Gavin Montag

Registry of the Evolved Database

File #05 Nov 2008 08:04

Summary

Name Gavin Montag Aliases N/A Status Registered Evolved (Tier 2) Ability Cryokinesis Gender Male Race/Eth. White Birthdate 5/21 Age 52 Height 6'2" Build Gaunt Eyes Hazel Hair Blonde Residence Abroad Employment Homeland Security Parents Deceased Siblings Older Sister Younger Brother Marital Status Your mum. Children N/A First Seen Expected Arrival Last Seen N/A Profile Mr. Montag is a British former constable/detective constable turned Company Agent over the course of the last twenty years or so. Recently transferred to New York City from London, he is about as subtle as most people who have never visited NYC before. Taxi drivers, crackheads and people who eat hot dogs fascinate him.

portrayed by Bill Nighy

Background

Born in Surrey in 1966 after an older sister and before a younger brother, Gavin had a rather unexciting childhood. He was mediocre in most respects. His grades were decent, he had a number of friends to get into trouble with, and he played tennis. His mother was a sex therapist, and his father was a regular psychotherapist, so there was some inevitable blowback from their particular brand of idealized compartmentalizing of every problem he came across, but no lasting damage was ever done. …Probably.

He eventually attended the Queen Mary University of London on a partial tennis scholarship, where he pursued a degree in behavioral studies, with a minor in zoology. It took him six years to get through, largely thanks to the interest in partying he developed around his second year, but he did finish, and with decent grades, even, once he'd retaken a couple of the more advanced classes. Given his major, the wise thing to do would be to keep going until he had enough degrees to acquire a teaching job somewhere, but he was quite tired of school, and quite tired of tennis.

Unsure of how to proceed with his life, he followed the advice of a pair of his undergraduate fellows and sought out a job with the London police force. It was something to do, and not something that required him to sit behind a desk and count money. Additionally, there was the entire aspect of having to deal with a bunch of people with severe behavioral issues that he found fascinating, so. Ignoring the pleas of his elder sister (who was pursuing an advanced degree) and parents, he took up his recruitment with a fair amount of enthusiasm.

He worked as a constable for some years, always with the idea in his head that he would eventually move on and do something more significant with his life. For a long time he just…wasn't particularly inspired to try. The usual scuffles, arrests, warnings, and talking tos came and went without any unusual amount of excitement. Until one turned out to be more exciting than he guessed it would be.

A routine disturbance at a strip club on the edge of town was called in. Rather than wait for backup, Gavin, now 32, took it upon himself to handle the situation on his own. What he found upon entering was the largest, angriest man he'd ever seen swinging one of the venue's stripper poles at the unfortunate few who had not yet managed to flee. Dressed in uniform as he was, it took approximately five seconds for the oaf to zero in on him. A STRUGGLE ENSUED. So did much creative cursing, two broken ribs and one pissed pair of pants, but in the course of the tussle, Gavin got close enough to get a grip on one of the man's wrists in an effort to get him handcuffed. Only, before he could actually fumble his cuffs out, the thick wrist in question began to turn black.

The oaf was no longer snarling threats, but thrashing in pain. This did not actually make putting handcuffs on him any easier, but he did drop the pole, so. Too pumped full of adrenaline to question why he had to pry a thick layer of ice away from the man's hand before he could get the cuffs on and hustle him out to the back of his car, it wasn't until he took his place in the front seat that he noticed that his own hands were frosted over. …And that he'd pissed his pants, but at least in the context of the situation, that made sense.

Somehow or another, a tabloid in London caught wind of the weirdness (the perp in question had to have his hand amputated), and with all manner of, "Freeze!" puns, took the story semi-public. Thoroughly baffled, Gavin could offer no explanation. "It just happened," was his response, followed up quickly by a more harried, "No comment," when a superior officer approached to shake the reporter off. Despite the obscure nature of the story and the source, it was enough to catch the attention of a Company agent operating in London.

Several long lunch meetings put concisely, Gavin was offered a position with the Company. It was put to him as sort of a second job - the sort of thing police officers commonly do in their downtime to supplement their scanty incomes. And it was for a good cause. Helping other people like him, who could do unusual and occasionally magnificent things once they learned to control that aspect of themselves. Gavin agreed. Who wouldn't take a position with a secret agency that promised to teach him to use his superpowers? Honestly.

At first, Gavin's contact with the Company was limited. His capabilities were tested, and later molded to function as more of a tool and a weapon than a random loss of control. As he became older and his technique more refined, he began to lose interest in the more mundane aspects of his policing career. He was too preoccupied with the promise of Company work to be of exceptional use, and despite being promoted to detective constable, eventually decided to leave the department.

Now a full time agent for the Company, he is just now in the process of transferring to New York to help with certain escalating problems within the city.

(OOC Note: I am very obviously not British and have never been to England. Please forgive me if my imagination has betrayed me by being utterly retarded in attempting to fill in the blanks.)

