Howard 'Yi' Chen (Accepted)

[Howard 'Yi' Chen]

HOWARD ’YI’ CHEN

’Things are getting rough, turn it back around
You gotta turn it up when they tell you tone it down…’

”With my power, I can see the past. With my camera, I can capture the present. And with my brain and my heart, I’m gonna change the future!”

THE BASICS;;
NAME: Howard ‘Yi’ Chen
AGE: 13
SEX:Male
CODENAME: After much thought and deliberation, he decided that a suitably cool superhero name would be ‘Flashback’. If he was ever going to be a superhero…
ALIASES: Yi (not officially his middle name, but he often goes by the nickname his father gave him as a young child)
AFFILIATION: Civilian
STATUS: ‘Staying out of trouble’. Yeah, right!
CANON: No
PLAYBY: My own design. So N/A



THE GOOD STUFF;;

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION:
While Howard is only half Chinese, his oriental heritage is very much dominant in his appearance and facial features. He is also slightly short for his age, though this has never bothered him, and is physically a somewhat scrawny figure, though nimble in movement and possessing boundless energy in everything he does. His hair is fairly short and perfectly black, and always has a couple of messy spikes protruding here and there that just never seem to stay down, especially in the fringe and at the hairline at the top of his neck. His most common expression is a cheeky grin that is quite familiar to anyone who knows him – it usually means he’s up to something.

Outfitting wise, Howard is lazy when it comes to changing out of his school uniform after school (“I’ve got way more important stuff to be doing!”), so he’s most commonly seen in the standard white shirt and blue tie and trousers that make up the uniform. Though if he can get away with it (and always after school) the tie is removed, top button is immediately undone to give him room to breathe, and the shirt is untucked, so that he becomes a picture of scruffiness. While most of the time on weekdays he can’t be bothered to change out of his uniform after school, he isn’t adverse to adding his own personal touches, however. His favourite thing to wear is a grey newsboy cap which he tends to keep in his school bag at all times. His schoolbag is a standard dark-coloured messenger bag, packed full of all the useful things like ‘survival cookies’ and a cleaning kit for his camera, and, sometimes, stuff for school too. As for his camera, outside of school hours it can always be found either on a strap hanging from around his neck or up against his face as he peers through the viewfinder. This tool is perhaps his most important possession. It’s outdated, clunky, slightly damaged and too big to be convenient, but he takes it everywhere he goes and is hardly ever seen without it.

But this is perhaps the second most recognisable thing about his appearance. The first, the thing that people instantly notice and mentally question, is his choice in gloves. He always wears a pair of thick yellow gloves with grey cuffs that make his hands seem oversized. Unfortunately, these are not a fashion choice, and if he’s ever seen without them, something serious is going down…

On the weekends, when he has no need to be in school uniform, he tends to favour loose clothes that allow him to run around without getting too hot. T-shirts and hoodies are the norm, usually paired with some three-quarter-length shorts and a pair of well-worn sneakers (he maintains that it’s impossible to run properly in new shoes, and that attempting such a feat has got him caught by displeased teachers on more than one occasion).

PERSONALITY:
Sharp as a tack, for one thing. His feet move fast but his mouth moves faster. His knack for quick-spoken quips and witty retorts has gotten him into (and out of) a considerable amount of trouble over the years, but throughout anything he goes through, his quirky (and some would say slightly dorky) sense of humour remains unshakable. He has been known to stare straight into the face of certain detention and laugh.

Howard is a bright kid, some would even say gifted – but he is easily distracted, lazy when it comes to real hard work, and constantly full of energy that makes it impossible for him to focus on anything he doesn’t deem of importance (or so claim his school reports). While he couldn’t care less about geography or chemistry, however, when he gets on the tail of a good mystery he turns into a dog with a bone – unwilling to give up on chasing the thing until it’s resolved. Since he has very specific interests in such areas, things like school lessons and friends tend to kind of bore him, which might explain why he doesn’t have as many pals as he should. He’s not a loner, as such, he knows names, has people to talk to while in school, but if anyone should come around to the house to see if he wanted to hang out, they would probably find that he was out gallivanting on his own. The words ‘trust issues’ have been bounced around by concerned teachers more than once, but the fact of the matter is that he simply gets so absorbed in his own interests that he sometimes forgets that other people exist, and so also often overlooks people’s feelings. This is far from intentional, of course, and if he ever realised he had upset someone with his disinterestedness, he would doubtless feel very bad. He has only ever had good intentions, after all. Any mischief he gets in is only because he was trying to help someone in some way or another. Unfortunately, with his overactive personality, his need to be where the action is, and his… ‘condition’, he winds up in some kind of trouble on at least a weekly basis.

