Mikkelus Vagus

[Mikkelus]

IRC Nickname: Mikkelus


Name: Mikkelus Vagus
Alias: (none)
Age: 4 (Only has one birthday every four years... see date of birth, below))
Date of Birth: 29 February
Hometown: Ruggle, Liechtenstein

Height: 5’11
Weight: 120 lbs
Hair Color: Lt Brown/copper highlights
Eye Color: Grey
Nationality/Race: Liechtensteiner / human

Occupation: Student

Personality Profile: In Mikkelus, a typically guarded European reserve tends to mask a caring nature; once he had progressed beyond the elementary grades, a warm handshake replaced hugs even in his family. (At least in public!) When his abilities began to manifest, imparting the maladies and aches of others upon his senses and his body, he became even more reserved than they "typical European" and conflicted in his motives; the healer's deeply engrained desire to reach out and help wars constantly with the urging of self-preservation, which leaves him hesitant to let anyone get close enough to touch. Understandably, he doesn’t want to get hurt.

Physical Description: On campus, Mikkelus seems just another student. An unremarkable young man, he moves across campus and skirts knots of people with the poise and grace of a dancer or gymnast. Thin and wiry, he favors conservative clothing typical of the Swiss area of the European Union: khaki, deep green, or navy trousers and plain button-up shirts, with or without a cardigan as weather dictates.

Character Picture (Optional):

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Mutation/Powers:

Primary : Vitakinesis (Diagnostic Touch): Though unable to heal with this talent, through touch, Mikkelus feels disease and injury in a person as varying degrees of heat and coldness. This ability to sense disruptions to the biofield does not give him the ability to cure the problem; indeed, all he knows for certain is that a sick person or a hurt extremity feels colder than someone who is healthy and uninjured.

Secondary : Empathic Healing: Through physical contact with someone for whom he has a common bond, Mikkelus has the unfortunate ability to transfer the hurts of another onto himself. Fortunately for him, the effect has been mostly limited to emotional distress, bruises, and minor cuts or abrasions. Unfortunately for him, he has yet to find any way to control the transfer, save lack of physical contact.

Tertiary : Accelerated Healing: A favorable trait that has run in his family for the past two generations, the vitality of Life flows within Mikkelus with preternatural strength. This life-force is so strong, in fact, that his body heals more quickly than the average human: bruises disappear in a matter of hours, or minor cuts and scrapes in about a day. If in perfect health, he may share that vitality with others through the power of his touch. Anyone so assisted recovers at his accelerated rate for as long as they remain in physical contact.

Drawbacks/Weaknesses/Side Effects :
If the cold hands of sick or injured people had made him a little hesitant to shake hands before, the constant barrage of minor injuries passed to him through touch has left him leery of touching or being touched by anyone. However, the custom of shaking hands out of politeness has been so strongly ingrained into him that practically without thought, whenever someone holds out their hand to offer a handshake, he returns the gesture.

Though not fully empathic in the usual sense, he is sensitive to pain around him – too much pain makes him feel physically ill, even without contact. As a result, he tries to avoid hospitals and fitness centers whenever possible.

How do you believe this character's powers will further develop in the future? As his powers have just started manifesting, Mikkelus has yet to learn control. One of his first goals at the Academy is to find someone to teach him how to turn it off before someone kills him. Ideally, he hopes to how to help others in a manner that doesn’t make him hurt or sick; the family does expect him to become a doctor, after all.

Background: Mikkelus seems just another student, an otherwise unremarkable young man moving across campus, albeit with the poise and grace of a dancer or gymnast. In his hometown of Ruggel, his daily routine had consisted of meditation at dawn, followed by the slow and graceful movements typically associated with Tai Chi for roughly an hour before breakfast. After a light breakfast of breads and juice, he went off to the public school in the village, studying a curriculum to prepare him for university. There had been no doubt of his profession, no question that that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, his uncles, and his grandfather before that as a doctor; all were respected doctors in their respective communities across Europe and abroad.

