Warren Worthington III/"Angel" (canon)

[Warren Worthington III]

Name: Warren Worthington III
Codename: None, officially, but the press have nicknamed him "Angel".
Age: 19 (born Sep 18, 1986)
Mutation:
Warren's most obvious mutation is his wings. At full extension they span six meters, but they're boneless muscle and easily compressed; he can hide them under normal clothing using a special harness. (It hurts, though!)
He has several less-obvious secondary mutations, as well.

• Several of these are adaptations for flight: his bones are hollow and his muscles have higher tensile strength per unit mass, making his body much lighter than a normal human's (he weighs about 50 kg, and his metabolism accelerates to keep him there... he can eat pretty much anything without gaining weight).
  
• Relatedly, his eyesight and hearing are far more acute than a normal human's, able to make out details from miles away and detect pressure differentials at range (aka "windsense"). His windsense keeps him from being surprised by sudden air currents and invisible objects.
  
• Another is a very-short-range telekinetic ability that he uses to augment his flight, allowing him to accelerate faster and carry heavier loads than his wings alone. (He was not aware of this ability until tests of his carrying capacity demonstrated it exceeded what was physically possible. For example, normal physics would not have allowed him to catch his father's body like that.)
  Without this ability he can glide for about an hour at about 20 kph without rest, climb/accelerate by about 5 kph/sec with strenuous effort, and carry loads of up to 50 kg. With it, he can glide indefinitely at about 50 kph, climb/accelerate by about 20 kph/sec with moderate effort, and carry loads of up to 200 kg.
  In theory, he should be able to extend this telekinetic ability to objects other than his own body and things he's carrying. In practice, he hasn't been able to do so yet.
  
• The last of his mutations is a superhuman regenerative capability, related to his accelerated metabolism.
  This is nowhere even close to Wolverine's level, but it's what kept his wings regrowing despite his father's (and his own) many attempts to remove them... any wound that isn't actually fatal will heal within a few days. (This also helps him deal with the inevitable windburn and temperature extremes associated with flight, and to repair the frequent greenstick fractures his lighter bones make him subject to.)
  

Physical Description:
Warren is just over six feet tall and incredibly lean... he would seem anorexic if he wasn't so obviously healthy. He has classic teen-hearthrob good looks: curly blond hair, wide blue eyes, chiseled features, well-defined muscles.
Now that he's able to go around without hiding his wings all the time, he has taken to showing them off, wearing custom-altered shirts with openings for them or going altogether shirtless. Otherwise he favors lightweight fabrics, even in winter, and is frequently barefoot or in light sandals. He's even working on a tan.
Personality:
Until six months ago, Warren was shy, subdued, constantly apologizing for his own existence. He saw himself as a failure, as a disappointment to his father, an embarassment to the Worthington name who wanted nothing more than to be normal and make his family proud of him.

To this day, he can't tell you what changed, or why he refused at the last minute to take the Cure when he'd gone along with his father with everything else up to then... but whatever it was, it (and the events that followed) turned his life around.

Now, not only has he decided to stop hiding from being a mutant, he has more generally stopped hiding from new experiences. He isn't reckless, exactly, but he won't allow fear of the unknown to stop him from trying something. He figures he wasted 19 years of his life hiding from the world and that's quite enough of that.

Consequently he gives the impression of boundless, happy-go-lucky confidence. Especially when in public, he's friendly, smiling, outgoing, charming. (Similar to the comic-book Warren prior to losing his wings.)

At the same time, he's aware that this mutant thing is serious business, and that as a wealthy celebrity mutant he has a unique role to play. He isn't crazy about the idea but won't hide from it... and truth be told, he does enjoy the fame and the attention. (He isn't quite so crazy about the hate mail and the death threats and tabloid rumors. He's learning to deal with all of that, but they can still send him into fits of depression.)

