Max Meyers

[Max Meyers]

A QUICK NOTE: There are a whole freaking lot of similarities between this character and one already on the board, Jonathan Cypher. It's not intentional -- I've been dragging Max around for about five years in various incarnations, including these powers and skills, which is the stuff that's the same -- but I'm assuming that if it's Not Okay to have such similar stuff, we can correct it in the editing process. I swear I'm not a dirty plagiarist!

____The Basics____


Canon or Original:

Real Name if Known: Maxine Meyers
Codename: Vox
Any nicknames: Max, M&M (greeted by a death glare)
Character's Age: 27

Appearance: While quite pretty and charmingly cute when she wants to be, most of the time Max plays up the fey side of her appearance; her pointed chin, heart-shaped face and sharp eyebrows make her look mischievous and a little cruel, which is honestly pretty accurate most of the time. Her eyes are an unremarkable greenish blue, slightly almond-shaped and upturned at the corners, and usually enhanced with several layers of eyeshadow, liner, and mascara. Her nose is short and straight, her skin fair, and her mouth wide, with lips that can be full if she wants to hedge her lipliner a little bit.

Her frame is slender, making her look younger than her 27 years. She's little underweight and you can see her collarbones, ribs, shoulder blades and some vertebrae through her skin when she's naked, but there are those who like that kind of thing. Because she's short, though, it comes off a little more "crack addict" than "model." Her breasts are small and her hips narrow, with long legs for her height and small hands and feet, almost childlike.

She's physically weak. A combination of laziness and her increased metabolism keep her always on the point of malnutrition, but she kind of digs the meth-babe look, so she hasn't done a lot about it of late. Even if she bulked up she'd never be strong. Her bone structure is very petite, and the best she could hope for at peak condition -- which she's far from -- is agility and speed. She will never, ever be a fighter.

She fell in love with the punk scene when she was 15 and still hasn't grown out of it. Max could probably open a leather goods store on her own: she has at least one representation, in leather, of most conceivable clothing items, up to and including assless chaps (only for very special occasions). She essentially lives in a pair of buckly, strappy, low-heeled black leather motorcycle boots, bought way back when she was an undergrad and had a sporty little Yamaha. She has a high-heeled red pair for dressing up, and you'll rarely see her not wearing one or the other. If she wants to dress to impress, it's all about corset tops and super-fitted skirts; if she's schlubbing around her apartment, it's skinny jeans and ratty band tees. Rather than swooping around in a leather duster like the other Big Evil Mutants do, she takes particular pride in an old leather bomber she found in a secondhand store, cut short and only slightly too big for her, with the leather all soft from age.

Her hair is almost always dark brown, but that's the only constant. She keeps it a little past shoulder-length so it curls up into a bob or straightens down into a short ponytail, her hair being naturally wavy and compliant. Every once in a while she cuts it off almost completely, into a very short boy's cut.

Actor chosen to portray your character: Milla Jovovich
Image:
(Posted Image)

Height/Weight: 5'3"/104
Eyes: bluish-greenish
Hair: dark brown
Place of Birth: Defiance, Ohio
Place of Residence: tiny apartment in Boston
Where will you stand: Brotherhood Leader


____The Details____


Personality/Description: Abrasive, sarcastic and with a nearly cruel disregard for the feelings of others, Max is pretty much a giant bitch. It's not that she tries -- well, okay, maybe she does try -- it's mostly that she doesn't know how to be anything else.

Like most genii, Max has no idea how to relate to people. Math she gets, science she gets, computers she definitely gets, but people are way too complicated. They don't make any sense. They're frustrating. They're messy. She doesn't like them. The feeling is generally mutual. Sometimes she wishes she had more friends, but she's never had enough to know whether having more than one or two best friends is worth the trouble. Honestly, for her, it probably wouldn't be worth it to have more than a very small circle. She's not cut out to be a social butterfly; crowds and parties exhaust her, and she requires a certain time alone every day to continue functioning sanely.

She is actually a genius, not just unsociable. With a complete brilliance rare even among the elite of the intellectual world, she's not just incredibly quick, she's creative... with computers, anyway. This is something that's often hard for math or science prodigies, but it comes easily to Max. Why shouldn't computers be able to alter reality? Why should the laws of physics apply to things that are essentially numbers? What mass does a number have? In Max's opinion, when you get down to it, even matter and energy are just ones and zeroes; with a computer, you can change the very fabric of reality. If you believe in reality.

