P L A Y E R   I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Samm
OOC Journal: neveryourmuse
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: 26
Email + IM: neverrryourmask @ gmail, nneveryourmaskk @ aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Charles Xavier, Caprica Six, Jaime Lannister

C H A R A C T E R   I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Peter Parker
Canon: The Amazing Spider-Man
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Post-The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Number: RNG me.

Setting: Peter Parker hails from the universe identified as Earth-120703, one of the many strands of Marvelverse. This Earth is very similar to contemporary Earth, but the limits of scientific advancement and possibility are stretched to permit the possibility of genetic mutation to the scale of superheroes and supervillains. His story takes place in New York City.

Oscorp is a dominant presence in this world, with the Oscorp Tower placed also in New York City. It is a multinational corporation with a talent for breaking down scientific barriers and then patenting it, selling it, and hiding the things that go wrong. It is at the forefront of medical engineering and research in the fields of genetics, biochemistry, electrical engineering, and so on. It is headed by Norman Osborn, a man committed to changing the world through mad science, as well as discovering the cure for his own ailments.

As a result, this universe has a few things taken for granted, for all that advanced science has not hit mainstream use. Biocable, for example, is a saleable substance made from the silk of genetically engineered spiders, and has entered the market as a high grade product. Advanced holograms are also depicted, although these are limited to use within places like Oscorp.

History: It's 1999, when young Peter Parker is taken to the home of his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, and his life is substantially changed before it can even begin. Richard and Mary Parker left without true explanation, vanishing through the door and into the night, and were never seen again until they were identified from the plane wreckage that took their lives.

This is how Peter's story begins.

2012. High school. It's high school. Not dramatically terrible, but not brilliant, either. Peter is more or less friendless, awkward and halting to talk to, otherwise passing invisible through the halls of Midtown High School. He is no teacher's favourite and no one's best friend, with his most significantly lasting relationship presented being the antagonistic back and forth he has with stereotypical jock bully, Eugene "Flash" Thompson, whom Peter is depicted rescuing a child from, with the reward being a punch to the face and the attention of Gwen "Tall Socks" Stacy.

Gwen, who is pretty. And smart. And tells him he's brave, for what he did. This is enough to garner a place on Peter's screensaver at home.

And home is where Uncle Ben and Aunt May look after him. Their exists a family dynamic, and even though Peter calls them Uncle and Aunt, they are in every other way his parents, for all that the absence of the other sets of Parkers seems to create invisible walls whenever their name is mentioned. Peter's life changes again, one day, and once again, it's because Richard Parker left something behind.

In this event, it's a briefcase, full of seemingly useless junk, save for a newspaper clipping showing Richard standing side by side with a colleague, whom Uncle Ben identifies as Dr. Curt Connors, employee of Oscorp, and a man who broke off contact with Richard's family after his death.

In search of answers about his father (and by extension, answers about himself), Peter decides to skip school and go poke around Oscorp. A little bit of impromptu spywork and identity stealing gets him as far as the labs (where he runs into intern Gwen Stacy and has a couple of charming exchanges, and manages to impress Dr. Curt Connors with his opinions on cross-species genetics). His snooping introduces him to some radioactive spiders. And he is bitten.

It's a briefly rocky road, this origin story. Peter is promptly inundated with superhuman ability, going through a feverish calibration stage wherein he manages to beat up a car full of train passengers by accident and then eat half the contents of Aunt May's fridge, including some frozen macaroni. (He must be going through a phrase.) Nothing has improved over much by the time he wakes up the next day, realising there is something seriously wrong with him.

Or, alternatively, seriously right with him. Peter is quick to discover the advantages granted to him too. He goes up against Flash and uses superior physical advantage to give him a dose of his own medicine, when previously he couldn't. He has a sweet Tumblr-like montage on a skateboard as he practices exploring the limits of his powers. And he then introduces himself to Dr. Curt Connors properly, and shows him the decay rate algorithm solution that had been halting Connors' progress.