Relatedly, he has developed a sincere and abiding respect for the X-Men, who he also sees as playing a unique and important role. One of his goals in returning to the Academy was to become an X-Man, eventually... but he is also considering a political career and he's not sure the two are compatible.

Underneath all this new confidence and ambition, though, he's really the same shy, introspective, insecure boy he always was. He likes the "new Warren" and intends to keep it up, but he's still fairly easy to manipulate by offers of approval or threats to withhold it, and is subject to fits of moody depression.

Background:
Since birth, Warren was the heir presumptive of the Worthington commercial empire, raised with a strict sense of "appropriate" behavior, taught by private tutors and allowed to socialize only with the select. Consequently he had few friends and not much of a childhood.
What little there was collapsed around him when he hit puberty and his wings started to grow in. He tried for a while to conceal them, then to pluck them out, but eventually his family found out. They "helped" him keep his secret and superficially everything was as it was before... except he was isolated from everyone from that point on, except Worthington employees well-paid to keep his secret and ensure he did the same.
The next six years of his life are a blur, really... fake friends, classes he didn't really care about, a constant parade of intrusive doctors, painful surgeries, and humiliating hormone treatments designed to make him "normal," and several suicide attempts his regenerative abilities neutralized.
Finally, it culminated in the Cure, and that was the last straw. He burst out of his old life then, both literally and figuratively. He met other mutants for the first time, eventually found the Xavier Institute, met the X-Men, fought by their side. It remains the single greatest experience of his life.

He left the Institute for a while after that, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, then returned a couple of months later and moved in. He and Storm agreed that he wasn't ready to join the X-Men... still too untrained in the use of his powers after half a lifetime spent hiding them. But he resolved to fix that as soon as he could, and has been training hard over the last few months.

During the same period, he started to come to terms with his role as a photogenic celebrity mutant. He is doing the talk-show circuit now, often quoted in articles and news programs about "the mutant menace." He also receives death threats and hate mail and even a couple of assassination attempts.
On the whole, he feels he's doing a good thing by becoming a personable, popular, attractive public face of mutantkind. He has talked to Hank McCoy a couple of times about it, and is growing inspired to run for political office when he's old enough.

In the meantime, he's reveling in being "out" and not having to hide, and doing all the experimentation that most teenagers do, but in a very compressed and intense timeframe... similar to the rock-star experience. In the last six months he has had his first experiences with alcohol and drugs (which his metabolism burns too quickly to have their normal effect, but can still take the edge off an evening), sex (he has "groupies" of both sexes, which still totally blows his mind), raves, meeting famous people, all that jazz.

It's all very cool, but it also has its down side. He is wealthy, the son of a powerful family, and a public mutant, all of which means his "friends" generally have ulterior motives, and he's savvy enough to realize it. Even when they don't, the whole "rock star" lifestyle is starting to pall... he finds himself longing for an actual relationship, to build a life with someone. On top of that, he's becoming dangerous to be around... for example, a week ago a girl he met at a nightclub was hospitalized when an anti-mutant vigilante took a shot at him and hit her instead.

So more and more he's taken to socializing with the other students at the Institute. In addition to training his powers and learning to work with the other students and the X-Men, he's taking more mundane classes both with other students and in private sessions. His curriculum at the moment is heavy on political science and macroeconomics... he's finding the math hard, but the general idea of being able to understand and perhaps predict group behavior exciting. (Unrelatedly, he's also developed an interest in gourmet cooking.)

He hasn't really talked to his father since saving his life, other than the occassional logistical exchange of emails. He knows he should get around to doing that but hasn't yet gotten up the courage.

Current Affiliation: Xavier Institute Student

Sample:
"Hi. I'm Warren Worthington. The third." He gives the camera a small shy smile, just enough to convey that he's not arrogant about his family name, without seeming ashamed of it. "You might also know me as 'Angel' -- the press have taken to calling me that." The same shy smile.

He's proud of that introduction... it's taken him a long time to get it right. It's a subtle thing, but it puts his mutant status on the same level as everything else... not something to be arrogant about or ashamed of, just the way he is. He wishes he were as certain of that as he made it seem.

