Name: Pope Clementine Henderson
Alias: Blastmaster
Age: 9
Alignment: Villain
Loyalty: Independent
Appearance: Pope is slightly shorter than it is average for his age and posessing of a fairly developed (again, for his tender years) physique that he owes to his active, on-the-move lifestyle along with proper and plentiful nutrition. His almost perpetually smiling face is wide and round and ruddy, with a small gap between his front teeth, a slightly upturned nose and dimpled cheeks, amiable and friendly-looking. His ears are small and pressed close to his head and his striking, bright green eyes are somewhat close-set and situated quite deep beneath his prominent brow. His hair is dark blond in coloration, worn short and combed to the left - or sometimes to the right. You never know with this zany guy, he just keeps you guessing! One of the more notable and prominent features of Pope's appearance is his burn scars, received in the Behemoth's rampage, which he survived - and survived with such minor damage, at that - through a mixture of incredible heroism on the part of the men participating in the evacuation effort and sheer luck. Largely superficial after a lenghty period spent recuperating, they do not impair him much, nor are they incredibly disfiguring. For the most part, in fact, they only remind of themselves through the discoloration of flesh on his face and body, although his legs and chest suffered significantly more damage, with thick and leathery scarred skin marring his body in unpleasant ways that somewhat limit his range of movement due to contractures and other issues. Therefore, Pope tends to move around in small, quick paces and maintain a peculiarly rigid, straight-backed posture to avoid discomfort. His costume consists of an extremely formal attire of a musical conductor complete with a ridiculously outdated claw-hammer coat and a bowtie and a baton, accompanied by a simple and tasteful domino mask that covers his eyes with dark and durable lenses. It doesn't help at all, but it's customary.
History: Pope was born and raised in relative comfort, in a family of a much-better-than-average kind of middle class, by singularly irresponsible parents who, while genuinely caring about his well-being, were themselves not very competent and knowledgeable of the ins-and-outs of parenting. The first pancake always comes out lumpy, and as such, his doting parents considered the state of contentment and happiness to be a sign of a job well done. When he was upset or troubled, enough money and kind words were thrown at the problem to make it go away, after which they ceased to care until the next bout of crying. Pope was growing up as a somewhat unempathetic child, readily capable of throwing rocks at animals for fun or resorting to violence when confronted by his peers, hardly discriminating between girls and boys as well - brief periods of strictness and exceedingly mild punishments meted out by his parents did nothing to alleviate these issues, or really any issues at all. Nevertheless, his education went on in a satisfactory manner, and that's what matters, right? By the current time, not a lot of things changed, except for his daily schedule, which got a lot looser. A couple months into fifth grade, Pope's city fell victim to the Behemoth. It was not a whole lot of fun. By the virtue of being situated in the part of city distant from the place where the rampage began, he and most of his school survived the initial devastation and proceeded to attempt to evacuate in a timely manner in compliance with the brave men and women organizing the rescue efforts. Pope triggered from the sheer pants-wetting terror after witnessing the monstrous figure rampaging through the downtown release a horrifying blastwave that rolled towards him as if in slow motion, tearing through the buildings in its path as if they were made of straw and rising up a wave of deadly heat and dust in its wake. The triggering was accompanied by a directed explosion manifested by his shard, powerful enough to ease the damages the blastwave would've otherwise inflicted at him. He did not perish, luckily, but was still half-buried in the rubble and concussed severely to the point of unconsciousness. Upon awakening again after a long, long while and freeing himself, Pope, emaciated and hurt, straggled around in search of parents or any other familiar or helpful faced, but was instead found and conscripted by a marauding gathering that emerged from the devastation in order to survive in the nigh-postapocalyptic landscape left in Behemoth's wake, led by several now-inconsequential parahumans. Pope rolled with it for the while that it took for him to recuperate (however poorly), come to understand his capabilities and comprehend that the marauding gathering in question was less than savory in its methods and intentions - and worse, that they were stifling his own potential. After all, getting superpowers and becoming famous is a dream that a lot of children across the world share. After making an explosive and dramatic exit, Pope left for greener, yet undevastated pastures as a free agent - the thought of applying for the Wards had never even occured to him, or if it did, it was stifled and unconsciously supressed for the fear of being arrested and hated for the criminal activity in the aftermath of Behemoth's assault or being derided and mocked for his injuries and the ugly nature of his power. This entire string of events occured roughly a year and a half ago. Since then Blastmaster developed a villainous persona, found a tailor, made some connections, a certain name for himself - including participating in an Endbringer fight in a quite impressive fashion - and never looked back. It's a whole barrel of fun.
