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CONCEPT
Enthusiastic marine biologist's optimistic exterior can't hold water.POWERS
hydrokinesis;• Control over the movement and shape of water. Jamie can pull, push and float water freely, including throwing it at people. He's currently unable to muster much force behind this, though, and can't do anything more damaging than the equivalent of being hit with a water balloon.
• He can also draw water out of permeable/porous objects, which can range from easy (a sponge) to difficult (a stone), and finally down to extremely exhausting (multicell organisms).
• Jamie's also able to "drink" through his skin by absorbing water out of humid air, or by touching the liquid with bare skin. It's a neat party trick to use your finger as a straw, but otherwise not very useful.
• He can, however, breathe underwater by taking in the oxygen in it.
• Ice is his undoing. Jamie can't heat or cool water, so if it's frozen, he's unable to work with anything that's not already melting off its surface. Ice and cold in general are a significant foil to his powers.
liquefaction/saline form;
• Jamie can dissolve himself into water, specifically (and exclusively) seawater. Even in his solid form, his saliva tastes as salty and briny as the ocean. He can do this at will, and with some effort is able to pull all of his molecules back together. While liquefying is instantaneous, reforming takes a minute.
• As a liquid, he can move around freely, slip through cracks, and generally get into any space that's not air tight. This comes with some risks, of course. If he loses a part of himself as a liquid, either due to it being destroyed, frozen or inaccessible, he can still reconstitute himself using surrounding water, whether it be in the air or in nearby objects. However, the process of reforming something that was lost is incredibly painful and creates a stinging, burning sensation in his extremities. (His physiology naturally prioritizes his head and torso when returning to solid form.)
• He can also use this on inanimate objects, causing them to collapse into a liquid state. Jamie initially learned this so that he could take his clothes with him, and hopefully not come back naked, but there are some complications. While he can liquefy objects up to about his own weight (~220-250lbs, appx 30 gallons), putting them back together is... challenging.
• He's just not that kind of scientist, or at least that's his excuse. He can sort of get the shape of clothing right, but it's like all of the particles were shaken up in a blender, rearranging the threads and colors, and leaving patches that look like procedurally generated lace.
• This goes doubly for heavier, more complicated objects. When he tries to bring them back, they return as denser, heavier versions of themselves reconstructed in natural crystal patterns. Very pretty, even sort of artistic, but not great news if you really wanted your toaster oven back. He cannot do this to living material.
• Jamie's power is unstable, but has improved hugely since he became a liminal nearly four years ago. For a long time it was difficult to stay solid for long periods of time, and he had to be kept in an air-tight space so he wouldn't accidentally slip through a crack in the floor. Luckily he doesn't lose parts of himself by accident anymore.
• He can still involuntarily collapse into a liquid state if he's under emotional or physical stress, though, both positive and negative.
• If his solid body sustains a serious injury, he will simply melt into seawater. If the injury is something he could walk away from, he can just reconstitute himself with effort. However, if the injury was serious enough to have knocked him out or done significant damage, he will remain in liquid form, unconscious, and will reform into a human body in 1-3 hours. Once reformed, his injuries will be healed.
• He does not know what happens if someone drinks him, and he doesn't want to try it.
• Jamie cannot communicate while in liquid form unless someone else can do so telepathically.
PERSONALITY
+ friendly, warm, interested, excited, loves a project, social, creative, gentle, knowledgeable, patient, driven, ambitious= shameless flirt but never follows through, class clown, evasive, rambles, unreliable outside of work, disorganized, easily bored, plays dumb when it suits him, needs to be liked
- survivor's guilt, no self-preservation, keeps things shallow, anxious, obsessive, self-loathing, codependent on his siblings, vain, hard-headed
likes; nature documentaries,
dislikes;
APPEARANCE
💦 6'2"💦 muscular but soft
💦 glasses
💦 apparently in a competition with Bruce to see who can die with the most tattoos — the majority of them are related to sea creatures or pop culture (use your imagination with me)
💦 eccentric fashion sense, colorful and casual, sometimes verging on fuckboy
HISTORY
• Grew up in Pittsburgh to a city bus driver (mom) and a social worker (dad) who didn't work the most regular 9 - 5 hours, so their kids lived it up latchkey style. Jamie was the second youngest, and his eldest siblings were more parental than his actual parents.• He excelled in school, and that gift for science carried him through his otherwise ordinary life. His sister was a Liminal, but no one else in his family was. Still, it was enough of a connection to inspire Jamie. He became a marine biologist, specializing in Liminal sea life and how Liminality alters the biology of complex organisms. He found a lot of success in this field, even if the pay wasn't great and the excursions were long and demanding. He traveled a lot, and looked forward to every moment out on the ocean. He was present diving or in in deep sea submarines to witness many new species born out of Liminal radiation.
• Four years ago, Jamie went on an extended research expedition near Australia to study the changes happening to the Great Barrier Reef, but the unexpected happened. An abnormal Riftland storm struck their vessel with no warnings. It's not completely clear what happened, as the event fried all of the recording equipment, but it was certain that everyone died onboard. Almost everyone.
• Jamie washed up on a beach a few days later, and immediately turned himself over to IRIS. He had developed the ability to dissolve into seawater, which was the only thing that saved him from dying with the rest of the scientists and crew. It was speculated that the sudden trauma triggered his newly obtained Liminal powers. However, said powers were extremely unstable, and he was kept him in a special facility for a while because of it. There were dangers of him leaking into floors that weren't airtight, or slipping down drains (not a fun experience). After a long time of tests and training, he was able to be more or less independent under IRIS' care.
• Over the last couple years he'd been working long distance with Raine Riley, a biochemist, collaborating on drug trials for Liminals. With Jamie's experience with Liminally altered biology, it was a good fit. They became long-distance friends, and eventually Raine confided in Jamie about the side effects of his own Liminality and it's particularly fishy side-effects.
• Growing desperately bored living in the same facility, Jaime wanted to get back into his field, despite (or because) still struggling survivor's guilt. He talked his caretaking team into letting him transfer to a research station, specifically Enodia. He could help Raine out more readily in person, and Enodia seemed to have a problem with interesting fauna.
NOTES
💦 talented (but amateur) guitar player and singer💦 SCUBA certified, even though that doesn't really matter anymore
💦 was very obviously a theater kid growing up
💦 trying to conceptualize his ability to melt and (badly) reform objects as Art
permissions
WRITING:
BACKTAGGING: yes please! i'm a little forgetful so don't be afraid to nudge me if you want to continue something
THREADHOPPING: hop away, little rabbit
PRIVATE FILTERS: go for it! i don't mind if things get spicy in private filters on my posts either
SENSITIVE TOPICS: abuse, sexual assault, bigotry, pregnancy, animal death. don't worry about me too much, i can just click away if i don't enjoy something.
SMUT: i prefer fade to black, but i'm happy to discuss what they get up to and how ooc, as well as exchanging sexually charged ic comments
CONFLICT: i'm fine with it! jaime can be passionate and hardheaded, but he's a lover not a fighter and would rather diffuse a situation than get into a real argument.
VIOLENCE: he'd really rather not, thanks! despite being a big, strong dude, he's adverse to violence. if you hit him too hard he'll literally dissolve into water.
BADMOUTHING: oh please do