OOC
GAME: Neopolis
DESCRIPTION: Freeze-rays and monsters and magic and superpowers, oh my!
DATE: January 2009
PB: Topher Grace
JOURNAL: notetakes
IC
NAME: Tobias Xander Hastings
NICKNAME: Toby
AGE/BIRTHDATE: 18 / August 4th, 1990
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual
ALIAS/CODENAME: He got stuck with the alias "Haiku Boy" over the years, but with time, will eventually rename himself to "The Precog Poet".
CONCEPT: The suburban kid of white picket fence supes, Toby Hastings was raised by a P.E. teacher with ultra-hard skin, and a flying reporter — all bets were off regarding whether he'd follow in his father or mother's footsteps, until he brought home written stories from composition class in grade four, and they started coming true two days later. It took them a while to work out whether his writing things made them happen (<s>Harold</s> Toby and the Purple Crayon, if you will), but they soon realised the creative work itself was simply precognitive. Ever since, this immensely gregarious and loquacious boy has been trying to prove that the pen really is mightier than the laserbeam eyes.
FACULTY: Capes
YEAR: Second
SKILLS: If Toby ever puts his mind to writing something creative — a limerick, a haiku, a poem, a short story — more often than not, it inevitably comes out precognitive. He writes prescient poetry whether or not he wants to, and it usually predicts events on this side of the continent within the next two weeks. As theoretically cool as this power is, Toby himself is a terrible, terrible poet. His premonitions are always hampered by this cripplingly bad sense for creative writing. In addition, the premonitions are often more ~dire doom-and-gloom~ than they actually turn out to be; it's the unfortunate side-effect of having to express it via dramatic poetry, I'm afraid.
ALLIANCE: The Band of Heroic Heroes.
PERSONALITY: Sure likes to hear himself talk, doesn't he? Toby can't crunch numbers worth a damn, but he's incredibly talkative and quick-witted nonetheless. The overall impression of the boy is that he is polite and genteel, with a certain tongue-in-cheek sarcasm — and for the most part, this is true. He has a problem with taking things seriously, which means he can be both deeply entertaining and deeply frustrating to associate with; Toby skirts away from srs bsns until it blows up in his face, and instead will keep some running commentary, pointing out flaws and gaping holes in others' plans. He's a social butterfly, and possesses a ceaseless tendency to heave himself into situations with an easy smile and a well-aimed (if slightly sardonic) quip. It's the most crucial foundation of the man's personality: the fact that he enjoys mental stimulation, quick-witted conversation, and intellectual games. He's a joker and an entertainer. It's what he does.
Unfortunately, however, he's also self-centred and self-absorbed to a fault. It's partially the only child syndrome; he can be surprisingly not astute when it comes to his own problems, often caught completely blindsided by personal issues when they pop up. A lot of Toby is his emotional short-sightedness, and he's particularly guilty of hypocrisy and double standards. He carries a certain pride in his bearing, all of which results in a peculiar mixture of cavalier politeness and then blunt insult or selfishness. He's perfectly amiable enough — after all, when he's critiqueing something, he rarely means it as a genuine insult, simply helpful criticism — but he still feels it's his god-given right to regale others with his opinion and commentary. Words are his weapons, and he throws them around like barbed confetti.
Toby is also that mythical unicorn of high school genres: the dorky jock. As much as he hems and haws over being a real manly man no really, he secretly adores Doctor Who, MST3000, useless trivia, and Dictionary.com's Word of the Day. He was always a bit too bookish and intelligent to fit the typical jock role during high school, but he still finds a certain brotherhood in mischief and a solace in sports, particularly baseball: Toby falls on the 'wiry runner' side of athleticism. He enjoys the easy-going comraderie of other boys equally fascinated with the Neopolitan sports scene — for good reason, too, because a sportsworld where the players can fly and shoot electricity across the field is totally amazing. So needless to say, you'll often find him lounging around the gym, trying to make up for what nature/science/cosmic flukes never granted him when it comes to his peers' superstrength and superspeed.
But Toby's pet love will, and always will be, language. He's fascinated with words, taxonomy, and linguistics, and attempts to broaden his vocabulary almost daily. He might shuffle his feet and say he'd rather be out in the field tossing a ball around, but the truth is that Toby's mother managed to drill a love of words and learning into him. He does the crossword every single morning, and plays chess like a master. He loves Scrabble.
At the end of the day, he also strongly believes that people should sort out their own problems. (Presumably it's one of the reasons he's so surprised when his own get too hard to handle — he's always attempting to tackle them alone.) It's practically a law in La Casa de Hastings: any overtures of helpfulness need to be preceded by an appropriate period of gentle mocking, and throwing up his hands at other people's Immense Fail. He'll help you, certainly, but he'll need to piss and moan about it at the same time. Boy loves complaining.