Howard has known since he was a little kid exactly what he wanted to do in life. He has been inseparable from the lens of a camera since he first got his gloved hands on one, and snapping pics, whether they be of the rare interesting parts of everyday life or of a crime scene he had managed to sneak into, is absolutely his passion. His bedroom walls are covered in photographs he’s taken over the years, and he owns stacks of filled albums due to his little hobby. His passion for capturing unique moments in time has become one of the main causes of his getting into trouble. If a disaster strikes and people on the street start running, his completely instinctual reaction is to grab his camera and run in the opposite direction to the crowd – before he even knows the situation.

As much as he is currently detached from any real friends, he still loves his family very much, and is very close to both his mother and father. His father has always been his one role model and mentor, whose word he would trust above anything. As for his mother, he would do anything for her.

Howard has a dog called Mack, who is dishearteningly uninterested in adventures, though is apparently willing to lend an attentive ear when he has a problem to rant about. His favourite colour his orange, his favourite food is his father’s homemade shui jiao-style dumplings, and his favourite day of the week is, of course, Saturday.

POWERS AND/OR ABILITIES:
Howard was born with a strange ability, one that has remained unexplained throughout his life. If an object, person, or creature touches any part of his skin, he experiences flashes of visions depicting the past of said object. A brief touch will result in a quick image of a random point in a person or object’s past, but prolonged contact seems to right the process and allow him to explore the history of an object from the current point in time working backwards. The longer he touches something, the more information he absorbs, though the process is extremely quick – he is able to comprehend the entire past of an object of thirty years in about a minute. Older objects take longer, of course, and newer ones might not take as long as that. Although the images of the past are ‘downloaded’ into his brain in such a short space of time, this does not alter the detail of the memories – on a mental level, within the few seconds it takes to absorb an object’s memories, he is also able to view them at a standard speed, as if he could see them happening in front of him. This temporal alteration is purely a mental process similar to being in a dream state, and in reality the process still only takes a matter of seconds or minutes.

When coming into contact with people, he is able to observe memories that they themselves cannot recall, whether they have simply forgotten them naturally or some other force has forced them to forget or manipulated their perceptions of true events. He cannot, however, sense anything other than what has occurred to an object. If he suddenly knows your name, it’s because he has seen someone calling you it in the past, not because he has read your thoughts.

His ‘superpower’ (as he has dubbed it) is far from his greatest strength, however. That would be his resourcefulness and quick wit, not to mention the frankly amazing speed at which he can run from an infuriated teacher, cackling with laughter as he goes.

WEAKNESSES:
His mysterious ‘gift’ is not without its drawbacks. Using it, even briefly, can cause dizziness and bad headaches. If, for some reason, he keeps contact with an object or person for an extended amount of time, it can cause convulsions and unconsciousness. For this reason, he will only ever use his power if he deems the cause truly worth it. Aside from this downfall, there’s the fact that he’s unable to remove his gloves or touch anything without protecting his skin, which is just generally inconvenient in day to day life.

His big mouth, as much as it is a strength of his personality, is equally a weakness. He has been told that he doesn’t know when to shut up, and one of these days his sharp wit is going to get him into some kind of trouble that he can’t easily get out of. Furthermore, his boredom with anything ‘normal’ is almost bordering on ADHD. He is easily distracted from even what people tell him are the most important of details, and for someone whose powers revolve around observing the past, he is also regrettably forgetful a lot of the time.

Finally, although he is very quick in his feet, able to hop a fence or go into a running slide at a moment’s notice (and he’s also proven himself to be pretty handy with a pair of rollerblades), he is physically both weak and small, and would have trouble if he ever had to defend himself from an adult or any kid bigger than him. But his moral has always been ‘Why fight when you can run?!’

GOALS:
Mainly, he’ll do anything required to stave of the boredom of everyday life. He wants adventure and excitement, just like his dad – and if he can help put a few bad guys away while he’s at it, then bonus points! Secondly, there’s always his photography – not only is he going to be able to take pictures for a living, but people are going to know his name! His photos are going to be in newspapers all over the place – and maybe hung up in a gallery or two!

