Frederick Slade (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} _scion_) wrote,@ 2010-08-02 14:26:00 |
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Frederick, Frederick Slade
Character Information
Code Name: Scion
Real Name: Frederick Slade
Canon: Yes (adaptation)
Gender: Male
Age: 26
Appearance: Frederick Slade is six foot, one and a half inches tall. He measures about 38" around the chest, while his waist is 31". His shoe size is 11 ½. His tall frame is packed with lean, well rounded muscle. He has a classically handsome face, with high, prominent cheekbones. His most salient characteristics are, of course, due to his mutation. Frederick's eyes, once hazel, now look like pupil-less, glowing orbs of green energy. His hair is now naturally a bright, warm pink where it once was a light chestnut color. His very skin acquired a pinkish hue after the Solar Flare of 2012, but his light olive complexion easily tans to a healthy caramel brown that overpowers the pink.
His family tried to make Frederick into a conservative dresser, but he was always a little out there. Only during the few years when he was paralyzed and didn't have a say on what he wore did they succeed, since everything was chosen for him during that time. Now that he has a vibrant, strong body again, and his family isn't around to ruthlessly criticize him, Frederick isn't very conservative at all. He still tends to stick to the basics, but he'll sometimes throw in something whimsical, like a pale rose linen scarf over an otherwise conservative outfit. He is also not shy at all about showing off his reclaimed body, and will gladly wear form fitting fashion and classy clubwear if it's not too gaudy. He's more of a silk bikini kind of guy rather than tighty-whities, although he's no stranger to the joys of loose silk boxers or going commando.
Personality: Frederick is a gentle soul trapped in the personality of a viciously competitive, arrogant, cocky bastard. This was all learned behavior from his rigid, pseudo-militaristic family. A Slade does not back down. A Slade always wins, even when he loses. The old odious adage of might makes right. All of these were things Frederick heard constantly growing up, and much of it stuck. Because of his upbringing, he has a crippling fear of being perceived as weak, and may lash out at such times.
But Frederick is also a rebel, whether or not he has cause. He's rather brilliant, but he works really hard at appearing shallow and never engages in worthwhile conversation if he can manage it. Frederick turned into a full fledged rebel of the cut off his nose to spite his face variety. He loves to be contrary and sometimes goes out of his way to be belligerent or simply annoying in the extreme to get a rise out of people. He gets a kick out of shocking others, especially the straitlaced and easily shocked. It's a way to keep them at arm's length and not let anyone get truly close. It is a variation on all of the reckless things he did in his misspent youth with the sole purpose of shaming and embarrassing his family to the best of his ability.
In short, Frederick has a good heart, and noble ideals, but he's not always successful translating them to his everyday reality. He feels isolated and misunderstood, and has a tendency to keep to himself outside of training. He can be arrogant and aloof, and he's pretty judgmental when it comes to those around him, but his prejudices are towards those he considers small minded or just plain stupid. That good heart is buried so deep under a slew of knee jerk defense mechanisms that sometimes it's a wonder he has friends at all. But other times one might catch glimpses of a more open, less afraid Frederick who will go out of his way to mingle in the public areas and strike conversations with whomever might be there.
He's stubborn, intense, aloof at times, downright goofy at others. His head is often in the clouds, but he has a razor focus whenever he's in a setting in which he feels he needs to be competitive. He's a sore albeit grudgingly gracious loser but he'll never brag about a win. He will wear the most self-satisfied expression, but not be overly smug about it, unless for the purpose of a good natured tease. And speaking of tease, Frederick may act like an inveterate slut, but he rarely actually goes through with any of it, preferring to go to his bed alone rather than share it with just anybody.
Powers: Frederick has limited molecular rearrangement capabilities in the form of shape shifting. He can reshape his extremities and their molecular density to form blades or other weapons with the tensile strength of an organic, steel like metal. He can also shape them into various other objects, limited only by his imagination and the baseline strength and stamina of his body.
His shapeshifting grants him a form of healing factor in the sense that he can reshape his flesh around almost any wound. Frederick has to be conscious to be able to manipulate his molecular structure in order to heal. If he is unconscious or otherwise incapacitated and cannot focus his powers, he can die of any wound that would be mortal to a human.