This creativity comes in part from a deeply personal connection Max feels with computers, one reserved in most people for other people. Her power to actually become code means that she can speak to machines on a level no one else can. And while they're not people, they're still alive, she's found - no less alive than she is. They don't hope or dream, really, outside the bounds of logic. But they do feel. They have an endless capacity for understanding, and where there is understanding, there is humanity. It's hard for her to explain, but one of the reasons she's such a great inventor is that she can pretty much just ask a computer to do whatever she wants it to. Computers like her.

Max has never been diagnosed with but nonetheless suffers from a dystemic disorder, which is a mild depression strung out over a long period of time. She doesn't cut or anything, though she did as a teenager, but she usually feels somewhat hopeless and just generally down. It's always been hard to make her smile. She does, however, have sense of humor (though it's sarcastic, dry, and sometimes morbid) and she can actually have fun. Her form of depression doesn't take over like some do, and no awkwardness is complete. She has good days like everyone else, and more of them than you'd think. She's really funny, and can be loving. She just makes it hard to find that out.

She's a giant, giant comic book and video game nerd. Yes, she played D&D as a teenager. She still keeps up to date on comics, mostly Marvel -- DC is for suckers and Batman has been just awful since Final Crisis, I mean, seriously -- and looooooves video games. When she doesn't have access to any of the many game consoles on which she wastes her academic disbursements every year, she likes Diablo II, since it's lovely and free. She limits herself to one hour of Warcraft a day and re-watches Star Trek, Bladerunner and stupid cult classics like Clash of the Titans way, way too often.

She's a terrible cook, to the point where it's actually remarkable. She chain-smokes, loves old music, and lives on Grey Goose vodka and frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts. She's got a bit of a sweet tooth, but it's nothing compared to her constant lust for any form of meat, especially if it somehow involves curry powder.

Mutation: Max's powers are electrokinetic, or electrically based. She has a psionic connection to raw power, from which she takes her name -- vox is Latin for "power." This is strictly limited by the way the energy she controls converts, though. For instance, when lightning hits the ground, it usually translates instantly into heat and noise, and she stops being able to control it. She can only get her hands on pure electrical energy. This takes a lot of finesse, since electricity is one of the most transient forms of energy and is extremely prone to suddenly changing into something else without warning or reason. She can't "touch" electricity -- you can't really touch something that isn't strictly matter -- but she can cast it and direct it, bending its path from other sources or even pushing it out of herself. Other sources are going to be stronger, especially grids or large generators, because she can draw on nearly infinite power, but if left by herself in the desert without any copper wire, she can cast bolts of her own bioelectricity up to about thirty or forty feet. That tires her out, though, and if she pushes too hard she runs the risk of emptying out her system, essentially killing herself unless somebody's standing by with jumper cables and a 12-volt. (That actually does work, though it leaves some nasty burns.)

She can withstand electric shock much better than most people, though she's just as vulnerable to other forms of energy attacks or blunt-force weapons as a normal human being. Her nervous system runs three or four times as hot as other people's do. Her natural temperature is around 106 Fahrenheit, reaching fever point at 120 or so. Her danger zone isn't until 145. This is one of the reasons she's as skinny as she is despite her truly horrifying diet. She needs more fat and protein than most people and is almost never full: she burns through as much nutrition lying around the house as a woman her size should burn in high-impact athletics.

Her favorite power is arguably her most dangerous, at least to herself. While she can control computers as long as she's in some sort of contact with a network (usually having a wireless phone in her pocket will work), Max can, if she pushes this power, translate herself completely, body and all, into a piece of binary code and upload herself into a data port. When you get down to it, all atoms are, really, is code. It's not hard to do, really, at least in theory. She becomes a program several megabytes in size, usually labeled "max.exe" (or "max.java," if she's on a Mac). While in this state she can think several thousand times as fast as she normally can, since she's moving at close to the speed of light. Her information processing is different, some would say colder (more binary, if you'll excuse the pun), but she comes out the same person on the other side. In theory she could reform into something else, but Max's sense of self is too strong for that to happen. If someone possessed her they might be able to do it, but she never will. In small doses, she doesn't have to upload herself to control computers. She can do it with focused thought as long as she's connected to the network. To other people this will look like she can do basic things like turning a stereo off and on or changing a computer's settings with the wave of a hand, but the more observant will notice the intense stare she adopts and the way she has to have questions repeated afterward. Most people put it down to "well, she's a genius or something, right?" syndrome.

