PERSONALITY

traits

imaginative. private. withdrawn. blunt. cautious. logical. self-deprecating. protective. reluctant fighter.

Cole is a largely complicated young man with many conflicting attitudes to make up his personality. For the most part, Cole is rather quiet and self contained; he makes himself fit into the background, trying to remain largely invisible and avoiding attention. It was a trait developed to avoid his father's wrath and to avoid drawing attention to the bruises he hid under baggy clothes and long sleeves, even in the summer. Academically, he put effort into his classes, his interest in written classes going rather well, to the point where he did stand a chance at a college future, if he didn't burn that down with the heavy weight of guilt in the last few months of the school year. Quiet, and occasionally meek, Cole isn't someone who craves attention, affection, yes. Attention, not so much.

While he is a little more sure of himself, Cole still carries the effects of years of abuse; he's not confident, he doesn't like crowded areas and he does flinch in the face of anger or physical attack. Cole does attempt to protect himself, but more often than not, his fight or flight instinct is firmly stuck in the flight position. He's exceptionally self sufficent, but because of how this developed it's through a belief that he's not worth anyone bothering with him and that he just needs to deal with that.

Cole does long for affection, even if he's not always sure he deserves it. He carries the weight of the past like a noose around his neck, always quick to remind himself of his own flaws before anyone else can. He tries to keep people at a distance, but his need for someone to tell him that he didn't deserve what he grew up with tends to make that utterly impossible. He craves a positive human interaction, something he grew used to while in high school and then missed like a limb after the group dissolved.

Very introverted, Cole is more likely to go with the flow than to speak up about doing something he wants, which tends to mean he might not be entirely comfortable with what he's doing, but he'll do it anyway. Cole has no idea what he's fully capable of, but his own fear of what he might be versus what he could be stops him from trying to advance. It's something that is a frustration to many others, but Cole's vision of his father and being like him has Cole holding back so he doesn't have enough power to seriously hurt people. The less he can do, the better in his opinion.

Like his father, Cole can be quick to anger, he does have a temper, and that does frighten him as much as other people. He tries not to lash out, and not to cause any mental pain due to his own temper, but controlling his emotions, particularly his anxiety at the prospect of his emotions hurting people, tends to turn into a cycle he can't stop. In a bid to keep people away, he developed a bit of an asshole streak, although it's mostly just a front -he's grumpy and annoyed a lot, but he rarely means anything he says unless really wound up.

ABILITIES

Due to Cole's impressive mental abilities, his implant is fitted at the base of his skull, attaching to his brain stem. If triggered, the implant releases a very potent mind altering drug to disrupt his ability to focus on any of his mental powers. The drugs leave him conscious but barely lucid and the after effects are hell on Cole's mind.

Cole has expansive mental powers that come under the header of psionic manipulation, allowing him some highly effective mental abilities to control. Technically, he has the potential to access any ability that falls under psionic based power, however his own fear and skill hold him back from fully achieving that potential.

To date, Cole has used a narrow scope of his own powers, choosing to not contemplate his possibilities and focus on what he thinks he can handle.

Cole predominantly uses telepathy, having worked himself up to an advanced level of telepathy, he's able to read thoughts and memories of people who do not have psychic shields or barriers against telepaths. He can send his own thoughts to another persons mind via psychic communication, and has learned to project feelings through telempathy to convey emotions without having to explain them. Through these methods, Cole is also able to manipulate memories and emotions, making people think or feel what he wants. Cole is able to set up telepathic pathways between numerous people without psychic abilities, his limit to date has been nine people and himself. These pathways are often harsh on Cole himself, leading to headaches and one time, when first upping his number of pathways, a period of four days unconscious while his mind healed from the exertion.

Cole is aware that he can cause pain through psychic torture, inflicting pain mentally to affect a person. He has done this impulsively before, while protecting himself, and tends to not consciously cause the pain when he's not emotionally unstable. Since he's very private and distrusting, Cole has constructed a psychic shield of his own to keep other telepaths more trained or powerful than he is out of his head.

