Name: Jesse Toliver McBain
Nick-Name: Sarge, Toliver (NEVER Tolly), T-Dawg, Mr. Bonez, Unit-676, and WarDog.
Codename: Wardog
Age: 21
Date of Birth: 01/29/2003
Height: 6’8
Weight: 536 lbs.
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Golden-Brown
Place of Origin: Daly City, CA
Nationality/Race: American Mutt (Black, Caucasian, Mexican)
Classification/Origin of Powers: Mutant, and both ‘Acquired’ and Intensive Training.
Status: Student/Trainee
Occupation:
-Course of Study: Engineering -: Energy & Weapons. Minors: Modern Dance & Zoology
-Employment: Potential PE Assistant/Combat Instructor. Assistant?
Personality Profile: Jesse Toliver McBaine prefers to be called Toliver, and pointedly so. He was named after his semi-absent father and resents the name ‘Jesse’ accordingly. To him, he is just Toliver, with no preamble and not too many familiarities (especially not the diminutive ‘Tolly’. He happily makes sure people don’t make that mistake twice). Toliver could be considered a complicated sort, once one got to know him, but he is rather fine with being mistaken for a very simple, semi-feral critter of a man. As a child he was secretly a contemplative sort, and that has never changed, despite his many trials.
Toliver is a realist, or at least that’s what he might say, if he were the argumentative type. With this well-grounded attitude, however, Toliver often finds he doesn’t need to argue at all. His general attitude is that he’s seen it all before, bought the t-shirt, and paid way too damn much for said garment in the process. Calm, slow to anger, but rough-around-the-edges, with bouts of acidic sarcasm (and occasionally caustic quips, when he needs to make a point), instead, he is even tempered and thoughtful about his acts of violence.
Toliver is as tenacious as the pit-bull mein that is his default. While not the most talkative, he is expressive (in his own way), and prone to acts of random kindness, occasional fits of gentleness and generosity that belies his brutish exterior… He is otherwise well-spoken, when he deigns to speak at all, but sometimes he comes off as a semi-feral, very old-and-tired soul, burdened with a surfeit of common-sense, who just wishes most people had at least two functional brain-cells.
Toliver is not a mutant-supremacist, nor should he be mistaken for such. He does find, however, that the natural progress of evolution (as we know it), is probably going to be the most likely course for humanity, in so much that mutants will probably be the next evolutionary stage of the species for a while, and non-mutants will eventually die out from natural competition over time. With that in mind, it is neither necessary or morally appropriate for mutants to hasten nature, though it is vital that mutants defend themselves against human predation, even if it’s just to ensure that both forces do not destroy each other, in the struggle for survival. Can humanity and mutants coexist? That’s a silly question: mutants -are- humans, and humanity doesn’t have a good track record of existing with itself, much less than with anything else. Thus it is imperative that those that can, strive to ensure that humanity doesn’t destroy itself.
Toliver has no spirituality to speak of. To him the idea of a great unknown is very probable, and that the unknown should be discovered, noted, explored, and examined as a scientific matter of course. So that the unknown becomes known, to avoid errors or religion or superstition. This leaves plenty of room for him to possess both atheism and wonder, which he does, in high and staunch amounts. He doesn’t tend to argue religion, or spirituality, however. Accepting that other people will adhere to their civil, religious or spiritual beliefs with great tenacity, and that there is no need to poke that proverbial bee-hive by insisting on the reality of any given situation. Moreover, he can and does appreciate that the spiritual traditions of many peoples often hides deep wells of discoverable scientific wisdom, and thus should be explored and exploited accordingly. There is no one way of doing things, and people should be clear-eyed when dealing with it. However, he can and will lie to get by, finding that the least amount of effort spent on fruitless debate is often the best.
Physical Description:
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General Power Information: Toliver powers are all basically related to his status as a Biophaegic-Mutant (literally a life or life-force eater), but that is more than enough. Every one of his sub-abilities is either directly or closely related to this, and are more like chapters of a book: a whole in and of itself, rather than several separate abilities.
