Jordan Baxter

Registry of the Evolved Database

File #17 Dec 2008 06:32

Summary

Name Jordan Baxter Aliases Baxter Status Registered Evolved (Tier 0) Ability Powered Flight Gender Male Race/Eth. White Birthdate Unknown Age 25 Height 6' Build Athletic Eyes Blue Hair Blonde Residence The sky Employment NYPD Parents Adopted Flint Deckard (biological, unknown) Siblings Twins (adopted) Amadeus Deckard (biological, unknown) Marital Status Unmarried Children Hahaha First Seen A Kiss Good Night Last Seen Profile Like Peter Pan, there is nothing real about Jordan Baxter. Not even his guitar. He is a narcissistic blond with a selectively bad memory who can fly. His SCOUT partner — and probably better half — is Terrence Knowles. (This character is currently an NPC and potentially up for adoption.)

portrayed by Cam Gigandet

Background

To be born golden and perfect is a good gift. Apparently satisfied that ought to do him for the rest of his life, his mother put Jordan up for adoption before he reached his first birthday. He was snapped up immediately, of course. Taken in by a banker and a secretary (reverse genders from the classic configuration) by the name of who were suffering from empty birds' syndrome after their twins left, he was the king of a very small household in a reasonably large Upper-East Side apartment. Every material desire met, and every spiritual need. (He didn't have a lot of spiritual needs.)

It's hard to say which came first: the fact he liked to rub everything he had in everybody's faces, or that 'everybody' took its digs right back at him. It probably didn't help that 'everybody' he met was well off, a notoriously catty tribe of people at whose hands a childhood charity case necessarily had to either tread gently or else face the consequences. He chose the latter. Or else, through childhood, Jordan chose to be seen as weird. This was, admittedly, made somewhat less taxing by the fact that he was fantastically pretty in that conventionally acceptable kind of way, and fairly bright.

He picked the electric guitar instead of the cello, collected bugs, watched movies in foreign languages and subtitles, shot a lot of guns, drank a lot of mead, vandalized the year's Cotillion with a British debutante who taught him everything there was to know about irony, and slept around a lot. Toward that lattermost goal, he also joined a rock band and got a nifty scar under his eye from thwarting a mugger wielding a box-cutter instead of surrendering his wallet. The scar faded.

Anyway, people who look like Jordan don't need to know how to read, so after high school he wound up going to the police academy. That, as well as becoming an officer, was pretty awesome, once he got over the intial rookie hazing and realized that people were that dumb in the grown-up world too. Free handcuffs, and a number of other fantasy bases covered. Everything went pretty good until he turned twenty-one and discovered he could fly. Fortunately, the girl he was with at the time was blacked out during the debacle in her shower. He was freaked out for about twenty minutes before he became utterly enthralled.

('Flight, Terrence, and the Bomb.')

The four years between this discovery and the bomb were spent mostly practicing with his new ability in ways both discreet and stupid. He got to be very good at hovering where everybody could see him and bolting off the roof for cloud-cover before the smoker on the other edge noticed anyone was there. He got fast. Strong. Explored as much terrain as he cared to. Although it was difficult to refrain from busting out with his faster gait on the job, he refrained out of the vague awareness that that was a can of bullshit that would overwhelm the bullshit he preferred to fill his life with.

Thus, he didn't technically perform his job to the best of his cability for a few years. This almost changed when his partner of two years, Terrence Knowles, discovered he could turn his skin into metal.

By then, Jordan actually liked Terrence for a number of reasons. Among them: Mrs. Knowles tolerated Jordan's perpetual skulking in her kitchen, they enjoyed exactly complementary types of donuts and sandwich materials and, coincidentally, the old man not only helped him quit smoking but saved his life like seven times. Despite the pranks. And the flirting with his daughter. And before he could turn into metal. When Terrence's ability manifested, Jordan taught him how to control it as best as he could, using odd little tricks and exercises of focus and raw willpower. Mostly, though, he made sure Terrence knew he was around, that he was neither alone nor a monster.

There was the inevitable debate. Terrence felt they ought to use their abilities to help people, whereas Jordan sincerely doubted people were ready for that. As far as he was concerned, the world needed police, not martyrs.

The Bomb changed things for both men, and then the public announcement of Evolved. Terrence Registered first. That made for some fairly awkward weeks in the cafeteria, characterized by cold shoulders and cruelty, subtle and otherwise, at the hands of coworkers who didn't know what to make of one of the Force's more reliable old dogs and known quantities suddenly capable of bouncing bullets off his chest and singlehandedly move passenger vehicles. Eventually, Jordan got tired of eating lunch with unattractive fuckwits all the way on the other side of the room; watching Terrence from there felt like watching them try to wring glue out of a butchered carcass, or would have, if he empathized with carcasses.

He Registered, got a fairy tattooed on his right shoulder, succeeded remarkably well on the field, and proceeded to talk really loud about genuinely interesting (and/or disgusting) things in the lunch room until the other boys came to sit. And then he alternately ignored them and was genuinely unpleasant and slept with Samson's wife and spent three weeks recklessly upstaging every officer on legs until he was suspended for being a psychotic asshole and Knowles literally had to straighten him out with a pimpslap. He recovered from these various indignities quickly and followed Knowles into SCOUT in 2008.

