metaheroes | application.

[obediences]

Player —

Player Name: Julie
Pronouns: she/her
Are you over 18? oui
Contact: quadrille or pm; discord available on request
Current Characters: n/a
Who Invited You?: shikki!

Character —

Character Name: Luther Hargreeves
Character Canon: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Character Age: 31
Canon Point: Immediately at the end of S2E10, plus after 1 year and 10 months spent in Mask or Menace.
Link to History: Canon history, with some CRAU summary:

• Lived together with the rest of the Hargreeves in a large mansion, slowly learning how to coexist with each other again
  
• This went surprisingly well... at least until they made the mistake of throwing a big combined bash for their 30th birthday, and Vanya accidentally destroyed their neighbourhood
  
• Experienced a couple alternate universe digressions: one where he was a brutal enforcer for an authoritarian government; another where he lived in peace with his family & other mutant-types on Krakoa
  
• Eventually joined the team known as Aegis Force as a reserve, then a full-time agent
  
• Downsized to a smaller house with just Allison after the others vanished (#jamjarstruggles)
  
• Had his body changed to looking human thanks to some accidental dream-based reality manipulation, although it wore off; then a year+ later he contacted Josh Foley, who used his healing abilities to mend the damage from the serum and change Luther’s body properly. This change will revert upon his arrival in Metaheroes.

Inventory: A copy of Books For Living in his jacket pocket. Otherwise, nothing in particular.
Powers:

Super strength: Luther was born with immense strength as a result of his superpowers; even as a child, he could easily lift and throw a fully grown adult across a room and through a window. It was then further enhanced by the experimental serum that gave him his larger body.

Enhanced durability: An extremely durable body due to his ape-like physiology, caused by a serum injection gone slightly awry. He is able to shrug off most physical impacts during combat, and could even take the full weight of a falling chandelier without injury. Luther is not invulnerable, however, as Diego managed to cut him with a knife and draw blood, and he is shown to hide from bullets.

Televator: A power acquired during his tenure in Mask or Menace. Almost like a variant of his brother Five's ability to teleport, Luther is able to step into any elevator, press a button, and then have the doors re-open on a different location anywhere on the planet (or within orbit, if it's near enough) — as long as there are elevator doors on the other side too. He doesn't need to have been there before. He can take others with him so long as they can physically fit within the elevator car. (To keep this a bit restricted, too: he can't open the doors to any private/secure location that uses keycards or keys to get between floors, etc, so he can't just break into government bases or what-have-you.)

Personality —

Luther, also known as Number One, was the first among Sir Reginald Hargreeves' adopted and purchased children: a mantle he took on gladly as the team leader of a group of child soldiers-slash-superheroes. They were ruthlessly trained since birth to fight and kill, to save civilians, to keep the world safe, and to put their lives on the line for the public, raised by a mysterious billionaire who treated them more like weapons than offspring.

As that team leader, his stubborn self-centeredness and rigid convictions could be immensely frustrating at times — it's what happens when you've grown too used to bossing others around — and it gave him a tendency to steamroll over others when he's convinced that he's right. Dutifulness and obedience have been hardwired into him, along with a loyalty to authority figures and a reluctance to deviate from instructions. He adheres to some strict rules of engagement: he doesn't mind snapping a criminal's neck, sure, but civilians need to be protected. Civilians are what they're all here for.

While the others eventually rankled at their abusive childhood, being actively broken and hammered into shape and thrown into harm's way over and over, Luther tilted too far in the opposite direction: he was desperate to keep the peace, to appease and impress their father, to keep the team together. When the others all left, he stayed behind alone and kept swallowing that poison, taking too much responsibility on his broad shoulders, until a solo mission almost killed him: Reginald’s experimental serum saved Luther’s life but made him essentially half-ape, with impossibly broad shoulders and a leathery chest and huge hairy arms. He withdrew from the public eye after that, as his father sent him on a dead-end mission to the moon where he lived in seclusion for four years, never speaking to another human being and mouldering in depression, self-conscious about his newly monstrous appearance.

So: for all that he's hard-working, driven, and brave in the face of battle, Luther is also hopelessly awkward and blundering in social interactions. Thanks to their reclusive childhood hidden away from the world, then those four years spent on a solitary moon base with no other human company, then his transformation, Luther has very little experience with ‘normal’ society.

After a year spent in Dallas (Season 2) and almost two years in Mask or Menace, however, he’s finally started to learn and grow. He wears better-tailored clothing and doesn’t hide his physique quite as much, although he’s still self-conscious enough to always wear fingerless gloves. He’s learned how to hold down a job and pay rent and exist in society, and he picked up the heroing gig again. He’s still terribly socially maladjusted, but he’s opening up and has even become capable of making a few friends(!). Having the steady anchor of other Hargreeves around in MoM, particularly Allison as a bedrock, was also invaluable in slowly repairing the damage from that decade of crippling loneliness.

Gameplay —

Areas of Interest / Brainstorming: At his latest canon point, Luther had been an active hero on the team Aegis Force for a while, coming to terms with joining someone else’s superteam which wasn’t the Umbrella Academy. He was also just working up the nerve to put together a new team himself and to be a leader again — except, y’know, hopefully in a better environment than the maltreatment they all suffered at the Academy. So he’ll be feeling very gung-ho about getting involved with the Guardian Alliance, and seizing the opportunity for ~heroic derring-do~ even if it’s in a brand-new world. OOCly, I might not have the energy to have Luther run his own team just yet, but he’ll definitely join something and be very into the whole superhero thing.

He’s also still wrestling with some body dysmorphia, since his arrival in Metaheroes will entail reverting to his apelike physiology (with Josh Foley’s nanite-powered changes from Mask or Menace dissolving upon reaching another universe), so he’d continue to be interested in talking to anyone else from other canons with similar issues re: looking inhuman.

Samples: one (an attempt at mystery sleuthing with his brother), and two (deploying as a superhero to try to help an exploding girl at the beach)