User:Talen Lee/Agent Throwback

In 1946, the White Wing program was founded in Malta. Subsidiary to the multinational Malta Group - which had not yet fully coalesced at the time - the White Wing group was part of a government-subsidised process to create metahuman operatives for international sale. The program operated for over sixty years, creating a number of metahuman operatives who were then trained and subsold to a number of other world governments in the area.

The project was a simple breeding operation, where many Maltese citizens and citizens who were hired (or rendered) from other nearby countries. After two generations, 99% of all infants born were mutants with a fairly predicable suite of powers, who were then trained from birth through to adulthood, then sold to friendly governments as discrete one-man armies.

The children being reared by White Wing were mutants, which meant often children would begin their training well before their individual mutancy evinced. Due to the extremely stable environment and the number of skilled psychologists on-deck, few children developed unpredictable or uncontrollable powers - the most common powers being regeneration and telepathy. Super-spies like this obviously were trained well and deployed across the globe, many coming to settle into normal lives of government-sponsored superheroics. Many have even had their memories reconstructed, not knowing their origin.

Throwback had a number of brothers and sisters, all of whom were mutants. Every last one of them evinced major powers, and he was seen as a slow developer. During this stage of his life, he picked up his particular preference for the use of the katana and his backup fighting style, and his inexorable cheerfulness. He never felt himself a mutant - and never expected his mutation to evince. Training alongside brethren capable of slinging fire and teleporting through space, however, left Throwback with a very clear sense of actualisation. Unlike more competitive individuals, who develop a sense of perspective on their own development, he came to view the world as stratafied - that there are those better, and those worse, and there is no clear option for overcoming those borders. The best - and only - thing he could do about it was deal with it.

Throwback's lack of mutancy was revealed only as the project entered its last days. About the time the modern Sapper firearm was developed, the White Wing Project was shut down, but not before extensive final field-testing was done on its members. Its most subtle operatives became members of the Malta group, subdivided and sold out to quash the same sleeper agents they had installed in foreign governments. They returned as many people to memory-altered civilian lives as they could, and executed any operatives they viewed as potential problems.

... All of which fails to address, however, the difficulty of capturing and executing extremely resourceful and dangerous people that you've spent twenty-five years training to evade capture and execution.

Division: Spec-Ops
Rank: Operative

Throwback is chatty and exuberant when in uniform. This is something that often seems at odds, given that he's a stealth agent, but he typically provides a non-stop stream of upbeat chatter, making jokes that only he gets, singing commercial jingles, conversing with enemies that might well never respond. This deranged attitude seems to indicate he's not taking things seriously, or that he needs to assuage an internal fear.

Throwback, when drawn on the subject of banter, has commented to the contrary^[3], and has even voiced the sentiment that a lack of banter betrays unfamiliarity^[4] with an intense combat scenario. It seems to have some traction - while a katana-swinging maniac seems a problem for many enemies, the value of a katana-swinging maniac who seems to be utterly fearless has shown to have a psychological edge. This doesn't seem to be the whole of it, though - Throwback cracks wise at unsentient zombies, at unfeeling robots and has even made passes at Rularuu.

Throwback's underlying personality is that of a a fundamental spy. Unlike many other people in his profession, this is the only life he's known. Without any sense of permanence, he has instead developed an intense joy of the moment. This has no doubt left him with an array of mental imbalance - no record indicates him ever having what could be called a stable relationship - but it equally makes him a remarkably efficient, fearless soldier. In essence, he has sacrificed his humanity, utterly, in aid of his job as a spy. This is not something that bothers him - it's the only life he knows. In his more maudlin moments, he considers himself a gatekeeper, an extreme that every spy should recognise that they do not want to be.

Agent Throwback's training began before he could walk. Immediately upon birth, he was being exposed to rounded syllables and disparate language in an explicit attempt to engender his ability to speak as many languages as possible without accent. He was trained to tumble from just before he could walk. Reared with the fundamental belief that he would grow up and evince some mutant ability that he would need to learn to expand, Throwback's education as a agent was therefore impossibly well-rounded and deep. His particular prediliction towards katana style combat is an affectation derived from the weapon's utility and usefulness in dealing with large numbers of opponents. Even disarmed, he is exquisitely dangerous, relying on techniques derived from Krav Maga as his tertiary weapon style.

Unlike many other blade wielders, Throwback's style is not necessarily lethal. Trained in medicine and anatomy, he's well-excercised in a style of blademanship that immobilizes and, at worst, cripples an opponent, rather than necessarily killing them. Shifting stances and styles, he can easily employ lethal force, but his mindset and mentality towards the life of individuals is such that he only kills when it's explicitly required. A remarkably cold man when called upon to kill, he nonetheless seems to think of it as a failure of a mission to require undue death.

Throwback possesses no superhuman powers or abilities. While he has a range of abilities that might be considered superhuman in their origin or nature, they're simply extensions of human abilities taken to their extremes through his training regimen. Amongst those more natural-seeming abilities, his capacity to see in the dark and perceive when otherwise blinded stems from training in echolocation.

As a recent addition to SCORPIO and a relative free agent at the best of times, Throwback does not have any particularly notable allies or friendships yet.