Capeworld Comics

“What I’m doing is none of your business. Sometimes I just do stuff just to do stuff, okay?”

 

“I hate superheroes because they lie. They act like they can take care of anything, that everything is going to be okay. That’s why they wear the stupid masks even when you know who they are. They don’t want you to see that they’re just as sacred and clueless as everyone else.”

 

Name:

 

Thomas “Tommy” Taylor

 

Supername:

 

Rock and Roll

 

Average Grade:

 

F-

 

Tommy goes to school because he’s made to, and on a good day he sleeps through class.

 

Emergency Response Class:

 

1

 

Tommy is an example between “trained’ ERC and “practical” ERC. By court ruling, he’s not allowed to fight anyone save in the strictest of emergencies, and even if he was allowed to take ERC 2 and 3 it’s likely he would stick to 1 as an underachiever. But he’s developed powers and competencies far beyond what ERC 1 would suggest. When Ms. E “deactivated” his implants on Willow-Wells, he mentioned that he could have lifted an island and that he felt the stars through telekinetic pulses. It would be nice to assume that he was being hyperbolic. But given how he was able to force open a tear in reality to follow Mr. Blue, it’s likely he was actually understating his abilities.

 

Personalized Curriculum:

 

Rehabilitation

 

Well, that didn’t work out, did it? I hate to put an X in our rehabilitation program’s box, but what happened on Willow-Wells happened. 

 

Contact Education:

 

Community Service at Joyous Harbor Statesmen Center

 

Who would have thought that all the time he was pushing a broom around the Statesmen Center’s foodcourt with his telekinesis like he was the Sorcerer’s apprentice he was holding back enough power to lift the entire center into the air?

 

Hyperstasis:

 

Genetically linked telekinesis.

 

Well, this was an interesting section to rewrite.

 

Tommy was born with telekinetic powers similar to that of his father Henry Taylor, the Wave. Following the death of his mother and the descent of his father into a black hole of depression, Tommy turned delinquent to force society to give him the attention his father couldn’t. People felt bad for Tommy, and the Wave was a highly respected member of the superhero community, so when Tommy’s antics amounted to little more than shoplifting and lifting skirts, he got slapped on the wrist. But he resented being pitied and upped his game to force real punishment. After he used his telekinesis to lift the boardwalk–and then fight off local superheroes including Fishergirl and Buttonbright when they tried to ground his parade of buildings.

 

He got fixed with implants for that, Earth State implants that telepathically blocked the activation of his power and limited its strength so that he could only barely muster enough force to pull a wire or turn a knob–of course, you can get into all sorts of trouble by pulling wires and turning knobs, and Tommy did. But the trouble he got into never amounted to more than a few PSI.

 

Or so we thought.

 

It turns out that he was able to turn his implants into “telepathic weights.” With great exertion, he could over power them. And then the next time it was easier, and the time after that easier. His implants made him stronger through exercise, and while we have no concrete data on what he can do, it is very likely that he’s surpassed his father. Telekinesis is force over distance, and at high levels of potency and skill it’s essentially limitless in applications.

 

Behavior:

 

Critically Poor

 

After the murder of Thomas’ mother Sharon by his father’s arch-nemesis Gravestone, his father Henry fell into a deep depression. Abandoning Thomas for the bottle, Thomas was raised by his grandmother. She tried her best to instill within Thomas the same values she instilled in his father, but the moment Henry turned his back on Thomas, Thomas turned his back on the world. Thomas has a bitter contempt for authority, especially superheroes, and deals with his frustrations by being as much a nuisance as possible. He prides himself on a juvenile criminal record of shoplifting, breaking and entering, and trespassing. His teachers work hard to ensure his record doesn’t grow.

 

Though rude and aggressive to peers and teachers, he acts this way out of a pathological need for attention. He doesn’t want to end up as lonely as his father.

 

UPDATE: Well, I can’t change the label to something that doesn’t exist. There’s no “criminally negligent” tag in the system.

 

Okay. Let’s put levity aside. There’s a lot to process here. Rarely has a Martin’s student ever gotten in as much trouble as Tommy is in now

 

Let’s start with the tip of the iceberg. Tommy has been lying about the status of his implants. He’s been lying about them for years.

 

Around the end of his freshman year, he started to figure out that if he concentrated, he could exert more power than the implants should have allowed. He found his implants were less like a limit on his power and more like weight, one that he could push against again and again and grow stronger from. And grow stronger he did. Eventually, he surpassed his father’s power, all while the implants remained in his body sending out the signal that he was under control.

 

Lying about his implants alone would be enough to get Tommy imprisoned indefinitely, but Tommy had to go and use his forbidden powers to do something very, very stupid. He hacked into the school’s omnimover network and tried to use it to open up a portal to the Sandcastle, the maximum security prison where Gravestone is being held. What he actually intended to do once he got face-to-face with his mother’s killer, he doesn’t know. And I believe him. But even ruling out premeditated murder, he plannned to jump into a prison. That’s not something you excuse with a slap on the wrist.

 

So for what Tommy is directly responsible for, we have lying about his court mandated implants, hijacking the omnimover network, and planning to jump inside a secure prison and possibly kill someone.

