MASK OR MENACE APP

[runningstart]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Trace
AGE: 28
JOURNAL: no personal journal!
IM / EMAIL: none / manicalpha@gmail.com
PLURK: gonewithouta
RETURNING: nope!

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Wally West / Kid Flash
CHARACTER AGE: 15
SERIES: Young Justice
CHRONOLOGY: Season 1, Episode 12 ("Homefront")
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: With either of his castmates if at all possible! Or y'know wherever, I'm cool with whatever happens.

BACKGROUND:

Kid Flash Wikia page

Wally West is from a world where superheroes are commonplace. It's a lot like our world, but the Justice League, a group of nationally-recognized heroes, is a steady fixture that operates independently of the government and is checked only by itself. Totally not a recipe for disaster, but hey, they're heroes! Of course they're trusted.

So aliens, people with remarkable abilities (generally referred to as meta-humans), gods and sorcerers are...not commonplace, but not unheard of. Many of them are heroes. Some of them are villains. Some of them are politicians right smack in the public eye, but positioned so that removing them from power forcefully would be considered an act of war, it's complicated.

Either way, heroes are both sort of adopted by their hometowns and by the countries they live in. It's almost like having a mascot, in some cases. One town in Kansas called Central City has its own hero that it loves. Barry Allen, who goes by the Flash, is just the nicest, most down-to-earth guy you'd ever meet. He is adored by millions, is a founding member of the Justice League, one of the most famous heroes in North America and worshiped by children of all ages.

Including his nephew, Wally West.

Eventually Wally finds out that the dude his Aunt Iris married is the Flash, and he begs him to take Wally on as his sidekick. Other heroes have sidekicks, even Batman, so why can't the Flash? But the Flash is adamant, no sidekicks, he doesn't want the responsibility.

Naturally, Wally does not want to take that lying down, so he uses his dumb little middle school chemistry set and BLOWS HIS DUMB ASS UP to try and recreate the experiment that gave his uncle powers after stumbling on Barry's notes about how it happened to him. He lands himself in the hospital and gives Barry an intense guilt complex, but a few weeks later he develops super speed so that makes it okay, right? Totally. NO.

Wally immediately goes to show off his newfound powers to his uncle and once again begs to be his sidekick. Barry, being a relatively smart man, can see the disaster brewing on the horizon if he were to tell Wally no and reluctantly agrees only if Wally swears to do whatever Barry tells him. That probably does not last long, but they form a tenuous partnership that lasts a few years. Wally gets to meet all kinds of awesome people, learns how to control his powers and how to be a hero, makes friends with Speedy and Aqualad and ROBIN how cool is that and generally mixes well with the superhero crowd on account of him being obnoxious and cute.

Everything's going good until Speedy throws a tanty, and then Robin and Wally peer pressure Aqualad into doing a side mission because they got benched by their mentors. They go hit up a lab, find out it's corrupt, tear that shit down and rescue their new friend, Superboy. The adults decide that if the kids are gonna be dumb they might as well be dumb with adult supervision and say "okay fine you can have a team, also here is your token girl" and Miss Martian joins up. Thus is born Young Justice.

Artemis joins up later because all the kids are dumb (except Aqualad) and they need assistance, God help them. The team does all kinds of cool stuff together and they are a team and they are teenagers and the drama is incredible, forever and ever, amen.


PERSONALITY:

Wow, Kid Flash. Honestly I don't know why this punk has friends.

Nah, that's not true. Wally is pretty obnoxious, yeah, but half the time it's in that cute way that makes you want to punch him and then squish his face. He's an only child and kind of the darling of the family so he's a bit spoiled when it comes to attention and being entertained, and boy does that show. Sure, his impatience and penchant for becoming easily bored might be because he's a speedster or it could be because he's a teenager; either way, he does not tolerate things that agitate him.

Rather, he's very outspoken about his opinions. He will not keep quiet when it comes to things he feels strongly about (except maybe to impress a girl but even that only goes so far) and he doesn't really do the whole deception thing. Wally is very much a case of "what you see is what you get." He's lacking a lot of the angsty background that many heroes have and as a result is kind of sheltered and naive about things, but growing up in such a healthy and supportive environment has given him boatloads of confidence (maybe a little too much).

That's not to say Wally is an uncomplicated person. Sure, blowing himself up to try and be like the Flash was probably 70% "dumb kid," but the other 30% was Wally's desperate desire to be a hero, like his uncle. There's something about Wally that just thrums with kindness. Even if he's got attitude and rocks the teenage selfishness like a lot of kids his age, Wally just genuinely wants to help people, keep the ones he cares about safe and be someone that kids can look up to. When he talks to people he's sincere, he's honest with his desire to do good and it shows in how he speaks, how he presents himself. He's a good kid, even a bit of a caretaker, down-to-earth in a way similar to Barry if not exactly like it.

Wally's also got his own insecurities to struggle with. When he first performed the experiment to give himself powers, Wally probably wasn't considering the long-term repercussions that would come with being another link in the Flash Legacy chain. Due to the nature of the experiment, how it wasn't as violent as either Barry's or Jay's, Wally's powers are subdued compared to the previous Flash. His top speed yo-yos around the speed of sound, which is incredible but nowhere near Barry's record or even Jay's in his prime. He can't do many of the things his uncle can do, and is getting to the point where he's wondering if he ever will. He also struggles with the memory of Barry being so reluctant to take him on as a partner, and the idea of taking up the mantle of the Flash after Barry retires is an intimidating one when he doesn't even compare in terms of ability.

