I Know Kung Fu
Joined: 26 Jun 2005
Posts: 425
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OOC Information:
Name: Martin Demers
E-mail: martind13@yahoo.com.nospam
Preferred Messenger: Yahoo
Other: N/A
Character Information:
Name: Nathaniel Essex
Alias: Currently, Mister Sinister and Matthew Evans. He has used many different aliases in the past.
Occupation: Perfectly sane scientist. No, really. It's everyone else who's mad.
Age: 173
Height: 5'7"
Build: Slender, with sharp angular features.
Hair color/style: Jet-black, worn very short against his scalp
Eye color: Solid, pupiless scarlet. Glow very slightly in the dark.
Detailed personal description: While not very tall or physically impressive, Mr. Sinister nevertheless possesses an aura of quiet menace and power that is immediately noticeable. He seems to be clad in a tight-fitting outfit of black leather, sometimes with a capelike garment of red and black ribbons when he wants to be particularly intimidating. His skin is smooth and stark white without any pigment whatsoever, with eyes that are empty red orbs and noticeably pointed teeth. A small crimson diamond is embedded in the middle of his forehead. His appearance is in fact highly mutable, and his "clothes" are mere extensions of his body, "worn" out of habit. Sinister always moves slowly and deliberately, with every movement being carefully considered. His voice is deep and resonating, yet lacking in any kind of emotional depth; it often sounds as if he were a slightly bored professor lecturing to his students. Dr. Essex is unfailingly polite, even to unfortunate individuals he is about to vivisect; he retains a calm Old-World sense of propriety which sometimes seems oddly out of place.
In his persona as Matthew Evans, the head of the Olympus Project, he is tall and distinguished, with finely-wrinkled features, piercing blue eyes and short salt-and-pepper hair. His age is hard to pin down: he could be anywhere from an elderly-looking fifty to a well-preserved seventy. He is always dressed conservatively, with button-down shirts and dress pants. Evans has a faint hint of British accent (he states that his family is originally from Manchester), and speaks very clearly and with excellent diction. It was often remarked by his colleagues that Evans's skill as a geneticist was matched only by his ego... and, indeed, his body language clearly expresses the immense pride in himself and his work. He is often curt with his underlings, though never egregiously impolite.
Family: No surviving family members.
Ability/Mutation: Sinister's powers all stem from his vast mental abilities; he can read and send thoughts within a 100' radius, and only someone with telepathic powers or strong willpower can resist his mental probes. When in close proximity with someone, he is able to alter memories and create strong post-hypnotic suggestions; however, he needs at least an hour of uninterrupted work for this. Sinister also has a degree of psychokinesis, but can only move relatively small masses (less than half a pound), albeit with great precision. He can generate bolts of psychic energy, and also erect force fields around his body, although these abilities drain him greatly. Finally, he can project his consciousness outside of his body and send it far afield; he can only keep this up for a few hours at a time, and will normally use this ability to spy on people or places that are key to his plans. While in astral projection, he can use all his telepathic powers on anyone in the area. Sinister's mental defenses are extremely hard to break; his will and concentration are at a superhuman level.
Sinister also has absolute mental control over his body at the cellular level; he can regenerate damage rapidly and protect vital areas by shifting and toughening layers of epidermis. In practical purposes, he is protected as if he were wearing a suit of bulletproof fabric. He can change his appearance to a normal human one, most often looking exactly as he did in his former life; he will then usually be wearing formal clothing, like a suit and tie, always in sober black and gray.
Thanks to this bio-control, Sinister has superhuman endurance; he does need to rest, but this takes the form of meditation/biofeedback practice to replenish his psychic energy. In his current form, he is practically immortal; he is unaffected by any disease or toxin. He no longer needs to eat and drink.
In addition to his other powers, Sinister has a vast intelligence and perfect memory; he can remember with unfailing accuracy every detail he has ever seen or heard. He is a genius-level researcher in the fields of medicine, biology and genetics, with over 100 years of experimentation behind him; he knows the human genome backwards and forwards, and can perform complex brain surgery with his eyes closed. He also has expert knowledge of electronics, engineering and computer science. He speaks and reads fluently many different languages, including all the major European tongues (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish); thanks to his photographic memory and advanced mental abilities, Sinister can become fluent in a new language in just a few days. He absorbs and processes information at almost computerlike speeds.
Weaknesses: Sinister is a very tough being to kill, or even to damage. His mental powers are great, and his physical form is highly durable. Still, he does need to breathe, and extreme physical damage will make him lose control of his body, essentially killing him.
Personality: Mister Sinister is, above all, a being of cold intellect. Freed from the constraints of mortality and morality by Apocalypse, he is consumed with hunger for knowledge. All of his energies are directed towards gathering information on, and the molding of the Homo Superior race... but to what ultimate end only he knows. He may be amoral, but he is nevertheless not a cruel creature: his every action is dictated by calculated reason, not emotion. He does not gloat, or fly into a rage, or laugh. He may smile in satisfaction, but that is the extent of his emotionality.
Sinister is a loner, a spider in the web, spinning vast and complex plans. Despite his personal abilities, he rarely takes action directly, preferring to act through intermediaries, as in the case of the Morlock Massacre. Every other being he encounters is either a tool to be used, a threat to be avoided or destroyed, or insignificant.
History: Nathaniel Essex was born in London in the year 1831, the son of a wealthy merchant family. From a young age, he showed a great interest in the physical sciences, which culminated in the study of medicine when he entered university. His parents did everything they could to support him, to the point of managing to send him to Cambridge and learn from the best in his field.
Young Essex proved to be a brilliant student, learning new material with inordinate speed. In 1859, when Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their works on evolution through natural selection, Essex read through them voraciously.