While in theory he could successfully shapeshift his whole body, he could only do it for about ten to fifteen minutes at a time before his focus faltered and he reverted back to self. He doesn't have that limitation when he's only focused on his extremities and simple shapes. Doing a full body shift spreads his focus too thin, not to mention he needs to stay within a tolerable range of mass/weight ratio to his original form. He can't shapeshift into an elephant, because he lacks the body mass. He can recreate the shape of one, but it would mostly be a fragile shell, empty inside. It's easier for him to compress his molecular structure into things smaller than himself, but even that is quite taxing on his system.
The more he uses his shapeshifting ability, the more he needs to eat, mainly protein and glucose. If he doesn't replenish his body regularly, his powers suffer and it becomes increasingly difficult and even painful to shift.
He also possesses a limited power of teleportation. Frederick can teleport inanimate objects smaller than three or four cubic feet in a bright blinking flash of pink light. He is technically able to teleport organic material, but it does not survive the trip. If he were to try to teleport a living creature, it would emerge dead on the other side. Whether he will some day learn of a way to teleport himself or others safely remains to be seen, but it appears doubtful.
Other Abilities: Basic hand to hand combat knowledge was taught to every Slade male, as well as Judo (he made blue belt as a boy) and wrestling. Frederick was no exception. He excelled at athletic activities, especially those involving stamina. He used to joke that this stamina served him well during his short lived porn career, which endowed him with other skills best not discussed in polite company.
Before he was attacked and temporarily confined to a wheelchair, Frederick was an adept long distance runner, and he even competed in a few junior marathons. After his recovery, he has been working on getting back to his peak physical shape, and he is looking forward to regaining his competitive edge on the mats. He's an avid cyclist, runner and mountain climber.
History: Frederick was the second child of Edward and Margaret Slade. The Slades were an offshoot of a powerful California family that had a rather muddy past that involved gold, oil and possibly quite a bit of blood. Little is truly known about them, aside from the fact that they had more money than God. The Slades had been friends of the Worthington family for generations, and they even funded some of the early research of one Dr. Daniel Madrox.
A quiet and reserved child originally, Frederick grew up relatively unseen by his parents and sibling. The only person who saw potential in him was a friend of the family he was taught to call uncle Oz, short for Ozymandias. Sadly, uncle Oz was a great big perv, and his advice would later bring much heartache to Frederick and his family. Frederick's older brother Hamilton was always the golden boy of the family. He was bigger and stronger than many of his peers, something his parents held in high esteem. He was the jock of the family, taking after his father, and he missed no opportunity to rub Frederick's face in it.
As they grew older, Frederick grew increasingly rebellious, and his father physically abused him for his trouble. The punishments were so severe, Frederick once lost the use of his legs for about a week. His only solace was whenever he was allowed to go and stay with his uncle Ozzie, who lent him a friendly ear and plied the boy with booze, parties and pornography so as to avoid listening to him whine. During one of Ozzie's wild parties, Frederick was mistaken by one of the rich patrons for the entertainment. The man got the teenager drunk and drugged up. The next morning (or noonish, rather) Frederick woke up hungover, and hurting in areas he had no business hurting. When he managed to get out of bed, he found a thick wad of bills on his dresser. In hindsight, he thought it was hilarious that he'd been mistaken for a hooker, and getting paid for it gave him a dark little thrill. Just thinking of the look on his father's face if he were to find out what had happened to his very male son multiplied that thrill exponentially.
Frederick Slade purposely did not use a fake name when he finally ran away from home to go into "modeling." And by modeling he meant he'd started working as a high-end stripper out in Vegas. He wanted to humiliate his family for the smothering, restrictive and rigid upbringing they had forced on him. Then came the porn. He did a few low budget Red Shoe Diaries style softcore fluff pieces at first, but after someone posted the dreaded sex tape of him and his costar all over the web, he figured there was no sense in being coy. He went so far as to perform in a couple of gay-for-pay porn flicks, like the kind his uncle Oz thought he'd kept hidden from him. Frederick became an underground celebrity, one with his own website, in which subscribers got a chance to put him through his paces. The family was in an uproar.