Biophage: Bio-Phage: Life Consuming - Toliver literally consumes the life-force of living, or, recently deceased beings, and adds their biomass, capabilities, instincts, and knowledge to his own considerable bevy of abilities. The facets of this solitary power are as follows, in order of operation:
Biophaegic Assimilation: Toliver can acquire the raw physical mass/density, and a limited number of natural abilities from the ‘absorption’ of the flesh and life-force of carbon-based life-forms. Co-opting of another being's physicality and capabilities is limited depending upon both the time he spends in absorbing their life-force, and just how much damage he does to them in the process (see Limitations and Weaknesses, number 5).
Biophaegic Physicality: When Toliver uses his Biophage ability, he can appropriate the raw biomass of a living or recently deceased animal or person, adding the musculature, nervous, and skeletal capabilities to his frame, at the best of their relevant abilities. This generally results in a notable increase in his raw strength, durability, and (depending on who or what he absorbs) speed.
Biophaegic Adaptation: Within the limits of what he has previously absorbed through assimilation, Toliver can respond to hazardous environments with limited physiological shapeshifting (ie: sprouting gills, if he’s underwater, etc).
Biophaegic Approximation: Sprouting from the ability to instinctively utilize the abilities of whatever or whomever he has absorbed, Toliver also can retain and manifest the skills and knowledge of the creatures or people he has assimilated.
Biophaegic Macro/Micronization: Toliver can condense or expand his assimilated mass to a limited degree. What this means, is that if he absorbs a sparrow, he’ll be able to fly at sparrow-like speed and agility, but he’ll have to readjust his current biomass to approximate wings and a tail, complete with wing and tail-feathers, and hollow bones. This process is painful for him and his victims, but otherwise rapid in process.
Biophaegic Self-Control: When Toliver’s power first manifested, it was not inherently controllable: If he touched a viable target, he would automatically start to absorb their lifeforce. Thanks to years of practice, focus, blood sweat and tears, he can now choose to use this power, or not, on an instinctive level. Accidents with his power are no longer possible.
Biophaegic Immutability: Thanks to his Biophaegic Self-Control, Toliver generally always retains his mental faculties, with only minorly incidental mental ‘instinctive’ quirks as a side-effect. As a secondary benefit, he also retains a resistance to emotional/mental attacks that would otherwise suborn his body or will, be they magical, physical or psionic based. This resistance does not come without its own secondary problems, however…
Previously Assimilations and Ramifications: With control, came limitations. Toliver has only a limited number of Biophaegic ‘slots’: genetic/memetic openings that are available for him to acquire or claim, before he risks a high level of rejection as well as a possibly permanent loss of his self-control and immutability. Two of his slots remain permanently in use, permanently ingrained from those early, less-than halcyon days when his power first manifested. These are never going away. Three other slots are semi-permanently retained and maintained because of their bluntly overarching usefulness. For safety’s sake, he reserves four such additional slots ‘open’ at any given time, and no more, lest he lose himself to his power… again.
Permanent Assimilation - American Pit Bull ‘Brick’: Toliver’s least-favorite step-father bred and reared pit-bulls for illicit dog-fights. When Toliver’s powers first manifested, he ended up absorbing his only friend, an obscenely large and muscular (and totally illegal) pit-bull named ‘Brick’. Toliver retains this anthropomorphic appearance of that first assimilation to this very day. From Brick, Toliver gained the considerable base abilities of a normal domesticated canine, as well as the proportional strength (Toliver can toss a car), tenacity, and the disproportional fighting spirit of the breed… as well as a serious bit of guilt. [XXL, Tri-Muscle-gene, Illegal Fighting Breed].
Permanent Assimilation - The Five-Lined Skink: The (American) five-lined skink (Plestiodon fasciatus) is a species of lizard in the family Scincidae. The species is endemic to North America. It is one of the most common lizards in the eastern U.S. and one of the seven native species of lizards in Canada. Thanks to this assimilation, Toliver gained major regenerative abilities, particularly for his limbs, but also for his non-vital and possibly his vital organs. Unlike with true reptiles, Toliver regenerates fairly swiftly, though the more vital the limb or organ, the more time he requires to heal, and for truly vital organs it is supposed that he will need stabilization of some difficult sort, though luckily this has never been tested.