Motivations: Blastmaster mostly does what he does for attention and for the feeling of personal empowerment that money, publicity and exploding things provides. Alongside with these is, perhaps, a desire for romantic and heroic adventure of which every child dreams at a certain point in their lives. With enough effort, he believes, the world will conform and let him shine! He hardly bears any active ill thought towards other people though - not ill thought complicated by murderous intent, anyways - and thusly desperately avoids inflicting death and great injury outside of truly exceptional circumstances. When he forgets himself, however, and in the course of a tantrum or due to misbehavior *really* hurts a man, and when and if he finds out about it, he is inconsolable, often even reduced to tears, depressed for as long as it takes for his mind to distract itself by something more welcome.
Sexuality: He feels a certain ill-understood tingle when seeing a pretty girl - but not much beyond that.
Likes: - Classical Music (pretending to know classical music, anyway).
- Air and ice hockey
- Animals of all kinds
- Acknowledgment, however mocking and insincere it might be
Dislikes: - Cars (some sort of imaginary smell only he feels causes him to vomit during rides quite often)
- Sandals and any other footwear that leaves the feet open
- Phonecalls that last longer than a minute
- Public bathrooms
Derangement: Due to his power naturally bearing a lot of intended and unintended collateral damage with it, and due to his upbringing and a slight degree of trauma inflicted unto him during and after the Behemoth's attack, Blastmaster developed a certain way of psychologically distancing himself from the short- and long-term horrors his abilities inflict on people. Whenever fighting, or otherwise utilising his powers, he focuses himself entirely on creating the maximally harmonic, appealing and beautiful explosions and series of such, a mockery of a conductor organising an orchestra. He calls out his musical motions, gestures wildly and makes things go up in flames and rubble without feeling particularly guilty about it. It is actually a fair bit more difficult for him on a psychological level to summon and effectively utilize his abilities outside of his costume or without assuming his persona.
Skills: He is quite knowledgeable on the topic of completely mundane bombs and explosives, their history and the theoreticals of their use and their effects. He knows roughly how to act in order to stay unharmed when an adult person is right up his grill and displays hostile intent - mostly through experience. He knows the basic procedures of first aid and emergency medical care. He also posesses a halfway decent singing voice, but almost no training. He knows how to sew and stitch, and does that fairly well.
Classification: Blaster 9+/Thinker 2
Details: Thinker - Explosive Intuition. Blastmaster posesses an uncanny innate knack for manifesting his power in the exact ways he envisions, and doing so quickly and expediently. By roughly comparing the strength of the explosion he generates with the power of it's real-life equivalent, and by nominating the qualities of the explosion, such as the direction, rough amount of heat and force and other factors, Blastmaster can tailor his detonations to his exact preferences. Accurate, expanding concussive waves with comparatively little heat behind them, instantaneous series of resonating, perfectly timed explosions at close range, detonations directed strictly down the hallway to make sure the shockwave does not reflect off of the walls - as long as it is comparatively simple to imagine, Blastmaster can make it happen, instead of being limited only by a single form of detonation.
Blaster - Master Exploder. Blastmaster is a mushroom-cloud laying motherfucker. He is the Guns of Navarone. Whenever the need arises and tempers flare, he's Superfly TNT, he's a goddamn Daisycutter - alright, that one sounds bad.
