Gabriel Togashi

{{CharacterPage
 * image1=Wilmer_Valderrama_as_Gabriel_Togashi_2.jpg
 * image2=Wilmer_Valderrama_as_Gabriel_Togashi_1.jpg
 * caption=W. Valderrama as Gabriel Togashi
 * fullname=Gabriel Togashi
 * codename=Gabriel
 * position=Gold-hearted Pickpocket
 * age=18
 * race=Mutant
 * role=Anti-Hero
 * type=Original Character


 * quote="Like it or not we're all nothing but reflections of each other. I just do the reflection bit better." Gabriel, in a slightly morose moment.


 * overview=Another face in the crowd. Gabriel is a young man that has been running away from himself since he was 15. Learning to live on your wits alone in New York City can be enough to turn anyone into a monster. And since turning into a monster is Gabriel's biggest fear he clings to the ideals of his favorite boyhood story, Robin Hood, using them as a compass in the concrete jungle.

OOC Information:
Music:

People Are Strange - The Doors

Tone Likes:

Classic, Comedic, Gritty, Heroic, Social, and (in moderation for the next two) Romantic and Angsty.

Commonly Used Personas:

As a shape-shifter Gabriel will from time to time go out in public in a persona other than his 'base', I.E. the body he was born into. These include:

Catiana Lovel - Gypsy Fortune Teller.

Ferios, the Red Dragon

Ricardo Gracia - Thief Extraordinaire

Mindee - The Seventh One


 * sheet=

Character Sheet

Abilities: Power

Enhanced Physique: 3-4, Never Nude, Tactile Mimicry, Unaging, Visual Shapeshifting

Abilities: Skill

Acting: 4, Con-Artist: 4, Cool Headed: 6, Sleight of Hand: 5, Stealth: 5, Streetwise: 5, Street Combat: 5, Urban Survival: 4

Advantages: Friends Down Low

Flaws: Disjointed Identity, Mass-Based Delay, Newbie, Soft Hearted

Languages: Currently spoken: English

Abilities

Power: Enhanced Physique (3-4)

After Gabriel's initial transformation his body returned to a base state that puts him at the peak of human conditioning. Without the need for any intentional training Gabriel's effective strength is 3, dexterity 4, and toughness 3; while not superhuman per se, his physical attributes are easily within the top 1% of human limits.

Power: Never Nude

Gabriel has gained enough experience with his power to be able to manipulate the cells of his skin so that they can visually mimic virtually any article of clothing.

Limitation: This pseudo-clothing is still skin so regardless of what it looks like it offers no extra protection from damage and only limited protection from the elements.

Power: Tactile Mimicry

Gabriel can shapeshift to become a perfect copy of any living creature he can touch, as long as he can remain in contact with his subject for a minimum of 10 seconds to "gather" genetic data. The transformation itself happens within one or two seconds after the "gathering" is complete and includes copying any and all genetically based powers. For example, becoming a tactile copy of Charles Xavier would give Gabriel all of Xavier's mental powers, along with his physical handicaps. However, past an instinctive base usage of the copied powers he does not inherit any of the original's ability to use their powers and skills. For example, if he were to mimic the Human Torch he would be able to take flight, fly around, and land without trouble but he would not be able to hit a moving target with a fire bolt or engage in complicated aerial combat without doing some extensive practicing as the Torch.

Power: Unaging

Aging and death are a result of cellular degeneration. The morphability of Gabriel's cellular structure has the fortunate side effect of voiding said cellular degeneration which ultimately means that Gabriel is particularly resistant to sickness and toxins and has the potential of forevermore existing as an 18 year-old. This, however, does not mean he regenerates. Physical injuries heal the way they would on a normal human and will remain regardless of any shapeshifting, carrying across forms, although they leave no scars upon healing. The one exception to this rule is the loss of a limb. If Gabriel survives the initial trauma (for example, if he doesn't bleed out) he is able to regrow lost limbs within the span of a week or so.

Power: Visual Shapeshifting

Within a matter of one or two seconds Gabriel can physically shift into a perfect copy of anything he can see, including size, mass, and abilities based on perceptual cues. For example, if he is watching Giant-Man on TV picking up an 18-wheeler and he then uses his power he can transform into a 50 foot tall Giant-man. But if he were to look at a picture of Giant-man at his biggest with a blank background behind it his Giant-man would be no bigger or stronger than a normal man. In addition he can not mimic powers beyond those attributed to a physical form. For example, he could mimic Colossus' armor by looking at a picture of him but he would not be able to mimic Cyclops' eye beam just by seeing a picture of Cyclops shooting it at something.

Skill: Acting (4)

Since running away from home and coming to grips with his mutant abilities Gabriel has come to realize that at times just looking like someone isn't enough. So he has been practicing his mimicry skills and has become fairly competent at imitating people once he has had time to study them.