Part of Cole's power is also the ability to control psychic energy, he can shape the psychic energy around himself to enhance and construct force and tools from the energy, a form of psychic constructs; changing psychic energy into objects, typically, Cole uses this to create a shield or armour to protect himself from attacks, however he can create projectiles or weapons which, when used against people, cause significant mental trauma to his target. Conversely, Cole has learned psionic healing, the ability to repair psychic damage, especially damage he himself causes. When significant mental damage is dealt by psionic abilities, Cole is able to repair the effects, regularly returning the victim to perfect health. Unwittingly, Cole causes massive amounts of damage to his sister when their psychic bond was shattered, repairing the damage was the first thing he did when he mastered the power. Additionally, psionic inducement is an unforseen side effect of stress related overwork; Cole can typically tell when this is coming on due to the throbbing in his temple and the leaking of emotion from his mental links.

Coupled with telepathy and telempathy, Cole have telekinetic powers, given his manipulation of psionic energy. His abilities with this are in their infancy, something he hasn't had the time to properly train, or the space to do so. Currently, he's able to levitate himself or objects, although he is barely able to hold himself a few feet off the ground he is able to control objects better. The larger the mass, the harder for Cole to control it. Through the telekinesis, he is able to alter an objects course, like the rolling of a dice, stop an object in it's course, like halting a car, or pulling/pushing an object from a stationary position. He also has a good grasp on telekinetic grip, firmly holding himself or someone else in place against another force, like wind or an avalanche.

It is believed that Cole could access a teleportation ability, given his skill with psionics, but he's terrified of what that might do and what learning how to do it might cause. Any time he's pushed to try he's obliterated the object he's meant to be teleporting.

LIMITATIONS: By and large, Cole limits himself. His own hesitance to fully accept his powers is largely what holds him back. He does have the potential to access abilities of teleportation, astral manipulation, precognition and retrocognition but his own refusal to properly explore his powers means that his abilities are hugely under-developed and untapped.

During intense, high stress incidents, Cole's powers can get away from him, he's worked exceptionally hard to stamp down on flares of his mental abilities inflicting damage on other people, but given his subconscious power it isn't always effective. Typically, Cole's telekinesis gets out of control when he's emotional, or those he has psychic bonds with get a good dose of his emotions without his conscious effort.

Over use of his psionic powers causes extreme and crippling headaches, a huge concern is the potential for serious mental backlash, given that his brain has displayed certain levels of damage when his powers are pushed to their limits. The possibility that over extending his powers could cause severe brain damage is a distinct possibility.

HISTORY

Shelby Shannon was a popular, athletic and smart girl from the right kind of family, she was a straight A student with big dreams and a loving set of parents prepared to give her anything she wanted in life. Shelby's biggest flaw was her constant attraction to bad boys. It started when she was fifteen, dating a seventeen year old footballer with a history of starting fights and boosting cars.

When he was arrested, Shelby just fell from one bad boy to the next until she met Donnie.

By nineteen, Donnie already had an impressive criminal record; theft, assault, breach of the peace, drugs possession and car theft. Although there was mountains of evidence that he was not a good guy, with none of the charges sticking and Donnie only having an 18 month stint in juvie to show for his antics, Shelby swore he wasn't the man everyone thought he was. They dated for seven months before he convinced her to move in with him, since her parents were being combative about their relationship. Two months after that, Shelby was pregnant with their son.

early life.

Cole was born into conflict from the start; Shelby was talking about marriage, but Donnie didn't want to be tied down. There were arguments about it all through the first nine months of Cole's life, until Shelby discovered she was once again pregnant, unaware it could happen while she was still breast feeding and Shebly never saying no when Donnie wanted sex. At a year and a half old, Cole became a big brother to little Prue, and Donnie put a ring on it and married Shelby, much to her parents anguish.

