Blackjack
Phillip Paxton (a.k.a. Blackjack)
Physical Description
Body Features
Phillip has brown hair, cobalt blue skin, and purple eyes. The eye and skin color is a result of the experimental stem cell treatments used to rewrite the cells in his bone marrow that were producing leukemia cells.
Mental characteristics
Gender Identity
Male
Employment
Blackjack ( otherwise known as Phillip ) runs a security consulting/private inquiries business out of a tiny office in a suburb of Metropolis. He goes where the work takes him, testing security systems for potential weaknesses against superpowered intrusion or performing provenance searches and estate investigations, throughout the northeastern US and occasionally abroad. Every once in a while, he also performs certain utterly clandestine missions for various parts of Phoenix Industries -- part of his unofficial deal with Dr. Gironde, wherein he lives with his family (wife Jarissa and son Grayson) at Gironde's home and doesn't get arrested over his robustly successful former career. He's considered a "reservist" member of Wyldfire, pitching in on fights when he happens to be in the area but not eligible to be drafted for most missions.
Failures & Embarrassments
Worked for Card Shark as an enforcer for a short time. This ended badly with Blackjack almost not leaving Card Shark's employ alive.
Mental Trauma
Driven by his own demons. Despite his jovial nature, Blackjack is driven to not return to his life of crime but instead be a hero for his wife and son to make the world a little better for them.
Personality Characteristics
Motivation
Responsibility of Power
Relationships
Legal Status
married
History
In 2004 in his reality, Blackjack's wife grew unsettled and hid herself in nearby forest about a month and a half before her current pregnancy's due date. Long before Blackjack could track her down in the heavy rainstorm, the pregnancy abruptly failed -- and Jarissa nearly died as well in her attempts to defy her own biological limits. The family grieved intensely and privately; every early April afterward, they again mourned the daughter they could not have.
Their happy, optimistic world turned itself upside-down.
The Paxtons chose not to share this incident with most of their colleagues.
Based on the medical advice of Rissa's primary care physician, they determined that future pregnancies would be just as risky. Blackjack ruled out any such option -- additional children would be adopted, not body-births.
In 2007 in her reality, Savannah's parents died during a villain's attack, buying time for their 7-year-old son and nearly 3-year-old daughter to escape. Subsequent villainous actions also got Savannah's older brother killed, putting the helpless toddler in the custody of an interdimensional villain named Multiplex.
Multiplex used various superscience gadgets collected from his journeys to speed Savannah's physical development until, by 2009, his minion "Grimalkin" appeared to be a robust nine-year-old preadolescent girl.
In August 2009, Multiplex sent Grimalkin to spy on the interfering busybodies in yet another dimension -- a team that included yet another version of Thunderstrike -- and report her findings back to Red Siren.
But when that target group proved to have parallels to Savannah's own murdered parents …
… on a Wyldfire mission that started in Brussels before it diverted to many locations across the Eurasian and African continents, Feral advised her husband that she needed to investigate a hidden observer.
One who could not be what they seemed.
Feral slipped away to stalk their stalker, prepared for the possibility that an enemy psionicist wielded a terribly painful illusion.
Feral came back via teleportation -- not one of her own abilities! -- with their lost daughter in her arms. Savannah promptly threw herself into Papa's protective embrace.
The world turned right-side-up.
Legal Status
parent+child
Blackjack, who's real name is Phillip Paxton, never set out to be a hero. In fact, he sort of fell into it through a series of events related to his - now-former - job as a professional thief.
Character Location
Alignment
Responsibility of Power
Species
Professions
Spouses
Feral
(spouse)
Siblings
Gender
male
Eyes
Purple
Hair
Short, chestnut to dark brown hair
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Cobalt blue
Aligned Organization
Comments