Victor Childs

Registry of the Evolved Database

File #05 Dec 2008 03:52

Summary

Name Victor Childs Aliases Status Registered Evolved (Tier 1) Ability Superhuman Speed Gender Male Race/Eth. White; American Birthdate 02/05/1989 Age 20 Height 6'2" Build Athletic Eyes Blue Hair Blond Residence Unknown Employment Student Parents George Childs Peggy Childs Siblings Jenny Childs (dec.) Gillian Childs] (adopted) Marital Status Single Children None First Seen Unknown Last Seen Unknown Profile Vic Childs is a native of Queens who went to college at USC in California last year. He's back, maybe to stay. Maybe to go to school here instead.

portrayed by Jeremy Sumpter

Background

The youngest child of three, his oldest sister Gillian and his other sister Jennifer, Victor was born in Queens, New York to a middle class family. Dad was a retail store manager and mom was a day care worker, and together they made enough to keep the house paid for and the kids fed.

As a kid Vic was always active. He got involved in sports early, mostly thanks to his excited interest. Baseball, football, soccer, skating, they were all great. He fit right in on a team and loved the friends he made. The whole thing put him on the fast track to being one of the 'jocks' by the time high school rolled around. His DNA had other plans for him, though.

Of the three siblings, Vic manifested first. He was always a fast runner and quick. He played running back on the junior varsity team, and had good hands. The change didn't come on him all of a sudden one day. It was more gradual than one had a right to expect, but over the course of about a month it became clear that Vic should not be able to do some of the things he was able to do. At first it generated talk of scholarships and college scouts, while he was a freshman! As the days wore on the talk got quieter and then stopped altogether.

Vic was able to outrun a car. He could catch birds that landed on the ground before they took off using just his bare hands. He could throw a forward pass on the football field and be there to catch it when it came down thirty yards away.

Being the kind of guy he was, Vic's teammates and friends actually thought it was cool. They'd make up games on their own time just to see what he could do. It was all fun. Until Vic's coaches cut him from every school-sponsored athletic activity he was involved in. For some reason that wasn't as heartfelt a betrayal to Vic as the fact that his friends and former teammates seemed okay with it. Sure, on the surface he claimed to understand. What kind of game could they have when one of the team could literally outrun cheetahs and perform movements faster than anyone could see? It wasn't fair.

But Vic didn't think it was fair to him either.

Soon after that Jenny manifested her ability, and eventually even Gillian once the three of them discovered that just being near Gillian made their abilities stronger. In spite of the prejudice that one might expect from being Evolved in a society that was increasingly uncertain how to treat such people, Vic didn't get a lot of problems from people about it. This was due largely to the fact that Vic has always been a good kid. He made friends easily and kept them. To take the place of the sports he was no longer allowed to participate in, he started to do more solo type sports. Skating was the first that came to mind, and though it took a while to break into the skater clique, Vic managed it. Some of his new friends there introduced him to parkour, and he began to dabble in that too. By the time he was a senior Vic was actually pretty good at it.

When registration became a legal requirement, Vic registered just like the law said he should and he never thought twice about it. When he graduated high school he tested very well on the SAT's and got accepted at USC, all the way across the country on the west coast. Mom and dad couldn't afford to pay that kind of tuition, but Vic went out of his way to pay as much as he could by working once he got out there. Pell grants got him started, and fortunately very little money had to come out of his parents' bank account.

Once he got to school, Vic came across the problem that so many college freshmen have. He couldn't decide on a major, so he just took general study courses with an undecided major. After just one year of school it occurred to Vic that he sucks at college. He wanted to go home, but stubbornly refused to give up. Anyway there were great things in California. He hooked up with a group that took him skydiving, and another group that got him into snowboarding. The skydiving led to more creative things, and he's already begun looking into other extreme sports like bungee jumping and even possibly base jumping. Such are the ideas of a boy with this much athletic talent who is kept from competing.

Quite suddenly the perfect excuse to satisfy Vic's nagging dissatisfaction with school occurred when Jenny was found dead back home in New York. He doesn't now why or how, but the news of her death was like an icicle in his heart. And just as suddenly Vic hopped a plane home, just packing enough stuff to stay a short while.

What Vic didn't tell his friends back at USC is he really didn't plan to come back to them.

