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Shaara, Neal; Thunderbird
Topic Started: Mar 15 2017, 10:53 PM (251 Views)
Neal Shaara
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Not the Human Torch
[align=center]PLAYER INFORMATION[/align]

NAME: Anne (we can go by my middle name for now)
CONTACT: PM (AIM only by request)
HOW YOU FOUND US: Stumbled upon in a directory many moons ago
OTHER CHARACTERS ON THE SITE: None, this is my first.
RULES CODE: Tesseract

CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE:
unncannyx-men.net
marvel.com
comicvine
previous application


[align=center]CHARACTER INFORMATION[/align]

[align=center]Posted Image

Nivin Pauly[/align]

BASIC INFORMATION

CANON OR ORIGINAL: Canon
AFFILIATION: SHIELD

FULL NAME: Nilesh 'Neal’ Shaara
CODENAME: Thunderbird
NICKNAMES: Other than his English name? None.

CURRENT AGE: 27 years old (28 in a few months)
DATE OF BIRTH: June 21st, 1989
MARITAL STATUS: Single, although his parents are trying their damnedest to change this.
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Heterosexual
BASE OF OPERATIONS: The Flatiron Building, New York City, USA
TIME AT INSTITUTE: 5 years, from 13 years old (September 2002) to 18 years old (June 2007).
REGISTERED WITH SHIELD?: Yes, very recently in fact.
HOMETOWN: Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India
KNOWN RELATIVES:

Like most people of South Asian origin, Neal has a lot of uncles, aunties and cousins but his main family include:

• Varun Shaara (father)
• Anousha Shaara (mother)
• Sanjit Shaara (brother; missing, presumed deceased)

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

HEIGHT: 5'11" (a bloody giant by Indian standards)
BUILD: Broad across the shoulders, proportionate and muscular (but not grossly so) with noticeable definition in his arms, basically he’s a guy with a natural slightly bigger than average build who has made the most of himself by working out on a regular basis.
ETHNICITY: South Asian (Bengali Indian)
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Black
DISTINGUISHING MARKS: Does the luxurious beard count? A few scars from various childhood scrapes and motorbike accidents but nothing too disfiguring.
CLOTHING STYLE: Neal always dresses for the occasion, but his everyday style is quite neat and would probably be described as ‘smart casual.’ He is rarely seen in hoodies or t-shirts, preferring instead to pairing his jeans with a button-up shirt beneath a cardigan or even a blazer; running shoes are only worn when engaging in physical activity, loafers being his everyday choice of footwear; and it is a truly noteworthy occasion when he wears shorts of any kind.

UNIFORM: Standard black SHIELD uniform with the organization’s insignia on the left side of his chest that has been modified to withstand high levels of heat and other effects of his powers.

POWERS

GENERAL DESCRIPTION:

Solar Energy Conversion (Pyrokinetic): Neal is a mutant whose body works similarly to a plasma reactor, absorbing and storing ambient cosmic energy (in particular, solar radiation) into his cells that superheat themselves until released in the form of plasma which immediately bursts into flame upon contact with the atmosphere.

With this ability, Neal can perform feats such as generating blasts of continuous flame much like a flamethrower from his extremities, throwing balls of plasma fire that simulate the effect of a firebomb upon impact, creating ‘firewalls’ around his body that melt/vaporize projectiles as well as deflect certain attacks and generating thrust by emitting plasma like a rocket from his body to achieve a crude form of flight.

Neal’s cells have a finite storage capacity which must be kept a certain level to be effective, too little energy and he won’t be able to generate plasma, too much and his body temperate will begin to rise to inhumanly hot levels. If left at this level for too long without expending the energy this can result in flames spontaneously combusting from his body against his will.

If his cells are fully charged, Neal is able to use his powers continuously and strenuously for about three hours before having to rest/recharge, should he preserve his energy this extends to about six hours. He can also project plasma up to 180 ft away from him (approximately half the length of a football field), control the amount of plasma that he emits and create fire that ranges in temperature from 1,800 °F (roughly the strength of a candle flame) up to 1,000,000 °F . When using his powers to fly he can reach speeds of up to mach one and heights of up to 25,000 ft (although he rarely pushes himself to the limit) while surrounding himself with plasma fire to counteract wind friction as well as the colder temperatures in the atmosphere.

