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[headinjuries]

PLAYER INFO
Name: Sam
Contact: estamir
Are you over 18?: yes

CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Sam Alexander
Canon: Marvel 616
Canon Point: Directly following Nova v6 #7.

Appearance: Awkward teenage superhero. He's 5'6" and weighs 140 pounds.
Age: 15

Setting: Earth-616
History: wiki
Personality:
What do you do when your father tells you stories about being special ops in an intergalactic force of space cops, fighting evil and visiting alien planets?

If you're Sam Alexander, you don't believe him, and it really screws with your relationship.

Sam was always considered one of the losers at school; money is always kind of tight, his father was the school janitor (when he wasn't drunk off his ass and not showing up), and Sam is mouthy enough not to just take the bullying and shut up. He's constantly in trouble for getting into fights, his attendance record is in the pits, and when his story starts, he's got a tremendous chip on his shoulder about all of it - but especially about his father. He's mad at his father for being drunk, for being a loser, for telling all his stupid stories about adventures in space - but despite all that, he still loves his father and there's a reparable relationship in there somewhere. For all the complaining and the trash-talking, Sam does everything in his power to cover for his dad, support his family, and try to make things better. He sneaks back into school after hours to clean bathrooms when his father is too drunk to finish, and he's careful not to shatter any of his little sister's illusions about how great their dad is.

And when he finds out that all of the space bullshit was actually true, and his father is stranded somewhere out there in the galaxy in need of help, Sam is determined to find him and bring him home.

Getting superpowers initially has about the expected effect on Sam of handing massive power to a teenage boy; he has some big ego trips, blasts off half-cocked, and makes messes of things before he makes them better. But even if he is most definitely a smartass, cocky teenage boy, Sam is also a genuinely good person under his bluster, and so it's not long after he's inherited his father's power as Nova that he starts to adjust to the responsibility that comes with it. His first few attempts to do heroic deeds go pretty horribly, but he does his best to straighten out his messes and do better the next time - which he usually does, even if "better" still usually translates to "rushing straight in and realizing the bad parts of that plan after they blow up in his face."

Still, it isn't really accurate to call Sam stupid; his school principal observes at one point that Sam is intelligent, and really isn't much like the usual truancy cases he deals with. Sam goes out of his way to learn Morse code so he can talk to spaceships he's bailing out, Sam gets put in the chess club as a deal to stay out of detention, and while he initially complains a lot, he's seen to really warm up to it over time. When a temporary issue with his powers and his injuries keeps him grounded for a while, he appears to be doing a pretty solid job in school - it's just that staying still isn't in his nature, nor is keeping his mouth shut, and he'd rather act (or mouth off, or both) first and think about it afterwards.

His sense of responsibility is seen improving by leaps and bounds over the course of the series, but the amount of stress he feels about it goes up right along with it. Sam's home life would be challenging even without the addition of a secret identity to go along with it; he struggles a lot with balancing the two sides of his life - he misses a lot of class, loses sleep trying to get homework done, sometimes has to either rush home from space or convince a friend to babysit his sister, because his mother takes two jobs to try and keep them afloat in his father's absence. By the time he faces his father's clone in volume 6, his fuse is a lot shorter than usual, to the point where his friends want to know why he's always busy and whether he's okay, and he nearly explodes on them. As he later says, in response to being told that he needs to stop holding back: I have to hold back everything all the time. I can't open up to the Avengers. I need to always stay strong in front of my mom and sister. And I have to lie to my friends about everything. I am so freaking pent up all the time... I could just burst!

Dropping the superhero thing is never an option, though, and despite the hardships, despite the moments of frustration when he accuses the helmet of ruining his life, Sam clearly loves the freedom and the thrill of being able to fly across the galaxy on a thought. When he's doing well, he loves the hell out of being a superhero, and that helps him stick through the times when it sucks. And more than that, he persists because being Nova is the only way he's going to be able to find his father, and it took becoming Nova for him to see his father as a good man who did great things instead of as a drunk loser. No matter what else happens, he can't let go of that power, because he wants to bring his dad home for all of their sakes - for his mother and sister, for his father, for himself.

What it all comes down to, really, is that when Sam cares about something, he goes all out and he's a force to be reckoned with - when lives are on the line, when his family is on the line, when he sees something and knows he can help with that. But a lot of the mundane stuff hardly clicks, in comparison, or it's a choice between homework and heroism, and the one where people might die if he doesn't do something wins.

Keeping his mouth shut never wins, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Canon Abilities/Skills:
Sam's superpowers are accessed via his Nova helmet; without it, he's a completely normal teenager, albeit a scrappy one who gets into a lot of fights at school.