Not everything is coming up roses. His focus splits off between finding himself through the research his dad once worked on with Connors, between what he's become, and between the budding romance he's cultivating with Gwen, none of which he can properly articulate to his Uncle and Aunt, who unfortunately only get to see the side effects. Uncle Ben reads him a riot act for humiliating Flash, and when Peter neglects to pick up his Aunt as promised because he forgot in favour of mad science with Connors, he is again lectured for being irresponsible.

And when Uncle Ben summons the memory of Richard Parker to emphasise the importance of responsibility, Peter snaps back: so where is he? The fight remains jagged and unresolved as Peter takes off into the night, and Uncle Ben follows him to bring him back home.

What happens instead is a robbery, a criminal on the run, and Peter, in the storm of his mood and enjoying this brief and cruel moment of selfishness, does nothing to help. His idleness is punished when it is Uncle Ben that gets in the way, and is shot in the street when he tries to wrest the weapon from the criminal. This time, when Uncle Ben dies, Peter is truly powerless to stop it -- there is no advantage he possesses to stop his uncle's bleeding out on the sidewalk, life slipping away without a final word.

From there, Peter is on a course of revenge. He starts tracking down criminals that fit the description of his uncle's murderer, and the creation of Spider-Man begins. At first, it starts as the need for anonymity -- he makes for himself a mask. And then the structure of an identity, the web shooters, a persona that characterises what Peter decides is a man who can do what the police cannot, delivering them the crooks he captures in his hunt for the one he's really after.

It takes Captain George Stacy, during the most awkward of 'meeting your prospective girlfriend's parents' dinners, to point out the obvious to Peter, without knowing who he truly is: this Spider-Man isn't a hero. His going after men with the same description implies a vendetta, an ultimately selfish goal.

It's on this same night that Peter outs himself to Gwen, and they kiss. It's also on this same night that he realises what Spider-Man should be.

Little did he know that Dr. Curt Connors was under pressure to meet certain goals with his cross-species genetics research. In an effort to prevent Norman Osborn green-lighting unethical human trials, Connors tested his serum on himself. It grew back his missing limb, but it also had the unfortunate side effect of turning him into a giant lizard. This, he finds out in his hunting down for Osborn's middle man during high night time traffic, creating a trail of destruction in pursuit.

Peter attends the attack as Spider-Man, rescuing innocent bystanders, and doing so at the expense of letting the Lizard go. He wins some of the hearts and minds of fellow New Yorkers in the process, and possibly also his own.

Suspecting that the Lizard is Connors after a tense conversation in person, Peter tries to alert Captain Stacy of this fact. Getting nowhere and needing evidence, he attempts to contrive an altercation between himself as Spider-Man and the Lizard, and take some pictures. This does not go well, and Connors is instead able to identify that it was Peter by discovering one of his cameras. This leads to an attack on Midtown High School, where Peter yet again suits up as Spider-Man to face the Lizard.

Afterwards, and after directing Gwen to go cook up an antidote to Connors' serum as Osborn Tower, Peter manages to discover Connors' underground lair, which confirms a few things. One is that Connors has gone completely insane. The other is that he is setting out to turn all of New York City into lizard-people, believing this state to be superior to that of a frail human. (It's probably a self-loathing thing though, but I'm not here to psychoanalyse the lizard today.)

The rest is largely history. Peter goes to stop the Lizard, with the help of both Gwen Stacy's antidote replacing the serum that Connors was going to bomb New York City with, and Captain Stacy (who learns of Spider-Man's identity during a run in with the police, deciding to let him go) and his assistance in fending off the Lizard. This all largely works out, with the Lizard reverting back to Dr. Curt Connors, and the antidote raining down on those he did manage to effect.

Except that Captain Stacy is killed, having between critically wounded by the Lizard moments before. In his lasts dying moments, he concedes that New York needs Spider-Man, but because Spider-Man is going to make a lot of enemies, he makes Peter promise to leave Gwen out of it.

Peter obeys. He withdraws. They break up.

