Todd Tolensky.
Toad.
X-Men: Evolution.
Canon.
17YRSO.
Factionless.
Appearance: Kinda greasy-lookin'. His spine is curved, making it easier to crouch longer than the average person. His gait is bow-legged and hunched while walking; on four legs, hopping, he kind of flails a bit. He has a noticeable Brooklyn accent, though some of his colloquialisms seem as if they've been borrowed from television or comic book characters (and,
oh, they have been).
Personality: About as slimy as his abilities from the outside, Toad is a twerp and if there's anything he enjoys more than annoying other people, it's pick-pocketing. A veteran opportunist, he's in it to
win it scrape by and make some profit for his own damn self. There's some genuine depth and hurting underneath; he struggles with a clusterfuck of abandonment issues and lacks self-esteem entirely, but his fake-it-til-you-make-it outlook does a fantastic job of covering it.
Tolensky's surprisingly loyal, even submissive and passive towards what he's often aware is abuse if just for the sake of receiving some sort of affection from someone. He purposely belies his intelligence, despite being a very talented mechanic and more intuitive than one would assume--he's a good in-field thinker, logical but emotionally aware. But mostly, he just goes out of his way to annoy people.
Abilities: (Wiki article?
Wiki article.), Thievery, some combat, Mechanical Engineering & Programming, annoying OP daughters of Magneto
Equipment: Think Ray Park's costume for the first X-Men movie, spandex hides X-gene from most scanners, shin guards are titanium alloy
Background: Born in to a poor couple in NYC, with a long list of "birth defects", Todd could have never had it easy growing up. His father split as soon as the nurse handed him a jaundiced, rail-thin baby with bugging eyes, and Mama didn't stick around much longer either--at age five the boy was lost to the system. Bounced from foster home to foster home and picked on mercilessly for his appearance by his peers, Tolensky's personality and grades suffered for it.
After failing middle school, he was approached my Raven Darkholme--Mystique--and was recruited as the Brotherhood of Bayville's first boarder, only somewhat non-consensually
see footnote. Of course, Mystique trained him when she could, but he was never all that good at fighting and had been better suited for stealth ops. And since Pietro joined two weeks after him (who could run into a S.H.I.E.L.D. base, steal their files and release their incarcerates, poke out Fury's other eye, and then run back out again all in the span of a few seconds) the Toad very quickly became renown as the Most Useless Member of the Brotherhood Boys.
After the spiel with mutants being outed to the public by that super-scary douchebag, Mags, who Todd happened to work for at the time, and then the whole Apocalypse thing, the Brotherhood found themselves not arguing as much with the X-Men--heck, even working with them more often--and Todd drifted away from his teammates.
One and a half years later finds the him more of a gadgeteer genius than he'd already been. An unattractive highschool dropout with no real aspirations and quite a few people who disliked him, Todd was looking for a way to escape; when some old hobo popped out of nowhere during a very dark moment in his life, told him the answer was in the box, and then proceeded to fuck off to another dimension, the teenager wents nuts trying to decipher what ancient proverb he'd been dealt.
Some 200 overcomplicated, failed attempts at creating a portal device using Forge's old tech and he figures it out. It's literally just a goddamn box. Hell's bells.
(Footnote:
Mystique is a scary lady.)