Assimilation - Unselected: These slots remain open for active in-game use.
Assimilation - Unselected:
Assimilation - Unselected:
Assimilation - Unselected:
Power Quirks and Limitations: Toliver’s power is very puissant and overt, he does have limits in how he can utilize it, these are the ones he knows about, at current.
Limitation - 01: Toliver cannot use his power upon on non-animals (plants etc)
Limitation - 02: He also cannot use his power on animals too alien from humanity (fungus, insects and MOST fish. Octopi may be a one-off)
Limitation - 03: Toliver cannot assume the use of any non-acquired meta-powers, like mutant-abilities, from the use of his powers.
Limitation - 04: He cannot -ever- acquire or learn the mystic arts. (More on that later).
Limitation - 05: Toliver’s power is overtly hostile, and damages the target he uses it upon. In fact the longevity of his powers' effect varies depending upon just how much he hurts his victim, as the bioforce is ripped from their cells. Killing his victim makes the effect permanent.
Limitation - 06: Toliver’s power is obvious in its use, manifesting as bright luminous gold and green sparkles, and a halo about his frame.
Limitation - 07: His power use might backfire, damaging him accordingly, if he uses it upon animals (like alien-species) that are simply too strange for him to absorb.
Limitation - 08: Toliver must be within 3 cm distance of his victim to use his power, but direct contact works faster.
Limitation - 09: Any lifeform Toliver drains must be alive or less than 15 minutes dead when he absorbs them. And recently deceased bio-energy is always temporary in its power-effects.
Limitation - 10: Strangely enough, Toliver is considered delicious & nutritious to Vampires of All Kinds (most vamps can sense this by his scent, at long range).
Drawbacks & Weaknesses:
Complex Meta-Healing: Because of the nature of Toliver’s power, he cannot be healed by any unnatural means. His tendency to absorb bio-force energies interferes with these, either negating them entirely, or making his wounds worse.
High Caloric Diet: The average human needs 1800-2100 calories a day, to remain healthy. Toliver requires five times as much.
Strict Carnivore: In connection with the above, Toliver can only gain nutritional sustenance from animal proteins and organs, seemingly preferring it the rarer in cooking, the better. Except for bacon, of course, bacon should be thick and suitably crispy.
Inhuman Default Form: Toliver’s form varies depending upon the abilities he has acquired and the people he has drained, but overall he generally defaults to the form of a large anthropomorphic (humanoid) pit-bull-man. With effort, he can retain a more ‘normal’ form, (that of the large 6’8 man), but it requires some level of focus and concentration. His concentration is not perfect, and occasionally slippage occurs, if he is angry or startled.
Medically Noticeable, Atypical Biology: Toliver’s assumed human seeming is only skin deep. A cursory medical exam, or x-ray like effect will easily reveal his Mutant nature, as he has more muscles than a human out to, his bones are far thicker than normal, and his skeletal structure is clearly ‘wrong’ with extra bits (thick, cross-banded/reinforced ribs, for example). Then there’s the issue of his extra and possibly redundant organs.
Mystic Bafflejack: Toliver is, by some quirk of his mutant biology, not so much resistant to magic and the supernatural, so much as that he causes such enhancements, enchantments, and effects to work oddly when they are used upon him. Magic spastically throws a fit when used on him and often results in a chaotic display of colorful eldritch energies (or, once, an explosive flight of confused pixies), or other random and wacky (but all too noticeable) phenomenon when used upon him. It’s easy to track him, mystically, thusly, as he’ll likely be the only bystander glowing pink when someone casts a spell in his general direction. This mystic chaos-factor only affects him and does not protect bystanders, except in the case of direct magical damage (rays of magic bolts of force, etc).