For a while, anyway.

Personality: Peter Parker got used to never really saying what he meant, or exactly what he wanted. The residence he grew up in was a loving home, with an uncle as strict as any father, an aunt as slap-wrists fussing as any mother, but they never took those titles on themselves. Those titles were given to the arctic freeze place of silence that was the gaping hole his dead parents left behind, and to talk on the hard details surrounding their absence was to tremor the fragility of his own relative happiness. (That Uncle Ben and Aunt May were, in fact, his bedrock, is one of those things you only realise when you hit the bottom.)

This produces a kid who is pretty quiet, who skates invisible through high school, whose idea of intimacy is through the lens of his camera. His parents left at age four and never came back, and his one childhood friend, the unlikely Harry Osborn, disappeared without a word one day too. The most significant relationships he has seems to be the ongoing antagonism he shares with school yard bully Flash, and then, eventually, Gwen Stacy. Although Peter possesses sass aplenty and carries a brand of awkwardness that is incidentally charming, he generally struggles to convey exactly what he wants to convey, struggling over his reveal as Spider-Man to Gwen, struggling to be honest about his existing angst with regard to his parents when he and Uncle Ben touch upon it.

But he is not the ostracised loser that Peter Parker is often depicted as. His social awkwardness passes as charming, and in fact, all instances of bullying in The Amazing Spider-Man happen to other kids -- the first time, Peter lacks the physical prowess to defend them, and the second, he's now capable. This was a conscious decision by the creators to recognise that the perception of 'nerd' might not only be the poindexter model as depicted in 90s/early 2000s media, but also the rockstar running the world/the meek shall inherit the earth kind of model, citing Garfield's other ventures into films like The Social Network.

Peter Parker is not a rockstar, but his awkwardness is relatable and endearing and a positive trait as opposed to a cringingly earnest affect that gets him in trouble. What makes him a loner is, instead, the fact that he is a loner. He is invisible to his peers and his teachers, and that Gwen notices him for who he is is a remarkable moment. There is certainly an unconscious wilfullness to it -- Peter could easily make friends if he wanted to, but doesn't, as if expecting that they, too, will go away again if he does.

Invisibility takes on a different shape by the time he is Spider-Man -- it turns into anonymity. When he is wearing his suit, with his face hidden, there is a spandex-thin layer that barricades his real life from this vigilante persona, and this persona is still very much a part of Peter Parker. It's a little like when you go online and suddenly feel capable of saying everything you mean, for those like Peter that struggle to do so ordinarily, and it erupts in a seemingly endless fount of one liners and over-confident threats, lending voice to his superhuman capabilities.

And most importantly, he is a hero. Although his era of Spider-Man began with revenge, Peter had at least fooled himself into thinking he was just trying to do good. When he realised he could do more, when the Lizard attacked the bridge and Spider-Man found himself beholden to protecting the innocent, that's when his heroism began to concrete itself. His ethics are almost entirely credited to Uncle Ben, both with his verbal lectures on responsibility towards doing good, as well as his death -- Peter Parker neglected to do good when he had a chance, and an innocent bystander was killed, and that innocent bystander was someone important to him.

And he knows, now, that all innocent bystanders are someone important to someone. No one has to be invisible, even in the big metropolis he calls home. These are lessons ingrained in Peter's actions going forward, and his fighting style does not accept collateral -- he stretches the limits of his ability in order to make sure that no one during even high tier battles gets significantly injured and killed.

Spider-Man's life is simpler, easier to make decisions, more slow motion bullet time to make them in. Peter's is a lot more complicated, which is not yet something he's grown into. Balancing his home life with his hero one puts things out of balance -- Aunt May continues to worry about him while he goes through the motions of what looks like on the surface a teenage boy unable to cope with the way things have worked out for him, and turning to violence and distractions instead. Which is almost true. At the end of his fight with the Lizard, Peter promises Captain Stacy that he'll leave Gwen out of his Spider-Man life, in order to protect her. The genuine motivation to honour this promise as well as seeing its wisdom creates an unresolved conflict, some unappealing wishywashiness, putting happiness and fulfilment on hold even when he comes back around to dating her.