Psych Profile

Victor Childs is a good guy. He's the kind of young man that is naturally upbeat, naturally friendly, naturally kidding around. He calls people "dude" a lot. Vic's quick to laugh at himself, and when he's in a bad mood or down about something he tends to hide it behind a pretended facade of everything being okay. He's also a terrible actor. There's just too much honesty in Vic for him to be good at lying, and he has trouble keeping a secret if it isn't impressed upon him how important it is to do so. Vic tends to assume the best of people and tries not to hurt anyone's feelings. He's also something of a modern hippie, believing in every cause there is to champion, from whales to climate change to stopping the wars overseas, all the way to HIV awareness. All the causes of the day are things Vic believes in. He has the optimism that unjaded youth can provide. Vic has also been known to have a lot of girlfriends.

Evolved Ability

Simply put, Victor Childs is a speedster. He is able to run and move his body at speeds far above the normal human limit to the point that he can sometimes defy the naked eye. His top running speed is just shy of 500mph (note that the speed of sound is 767mph, so he's a ways below the speed of sound). While it might be possible for him to someday exceed this speed, he currently hits terminal velocity at that point on account of wind resistance.

His reflexes are faster than eyeblinks, and aside from perhaps the motion of air he can move in such a way that it's too fast to perceive. While moving at highly accelerated speeds Vic's perceptions adapt, and he sees the world as crawling along at a snail's pace around him. This perception allows Vic to react to his environment as he navigates it in superspeed and occurs only while moving at speed. The superspeed perception lets Vic retain a sense that he is moving fast, which is to say he doesn't literally think the world is slow or see it as slow, just slower than him.

Because of his ability when Vic uses his superspeed for longer than a few minutes he is often overcome with hunger and thirst afterward, and tends to need a lot of food to recover. His body burns through it quickly though and he never puts on much weight. If denied this extra sustenance Vic gets very lethargic and feels drained of energy. Needless to say, doing anything superfast in that state is pretty much impossible. While actually in motion and moving at superspeed, Vic is able to sustain his 'wind' for about 90 minutes at a stretch, in keeping with his natural endurance. It exerts him to move at superspeed about as much as it exerts him were he to run normally. It's only when he stops for more than about five minutes that his hunger will catch up to him and he'll need to pig out. When he's got his wind it can last for hours, depending upon the amount of activity Vic goes through and whether he ever slows down long enough for the hunger to catch him. When the hunger hits him it is no greater if it occurs fifteen minutes after he began using his speed or two hours after. It's always the same. Strangely, and perhaps disturbingly, even though Vic eats a lot of food this way it somehow does not translate to extra waste matter. The less said about that the better.

Appendices

Skills

('Athletics,' 'Extreme Sports,' 'Parkour,' 'Math,' and 'Housekeeping.')

Athletics
Even though Vic was kept out of organized sports once his Evolved ability manifested, he was and has been athletically talented. Even without his ability he is an outstanding runner, has good hands, and can compete physically with anyone in his weight or size class on the game field. He's great at football and baseball as well as his own individual sports that he took up after realizing he was Evolved.

Extreme Sports
Skateboards may not be everyone's idea of an extreme sport, but it led to other things for Vic. He's taken up skydiving and snowboarding, and has been wanting to try bungee jumping. Skydiving is serious business because it involves a lot of safety knowledge and near-perfect gear discipline. It's only recently that Vic has been able to jump unassisted.

Parkour
While this could go along with his other athletic talents, parkour is a unique skill in America. Very popular in Europe, it is the art of 'free running', where one runs, jumps, climbs, and tumbles from and onto pretty much everything one encounters in a typical urban environment. Key among the skills for this is how to break a fall without breaking your own bones. Vic so far is able to jump and land unharmed from a height of about twenty five feet if he's prepared to do it and has ample room to tuck and roll on his landing. He can scale most irregular surfaces using just his hands and feet, not unlike a rock climber could. He's got very well-developed strength in his hands, forearms, and upper body, and can do a standing backflip. Perhaps most importantly, parkour has taught Vic to be surefooted and agile, and he excels at running and leaping over surfaces and objects that most people would have to pick their way around, such as subway turnstiles or stairway banisters.

