Name: Toliver Bane
Nick-Name: Killhound, Hellhound, #637, Rabies, Sarge (never Tolly).
Codename: WarDog
Age: 22
Date of Birth: 01/29/2003
Height: 7’2
Weight: 436
Pelt Color: Golden-Brown with White spots
Eye Color: Canine-Yellow
City/Place of Origin: Daly City, CA.
Nationality/Race: African/Latino-American
Classification: Mutant
Concept: Thaumiavoric-Fueled, Hyper-Predatory Telepath
Status: Student/Team-Member
Occupation: Student (Engineering: Major, Performance Arts: Minor)
Personality Profile: Toliver is a complicated sort, once one gets to know him, but he is rather fine with being mistaken for a very simple, semi-feral critter of a man. As a child he was secretly a contemplative sort, and that has never changed, despite his many trials.
Toliver is a realist, or at least that’s what he might say, if he were the argumentative type. With this well-grounded attitude, however, Toliver often finds he doesn’t need to argue at all. His general attitude is that he’s seen it all before, bought the t-shirt, and paid way too damn much for said garment in the process. Calm, slow to anger, but rough-around-the-edges, with bouts of acidic sarcasm (and occasionally caustic quips, when he needs to make a point), instead, he is even tempered and thoughtful about his acts of violence.
Toliver is as tenacious as the pit-bull mien that is his default. While not the most talkative, he is expressive (in his own way), and prone to acts of random kindness, occasional fits of gentleness and generosity that belies his brutish exterior… He is otherwise well-spoken, when he deigns to speak at all, but sometimes he comes off as a semi-feral, very old-and-tired soul, burdened with a surfeit of common-sense, who just wishes most people had at least two functional brain-cells.
Toliver is not a mutant-supremacist, nor should he be mistaken for such. He does find, however, that the natural progress of evolution (as we know it), is probably going to be the most likely course for humanity, in so much that mutants will probably be the next evolutionary stage of the species for a while, and non-mutants will eventually die out from natural competition over time. With that in mind, it is neither necessary nor morally appropriate for mutants to hasten nature, though it is vital that mutants defend themselves against human predation, even if it’s just to ensure that both forces do not destroy each other, in the struggle for survival. Can humanity and mutants coexist? That’s a silly question: mutants -are- humans, and humanity doesn’t have a good track record of existing with itself, much less than with anything else. Thus it is imperative that those that can, strive to ensure that humanity doesn’t destroy itself.
Toliver discarded the faith of his mother, when she discarded him (they still don’t talk). Embittered by the hypocrisy of many in regards to the theological take on the ‘Mutant problem’, Toliver found himself tacking leftward in mentality and philosophy. Being inherently a rationalist, Toliver is more prone to following the evidence on matters, believing that if science doesn’t have all the answers now, it will eventually enough, given enough time and effort. He doesn’t bother debating his views, however. He’s got bigger fish to fry.
Physical Description:
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Power Information: Thaumiavoric, Telepathic, Hyper-predator.
Thaumiavore: Toliver’s abilities are focused on, harness, and are honed by magic, and magical energies. This is an automatic and passive power that fuels his other mutant abilities. The details are as follows.
Direct Magic: When in the presence of (or targeted by) active magical abilities or spells, his body absorbs some of the expressed energy. The range for this is a 30-foot radius. Spells or effects that include or target him are absorbed with 80-100% efficiency. Otherwise they are reduced in effectiveness by 30-50%.
Indirect Magic: When in contact with inert magical effects (items, magical traps, wards, etc), Toliver’s body absorbs them with 80-100% efficiency.
Over-Eating: The residual effect for when Toliver is ‘topped-off’ on magical energies, is a golden-hued aura of light that is ‘mostly’ harmless, but may result in random magical effects in his immediate vicinity.
Magic-Hunting Hyper-Predator: Toliver’s core abilities are innately focused around a canine’s awareness and instincts concerning magic and the theoretically supernatural. He is also genetically built for hunting and fighting the same.
Heightened Senses: Toliver has a hunting canine’s heightened auditory and olfactory senses, combined with a human's forward facing vision, he has a nearly 360 degree of immediate spacial awareness, and can easily notice prey or their leavings, and track accordingly. Whether this is demons, deer, sorcerers is moot.
