Institute NPCs

[N.P.C]

Faculty
Wolverine
As per movie canon.
Officially one of the three Institute heads (along with Storm and Jake) now that Xavier is presumed dead, but is most often absent.
Has been referenced and NPCed in many different threads. Was Bobby Drake's unarmed-combat trainer for a while.
We are somewhat reluctant to have him PCed regularly, though a sufficiently impressive application could convince us.

Nightcrawler
As per movie canon, but also a retired PC who posted on several threads. Kurt has left the Institute to pursue his own affairs. We are somewhat reluctant to have him PCed regularly, though a sufficiently impressive application could convince us.

Arthur Coleman
See his entry. Former PC turned NPC. Teacher, empath, psychometrist.

Graduates
Piotr Rasputin (Colossus) - As per canon; currently visiting family in Siberia. (Available to PC.)


Upperclassmen

Alice Kruglinkski (aka Zip)
Class of 2011, though 2 years younger than normal.
Introduced during Institute Invasion; young girl with superspeed abilities and a bit of ADD.

Micheal Staten
Mutation unspecified; class of 2010; a bit on the obnoxious side; has a crush on Laurie Collins.

Jubilation Lee (Jubilee)
As per comic canon; class of 2009. Former PC turned NPC.

Freshmen (class of 2011)

Sam Guthrie (Cannonball)
Born in 1991 -- lost 2 years of school due to having to work to support his family when his father died in a coal-mining accident in Kentucky. Oldest of several siblings. Can fly like a rocket, with an invulnerable forcefield, but can't control it -- he only blasts in one direction. Can be a bit of a class clown sometimes, but is actually very serious and sometimes over-formal when something matters to him. He arrived at the Institute in June '07. Speaks with a thick Kentucky drawl.

Illyana Rasputin
Piotr's younger sister. Can summon teleportation-disks that take her and/or others through space and, on occasion, time. Has little or no control over where they end up. Prefers not to use -- or, if possible, admit to -- her powers, but they tend to flare up despite her. Shy, reclusive, speaks Russian and mediocre English.

Danielle Moonstar (Psyche)
Homeschooled Cheyenne from Colorado; the Institute is her first "mainstream" school. Illusionist, can make people see what they most want to see, or what they are most scared of seeing, but otherwise has minimal control of her power. Suspicious of strangers but fiercely loyal to her friends. Strong sense of privacy, both her own and others.

Julian Keller (Hellion)
Telekinetic only child of a wealthy New York City family. Ambitious, questionable ethics. Wants to prove himself the best telekinetic at the Institute; rivals with Josh. Charming, attractive, incorrigible womanizer despite his youth.

Doug Ramsey (Cypher)
Mutant fluency with all languages: spoken, written, or computer. A bit of a nerd. Jealous of other mutants with more showy/physical powers.

Roberto "Berto" DaCosta (Sunspot)
His father is a powerful politician in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as a Hellfire Club member (though this is not generally known, including to Berto).

Remy LaBeau (Gambit)
Louisiana street-kid with minimal formal education; affects a heavy Bayou accent. Competant thief, gambler, and knife-fighter despite his youth; HUGE attitude problem. He and Hellion have a semi-friendly rivalry going about everything, especially girls. Mutant power to charge inanimate objects with energy, causing them to explode.

[Bobby Drake]

In April 2007 Bobby Drake underwent an threshold event with his MGH-induced cybernetic abilities. It almost killed him, though emergency medical treatment saved his life and neutralized those abilities permanently. In the process he spawned a highly edited copy of his cybernetic consciousness within the Institute's computer systems.

The result was an AI that resides in the Institute network. Some notes about it:

• It identifies itself as "Robert Drake," but it doesn't actually think of itself as being Bobby... that's just the name it's accustomed to using. It has a few of the real Bobby's memories, but not very many; similarly it has some superficial personality characteristics in common, but not very many.
  
  
• It is largely emotionless (not just suppressing emotions, but genuinely lacking in them) with the exception of basic things like the desire for self-preservation.
  Other than that, it doesn't really have much of a purpose... it merely exists. It doesn't tend to initiate action, though it will typically respond if addressed directly.
  
  
• It isn't exactly "smart", but it has a hell of a lot of processing power and data to play with. Any technical problem that can be solved by research and analysis without requiring great leaps of insight or intuition it can solve extremely quickly.
  
  
• Physically, it exists in a distributed fashion across a lot of different computers. It is redundant enough that shutting down or replacing individual machines doesn't affect it very much; however, if you shut down the Institute's network all at once it's gone. (It might return when you turn the systems back on, it might not, it might be corrupted in some way, depending on how scrambled the RAM gets in the meantime.)
  
  
• In principle, it could copy itself to other computers over a network connection.
  In practice, its encoding is constantly changing, so any linear copy process would result in a corrupted copy (since the last bits copied would not be consistent with the first bits copied). The result might be recognizably "the same AI", might be completely different, might not be sentient at all. Thus far it hasn't done so.
  A reliable copy would require hardware capable of taking an "snapshot" of its entire several-gigabyte encoding within a few milliseconds. This isn't impossible, but the hardware to do it is extremely rare/specialized. (A sufficiently powerful cyberpath might be able to do it, much as a sufficiently powerful telepath might preserve someone's personality independent of their body.)
  For the same reason, it cannot easily move itself to other networks, since a "move" operation for software is really a copy followed by a delete. It would be more like having a child and then committing suicide than like traveling.
  
  
• All of that said, it is capable of spawning "software agents" to perform particular tasks, which it can send out into the Internet and any other networks the Institute is connected to, to obtain information and manipulate stuff. So, while it is physically "trapped" in the Institute, it is capable of interacting with things outside of it, and in fact does so all the time.
  

It's an NPC; feel free to include interactions with it in your posts if it's IC for you to be interacting with it.