| Introduction
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xxxxxWarm and open, Ryan is friendly to most that he meets, though an underlying undercurrent of snark here and there may mark this as more a /practiced/ skill than an inherent one. He lives his life with a good deal of passion; for his music, for his friends, for the activism he delves into (largely centered around environmental justice and animal rights.) A strict vegan, he makes up for his care in diet with wanton abandon when it comes to chemicals, partying hard most nights a week and harder still after shows. For all his excess, he works fiercely hard when it comes to things that matter to him, practicing his music long hours each day and devoting plenty of time to various radical enterprises around the city. He also has kind of a problem with inveterate lying. All but the closest people in his life have gotten any number of different (untrue) answers about his life history. He tends to make up new stories on the fly when confronted with questions about his past.
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| History
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xxxxx Born the youngest of five children to a Baptist preacher in the deep South, Ryan's early life was mostly pretty strict. His parents insisted their children be prim and proper reflections of what a preacher's family /should/ be, and his father was not above enforcing discipline with a belt if the children stepped out of line. What 'out of line' constituted was a wide range of things. No cursing, no friends they did not approve of, no going to parties, no television, no rock music, no -- the list was extensive. Ryan never did all that well with it. He was never a particularly good student, and the constant parent-teacher conferences about his lack of homework, lack of studying, lack of discipline, just made his parents tighten the restrictions on him. He threw himself pretty hard into music, through this, this one /approved/ activity bringing him some respite from the constant discipline.
The manifestation of his mutation near the beginning of high school did not make the situation any better. His father insisted his son was possessed by a demon, and went through many elaborate lengths to try and exorcise this. Every attempt to rid Ryan of this "demon" failed, from holy water to prayer meetings to scourging to, at one point, getting a man who insisted he could /carve/ the demon out of Ryan (an ordeal that left him with thick autopsy-looking scars on his torso that he hides from all but his very closest friends.)
In the face of all this treatment, Ryan's behavior grew, well, worse. Aside from doing badly in school he'd never acted up all that much, but in the face of this recurring abuse he gave up on his parents' rules. He left home sometimes for days at a time, occasionally returning still high, on more than one occasion returning in police custody (though being the son of a popular preacher at least meant the sheriff returned him to his /home/ and not to jail.) It was a cycle that only made his parents come down on him harder. Which made him act out more. Eventually, though, tired of the increasingly /violent/ attempts to cure him of his mutation, Ryan left home for good, dropping out of high school at sixteen and leaving his parents behind to move to New Orleans. Though technically homeless, he made friends easily, crashing on many couches and only infrequently actually spending nights /on/ the streets. It was around this time that he started getting seriously involved in activism, while crashing in a squat with a bunch of anarchists. He and his friends arranged a raid, one night, on a mink farm, freeing the animals inside. They got away with it -- for a while. But a second such raid ended with the FBI at their door, charging them with a whole litany of things, though the ones that stuck were Animal Enterprise Terrorism. One of the other teenagers involved in the raids accepted a plea bargain in return for turning in information about the others, and Ryan served two years in prison, one in a juvenile center before he was moved to a general detention center.
He's probably one of the most peaceful terrorists the country has seen. He left the South behind, once he was out, hitchhiking up the East Coast and -- getting picked up by the wrong people, who turned him in to Prometheus when they realized he was a mutant. Ryan was in the labs another two years, a rather grueling time that left him with a healthy dose of PTSD.
He jokes it also gave him some of his best friends, though. These days he lives in the East Village, publicly making a name for himself as an up-and-coming musician, privately still working to help break other people out of the laboratories that stole two years of his life. He's tight-lipped about his mutation in public, not wanting coming out to ruin his burgeoning music career, though he harbors fantasies of some day /after/ he has achieved some measure of fame just letting the world know and seeing how they handle it.
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| Powers
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xxxxxRyan is primarily an audiokinetic, with control over sound waves. He can do a lot with them, from distorting the flow of sound to have conversations audible to who he wants and nobody else to autotuning his own music (which he never does, he /swears/) to replicating soundwaves (mimicking voices, music, or whatever other noises) to using echolocation to navigate. He can generate large amounts of sonic energy, enough to cause injury to people in the way of his blasts or even enough to vibrate at the right frequencies to break down some solid objects. Plenty of intensive experimenting during his stint in Prometheus has honed his abilities to give him a good deal of control, though given his age this will likely only grow with time.
Secondary to his audiokinesis, Ryan possesses a low-grade empathy, capable of reading and guiding the emotions of those around him. It took him a long time to realize it, because his empathy /only/ works in tandem with sound, and /only/ with sound that people are voluntarily creating. He can only /influence/ emotions through sound he creates -- music, singing, talking -- and he can only read people's emotions if they are talking/singing/etc. The radio doesn't work. Footsteps and incidental sounds don't work. Just intentional noises, most especially those intended for communication. His empathy is not enormously powerful; it can affect anyone capable of hearing the sounds in question (meaning it is useless on, say, deaf people, or people with earplugs in, or people out of audible range) so its range can be wide (especially at something like an amplified concert) but its pull is only moderate. He can't force someone to do a complete 180 with their emotions, but he can nudge them in the direction he wants to go. He can take the edge off anger and encourage calm, for example, but if someone's really /determined/ to start a fight he likely won't be able to sway them as much. People already receptive to what he is trying to do -- people who /know/ he is using empathy and are okay with it, people who are already mildly inclined in the direction he's pushing -- are far easier to sway and will feel his influence very much more powerfully.
This tends to mean his music really moves people. He was actually pretty sad to discover that this wasn't just because he is a great musician and was helped greatly by playing with cheat codes enabled.
He's still a pretty great musician, though.
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| Connections
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Friends
Foes
And everything in between
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| Gallery
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[[Image:|x150px]]
[[Image:|x150px]]
[[Image:|x150px]]
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| Full Name
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| [[Image:|center]]
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| Codename
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None
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| Birthdate
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1980-08-22
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| Species
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Mutant
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| Affiliation
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None
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| Alignment
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None
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| Powers
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Audiokinesis & Low-grade Empathy
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| Occupation
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Musician
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| RP Hooks
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| RP Hook - Explanation.
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| RP Hook - Explanation.
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| RP Hook - Explanation.
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| RP Hook - Explanation.
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