With his helmet on:
- Life support allowing him to travel through space.
- The helmet automatically generates the Nova Corps uniform when he puts it on.
- The helmet also provides him with information in the Xandarian databases, translates alien languages, and does quality-of-life stuff like navigation for him.
- He's stronger and more durable. Actually survived a Hulk smash! (Barely.)
- Flight at speeds beyond lightspeed (easily nerfable if necessary; he could be cut down to rocket speed?).
- Making hyperspace tunnels to shortcut across the galaxy (if his speed needs to be reduced, I'd assume this can just be omitted along with it).
- Energy manipulation, usually attacking blasts/beams or defensive shields. He also frequently charges himself up to fly straight into things and hit like a brick wall.

A couple of things he's been seen doing once, but that I'd be fine dropping because they seem like stretches for his powerset:
- Illusion via energy projection.
- Detecting and removing toxins in another person's system.

ON STATION 72
Symbiote Specialization: Rho
Symbiote Ability: True perception, allowing him to see the truth of things - effectively, he'll be able to see through illusions and tell when he's being lied to.

If he's not making a conscious, focused effort to see the truth of something, then he'll only have fairly vague, broad feelings that something isn't right; these manifest primarily as a sense of nausea. Someone telling little white lies might just make him feel momentarily queasy, with the severity increasing parallel to the level of deception. In the midst of an extensive, well-crafted illusion, he'd feel so nauseous that he'd have a difficult time functioning.

That sense that something is off doesn't give him the details of what or how - but if he decides to actually focus on it, he'll be able to narrow it down to the specifics. Focusing on an illusion would let him see through it and know what's actually there; focusing on someone lying would let him pick out which statements are false and which are true. (When applied to language, this sense is very literal. If someone repeated false information that they themselves believed to be true, he'd see that as a lie - despite the fact that they're not consciously lying, the statement itself is false. On the other hand, lies of omission can slide right past him, and statements that are technically true but that he takes the wrong interpretation of will still show up as truths.)

Focusing causes definite mental strain, so it's nothing he'd be able to maintain constantly - he needs to choose when and where it's worth using. This comes out as headaches; the severity of these headaches increase if he uses his power frequently, for longer durations, or repeatedly in the same day. Using it once to spot a lie in a quick conversation would be a minor headache that's mostly an annoyance and doesn't keep him from functioning; having to use his power continuously for an extended time to get through a complex illusion, or keeping it up for negotiations lasting for hours, would leave him with a full blown migraine, possible also with extra sensitivity to sound or temporary vision loss.

Level I: The side effects will last for most of the day, even for a single quick use. Using it more than once in a day would be extremely difficult and something he's unlikely to subject himself to.
Level II: Side effects linger for a few hours. He could use it twice or maybe three times in a day before things get unbearable.
Level III: Side effects last around an hour. He'd be able to get about five shots before he hits the point of "oh hell no."

A final downside of this power, albeit a somewhat less concrete one than the rest of them, is the simple fact that knowing exactly how much and how frequently you're being lied to could get pretty unpleasant.

Inventory: His Nova helmet and the clothes on his back.

SAMPLES
Samples:
A log and a network thread, both from Legion.

Rescue Write-up:
Once, Sam had asked Iron Man how space could go on forever. Didn't it have to end eventually?

Didn't everything have to end eventually?

Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, but the last few weeks have been proof enough that some things that he thought had ended weren't so finished after all, and with his father's clone dead, and the knowledge that his father was still out there, somewhere, he'd told his mother - I don't know how long it will take, but I don't think I can come back until I find him.

And the last few minutes have been proof enough that some endings he wasn't expecting are a lot closer than he'd hoped they would be.

He doesn't know what the things chasing him are. His frantic yelling at his helmet to tell me what the heck those are and where are they squishiest hasn't gotten anything, either, so he can only assume that the helmet doesn't know, and if it's not in the Nova Corps' database, then where could they have even come from? As for squishy, well - it's becoming rapidly more questionable whether they have a weak spot at all, because the last five shots he's made haven't left much of a dent.

"Gonna have to be faster than that!" He banks left, hard, the kind of hairpin turn that would normally leave anything skating in the wrong direction with its back wide open, but these things actually keep up, and one thought rises to the front of his mind as he glances back and finds them just as close on his tail as they were before -

You're going to die.

"Yeah, thanks for that," he mutters, picking up his pace and finding to his dismay that they're picking up theirs in turn.

But something about that didn't sound like the voice of his own nagging doubts -

We can help. Come this way.

How does he know he can trust them?

There's a sound behind him that can only be described as a chorus of snapping jaws, but not quite, because there's something weirdly off about it that nothing on Earth would be able to replicate, and he winces.

Okay, can it really be any worse?

He turns again, changing course. Just a little faster, push a little harder, he's almost there (but so are they) -

Sam has no idea where it even came from, in the middle of dead space, but there's a hand reaching out to him, and without pausing to think twice, he reaches forward to take it.