His plan, however, worked a little too well. Edward Slade had a heart attack later that year, after a family member couriered him a copy of Frederick's gay flick. He was bedridden for months. Frederick eventually flew home, honestly feeling guilty and remorseful. He'd only meant to annoy the living hell out of his family, not downright kill them. They might be controlling freaks, but he didn't truly believe they were evil. They were just misguided, clinging to a Victorian moral code. He was surprised when he was told his brother had offered to pick him up at the airport. He should have been wary instead.
Hamilton had always hated and envied him his younger brother's free spirit, and he idolized their father. On the drive to their childhood home, Hamilton ranted and raved at Frederick, accusing him of trying to murder their father and of driving their mother to drink. In a rage, Frederick told Hamilton that if their mother drank, it was all because of their bullheaded father. Hamilton did something entirely unexpected. His face contorted by rage and hate, he purposely drove off the road even as Frederick called him crazy and begged him to stop. Hamilton stopped all right. He wrapped the front of the car around a tree, and broke his clavicle and a few ribs when the airbag exploded at him.
There was no airbag on the passenger's side.
Frederick was told he was lucky to be alive, but he didn't feel lucky at all. He couldn't move or speak, and was effectively paralyzed from just above the neck down. The only way they knew he wasn't in a coma was because he could move his eyes and the upper part of his face, above the mandible, and because his heart raced every time he saw Hamilton. He couldn't even scream at the sight of his murderous brother, who claimed he had accidentally lost control of the vehicle. Since the boy couldn't even speak nor move his arms to signal or write, he lived the next five years of his life in terror, since Hamilton was petty enough that whenever he was less than happy he would sneak into Frederick's room to gloat and watch him sweat. He would one day confess to Frederick, during one of his cruel visits, that it had all been premeditated. Hamilton went on to tell him that at first, he'd been disappointed when Frederick didn't die, but that now he realized that this was so much better. He also reminded Frederick that he could kill him at any time he chose, and there was nothing he could do to stop him.
It was uncle Oz who got suspicious of the interaction between the brothers, and he managed to convince Margaret to let him help out by taking Frederick out of her hands, supposedly for a while. He'd noticed how agitated Frederick became whenever he saw or heard Hamilton around, but it wasn't until he began to see true despair in the paralyzed boy's eyes that he decided to take action. Margaret didn't seem to notice, or care. In fact, she rarely came to see the boy except on rare occasions between nurses' shifts when the maid was busy. Edward wouldn't even acknowledge his son was in the same house as himself.
There was no discussion. The very next day Frederick and his nurse were both sent to live at his uncle Ozzie's house. Margaret herself informed him that she was relieved not to have a perverted cripple living in her home. She had not forgiven him for apparently causing her husband's heart attack. Hearing his own mother say those things so calmly twisted a knife in the boy's gut. Frederick held it all inside but that night, in the safety of Ozzie's house, he wept from relief and gratitude, literally crying himself to sleep. He slept like a baby for the first time in years. Not one of those tears was spent over his mother's cruel comment. That had only filled him with a cold contempt for the people who had raised him.
His life was quiet for that period of time, mind-numbingly boring but safe. Ozymandias maintained that Frederick would one day walk again, possibly out of guilt for setting this whole tragedy in motion. Eventually, Frederick did recover somewhat from his injuries. The doctors gave no hope that he might ever walk or tend to himself again, but he could move his fingers, and he could say a few words at a time in a breathy, unpleasant croak. After a year of no further progress, he sank into a deep depression, often begging his uncle to kill him.
Frederick's life was grim, and remained so until the fateful Solar Flare of 2012. The boy had been delirious with fever for some days before the big flare hit. That day and night of December 21st, his previously paralyzed body had writhed in agony as his X-gene became fully active. Pinched nerves, atrophied muscles, and his whole spine screamed at him as they moved, reformed and regenerated. He screamed right back, oblivious of the miracle that he could draw deep breaths again. The pain was so intense, he was nauseous while he passed out and came back to from it over and over. He felt as if he was burning from the inside out. When it was all over, Frederick's eyes were pupil-less orbs of glowing green energy, and his hair was a bright shade of pink. His pale flesh had a tinge of pink to it too that would later be obscured by tanning.
