Alex Summers

Alex Summers is a teenage ex-convict mutant superhero from 1962, bitches. He arrived in-game on 07/13/11 and currently lives in Kurzweil.

age: 19

origins: X-Men: First Class [canon]

app link: here

hmd: here

played by: Siri

contact:  coolercouleur [AIM | Plurk]

Setting
Okay, so. The world as we know it? Pretty much the same right up until the early 1960s. Right up until the Cuban Missile Crisis, actually, which was partially caused by a bunch of people calling themselves, rather melodramatically, the Hellfire Club… and mostly caused by a crazy dude named Kevin Bacon Sebastian Shaw.

Oh, and there are mutants.

Mutants, also known as Homo sapiens superior, are a subspecies of humanity who manifest superhuman abilities, such as telepathy, massively increased intellect, or psychic control over metals, usually during puberty. (Canon says they're a separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens, or the modern-day human being, but the laws of biology insist otherwise. We're going to go with the laws of biology for the purposes of this section, since they make actual sense. Comics, man.) Most of the time, mutants stay as hidden as they can from society, because they don't want to get murdered or locked up as a science experiment. This… doesn't really stay the case after the movie's done, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Anyway, so, the Hellfire Club. Most of the time, the Hellfire Club is a place for ridiculously powerful people to mingle and drink and stare at pretty ladies. Sounds innocuous enough, right? Well, no. The Inner Sanctum of the Hellfire Club is where all the fun stuff happens, if by "fun stuff" you mean "Kevin Bacon blackmailing and/or manipulating ridiculously powerful people into doing what he wants". Kevin Bacon (and his henchpeople, a strippertastic psychic named Emma Frost, a teleporter who looks like the Devil, and a really hot guy who doesn't talk and just so happens to throw tornadoes with his brain) are essentially trying to kickstart a thermonuclear war between the US and the USSR. This will, hopefully, kill off all the average humans, leaving only the mutants to survive--with Kevin Bacon in charge of the entire world after everyone else dies, of course.

Yeah, that's right. Kevin Bacon is trying to cause a nuclear holocaust.

Long story short? Charles Xavier (Oxford-educated professor of genetics, telepath, not paralyzed yet), Raven (Charles' adoptive sister, blue and scaly, shapeshifter), and Moira Mactaggert (CIA agent, totally normal) assemble a CIA-based team to take on Shaw and hopefully prevent all this nuclear apocalypse bullshit. This team consists of, in alphabetical order: Alex Summers, a teenage ex-Army prisoner with laser hula hoops erratically channeled plasma blasts; Angel Salvadore, an exotic dancer with dragonfly wings and fire-spit; Armando "Darwin" Munoz, a taxi driver with the power of ~adaptive evolution~; Erik Lehnsherr, a Holocaust survivor with control over magnetism and a serious vendetta against Shaw; and Hank McCoy, a supergenius CIA scientist with thumb-toes (and ridiculous whaaaambulance-based issues).

Thing is, this plan works… sort of. You know, if the only goal of the plan was to keep Kevin Bacon from causing the nuclear apocalypse. Too bad there are a lot of other bad things that happen while they're trying to save the world.

Bad things that happen before the team tries to stop Shaw:

1. Angel saunters on over to Shaw's team. For no good reason. 2. Shaw kills Darwin by redirecting one of Alex's plasma blasts into the middle of his chest. (You'd better believe that leads to some issues on Alex's part.      We'll get to those in a minute.) Alas, poor Darwin. We… didn't know thee well, actually, thanks to that rather stunning lack of screentime. 3. Remember that thing I said about Hank McCoy and his issues re: toes? Yeah, he makes himself a serum to try and fix it--and accidentally turns himself      into a giant blue kitty-gorilla. Whoops. 4. A bunch of CIA agents get stabbed to death by the teleportey guy who looks like the devil, but no one ever brings that up again.

Bad things that happen while the team is trying to stop Shaw:

1. Erik goes completely off the fucking rails.

… okay, maybe that last one needs a little more explanation.