He's also very patient. Toby's on an eternal quest for instant verbal and comedic gratification, but everything else can wait. One step at a time!
HISTORY: Daniel Hastings was a solid, dependable man, the epitome of your desperately normal suburban patriarch… except for the part where his skin could harden and become nigh-invulnerable. He had the codename Tortoiseshell listed on all his Neopolis documents, but after mastering his powers (with enough training not to, say, suddenly burst into stone when bumped on the bus), the man moved onto taking a bachelor in education. He spent several years teaching phys ed to Neopolitan trade school kids, before he got married and had a son — at which point the Hastings family decided to relocate, to raise their son in a non-metropolitan environment. When the family left Neopolis, he found new work — high school P.E. teacher — whilst his wife, Laura, took her work with her. She was a flier and a reporter for the Neopolitan Scoop, and where he taught his son about sports, television, and being a gentleman, she taught her boy the importance of words. This was the start and slow build of Toby's odd duality, balancing macho bonding with his father to his mother's reading of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
For Daniel, his new job was a step down in difficulty from getting battered by children still learning werewolf claws and exploding elbows, but their new living in Scottsdale, Arizona, was fine. A smaller town suited the small family well enough. His wife 'commuted' every day. Flying isn't a particularly glamorous power — when you get right down to it, it's just a transportation method, and you can't exactly fight crime on that basis alone — but Laura Hastings used it to whiz through the skies between the Scoop's HQ and her newest journalism target. And after they discovered their son's admittedly rather passive power, they made the additional decision to stick around in Arizona until he was old enough for Neopolitan high school.
They raised him out in suburbia to give him a more peaceful upbringing before whisking him off to the big city — which finally happened when he was 13. They're still on the lower side of middle class, his father's income a pittance and his mother's paychecks (a result of stellar reporting and constant bonuses) being the main thing keeping them afloat. He has an extremely healthy respect for women as a result of it, even moreso than his admiration of most adult men in his life. Before the Academy, Toby went to Marvelous High (where his father now taught phys ed, once again) and an unnamed, unprestigious trade school. His gym days were spent in the group of students always picked last for PE due to their lack of 'real' powers, lame capes and put-out science kids alike. The rejection rankled, so he made himself into one of the best athletes among the non-physical kids as he could. Today, he's admittedly a pretty awesome baseball player by normal human standards, if we're talking non-superspeed.
Growing up with his mother's insight to the Neopolitan Scoop gave Toby an interestingly sober perspective on the politics of Neopolis. He enjoys the BHH's ideals (heroism! comraderie! so much public admiration!), but he's grown too familiar with the gossip and rumours and special illuminating features on the Band's star members. Thanks to Laura, he knows that the superheroing gig really is 90% public relations and image management. As a result, he doesn't exactly idolise the inner circle of the BHH (except for, alright, that one risque poster of Power Chick), but he still desperately wants into the guild. Toby's worried his powers will only rank him as sidekick fodder, and he's not fond of the thought of toadying up to the bigshots, who aren't really so big when you get right down to it. This disillusionment aside, he still carries around some fanboyish love of the Band's predecessors, one of the first official hero teams ever: the Super Squadron. The golden age of heroes with cheesy rhyming catchphrases and alliteration, now THAT'S where it's at!
Like most of his peers, he idly daydreams about fighting crime, but has no idea how to use his power to do so in anything greater than a sidekick context, a one-track eccentricity in the sidelines. This bothers him fairly often. In the meantime, he tries to walk the precarious tightrope of keeping both his parents happy with his progress. Yes, mom, he's still taking English literature; yeah, dad, he's still practicing his prescient powers and hasn't given up on armed combat yet, okay?
PLAYED-BY: Topher Grace
Aspirations: To get BHH-accredited, and maybe run some sort of bookstore in Neopolis, to be perfectly honest. He'd like to have a commercial income between super hijinks.
What would be the title of the comic book starring your character? Early Edition, if the 90s television show happened to be a crisis-of-the-week type comic book. He'd be one of the supporting characters, revealed as the ~mysterious source~ behind the newspaper from the future.
Courselist: TERM ONE
- Literature
- Witty Banter 101
- Vigilantism vs. Heroism: Understanding the Law and Crimefighting
- Arcane Languages II
- Harnessing Latent Skills
- Personal Development
Courselist: TERM TWO
- Personal Development
- Literature
- History of Notable Sidekicks and Henchers
- Speculative Fiction I
- Arcane Languages III
- Intermediate Witty Banter
- Seminar: Theory of Time Travel
soundtrack
cake, "perhaps perhaps perhaps"