Person of Interest: Toliver was dragged into an authorized, black-bag military unit, known only as Badger-Strike, wherein he was trained to performed all sorts of wetwork tasks with other experimental, altered, or mutant soldiers that were either ‘drafted’ or ‘recruited’ at proverbial gun-point. While Badger-Strike is no longer authorized (or acknowledged), Toliver is still considered a military asset by more clandestine aspects of the US Government, and other unknown actors or nations.
Scentless/Sneaky: Despite his natural bulk and hulkiness, and his mental mutter effect, Toliver is otherwise innately and instinctively stealthy, in a naturally predatory way. He must take great pains and effort to not sneak-up on people, so that they either see or hear him coming. Often he fails at this, and frequently he startles innocent bystanders. He is also oddly scentless without an overt use of colognes and such (he swears by speed-stick, classic old-spice, and a splash of Axe: ‘Phoenix’), but even then, people rarely connect the odor with the man. Animals bigger than an average-size pomeranian canine are also unnerved by his unnatural scentless nature, and shy away from him, becoming aggressive if he pushes them with friendly overtures.
Unwanted Animal Magnetism (Disney Princess Effect): Possibly Toliver’s most embarrassing flaw, is his tendency to somehow ‘attract’ small woodland creatures of all kinds. They are curious, obnoxious, and often pests, drawn to him by some magnetic force as they can’t possibly find him by scent. It is noted that they are perhaps drawn to him by sound: Heaven help Toliver if he starts singing while in the woods or fields. When doing so, the animals will cavort playfully about him, and then turn obnoxious or pest-like, if curious, when he is done. They most definitely will annoy him, but he will NEVER prey upon, abuse, or harm them, often instinctively going out of his way to protect them.
Skills: Toliver possesses military training, but no real field-experiences to back them up, thankfully. The current bevy of abilities are as follows:
Escapology: If it’s pickable, pry-able, bolt-able, screwable, and even if it’s electronic, Toliver can likely escape from it, given time and a few obscuring shadows. From locked cages, to handcuffs, to zip-ties and ropes, Toliver cannot be easily contained, usually, unless he willingly decides to go with it. This is how he escaped from Operation Foolscap.
Foreign Languages: Thanks to a lot of United States ‘Adventuring’ in the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, Toliver was trained in working street-passable understanding of the Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Russian and Serbian, with some limited Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian and Spanish, under his belt. He has a limited understanding of the cultures and peoples accordingly..
Military Training:: Toliver has the basic training and skills of a professional soldier, fresh out of BASIC. He is athletically proficient, well versed in knives, rifles, and small fire-arms, and knows the basics of survival. He is Specialized in Stealth.
Stealth: Yes, we keep on mentioning Stealth. On top of being inherently sneaky and scentless, Toliver is well trained and experienced in the methods and mechanics of being a right-sneaky bastard. This includes the use of advanced camouflage techniques, and hunter-stalker comprehension of human/prey behaviours. Such as the fact that most people -rarely- look up, and so on, until it's way too late.
Background:
He was named Jessie-Toliver McBain, and was born to Shawnikwa McBain, on January 29th 2003 – with the general assumption by his mother, that ‘Jessie’ was also his father’s name… though there was some question about that. In any case, from the moment he understood where his primary name came from, Toliver -insisted- upon never using or responding to it. When he was eleven, his latest step-father gifted him with a massive XL-triple muscled pit-bull puppy named, affectionately, Brick.
Shortly after he turned thirteen, his mutant powers manifested. The first thing he absorbed, unfortunately, was Brick, killing the dog in the process. This left him forever marked as half-man and half-canine, with fur and features that he couldn’t hide. His parents gave him up to the authorities almost immediately, who whisked him off to a clandestine government anti-mutant program secretly named Operation: Bellerophon, for examination, testing, and experimentation. He would stay there for the next four years, striking back at his captors whenever possible, and learning how to control his power by personal initiative, than by training, always seeking a means to escape. But none was available. He might have died in captivity, had not the war on terror gone into high-gear, in 2003, causing the search for other available military assets and weaponry. Operation: Foolscap was quietly authorized in the backrooms of political power, and ‘natural resources’ such as incarcerated mutants were loaded up and shipped to the Middle East for training. In 2020, when the US was considering pulling out of Afghanistan, Seventeen year-old Toliver was being shipped out for training.