Everybody piles into the thuper-thecret jet that Hank built, flying down to Cuba in order to place themselves right in the middle of two very large and heavily-armed fleets of very angry people, a ship carrying nuclear weapons, and a submarine containing Kevin Bacon and his ragtag bunch of henchpeople. The X-Team manages not to get shot down off the coast of Cuba. Somehow. Erik hauls Shaw's submarine to the shore through sheer force of will, then heads into the beached submarine to find Shaw and, in theory, drag him out so he can be brought to justice. Sounds good, right?

Welp. Have I got news for you.

See, no one took into account the fact that Erik spent years being physically and psychologically tortured by Shaw, and then spent even more years trying to hunt the son of a bitch down all on his own. As a result, when he finally gets close enough to Shaw to take him down for real? Erik's issues becomeeveryone's issues.

Erik gets into the sub… and then relies on Charles' access to Shaw's brain in order to hold Shaw still so he can be murdered slowly and excruciatingly. He also steals Shaw's Applied Phlebotinum magic psychic-deflecting helmet so Charles can't stop him, and then levitates Shaw's dead body out onto the beach so eeeeeeveryone can see it. The Russian and US Navies then promptly flip out--since oh my god, that was a guy who can lift a sub with his mind--and unite in firing a giant barrage of missiles at the Cuban shore, regardless of the fact that the dudes in the ridiculously tacky yellow-and-blue jumpsuits and the top-secret plane just kept everyone from dying in a massive thermonuclear war.

Anyway, the missiles end up detonating in the air rather than on the boats full of innocent-ish soldiers, thanks to the timely intervention of Moira Mactaggert, who started just firing bullets at Erik to distract him. It worked--except for the part where a deflected bullet goes wild and Charles is paralyzed by a stray bullet. Oops.

Even after paralyzing his new biffle (and the man who helped him get his powers under true control), Erik refuses to compromise. He takes the remainder of Shaw's crew--and Raven, who was tired of having to hide her true form in order to fit in--and teleports away to the mainland, leaving the paralyzed Charles, the injured recruits, and Moira to fend for themselves.

Anyway, there is a very important reason why I spoiled the entirety of X-Men First Class for you, and it is this: everyone in this universe knows mutants exist now. Everyone.

The end of the movie basically sets up the entire paradigm for how the entire world treats mutants--aka badly, because they're terrified. It also neatly divides the mutants themselves into two camps with diametrically opposed philosophies. One team advocates peaceful cooperation between humans and mutants, and blah blah holding hands and singing kumbayah forever. (That would be Charles' team.) The other one basically wants to force humans into accepting mutants… by any means necessary. (That would be, by process of elimination, Erik's team.) Naturally, they'll keep fighting for the rest of forever.Because really, that's just how comics work.

The ending also just serves to illustrate the fact that mutants are people too, and people can fuck up hard. Charles actually managed to let the entire worldknow publicly that mutants exist, and thus helped to create the populace that hates and fears mutants that he'll eventually work to dispel. Erik's not much better, though. He advocates the ~innate genetic superiority~ of mutants… which would sound unpleasantly Nazi-esque coming from just about anyone, but is hideously hypocritical and Nazi-esque coming from a Holocaust survivor.

Yeah. Nice job breaking it, heroes.

But hey, at least they managed to avert nuclear war.

Personality
Lucas Till once said of Alex in an interview, "He’s a powder keg waiting to explode, metaphorically and literally. He’s always on the brink of destroying everything around him." Cliched though it might be (and sweet Lord is it ever cliched), it's actually a pretty apt description of Alex.

For the most part, Alex tends to keep himself guarded by layers of sarcasm, antisocial silence, and general assholery. He's not the easiest person to get along with in the world, and this is a completely intentional move on his part. It's easier to just lash out at everyone and make them think you're an asshole--and thus make absolutely sure that no one will get hurt when you lose control for real, because no one will want to be close to you--than it is to actually work to get his powers under control, so… that's exactly what he does. When he's in a situation where he can't do that (see: prison), he tends to find the next-quickest way to isolate himself as much as possible (see: voluntary time in solitary confinement). It's worth noting that this attitude was also a response to jail, to a certain extent; Alex slowly becomes less of a dick as he becomes more comfortable with the rest of the X-Team and, more importantly, gains an aspect of control over his powers. People he's not familiar with are still more likely to be treated warily at best, though, until he warms up a little.