In 1861 he set up a practice in London; he worked hard for months to build up a clientele, but in his spare time continued to ponder the question of evolution. Natural selection made perfect sense, he thought; it explained very well how the human race and other creatures existed. But, he asked himself, could it also determine where the human race would go?
Essex read through every scientific book and journal he could get his hands on, but never got a satisfactory answer to this question. In frustration, he turned to less scientific sources, and eventually decided that the human race would undergo a profound change in the decades to come. Within a hundred years, he predicted confidently, Man would exhibit strange new powers and embark on a bold new evolutionary journey. These powers were based on the so-called "Essex Factor", a particular trait in the human anatomy which he tried to isolate and study.
Needless to say, such claims were not well-received by his peers. Citing overwork and mental fatigue, Essex's scientific peers shut him out of their circles, eventually discrediting him completely. Even his wife began to regard him with pity for his ravings on a new race of humanity. His practice declined, and his health began to fail.
In 1870 his wife and four-year-old son both died of pneumonia, and this crystallized Essex's determination to isolate the Factor. He hired a gang of street thugs, which he nicknamed the Marauders, to capture homeless men and women so he could experiment on them.
It was soon after that, in their search through the sewers of London, the Marauders came upon the dormant form of Apocalypse, the First Mutant, and inadvertently woke him up. Immediately seizing psionic control of the thugs, Apocalypse learned of their master's goal and was interested in finding out more. Bringing Nathaniel Essex before him, the giant mutant offered him a bargain: he would be given an immortal body and greatly increased mental powers so he could continue work on the "Essex Factor", in exchange for eternal servitude to the First Mutant. Having nothing to lose, Essex agreed, and the doctor was transformed into his present form.
The Marauders nicknamed him "Mister Sinister", and the name stuck. Sinister's first task was to create a virus intended to cull the weak humans from the strong, essentially decimating the human population; Essex found Apocalypse's methods far too extreme, and right from the start plotted to undermine him. He designed the virus but infected the Darwinian Overlord instead, crippling him and forcing him to return to dormancy. Free once again, Essex decided to move away from the old city of London to continue his research and explore his powers. He first opened a practice in New York City but moved throughout the country every few years, all the while pursuing his research in human genetics.
The 20th century was an exceedingly busy time for Essex. Taking advantage of every advance in technology and developing new methods and techniques for himself, he perfected his understanding of the human genome to the point where he could, in theory, create and modify any mutation. The appearance of Homo Superior in mid-century validated Essex's long-ago predictions, but he wasted no time in mocking the long-dead fools who had pushed him aside. There was too much work to do. In addition to experimenting on living subjects to refine his genetic manipulation techniques, he was instrumental in creating the Olympus Project in the early 1980's under an assumed identity; the Project, a series of government-sponsored genetic laboratories, had the stated goal of creating artificial mutants for the use of the US government. In reality, Essex created the organization to control those scientists skilled enough to (as he saw it) encroach on his territory, and to give himself the resources needed to apply his research. Throughout his involvement in Olympus, he maintained the persona of a brilliant but erratic scientist, absent from the facilities more often than not. This allowed him to continue his personal research unimpeded.
In 1999, Essex saved the mutant named Gambit from his own powers, which were gradually growing out of control. In return, he asked Gambit to assemble and train a group of mercenaries for purposes which he kept deliberately vague. Those purposes became all too clear when Gambit was asked to lead these thugs, the Marauders, into the sewers under New York City... and the mercenaries started the cold-blooded slaughter of the mostly-defenceless Morlocks, deformed mutants unable or unwilling to live in normal society. Essex had ordered the "Morlock Massacre" to rid the genepool of these undesirables; not all the Morlocks were killed, but the slaughter was still appalling, with dozens of mutants meeting their end. The horrified Gambit tried to intervene, but was injured and driven off by by the bloodthirsty mercenary named Sabertooth. Essex did not order the killing of the surviving Morlocks, satisfied that they no longer represented a significant threat to the future of mutantkind.
Since then, Mister Sinister has been mostly reclusive, most recently moving into a quiet town in rural Pennsylvania. From here he continues his research sporadically on living subjects, but principally tracks the explosion of mutants throughout the world, refining his predictions about Homo Superior and devising plans to guide the race of mutants to its highest potential... whether it wants to or not. In the last few months, however, Sinister has decided to end his self-imposed solitude and take an active hand in the world. One of his first actions was to coerce Gambit into giving him a detailed manifest of the X-Men and their powers, then to steal an experimental device called a "biometric morpher", which let him create clones far more quickly than before. Using a sample of DNA from Calvin Rankin, he created a clone which he then gifted with a number of offensive and defensive powers. This clone was sent to attack the Xavier Institute in the middle of the night; Essex planned to record every change in the genetic makeup of his creation in order to expand his library of genetic information. The clone wreaked extensive damage on the Mansion and the grounds; there were injuries but fortunately no loss of life among the X-Men or the students.
Knowing that Professor Xavier knows of his existence, Essex has decided to return to head the Olympus Project on a full-time basis. First, however, he adbucted Penelope Dawson and brought her to his Pennsylvania lab to extract genetic information and gain more insights into the mechanisms of her power. During this time, unfortunately, his associate Sage decided to betray him, sending Penny's old flame Pyro to free her. But Essex got wind of the plan and managed to turn the tables on Sage and the X-Men, faking his own death and escaping into the night. He is now back at the helm of the Olympus Project in the guise of Matthew Evans, and only time will tell how his nefarious schemes will progress...
Other: I decided to change slightly Sinister's appearance, while still keeping the white skin, red eyes and diamond in his forehead; in the comics, he always appears as tall and muscular, but it made more sense to me to keep him as he looked in life: i.e., smaller than the 20th century average, and probably not built like an Olympic athlete. |
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