Blastmaster's chief ability is to create custom-tailored explosions at will. He can manifest them anywhere within his line of sight, and also from any point of his body - even those that he does not see. The explosions range in power from that of a rough equivalent of 1 kg of TNT to that of Tsar Bomba - or perhaps even beyond that, though with obvious and clear complications. The blasts do not require any outside material or assistance to happen - explosion simply *happens* in the localized point in space, instantly and often unexpectedly, it's imminent arrival signalled only by a small flash of a white-hot spark a moment before hell is unleashed. The power also manifests in a secondary, "passive" fashion, that contributes to his survivability and makes him immune to the terrible effects of his own power, which he often manifests at point-blank range. Whenever his body is affected by a harmful physical force beyond a certain threshold - such as the shockwave of one of his explosions, or a bullet right after connecting with his body - his power manifests half-unconsciously in order to create a tightly localized and extremely precise explosion of equivalent force that negates what might've otherwise been a suicide by his own explosion. This is mostly a manifestation of Manton's effect, and of the shard's self-preserving programming - Blastmaster is incapable of creating explosions of even remotely similar precision and tightness on his own under usual circumstances. His level of control, however, is enough to warrant a low Mover rating - by creating powerful directed explosions he can, for example, propel himself into the sky and through the air, cushioning his fall at the point of landing with another directed explosion. Overall, the level of control Blastmaster has is enough to concuss and deafen a group of men in a tight corridor with a directed explosion without killing them via the rebounding shockwave or to blow a man-sized hole in a wall of a building without collapsing the wall in question or to fairly precisely open a fissure in earth via a downwards-directed shock, but not nearly enough to say, blow a weapon out of a man's hands without breaking or mutilating them in process.
Limitations: Collateral and lack of precision, plain and simple. If Blastmaster wants to really let loose, he risks almost guaranteedly killing or crippling great numbers of bystanders and causing millions of dollars of damage to infrastructure - and even when he controls himself, there's simply no guessing just how sensitive any given man would be to tanking an explosion with his face. Therefore, more often than not Blastmaster plays it safe when civilians are nearby or evacuates them from the zone of hostilities through gentle persuasion and series of weak and dispersed shockwaves, if the circumstances allow. Additionally and obviously, due to Manton's limit, he cannot create an explosion directly inside of someone's body. Oh yeah, and the last big thing! Due to the degree of control and precision required by the shard, Blastmaster can only create explosions at range once per second, or roughly around that - which means that when engaging an opponent at a long range he often has to decide between going big and efficient or not annihilating the city block and wasting valuable time on small detonations. This vexes him to no end - and forces him to be creative with the explosions he produces from his body in order to compensate.
Equipment: Being a semi-successful evildoer and ruffian, Blastmaster has some means to alleviate the various issues that arise from being a minor in a world full of adults. First of all, through actions of questionable legality, he have obtained a legal guardian that is in on the whole supervillain gig and is okay with providing Blastmaster with a civilian cover and settling many of the life's more boorish and mundane matters that'd otherwise require a lot of attention and dangerous and bothersome effort on his side - all in return for money and lack of explosive retaliation. Essentially, a henchman of considerable competence. His civilian identity has a trust fund, is homeschooled, lives in relative comfort and travels quite often. Similarly, Blastmaster has a competent and relatively loyal lawyer on speed dial.
To move onto the more personal equipment - Blastmaster's costume is both stylish and practical, being made out of a very comfortable and durable material that is also almost completely water- and stain-proof. It is quite expensive, but no price is too great for comfort. Particularly, it is quite warm and heavily insulated from cold, in order to allow him to move through the sky at high altitudes for somewhat respectable amounts of time. Similarly, in a stylish black sacvoyage he almost always carries, Blastmaster has two breathing masks and air tanks to facilitate comfortable breathing at great heights and in clouds of dust and smoke, alongside various snacks and personal affects of little importance. His conductor's baton is a veritable marvel of un-powered engineering and may unfold in a hefty club that doubles as a high-powered taser, not that he requires to use it often.