After the Flare, Frederick spent the whole first year on an arduous path of recovery, retraining his mostly atrophied muscles through grueling therapy supplemented by a customized exercise program. The next year after that was spent reshaping his body, aiming for the peak athletic shape he had enjoyed before his brother's attack, and training his mutant powers. Where initially he could momentarily reshape his fingertips, he was eventually able to completely shapeshift his extremities into various shapes, elongating them into sharp blades of some sort of organic metal or whatever forms he could visualize.
His brother Hamilton and his father Edward had died in the wake of the Flare. Margaret survived them. Frederick went to see her, figuring he might as well give her one last chance. After all, he wasn't a cripple now, was he? As much as he hated her, she was his mother, and a little part of him was hungry for her love. But the scene soon turned ugly. She berated him and told him she wished he had died instead of Hamilton, and blamed him for pretty much everything but global warming. She slammed the door in his face and forbid him to ever show his face to her again. Margaret eventually lost her mind with grief for Hamilton and her husband. She lashed out at her servants, killing them all with her own hands, which she could shapeshift into bladed instruments, not unlike her son. She was arrested and, upon the discovery of her mutant abilities, was taken away by Sentinels. She has never been heard of again.
Betrayed by his family at every turn, Frederick never returned to the empty mansion that was his childhood home, even though it was now his. To this day he claims it's filled with nothing but bad memories. He is the sole heir to the Slade estate and, while he certainly doesn't mind the fortune that entails, he was never interested in the family businesses. Enter Ozzie. Ozymandias too manifested a mutation, as it turned out. Oz gained the ability to turn himself into living stone, but he felt as if every time he turned into stone, it was a little harder changing back to his human form, so he was leery of using his newfound power. Good old uncle Ozzie may have been a bad influence, and may be a perv and a lecher, but he was also a highly capable administrator, and a bit of a maverick in his own right. He was also the only person in the world Frederick could trust, and so Frederick appointed him his executor, and put the family business in his hands while he pursued other interests. While Oz chose to remain in his old home, once he felt like he was in control of his body again, Frederick chose to search for the Haven and see if he could perhaps find some sort of kinship with others like him.
Affiliation: Acolytes
PB: Alejandro Guinot
Character Information
Code Name: Scion
Real Name: Frederick Slade
Canon: Yes (adaptation)
Gender: Male
Age: 26
Appearance: Frederick Slade is six foot, one and a half inches tall. He measures about 38" around the chest, while his waist is 31". His shoe size is 11 ½. His tall frame is packed with lean, well rounded muscle. He has a classically handsome face, with high, prominent cheekbones. His most salient characteristics are, of course, due to his mutation. Frederick's eyes, once hazel, now look like pupil-less, glowing orbs of green energy. His hair is now naturally a bright, warm pink where it once was a light chestnut color. His very skin acquired a pinkish hue after the Solar Flare of 2012, but his light olive complexion easily tans to a healthy caramel brown that overpowers the pink.
His family tried to make Frederick into a conservative dresser, but he was always a little out there. Only during the few years when he was paralyzed and didn't have a say on what he wore did they succeed, since everything was chosen for him during that time. Now that he has a vibrant, strong body again, and his family isn't around to ruthlessly criticize him, Frederick isn't very conservative at all. He still tends to stick to the basics, but he'll sometimes throw in something whimsical, like a pale rose linen scarf over an otherwise conservative outfit. He is also not shy at all about showing off his reclaimed body, and will gladly wear form fitting fashion and classy clubwear if it's not too gaudy. He's more of a silk bikini kind of guy rather than tighty-whities, although he's no stranger to the joys of loose silk boxers or going commando.
Personality: Frederick is a gentle soul trapped in the personality of a viciously competitive, arrogant, cocky bastard. This was all learned behavior from his rigid, pseudo-militaristic family. A Slade does not back down. A Slade always wins, even when he loses. The old odious adage of might makes right. All of these were things Frederick heard constantly growing up, and much of it stuck. Because of his upbringing, he has a crippling fear of being perceived as weak, and may lash out at such times.
