Josh Kennedy

World: POWERS
Name: Josh Kennedy
Date of Birth: 14th July 2000
Age: 15
Position: Student at Tyler Jacobson Academy
Class: Centurion
Appearance: Josh is 6'2" tall and extremely skinny. He has long, black hair that reaches a few inches past his shoulders, very pale skin and grey eyes. He almost always wears black long-sleeved shirts with from obscure metal bands, washed-out jeans and skate shoes. On more formal occasions, he will wear a white button-down shirt, a black skinny tie and dark blue chinos.
Backstory: Born as Josh Warren to a very poor family in Detroit, Michigan, his father resorted to dealing drugs while his mother went between many minimum wage jobs, struggling to make ends meet. At the age of 3, Josh was incorrectly diagnosed as schizophrenic due to his reporting of hearing voices in his head at all times. Treatments for Josh's 'schizophrenia' were very expensive and had absolutely no effect on the voices he heard. He was outed as a meta-human at the age of 5 - almost two years before the first publicized meta-human cases - when, at a birthday party of someone at his school, he began telepathically moving small objects such as his drink to himself, hardly aware of what he had done. The teenage brother of one of the children recorded video of Josh's telekinesis and uploaded it to the Internet. It went viral within a week, with most viewers considering it a hoax, albeit a pretty awesome looking one. This video took the attention of the United States military, however, and they investigated the source, tracing it back to Josh and his family. A military researcher, Lyra Kennedy, visited Josh and his family under the guise of a psychologist who wished to help Josh in his struggle with 'schizophrenia'. After seeing Josh openly using his telekinesis in her presence, she had all the information she needed to confirm his status as a meta-human. The following day, a strike team took Josh away from his family and to a remote base in Nevada. His parents were paid-off handsomely to keep quiet about the situation, and so they obliged. All proof of Josh's existence was either destroyed or taken back to the base. Upon arrival, Josh was placed in living quarters that were closer to a cell which he was not allowed to leave unless accompanied by three armed guards at the request of scientists who sought to carry out tests. The military wished to find the source of meta-humans' powers and replicate it in their own forces in something they called the Human Enhancement Project. Lyra was the only kind and merciful staff member, making sure all eight of the metas stored in the base were being treated properly under her shifts. They were all identified only by their first names. Other than Josh and Clara, who had the abilities of flight and healing, there was Annie, whose powers were unknown, Alex, who had an enhanced speed, Mark, who had the ability to temporarily stop time, Lexi, with powers of enhanced strength, David, who had powers of pyromancy, and Katherine, who had the ability to create psionic blasts. Josh only ever had interactions with Clara and Annie, as they were in the cells either side of his. The other researchers and soldiers treated them like sub-humans, beating them, teasing them, torturing them, and refusing to provide even the slightest amount of comfort. They were fed only once a day, and given a limit of two glasses of water per day. The metas got by from the kindness of Clara, a meta who had parents in the military who had helped to initiate this program in the first place. She had been extended certain privileges and freedoms that the others weren't, allowed to roam the base freely, so long as she stayed confined to the heavily guarded and protected underground area where she and all other metas were being housed. As the experiments continued, Lyra's guilt came to a head. She quit her position as head researcher and left the base for good. At this point, the metas made multiple attempts to escape. In the first, the most spontaneous and least successful of all the attempts, Josh was about to be cut into by a doctor wielding a scalpel, he used his mind control power to instruct said doctor to stab the guard at the door. The doctor obliged and Josh made a run for it, before he could get to the control room to open the cells of the other metas, he was knocked out by a hit from the stock of a rifle of one of the guards. The other metas never even learned of this attempt. On a second occasion, Clara utilized her proximity to some of the guards to ascertain exactly when the shifts switched, finding that there was a very small window of opportunity in which she could infiltrate the control room whilst invisible. Clara was caught mid-way through opening the cells, with Lexi, David, Mark and Alex set free. The four tried to escape with the use of their powers, but they were executed immediately. Clara was left to punish herself by struggling with her own guilt. In the third and final attempt, Katherine found that her psionic blasts could destroy some of the wall of her living quarters and fired upon the same area of everyone else's. Katherine then tried to unleash a powerful blast of energy to blow the doors off, but the alarm was raised and the four were moved into new cells reinforced with eight inches of steel. The mistreatment of the test subjects continued for years before the Meta-Humans Rights Act of 2011 passed through Congress, with Lyra herself being one of the main driving forces behind it, speaking openly about what she had witnessed in Nevada, and calling for the freedom of the meta-humans stored in the facility, given that all global experiments on the metas had proven completely fruitless. The following night, a group of militant activists stormed the base. Josh and his fellow metas used their powers in an attempt to gain freedom, but only Josh and Clara managed to get out of the chaotic skirmish alive. Josh and Clara found Lyra, who legally adopted the two and tried to raise them herself. From that point on, Lyra essentially became Josh's mother, and Clara his sister. However, Josh was severely mentally damaged by their horrific treatment in the Nevada military base, and Lyra feared his mental instability, or that he might use his powers with ill intentions. So, upon the announcement of the Tyler Jacobson Academy, both he and Clara were enrolled immediately in the hopes that Josh could learn to be something akin to a real-life superhero as opposed to a real-life super-villain. Clara joined him to provide support, learn more about her own powers, make friends and protect Josh, taking extra care in ensuring he didn't tip over the edge into going rogue.
Powers: Josh is a powerful psychic with the ability to read minds and move objects. He has rudimentary mind control powers too. Those being that he can suggest an idea or concept to an individual's mind. However, he has no control over how this suggestion or concept manifests itself in the target's mind. It could be a fleeting thought, or it could become a relentless obsession. Also, suggestions that are extremely out of line with how the target would usually act are almost completely ineffective in most cases. His main weaknesses are that he is physically weak, and that he has very little control over his psychic powers, receiving the information from reading minds as a constant flood of voices in his head, each sounding like the person they represent. To use his power of control, he has to single out the voice of the target and focus on it, until it becomes the more dominant voice in the maddening din of chaotic thoughts. This is also somewhat necessary to read one mind properly. Josh's telekinesis gives him the ability to lift or move relatively large objects without fatiguing him in any way; he can move non-living objects weighing up to 15kg with no effect on himself. However, he cannot move anything weighing over this limit.
Personality: Josh was always quite the loner, even before his kidnapping, desperately avoiding crowds and groups of people to keep the voices at bay wherever possible. He was always seen as a strange child, because of both his looks and behavior. Josh is a very mentally unstable person since his mistreatment in the military base in Nevada, and his constant struggle with the never-ending stream of voices from his psychic capabilities. He is completely neutral on the whole good vs. evil issue, believing that morality is completely subjective. A significant part of him is bitter and hateful towards the human race as a whole for the way he has been treated, but the knowledge of Lyra's kindness serves to remind him that not all humans are like the ones that tortured and experimented on him. Due to the maddening nature of his psychic powers, Josh prefers to be alone or with the only two people he has any attachment to: Lyra and Clara. In his spare time, he skates or listens to music, having developed a taste for the bleakness and aggression of death metal and black metal. He sometimes uses his telekinesis on his skateboard to pull off impressive tricks that would otherwise be impossible. His powers have revealed to him some of the darkest thoughts ever to emerge from a human mind, so as a method of coping with this, he writes the very best and very worst thoughts he hears in a diary of sorts; dedicating one half to the happy, pleasant, kind thoughts that give him faith in humanity, and the other half to the most vile, hate-filled thoughts he's heard over the course of his lifetime. He hopes that his time in the Tyler Jacobson Academy will teach him more about his powers and how to control them, give him a chance to make friends with more fellow metas than just Clara, and find some sort of mental stability. He desperately wants to expand his life outside of his own comfort zone, but struggles to do so. His psychic capabilities show him a person's true nature, so he will not befriend people who tend to have dark thoughts. His main source of happiness is spending time with Clara, who often gets him in on pranks which utilize his telekinesis and her own invisibility to confuse and startle people for fun. He has no real feelings towards his biological parents, as he was too young to remember anything about them.