Neal’s body has also adapted to withstand the effects of his powers. At present, he is able withstand extreme temperatures of up to 1,000,000 °F and his flesh does not burn or damage when he comes into contact with plasma, fire or other hot materials/substances below the maximum temperatures he can produce; he also appears to be immune to the effects of non-ionizing radiation (i.e. microwaves, ultraviolet rays) as well as some forms of ionizing radiation (particularly those related to cosmic or solar energy such as charged nuclei).

WEAKNESSES:

  • Neal can create fire and expel it from his body but he can not control fire that is just randomly there or manipulate it beyond the scope of projecting it.
  • Like most mutants with fire-based powers, Neal’s abilities aren’t especially effective when fighting against cryokinetics (those who can create ice), hydrokinetics (those who can manipulate water) and thermokinetics (those who can affect the temperature of the environment around them).
  • Neal requires cosmic/solar energy to use his powers, if he were to expend all of the energy stored in his cells and he were in a place where cosmic/solar energy could not reach him or were significantly diminished (i.e. during the night) then he could not create plasma until he recharged.
  • As with all mutants, his offensive abilities (i.e. the fire slinging) are neutralized by power nullifying technology.
  • When flying, Neal cannot change direction easily and either has to slowly arc his way over to where he wants to go or land to reposition himself before taking off again, there is no turning on a dime here.
  • With the exception of his immunity to high temperatures, certain types of radiation and flames/heated materials or substances, Neal’s body is exactly the same as a baseline human’s, which means he can be hurt or even killed through most conventional means (i.e. bullets, knives, poison, blunt objects).
  • Neal is very cautious to use his powers in more offensive ways thanks to his fear of hurting someone and can sometimes hesitate in situations where he needs to do so to both his own and other's detriment.
PERSONALITY

Neal is polite, articulate and level headed, almost always keeping a collected exterior regardless of the situation or his emotions. He is not prone to overreaction or rash behaviour and can usually be counted on as the voice of reason when others have lost theirs. Generally, he tends to be a calming influence and prefers to diffuse conflicts with words than resort to resolving them with his fists, although he is willing fight if it is for the greater good (i.e. protecting someone else).

Although he grew up with a great amount of privilege, Neal is by no means stuffy, prudish or snobbish and often comes off as someone who came from much more modest means with his warm sense of humour, laid back nature and non-judgmental attitude. Being something of a free spirit, he blends easily into most crowds and is good at making friends when he wants to, although he does enjoy time to himself as well.

Having attended both the University of Cambridge and Harvard University, Neal is very intelligent, is possessed of a rather dry wit and is very detail orientated as well as highly organized. While not a smooth talker exactly, he still has a very good grasp on interpersonal relationships and could be considered charming by some.

Still, that isn’t to say Neal doesn’t have his faults. Probably the biggest being his stubbornness, once he decides on a route to take it is rare that he changes his mind without some significant intervention. He also has an extremely complex relationship with his family that has not settled down with time that in some part is complicated by his inability to move past the slights of his childhood.

Despite this, Neal is still a genuinely good person who wants to make a difference in the world and is willing to sacrifice a lot personally to change things for the better.


HISTORY:

BEFORE THE BEYOND

Born into privilege as the second son of a father who just so happened to be the Chief of Police in Kolkata and a mother whose parents owned a profitable tea estate in the neighboring province of Assam that the family vacationed at during the holidays, Nilesh Shaara (or Neal, as he was later called) wanted for very little in life... well, at least in a material sense.

Growing up, Neal always felt that in some way he was overlooked in favour of his older brother, Sanjit. From his point of view, his parents seemed to worship everything his brother did while treating him as little more than an afterthought, if they remembered him at all. Everything was always about Sanjit all the time and as a result Neal often acted out to get some well deserved attention, which earned him many spankings as a child as well as a few years in several different boarding schools around Delhi as a preteen when his mother decided he was too unmanageable.

