VOLT

Dusty / Central

[break]AO NO EXORCIST, RENZOU SHIMA

[attr="class","appcat"]vigilante

[attr="class","appcat"]profile

[attr="class","apptext"]





Jacob Lloyd Hayden





Volt





Human (ESPer)





21





October 22nd






Kingsport




Male





Male

[attr="class","appcat"]dossier

[attr="class","apptext"]







Jacob likes to joke around; his favorite thing to do is to laugh. He subscribes to the philosophy that if you make yourself laugh, you can make others laugh with you, and he loves being a positive influence. He's dedicated and intelligent, even if he's a little too laid-back to show off that intelligence. When he has a task to complete, it's like a whole different person; he chooses one thing, finishes it, and moves on to the next one. He's not normally capricious, by any means, but his one-track mind is most evident when he's forced to be serious. Otherwise, he'll still be acting according to a purpose, but he'll be less upset if something comes along to distract him.

[break][break]
Jacob dislikes explaining himself, preferring the company of people who are smart enough to figure out his reasons for doing things. He lacks the clarity required to adequately explain complex subjects; his intelligence has not helped his communication skills. He'd be an absolutely terrible teacher, and he often speaks too bluntly without realizing it. The one thing that can make him lose his carefully cultivated laid-back persona is someone in close proximity being an absolute nitwit. He hates people who don't try to understand things, who just give up before they even put in any effort. It's not the only thing that makes him angry, but it's the most common one.

[break][break]

Jacob is also rather distrustful of large organizations like the Initiative for the Greater Good, a trait which plays a large part in why he hasn't registered despite his propensity to get into situations that should require a licensed hero and his general positive attitude. He doesn't believe in conspiracies, but rather that people do terrible things under the aegis of such organizations, and an organization that gathers up all the superheroes under its banner has a tremendous capacity for both error and malicious wrongdoing.







A Kingsport native, Jacob was born to working middle-class parents, and he's always been intelligent. That's not to say he's always been good with people; he was an incorrigible little know it all growing up. Not that it was unwarranted; the kid did skip over two entire grades of middle school, after all. It was the problems inherent in being two years younger than your entire high school class that forced him to mature, getting over a number of his social problems just to survive high school. He's loved science for a long time, but since entering college, he's had a vested interest in the physical sciences, electrical engineering in particular, because at the age of 16 Jacob started manifesting his latent psychic abilities; electrokinesis and magnetokinesis.

[break][break]

That's right. Psychic abilities. They'd be normal superpowers if they worked like electrokinesis and magnetokinesis are supposed to work, but they don't. The thing that reclassified them, apparently, was their ability to affect Jacob's own body like it was made of ferrous metal and ran on a manipulable current, and the fact that they didn't have an associated physiological difference; the power comes entirely from Jacob's mind, a manifestation of his ideal reality projected onto the real world through psychic potential that lacked any other avenue to express itself. Jacob declared his major in electrical engineering and thought that would be the end of it; he'd learn how to control his powers and he'd keep to himself on the grand stage of superheroes and villains. Of course, his luck wasn't destined to be that good.

[break][break]

Jacob's life during and immediately after college was dotted with numerous incidents wherein he was the only person who could intervene in some sort of supervillainous activity, or just regular criminal activity. People would rob his bank while he was depositing his check. People would mug him on the street. People would mug other people near him. He just kept running into things, and he couldn't help but intervene; it just wasn't in his nature to ignore something that could get someone hurt or killed. But he still didn't want to sign on with the Initiative for the Greater Good. He didn't trust an organization that gathered every superpowered do-gooder to their banner and brought them under control. That was too much potential for catastrophe. He didn't want any part of it, which meant that one day, he came across a wanted poster for himself, labelled as "The Vigilante 'Volt'". He was torn between being offended that he was a wanted criminal for no good reason and being disappointed in the Initiative's choice of name, but he dyed his hair pink and tried to counteract his rubbish luck with subtlety.

[break][break]

He's not in jail so far, so it's obviously working.

[attr="class","appcat"]powers

[attr="class","apptext"]







Jacob can perceive, control, and generate electricity. He can see the wires running through a building or a piece of technology, control electrical current in any form (except other people's bioelectricity for whatever reason), and even amplify his own bioelectricity to generate powerful currents from his body. While this allows him the standard "throw a lightning bolt" attack, that's only the beginning of Jacob's power over electricity. For starters, Jacob has the potential and the skill to manipulate any device that runs on electricity. If he wants to fine tune things, he has to touch the device, but making things start, stop, or break is easy as long as he can see it and has a line of effect for the current to flow through; a device separated from him by an insulator or vacuum would be off-limits, for instance, and he can't use his powers very well in the dark since he has to see his target to hit it. That said, generating light is easy when you can make arcs of miniature lightning dance between your fingers.

[break][break]

Jacob's powers also allow him to control his own bioelectricity, which has its own effects. Firstly, as long as his brain is capable of directing the current and his body is physically capable of moving the muscles involved, Jacob can always move. Abilities that induce paralysis by blocking nervous impulses simply don't work; he can send the bioelectrical messages through alternative paths, outside of his nerves. That said, a power that induces paralysis by actually stopping the muscles from moving would be effective. Secondly, Jacob can flood his system with active currents, providing a more efficient manner of transport for nervous system impulses and thus boosting his reflexes to superhuman levels, but this has a lot of side effects. Firstly, it makes him shake like a chihuahua on Adderall, thanks to the excess electricity. Secondly, it's just downright exhausting. Third, anything he touches, whether he wants it to or not, is going to get shocked. Fourth and finally, it increases the efficiency of all transmissions on his nervous system, including touch and especially pain. When he gets hit, he really feels lit. Blows that shouldn't do more than stun can put him out of a fight. In effect, every successful shot is a nut shot. Understandably, he doesn't use this often.







The twin to Jacob's ability to manipulate electricity, Jacob can also manipulate magnetism. He can give his own body a magnetic charge, or manipulate the strength, alignment, and presence of the charges in other objects, though he cannot charge non-ferrous metals or other humans. Again, his own body is the strange exception to the rule. Jacob can launch ferrous metals at high speeds by alternating the charges like a railgun, cling to buildings with metal rebar in them, magnetize weapons, and mess up credit cards at fifty paces.







A passive application of his own abilities, Jacob is surrounded by an electromagnetic field. The field does little, barely of strength to attract paper clips, but the reason his subconscious maintains it is simple; it provides a path for electrical current to flow that doesn't go near Jacob's vital organs. Jacob can be tracked by anything capable of spotting electromagnetic disturbances, but he is also fairly immune to any electrical attack that doesn't penetrate his skin; stun guns are a no-sell, for instance, while taser darts hurt like nobody's business.