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The Terrible Jack O'Thorns

"What fools these mortals be!"

Natural Dominator

Plant Control / Thorny Assault

Speed / Concealment / Medicine

Jack O' Thorns is a brutish thug whose penchant for mayhem and torture is made only more horrible by the tenderness with which he treats his plants. He towers over most people, and uses his size to intimidate as much as he does the threat of his toxic herbology.

Jack's face and arms are covered over with a flexible bark-like substance, and ram's horns sprout from his head. It appears this is his natural appearance, as he has never been seen to remove either horns or bark, even in custody.

Jack favors apparel which capitalizes on his brutish appearance, and reflects his roughneck upbringing. He usually wears motorcycle or outdoor gear. He should be considered extremely dangerous. This suspect is considered armed at all times. Lethal force is authorized.

RP - Character Background

Jack was always a quiet boy. As a child he grew like a weed, and was nearly six feet before he was out of elementary school. For all his size, Jack was slow and shy. He was out of school several weeks out of each year to help with his family's crops, where his size was an asset, as were his considerable gifts in botany. Given his rural upbringing and unusual size, the kids in his school teased him, calling him the Jolly Green Giant.

Those same kids were more kind to him in high school, where his skills with growing herbs made him a certain kind of popular with a certain kind of student. Still hulking over his classmates, and still painfully quiet, Jack found a kind of peace at that point of his youth. No one wants to talk too long when they're only buying herbs from you, but nor do they want to bother you. Jack had quite a productive little entrepreneurship going by the time he graduated high school. Despite his business venture and the time associated with it, Jack was an excellent student, though his attendance suffered when it came time to sow and to reap.

Jack's parents died under suspicious circumstances, both succumbing to a gradual buildup of pesticides in their system. That they went several months apart did little to assuage the authorities, but nothing could be proven and they did work with the pesticide in question. Their deaths were ruled accidental, and Jack became an orphan. Only after his parents' death did Jack learn that his father's farm was not doing as well as he had thought. Less than a year after his parents died, Jack was forced to sell the farm and hit the road. Jack had always been able to locate good things to eat in the wilderness, so he never wanted for food. He spent a couple years following the seasons. He planted oranges in Florida, tobacco in the Carolinas, and peaches in Georgia, before moving on to plant corn in Iowa, potatoes in Idaho, and coming back around to start picking oranges in Florida.

A sharecropper's life is never easy, but Jack was a simple man and roughened from years of hard living. Growing up a farmer and becoming a migrant worker had taught Jack to look out for his own. No one picked on him for being too tall anymore. Now they were glad he could reach the higher branches, and glad he could break their fall if he had to.

As Jack traveled he continued with his business operation he'd started in high school. Wherever he went, Jack could always locate a good supply, and people who knew him never knew where it came from. Jack had a secret he'd kept all his life. From the time he could talk, could walk around and look at things, he'd been able to talk to plants. "Grow up," he'd ask the crops, and they would, over time. As he grew up, his powers increased, and he could grow an acorn to a tall tree over the course of a week of patiently encouraging it. His parents were terrified of Jack's powers, but grateful for them. They taught him to use his powers sparingly, so as not to arouse suspicion. Jack felt when he lost the farm that if he'd been able to use his powers to the fullest extent, he could have kept it. Only his father's fear had cost Jack his land, which thought drove Jack to push himself over the years that followed the loss.

By the time he was 26, Jack was well known among such circles as "Lucky Jack." Crops he planted never failed. Harvests he brought in never spoiled. Farmers were always glad to see his massive frame darken their door, and other workers were always glad to gather around a campfire with him at night. It was a hard life, but one at which Jack would have been happy for many years to come, except for one night's work.

One evening in early Spring, Jack was enjoying some down time, having just earned a good stack of cash at his legal trade, and an even better one at his not-so-legal one. Jack was out on the town for a drink and a dance, perhaps more if the dancing went well. Unfortunately things didn't go so well. As he was leaving a bar, Jack was struck from behind by a mugger, who made off with Jack's wallet and the considerable stack of cash still stored within. Without time to think, Jack reached out after his assailant, wanting only to grab him and pull him back. The powers Jack had long been exercising came fully to the fore in the height of his anger, and Jack felt something new and green flex in his mind. As the thief ran, thick thorny vines sprung out of the ground, cracking through the sidewalk, and wrapped him in their embrace. Jack, still enraged, only hung back a moment before diving fully in, making another gesture, another of those strange green flexing feelings, and more vines burst through the sidewalk and clutched the mugger even more tightly, as Jack bore down on him and retrieved his wallet. Only after Jack had his wallet back did he return to himself, and take notice of what he'd done. The mugger hung rigid in a cage of rapidly drying and withering vines, his face twisted into a convulsive grimace by the poisons in Jack's vines. And behind him, Jack saw a group of twenty or thirty people, all looking at him in horror. Several of them had cell phone cameras pointed at him. Jack was a murderer, he realized, looking at the poisoned husk now surrounded by splinters of dead vine. What's more, Jack realized, this had only been an accident.

Now it was time to start doing it on purpose.

Jack spent another year engaged in fairly petty crimes, as far as budding supervillains go. He robbed a bank here, an armored car there. Robbery, murder, the occasional kidnapping, all were crimes Jack dabbled in over the years. As he worked with his powers more and more, that strange feeling of a green muscle in his mind spread to his entire body. Extending lethal constrictor vines was no more effort than picking up a spare tire. Crushing the life out of someone with those same vines would barely even knock him out of breath. And as he became more in touch with his powers, they became more in touch with him. His skin roughened and darkened to a barklike consistency, while over the six months following his first murder ram's horns budded from his skull and grew to apparently full length. It's possible Jack could reverse this process, but his powers are more interesting to him than his complexion, and he's not yet exercised the option.

Jack has taken the name Jack O'Thorns as his nom de crime. All accounts of his career since his escape from the Ziggurat indicate that his power is only growing, matched by his ruthlessness.

"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit." -Lamont Cranston

Career Progression Notes

Power Pools: Speed, Concealment, Medicine

Level 1: Entangle / Thorny Darts

Level 2: Strangler

Level 4: Roots

Level 6: Flurry (Speed)

Level 8: Fling Thorns

Level 10: Skewer

Level 12: Impale

Level 14: Super Speed (Speed)

Level 16: Seeds of Confusion

Level 18: Vines

Level 20: Thorn Burst

Level 22: Stealth (Concealment)

Level 24: Invisibility (Concealment)

Level 26: Carrion Creepers

Level 28: Whirlwind (Speed)

Level 30: Aim

Level 32: Fly Trap

Level 34: Aid Other (Medicine)

Level 36: Ripper

Level 38: Thorn Barrage

Level 40: Aid Self (Medicine)