Skill: Con-Artist (4)

Gabriel has become pretty adept at lying and making it seem like the truth, mostly as a way to get some pocket change by tugging on some fat-cat lady's heart strings or to talk his way out of trouble. Although he's learned a few easy cons too he feels like that taking blatant advantage of someone good will or gullibility is too much like a real crime, especially since the people that will usually fall for a con are the true innocents and not the ones that would deserve it.

Skill: Cool Headed (6)

Gabriel is one of these people that doesn't seem to panic, no matter the circumstances. This does not mean he lacks emotions; he gets angry, he gets sad, he gets scared, but he never looses his cool. In situations relating to maintaining his composure Gabriel has an effective Willpower of 6.

Skill: Sleight of Hand (5)

Out of necessity Gabriel has had to learn a variety of tricks depending on the speed and finesse of his hand movements, some perfectly legitimate, like coin vanishes and manipulations, others less so, like picking pockets.

Skill: Stealth (5)

Any thief, even one that steals from the rich to give to the poor, needs to be able to get in and out of places without being noticed as well as being able to follow a mark without being seen. Gabriel has had a lot of chances to practice with this particular skill since running away from home.

Skill: Streetwise (5)

Even if you are not a criminal yourself (or at least don't see yourself as one) living on the streets creates some necessities that sometimes can't be taken care of without dealing with some of the seedier characters out there. Gabriel's contacts are fairly low level but he has learned where he can get fake IDs, how to spot gang turfs, where to find grey-market good, and other tidbits necessary for surviving on the fringes of society and treading that fine line between doing-what-needs-to-be-done and becoming an outright criminal. As he has become more established he has worked on strengthening his contacts and learning how to best use them to meet his mission to help the poor and downtrodden.

Skill: Street Combat (5)

Gabriel is not a violent person by nature but sometimes you are forced to defend what is yours or to help people that can't help themselves. The changes Gabriel has gone through since his mutant powers surfaced have given him an edge in a physical fight but not a big enough edge in many situations, so he has learned how to fight, the hard way. He is also becoming more and more aware that he has a lot more to learn which is why since becoming a member of the Justice League he has been eagerly taking every opportunity available to train with other JLA and Young Justice members.

Skill: Urban Survival (4)

Knowing where to find edible food and shelter when you're in the middle of the big city and without a cent to your name can be the difference between life and death, especially in the middle of winter. Gabriel has developed a fairly comprehensive knowledge of where and when the best food is to be found in Dumpsters as well as the best places to look for a warm place to sleep if he doesn't make it to a shelter before curfew.

Advantages

Advantage: Friends Down Low

Soon after his arrival in New York Gabriel befriended a low level member of the Yakuza, a fellow Japanese-Hispanic named Ricardo Yamaguchi. Yama, as Gabriel has taken to calling him, has served as both a mentor and a contact to the underground culture of New York while being a good enough friend not to push him to go any deeper into the city's underworld than Gabriel feels comfortable with.

Flaws

Flaw: Disjointed Identity

Imitating so many personalities and people is taking its toll on Gabriel. He is slowly starting to realize that he has less and less memories of his original life. And the scariest part of it to him is that he can't seem to bring himself to care. To compound this problem his most frequently used personalities (Catiana, Ricardo, Ferios the red dragon, and Mindee) have reached a point of individuality in his psyche that if he doesn't spend at least one day a month in the physical form for each he runs the risk of unexpectedly and uncontrollably morphing into the ignored persona.

Flaw: Mass-Based Delay

Gabriel's shifts are usually fast enough to be immediate for all practical purposes. However, transformations that require drastic changes in mass, be it adding or decreasing his mass, tend to slow down the process significantly. Truly drastic changes, like mimicking Giant-Man at his biggest or the Wasp at her smallest, also leave him tired and disoriented for a minute or two.

Flaw: Newbie

Even after three years Gabriel is still learning the limits of his powers and how to control them. This means sometimes... accidents happen. Especially when he touches other living things. Or when other living things touch him. As Gabriel's personality has started fragmenting he's also been finding that spending too much time in one 'personality' is causing uncontrolled changes to other neglected personalities and their related form.

Flaw: Soft Hearted

Gabriel genuinely cares for others, which at times leads him to take unnecessary and even dangerous risks to help people in need or people that he sees as being innocent or helpless. Sometimes this has positive results, like his meeting and subsequent friendship with Yama, but most of the time it just gets him in trouble.