Hunting Senses: Toliver’s ‘mundane’ mutant senses are formidable enough, but he’s also aware of magic and supernatural energies, as well as other preternatural shenanigans, and can recognize and/or hunt them as well. Moreover his senses are supernaturally hardened. They do not become overused or overwhelmed when exposed to unseemly amounts of scent, sight, or weird supernatural energies.
Hyperbody Enhancements: All the magic Toliver absorbed comes to the fore in the final aspect of this power. It hardens and enhances his sinews and bones, making him vastly stronger, faster, and more resilient than a peak-tier human. He can bench a rough 10 tons, run an easy 65mph for ages (like the persistence hunter that he is), and survive in extreme environments such as deserts or arctic climes. He even packs a moderately impressive healing-factor, that will regenerate mild-to-moderate flesh and bone wounds in moments, and moderate to major bone and lethal organ wounds in hours or days. He can be stopped (temporarily), but between that and his pitbullish tenacity, it’s hard to keep him down for long.
Moderate Pack Telepathy: Sometimes you can’t do it alone. Sometimes it takes a team… or a pack. And when Toliver first mutated, he demonstrated the power to reach out and ‘communicate’ with others, telepathically, over moderately wide distances. This wasn’t anything formidable, as far as most telepaths are concerned, being instead rather the basic ability to connect with a select handful (or two) of people to coordinate deft strategies for a short period of time. That was 9 years ago. Toliver has become somewhat better at it, since then.
Empathic Awareness: Toliver can tell a person’s emotional state, even if they are otherwise unable to express it verbally or physically. In a lot of ways this can act as a psychic lie-detector, but it isn’t 100% reliable against a canny character.
Telepathic Link: Toliver can create telepathic links of two-way silent communication between himself and multiple parties, bypassing the need for com-devices that might otherwise be jammed or spied upon. This communication has other benefits, due to his super-doggy brain, allowing others on the link to mentally react lightning fast to threats and changes in planning. This link does NOT allow for truth-detection or any degree of probing.
Telepathic Probe: Toliver can ‘trick’ people into thinking about things through verbal (non-telepathic) communication. At most, Toliver can only read surface-level thoughts and cognition, however the honest answer often comes to most non-innately deceptive people, when he simply asks a proper question. It is not 100% effective, but it’s either a ‘he gets it’ or ‘he doesn’t’, there is little to no chance of a misread.
Drawbacks & Weaknesses: Toliver is a dangerous customer, which is sometimes unfortunate thanks to his status as a mutant.
Bloody Obvious: Toliver is a 7’2 anthropomorphic pit-bull. He is also a medical curiosity. A cursory exam, or x-ray like effect will easily reveal his Mutant nature, as he has more muscles than a human out to, his bones are far thicker than normal, and his skeletal structure is clearly ‘wrong’ with extra bits (thick, cross-banded/reinforced ribs, for example).
Call of the Wild: Toliver is so in-tune with nature, that nature considers him a part of it, and often comes up to him to check him out. The Disney-Princes rule is in full effect, here.
Clawless Wonder: While Toliver possess fangs, sharp canine teeth and a horrendously stupid amount of P/SI on his bite, He does not have either canine digging-claws or the humanoid version thereof. His fingers instead end in thick blunt nails. Jokes about him being declawed are usually met with some form of violence.
Eldritch Immunity: Truly deep, eldritch or just plain bizarre magic or supernatural energies might be too alien for Toliver’s powers to fully deflect. Resulting in a harmful but random backlash (determined by the Judge), if they touch him.
Inherently Sneaky/Stealthy: Despite his natural bulk and hulkiness, Toliver is otherwise innately and instinctively stealthy, in a naturally predatory way. He must take great pains and effort to not sneak-up on people, so that they either see or hear him coming. Often he fails at this, and frequently he startles innocent bystanders. He is also oddly scentless without an overt use of colognes and such (he swears by speed-stick, classic old-spice, and a splash of Axe: ‘Phoenix’), but even then, people rarely connect the odor with the man.
Magical Hole: Toliver appears to most mystic surface scans as a man-dog shaped hole in the world. A deeper scan reveals his bright golden aura… as a warning.