Cole grew pretty capable of taking care of himself from a very young age; his mother had her hands full with a prematurely born daughter and his father was rarely around, and when he was around Cole learned not to bother him. Cole stopped asking for attention, because it only got him berated. The only place he felt like he was cared for was with his grandparents, who tried to cram as much attention and affection into their visits as possible.

That all stopped one day, when Cole was five, and his grandmother foolishly asked her daughter where she got her black eye from.

The removal of the best relationship in his life hit Cole especially hard, although he had his sister to help take care of, the positive influence his grandparents provided was removed very quickly and with no explanation. Trying his hardest to keep his head down and away from the yelling, Cole started to figure out how to do things for himself.

power development.

By the time Cole was in school he'd figured out how to hide bruises and injuries, how to get by without catching any attention. When his father's attention turned from his mother to him, he figured out how to minimise the effects. Staying out of the house longer than usual tended to help.

It was during a period when his father was in lock up for a drunk and disorderly complaints that Cole's powers began manifesting. At first it was just a noise in his head, the beginnings of a buzz, until he started to hear the thoughts of his little sister, who he could clearly see, sitting across the room playing with her gameboy. An hour of quietly freaking out with Spice Girls as a backdrop let Cole process the fact that he was a super with mind reading powers.

As the next few months passed and Cole's telepathy increased, he started to think he got duped in the power department; the headaches increased and he started to learn far too much about other peoples lives than he wanted to. His father coming home just further increased his anxiety and need to hide his powers. It was Prue who first figured out something was wrong, and since he and his sister were so close, he told her what was going on. Promising to keep his secret, Prue told him he could read her mind any time. With Prue, Cole started to work on other areas of his powers, able to send messages to her, forming a connection between the both of them that meant they could talk over long distances.

The first time Cole sent emotions through their connection was during an incident with their father.

Cole had always worked hard to shield his sister from their father, just like their mother tried. Knowing that she could feel his fear left Cole feeling anxious and uncertain, trying to withdraw from their bond to limit her exposure. Prue told him there and then to stop being an idiot, because she wasn't dumb and knew what was going on.

It was during school one day that Cole became aware of another student trying to hide their powers. He'd never been all that prone to talking to anyone else, choosing to go as unnoticed as possible, but when he approached the other boy, it sparked the start of some of the best and ultimately the biggest turning point in Cole's life.

friendship & tragedy.

Before long it wasn't just two of them keeping a secret, Cole had managed to form friendships with five other teens like him, all with powers, all trying to hide it. Through some accidental power experiments, Lee augmenting Cole's powers to one of their highest settings, Cole discovered that telepathy wasn't his only power, and that his ability was linked closely with psionic energy, being able to tap into it and control it. While augmented, Cole was unable to properly shut out anything around him, eventually needing to spend the night at Van's place just to calm his head.

Trying to avoid his friends powers wasn't as effective as he'd like, but Cole became better at managing his own powers while augmented to balance the accidental incidents. Each time they happened, avoiding home, he'd spend the night with one of the five and return home when he wouldn't be hit with all his father's thoughts and feelings with no barrier.

Cole was perfectly happy to continue life without revealing anything. He made plans with Lee to go to the same college, his grades having pulled up to the point where he might be able to get into a college at that point, his friends were good at helping him avoid homelife, since his sister had her own friends to do the same. Things were starting to look like he might have a chance at life. Until Stella started talking about exposing them, showing off instead of hiding, being in the open. And she was talking about all of them.

The intervention didn't go as well as hoped, cornering Stella to try and discuss the situation, to talk her around from outing all of them. Cole tried his hardest to keep things calm and civil, pushing his mental powers to try and difuse the rising anger and issues. Things backfired when his telempathy started to get away from him, transmitting emotions through everyone rather than calming, escalating the situation. While none of them are sure how Stella died, Cole was able to feel the moment she did, even as Lee tried to revive her, the snap of the psychic connection and the inability to locate that specific signature telling Cole all he needed to know.

They'd just committed murder.

aftermath & operations.

Dealing with the fact that they'd just killed one of their friends wasn't something any of them excelled at.