"Thank you for joining us this morning, Angel. I'm sure, with your new girlfriend in the hospital, you don't have a lot of time to spare giving interviews, so let's get --"

"On the contrary, ma'am -- and please call me Warren -- " he cuts her off smoothly, careful not to smile, careful not to use her name. Ororo had drilled that into him during their practice interviews, not to use their real names when they use his codename. Again, it's a subtle thing, but it's important that he remain "Warren" in the public eye, that "Angel" be just a title, a formality. And a 19-year-old kid can always get away with calling an older woman "ma'am." I bet Mystique is having a fit right about now, he thinks as he keeps talking, "being here is the best thing I can do for her. She was shot because Arnold Streete was scared of mutants. If we can show him, and those like him, what I'm really like, we can keep the next girl who dances with a mutant, or talks to one, from suffering the same fate. And we're just friends."

He handled that one well, he thinks... dodged the attempt to paint him as a mutant playboy unconcerned by his human conquests, and placed his agenda front and center. She wants to make this interview about how dangerous mutants are, he doesn't intend to let her.

He feels the adrenalin-level rising and lets it fuel his intensity, the way he does in Danger Room sessions... no panic, no anxiety, no distracting fear, just pure, performance-enhancing arousal. Interviews aren't the same kind of fight, but they <i>are</i> a fight, and he must keep his wits sharp.

She frowns disapprovingly, refuses the "just friends" bait (a pity... Warren had prepared a charming little routine about his bachelor status ready to use here. Well, maybe she'd give him another opening...) and pulls out the heavy artillery. "Well, can you blame ordinary people for being scared? Supposedly 'cured' mutants have started showing their powers again... your fellow mutant Magneto used them to kill two police off--"

"Magneto is NOT my 'fellow' anything!" Warren feels his wings quivering and knows he is losing points by getting angry, but he can't let that implication go by unchallenged. He adds, hastily trying to recover his momentum: "He's a criminal and a madman, just like Arnold Streete... used magnetism instead of a gun, but the same kind of scum." There. That wasn't too bad a recovery.

The rest of the interview proceeds to a draw. Of course, Warren knows she'll edit it to make him look as bad as possible, but he'd given her as little ammunition to do it with as he could. The depression that claims him afterwards, back at the Institute, is almost an old friend by now.

Later, he'll post the full transcript on his blog, and visit the hospital. He knows his visit will be perceived as a PR ploy, and hates the fact that on some level that's what it will be. But she'd seemed like a nice girl, and she hadn't deserved to be shot just for dancing with a "freak," and the least he can do is apologize in person. She'll probably throw him out of her room when he does, but she deserves that chance.

And at least he's managed to keep the fact that he's paying her bills a secret. For the moment, at least.

He sighs. It all seems so... impossible. Baby steps, while the train comes barelling across the bridge. But even baby steps add up.

At least, that's the theory.

[Pyro]

Okay... wow. The sample post is awesome, and I like how you've worked out a post-Alcatraz lifestyle for Warren which I see working incredibly well - the reference to Magneto's recent actions is a particularly nice touch

It's clear that you 'know' Warren really inside-out, and I have no hesitation in accepting. Just set yourself up with an account and start playing. I'll then sort you out with member grouping etc...

Welcome to the site!

[Warren Worthington III]

Name: Warren Worthington III
Codename: Angel
Age: 20 (born Sep 18, 1986)

Mutation:
Warren has a number of physical mutations related to flight:

• The most obvious is his wings, of course. At full extension they span six meters, but they're boneless muscle and easily compressed; he can hide them under normal clothing using a special harness. (It hurts, though!). He uses them for guidance and propulsion in flight; he also uses them as limbs (they are significantly stronger than his arms, and they don't break as easily).
  
