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Name: Tristan Moore III
Codename: Harlequin
Aliases: ‘that annoying brat’ ‘oi, you!’ ‘[My] Lord Anson’ ‘The Viscount Anson’ Tris, Harbinger, Squire [only his uncle calls him this], Quin, Wraith… the list goes on.
Age: 17
Occupation: student/assassin in training/FMX rider
Sexuality: heterosexual
Faction: Hellfire Club [heir apparent, Black Knight]
Physical Description: Tristan is around average height, being just under 5’ 10” tall. He has a slightly lower than average build, but is stronger than he looks, despite a slight limp due to a poorly set leg injury in his childhood. When deputising for his uncle in the United States he often carries a cane or uses a crutch, but on his own time he moves with a lot more speed and vaguely clumsy grace than when he’s dealing with people who essentially hate him.
His dark brown hair is usually kept uniformly short, adding to the somewhat angular shape of his face to emphasise an almost skull-like countenance, which can be particularly creepy when he’s wearing a hoodie or something similar. His eyes are a rather dull and ordinary brown colour, except when he is using his powers, when they go the shade of green which gives him his codename.
When it comes to clothing, he looks best tricked out by his uncle’s tailor, who has all the money in the world at his disposal and therefore tries to set Tristan up with the best tailored black suits any teenager ever wore. But like any teenager, Tris has his own style. An FMX fanatic, he is just as likely to be found in jeans and a t-shirt with safety gear on as he is to be found in a suit lording it up with the ladies in some swanky members only club. Not that he doesn’t use his connections to make sure everybody sees him looking god, he just feels more comfortable in American Eagle than Armani.
Aside from the piercing in his left ear, Tristan can also be identified by a network of scars criss-crossing his body. Some of these are from his childhood, so early that even he can’t remember them, while others are the result of climbing falls, weapons lessons and spills from his motorcycle. He also has a port-wine birth mark about five millimetres across staining his right arm from the base of his thumb up to his elbow.
Likes: Climbing
Sign language
Using his powers
Sensory Deprivation Tanks
Freestyle Motocross
Cricket
Baseball
Fencing
Football (the soccer kind)
Having access to his trust fund
Dislikes: Hellfire club policy
Lawyers
Accountants
Rainy weather
People who treat him like an idiot
Snobs
Nuts (he’s allergic)
Dentists
Personality: A silent and serious young man, Tristan is a stealthy minor with a tendency towards extremes. When he is awake he wishes to be as social as possible, although he never speaks. He just feels the need to surround himself with people, either close friends in a coffee house or a club, or crowds of people watching him pull tricks and train; something about his powers makes him tense when he’s not around people. This is an emotion that he is trying to suppress, given the eventual line of work that he will take up until his uncle becomes too much of an obstacle to Tris’ ambitions and the young man inherits the position of Black Knight. During waking hours, Tristan is a silent entertainer, an ambitious businessman and a charismatic crowd pleaser. He is always very much aware of what needs to be done to keep people happy and to keep his own ambitions hidden.
In private, though, Tristan is a much more reserved person. He sleeps better in a sensory deprivation tank than he does in a bed, and his uncle sometimes jokes that Tris still sucks his thumb at night. Tristan doesn’t see anything wrong with sucking his thumb, so he keeps doing it despite the scorn. The way he sees it, everyone should be allowed to have their own quirks without being put down by society. His particular quirks are thumb sucking and not believing in the stance that the HellFire Club has taken on the whole McAllister thing. It is only his age and certain rules revolving around trust funds and inheritance that have stopped him from defecting all together; that and the fact that he knows that he is currently safer as part of the HFC than he is out on his own.
Tristan is a well-travelled young man who delights in learning new languages and cultures even though he does not speak. He respects the fact that people are different, and will try and fit in with whatever customs he deems appropriate when visiting foreign countries. He finds that his uncle’s xenophobia sits uneasily with him, given that both of them are secretly mutants and therefore feared by everyone, and so has tried to accumulate as much knowledge of other people as he can get. He’s an ‘all’s fair in love and war’ type; any advantage he can get, he will use, and if it is used against humans then that’s even better. He knows that he won’t always be a minor, and treats life in such a way as will benefit him in future.
