Name: Joseph Powell Friesen (more commonly uses his codename, Prior -- others would not know his real name).
Gender: Male
Age: 25
Race: Contractor
Appearance: Prior has longer, sandy blond hair that he wears loosely swept to one side. He has extremely fair skin, a side effect of his British heritage, and cold grey eyes that make one feel as if he is looking through them. He generally wears a black coat over a white button-up shirt, carrying a folded miniature Welsh flag in the jacket's breast pocket. In addition, he wears khaki pants with a black leather belt, to which he has attached a holster to hold his favorite deck of playing cards.
Powers: In short, Prior has the ability to manipulate probabilities. While he does not have full control over probabilities (he cannot, for example, make a 0% chance 100%), but he can make events more or less likely within a certain range. The smaller-scale the event, the larger this range; for example, he can increase the probability of an earthquake occurring across the entire west coast of America far less than he can increase the probability of someone missing their gunshot. In addition, he has commented that he "cannot make any probability 100%", and later elaborated that the highest he can make a probability is 99.8% likelihood of occurring. This means that there is always, no matter how small, a chance that his power simply will not work. In these situations, though, he still must pay his renumeration, as he did technically activate his power.
Renumeration: For every use of his powers, Prior has to shuffle a deck of cards ten times. Because of this, he carries a deck of cards in a holster on his belt. The deck of cards can be any deck; it just has to contain fifty-two objects measuring 2.5 by 3.5 inches in area with the fifty-two patterns seen within a standard deck of cards. Because of this limit, Prior has mixed twelve weighted throwing cards in the deck.
Skills and Abilities: Even without his power, Prior has tremendous aim with his throwing cards, using them as a backup weapon when he does not have time to pay his Renumeration. In addition, Prior has been trained, to an extent, in hand-to-hand combat, but he falls short when compared to many of those who specialize in the art. Finally, though he detests using them, Prior is very skilled in the use of firearms, specifically smaller weapons such as handguns and revolvers.
Weapons and Equipment: As previously mentioned, Prior carries weighted throwing cards, with which he has been shown having excellent aim without his powers. He is capable of using his powers to enhance his aim with these cards to near godlike levels. In addition, his jacket has been reinforced with kevlar, though it is not completely bulletproof due to it being primarily cloth.
Personality: Quiet and distant, Prior is known for being a man of extremely few words. Rarely giving more than the minimum amount of words required to logically answer a question, his silence is often described as "eerie" by those around him. To others, he seems generally unsettling and creepy, and people may tend to avoid him because of this. In his mind, however, Prior is intelligent and calculating, regularly determining the cause and effect of what to do in any situation. He is a brilliant tactician when it is asked of him, though his refusal to speak or involve himself in unnecessary social situations renders this all but useless.
History: Prior was born Joseph Powell Friesen in Melbourne, Australia, fifteen years before the appearance of the Gates. His father was a semi-successful Australian entrepreneur, while his mother was a Welsh socialite from a very wealthy family. His mother's family, the Powells, was known for having made their money in amoral ways, and being generally corrupt. However, from a young age, it was very apparent that Joseph would be the one to clean up the Powell's act, regularly being praised for his large heart and giving spirit.
Then the Gates appeared.
One of the first to be affected by the Gates, Joseph was turned into a Contractor over the course of the twenty-four hours immediately following the Gates' appearance. He began to become quieter, colder, and more reserved, eventually becoming a recluse and rarely leaving his room. His parents became concerned about him, and eventually contacted a psychologist to speak to him. It was around this time that the existence of Contractors became known to the world, and so the psychologist immediately deduced Joseph's nature when he entered the boy's room and saw objects organized perfectly in places no human could reach, such as a Mona Lisa made entirely of thumbtacks on Joseph's ceiling. The psychologist revealed to Joseph's parents that their son was a contractor and, within two days, Joseph was abducted by the Australian government and made an agent of ASIS.
In ASIS, Joseph was given the code-name "Zeroth", a term that refers to an object in a list that comes before that list's first object. He was given this name because he was made a Contractor before any of ASIS's existing hired Contractors, though was hired second. Eventually, for unknown reasons, he left ASIS and took the codename "Prior", moving to Japan immediately afterwards. He since has began fleeing from the group that is hunting the Contractors while also trying to discover what he can about the Gates.
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