Unfortunately, in code form Max is as susceptible to basic computer malfunction as any other bit of code. She can get viruses, be mistranslated, even be deleted by a fast enough attacker. This power increases her mobility so that she could potentially hack an enemy's network and jump into their base, but there's no telling what their protections would do to her if she couldn't successfully fight them off. It sounds a lot more useful than it actually is. While she's code she can control other elements of whatever computer she happens to be in, though. If she were in the Danger Room, she could project a hardlight image of herself that would be indistinguishable from the real Max, even alter the environment automatically, without the lengthy programming it takes most people. It's definitely her favorite power for a reason, but the repercussions of offensive use are too great for her delicate constitution, at least at the moment. These dangers are also present, in a limited way, when she uses this power without jumping in. Any connection to the network opens her up for attack from viruses, but it's definitely easier to avoid when you can sever that connection just by letting go of your phone. When you're actually inside the CPU, it's much, much easier to be surrounded.

When I say "machinery," it's implicit that the machinery runs with code. Max doesn't have the intuitive control of anything with mechanical parts, like Forge does; she's a software person and only works with machines that have software. A computer chip is necessary for her to work her magic.

Weakness: Max is highly-charged and runs the risk of shorting out small electronics just by being near them. She can jump-start a car with her bare hands, but she can also fry its battery if she doesn't control herself. Sparks often jump from her to other people even when she's not excited; they sting but don't hurt.

She's very vulnerable while she's code. She can be attacked by the computer's defenses and her ability to exit will be very compromised; a fast enough hacker could delete her and it'd be as if she never existed. Viruses, automatic defenses, or even a simple malfunction in the logic unit could be the end of her. She's a noticeable application if she's going for stealth -- she's larger than most messenger programs, though not as large as anything like iTunes or an internet browser -- and while she can mask her appearance, someone who knows their way around a computer would be able to tell something was there. This isn't helped by her general arrogance. Max is, unfortunately, one of those programmers who assumes everyone else has been using an abacus for the last 25 years.

Too much use of any power depletes the energy she needs to keep alive. She doesn't have very good self-control in the first place, so this is an easy threshold for her to cross. The only way to get her back up and running if she taps herself out is to jump-start her pretty much the way you would a car. She's had to do it before and has little scars from alligator clips to prove it, three matching pairs on her shoulders.

Other Skills: Max is a brilliant programmer and gifted hacker. This is partially enhanced by her power but she can do it without, too. She's great at math and most forms of science and knows as much about medicine as most general practitioners, though she's kind of ham-handed about it, not having had nearly as much practice as a real doctor. She doesn't like chemistry, but she's all right at it. She's always been and always will be most comfortable with energy-based physics.

History: Max was born in a housing development called The Bend, just down the road from Defiance Memorial Airport in Ohio. Her dad, Thomas, worked for the airline as a commercial pilot; her mother, Mary, was a stay-at-home mom. Max is the sixth of eight sisters.

Her elder siblings (except Mary, the oldest) were named for virtues; they are Hope, Faith, Grace, and Joy, in order of birth. Maxine was the first of the last three girls to begin to be named after her father's aunts. (The other two are Lillian, Max's twin, and Vivian, the youngest.) The first three girls are each about a year apart, with more space as the girls get younger. Mary is 34; Hope is 33; Faith is 32; Grace is 30; Joy is 29; Max and Lil are 27; Vivian is 23. Each girl older than Max is married; Mary, Hope, Faith and Grace have children of varying ages; Joy is pregnant with her first; and Lil is engaged. Viv is a bit of a wild card.

They grew up in relative peace. The area of Ohio in which the girls were raised was very religious; the Meyers themselves were Roman Catholic, thus the plethora of children. (Actually, they were trying for a boy, but Mom hit menopause before one happened.) A pilot's salary is large, but eight girls try it severely. They were never poor, but they were never more than firmly middle-class either, and none of them ever had her own room.

Max was always different from the other girls. Well, Viv has her wild streak, and Lil's a little different as well, but Max was... odd. Intelligent, which was fine, but terrible with other children, which wasn't. When she was young, it was put down as sibling rivalry or a hot temper or any number of things. But as she got older, words like Asperger's and autism and idiot savant began to be tossed around. Max never liked that.

When she started school, another word began to appear often in conversation, but she liked this one: gifted. Max wasn't strange, she was gifted. Gifted children could be excused any number of things. Desperate for a reason to justify their odd duck, both Max and her sister were admitted to the Gifted and Talented program. Lil was always artistic, as good with words and pictures as Max was with numbers, and fit right in.