But Frederick is also a rebel, whether or not he has cause. He's rather brilliant, but he works really hard at appearing shallow and never engages in worthwhile conversation if he can manage it. Frederick turned into a full fledged rebel of the cut off his nose to spite his face variety. He loves to be contrary and sometimes goes out of his way to be belligerent or simply annoying in the extreme to get a rise out of people. He gets a kick out of shocking others, especially the straitlaced and easily shocked. It's a way to keep them at arm's length and not let anyone get truly close. It is a variation on all of the reckless things he did in his misspent youth with the sole purpose of shaming and embarrassing his family to the best of his ability.
In short, Frederick has a good heart, and noble ideals, but he's not always successful translating them to his everyday reality. He feels isolated and misunderstood, and has a tendency to keep to himself outside of training. He can be arrogant and aloof, and he's pretty judgmental when it comes to those around him, but his prejudices are towards those he considers small minded or just plain stupid. That good heart is buried so deep under a slew of knee jerk defense mechanisms that sometimes it's a wonder he has friends at all. But other times one might catch glimpses of a more open, less afraid Frederick who will go out of his way to mingle in the public areas and strike conversations with whomever might be there.
He's stubborn, intense, aloof at times, downright goofy at others. His head is often in the clouds, but he has a razor focus whenever he's in a setting in which he feels he needs to be competitive. He's a sore albeit grudgingly gracious loser but he'll never brag about a win. He will wear the most self-satisfied expression, but not be overly smug about it, unless for the purpose of a good natured tease. And speaking of tease, Frederick may act like an inveterate slut, but he rarely actually goes through with any of it, preferring to go to his bed alone rather than share it with just anybody.
Powers: Frederick has limited molecular rearrangement capabilities in the form of shape shifting. He can reshape his extremities and their molecular density to form blades or other weapons with the tensile strength of an organic, steel like metal. He can also shape them into various other objects, limited only by his imagination and the baseline strength and stamina of his body.
His shapeshifting grants him a form of healing factor in the sense that he can reshape his flesh around almost any wound. Frederick has to be conscious to be able to manipulate his molecular structure in order to heal. If he is unconscious or otherwise incapacitated and cannot focus his powers, he can die of any wound that would be mortal to a human.
While in theory he could successfully shapeshift his whole body, he could only do it for about ten to fifteen minutes at a time before his focus faltered and he reverted back to self. He doesn't have that limitation when he's only focused on his extremities and simple shapes. Doing a full body shift spreads his focus too thin, not to mention he needs to stay within a tolerable range of mass/weight ratio to his original form. He can't shapeshift into an elephant, because he lacks the body mass. He can recreate the shape of one, but it would mostly be a fragile shell, empty inside. It's easier for him to compress his molecular structure into things smaller than himself, but even that is quite taxing on his system.
The more he uses his shapeshifting ability, the more he needs to eat, mainly protein and glucose. If he doesn't replenish his body regularly, his powers suffer and it becomes increasingly difficult and even painful to shift.
He also possesses a limited power of teleportation. Frederick can teleport inanimate objects smaller than three or four cubic feet in a bright blinking flash of pink light. He is technically able to teleport organic material, but it does not survive the trip. If he were to try to teleport a living creature, it would emerge dead on the other side. Whether he will some day learn of a way to teleport himself or others safely remains to be seen, but it appears doubtful.
Other Abilities: Basic hand to hand combat knowledge was taught to every Slade male, as well as Judo (he made blue belt as a boy) and wrestling. Frederick was no exception. He excelled at athletic activities, especially those involving stamina. He used to joke that this stamina served him well during his short lived porn career, which endowed him with other skills best not discussed in polite company.
Before he was attacked and temporarily confined to a wheelchair, Frederick was an adept long distance runner, and he even competed in a few junior marathons. After his recovery, he has been working on getting back to his peak physical shape, and he is looking forward to regaining his competitive edge on the mats. He's an avid cyclist, runner and mountain climber.
History: Frederick was the second child of Edward and Margaret Slade. The Slades were an offshoot of a powerful California family that had a rather muddy past that involved gold, oil and possibly quite a bit of blood. Little is truly known about them, aside from the fact that they had more money than God. The Slades had been friends of the Worthington family for generations, and they even funded some of the early research of one Dr. Daniel Madrox.