Despite the obvious favoritism, Neal still idolized his elder brother almost as much as a he envied him, especially when he decided to pursue a career in journalism instead of medicine against their father’s wishes. Sanjit seemed to be fond of him too, even though they didn’t hang out so much due to the five-year age difference between them beyond playing cricket in the park occasionally.

Shortly after being expelled from his last boarding school, Neal woke up with a terrible fever and a building pain in his body. Doctors were called, but the initial tests found him to be in perfect health despite his steadily rising temperature. Fearing the worst, it was decided that Neal should be transported to a hospital for observation. Unfortunately, it was there a few hours later that Neal manifested his abilities and caused an explosion in the intensive care ward that destroyed his room as well as injuring dozens of others.

Neal awoke a few days later in the hospital with a man he would later come to know as Professor Charles Xavier at his bedside, who informed him of what happened and offered him a place at his school for mutants. Deciding that this seemed to be the best option considering how much damage he could cause if his powers were left unchecked, the young teen agreed. So, with some slight tweaking of memories that resulted in the authorities writing off the explosion as a gas leak and the cover story of being offered a scholarship at a prestigious boarding school in America for ‘gifted youth’ thanks to his teachers putting his name forward was presented to his parents, allowing Neal the freedom to start a new chapter in New York.

For a long time, Neal had a strong aversion to working with his powers. He didn’t feel very gifted, viewing himself largely as a danger to others and his abilities a terrible curse. Culture shock didn’t exactly make the situation easier nor did the fact that his parents seemed to completely forget about him while he was gone once again.

Eventually a few students reached out to Neal and took him under their wing, which lifted his mood. After a few months of basking in their companionship, he even slowly began to apply himself until he learned the basics of his powers and how to control them, although he never outgrew the fear of harming someone with them.

Neal graduated shortly after Professor Xavier’s disappearance and despite his concern, left to attend the University of Cambridge in England to pursue a Political Science degree in preparation for his eventual acceptance to law school, which was what his father had always wanted from his second son. Despite knowing he was more interested in enforcing the law rather than arguing about it, Neal didn’t protest knowing that he didn’t have the money or skills to support himself if his parents were to cut him off and consoling himself that while being a lawyer wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do it was related to what he did want to do, so… for the time being, he remained silent.

He was in the final semester of his second year in Cambridge when Apocalypse and the Horsemen unleashed their wrath upon the unsuspecting world. For a few days, Neal and his fellow dorm mates holed themselves up in their residence hall as a terrible storm raged outside, the lower levels of the building were flooded and looters ran wild through the streets, until they were evacuated by the military because London (which wasn’t too far away) had been overrun by zombies.

From the sporadic news reports that were coming through whenever the electricity was on Neal knew that the X-Men were involved in resolving the crisis and was very grateful that he had such powerful, altruistic friends… even if the rest of the world didn’t see them that way.

Eventually he finally managed to get a phone call through to India where he learned the good news that his parents and brother had miraculously survived, but also received the bad news about the deaths of several extended family members including his favourite cousin, who was killed when a massive typhoon hit Kolkata.

It took a while for things to settle down, but eventually life went more or less back to normal for Neal and he continued to work on his degree while visiting India every summer as he did before.

After two more years of hard work, he finally graduated with a BA in Political Science and was all lined up to attend Harvard Law School when a wrench was thrown into the works of his life once again. Upon returning to Kolkata for the summer gap between his undergraduate and graduate degrees, Neal learned that Sanjit had gone missing months earlier while investigating the disappearances of people living in the city’s slums, but his parents didn’t mention this until he was back because they didn’t want to worry him while he was writing his finals. Furious at his parent’s omission of the truth and frustrated by the slowness of the investigation, Neal stormed out of the house against their wishes to start looking for his brother on his own with only the entries he’d found in Sanjit’s journal to go on.