History: Death, it seems, has followed Tristan Moore around since birth. His mother was killed by a psychotic woman in the hospital soon after he was born, and his father, landed with a kid he wasn’t prepared for, was never able to get over his girlfriend’s death. Here Tristan Moore Junior was, the bastard son of an earl with a bastard son of his own, and for five years that was how it stayed. Tristan Moore the Third was fed and bathed and generally kept alive, although there were accidents and injuries as there are with any child, but his father slowly faded away, and Tristan, deprived of any real stimulus, never learned to speak. His vocal chords simply weren’t used, and by the time his father went to join Tristan’s mother it was simply too late for him. He never learned to speak, and has never seen the point in trying.
When his father died, he was taken into care for just a couple of days, until the will was read and he was picked up by his uncle, heir apparent to the Earl of Lichfield. Tristan had never been told anything about his heritage and his family, but in about five seconds, from the man entering the room to them being introduced, he came to understand that what had gone before was not to be repeated. His uncle was unable to have children for some reason, and Tristan was the only blood relative the man had, so illegitimate or not the boy was not going to fester away in some foster home somewhere. Instead, he was taken in by his uncle, his father’s younger half-brother, and introduced to a life that he had never even imagined.
What followed was seven years of hard toil for the boy. Initially he was put in with a speech therapist, but as months went by with no sign of progress these sessions turned quickly to sign language and to the written word; at five years old Tristan was a way behind many of his peers, but given one-on-one care an attention soon brought him up to speed. He was kept out of any kind of class room, instead being home-schooled in a pretty liberal manner; he had classes in maths, English and science, but otherwise just picked up information from whoever else was around and willing to show him things. This was how he developed a love of team sports and of motocross and of generally being around people.
He was twelve years old when his grandfather died, having only visited his grandson a couple of times, and that was when his education began in earnest. His uncle had become the Earl of Lichfield, leaving Tristan as the Viscount Anson, and now he had to learn about a whole new world, that of the HellFire Club. His introduction to the group was entirely accidental; he walked in on a meeting one day and wrote down an answer to a question, passing it to his uncle before anyone could tell him to shove off. Of course, he was eventually told to go and play. But he was noted in the minds of several people as being both sharp and silent, and soon after that he started receiving tuition in several of the more clandestine noble arts. An illegitimate heir shouldn’t be able to clamber up the rungs of the ladder to legitimate noble status, but there had long been an understanding about the use of bastards in the world of blue blood, and so at the age of thirteen Tris became both his uncle’s deputy in certain matters and the HellFire Club’s pet human. By this time, of course, they assumed that the training would pull any powers out of him that he had, and they would then announce him to the government as one of their own rather than as a human.
But his powers continued to lay dormant as he trained, and it wasn’t until he was fifteen that he realised that he had any at all. At this point he was competing as a semi-professional FMX rider, and unknowingly feeding off crowds as he got more and more psyched up to ride; it wasn’t until a fellow rider crashed in a bad way and nearly died that Tris realised he could sense life energy from everyone else in the crowd as well; who was strong, who was sick, who was likely to keel over from a heart attack at any second… It was a strange feeling, and one he made sure to keep to himself. He doubted that he would still be allowed to ride if it was discovered that he was a mutant, no matter how much cash he had to hand, or what titles might be attached to his name.
In the years since he discovered his powers, he has practised them in private when ever he can get away from his uncle. Since his uncle is deathly afraid of flying, this is becoming a more and more regular occurrence as Tristan gets older and the HellFire Club’s interests in America soar, he has picked up the intricacies of his abilities in the same way as he learned to read and write, with quick and almost brutal efficiency. He still keeps it a secret, though; he doesn’t want to be the kind of person who sells out his own kind for safety, although he has actively recruited people for a similar purpose in the past, and no doubt will again in future.
Power: Tristan’s power is life force manipulation. He can drain a person’s life force to boost his own energy, act as a conduit to resupply one person with energy from another or simply rip it out of one body and expel it as kinetic force without absorbing any of it at all. Draining life force to rejuvenate himself leads to the absorption of memories and skills, although if he takes energy from a mutant he cannot absorb their powers. He can, however, absorb memories of them using their powers, thus identifying them as mutants. When he makes this identification he will most likely retract his thieving and repay the energy back; he doesn’t agree with culling mutants, since he is one himself.