• His bones are hollow and his muscles have higher tensile strength per unit mass than normal. Consequently his body is much lighter than a normal human's (he weighs about 50 kg, and his metabolism accelerates to keep him there... he can eat pretty much anything without gaining weight). This also means his bones are unusually fragile and easy to break.
  
• His eyesight and hearing are far more acute than a normal human's, able to make out details from miles away.
  
• His hearing also lets him detect pressure differentials at range (aka "windsense"). His windsense keeps him from being surprised by sudden air currents and invisible objects; it functions somewhat like passive sonar.
  
• He heals from injury and illness at a superhuman rate... nowhere even close to Wolverine's level, but still far faster than a human. Any wound that isn't actually fatal will heal within a few days. This is why his wings kept regrowing despite many attempts to remove them surgically; it also helps him deal with the frequent greenstick fractures (and worse) his lightweight skeleton makes him subject to.

In addition to the physical mutations above, he also has a very minor telekinetic ability that he primarily uses to augment his flight. This talent lets him:

• Accelerate at about 20 kph/sec with moderate effort (vs 5 kph/sec with strenuous effort with wings alone)
  
• Carry loads of up to 200 kg (vs 50 kg with wings alone)
  
• Maintain a steady cruising speed of 50 kph pretty much indefinitely (vs 20 kph for about an hour with wings alone).
  
• Wrap himself in a frictionless telekinetic "aura"... a low-grade forcefield of sorts. This protects from windburn and eliminates drag, thereby increasing his maximum windspeed, and can repel water with some effort (allowing him to "fly" through water at normal pressures). This does not protect him from physical attack (although see below).
  
• Wrap himself in a thin cocoon of air, insulating him from temperature extremes and providing about a minute's worth of air to use when underwater or at high altitudes
  
• Telekinetically manipulate objects weighing up to about 10 kg within a few inches of his body. This requires a great deal of concentration, though not very much effort; he's really not very good at it.

It's not clear whether this is part of his mutation or just a natural/trained talent, but Warren is also an instinctively superior flier. He doesn't have to concentrate much on his flying, he just does it - he can literally fly in his sleep.
Relatedly, he has an instinctive knack for evading obstacles and missiles while in flight... his windsense is an important part of this, allowing him to map missile trajectories even for objects he can't see.
Again, he doesn't really think about it, he just evades... he can fly through hails of machine-gun fire, for example, and is pretty much impossible to hit with a missile or beam weapon as long as he can perceive the attack.

In late 2006 Warren began a romantic relationship with Josh Dalton (Impulse); this has had unexpected consequences in terms of his powers and skills.
Warren has no telepathic abilities whatsoever, but he is unusually skilled at telepathic communication... it's easier for him to send and receive complex detailed information telepathically. This is particularly true with Josh, with whom he has developed a telepathic rapport that allows them to communicate more efficiently and comprehensively, and at longer ranges, than Josh's telepathy normally allows.
The flip side of this is that he has no mental defenses to speak of -- he is far more vulnerable to mental attack and influence than a normal person.
Also, a few months later they discovered that they can mesh Josh's raw telekinetic power with Warren's aura, creating a real force-field capable of deflecting bullets as long as they remain in contact.

Physical Description:
Warren is just over six feet tall and incredibly lean... he would seem anorexic if he wasn't so obviously healthy.
He has classic teen-hearthrob good looks: curly blond hair, wide blue eyes, chiseled features, well-defined muscles, tanned over most of his body.
Now that he's able to go around without hiding his wings all the time, he has taken to showing them off, wearing custom-altered shirts with openings for them or going altogether shirtless. Otherwise he favors lightweight fabrics, even in winter, and is frequently barefoot or in light sandals.

Personality:
Until the first attack on Alcatraz, Warren was shy, subdued, constantly apologizing for his own existence. He saw himself as a failure, as a disappointment to his father, an embarassment to the Worthington name who wanted nothing more than to be normal and make his family proud of him.