A quiet and reserved child originally, Frederick grew up relatively unseen by his parents and sibling. The only person who saw potential in him was a friend of the family he was taught to call uncle Oz, short for Ozymandias. Sadly, uncle Oz was a great big perv, and his advice would later bring much heartache to Frederick and his family. Frederick's older brother Hamilton was always the golden boy of the family. He was bigger and stronger than many of his peers, something his parents held in high esteem. He was the jock of the family, taking after his father, and he missed no opportunity to rub Frederick's face in it.
As they grew older, Frederick grew increasingly rebellious, and his father physically abused him for his trouble. The punishments were so severe, Frederick once lost the use of his legs for about a week. His only solace was whenever he was allowed to go and stay with his uncle Ozzie, who lent him a friendly ear and plied the boy with booze, parties and pornography so as to avoid listening to him whine. During one of Ozzie's wild parties, Frederick was mistaken by one of the rich patrons for the entertainment. The man got the teenager drunk and drugged up. The next morning (or noonish, rather) Frederick woke up hungover, and hurting in areas he had no business hurting. When he managed to get out of bed, he found a thick wad of bills on his dresser. In hindsight, he thought it was hilarious that he'd been mistaken for a hooker, and getting paid for it gave him a dark little thrill. Just thinking of the look on his father's face if he were to find out what had happened to his very male son multiplied that thrill exponentially.
Frederick Slade purposely did not use a fake name when he finally ran away from home to go into "modeling." And by modeling he meant he'd started working as a high-end stripper out in Vegas. He wanted to humiliate his family for the smothering, restrictive and rigid upbringing they had forced on him. Then came the porn. He did a few low budget Red Shoe Diaries style softcore fluff pieces at first, but after someone posted the dreaded sex tape of him and his costar all over the web, he figured there was no sense in being coy. He went so far as to perform in a couple of gay-for-pay porn flicks, like the kind his uncle Oz thought he'd kept hidden from him. Frederick became an underground celebrity, one with his own website, in which subscribers got a chance to put him through his paces. The family was in an uproar.
His plan, however, worked a little too well. Edward Slade had a heart attack later that year, after a family member couriered him a copy of Frederick's gay flick. He was bedridden for months. Frederick eventually flew home, honestly feeling guilty and remorseful. He'd only meant to annoy the living hell out of his family, not downright kill them. They might be controlling freaks, but he didn't truly believe they were evil. They were just misguided, clinging to a Victorian moral code. He was surprised when he was told his brother had offered to pick him up at the airport. He should have been wary instead.
Hamilton had always hated and envied him his younger brother's free spirit, and he idolized their father. On the drive to their childhood home, Hamilton ranted and raved at Frederick, accusing him of trying to murder their father and of driving their mother to drink. In a rage, Frederick told Hamilton that if their mother drank, it was all because of their bullheaded father. Hamilton did something entirely unexpected. His face contorted by rage and hate, he purposely drove off the road even as Frederick called him crazy and begged him to stop. Hamilton stopped all right. He wrapped the front of the car around a tree, and broke his clavicle and a few ribs when the airbag exploded at him.
There was no airbag on the passenger's side.
Frederick was told he was lucky to be alive, but he didn't feel lucky at all. He couldn't move or speak, and was effectively paralyzed from just above the neck down. The only way they knew he wasn't in a coma was because he could move his eyes and the upper part of his face, above the mandible, and because his heart raced every time he saw Hamilton. He couldn't even scream at the sight of his murderous brother, who claimed he had accidentally lost control of the vehicle. Since the boy couldn't even speak nor move his arms to signal or write, he lived the next five years of his life in terror, since Hamilton was petty enough that whenever he was less than happy he would sneak into Frederick's room to gloat and watch him sweat. He would one day confess to Frederick, during one of his cruel visits, that it had all been premeditated. Hamilton went on to tell him that at first, he'd been disappointed when Frederick didn't die, but that now he realized that this was so much better. He also reminded Frederick that he could kill him at any time he chose, and there was nothing he could do to stop him.
