Nolan MacKenzie

[Nolan MacKenzie]

Nolan Arthur MacKenzie
FACE CLAIM: Masam Holden
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AGE: 19
GENDER: Male
ORIENTATION: Bisexual aromantic
POSITION: Bellefonte College student

POWER: Enhanced hearing, increased neural capability
In short, Nolan can hear things other people can’t. It’s hard to quantify how enhanced his hearing is exactly, but he could hear someone walking one or two floors below. The sensitivity of his hearing is also increased; he has a perfect musical ear, able to tell musical notes from sounds. This ability is not selective, but active at all times.

Thankfully, part of his mutation is a brain more or less equipped to handling his hearing. He can process sound reasonably well, most of the time. Not all of his ability to cope with his mutation is due to neural enhancement, however. He has learned a great deal about how to process his mutation. If someone mimicked his mutation, it is likely they would be very overwhelmed at first despite the increase to their brainpower. What is clear is that, were it not for this neural boost, he would have gone insane a long time ago. His intelligence is not enhanced.

LIMITATIONS: As mentioned above, his hearing is difficult to put a concrete range to. Generally, he can hear something if it’s within sight, though of course this depends greatly on what other noises are around, whether he’s paying attention at the time, etc. He can hear heartbeats of people within five feet or so. Over time he’s learned to hone in on specific sounds, but this depends greatly on his concentration and the ambient noise – in a loud room, it’s very possible he might miss something entirely.

His increased neural capability also has its limitations. It helps him deal with his mutation, but not completely. When he was younger, Nolan wouldn’t be able to go to places like clubs or concerts, because even his empowered brain wouldn’t be able to handle it. Places with constant noise also posed problems, like in classrooms with scratching pencils or the din of lunchrooms. In the eight years at Bellefonte, he’s learned to filter out most noises enough to focus. Over time, he’s gotten used to louder noises, and now they don’t pose as much of a problem.

SIDE-EFFECTS:
Perhaps this isn’t necessarily a side-effect directly caused by his power, but Nolan gets migraines. Theses migraines increase his sensitivity to noise just past the point his brain can compensate for. They happen due to stress, but on the whole are quite unpredictable. This means that once in a while he will be locked in his room alone, in extreme pain and unable to stop it.

He’s done his best to soundproof his room, but he can still hear people in rooms adjacent to his. He can hear them talking, walking around, and yes, he can definitely hear them having sex too. Dorm life has some serious drawbacks.

Even without the migraines, he gets overwhelmed now and then. He can be in loud places, but standing in front of the speakers at a concert will give him a persistent ringing in his ears for days at least, and he’ll likely get a migraine from the shock. He also has to get a reasonable amount of sleep each night, otherwise his ability to concentrate falters, and constant, little noises like high-heeled footsteps or loud breathing become unbearably distracting.


HEIGHT: 5 foot 11
HAIR COLOR: Dark brown
EYE COLOR: Brown.

MISC: When it’s cold enough, he usually wears scarves.


PERSONALITY: Nolan used to be one sarcastic sonuvabitch, to be honest. It got to the point where even he got annoyed, so he stopped. Turns out, sarcasm was a great way to scare people off. A therapist might say he was trying to scare people off because he was afraid of rejection and unpopularity, but he never saw one, so he wouldn't really know. What he does know is that at this point, his sense of humor has matured with the rest of him. 


Nowadays he's still a bit of a cynic, but it's not overbearing. Sardonic is a good word to describe his overall demeanor. He respects people who know what they're talking about and has no tolerance for people who talk loudly and say little. Given his hearing, he often hears things he shouldn't, but his ridiculously strong conscience tells him to keep that kind of shit to himself. He's actually an extrovert and enjoys being around people. There was a time when he couldn't bare to be at a party because of his mutation, but nowadays most parties are manageable, and he loves the atmosphere.

He's afraid of sudden loud noises, which means things like balloons scare the crap out of him. He doesn't like needles, like the rest of the entire planet, and hospitals make him uneasy. Aside from that, there's not much he's afraid of. He came to terms with his bisexuality in high school, but he hasn't had much in the way of sexual experience. It's something he's conscious of and a bit embarrassed about, even though he knows he shouldn't be.

SECRET(S): With his hearing, he likely knows a few things. He doesn't have too much of his own, though. I mean, he considers what he says carefully and doesn't babble too much about himself, but he's pretty open if people ask.


FATHER: Terrence MacKenzie
MOTHER: Sana Nawaz
SIBLINGS: Dahlia MacKenzie – sister, two years older
Benjamin MacKenzie – brother, six years younger
WORTHY MENTIONS: He had a gerbil named Pepper as a kid? Nothing else, really.

CHILDHOOD: Nolan’s dad is Scottish-American and his mom is a second-generation Iranian immigrant, but the family they raised was thoroughly American. Nolan grew up playing baseball and doing swim team in the summer, and his sister did ballet and then, later on, jazz.
His parents were down-to-earth sorts, so when they started fighting, they did so quietly and rationally. His mom had been a debate star in high school, and his dad was the quiet type. In fact, their arguments were so innocuous, it was surprising Nolan noticed at all. They were more disagreements than full-flung fights, really. Nothing really memorable to speak of.

