Scott Harkness
Scott Harkness
Portrayed By Robert Davi
Sex Male
Status Unregistered Evolved
Ability Pocket Plane
Age 51
Date of Birth February 4th, 1958
Date of Death N/A
Occupation Security Guard
Family Gale Harkness (father, alive); Dorothy Harkness (mother, alive); Emily Montaigne (wife, divorced); Francis Harkness (son, estranged)
Significant Other(s) None
First Appearance Endgame - Resonance
Last Appearance N/A

swing low, sweet chariot
coming for to carry me home
swing low, sweet chariot
coming for to carry me home

i looked over jordan and what did i see
coming for to carry me home

a band of angels coming after me
coming for to carry me home


Character History:

Scott Lawrence Harkness is an Army veteran who works as a security guard at a few local banks. However, his real job is to help Grace and Alistair operate a safehouse for Evolved needing a quiet place to settle down.


Personality

You can take a man out of the Army, but you can’t take the Army out of the man. Harkness is gruff, blunt, and crude, with little tolerance for idiocy and even less for incompetence. He doesn’t seem to have realized that he’s fifty-one and balding: as far as he’s concerned, he'll have plenty of time to sleep when he’s good and buried, and so it is that he expects his associates to display the same sort of drive. Scott doesn’t make much of an effort to ingratiate himself with strangers, nor does he try particularly hard to hide his feelings about others — the negative ones, at least. Compliments, on the other hand, he almost never throws around. Small wonder, then, that most civilians perceive him as distant, even hostile: an image that comes in handy when one’s business, as his so often does, rests upon the capacity to intimidate others successfully.

Scott remains committed to the principles of the oath he swore, particularly the part about supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States. While he’d never be caught dead using the term, he’s actually a conscientious objector of sorts, having found himself in the awkward position of defying an unjust and unprincipled act of Congress in the name of the supreme law of the land. Harkness has a clear sense of where his duty lies; at the same time, he’s by no means a martyr, nor does he intend to go public and immolate himself for the cause. A consummate pragmatist, he realizes that his arrest and subsequent trial will likely spell the end of his project, modest as it is. And so he’s resolved to stay in the shadows for now, where in his estimation he can do the most good.


Skills

Harkness was an infantryman in the United States Army from 1982, when he signed up as a rank recruit, to 2007, when he was discharged honorably as a sergeant first class. While his skills aren’t what they used to be, he’s still a crack shot, a damn good driver, and a cagey brawler — even more so when he has a knife. He’s also in prime physical condition for a man of his age, and he expends considerable effort trying to keep himself in shape. Then again: he’s fifty-one. MMA material he’s not, at least not any more, but underestimate him at your peril.

During the course of his service, Scott picked up an assortment of skills. For one, he’s a passable mechanic, albeit only with respect to military vehicles; for another, he has very basic knowledge of a remarkable assortment of languages — Arabic, German, Creole, Spanish, Pashto, Somali, and even Serbo-Croatian. He can’t write in any of those and he can just barely read, but give him enough time and he might be able to pick out what’s being talked about. Scott’s also a decent negotiator, having bargained with Afghan rug merchants, Kosovar arms dealers, and international peacekeepers alike. Over the years, he’s developed a knack for squeezing just hard enough to get his way.

Lastly, Scott maintains a network of friends and comrades scattered throughout the military, the federal government, local and state law enforcement, and various other convenient places. He won’t hesitate to exploit those connections if the need arises, though he’s well aware that any unseemly inquiries or requests might raise equally unseemly questions: and given his chosen profession, raising his profile with the authorities — especially those authorities — is a risky thing to do.


Evolved Ability

Scott's Evolved ability allows him to summon his own personal pocket plane with a holding capacity of exactly one cubic meter. This fold of space is nearly always nearby (see below), and he is able to transport objects in and out of it at will. He can only dematerialize and re-materialize one object at a time, and that object must be a single unit; he can't take out a section of wall, for instance, but he could take an entire wall — if it was freestanding and within the volume limit. Which, really, isn't much of a wall to begin with.

The pocket has no set dimensions. Its length, width, and depth are perfectly malleable, but its volume is never greater than a cubic meter. There is no limit on how many objects it may hold, so long as their total volume does not exceed that amount. Within the pocket, time moves at a rate of 1:100 — one second passes inside for every 100 seconds outside. Effectively, any objects stored within are in temporal stasis until Scott chooses to return them to this world.

Scott may put living things inside the pocket plane as well, but if he does so (and if the living thing is larger than a bug), it no longer moves with him. It stays exactly where that living thing was in the real world until the living thing is called back, no matter what he does or where he goes. He always knows where it is in relation to himself, so he will never lose track of its location, and is always aware of its contents. More specifically, he can think to himself "Is this in there?" and know the answer in an heartbeat, even though he doesn't automatically inventory what's inside.

In truly desperate times, Scott can even hide himself within his pocket plane, though doing so poses significant risks. He can't see outside from within his plane, and its stasis effect means he can never be sure that the situation outside is the same as he left it. As living things must re-materialize at precisely the place from which they left, the consequences should something else be occupying that space — living or dead — would be dire indeed. For obvious reasons, then, Scott has invoked his ability in this manner just once.

The range on his power varies depending on what he's attempting to transport. Smaller inanimate objects — guns, ammunition, rope, bottled water, medical supplies, and the like — he can place within his pocket plane as long as they're within his line of sight; larger ones require him to be within ten meters of their closest point. Why ten? He doesn't know, and frankly, he doesn't care: if that's how his ability works, that's how it works. So far, he hasn't been able to transport living matter on sight; to accomplish that feat, he must touch the subject's bare flesh, if only for a millisecond.

The Ferryman has grown quite adept at this sort of teleportation, to the point at which he has merely to want something inside to make it so, provided the range condition is met: the process is essentially instantaneous. However, his capacity to do so is not limitless, and continuous usage of his power will assuredly tire him out — for instance, if he attempts to vanish all the bullets fired from a machine gun over the course of ten seconds. The consequences of entering this refracted state are severe: for one hundred hours beginning from the moment of his overexertion, he loses all access his pocket plane. Worst of all, Scott doesn't know how exactly how much mental effort will cause him to burn out, although he's fairly certain the threshold is quite high. Nevertheless, the precise trigger seems to vary each time, transforming each particularly adventurous use of his power into a roll of the proverbial dice.

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