Toliver spent the next three years as an increasingly valuable secret military asset, as he and roughly several dozen captured, kidnapped, or incarcerated mutants were given a stark option: fight for Uncle Sam, or face a quick execution and burial in a mass grave. Most opted to take their chances on the battlefield, and Toliver was no exception. The impressed mutants were brutally but effectively trained, given ‘enough’ proper with the idea that they would be trained into a specialized fighting force– those that survived the training, that is. Surprisingly fully a third of them survived the whole affair, and many, like Toliver, eventually escaped and made their way back to the free world, by various means, foul or fair. The rest, however, were either dead, ground down under three years of minimal care, or actually opted to stay behind…
By 2023, Toliver had snuck back into the United States, and spent some time hiding out in various mutant slums, sticking to the shadows as he perfected his stealth, survival, and personal disguise abilities. Always careful to stay just far enough under the radar to not be a problem, he also made sure to be just visible -enough- to be a hard target to eliminate, either Operation Bellerophon or Foolscap should decide to come after him. But after several political sea-changes, the United States had become a different beast, all-to-gether.. Mutant Rights was now something to be considered, and Mutant Purges were considered ‘bad PR’... depending on who one asked, that is. Toliver managed to exist with limited worry.
He proved to be decidedly effective in stopping Human-on-Mutant (and Mutant-on-Human) violence, wherever he was, however, and someone, somewhere, began to take note. He passed his GED via correspondence courses, and some severely good fake ID documents, and applied to Cobalt Academy, through back channels, in the Winter of 2023. Deciding that if he was going to do some good for himself and the people around him, he’d need a better education. No one was more surprised than he that he was accepted, however…
Criminal Record: Toliver likes to keep off the camera, and below notice, when it comes to legal and extra-legal issues. Thus he has no official criminal record, or files in the standard criminal databases. However, this doesn’t mean his hands are anywhere near clean – Only that he prefers not to get caught.
Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts: Because of his biology and power, Toliver has grown up to develop a number of interesting idiosyncrasies and quirks that make life interesting with and around him.
Always Prepared/Hypervigilant: Thanks to his well-nigh-feral instincts, and training, Toliver tends to grossly over-prepare for most situations. This is a man who wanders into classrooms well prepared for a school shooting - armed with smoke grenades and the like, for protection. Like a furry Macgyver, he might have the necessary tool or odd implement on his person, or its nearest equivalent cheapest-available substitute. There are more uses for a rubber-chicken than one might at first appreciate.
Dancing Dodge: Toliver is an avid student of Modern dance and ballet, leading to his having an unexpected amount of grace and dexterity –especially to a person with his stocky build! The problem is that the rhythm never leaves him. So even when he dodges an attack, it tends to look like dance maneuvers.
Mutilated Ears & Tail: Toliver absorbed Brick, as his first accidental meld, and Brick was in all other aspects a dog trimmed for pit-fighting (even if he never actually fought). This means that Brick was a victim of the unnecessary and cruel practice of ear and tail clipping. Toliver absorbed these features as well. His ears in his standard form are clipped and upright, and his tail is just a stub, easily concealed in his trousers. These features remain in his more human-forms, with his ears looking at the very least ‘mauled’, and his tail (a feature present in most of his alternate forms) present as a stub unless he puts extra effort into making it larger. Periodically it wags when he’s happy or excited.
Pouches Pouches Pouches!: Toliver suffers from the chronic Liefeld based tendency of carrying way too many pouches on his person. This helps with his ‘always prepared’ quirk, but otherwise tends to look silly. These pouches carry his ‘potentially necessary’ gear, along with foam padding to aid in keeping them sorted and silent as he moves.
Sensational Soprano Sax Artist: Toliver plays a mean Soprano Saxophone, and even writes music for it. If the mutant-vigilante/veteran business ever tanks, he can at least make a decent living, playing music on street-corners for handouts.