Alexander McCoy

Player
John

Personality
Alex has problems with feelings of inferiority, the source of which he cannot easily define. As a result, he's allowed this perceived inadequacy of 'never quite measuring up' to color most everything in his life. He tends to be insecure and that insecurity often comes across as defensiveness or misplaced aggression. He can be blunt to a fault, but is also accepting of his circumstances to the point of being practically indifferent to his own self-interest.

Alex has been through some pretty crappy things, and--on the surface, at least--he tends to regard being relocated to an island full of global outcasts as just the latest in a succession of less-than-ideal circumstances he's learned to live with. Goes out of his way to sound like a "glass-half-empty" type. He complains a lot, and he scowls a lot, and makes an outward show of trying to keep others at a distance.

That's all it is, though: show. Alex is wary of forming relationships, as much as he might crave them, so he likes to make sure other people are serious before he'll risk getting his feelings bruised. His attitude tends toward "us" (i.e., that small group of people he feels genuine attachment for) vs. "them" (anybody not in the circle). He's willing to treat with the enemy camp, but always with tremendous caution--and the conviction that the worst possible thing will go spectacularly wrong at the most inopportune time. He's a ray of sunshine that way.

Powers
Highly specialized enclaves in Alex's cells enable him to absorb ambient cosmic energy and process it into plasma. Though this gives him access to a powerful, potentially highly destructive force, his control isn't perfect. His body is constantly in the process of absorbing radiation, and when his cellular storage capacity is filled, he begins re-emitting that radiation in negligible quantities. He can also generate potent plasma wave discharges that super-heat and disintegrate objects they strike, or create concussion bursts by violently displacing air molecules in his path. By focusing his energy into a fine, low-level beam, he can induce massive, debilitating headaches--though he doesn't try that often, due to his control issues.

He is, in practical terms, invulnerable to all forms of radiation as well as conventional heat. Alex is also unaffected by his brother's concussion blasts (though he doesn't know it yet).

Limitations
Scott is, strangely enough, also unaffected by Alex's plasma waves. More significantly, Alex sometimes has serious difficulty controlling his energy output, which can result in random, highly damaging plasma surges. His absorption and discharge rate is currently regulated primarily by a specially-designed containment suit devised by his adoptive father, which also serves to record data pertaining to the functioning of his powers.

Should Alex expend all of his energy reserves, it takes him approximately sixteen hours to recharge to peak capacity. Unless, of course, he happens to absorb a massive amount of radiation at once. But that would be a very hazardous proposition for anyone who happened to be near him at the time.

Alex is allergic to tomatoes. And cats.

Talents
Like Scott, Alex is an exceptional strategist, though he tends to be more intuitive than logical. He has a knack for the physical sciences.

Interests
He's an avid student of history (particularly military history), but he tends to read for pleasure rather than as a deliberate effort at self-improvement. He is particularly intrigued by geophysics, and can spend hours reading up on geology, tectonics, and magnetic fields before realizing how lame he must look. Music is something he thinks is pretty awesome, but he doesn't have enough experience with it to have much faith in his own tastes. Mostly, he's interested in figuring out who Alex is, given that he spent a lot of years pretending to be uninterested in his own interests.

History
Alex doesn't remember his early life being anything too special or interesting. His family used to move around a lot because of his dad's job, and that kind of sucked, but it definitely didn't suck to be the son of a major in the USAF. In fact, that was kind of cool. And he had his mom and his brother, so never really sticking around one place long enough to make any really good friends wasn't all that bad. Not really.

Then there was the accident. He was eight, and his dad was flying them back from somewhere that probably wasn't very important, and there was a problem with the plane. Alex remembers the smell of smoke and a rising sense of panic, and hundreds of feet of empty space between him and the ground. He's kind of surprised he didn't wet himself.

Actually, he supposes he might have. A lot of what happened next got extremely blurry, over time.

What he does remember is a girl, about his age, meeting him in an open field, in a space that was in no way familiar to him. Alex was hesitant at first, but, not having any other realistic options, accompanied her, and was strangely accepting of his new furry adoptive Dad. He and his new sister were both pests and occasional guinea pigs for the Doctor who raised them (with substantial help from their automaton nanny). And while Pam's mutant abilities evolved and grew over time, Alex's were strangely resistant to augmentation.

In fact, the more Dr. McCoy attempted to enhance Alex's abilities, the more out of control they grew. This culminated not long after he turned thirteen, when the doctor's latest attempt to modify his mutation resulted in his inadvertently burning his room nearly to a cinder (and his sister along with it) as his powers went out of control. Since then, Alex has been confined to a bulky and complicated containment suit devised by his father, one that contains and controls his absorption of radiation and provides both input and output data his adoptive father can use to direct his research.

Alex has been extremely hesitant regarding his family's relocation to Krakoa, but it's a reservation tinged with reluctant hope. Hope that he and his sister and his dad can live something like the lives he only ever had the opportunity to watch before, from beneath the streets of London. Hope that maybe, just maybe, there's some solution out there that can get him out of the suit for more than a few hours at a time. Hope that perhaps this is really a chance to start over and do better than he's done so far.