Of course, this worked just about as well as you’d expect for a young man from money with no investigative skills whatsoever. It was only hours later on the same day that Neal was being robbed by a group of thugs with a knife pressed to his throat in a back alley. Luckily, his father had the foresight to call one of his people in the police department to trail him almost as soon as he’d left the house and it was she along with her standard issue pistol that probably saved him from sharing Sanjit’s fate.

His saviour did her best to convince Neal to return home, but didn’t seem surprised when he refused and to his shock offered to come along with him, bringing her own professional skills in the mix.

They never did find Sanjit, but along the way they did develop feelings for each other and began an ill-fated love affair that ended when she left him during the night with only a letter urging him to give up his crusade, return to school and forget about their relationship.

Devastated, broke and out of leads, Neal did the only thing he could do: he returned home to his parents for the last few weeks of the vacation before taking a flight back to the states.

For the next couple of years, Neal kept his head down and focused solely on his work, barely stopping to eat or sleep as most students that are admitted into Harvard do. However, unlike his fellow classmates, Neal welcomed the ungodly workload that had been thrust upon him: it stopped him from thinking about where the only woman he’d ever loved was now, what she was doing and if she thought about their brief time together nearly as much as he did. Neal was haunted man, a state that was only compounded at the end of his second year in law school when his old high school was blown up, injuring and even killing a few of his friends.

Yet, sometime in his third year things began to change. Neal spent a lot of time contemplating his losses over the last few years: his cousins, his older brother, his first love, his friends… and he realized that his grief was holding him back. Sure, he had lost a lot, but others had lost a lot more than him and while he couldn’t change what had happened he could control his response to it. He needed to come to terms with it, stop living half a life, seize the day and move the fuck on.

So, that is exactly what he did. He pulled up his socks, started going out more with his fellow interns instead of holing up in his room all the time, started working out and told his parents on graduation not only that he was a mutant, but also that he was only planning to be a lawyer until he had been in America long enough to gain the required citizenship to work as a police officer.

Furious that yet another of his sons had rebuffed his plans for them and (even worse) revealed himself as a freak of nature, Neal’s father angrily disowned him, leaving him to make his own way in America – alone.

It was very difficult at first, even though Neal was lucky enough to get a job at a small law firm in New York City that earned him a green card he was still going to have to wait for another five years before he could apply for naturalization, his salary was meager for what he was used to and it seemed that every other week there was always some sort of supervillain running amok in the area but he managed to pull through. His father even came around a little thanks to his mother’s pleading that they not cut him off for good. Life was going okay for the most part...

POST BEYOND HISTORY

... At least until he ran into a burning building last month to save a woman trapped on the upper floor and emerged completely unharmed from the flames. People started asking questions then, his landlord started making some noise about evicting him and a SHIELD agent showed up at his office asking him to come with them to 'clear some things up.'

Neal was pleasantly surprised that the interview didn’t end with him being shipped off to some prison camp and even involved the offer of recruitment into the covert organization. His answer was yes, of course. After all, the only thing that is better than being a police officer is being a government agent and it seems with the recent attack on SHIELD headquarters by the recently reappeared Magneto they're going to need all the help they can get.


SAMPLE RP POST:

Neal sighed as he sat down in his cubicle at overwhelmingly beige coloured offices of the Smith & Gallagher Accident & Injury Law Firm and opened up his mail inbox to reply to some e-mail that had come in during his lunch break. He sighed again as he scrolled through the list, much of the subject lines written in all-caps until he spotted a message from his mother of all people.


From: Mummy <anousha.shaara@yahoo.com>
Subject: Wifes for You!!!




Oh for fuck’s sake… he opened the email and clicked the link, which directed him to a profile of a girl from Kolkata from the same caste and social strata as him with an appropriate star sign on a personals website based in India.


From: Neal <nilesh.shaara@smithgallagher.com>
Subject: STOP, PLEASE.

Mum, I don’t need help finding a wife and I already told you I’m not interested in an arranged marriage. Please, I’m begging you; don’t send me advertisements for brides on my work email and stop leading these poor girls on.



Pressing the send button with more force than was probably needed, Neal shook his head. It wouldn't do to let the annoyance that was building inside him turn into anger. His mother was only trying to do what he thought was best for him… even if it was completely obnoxious.