Psych Profile

There is nothing real about Jordan Baxter! He is like Peter Pan. He has a selectively bad memory (mostly about those times he screwed up) and a blonde head. He lies compulsively and is feckless, vain, condescending, selfish, and generally quite full of himself. Not so much cynical as prone to err in assuming most people are like him, he generally expects people to do what's easy or exciting. This worldview does not inspire disappointment so much as it does boredom. He is perfectly aware that he is so often bored because he is fundamentally boring.

An inherently happy young man, he is not visibly cerebral, but he distinctly prefers having interesting friends to very many of them. His is a flighty sort of intelligence that he does not especially mind if you don't recognize, but he would prefer not having to shoot you for failing to as a matter of professional necessity. This preference is not extremely strong.

Frequently, he exercises his right to change his mind (about his Zodiac sign, true love, hobbies, favorites, what happened with that thing you asked him to do on Tuesday, etc.). One of his more annoying habits is his tendency to test people before undertaking a friendship with them, an examination that has nothing in the way of identifiable rubric, grading scheme, and test-retest consistency. His favorite way of learning is from his mistakes. He only complains about injury when it is superficial. He is more of a cat person than a people person. He loves women — the way they talk, think, fight, close to how the social preconception goes, but he doesn't trust them. Love doesn't turn him on, and kissing is awesome. He probably enjoys being angry a little too much and is often at risk of addiction. To legal substances.

Flying and Terrence Knowles are probably the best things that ever happened to him. He is a firm believer in that if you can't beat them, then confuse them! His family tends toward confused. Despite everything, he's a pretty good cop.

Evolved Ability

Jordan Baxter has the Evolved ability of flight. His control over the minute degrees and processes is remarkable. He can hover a sixteenth of an inch off the floor and apportion his weight between flight and other surfaces or people for hours with minimal concentration, and can stop and turn on a dime.

He is also remarkably agile in the air and as comfortable floating around upside-down as he is right-side up: his neuro/physiology is built to handle the changes in pressure and proprioception, as well as extraction of oxygen in extremely high atmosphere and survival in intense cold. He is also considerably more physically durable against blunt trauma than the average human, though he manages to avoid injury from air flow mostly by intuitively configuring his body to maximize aerodynamism.

The fastest he's flown as yet is 600 miles per hour — as effortful for him as running, though the above-mentioned finer maneuverability starts dropping out from under him drastically at roughly 80 miles per hour. At over 200 miles per hour, stopping sharply creates painful stress on his joints, bones, and muscles, leaving him with the sense that whatever biological mechanism is responsible for his flight might get ripped right out of its flesh-and-bone trappings, propelled by inertia. It's always the sudden stop that threatens to get him.

For this reason more than any other, he has thus far refrained from pushing the upper limits of his ability. As he is now, ripping out to Mach 1 would require a great deal of focus and gradiated movement or he would break something. A lot of somethings.

Jordan's flight is limited by the fact that he is otherwise perfectly human. Despite almost a decade of various types of training for his fitness and reflexes, he can only think and perceive so fast before a clothesline decapitates him. He's stronger the faster he goes in the sense that his capacity to exert the force of velocity increases, but not more durable.

Appendices

"Pan, who and what art thou?" Hook cried huskily. "I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture, "I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg." J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

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Skills

Generic cop stuff, special weapons and tactics, flying, lying, aerial navigation, playing the guitar, a little bit of understanding in how to train people with their powers, miscellaneous trivial knowledge of all kinds of things that (he thinks) make him look good or actually seized his fancy at one time or other.

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Timeline

December	Title	Summary
14th	A Kiss Good Night	SCOUT's raid on the PARIAH base goes terribly wrong.

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Memorable Quotes

• I'll never grow up.

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Media

Gallery

Gallery

Theme Music

Theme Music

The Arctic Monkeys, "Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor

Stop making the eyes at me,
I'll stop making the eyes at you.
What it is that surprises me is that I don't really want you to.

I said I bet that you look good on the dance floor.
I don't know if you're looking for romance or…
Don't know what you're looking for.
Well, I bet that you look good on the dance floor,
Dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984.
From 1984!

I wish you'd stop ignoring me because you're sending me to despair,
Without a sound yeah you're calling me and I don't think it's very fair
That your shoulders are frozen, (as cold as the night)
Oh, but you're an explosion, (you're dynamite)
Your name isn't Rio but I don't care for sand.
Lighting the fuse might result in a bang with a bang-go.

Oh, there ain't no love, no Montagues or Capulets,
Are just banging tunes and DJ sets and…
Dirty dance floors, and dreams of naughtiness!

Well.

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Trivia and Notes

• Inspirations include JM Barrie's Peter Pan and Daniel Craig's James Bond.

• This character was originally conceptualized by William's player. Thank him!

• I know who his biological father is.