A lack of patience has always been one of Owen Whitcomb's more noteworthy traits. He was born a month early and has not really slowed down much since then. His early life would seem in hindsight, were he given to such, to be something of a blur. As the middle child of an appreciably well-to-do family he encountered few obstacles which hindered him long enough to rate any lenghty consideration and everything else just sort of fell into place. He saw himself as the center of his own little universe and there existed very few challenges to that delusion.
College woke him up a bit. He turned an interest in art and a lack of interest in much of anything else into a course of study and moved to Manhattan to attend the Art Institute. For the first time in his life he was truly challenged, which not only awakened his dormant restless streak but also turned something 'on' in his head, and then his entire body. The emergence of his ability predictably changed everything. Suddenly he was faster than any human being should possibly be, and had seen no evidence to suggest that was not unique in all the world. Now the world seemed to be moving too slow, and once again nothing was a challenge. The difference was that this time it felt like he was waiting on the world to catch up. That, coupled with the perceived need for secrecy, was absolutely maddening.
He found an outlet through guerilla art, falling in with a group of like-minded malcontents who regarded any undecorated surface as an affront to their sensibilities. Graffiti seemed to be his calling in life, or so he decided upon realizing that he was growing increasingly disinclined to waste time on thought or discussion on the prospect of life after college. He and his friends boldly adorned the city with their art, and he secretly employed his newfound power to create some of the boldest undertakings in the history of 'art crime'. He would spend his nights racing through the city, wantonly beautifying its streets and burning off a day's worth of frustrations in the process.
It's guaranteed that he would have been caught sooner rather than later, had hubris and a lapse of his attention taken him off the streets before his antics could become truly noteworthy. In short, he hit a bus. It was parked, but it proved to be an immovable object and he was not, unfortunately, an unstoppable force. He woke up in New York Downtown Hospital two months later unable to do much more than blink and in no condition to explain the cause of his mysterious accident.
Once he woke up, Owen found he had entirely too much time to meditate upon the virtue of caution. His own carelessness had reduced him to a prisoner in his own body, with his mind processing the sameness of his surroundings many thousands of times a second. The ordeal was maddening, and the doctors who tended him, ever clueless as to just how he'd wound up in such a state, made it sound like he'd be stuck this way forever.
He never did learn how or why he awoke one morning to find himself suddenly healed and whole. Lacking any kind of religious bent, he didn't assume it to be a miracle. Lacking the patience to ask questions and the money to pay what was surely an exorbitant hospital bill, he didn't stick around to see if anyone else at the hospital knew what was up. At some point during his infirmity, somebody had set off a bomb in midtown Manhattan and survivors of the blast were filling hospitals across the state. Amid the confusion he slipped out and set about figuring out what to do with himself. His memory was no longer reliable for some reason. Entire chunks of his life had simply disappeared. Furthermore, he found himself unable to be concerned too much by this fact.
There were new things to concern himself with though, and Owen quickly learned he was not unique in having a special ability, a 'super power'. With the influx of the curious and well-intentioned to the city in the aftermath of the Bomb, there became a trend in the street art decorating the city, and in Owen's not-so-humble opinion it left something to be desired. It was clear they were messages serving some purpose beyond mere aesthetics, but that really wasn't much of an excuse. He began to frequent the places where he found these tags and eventually encountered PARIAH. He was quick to present himself but too intrigued by what they represented to quibble over artistic concerns once he was actually in the company of other Evolved. Owen was quick to throw in his lot with the group, turning his fondness for vandalism into service to the 'cause'.
Recently, following the schism within PARIAH, Owen made what he felt was really the only sane choice. His impression of the particulars was largely based on hearsay rather than any factual evidence, but he'd come to expect a sort of status quo within the organization and Phoenix was an evident continuation of that trend, so that's where his loyalties went, and where they remain today.