To this day, he can't tell you what changed, or why he refused at the last minute to take the Cure when he'd gone along with his father with everything else up to then... but whatever it was, it turned his life around. He decided to stop hiding, from being a mutant and more generally from new experiences.

At the same time, he's aware that this mutant thing is serious business, and that as a wealthy celebrity mutant he has a unique role to play. He isn't crazy about the idea but won't hide from it... and truth be told, he does enjoy the fame and the attention. (He isn't quite so crazy about the hate mail and the death threats and tabloid rumors.)

He isn't reckless, exactly, but he won't allow fear of the unknown to stop him from trying something. He figures he wasted 19 years of his life hiding from the world and that's quite enough of that. Consequently he gives the impression of boundless, happy-go-lucky confidence. Especially when in public, he's friendly, smiling, outgoing, charming. (Similar to the comic-book Warren prior to losing his wings.)

Underneath all this new confidence and ambition, though, he's really the same shy, introspective, insecure boy he always was. He likes the "new Warren" and intends to keep it up, but he's still fairly easy to manipulate by offers of approval or threats to withhold it, and is subject to fits of moody depression. (However, his current relationship with Josh significantly mitigates this.)

Background:
Since birth, Warren was the heir presumptive of the Worthington commercial empire, raised with a strict sense of "appropriate" behavior, taught by private tutors and allowed to socialize only with the select. Consequently he had few friends and not much of a childhood.
What little there was collapsed around him when he hit puberty and his wings started to grow in. He tried for a while to conceal them, then to pluck them out, but eventually his family found out. They "helped" him keep his secret and superficially everything was as it was before... except he was isolated from everyone from that point on, except Worthington employees well-paid to keep his secret and ensure he did the same.
The next six years of his life are a blur, really... fake friends, classes he didn't really care about, a constant parade of intrusive doctors, painful surgeries, and humiliating hormone treatments designed to make him "normal," and several suicide attempts his regenerative abilities neutralized.
Finally, it culminated in the Cure, and that was the last straw. He burst out of his old life then, both literally and figuratively. He met other mutants for the first time, eventually found the Xavier Institute, met the X-Men, fought by their side.

He left the Institute for a while after that, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, then returned a couple of months later and moved in. He and Storm agreed that he wasn't ready to join the X-Men... still too untrained in the use of his powers after half a lifetime spent hiding them. But he resolved to fix that as soon as he could, and has been training hard over the last few months.

During the same period, he started to come to terms with his role as a photogenic celebrity mutant. He is doing the talk-show circuit now, often quoted in articles and news programs about "the mutant menace." He also receives death threats and hate mail and even a couple of assassination attempts.
On the whole, he feels he's doing a good thing by becoming a personable, popular, attractive public face of mutantkind. He has talked to Hank McCoy a couple of times about it, and is growing inspired to run for political office when he's old enough.

For most of that time he reveled in being "out" and not having to hide, and doing all the experimentation that most teenagers do, but in a very compressed and intense timeframe... similar to the rock-star experience. Over the course of six to twelve months he had his first experiences with alcohol and drugs (which his metabolism burns too quickly to have their normal effect, but can still take the edge off an evening), sex (he had "groupies" of both sexes and developed a well-deserved reputation as a playboy), raves, meeting famous people, all that jazz.

Eventually, the whole "rock star" lifestyle started to pall... he found himself longing for an actual relationship, to build a life with someone. That someone turned out to be Josh, a fellow Institute student. By the end of 2006 the two were well-established as a couple, both around the Institute and in the media.

Meanwhile, Warren has developed a significant interest in political science and macroeconomics... especially as it regards mutant affairs. He works closely with Hank as an unofficial intern, and has started teaching a Mutants and Politics seminar for other students at the Institute. (Unrelatedly, he's also developed an interest in gourmet cooking.)

He hasn't really talked to his father since saving his life, other than the occassional logistical exchange of emails. He knows he should get around to doing that but hasn't yet gotten up the courage.

Current Affiliation: Xavier Institute Student/Part-time faculty