ADOLESCENCE: What was memorable was their decision to get divorced when he was twelve. It was a good divorce, really – amicable and mutual. It was sad, but not angry. That being said, twelve-year olds tend to latch onto things and blow them way out of proportion. Nolan went wild. He smoked a cigarette, started hanging out downtown… on the whole, his tweenage rebellion was pretty vanilla. But he was bad! He was a bad kid. Or at least he tried to be.

It was then that his mutation manifested, and suddenly he could hear everything. He developed the ability to process his hearing just after the hearing itself increased to superhuman levels. For a week it was unbearable. He couldn’t be in his room, which was at the part of the house facing the road, because the noise of traffic was skull-splitting. He couldn’t play piano anymore, because the sound of the keys felt like needles in his ears, and the hum of the strings made him queasy. Instead he retreated to the guest house. Suddenly, he could hear his family’s heartbeats, his brother’s cartoons, and, worst of all, his parents’ fights.

They weren’t too vitriolic, but they were bitter. Somehow, the divorce process had turned what was an even-tempered affair into something worse. Neither wanted to leave the house, lest their children think they were being deserted, but living together through the filings quickly became a nightmare. It wasn’t hell – the fights still had more in common with a debate than anything else – but it was far from pleasant, especially with Nolan able to hear it all.

To some, being rescued out of that mess would have been a blessing, but for Nolan it meant that he was leaving his brother behind in a home that was due to fracture in weeks. When the Bellefonte people showed up and explained the situation, he felt insanely guilty. He was leaving, and his brother would remember his last few weeks as the ones where Nolan holed himself up in the guest house.

His secondary mutation developed fully within a week of arriving at Bellefonte. He found the piano before he memorized his class schedule, and for a while he never left it. It turned out that the piano was a great stabilizing influence – he settled in relatively well, surprisingly enough. He’d always been a B student, and that continued to Bellefonte. By summer, he was rather grateful to Bellemonte. Although eh wanted to go home, a part of him knew that home was very different now. It was two places now, and his siblings shuffled between the two. Being stuck at Bellefonte gave him something to resent, but more importantly, it let him keep the memory of his childhood home alive. 

Unfortunately, it also kept him in denial, and when he eventually did go home three years later, it hit hard. Going home meant keeping his suitcase packed and moving from mom to dad every other weekend. It meant his parents trying desperately to win him over with ice cream, video game consoles, and Giants games, even though he hadn’t played baseball in years. After a summer of that, he was in a bad place. He started the whole rebellious teenager thing properly, and it wasn’t a good look on him. He went from the quiet kid constantly at the piano to the brooding one in some cranny of the school grounds. He’d never been chatty, but for a while he shunned all contact.

Luckily, at some point he grew up. He quit smoking at eighteen after three years. He didn’t stop drinking, but he definitely toned it down. He even made some friends midway through junior year. He’s still the silent type, but that made him a fairly good listener. Ha ha. See what I did there. Anyway, the last year of high school was amazing for him. He met people, explored some new developments with his sexuality, and got pretty decent at the piano again. He started swimming for the first time in years, and even started working out. His 3.13 GPA went to a 3.45, and by senior year it was a 3.6. He graduated, and came to the startling conclusion that he liked it at Bellefonte.

ADULTHOOD: So he enrolled at the college. It was a good school, and he liked being public about his mutation. He’d come to the conclusion that he was a bad liar, and constantly pretending he couldn’t hear people talking shit at a normal college sounded awful. Plus, despite the cynical shell, he liked his classmates. The college life suited him pretty well, on the whole. He’d matured enough to live with less supervision, and his study skills had improved to the point where he knew how to put his head down and get shit done. He’s about done with his first year now, and looking forward to the summer.


SAMPLE: The old man inspected the pages, moving his fingers gingerly. The parchment wasn’t the sturdiest, but his gentleness was more motivated by the ever-creeping pain in his joints than by caution. He had long since begun to notice the effects of age – a soreness where he was sure none had lurked just the day before, or an icy, naked feeling in his teeth when he drank anything below lukewarm temperature. Now his fingers were stiff, but at least the pain was dull. The seeping cold sent shivers through his lean form.

Only forty-six, he told himself. Not old. Only forty-six. All the same, insisting on his youth didn’t ward off his aches, and trying to ignore the weight of forty-seven years did nothing to loosen his joints. Speaking of which, he could feel a headache coming on. “Willow tea,” he muttered. He had some, somewhere.

Tristan Durant was not known for his cheeriness. If he complained about the downsides of aging to himself, what others got was far worse. Somehow, he managed to occupy the roles of complainer and quiet man at once, bridging the gap with his brooding presence and vaguely disapproving gaze.

The man found himself hobbling into his stores, row upon row of jars filled with dried herbs of all shades of green and brown. The room smelled strongly, so strongly that his headache forgot to move slowly and instead roared up in full force. In minutes he sat, staring darkly into a mug of bitter tea. You’d think I’d have gotten used to it, the herbalist thought grimly, looking into the murky depths of the cup. He hadn’t. A sip brought on a grimace he had fully expected but had foolishly wished away.

USERNAME: Red

AGE GROUP: 19
EXPERIENCE: 4 years now I think! I took a break for uni for a bit though, so I’m rusty.

WHERE DID YOU FIND US? RPG-D

[Mel *]

Welcome to the Bellefonte Academy, Red!
I can't wait to see Nolan interact with the rest of the character body!
Here's a link to the CLAIMS!