It became impossible to keep the group together, each of them slipping away their own ways. Cole's notions of college crashed and burned in the space of a few months and without the buffering of his friends, he was left at home a lot more often. Getting a job, ending up on the graveyard shift as a janitor, Cole wound up keeping odd hours, to the point where he was regularly coming home just as his father finished a binge drinking session. Given that was when his dad was at his worst, it ultimately led to more bruises and heightened emotions.

During one such time, Cole accidentally broke the connection he had with Prue, snapping their mental bond and, in the process, sending a backlash of energy into her mind. The damage resulted in a psychic coma, with no obvious cause other than Prue being unresponsive to all stimuli. She was hospitalised and only Cole reaching out to their grandparents after years of silence meant that her medical bills were covered.

The only good thing to come out of it was Donnie leaving town, since there wasn't a hope in disguising the abuse at that point.

Shelby and Cole moved back in with Shelby's parents, and while it was meant to be a good thing, the tentative connections that the elders tried to make where rebuffed, mostly because Cole didn't believe he deserved any of it. He blamed himself for Prue's condition and for escalating the situation with Stella, to the point where he tried to stop using his powers entirely.

It was while he was visiting Prue that he remembered the scope of his own powers, things that had been laid out for him while his powers were augmented by Lee's. Trying desperately to track down any of his friends came up empty and Cole felt like he'd failed all over again. After almost four months in a coma, and Cole pushing himself to figure out just how he could fix the mental damage he did, Prue came out of her coma just as suddenly as she slipped into one, as Cole managed to get to grips with his psionic healing skill.

Bittersweet, as Prue returned home, to a safe home with their grandparents, trying to assure Cole that it wasn't his fault, Cole made the decision to leave, in order to protect Prue from his own inadequacy. He urged her not to look for him, putting a little bit of a psychic suggestion into it, and hoping that she'd make something of her life where he'd systematically destroyed his own.

Cole ended up somewhere near California, moving from hostel to hostel, trying to keep his powers to himself, and hoping that he'd find something to just keep him occupied. He ended up roomed with a slightly older boy in one of the hostels who convinced him to come on a job with him. At the time, Cole knew it was a robbery, but he didn't really care, since he needed to replace his shoes if he didn't want to walk through them. In the long run, being a petty thief didn't really bother him, so they got involved in a few more jobs, before a big one cropped up, one that might allow the boys to actually get an apartment for a while. It was when they got there that Cole realised it was a hostage situation, the girl tied to a chair gave that one away. Cole still doesn't know if she looked like Stella, or if his guilt just manifested that she did, since most of the time he couldn't remember what Stella looked like anymore. Things started to get heated at the location, and Cole once more attempted to cool things off.

This time, it was a little more effective than the first time; managing to freeze the kidnappers in place, stunning his so called friend, Cole got the girl out of there, getting his buddy to leave instantly. He knew he'd just outted himself as a Superhuman, but at the time, managing to save someone rather than cause another girl to die was the only thing he considered. Her name was Daphne and she'd run away from home the same day she'd been kidnapped, because her dad was a City Attorney. The feeling of accomplishment at Daphne being able to go home, to see her family again, just reminded him of Stella, who couldn't do that. It was right after that Cole found his way to a bar on the shore, one accidental brush with drugs in that bar changed the rest of his life, as his grip on his powers went haywire and he affected the whole bar, sending redflags up with people who knew what to look for. Cole had barely gotten down the block, woozy from the drugs and drink in his system and lacking the coordination to know what way was up, he was taken into Government custody.

Due to the fact that Cole had been involved in the kidnapping of a prominent person, he was facing a serious sentence. The implant for his powers was done before the process due to how significant his abilities were. Cole didn't really mind it. The mild brain surgery to implant his control chip didn't bother him terribly at the time, due to the fact that he could finally stop hearing the prejudice thoughts coming through. He got a five year sentence for the numerous crimes they could link to him by his fingerprints. It wasn't a big surprise for Cole, he figured it would be serious like this.

Cole's pretty much just resigned himself to it all.