The absorbed memories are often lost within an hour of being taken, but skills last up to a week, longer if he dedicates some time to actually learning them himself. He can’t turn his own life force into kinetic energy yet, but it is possible that this ability will develop as he gets older. When it comes to choosing who to drain he has an ability to sense higher or lower life forces and pick one which suits his purposes; the elderly are very rarely preyed upon due to having low energy signatures, whilst those under the age of eighteen are never chosen due to the potential overload and damage that can be done to both himself and the target; he doesn’t believe in abusing his abilities when it comes to children.
The manipulation of a person’s life force is easier the closer he is to a person, with skin contact making for the easiest transferral of energy. He has enough control of the power to make sure that skin contact only results in transfer when he wants it to, it is not an uncontrollable power but the further he is from a target the less energy transfers. The radius can increase if he is on the verge of dying, as he has been once or twice before, but usually peaks at around fifty metres from his body, with perhaps 5% of a person’s life force transferring at this distance, just enough to keep him alive. When it comes to using the life force of a person as a kinetic blast, he must be touching them directly, not through clothes, in order for it to work. Transferring energy from one person to another doesn’t heal the person it is transferred to, it just keeps them alive long enough for them to get medical care; in the direst of times he can use his own energy to bolster the life force of another person, although this is highly draining and requires a lot of food to be eaten after he does it.
Place of Birth: Oxford, England
Place of Residence: splits time between New York City, Lichfield and London
Nationality: British/American, dual nationality
Relatives: Alan Moore, uncle
RP Sample:Tristan reached up behind his head and caught his uncle’s wrist before the man’s hand connected with his head. His uncle often admonished him for sucking his thumb, but as yet it had had little effect on the teenager’s behaviour. Besides, he had sauce on his thumb this time, and that was why he was sucking his thumb in the middle of a crowded room where many of his uncle’s cohorts were gathered. It was all very prim and proper and British, and Tristan was bored senseless. He was the youngest person in the room by about ten years, and those who weren’t trying to get him to meet their daughters were treating him like a complete moron, speaking all slowly when they saw him using sign language because they didn’t realise that he was mute, not deaf. Of course, he could lip read quite adequately, and giving the impression of being deaf had its advantages, but if anyone else in the room knew sign language then he had to be careful exactly what he signed to his uncle.
He had, of course, purposefully left his notepad and pen in his room; he had objected to coming, and whilst he would mingle and breathe in the sheer energy present in the room, he was throwing something of a strop. Not that it was really noticeable; his uncle had known that when he sent the butler along with the night’s outfit. Tristan hated the butler sometimes because he couldn’t hit the man for following orders. Well he could, but he wasn’t his uncle. He wasn’t a total asshole, and as yet he wasn’t a known mutant. He hadn’t displayed his gifts to his uncle, and was only an heir in the HellFire Club because the older man refused to let his spot go to the highest bidder as long as he had a male heir to inherit it, mutant or otherwise. His uncle might be a dick, but he looked out for his family. Still, Tristan wasn’t keen on anyone with the power to imprison him knowing that he was a mutant, so as far as the American and British governments were aware he was just a human with a cooperative mutant uncle. And since it was his uncle who was the mutant, not one of his parents, they hadn’t gotten around to testing him for an X-gene yet. Had they done so, he had no doubt that those trying to marry him off already would be avoiding him; going to a party hosted by a mutant was quite different to having on in the family.
Removing his thumb from his mouth he released his uncle’s hand and turned his head slightly to smirk at the older man. Body language was an interesting thing, and being unable to speak meant that Tristan was a master of the non-verbal forms of conversation. A smirk from him was more than just a smirk, and he disentangled himself from his uncle’s company before the older man could fully understand what Tristan was conveying. No doubt his tutors would end up being told to push the pace up even higher than it already was, but as the Viscount Anson to his Uncle’s Earl of Lichfield Tristan couldn’t be allowed to fall behind in classes any way. It was bad enough that he never spoke, although undoubtedly none of the women looking to marry him off to their daughters felt that way. Tris just sighed – he was capable of that noise at least – and dodged as many people as he could to make his way out to the garage. The tailor would murder him if he got oil on his suit, but quite frankly that was preferable to spending one more second having to listen to his uncle’s peers. He needed an excuse to go to America again, that was for sure, and maybe his bike would be it. And if it was… Well, he wanted everything to be perfect.
Tristan Moore [Harlequin]