Curious, he browsed through the girl’s profile a little more in depth. For a bride she was very old by Indian standards, almost thirty. He wondered vaguely what she was doing on this site, most people turned to the online version of matchmaking in India when they’d exhausted all other options and despite her age she seemed to be a pretty good candidate. Maybe she was in the same position as him, refusing marriage and being advertised on this site by her parents without her knowledge while being nagged to death about being unmarried.

Although he tried not to, Neal’s thought began to drift towards his first love. Normally she’d be married at this point, but she had been strong enough to join the Kolkata police force against her parent’s wishes., so it was possible that she’d also manage to resist the pressure of an arranged marriage too.

It’d been…god, almost six years since she’d left him and he still had no idea where she was or what she was doing.

Hesitantly, he opened a search engine and typed her name into it.

“Mr. Sharma?”

He looked up, trying not to look like the kid that just got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and failing. “Yes? Uh...it's Shaara, actually.” Quickly, he closed the window on his computer with the press of a few keys and ran a hand through his dark hair nervously. “How can I help you?"

It was a middle-aged woman with blonde hair in a black suit that spoke like she had some authority. “You need to come with us to clear some things up.”

Us? It took a moment for it to sink in that the black suit she was wearing had the insignia of an eagle emblazoned on it.

“Oh shit,” he said empathetically, hoping that no one else in the office was listening to this exchange but knowing that they probably were. Fuck… he really couldn’t lose this job, as crappy as it was. He still had a little over two years before he could apply for citizenship here and join the police force from there. If they even let him apply now that he’d probably been outed as an unregistered mutant.

“Please, don’t freak out. You haven’t done anything wrong yet. We just want to talk to you about the fire last week. Is that okay?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really,” she admitted, her expression almost sympathetic.

He breathed in shakily. “Alright, just… let me get my coat.”
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Wind Dancer
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Wind Manipulation/Flight
Hey Anon! Welcome to XMR.

So, not a big deal, but if you'd like us to call you something else other than 'Anon', do put that under 'player name', maybe like an alias or screenname.

Now, your app looks good mostly, though I have a bit of an issue with his powers. They are great, but I notice you say he's only trained in the basics of his powers. Now, he was at the school for 5 years, up till when he was eighteen. I'm thinking the school would definitely have helped him gain confidence in it, especially if you would like him to go into SHIELD in-game... He might even remain at the school, to keep learning, despite his age... Also from the time he left (at 18) to present time (age 27/28), he would have been a danger to anyone else, if he didn't have his powers under control or was confident in using them. The school wouldn't have let him leave, and SHIELD wouldn't have waited this long to get him.

I'm not sure yet how it would work for him to be inexperienced, and 27 years old, but we can discuss if you would like to play into him learning his powers. Drop me a PM or catch me on IM if you need to! If not, post here, when you have clarified his experience/powers.

Thanks!
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Neal Shaara
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Not the Human Torch
Hello,

I think I have addressed the issues you have brought up. Let me know if there's anymore changes that need to be made.

Thanks!
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Emma
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Telepathy, Diamond Form, Killer Fashion Sense
Thanks for your clarifications Anne!

So sorry this just came up -- I've realised that the Human Torch's supernova powers hit a maximum temp of 1,000,000 Fahrenheit. If you could tweak the upper limits of Neal's powers to match up with this -- or be slightly under -- that would be great.

Johnny's marvel Bio

Oh, and also, SHIELD agents live on the helicarrier -- the Flatiron building is for the Defenders. :)

I'll stamp you once those changes are made!! :D Thank you!
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Neal Shaara
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Not the Human Torch
Whoops! Didn't mean to steal the Human Torch's flame :D

Edits made as requested, thanks.
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Emma
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Telepathy, Diamond Form, Killer Fashion Sense
Thanks!!

I'm giving you your first [S T A M P]. Another staffer might ask for changes I have not considered!

(Also, love the pun. Flame indeed!)
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Rachel Summers
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Daddy's Little Princess
[APPROVED]

Please post your claims in the list updater thread :)
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