Still, Wally doesn't let it get him down. No really, he refuses to let it get him down. Things that really hit home, hit him right in the heart, he prefers to avoid with jokes. Humor is a tool that Wally wields with alarming frequency, from defusing volatile situations to deflecting uncomfortable conversational topics. He doesn't mind talking about someone else's deep, dark secrets, but the second someone tries to scratch his back? He's not down with it. The boy's obvious about his avoidance, but doesn't apologize for it so that's probably refreshing...ish.


POWER:

SUPER SPEED. And all that it entails.

Wally, of course, can run very fast. His max speed isn't a set number, but hovers around 760 MPH on average. He can manipulate any part of his body at that speed, so sometimes he uses his powers to displace wind and create cyclones. He also uses his speed to vault himself incredible distances, deliver blows like a human cannonball- basically anything that involves using velocity as a tool, Wally does.

His super speed also occurs on a molecular level, though not nearly to the extent it does for Barry. Wally can vibrate his molecules at different frequencies, though if he tries to do anything with it (IE pass through solid objects, like Barry can) he risks very serious injury to himself.

He also has a hyper-accelerated metabolism. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, metabolizing so quickly means he also heals remarkably fast. Cuts that take days to heal on a regular human take minutes. Broken bones that take months? A few weeks. It also means that any poisons, venoms or chemicals that enter his bloodstream race through it pretty quickly. A sedative that knocks out a grown man for a day might only keep Wally under for an hour.

The downside to that is Wally has to consume enormous amounts of food just to stay functional. He can still move around as a regular human when he's hungry, but he can't access any powers and the feeling of starving to death is a little distracting and all. He never feels full. No literally, ever since getting his powers Wally spends a lot of his time eating and he never feels sated, it's kind of sad.


〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉

COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

Ohhhh dude, this is so awesome! I've always wanted to be a super hero! I've especially always wanted to be kidnapped and conscripted into being a super hero instead of doing it myself. This is my dream. I'm living my dream.

[A pause to allow any listeners to recover from the deluge of sarcasm.]

No but seriously. I'm all for helping people and the free everything is a perk, but really? The tats, the pledge? We can't opt-out of this entire program or anything? Because I'm cool with just, y'know, going back home and being a normal kid. Normalcy is the sweet nectar of life. [More like he's already doing the hero gig elsewhere and he didn't sign up for this trans-dimensional moonlighting BS. HE HAS AN ESSAY DUE. Also his friends could be in danger and stuff.]


LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

Wally can count on one hand the amount of times he's done something that he actually regrets. Sure, there were plenty of instances where he would do something, the something would blow up in his face and he would think, "maybe shouldn't have done that," to himself as he ran from danger or received a lecture or got his arm splinted. That happens a lot, but the feeling of regret doesn't really come into play. Wally likes to look at his mistakes as learning experiences so that instead of feeling regret, he's proud of himself for having discovered exactly what not to do in a particular situation.

It's a science thing. Learn just as much from your failures as from success.

So yeah, regret doesn't often come into play for Wally West. He also likes to think that makes him a more likable person, although how true that is would be purely objective, of course. So long as whoever is being asked says something nice about him. If they say his lack of remorse for his mistakes makes Wally insufferable, childish, irresponsible and naive, well, that person is most likely Batman and everybody knows he can be kind of a jerk sometimes (all the time).

No, there's definitely not a lot of things Wally regrets doing. There was one, when he was a kid, when he played with his father's power tools knowing full well that he was not allowed to touch them, that nothing good would come of him touching them and that he was absolutely disobeying his father, one hundred percent bad kid. He, unfortunately, didn't learn very much from that situation except for what kind of punishment is considered acceptable for drilling twenty-seven holes into the post out on the front porch. The answer is: a severe one.

Another thing he regrets is making up a lie about Tricia Parkinson in third grade because he heard the other boys laughing about her outside and he desperately wanted to be accepted by someone, anyone, and the boys had paid him some attention while he told the lie about how he saw her peeing on the ground behind the gym. Tricia hadn't ever come back to school after that had gotten back around, and Wally had been grounded and served detention for a week, but that hadn't been the punishment for him anyway. He'd seen Tricia earlier, all alone and crying in the hall while the principal talked to her parents, and Tricia had called Wally one of the nice boys just a few days before.

Now that's punishment. That's regret.

So Wally isn't unfamiliar with the concept of regret, it just doesn't come into play often. One example of this is when he was yet again about to kick the tar out of Mr. Cold, and the man actually cackled and told him not to do anything he might regret later. Wally had answered cheerfully, "I don't really do regret," and then gleefully stood back as his uncle got the drop on him from behind and proceeded to make an ass of Mr. Cold with the old tried-and-true circle-running. That always pisses off the bad guys.

Another time Wally didn't regret his actions is when M'gann had made four batches of cookies and Wally ate three. He didn't regret it because, although his teammates were annoyed with him, they got called out on a mission later and he'd burned off almost all of that sugar rush and saved the day. Absolutely no regret.

And now; now, for example. When he stands over Robin, M'gann and Artemis, Kaldur about to drop the water shield he has around them and Conner being held up by the throat, and Artemis asks everyone in a voice too-thick (probably because of all the blood), "Anybody here ever regret putting on the costume and doing the whole hero thing?"

Wally eyeballs the big bad as he throws Conner into the face of a mountain, clenches his fists until the leather of his gloves squeak and scoffs. "Don't know the meaning of the word."

And then he bolts.


FINAL NOTES: NOPE