John “Grit” Crane
⫸ B A S I C I N F O R M A T I O N ⫷
▼ | S T A T S : |▸ B I R T H N A M E : | John Crane
▸ N I C K N A M E / A L I A S : | Grit
▸ G E N D E R : | Male
▸ A G E : | Eighteen
▸ H E I G H T : | 6’4”
▸ W E I G H T : | 220 lbs
▸ E T H N I C I T Y : | European. Irish and English, mainly. Little bit of Native American in there too.
▸ Y E A R : |
Freshman
▼
| P H Y S I C A L D E S C R I P T I O N : |John Crane is a tall, beefy guy who looks like he’s from the part of Oklahoma where recreational boulder throwing is everyone’s sport of choice. He has broad, massive shoulders and thick pecs. His chest is barrelled and his arms are thick. He’s got a thick core that is poorly-defined and legs like tree trunks. His arms are long and end in big baseball mitt hands that look like they belong on a street fighter character. He walks In general, you could call John a big guy. He’s decently hairy as well, with a good amount of curly hair on his chest and arms. On the bottom of his right shoulder is something that looks like a brand in the relative shape of a fist.
John’s head is roughly rectangular, not narrowing much from the top of his skull to the bottom. He has messy blonde hair that tends to fall curtain-like down the sides of his head. He has a thick, somewhat messy blonde beard on his face. His lips are slim and he has an angular nose. John’s eyes are a light grey and are set a little far apart. He has thick dark brown eyebrows that sit just above his eyes and make him look very cross whenever he gets upset. His ears are average-sized and stick out a little bit from his head.
John’s fashion sense is very rustic and country like. He wears a lot of flannels and plaid shirts. If it’s warm, he’ll wear a plain-color tee shirt. He wears pretty much exclusively blue jeans and a pair of brown leather Timberland boots. He wears a thick brown leather belt as well with a large silver buckle. He’ll wear a grey sweatsuit when he’s working out.
▼ | P E R S O N A L I T Y : | John is a quiet, genuinely good natured guy, the kind of gentleman who’s associated with the Midwest. He’s well-mannered and proper-acting to the point where he seems like he has a stick up his ass constantly. He’s kind and respectful when you first meet him, offering a firm handshake and a gracious smile. He’s been trained to respect his elders, open doors for women, help elderly people across the street, etc. Externally, he looks like a total do-gooder.
He’s incredibly defensive and, if anything, brave, the kind of guy who’s the first person to step up to defend a friend or protect someone. He acts this way mostly because he always has and has no reason to change, but deep down he’s that kind of guy who feels responsible for the wellbeing of those around him. If someone got hurt when he was around, he would feel responsible for their pain, so he’s become a universal shield of sorts. Strongly loyal, he will act selflessly to defend others. It’s easy to get in a fight with John, but hard to convince people he started it.
Despite his gentlemanly nature, John is very prideful of himself and his resolve. His pride is easily hurt, especially if he doesn’t get recognition for being helpful or fails to help someone. He cannot stand being beaten and thus constantly trains to be stronger. He claims this is because he wants to be sure that he can protect others, but really it’s because he doesn’t want to lose. He wants a reputation of being the strongest, most resolute meta around and the only way to keep that reputation in his eyes is to train constantly. This training mentality one applied to football, then to law enforcement, and now it’s more of just a “I need to protect myself and the people around me.” John is super praise-driven as well. He loves getting recognized for doing something good more than he likes actually doing something good. Compliments greatly uplift him and pepping him up is really easy to do if you compliment him enough.
Miscellaneous other stuff: Politically, John tends to lean conservative, though he’s more center-right than full-on fundamentalist. He’s fairly religious and is a big proponent of the government. He’s of roughly average intellect, getting mostly Bs in high school, with the occasional A or C. He liked history a lot and enjoys it still today. His primary hobbies include exercising, hiking, and hunting. He likes country music and rock, mostly classic but some new stuff as well. He has only recently started playing video games but has gotten good at them due to his train hard to never lose mentality. He mains Guile in Street Fighter and switches between Ganondorf and Marth in Smash. He loves westerns, his favorites being Rio Bravo and the original True Grit (where he got his nickname from). He is an extrovert.
▼ | B A C K S T O R Y : | John Crane was born in northeastern Oklahoma, on the foothills of the Ozark mountains. He grew up the older of two boys in a small town. His father was a state trooper, a hard-working hard-ass former marine who ran a tight ship and taught his boys strictly. He rarely beat them, but he was a stern and hard-to-please man who expected the best out of his children. John’s mother stayed at home and was more or less a nervous wreck. She was kind and gentle, but had no patience for the fighting of two boys and was very meta-phobic. Knowing her son was one of *those* chilled her to no end, and she essentially hated her son.
Until the age of eighteen, John went to a christian academy in his town. Here, the graces of a southern gentleman were beaten into him quite literally at times. At the age of eleven, John began to play football in a local Pop Warner league. He played running back at first, and became praised for his resolve and ability to get up no matter how hard he was hit. At school, he was looked up to by many students, and commonly got in fights with bullies. This wasn’t because anyone was dumb enough to bully him, of course, but because kids would hide behind him for protection. The first evidence of John’s power occurred when a bully got in a fight with him and tried to hit him with a rock. He shoved John to the ground, busting his knee, and then hit him in the face with a piece of concrete. A few moments later, John rose to his feet, completely unharmed, and punched the bully in the face. This wasn’t looked at too suspiciously, and most kids forgot about it, but after that day nobody tried to mess with him much.