It was uncle Oz who got suspicious of the interaction between the brothers, and he managed to convince Margaret to let him help out by taking Frederick out of her hands, supposedly for a while. He'd noticed how agitated Frederick became whenever he saw or heard Hamilton around, but it wasn't until he began to see true despair in the paralyzed boy's eyes that he decided to take action. Margaret didn't seem to notice, or care. In fact, she rarely came to see the boy except on rare occasions between nurses' shifts when the maid was busy. Edward wouldn't even acknowledge his son was in the same house as himself.
There was no discussion. The very next day Frederick and his nurse were both sent to live at his uncle Ozzie's house. Margaret herself informed him that she was relieved not to have a perverted cripple living in her home. She had not forgiven him for apparently causing her husband's heart attack. Hearing his own mother say those things so calmly twisted a knife in the boy's gut. Frederick held it all inside but that night, in the safety of Ozzie's house, he wept from relief and gratitude, literally crying himself to sleep. He slept like a baby for the first time in years. Not one of those tears was spent over his mother's cruel comment. That had only filled him with a cold contempt for the people who had raised him.
His life was quiet for that period of time, mind-numbingly boring but safe. Ozymandias maintained that Frederick would one day walk again, possibly out of guilt for setting this whole tragedy in motion. Eventually, Frederick did recover somewhat from his injuries. The doctors gave no hope that he might ever walk or tend to himself again, but he could move his fingers, and he could say a few words at a time in a breathy, unpleasant croak. After a year of no further progress, he sank into a deep depression, often begging his uncle to kill him.
Frederick's life was grim, and remained so until the fateful Solar Flare of 2012. The boy had been delirious with fever for some days before the big flare hit. That day and night of December 21st, his previously paralyzed body had writhed in agony as his X-gene became fully active. Pinched nerves, atrophied muscles, and his whole spine screamed at him as they moved, reformed and regenerated. He screamed right back, oblivious of the miracle that he could draw deep breaths again. The pain was so intense, he was nauseous while he passed out and came back to from it over and over. He felt as if he was burning from the inside out. When it was all over, Frederick's eyes were pupil-less orbs of glowing green energy, and his hair was a bright shade of pink. His pale flesh had a tinge of pink to it too that would later be obscured by tanning.
After the Flare, Frederick spent the whole first year on an arduous path of recovery, retraining his mostly atrophied muscles through grueling therapy supplemented by a customized exercise program. The next year after that was spent reshaping his body, aiming for the peak athletic shape he had enjoyed before his brother's attack, and training his mutant powers. Where initially he could momentarily reshape his fingertips, he was eventually able to completely shapeshift his extremities into various shapes, elongating them into sharp blades of some sort of organic metal or whatever forms he could visualize.
His brother Hamilton and his father Edward had died in the wake of the Flare. Margaret survived them. Frederick went to see her, figuring he might as well give her one last chance. After all, he wasn't a cripple now, was he? As much as he hated her, she was his mother, and a little part of him was hungry for her love. But the scene soon turned ugly. She berated him and told him she wished he had died instead of Hamilton, and blamed him for pretty much everything but global warming. She slammed the door in his face and forbid him to ever show his face to her again. Margaret eventually lost her mind with grief for Hamilton and her husband. She lashed out at her servants, killing them all with her own hands, which she could shapeshift into bladed instruments, not unlike her son. She was arrested and, upon the discovery of her mutant abilities, was taken away by Sentinels. She has never been heard of again.
Betrayed by his family at every turn, Frederick never returned to the empty mansion that was his childhood home, even though it was now his. To this day he claims it's filled with nothing but bad memories. He is the sole heir to the Slade estate and, while he certainly doesn't mind the fortune that entails, he was never interested in the family businesses. Enter Ozzie. Ozymandias too manifested a mutation, as it turned out. Oz gained the ability to turn himself into living stone, but he felt as if every time he turned into stone, it was a little harder changing back to his human form, so he was leery of using his newfound power. Good old uncle Ozzie may have been a bad influence, and may be a perv and a lecher, but he was also a highly capable administrator, and a bit of a maverick in his own right. He was also the only person in the world Frederick could trust, and so Frederick appointed him his executor, and put the family business in his hands while he pursued other interests. While Oz chose to remain in his old home, once he felt like he was in control of his body again, Frederick chose to search for the Haven and see if he could perhaps find some sort of kinship with others like him.
Affiliation: Acolytes
PB: Alejandro Guinot