His childhood in Sebring, FL was perfectly normal in a 2.5 kid family sort of way. He played all the common childhood sports, never excelling in any of them. He did well in school with grades that were above average but nothing to make him exemplary either. And since he was a little better at academics than at sports he became one of the 'nerds' of his high school becoming one of the less frequent targets of the bullies in school. And that was what ruined his middle-class American dream life a little after his 15th birthday. Not realizing that a couple of the school bullies were behind him he decided to cut through an alley to make his walk home from school shorter. And the bullies saw a chance to have some fun. Following him into the alley they cornered him and started having the kind of fun bullies usually have. Shoving him, pushing him, demanding any money he might have. That day Gabriel decided to fight back and things went from being 'fun' to turning into a real beating. All Gabriel can remember from that day is laying on the ground in a fetal ball, looking at a discarded poster for a circus that had come through town a few months earlier. On the poster was, among other images, the picture of a silverback gorilla and Gabriel started imagining what he would do to his tormentors if he had the size and strength of one of those huge animal. Then everything went... wobbly. And next thing he knew Gabrielle was towering over the two bullies, roaring a challenge and tossing them around the alley like they were rag dolls. The whole thing lasted no more than one or two minutes and at the end of it everything went wobbly for Gabriel. He was now standing over two batter and bloodied young men, to afraid to check and see if they were dead or alive.
 * history=Gabriel Togashi was born January 20, 1995 to Matsuhiro Togashi and Rosalinda Ferara. Both of his parents were second generation immigrants so he carries the look of his heritage but no real knowledge of the cultures either side of his family comes from.

Being aware enough to grab his things Gabriel ran the rest of the way home and took advantage of both his parents being at work to change his books for some clothing and all the money he had saved away and running. First, running just to get away, then deciding to head for New York City. Far away from his home in Sebring and big enough for anyone to get lost into in his mind it was the perfect place to hide from what he'd become.

Walking, hitching rides, and infrequently buying a bus ticket he finally made it to the Big Apple and... Had no idea what to do from there. Survival in a situation like that depends as much on luck as knowledge and he was lucky enough to run into the right kind of denizens of the street in his first few weeks. People that taught him where to look for places to sleep, which areas of the city to avoid, how to tell if food in a Dumpster was still edible, the shelters that were trustworthy, and enough other tidbits for him to start building upon it one his own. Two months later, huddled under some cardboard between a Dumpster and a wooden wall he was woken up by a commotion in the alley he'd picked as a sleeping place for the night. Peeking around the corner he saw a scene so similar to the one that had started this whole adventure that he felt impelled to intervene. On his way to New York Gabriel had finally come to the decision that if he was to avoid becoming the monster his beating of his two bullies hinted at he had to practice and gain control of these new abilities. So at the point he witnessed the beating of Ricardo Yamagushi, whom he later would come to know as Yama, he was good enough to be able to flip through the pages of the discarded Dog Fancy he had been entertaining himself with and come out from behind the Dumpster a few seconds later as a large, growling, slobbering Rottweiler. Once the other young man's attackers had been scared away he shifted back and helped the young Yakuza member sit up against the wall of the alley. As he recovered they exchanged stories and, in gratitude for his actions, Ricardo decided to take Gabriel under his wing.

As the months went by the time the two younger men spent together, which started off just as a way to pay off a debt as Ricardo taught Gabriel to improve the necessary skills to survive on the fringes of society, especially how to pick pockets and a few cons, a true friendship developed. Thanks to Ricardo's contacts and help Gabriel has managed to get some fake paperwork and put enough money together to be able to rent a dilapidated apartment that is barely better than living on the streets, but better none-the-less.

Recently Gabriel has been having some issues. The three main 'personas' that started off as Gabriel simply acting a part (Catiana, Ricardo, and the red dragon) have started to develop into full blow personalities in Gabriel's brain. Unlike someone with dissociative identity disorder, where the core personality retain no memories or control when a secondary personality is in control, Gabriel always knows what has happened when he has spent time in another persona and he can typically change to another persona or back to Gabriel at will. All of the personalities share a core set of values and goals but other than that they are now individual and distinct from each other. The main problem really comes from the fact that in the last few months the longer one persona goes without being 'let out' the bigger the possibility becomes that a spontaneous, uncontrolled change will happen into the neglected persona. When a change like this happens 10 to 15 minutes have to be spent in the neglected persona before Gabriel has enough control to change again.

To compound the problem recent events involving the Stepford Cuckoos have left Gabriel with an instant new persona, Lacey. Lacey shares all the Cuckoos powers and when Gabriel is in the Mindee person he also becomes part of the Cuckoos Gestalt. Added on top of that Gabriel had a recent encounter with a semi-mystical drug called Dark Eternity. As a result of imbibing said drug Gabriel's control over his powers has been very erratic, taking away the need for stress of surprise for an uncontrolled change to kick in when contact happens with another living being.


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