Max didn't last. She couldn't write to save her life; the words didn't make sense together, and she had no idea how to make up stories. They were always essays. No creativity. At least not where, to the second-grade Gifted teachers, it counted. Booted back into regular classes while Lil flourished in the arts-and-humanities-centered Gifted program, she began to grow a little angry. And then a little angrier.

When she came into her powers (age 10, with the onset of the early puberty enjoyed by Meyers women) the anger seemed justified. She was different, she was special, but no one understood it. Her family was just holding her back. Meltdowns and truly frightening tantrums became commonplace, and their beautiful daughter became something her family was convinced she was not - a screaming, psychotic freak.

Her sisters turned on her, except for Lil, whose support was unwanted and scorned. Max made it through high school, barely. She actually did make it into MIT on basis of her budding inventions, but couldn't pass freshman English. She failed out at the end of her first semester.

Salvation blossomed in the form of Olin College, an engineering school outside Boston with an endowment so huge that there was no tuition charged. Best of all, it was states away from Ohio, and even though she had to beg and plead and eventually break down and donate a patent to the school, she got in. She got in and she thrived.

Scientific minds have little time for prejudice, really. They believe what they believe, and while sometimes an anti-mutant kid would cross Olin's threshold, on the whole most of the kids liked Max. She was weird, but they were all weird. She was nuts about computers, but... again, she was one in a crowd. She's never felt at home as she did at Olin, where she obtained several degrees (her bachelor's, a teaching credential, a doctorate and a PhD) in half the time it would take anywhere else. She intends to return and take up a Professorship at some point. Maybe.

She's always been intrigued by criminals, especially masterminds. Herself a genius, she introduced a hypothetical disorder in a psychology class once she called "Malign Hypercognition Disorder," an explanation of why so many geniuses turn out to be evil. Sure, she said, there were some like Charles Xavier who were nice, but on the whole -- and even look at Xavier. Where's the creativity there, the foresight? His entire idea was inherently flawed. There was no future for the X-Men.

MHD was what spawned it all, really. She began to do more research on the Brotherhood and on Magneto as she grew older, though the idea of joining them was always distant. (She had code to write, for God's sake. Surely international terrorism could wait until after finals.) But then her Master's was finished, and then her doctorate, and then her PhD... and now she's bored. She's been TAing for the same intro to computing class since she was 22 and it makes her want to stab things. She needs some excitement, a change of pace, and getting drastic new haircuts isn't cutting it anymore.

Max has recently decided to look for the Brotherhood in earnest, especially after recent chatter that they might be reforming, preparing for another go at mutant supremacy. These days Max spends her nights in her tiny apartment, trolling the web for some connection to the Brotherhood, some spark that will lead her to them, but until now she's turned up nothing.


____Interview for the Role____


Your Name: Charlotte
Your Age: 19
Why did you choose this character? I've been dragging her around since I was 14. She's one of my favorites -- not many people play intentionally bitchy characters. I like playing with mental illness without going all-out crazy or making it a huge Thing.
How did you hear of us? Sarah!
Will you post as least twice a week? Of course.
Character(s) you have here none
Member title you would like: it's electric!
Password:[...]


____The Work____


Sample Post: This was the best burger on the planet. Just, seriously, the best. There had never been a burger to rival this one. Not even her dad's, and he even knew exactly how to leave them pink inside.

Max bit into the burger again, her eyes sliding closed as the perfect mix of slightly undercooked beef, mustard, overbrined pickle and old onions hit her tongue. To most people, she reflected, this burger would probably be nasty beyond all comprehension, but she liked her meat as rare as possible and this burger tasted like they'd cut it off the cow and walked it past the fire. It was almost still mooing. And spicy mustard -- mmm. She made a mental note to come back to Chicago all the time, even if she had to go to stupid conference to do it. She was probably getting mad cow disease right now, but it was totally fine. She'd die happy. Insane and with giant holes in her brain, but happy.

She glanced down at the stack of papers on the table in front of her, twirling her chewed-up pen in the one hand that wasn't occupied with her triple hamburger, and contemplated burning them all. Surely her class wouldn't notice. They couldn't care less about introductory elements of computer programming and Max was bored to tears, but she had to TA if she wanted to keep her place at Olin, and she didn't have anything better to do anyway. Jesus, that was sad. You needed something better to do than go through a stack of Hello World programs. Why couldn't people learn to close their flower brackets? Was it that difficult?

