag and fled on foot all the way to China. In total, Shep has spent about thirty of his 475 years of life in prison in one country or another.

+++Military History: He privateered the Spanish for the Dutch Republic and Queen Elizabeth I; commanded Anglo-Scots volunteers for Gustavus Adolphus; led a company of horse during the English Civil War; was an officer in the army of the East India Company in the mid-eighteenth century; served as a training officer and spymaster for Washington during the American Revolution; was a cartographer on the Corps of Discovery; fought first for and then against Napoleon; led a secret wetwork team for Lincoln during the American Civil War; was involved in the Paris Commune; commanded British military expeditions to explore Central Africa and Tibet; spied for the British secret service before, during, and for a few years after the First World War; played a significant role in OSS and SOE during the Second World War; fought in the various civil wars of the late twentieth century, for whichever side was better at protecting abhumans; and held a high but classified rank in the CIA's Abhuman Activities Center (AAC) from 2021 until 2034.

* * *

+++Abilities: Thomas Shepard is immortal. This is an incredibly rare mutation, perhaps unique even among abhumans, and its exact explanation remains unclear. As far as Shep and Dr. Devereaux have been able to establish, the main physical manifestation is that Shep's telomeres do not shorten with time as every other human's do. Thus, his cells can replicate themselves without meaningful error more or less indefinitely. Shep literally does not age, in the sense of physical deterioration. His body developed to the latest possible point before genetic deviation occurs, and then it stopped - which is why he looks to be somewhere in his forties. Moreover, because his cells can self-replicate perfectly, his genetic code will itself eventually correct any physical damage, as it gradually rebuilds his body one cell at a time. Despite drinking seven lifetimes' worth of alcohol, Shep's liver is completely healthy; despite having been shot, stabbed, and raked with shrapnel dozens of times, his scars are all merely skin-deep. It is biologically impossible for him to have cancer, arthritis, or Alzheimer's. He is susceptible to external threats: infectious disease, and violence. But at a fundamental level, his body will never turn on itself.

+++Skills: Far too many to list. Shep is defined by an intense natural curiosity, and he has had five centuries to indulge it. He speaks dozens of languages, has advanced degrees in sixteen fields, plays nine instruments flawlessly, and can quote from memory tens of thousands of lines of poetry and prose. He is perhaps the only true living master of a number of centuries-old skills: he can draw accurate maps with eighteenth-century techniques, and understands seventeenth-century political theory better than anyone alive - because he participated in the debates that created it. He has, over time, gotten quite good at making money: for three hundred years, the fortune he made in India has quietly kept him rich beyond most men's wildest dreams, by virtue of careful long-term investment. And his adventurous and violent existence has left him proficient in dozens of martial arts and highly skilled with most of the major weapons of the last half-millennium, from the backsword to the Kalashnikov. It is possible, in fact, that Shep's sheer ability to retain so much information is itself an unexplained symptom of his abhuman genetics: not only can he live forever, but he can continue learning forever, and he can remember what he learned in 1610 as easily as he remembers what he learned yesterday.

+++Code Name: The CIA often referred to Shepard as "Methuselah." The appellation stuck, though at Loyola it is more a nickname than a code name.

* * *

+++Psychological analysis:

Immortality is a unique experience of such profound consequence that it is difficult to analyze Shepard using conventional psychological tools. The one thing that is clear is his drive to explore, understand, learn, and discover. This has been consistent across his many centuries of life. It manifests itself in some deep, spiritual ways: profound empathy and commitment to human worth, a sincere interest in other lives and culture, an ability to tolerate complexity and contradiction, a hostility to the arrogance of easy answers. But Shep's deep curiosity also gives rise to a cheerful materialism: a love of fine food and drink, art, music, and beauty of all sorts. He doesn't have to worry that being a connoisseur of these things is a waste of time; he has potentially infinite time, and so there is no opportunity cost to enjoying life.

Beyond this drive to learn and understand, though, Shep's psychology is difficult to plumb. He can be exceptionally charming; after centuries of life and countless thousands of human relationships, he can read people with ease. He often appears to be playing the part of the twenty-first century man; he seems a little too normal for a being of his vast age truly to be, though he doesn't quite seem British, or American, or of any other nationality. Notably, after seven lifetimes' worth of war, torture, and loss, he appears remarkable psychically intact and untroubled; he shows no obvious symptoms of post-traumatic stress. The overall impression is of a mask of ordinary humanity: charming, drily funny, cultured and intelligent, deeply decent. But still, in some sense, a mask - and the slow march of history has surely left what lies behind that mask far more strange and unknowable.

+++Occupation: Shep will sometimes drily describe himself as a gentleman of leisure, and in some sense this is true. He made a fortune in eighteenth-century India, and has reinvested it ever since, so that his net worth is now easily over $500 million. He works the jobs he wants to work: teaching history at Loyola and Georgetown, spending a lot of time with historians to share his unique wealth of firsthand experience, and organizing political and philanthropic work that supports the abhuman community. He worked for more than a decade with the CIA's Abhuman Activities Center, and before that had military experience in almost every major war since the Reformation. But he doesn't think of himself, fundamentally, as a soldier or a spy or even a teacher. Shep has seen a thousand occupations invented and then become obsolete, and so he is defined less by his work and more by the reasons he chooses to do it.

+++Biography: Odd as this may sound, I'd prefer to flesh this out in the IC as it becomes relevant, simply because the character has been alive for so long that no OOC bio could do him justice. The key points should be evident from the military and criminal history, anyway.

+++RP Sample: Sure.
#ItWillBeDone (DO NOT REMOVE)

[Rupudska]

+++Biography: Odd as this may sound, I'd prefer to flesh this out in the IC as it becomes relevant, simply because the character has been alive for so long that no OOC bio could do him justice. The key points should be evident from the military and criminal history, anyway.

Who are you and where have you hidden Norv's body? Accepted, anyway.

[Lancearc]

If I’ve ever seen the very model of a modern major general, this has to be it.

[Reverend Norv]

Reckon I'll start on a post. Would anyone object if I introduce Shep by assuming a brief timeskip to the start of his history class?

[Lancearc]

Reckon I'll start on a post. Would anyone object if I introduce Shep by assuming a brief timeskip to the start of his history class?

No objections on my end.

[Danceria]

Reckon I'll start on a post. Would anyone object if I introduce Shep by assuming a brief timeskip to the start of his history class?

No objections on my end.

The Ayes have it, or at least, you have my vote.

[Rupudska]

Reckon I'll start on a post. Would anyone object if I introduce Shep by assuming a brief timeskip to the start of his history class?

Feel free, I'm still pretty busy on my end.