Because it doesn't end there. He says that promises he can't keep are the best kind to make, but this pledge goes two ways. He can't promise Captain Stacy he will stay away from Gwen, and he can't promise Gwen that they'll live happily ever after either.

And how should Peter know. He's only 17.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Spider-man does whatever a spider can. End app.

Okay no.

Upon getting bit by an especially irradiated spider that was subject of experimentation to combine human and spider DNA so that the former can benefit from the latter, "radioactive mutagenic enzymes in the spider's venom" caused for widespread developmental changes in Peter's body. This manifests mainly as the gaining of physical advantages, as well as some mental.

Peter's strength, agility, durability, and all around physical prowess has been ramped up ridiculously. He is strong enough that he has been depicted as almost effortlessly catching a car (approximately 2 tonnes of weight) out of the air, and stopping a bus from flipping by digging his heels in. When he first developed his powers, he was depicted as not being in complete control of them, implying that they are all inherently a part of him now as opposed to something he can switch on and off.

In terms of durability, he possesses a resistance towards injury as well as the ability to heal swiftly from injuries he does obtain. Durability is only that -- resistance, not invulnerabilty, as he gets plenty beat up during particularly high tier boss fights, such as when he went up against the Lizard. His regeneration, similarly, is not instantaneous -- he will walk around with bruises and lacerations for a couple of days, at least.

His other physical attributes in terms of human performance includes agility and fast reflexes, and these are as much mental advantages afforded him as they are physical. Peter enjoys a bullet time speed of perception and hyper awareness of his surroundings, especially during dangerous and high energy situations. This permits him to dodge bullets with the power of gymnastics, as well as take stock of a messy and violent situation and figure out how to solve it, as well as be physically able to carry this out. Although Peter displays these reflexes in the every day as well as high tier battling, it seems as though these powers are enhanced while he is actively engaged in a fight. Taking him by surprise when he's not exists as a possibility.

That said, this brings us around to his spidey senses. When danger is near, Peter gets a tingly kind of sense at the back of his mind and a directional knowledge of where it might be coming from, for all that he won't know exactly what it is until he investigates or it happens. This makes him difficult, but not impossible, to sneak up on, and he is also carefully attuned to where crimes are being committed if within seeing or hearing perception.

Last but not least, possibly the strangest and most spider-like of his abilities, is his power to stick to surfaces via his hands and feet. Whatever the method of this traction, it's enough to support his body weight easily, as well as that of another person (such as, if rescuing someone). It appears to function through the thin fabric of his suit, but it necessitates he take off his shoes, nor can he wear thicker gloves. This would be played as a combination of friction control and some kind of mutation to the surface of his skin, such as microscopic hairs that interact with surfaces on an atomic level.

In terms of power nerfing for the benefit of the game, his physical strength would be downgraded to about half, so he would be able to catch half a car instead of a whole one. His super senses will be lessened as well, meaning that he won't be operating in bullet time, just a grade above peak human potential. He gets to keep wall crawling unless you guys say otherwise!

In terms of other abilities that are not a part of his suite of supernatural ability, there is his web slinging. In this reboot, Peter makes a return to the ye olde mechanical webshooters that he has created himself, using something called 'biocable' produced by Oscorp, which is a sticky, incredibly strong web-like cord made from the silk of genetically engineered spiders. They can be cut through by a knife, or broken if the person doing the breaking has some form of super strength. His web shooters allow for them to be, well, shot to stick to things, create tripwires, summon stuff to his hand, summon himself to stuff, and so on. He will be receiving his web shooters in game, as well as some reloads of biocable, but they are a finite resource.

As implied by the above, Peter is an exceptionally smart young man, if a somewhat unfocused one. He has a great affinity for science but lacks the drive to chase a dream in this field like, say, Gwen Stacy, and so tends to pick up on stuff that's directly relevant or interesting to him. It is his talent, but not his calling.