Darwin is really the one demonstrated exception to Alex's usual… style of interpersonal relations, mostly because a: Alex assumed that a guy with the power of adaptive evolution would be able to protect himself when--not if, when--Alex accidentally lost control and hit him, and b: Darwin is just really friendly. Darwin is the first person Alex really opens up to on the team--as much as Alex ever opens up, anyway--and for a minute there in the middle of the movie, it almost looks like Alex may be dropping the tough-guy act. Unfortunately… Darwin dies, and it's really not pretty. Sebastian Shaw actually redirects one of Alex's plasma blasts into the middle of Darwin's chest, then leaves him there while Alex watches his friend die. Alex, naturally, is convinced that Darwin's death is all his fault, since it was his plasma blast that eventually turned Darwin into a statue. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't help Alex's massive guilt complex; even though the plan to rescue Angel was entirely Darwin's idea, the sheer fact that Darwin got hurt thanks to Alex's powers means that Alex just blames himself for his friend's death.

As you might have noticed, all of Alex's psychological problems pretty much tie back into his powers. This… isn't really a coincidence. Accidentally vaporizing someone at the age of 16 does not do wonders for your psyche, especially if the end result is a murder trial where people basically accuse you of lighting a man on fire for no reason whatsoever. There wasn't any proof that the guy Alex killed was trying to hurt his foster sister, beyond Alex's testimony (which was seen as obviously biased) and his sister's (which was seen as traumatized and delusional). Besides, how do you prove that you accidentally threw a magic laser hula hoop that vaporized that guy and his car? (Even if the guy Alex killed did try to hurt his foster sister, his death was still an accident. He was just trying to protect someone he cared about, but ended up overreacting… which is a rather accurate metaphor for Alex's temper in general, really.)

Learning to control his powers to a certain degree has done a lot to help Alex, but--look, Alex yo-yos up and down the emotional spectrum about his powers fast enough to give anybody whiplash. He's getting better, but you can't fix two and a half years' worth of emotional problems in a week.

Despite all the angst and issues, though, Alex is really a decent person at the core, and when push comes to shove, he'll do the right thing. He voluntarily puts himself in solitary confinement just so he can't hurt other people on accident, even though he's surrounded by Very Bad People in a high-security prison facility; no one would mourn most of his fellow inmates if they died, but he still puts in the effort to make sure nobody (else) dies because of him. There was one incident, very early in his prison stint. He doesn't talk about it. He also refused to side with Magneto, despite having a totally valid reason to do so, and by the end of the film he's actually made an effort to get along with the remaining members of the X-Team. Yes, even Hank. Sort of.

Abilities & Weaknesses
Abilities THE MUTANT HULA. According to the Marvel Wiki, Alex “absorbs ambient cosmic energy into the cells of his body and processes it into plasma. This results in control over an extremely powerful sort of destructive force.” In layman’s terms, this means that he subconsciously yanks energy out of the air, from x-rays and gamma rays and what-have-you, and then lets it out in blasts that look suspiciously like laser hula hoops. They’re not concussive, but when he can light you on fire hard enough that things actually melt neatly in half? That’s not such a big deal any more. Fun side effects include immunity to a lot of the effects of heat and radiation and the ability to naturally run at an internal temperature of about 102 degrees without actually being feverish. The more you know!

YAY NOW IS FIGHTY TIME. Kid’s pretty good in a hand-to-hand fight, provided you’re looking for “effectiveness” more than “technique” in his skillz. He’s SOL with guns, though... not that he really needs them.

Weaknesses LACK OF CONTROL. Without the handy-dandy focusing device built into his suit, Alex is completely reliant on body movement to control the direction and force of the plasma blasts. This is, obviously, Not Good--especially when you take into account the fact that Alex's anger issues (and issues about his powers, period) just feed into his lack of control.

BOOK LEARNING. Alex isn’t stupid, but the past few years has meant that his academic pursuits have, uh. Suffered. Yes, he has a GED, but... frankly, the learning conditions in prison aren’t the best, and he didn’t pay much attention in school when he wasn’t incarcerated.

I AM FROM 1962 AND WHAT IS THIS. Enough said.