Mystic Null: Toliver can never learn or benefit directly from applied magical, mystical or supernatural-based effects.
Naturally Delicious: Because of his nature, Vampires find Toliver’s scent to be attractive, and his blood to be extra-delicious and filling.
Person of Interest: Toliver was dragged into an authorized, black-bag military unit, known only as Badger-Strike, wherein he was trained to perform all sorts of wetwork tasks with other experimental, altered, or mutant soldiers that were either ‘drafted’ or ‘recruited’ at proverbial gun-point. While Badger-Strike is no longer authorized (or acknowledged), Toliver is still considered a national military asset by more clandestine aspects of the US Government, and other unknown actors or nations.
Special Caloric Needs: The average human needs 1800-2100 calories a day, to remain healthy. Toliver requires five times as much.
Strict Carnivore: In connection with the above, Toliver can only gain nutritional sustenance from animal proteins and organs, seemingly preferring it the rarer in cooking, the better. Except for bacon, of course, bacon should be thick and suitably crispy.
Skills: Toliver is physically and mentally fast, easily and quickly picking up new skills, and thinking of refreshingly horrible ways to use them. He has the equivalent of USMC training, but no known, official field-experiences to back them up, thankfully. The current bevy of abilities are as follows:
Engineering:: Engineering includes all the varied types of that profession dedicated to the design of functional items: civil, chemical, mechanical, etc. In Toliver's case this involves Energy and Weapons engineering as a major focus.
Escapology: If it’s pickable, pry-able, bolt-able, screwable, and even if it’s electronic, Toliver can likely escape from it, given time and a few obscuring shadows. From locked cages, to handcuffs, to zip-ties and ropes, Toliver cannot be easily contained, usually, unless he willingly decides to go with it. This is how he escaped from Operation Foolscap.
Foreign Languages: Thanks to a lot of United States ‘Adventuring’ in the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, Toliver was trained in working street-passable understanding of the Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Russian and Serbian, with some limited Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian and Spanish, under his belt. He has a limited understanding of the cultures and peoples accordingly..
Military Training: Toliver has the basic training and skills of a professional soldier, fresh out of Marine BASIC. He is athletically proficient, well versed in knives, rifles, and small fire-arms, and knows the basics of survival. He is Specialized in Stealth.
Stealth: Yes, we keep on mentioning Stealth. On top of being inherently sneaky and scentless, Toliver is well trained and experienced in the methods and mechanics of being a right-sneaky bastard. This includes the use of advanced camouflage techniques, and hunter-stalker comprehension of human/prey behaviours. Such as the fact that most people -rarely- look up, and so on, until it's way too late.
Background: He was named Jessie-Toliver Bane, and was born to Shanikwa Bane, on January 29th 2003 – with the general assumption by his mother, that ‘Jessie’ was also his father’s name… though there was some question about that. In any case, from the moment he understood where his primary name came from, Toliver -insisted- upon never using or responding to it. When he was eleven, his latest step-father gifted him with a massive XL-triple muscled pit-bull puppy named, affectionately, Brick.
Toliver’s latest step-father, however ran afoul of a local street-wizard, over his questionable earnings in an even more questionable tourney of underground dog-fighting. The wizard tracked the ignorant winner back to his apartment, where Toliver, his mother and Brick greeted him at the door. The wizard, however, hell bent on street-vengeance, and unconcerned for witnesses, then blasted the four of them with an arc of mystic lightning… Or tried to.
Toliver’s mutant powers manifested for the first time, in the stress of the moment, hyper-charging his nascent mystic absorption powers to their limits – and beyond. His father and Brick still took their (un)fair share of the lightning, and were incinerated instantly. His mother was left slightly singed and permanently flash-blind. Toliver himself survived unscathed, however the mystic energies of the unknown left him forever marked as half-man and half-canine, with fur and features that he couldn’t hide.
Upon seeing the giant fearsome furry beast-man, the wizard ran into traffic, where he was subsequently run over by a cement mixer (leaving the world no poorer for his loss).