Inventory:

clothing; two jeans, two shirts, a hoodie, a jacket, some underwear, socks, trainers

two web shooters

six extra cartridges of biocable

skateboard

Appearance: Gangly in the way that teenage boys who are only 5'10" but have probably been 5'10" for an abnormally long time can be, Peter Parker is white, dark haired, dark eyed. He has an easy and bright grin that occasionally angles crooked, a slight unibrow thing happening, and thick, bushy hair. Until recently, he required corrective lenses to see properly, and has since developed several more muscles than he had previously. He is depicted by Andrew Garfield.

Age: 17

AU Clarification: n/a

S A M P L E S
Log Sample:

By the time Peter is enduring his fifth jump, he's getting the hang of it. He stacks two robes next to his pod before he climbs in, having learned the hard way what happens if you don't got a back up, and, after bundling himself up from the shoulders to his knees, there's a speed walk for the showers, 'cause if you wait, the tiles start looking incredibly disgusting after the fiftieth passenger's trekked through blue slime. That, and frankly, he wasn't a real locker room guy back in Midtown, and he isn't one now.

Once cleaned, and cocooned in clean towelage, it's time for the lockers. He hasn't received anything he didn't put in there himself since the first time, and doesn't expect it now when he slings open the door.

And stares.

Reinforced red and blue, metallic glinting rubber-based material folded careless is so indubitably familiar that he kind of just stands there for a minute, reaching in finally to turn the mask over and look at the perforated black eye he'd sewn into fabric. "You finally show up, huh?" he queries it out loud, the mutter lost into the shadows of his locker. "Now you show up. I could have used the support several months ago, but now here you are."

Except no. Spider-Man doesn't really exist here. This isn't New York. New York doesn't have elves and mutants and wizards and robots and things infinitely more special than some dumb kid that got bitten once. It has crime. Open skies. It has Gwen Stacy, dimensions away. He draws his hand back out, empty.

"Peter?"

"Yo."

CLANG is less than surreptitious when he flicks, too hard, his locker door closed, turning on a dime. The exchange goes something along the lines of you okay and Peter making affirmative vowel sounds until the moment is passed, and he thinks about turning back around. The side of his fist thumps light and contemplative off closed locker door, before he decides he can just.

Get dressed in his room and be conflicted about his spandex unitard in peace. Jeeze.

Comms Sample:

Okay. So. How do I put this.

[ The guy that appears on the network today, a maximum of twenty-four hours after the latest jump, is not ordinarily seen on camera, and certainly not posting himself, favouring text if anything at all. Yet, here he is, with only a sort of fixed anxiousness in his direct stare down the lens indicating that this may be an emergency, but otherwise--

--he smiles. ]

We've got a, uh. Spider problem. You may have noticed. This is like sort of a PSA, if you will, about how spiders are far, far more afraid of you than you are of them. You may be tempted to squish them, step on 'em, or if you got bug spray, somehow, for some reason, but don't-- don't do that. I bet they don't wanna be in space any more than you do.

So I'm just going to do a little demonstration, hopefully it'll come in handy. All right.

[ Look, someone may have received a jar full of spiders in the last jump, and someone may have, through an unlikely set of unfortunate circumstances, let them loose by accident. Peter backs up, adjusting the video to show off the expanse of table he is beside, taking a jar to shake a spindly spider onto the metallic surface. In the view of the communicator, it could be a tuft of hair, until it suddenly takes off at a run.

Peter neatly brings the jar back down over it. ]

There, now it can't get at you. Try not to squish its legs, it's only got eight. Now you take this piece of paper-- whatever paper you got on you, really, and-- like so--

[ He slides the paper beneath the jar. He flashes a smile, lifts the trap up, down. ]

And you got yourself a new friend. And just, I mean, I'm happy to come... wrangle... your spiders, if you have spiders. Okay, that's all. I'm Peter, this has been a public service announcement, thank you a lot for watching it. I'll be here all space-night.