HISTORY:
Some things in life simply cannot be explained. Delun Chen, an honest cop who had come to America with his father as a child, and his wife Sophie, a pre-school teacher whom he had first met as a teenager, were both completely normal, healthy people. There was no logical reason that their son would be born anything but the same, and yet this was unfortunately not the case. Ever since little Howard Chen was born, he has been gifted with the ability to see the past through touch. As a baby and a toddler, the nature of this condition was far from clear, and, being undocumented, impossible to explain. All that could be seen was that any direct contact with the outside world to the child’s skin would result in potentially lethal pain and convulsions.

It was only when Howard was older and able to communicate that the nature of his ability truly came to light. By this point, his parents had gotten used to caring for a child with what had apparently been a disability, and the fact that he was capable of sensing an object or person’s past through physical contact did nothing to change their love for him. They still raised him and loved him just the same, and, like any parents, were forced to keep from bundling him up in safety precautions. They realised early on in his life that holding him back – because of his ‘gift’ or otherwise, wasn’t going to do him any good at all.

It was obvious that Howard was a child with an active imagination and a short attention span from the word ‘go’, and, unable to sit still for very long at any one time, there was worry from his teachers about his inability to focus and his lack of interest in anything at all. It was at that point, as a kid of about seven, that he discovered photography. Perhaps it was his natural ability to see the past that led him to want to capture the present. Perhaps it was unrelated. Either way, photography became his passion, and gave him a purpose in life and at least enough focus to help him get by. It didn’t help him stay out of trouble though. At least once a week his parents would be called in to see the teacher or Howard would show up on their doorstep, having been escorted by a police officer because he had been trespassing during his adventures. This was embarrassing for them, of course, but no matter how many times they told him that he had to behave himself and follow the rules, he couldn’t seem to do so. They could see, however, that he wasn’t a bad kid. He didn’t go out of his way to start trouble or irritate other people – if anything, he was particularly good natured, and because of this they eventually came to accept that, when there were rules, Howard would always try to bend them for one reason or another.

Luckily, his father was an excellent role-model for him. Having been working on the force for a number of years, Delun was a well-respected officer, and looking up to him, Howard saw the kind of man he wanted to be. That was why, when he saw his chance to help his father, he didn’t waste any time in doing so.

Delun had been trying to advance to detective for several years unsuccessfully, and although he always remained upbeat and positive, Howard could see that his father was unhappy at times. One day Delun was assigned to a murder case, in which a weapon had been left behind at the scene, but, once analysed, had been found clean of prints or any traces of evidence that could lead them to a perp. With no other traces or clues, the police were stumped. Howard overheard his father talking to his mother about the case, and immediately demanded to see the weapon – a single touch would be enough for him to see who the criminal was, and solving such a tough case would surely be enough to get his father promoted to detective. But Delun refused, claiming that he wouldn’t use his son as a tool to solve crimes, and that he was far too young to get mixed up in anything to do with his dangerous job. After that, there was of course only one thing for it. It wasn’t hard to sneak into his dad’s car and go with him to work one day. It was only slightly harder to slip into the police station where the evidence was being held, but Howard had become an expert at sneaking by this point. Once he had avoided detection and located the evidence with the correct date and details assigned to it, he was able to grab the weapon and witness its history with his power. And, shockingly, it revealed that the criminal had been none other than one of the workers on the forensic team working with the police force! The gun hadn’t been clean of prints when it was found on the scene, but for the killer, working with the forensics department, it was a simple matter to wipe it clean and eliminate the evidence before it could be seen!

Taking his findings to his father, Howard found that, of course, he was furious with him. He had not only disobeyed his direct orders, but had snuck into a police station and contaminated evidence while he was at it. Not having any reason to doubt his son’s powers, though, he personally investigated the forensics worker who Howard was able to identify as the criminal, and after his investigation, Delun discovered enough evidence to put the man under arrest. The case was solved and, sure enough, he was promoted to detective. He thanked Howard for his assistance, but asked him never to do anything like that again. He wasn’t expecting a promise, and so when Howard only grinned at him and didn’t offer one, he wasn’t surprised.

Crime-solving and getting into trouble in and out of school aside, Howard lives a surprisingly normal life. He’s able to pass his need for gloves off as being due to a ‘skin condition’, so the world can continue to see him as just another bright but mischievous kid. Luckily, in Jump City there’s always something extraordinary going on for him to take snapshots of – even if it does mean he’s going to be a little late for class…


THE NITTY-GRITTY;;
SCREENNAME: Astalakio
Time spent roleplaying: Not enough
Other Characters: Aqualad, Superboy

RP Sample: N/A