cablebelly
well poised
looks as we discussed! approved for full cs (:Name: Matthew Posada
Age: 20
Face Claim: Leo Hoyte-Egan
Personality: Matt is a man driven by guilt--A sense that he owes others. He finds it impossible to let others fail on their own. After all, he knows that if he'd been left to fail on his own, that's all he'd have done. His power set leaves superherodom out of the question and besides, watching what's going on with his dad would've soured that anyways. So he stays at the school as a TA, assisting the younger students with an almost nervous kindness, shepherding them as best he can with his own experiences as a guideline.
He learned early in his schooling to toe the line and does his best to imbue this skill in others--If you just keep your head down and do your work, don't stand out too much, you'll be fine. You'll probably even learn something. He's loyal and looks out for those he cares for, but a life in the school has warped what that looks like.
That doesn't mean he always follows his own advice. It's hard, goes against his better thinking, but sometimes... there are things you need to know. His acts of trying to figure out the causes of disappearances have so far been minor, each glance to a screen or innocuous enough question leaving his heart pounding in his throat and palms sweaty, but he's running out of time and less drastic options and he's keenly aware of it.
Powers: Corpse reanimation. Common factors that play a role in how smoothly a reanimation goes are size, familiarity with the creature both how it works internally and when just existing while alive, practice with the specific type of creature he's reanimating, how much he's practiced recently in general, his current well-being both physically and mentally, how clear his vision of what the corpse is meant to be doing... Things in that vein.
Though his power could probably grow a fair bit, he's well past the control issues that earned him his letter and is pretty decent with his abilities now, if he does say so himself. With the things he's really familiar with like mice and birds he can have a couple running at a time while also splitting his focus on another main task. Bigger, less familiar things like, say, a bear or something would take a lot more effort though it would still take a lot to get him to the point the creature could go rogue.
In the past, he struggled with his powers overwhelming him in the minutiae as well as his own emotions rising to the surface and clouding the connection between the part of him actively thinking and the part more focused on keeping him alive no matter the costs. The worst thing that can theoretically happen is a creature starts acting less like a puppet doing his bidding and more like a facsimile of whatever it was before it was a corpse based on his own internal image of said before. At that point, it's a threat to both himself and others and he's going to struggle to put it back down.
This would be really hard to make happen now, the last episode to that extreme happening early in his freshman year. We are talking full blown having an out-of-nowhere anxiety attack mid-whatever has made him decide to actually use his powers. If it's not out of nowhere, unless somehow distracted past the point of practicing the basic discipline trained into him around this, he'd shut it down before it could get out of hand.
Background: Matt was born in Denver, Colorado, the child of a rather secretive marriage between Darius Chandler aka then-struggling-now-famous superhero Doctor Revive and meta-in-hiding Catalina Posada, daughter of the infamous Puppeteer. They were drawn to each other from the moment they met, reveling in their differences. It didn't take them long to marry and, post-marriage, have their first child--Their only child.
They'd known each other's powers, but it's admittedly a jump from that to corpse reanimation and it scared them. Watching Matthew struggle with it, watching others be hurt by it, their son ostracized... On top of the strain from Doctor Revive's growing fame, it was too much. The marriage began unraveling right before Matt's eyes and even as they tried to tell him it wasn't because of him, he knew it kind of was.
And then the letter came. It wasn't like they just sent him there without his approval or like they didn't treat it like a serious thing when they discussed it. Not at all. Matthew was excited to go--To have a chance at friends, to learn to control his powers. And maybe if he got a handle on that, his parents would stay together, though he kept that last bit to himself.
Of course, in the end it didn't really shake out like that. His parents divorced. He had problems bonding with other students and the teachers were mean, their methods at first undeniably cruel. But even if the methods often left him feeling worse about himself and his powers, it's undeniable that he did learn to control them. He'd already decided to stay on, do his best to help others like him, give back to the school that had given him back some sense of control. But there was also still the disappearances. They unsettled him and added a second goal to the first: Find out what was happening to people, absolve the school that had give him so much of guilt.