She started circling problems in red, drawing in the flower brackets where almost every student had left them off. She wondered, at times, why Professor Mitra didn't just hang himself some night and save them all the trouble of coming into class at the crack of dawn (11:30 a.m.) every morning to dully chant, over and over, "public static void main parenthesis strings square brackets args close parenthesis." She'd woken up a few nights recently, still chanting it. She needed a new job. She needed to just break away on her own, start a programming business. Even just sign on with somebody else. Google'd been hounding her recently. That was supposed to be a fun place to work, right? She'd taken a tour of the facility once, early in college. Everything had been brightly colored. She had a dim memory of free coffee and overly friendly programmers with bad hair. She repressed a shudder. No, she'd go to Microsoft before she went to the Google pricks. "Don't Be Evil"? How about "don't sell the company to the Chinese..."

Christ in heaven, this was a good burger.

A little "ding" came from the laptop that was open before her, and Max set down her double to call up the Adium screen. It was from somebody she didn't know, but she accepted the message anyway. If nothing else she could ream out some kid and then the evening wouldn't be totally wasted.

LOOK BEHIND YOU, said the IM. It was from, of all the stupid sockpuppet screennames, thegreathatsby.

Max stared at it. She had brief flashbacks to Eagle Eye.

She turned around.

[Samantha Carter]

Eerily familiar to Jonathan's, even though I've spoken to both of you on separate occasions. I can see coming up with this kind of character twice. And personally, I don't mind since our third one is completely inactive anyways. This could lead to a possible storyline between the two of you or something or a connection in some way which can bring a plot to the boards.

I'm allowing this and going to see what my other mods think before granting the approval. Nice work so far.

[Jonathan Cypher]

I may not be a mod or anything, and I hope my input isn't entirely uncalled-for. So... here I go.

As far as I'm concerned, I have no issues with this character concept.

Sure, some of the abilities are similar, but they're different enough to suit me.

So, to reiterate... I have absolutely no problems with this character concept. Yes, you can quote me on that later.






And no.... I didn't base my character on anyone else's, either. I don't care what folks say about the odds against something happening. Nothing is impossible, only improbable.

[Logan Howlett]

Its a grand application and my only caveat would have been with Cypher's player's opinion on the matter. As he has helpfuly commented with no grievances on the issue then i have none either - tis a thumbs up from me.

[Samantha Carter]

There is one small issue. Being able to control machines by actually becoming part of their code only works with machines that have a code to begin with. When you speak of machines that she is able to "enter" so to speak, could you be a little more specific as to what kinds. Possibly, she has just found herself aware of this particular power and is still working out the kinks. Not all machines should be included within this power. I think that would open up for a bit more realism.

Other than that, it looks great and can't wait to RP with you with Raven. ;)

[Max Meyers]

All machines weren't intended to be included -- only machines that actually have code involved, so just stuff with computer chips. Clearly, this wouldn't work with, like, a grain thresher or something. So she doesn't have sweet grain threshing skills. But yeah! I'll go clarify her powers a bit. (I'm also going to add to her personality a little -- I always forget to add, for some reason, that she's a giant video game/comic book nerd. FYI when paragraphs appear!)

I might actually do something slightly different with her power, specifically the code one. Would it be okay if she could translate her entire self into code, not leaving a body behind? It wouldn't be terribly realistic (unless you get crazy with certain subatomic philosophies, which are more boring than they sound) but I've done it on games before and I like the effect. It does give her a lot more mobility and makes her harder to hurt as a character, but I'm pretty good about not godmodding or making characters unplayable powerful. I'll make the switch for now and if it's not okay, I'll switch it back.

[Samantha Carter]

Well, I would say that if you did that, there should be a very serious consequence or weakness to balance out the character. Something drastic that would deter her from doing that at most times unless it is absolutely necessary kind of thing.

[Max Meyers]

Hrm... well, it's not a very offensive facet of her power, but I edited above. See what you think. The thing is that she wouldn't use it offensively except under extreme duress; she's not stupid or reckless, and she's well aware of how vulnerable she is in code form. It's not as if she would (or could) just upload herself to the X-network and jump out smiling. It's something she'd do at home, to work faster. She's arguably just as vulnerable as with her body left behind, since she could already travel farther than just what she's in contact with. Dunno.

[Samantha Carter]

**Approved**

We have enough leaders in the Brotherhood, so I put her as a student. This doesn't necessarily mean she's a student, but doesn't have the authority of a leader yet.

[Max Meyers]

Awesome possum! It was an age thing, I wasn't sure. Thanks!