For as long as he could remember, he could tell just by shaking hands who was not feeling well… sometimes, even before they could tell. He never thought to question the ability, it simply was. He knew that when his friends got sick, or when someone got hurt on the playground, that person felt cold to him, and to them, his hands felt warm. He knew that as small children, when his little brother or little sister got sick, they would sneak into his bed and cuddle up to his warmth; in the morning, if they were no longer ill, they didn’t feel cold to him.

Shortly after the start of his seventh year of school, things began to change. Though he felt alright at home and at the start of the day in school, as the day dragged on he began to feel worse, a general malaise. Chills began to set in, accompanied by a non-specific ache. He often went home with bruises on his arms and legs; he could offer no explanation for where or how he’d gotten the bruises. Usually, by morning, the bruises had faded.

One afternoon in the last year that he’d attended the public school he’d fallen asleep during a movie. He didn’t notice that the teacher on whom he (and, admittedly, most of his male classmates) had a crush approaching his chair to wake him up. The teacher approached his chair, tapping his shoulder, and the touch sent a shock racing down his young spine. His eyes popped open, his hand moved entirely by reflex to capture the icy extremity. Then, with a startled yell, he instantly released the searing cold hand. He spun away from further contact and out of his chair.

Thinking that he was falling rather than trying to get away, the teacher grabbed for Mikkelus, caught him, and was rewarded for her efforts by his yelp of discomfort. Mikkelus flailed, caught her hands, and they both fell to the floor.

In that strange, detached clarity that sometimes accompanies calamity, Mikkelus made three near-simultaneous observations: the floor did not yield at all to the sudden gravity-assisted pressure from his posterior, the right hand of the teacher felt much colder than her left hand, and he could not recall a time in his whole life when he had been in such close physical proximity to an attractive adult female as he suddenly found himself when she landed on him. The sudden encounter left him quite unable to breathe. Or maybe it was a matter of her knee in his solar plexus?

They lay tangled for a moment, he unable to breath and she trying to figure out what had just happened. With a giddy laugh, she scrambled up off of him. He gasped for a moment, mortified, then centered himself and willed his body to resume breathing. She offered him a hand up, and once again, he felt the icy chill as she gripped his hand. He inhaled sharply, then winced as his hand felt icy cold stab through it. In his fantasies, he’d held her hand and it felt warm and wonderful; not only was reality nothing like his fantasies, it wasn’t even pleasant… and she laughed! On his feet, he scrambled for the bathroom door, just making it to an empty stall before he lost his lunch.

Though she had used no more force than one would expect from a handshake, though he could not recall hitting his hand on anything, it ached uncontrollably. X-rays at the clinic revealed two bones in his hand had been broken. Curiously, the teacher felt better than she’d felt in weeks. She had broken two bones in her hand in a bicycle accident six weeks earlier and had been seeing a physical therapist three times a week since to regain mobility and full use of the hand. She didn’t know what had happened when she’d woken Mikkelus, why his hand had seemed so warm, or why the ache had vanished when he'd held her hand. She didn’t know what he had done that made her hand feel better even after he’d held it. And that the headmaster had then called her into his office for a warning: holding hands and rolling on the floor with students was deemed inappropriate behavior for staff. Enough said.

At her next physical therapy session, the teacher's therapist determined that her hand had fully recovered, much earlier than expected, and she need not come back unless her hand started to bother her again. As for Mikkelus, the broken bones in his hand ached for a week while they mended. It was the first time that he was hurt, albeit unintentionally, by another at school on whom he had a crush. It was not however, the last. Subsequent hurts, limited to emotional distress, cuts, and bruises, led to his withdrawal from public school. A family friend suggested Cobalt Academy; with “opa Mikkelus” missing, his parents deemed it his best chance of learning to master his gifts and talents… and surviving the lesson.

Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts:
Raised in Liechtenstein near the border of Switzerland and Austria, Mikkelus grew up speaking and reading in German, English, and Romansch. He inherited predominantly Irish lilt and pattern of speech from his parents.
His primary mode of transportation on campus is either on foot or his recumbent tricycle. Off campus, there’s public transit; why would anyone want to drive, much less own, a car?

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Born on February 29th, his birthday falls once every four years. When asked about his age, he has drawn strange looks after answering that by his reckoning, he is four. He has, after all, seen only four birthdays.