application ; quietplace

[assguardian]

OOC:

Player Name: danzy
Age: over 18!
Contact: pm or via wolfteeth

IC:

Name: billy kaplan
Canon: marvel comics (616)
Canon Point: Volume 2 / Gillen's run, just before Tommy reappears
Age: 17 or 18

Spoken language(s): English and some Yiddish
Username: semiurge
To the Mods: nothing comes to mind, but if he could keep his suit and cape that would be greatly appreciated!

History: a wiki
Personality:

Billy is the closest to normal that can be found within the Young Avengers roster, in terms of healthy psychological development. He has no emotional damage compared Eli Bradley or Cassie Lang (prior to Volume 2 anyway), nor does he carry trauma like Kate Bishop, Teddy Altman and Tommy Shepherd do. For all intents and purposes, Billy just decided to follow his dream of becoming a hero. That aside, Billy is incapable of guile. Or at least, malicious intent. He'd sooner get hurt or hurt himself than let others be hurt in his place. Billy is optimistic about a lot of things, and doesn't give up on a line of thought if he thinks he has a chance of being right, but he is also self-aware enough to recognize that his views of the world can be painfully naive, and that despite having the power to actually dictate reality, he knows above all not to do so in respect to other people's rights to their own freedoms.

Billy is also the type to depend on wit for communication. He likes using witty rejoinders when he can - something of a pastime he and his twin Tommy unwittingly share - and his irreverent humor often shows up when he's stressed. Which brings us to Billy's emotional stability - he's easily prodded into feeling things. He's empathetic; he relates to a lot of things because he's kind of a bleeding heart like that.On the other hand, Billy doesn't have the sharpness that the rest of his team has; he has no trauma, damage or deep dark secret to hold close, and initially it makes it difficult for him to relate to a lot of issues that other members of the hero community constantly deal with in daily life — an example of this being his lack of connection to Tommy's abuse in juvenile hall. Billy understands the damage intellectually, but doesn't fully understand or comprehend the extent of it; he has no frame of reference for these things beyond his involvement during Civil War, and it's also an issue that Billy hasn't fully dealt in a healthy way himself.

He does like to try hard, on the one hand. In everything in his young life, Billy has had a habit of overreaching and somehow succeeding (sometimes by sheer luck); from shooting a bully with high-voltage lightning in retaliation, or finding the Scarlet Witch, or getting Doom and Magneto to come to blows while he scurries off to show his stripes, Billy practically has the secondary power of putting himself right in the middle of a situation and managing to make it spiral way out of his control, for the good or bad. Billy wants to impress, but half the time he manages it, he also pisses off those he's just impressed with, either his audacity or stupidity or both. He can be shallow about many things, like being more concerned about texting his boyfriend when his twin has been teleported off-world, but he is also capable of rationalizing beyond his perceived immaturity, like when he defended Wanda Maximoff, physically and verbally, during the stand-off between the X-Men and Avengers.

The short version of all this is that Billy's a moderately normal kid born into a mutant legacy, and who despite his potentially world-breaking powers remains to have simple motivations in life, like pleasing his peers and elders, and being helpful in any way he can. He can be hilariously or depressingly pathetic in his willingness to stick his nose into things beyond him, but he does so with only the best intentions in his heart, and he would never actively choose to use his abilities to hurt anyone at all, even if his hand is forced. He's the kind of kid who goes in blindly, and he's lucky he's lucky because of all the mishaps he tends to get into, but he thinks it's all worth it for the people he loves and cares for.

Abilities/Skills:

Billy Kaplan is both a mage and a mutant, though where the dichotomy lies can't be said for certain. Billy can teleport, generate light, lightning, fire and forcefields/shields, fly, warp matter into different shapes (handy for changing costumes), and other skills that fall under a list of mutant capabilities, but he also aids/augments these skills with spellcasting, scrying, manipulating reality and other talents that fall under wielded magic. Billy's powers are untested on the whole, and he himself doesn't know any limits to it, or if he even has any; a concern has come up particularly in Children's Crusade, where the Avengers try to decide what to do with the dangerous potential of his powers based on the idea of "not wanting another House of M event".

The easiest comparison to make for Billy's powers is that with the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff - Billy's soul-mother (IDEK it's fucking Marvel, just roll with it). Where Tommy Shepherd is every inch a perfect parallel to Pietro Maximoff - both speedsters, both quick-tempered and sharp - Billy's powers are as world-changing like Wanda's powers are, and his powers come with similar caveats and problems.

A noticeable canon cap to the mage-side of Billy's powers is that rendering him deaf also renders his spellcasting ineffective. While in theory this shouldn't affect other skills, like generating lightning, warping solid items and self-propelled flight (he doesn't cast spells on these verbally), the times he's seen power-capped shows him both soundproofed and wearing power suppressors. Physically, Billy is only about as strong as a regular non-mutant, if not weaker (he's not very tall or well-built... for some measure of well-built in comics universe anyway). Billy is also at the height of his adolescence, and while he's not exactly a pro at carrying the idiot ball around, his judgment is often suspect (lampshaded in the the main YA series a few times, where Billy gets them in trouble for thinking - as well as when he decided it was smart to invade Doom's castle despite literally everyone else saying not to).

Billy's use of his powers are currently reliant on intuition, which both is an advantage and disadvantage; while reflexive use of his magic has saved him and his team numerous times, it is also wildly uncontrolled, as depicted when Billy powerbombed a wide area and knocked out at least twenty men without having any idea how, and when Dr. Doom effectively fooled Billy into thinking he didn't have his powers (this is more testament to his (lack of) deductive skills, but hey, it's Doom).

His control over his powers seem directly proportional to his self-confidence and emotional state, which can be worrying when they're facing enemies well above their skill or against storied villains. The scope of Billy's powers are also problematic — given that there's no discernible limit to it, there's no certainty in what he can and cannot actually do; this makes his powers something of a magical sweepstakes roulette, which in theory is cool but in application is more like picking up a firearm and hoping it doesn't malfunction in all the ways it could possibly malfunction. Which is a lot. And that is terrifying.

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