 

Now let’s talk about what Tommy is indirectly responsible for. Because he botched hacking the omnimover system, he caused the crysaloid infection. Yeah, he was behind it, just as people thought. Isn’t it awful when you’re absolutely right about the bad kids?

 

And now for the big one–Tommy is indirectly responsible for Mr. Blue’s rise. Back when he was with the BOL, Mr. Blue probed Martin’s for gaps in our security. He and the BOL hoped to find backdoors into the school so they would spy on and manipulate our students in the hopes of luring them to their side. The supervillain Glass was supposed to be their way in. They had Glass kidnap and impersonate Edith Ogden. Edith made the perfect cover for installing teleporters around the campus. Everyone was used to Edith flying around and touching things.

 

When Spelunker helped us rescue Edith and defeat Glass in the tunnels beneath Joyous Harbor, we forced the BOL’s hand and they activated their teleportation network before we could fully destroy it. The school was besieged by armies of drones led by the supervillain team Joy/Buzzer, but they were fought off by a combination of local superheroes, ARGO (who had a history tracking and containing Glass), and our own Emmy. But Joy escaped through a portal created by Mr. Blue, and we assumed that Mr. Blue went with Joy, but he didn’t. He used his energy powers to sense the nascent portal Tommy created in the omnimover system with his telekinesis and hid himself within it. While the authorities hunted for Mr. Blue outside, he was safe and hidden within our own school. 

 

Mr. Blue waited for an opportunity to turn to his advantage, and that opportunity came when Willow Collins opened a portal from the school to the universe that is now known as Willow-Wells. Mr. Blue was able to sense the opening of the portal with his powers, copied Willow’s pictomundus power (the power to open portals to anything the user pictures in his or her mind), and entered the multiverse.

 

Tommy is indirectly responsible for all the trouble Mr. Blue has caused us, Willow-Wells, the Kingdom, and his “students.” He left the door open for Mr. Blue–and he knows it. Tommy isn’t a bad kid. I know that’s said about a lot of “bad kids,” but it’s true. When he used his powers to chase Mr. Blue into the Kingdom, a lot of people looked at it as Tommy running for the consequences of his actions. But I think he really wanted to make up for what he’s done. And he is helping us by being “behind enemy lines” as it were.The portal NUADA showed Danny depicted Tommy being helped by King Ewen of the Cerbereans. If we ever find ourselves within the Kingdom, Tommy will no doubt be our ace-in-the-hole.

 

There are two questions that need to be answered regarding Tommy–what do we do about him now, and what do we do about him later? So far, we’re the only ones that know that Tommy allowed Mr. Blue to copy Willow’s power and access the multiverse. All that ARGO knows is that Tommy’s implants are “off” and that he chased Mr. Blue into the Kingdom. They don’t know anything else. 

 

Should we tell ARGO more?

 

I don’t think we should, and I’m ready to take the fall for everyone if this blows up in our faces. As vice principal, my first duty is to the welfare of our students. I do not believe informing ARGO and Commander Victory about Tommy is in the best interests of our students. Commander Victory has already made it clear that he’s willing to use lethal force “if necessary” to “neutralize” Mr. Blue’s students. If he found out Tommy was responsible for Mr. Blue powering up, he might use it as an excuse to completely take over our school’s connection to the multiverse. He might lock us out of the multiverse entirely and try to solve the problem of Mr. Blue and the Kingdom on his own under the justification that we’re unable to prevent multiversal supervillains from taking advantage of our students and their powers.

 

I think such a case would be disastrous for Tommy, Lanty, and Claude, and as those three are our students, I must act in their interest. I must withhold information from ARGO. Let the dice fall where they may, I sleep with a clean conscience.

 

But there’s also the matter of what to do about Tommy once everything’s over–once Mr. Blue is rotting in a cell and peace is restored to the Kingdom, what do we do? Do we bring Tommy back home to face charges? Make no mistake. His future on our world likely involves the complete elimination of his powers and an indefinite prison sentence.

 

But say we don’t bring him back. Say we let him start over in the Kingdom. Should we do that? Is that right? I honestly do not know.

 

Appearance:

 

Thomas cares little for his appearance and takes great care to dress slovenly to demonstrate to everyone that looks his way how little he cares to be here. He often wears provocative t-shirts in the hopes of provoking a reaction. Typically, he wears t-shirts bearing the logo of the criminal organization  Brotherhood of the Lion and various supercriminals such as Gingerbread Man and Gelid. Martin’s is extremely permissive when it comes to its dress code, but sometimes Thomas crosses a line with what he wears, such as the time he wore a hammer and sickle and the time he wore superhuman assassin Headshot. In such cases, Thomas is given a plain white shirt to wear.

 

UPDATE: From what Danny was able to see through NUADA’s portal, Tommy has changed a little bit since he went into the Kingdom. He’s got Elian wings now–eight of them. Apparently, he found some way to attach a coire strip to his spine. Such a thing wouldn’t be beyond his abilities given that he was able to extract his implant by using his power to part his body like water, especially with King Ewen able to explain to him how a coire strip works.