His mother gave him up to the authorities almost immediately, who, upon seeing him there, naked except for his fur, crackling with a golden aura of harmless mystical energies, blamed him for whatever had mysteriously occurred. After a year-long stint in Juvenile-Hall, he was then whisked him off to a clandestine government anti-mutant program secretly named Operation: Bellerophon, for examination, testing, and experimentation. He would stay there for the next three years, striking back at his captors whenever possible, and learning how to control his power by personal initiative, then by training, always seeking a means to escape. But none was available. He might have died in captivity had not the war on terror came to an ignoble pause in 2020, causing the search for other available military assets and weaponry to rapidly dry up in funding. Operation: Foolscrap was quietly authorized in the backrooms of political power, and ‘natural resources’ such as incarcerated mutants were loaded up and shipped to the Middle East for as expendable military assets. In 2020, when the US was considering pulling out of Afghanistan, then Seventeen year-old Toliver was being shipped out for training.
Toliver spent the next three years as an increasingly valuable secret military asset, as he and roughly several dozen captured, kidnapped, or incarcerated mutants were given a stark option: fight for Uncle Sam, or face a quick execution and burial in a mass grave. Most opted to take their chances on the battlefield, and Toliver was no exception. The impressed mutants were brutally but effectively trained, given ‘enough’ proper equipment (leftover from US ‘adventuring’ in the Middle-East), with the idea that they would be trained into a specialized fighting force– those that survived the training, that is. Surprisingly fully a third of them survived the whole affair, and many, like Toliver, eventually escaped and made their way back to the free world, by various means, foul or fair. The rest, however, were either dead, ground down under three years of minimal care, or actually opted to stay behind…
By 2023, Toliver had snuck back into the United States, and spent some time hiding out in various mutant slums, sticking to the shadows as he perfected his stealth, survival, and personal disguise abilities. Always careful to stay just far enough under the radar to not be a problem, he also made sure to be just visible -enough- to be a hard target to eliminate, either Operation Bellerophon or Foolscrap should decide to come after him. But after several political sea-changes, the United States had become a different beast, all-together. Mutant Rights was now something to be considered, and Mutant Purges were considered ‘bad PR’... depending on who one asked, that is. Toliver managed to exist with limited worry.
He proved to be decidedly effective in stopping Human-on-Mutant (and Mutant-on-Human) violence, wherever he was, however, and someone, somewhere, began to take note. He passed his GED via correspondence courses, and some severely good fake ID documents, and applied to Cobalt Academy, through back channels, in the Winter of 2023. Deciding that if he was going to do some good for himself and the people around him, he’d need a better education. No one was more surprised than he that he was accepted, however…
Criminal Record: Toliver has an expunged Criminal record, that (when examined with painstaking care, and not a little bit of computer hacking), reveals that he was tried and found guilty of two counts of involuntary manslaughter, in 2016.
Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts: Because of his biology and power, Toliver has grown up to develop a number of interesting idiosyncrasies and quirks that make life interesting with and around him.
Always Prepared/Hypervigilant: Thanks to his well-nigh-feral instincts, and training, Toliver tends to grossly over-prepare for most situations. This is a man who wanders into classrooms well prepared for a school shooting - armed with smoke grenades and the like, for protection. Like a furry MacGyver, he might have the necessary tool or odd implement on his person, or its nearest equivalent cheapest-available substitute. There are more uses for a rubber-chicken than one might at first appreciate.
Dancing Dodge: Toliver is an avid student of Modern dance and ballet, leading to his having an unexpected amount of grace and dexterity –especially to a person with his stocky build! The problem is that the rhythm never leaves him. So even when he dodges an attack, it tends to look like dance maneuvers.
Mutilated Ears & Tail: Toliver’s ears are clipped and upright, and his tail is just a stub, easily concealed in his trousers. These features are not natural, and were ‘earned’ when he was in Juvie as a survival tactic for when he got in fights with other inmates. Periodically his stub of a tail wags when he’s happy or excited.
Pouches Pouches Pouches!: Toliver suffers from the chronic Liefeld based tendency of carrying way too many pouches on his person. This helps with his ‘always prepared’ quirk, but otherwise tends to look silly. These pouches carry his ‘potentially necessary’ gear, along with foam padding to aid in keeping them sorted and silent as he moves.
Sensational Soprano Sax Artist: Toliver plays a mean Soprano Saxophone, and even writes music for it. If the mutant-vigilante/veteran business ever tanks, he can at least make a decent living, playing music on street-corners for handouts.