Psych Profile

Loyal to the idealism behind the Company, Gavin enjoys the clandestine nature of his occupation and so takes a certain superior satisfaction in it. He's a little smug, but overall rather laid back for someone who is regularly expected to ponce out and drag dangerous people back into holding cells for study against their will. He has a peculiar idea of what's fair, and tends to operate off a personal sense of morality that does not always fall in line with generally accepted social sensibilities. A man that has taken orders for most of his adult life, he generally does not have any trouble following them. That said, he may become stubborn or intentionally screw up and take a fall if he thinks he's been ordered to do something particularly unjust or undeserved. He was a cop. Old habits, and all.

He can be ill-tempered, but has a decent sense of humor overall, and does not tend to take people very seriously. People including his fellow agents (particularly the non-evolved ones, though he endeavors to keep anything resembling real prejudice carefully under wraps), and himself, which can be a pain in the ass when it is time for Serious Business and he is only peripherally interested because that commercial with the talking baby is on. And oh, sorry, what? Who are we supposed to be killing? No, I was listening, I just missed the name is all. LIKE THAT.

Evolved Ability

Resistant to extreme cold as a necessary side-effect of his power, Montag has the ability to supercool water molecules in his general vicinity (with a radius of approximately twenty feet) to well below freezing, which has some pretty tangible effects on the temperature around him. Once the water is cold enough, regardless of whether it began as a puddle or humidity, he can condense, direct and manipulate it to a limited degree that is generally restricted to objects that he is in direct contact with. If the object is in itself part or mostly water, like a human body, he could theoretically freeze all or part of it solid. If the object is something like a rock, he could freeze a shell of ice around it, even cooling it to the point of brittleness, but could not actually change it physically in any other way.

His hands are the focus for this type of manipulation largely for psychological reasons (it's easy for him to envision) and typically become partially encased in ice in the process. In hand to hand combat, if he swatted someone with an iced-over fist, it'd probably be a bit like being hit in the head with a very cold brick. His abilities do not work in the opposite direction. That is, he can't force ice that he has created to melt or heat water molecules in any way other than the old fashioned way. Additionally, his body temperature is some degrees lower than the average person's. Enough so that he might be considered hypothermic. Or dead. (He isn't.)

The speed at which he can freeze something depends largely on its size, whether or not he's trying to freeze it solid or just coat it over, and how good a grip he has on it. It's definitely faster than sticking something in the freezer since he sucks the heat right out, but short of instantaneous or liquid-nitrogen fast. For all I can picture this, I am weirdly having a hard time putting this into words, for some reason. Maybe there's a period of a minute or two while he forces the temperature of the water down initially (it would become uncomfortably cold in his vicinity, particularly if he was drawing water out of the air), but from there, since he's dealing with a starting material that's already supercooled and so on the verge of becoming solid, the actual ice would form fairly quickly across a target. Possibly like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6fdlJ5jQXQ and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDwZqBq-rLQ&feature=related. Freezing something like human tissue or a bottle of beer that is mostly water anyway wouldn't require the use of "extra" water hanging around in the environment, but for something that started out hot or warm (like, again, human tissue) he'd have to hang on long enough to get it to freezing point, adding that aforementioned minute or two to the process. Casting ice over the object from the environment would probably help to accelerate that, wouldn't be impeded by the warmth of what was beneath unless they were on fire or something, and could cause frostbite just through forcing flesh to be in direct contact with ice for several seconds while he tries to do more lasting damage.

Appendices

Skills:

Hand to Hand: Gavin was a police officer for well over a decade before becoming a full time Company agent. He's well-versed in how to incapacitate the average assailant at close range. Of course, it helps when you can freeze their fingers and toesies off.

I Read A Book On This Once: Intrigued by human behavior and psychology, though not enough to pursue an advanced degree, Gavin has done a great deal of studying up on people and why they do what they do. As a result, he tends to have good sense of intuition when it comes to what is up in the average person's noggin, individually and from a more sociological perspective. Sometimes. At least, he thinks he does. Additionally, regardless of whether he actually knows something or not, Gavin is very good at making it sound as if he is an authority on the subject. He watches a lot of discovery channel, let us say, and is technologically literate enough to have mastered the use of Google and Wikipedia. This skill can be defied with the use of actual knowledge on a given subject that was not taken from the internet.

Oh. Fuck — Sorry!: Gavin has been trained with firearms, but is crap with them. His aim is terrible and nothing the Company does seems capable of improving upon his skill. He still carries a gun because it can be effective just to point one at someone, but god help him and everyone in the vicinity if he's ever in a situation where he has to try and shoot a person. Especially if they're moving.

Criminalistics: As the first officer on scene in a number of disturbances, and later an actual detective, Montag has a fairly sturdy knowledge of criminalistics. How to secure an area, where to find evidence, how to collect it without contaminating it, what it might mean. Perhaps more significantly, he's an expert at completely fucking up a crime scene to minimize the odds of any other investigators getting anything useful out of it.

Media

Trivia and Notes:

• Fully capable of tactical defense and offense at close range, but tends to avoid engaging targets when the odds are even or otherwise not in his favor.
• Does not take report writing very seriously. Has probably been asked to rewrite them with less personal commentary on more than one occasion.
• Sports the 'tagged' mark on the back of his neck and typically tries to wear shirts high-collared enough to hide it.