Hey, finally another meta!

Firstly, I like the profile. The backstory really adds a lot to the POWERS universe, with government intervention and the like. It's well-detailed, but I'd like a bit more exposition on his wants and desires. There's quite a bit in the personality section about his aggressiveness and instability, but we don't really know a lot about how he gets on with other people and how he got on with people before being shipped off to the military base. I'd also like a little bit about that, the kind of torture he was subjected to and more on the other metas living there, aside from Clara, if he ever saw them. I'd also like you to expand on the military base itself, surely he didn't just allow himself to be experimented on day in and day out? Embellish the story a little, friendships with certain guards, blackmailing them with their own thoughts, escape attempts, that kind of thing. Go wild!

Also, you need to pick a class for Jimmy. I'd personally choose the Centurions for him, the ones that are most likely to go rogue. He'd fit in in the Sentinels, though.

As for the power itself... telekinesis is difficult to control. As in, from a roleplay standpoint. For example, if Josh gets trapped in a last-ditch 1v1 fight the other guy is boned, basically. Rethink the limitations a little, it just seems a tad too easy for him to become an unstoppable force at present.

Bumping because I made some changes. You may feel like I need to nerf Josh's telekinesis a little more, but for the time being, I halved his weight capacity and made him unable to move objects above that limit.

The power is perfect now, no need to make any more changes. Backstory seems sufficiently fleshed out now, but for the sake of formatting you should make the escape attempts and details of the other metas a part of the narrative.

Right, that's done!

Looks good to me. Go ahead, go out into the Metropolis and do some good! ... Or bad!