Unfortunately Vic has kind of fallen out of practice on his parkour-fu. He still has the skills, but the fine-tuning is kind of fading.

Math
The thing that got Vic really good scores on his SAT was his natural aptitude with Mathematics. He's got a knack for numbers. It's come in handy in practical matters, such as doing quick arithmetic in his head. It's also been his savior in school, and although he never did decide on a major before he ditched USC Vic was beginning to give thought to studying some species of Engineering or even Physics.

Housekeeping
How about not? Vic is a slob. He's not the nasty kind that leaves food and rotten garbage everywhere. He just throws his clothes all over the floor in piles and never puts anything back where it belongs. He can't cook. If left to his own devices Vic would have two options for food: Fast food or dry ramen. Dry because he's managed to ruin ramen when trying to prepare it according to instructions.

Police
Vic joined NYPD. The Academy teaches its cadets criminal and traffic law, "offensive" driving, arrest search and siezure procedures, crime scene investigation, interrogation techniques, radio protocol, counter-terrorism techniques, and of course personal combat of the armed, unarmed, and firearmed nature.

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Relationships

Friends

Vic met Stella at Old Lucy's, where he's met most of the friends he knows now in New York. Turns out she's a mindreader, but she's also very pretty. And very quickly (fitting for Vic) has developed into something more than just a friend. She's one of the few openly compassionate and caring people he's found in the city, which might have something to do with the fact that she's not from New York originally. (Update: She vanished mysteriously)

	Though she's a member of some underground group of Evolved refugees, Vic likes Monica and doesn't hold it against her. The law can be unjust anyway. She's a very nice girl from New Orleans who has a hard time in this town, and he completely sympathizes. That's why when she needed a place to stay that was safe, he opened his crappy little apartment to her and for a while had a roommate.

	If anyone is destined to be Victor's BFF, it's this guy. Even Vic doesn't know the full extent of it yet. They know each other, and first impressions have been great. Plus they share a common friend in Abby!

There was a time when Vic liked Abby enough to ask her out repeatedly, but enough rebuffs and enough drama involving the secrets she keeps, the questionable ties with his surviving sister Gillian, and the nagging suspicion that she might just be some kind of pathological liar HAD made him back off from that forever. And then haha, out of the blue SHE ended up asking HIM if he'd like to date. Strangeness abounds.

	He makes the funniest facial expressions going from zero to three-hundred backward into a mailbox.

Ohana (Means Family)

Jennifer Childs is the lost sister whose fate has come to haunt Victor deeply. It's almost an obsession, and it has tainted his soul. So far what he knows is her body was found dumped in Rhode Island and the manner of her death (brain missing, skull cut open) points directly to the serial killer Sylar. What he also knows is that Gillian told him herself that Sylar killed Jennifer, but insists somehow that the ultimate blame lay not with Sylar but with some group called Vanguard.

Make no mistake, Victor loves his sister Gillian unconditionally. Growing up she was his Big Sister, always considerably less flighty and self-absorbed than Jenny was. But lately a darkness has come between Vic and his feelings for Gilly, and it involves the fate of Jenny. Now he knows that Gillian has been keeping a dark secret from him for some time, and that secret was that she has known for a long time that Sylar killed Jenny. And that she says she is in love with Sylar. How this is even possible is not something Vic has figured out, and just what should be done because of it is as much in doubt.

Enemies

The evidence says it. The cops say it. Gillian told Victor herself that it was the case. Sylar seems to have been the one that killed Jennifer Childs, and that's all that Vic cares about. Never mind that he's also known to be a serial killer and is generally infamous for being behind the Bomb itself (which Vic has been told was not Sylar's doing). In spite of all the stories about Sylar the boogeyman, Victor doesn't harbor the same fears that this guy cannot be beaten or taken down. Nor, to Vic's credit, is he out for personal revenge. Victor dared to work toward actually having Sylar captured, intact, and made to stand trial for the things he's done and actually managed to achieve part of that goal in a sense. Justice, rather than revenge. Thanks to the fact that Cat mentioned it to him, Victor now knows that this man's name is Gabriel Gray. Disturbing to Vic in the extreme is Gillian's hybristophilic attraction for the man. Since actually coming face to face with him, Victor no longer feels the need to hunt him.

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