In high school, John became a linebacker on the football team. He was one of the best players in the state, an incredibly hard worker who never went down without a fight. His power unknowingly made him nigh-unbreakable on the football field, and he often took hits that should have kept a normal man on the ground completely unphased. He was all-state two years in a row, and planned on using his talent to go to University of Texas and earn a degree in criminal justice. In the summer from the time he was sixteen, between training sessions for football, John worked as a volunteer firefighter to build his resume and help serve the community.
When John turned eighteen, just as he was about to leave for college, he was selected to go to The Promise. This was a big letdown to him, as it meant that he couldn’t play football, but he left for the spaceship with hopes that its training would help him serve the world and do some good.
⫸ P O W E R I N F O R M A T I O N ⫷
▼ | P O W E R C L A S S I F I C A T I O N : | Super System, Biological
▼ | P O W E R D E S C R I P T I O N : | True Grit: John’s power is the embodiment of grit, the resolve and persistence to keep fighting on no matter what. Essentially, his power gives him the ability to survive any attack unharmed so long as he can tolerate its effects. This power is a little hard to explain, so I’ll give an example. Say Grit is fighting an opponent who is very strong, and said opponent punches him in the gut. Grit takes the hit at first like any normal person would, feeling the force and pain of being punched. If he can tolerate that pain, however, and keep fighting, the wound sustained as well as all of its effects (pain, trauma, etc) are instantly repaired and Grit’s body is as if he had never been damaged. If Grit gets hit in that same example, feels the force of the hit and the pain, and cannot keep fighting (say the pain is too bad to tolerate), the wound is not healed and he takes just as much damage as a normal human would from that hit. This selective immunity applies to any kind of attack, from a punch to a gun to fire to electricity. If John can weather the initial pain of the strike, his body heals near-instantaneously.
Because he is on the Promise, Grit’s ability isn’t quite as effective as normal. His wounds normally heal instantly, but power dampening has caused his wounds to take a second or two to heal fully, making him a decent bit weaker. He also still feels some residual pain from attacks after his power kicks in, which usually doesn’t happen when he’s at full strength.
Veteran’s Resolve: Grit’s second ability is an offshoot of the first and in the confines of this RP will be more-or-less useless. Grit’s second ability passively increases his strength, endurance, and pain tolerance the more fights he gets into. After every fight, he gains just a liiiittle bit of strength and durability from this ability that is permanently added to him. In the short run, this will be completely unnoticeable, and right now this only gives him slightly above-average strength and endurance, the kind that any normal human could simply get from rigorous exercise. In, like, thirty or forty years, the power will have stacked up enough that he could be supernaturally strong, durable, and tolerant, but right now he hasn’t had enough time for the power to accrue in any way that would make him superhuman. This part of the power also will cause his aging to slow down dramatically once he hits about the age of forty, so after that point he essentially will not age. Once again, not something we’ll have to deal with in this rp, but good info to know in-general.
▼ | L I M I T S | W E A K N E S S E S : | Due to how his power is structured to heal him as he sustains damage, Grit excels against fights with opponents who rely on sustained damage. They essentially do nothing to him, as the moment Grit heals from one wound he can take another easily, as if it were a first strike. This does not help Grit, however, against strong opponents who are capable of out-muscling him. If Grit is hit hard enough to make him unable to fight, he doesn’t heal. So a single super-powerful hit to somewhere vulnerable, especially the head, will take Grit down in a single hit. His head is his primary weak spot, as if Grit is hit in the head and loses consciousness, even if it’s only for a few seconds, his power does not kick in at all. It’s a really all-or-nothing kind of thing.
Additionally, Grit’s adrenal glands have been altered to produce a slightly mutated version of adrenaline. This altered hormone doesn’t fit quite right into the adrenaline receptors on nerve cells in Grit’s body, causing them to be less effective than the adrenaline of a normal person. In layman’s terms, it means that Grit doesn’t benefit nearly as much from the pain-dampening effects of the fight or flight response. If a normal person gets hit when they’re really scared or excited, the adrenaline pumping through their body causes their brain to register their pain as being less intense or not present at all. Oftentimes people whose fight or flight responses have kicked in will ignore the pain of bullet or stab wounds completely because they’re focusing on getting away. Grit doesn’t get that effect nearly as much as normal people do, causing his body to register more pain than a normal person would when he’s under stress. This might be a neutral effect or even a benefit to some people, but because Grit’s power is based on him being able to tolerate pain and fight through it, it acts as a decent weakness.
Grit’s powers also rely on Grit having the willpower to get back up and keep fighting when in pain. There is a heavy mental influence there, so any kind of psychological tricks that can be used to lower Grit’s morale or break his willpower will physically weaken his ability. This is most obvious with telepathic metas, who can literally mess with his brain to make him think he cannot keep fighting, but it also applies to psychological effects caused by intimidation or psychological warfare. Basically, if you make Grit think he can’t win, he will lose. He has no resistance whatsoever to psychic attacks, so telepathic/psionic metas absolutely shit on him.
