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Mercer Ezekiel ChantCode-Name: Cog
Position: X-Men (Reserve), IT & Security
Ethnicity: Welsh-American
Sex: Male
Age: 27
Appearance:
Hair: Normally an orangish-yellow, but when the holographic projector wired into the Gadget at the base of his skull is active, it looks like it’s a sort of dirty blond. He keeps it at a medium length and messy.
Eyes: Grey
Skin: Snakelike skin that is a dark burnt orange with black spots. With the personal holographic projector wired into his spine at the base of his skull, it appears that he has normal Caucasian skin, but the projector can’t change the texture of his skin. His lower abdomen, on the right, has a long jagged scar from a knife wound, and he has a few other scars besides this.
Weight: About 130 pounds
Height: 5’8”
Other: Besides his orangish-yellow hair and burnt orange snakeskin, Mercer’s ears come to an elfy point, and his canines are sharper than the average human’s. There is a slight bulge along his upper back, where the main body of the “Gadget” is installed. The interface port of the Gadget is a stainless steel hatch about two inches in diameter on his back just to the right of his spine and above his shoulder blade. The port contains a coil of fiber optic cables that are designed to allow him to interface with almost any device.
Date Of Birth: July 17th, 1993
Place Of Birth: Bristol, UK
Education: Formally to Year 9 (Age 14), not that he remembers much of it.
Mother:
Name: Lily Chant (Maiden name: Pritchard)
Age: 48
Race: Mutant (Uncanny balance)
Father:
Name: William Ezekiel Chant
Age: 50
Race: Human
Other Relatives:
Younger Sister, Evie, age 18
Younger Brother, Lyle, age 21
Powers: Mercer has an intuitive sense of how to break technology up and put it back together, and how to invent new things that will do what he wants them to do. He sees how something works and he knows what it needs to be fixed, though he doesn’t automagically know technical terms. He can also look at devices or components put in front of him and see what they are composed of and what he can do with them.
He has a hunk of technology he refers to as the Gadget wired into his nervous system and connected with a network of nanotechnology in his brain. Its primary purpose is to provide a wired channel for mental programming and massive data uploads and downloads. He has tweaked with the system to be able to connect to just about any device to make a link and interact.
The Gadget has a holographic projection device that can make him appear normal on the surface. He doesn’t like to keep it active for more than an hour at a time because it tends to make the whole Gadget run uncomfortably warm. He’s been trying to work on it, but it’s not exactly easy to meddle with a gadget installed in one’s back, attached to one’s own nervous system.
Power Limitations: He lacks much technical training, so it can be hard for him to relay to others what he is doing or what he needs to get the job done. If someone else tries to explain to him what they’re doing or what they want him to do using technical terms, he may not know what they mean.
He can’t just make something from nothing. He needs the right supplies and tools.
The Gadget lets him interface with almost any technology, but he can’t just bypass encryptions, firewalls, passwords, or any other barriers. He describes the interfacing process as him pretending to be a keyboard, mouse, or storage device.
He can have someone upload programming that goes against his nature into his brain through the Gadget and override his personality and functions. He cannot program himself easily. One of the subroutine fragments still present in the Gadget’s system cues a migraine that builds until he passes out the more he tries to meddle with his own programming.
If he does a straight information upload, it doesn’t make him an automatic expert. He needs to be able to anchor the information into his schema to make connections and understand it. It’s like giving a child a dictionary and expecting them to know how to use every word in it. It just doesn’t work that way. However, a well-designed program that gives his brain the schema will make him an expert so long as the program is active. In the case of information or programming pertaining to physical actions—like karate—he needs physical training just like a normal person to be actually affective or have any sort of strength.
Hobbies and Interests: Mercer loves clockwork gadgetry. He believes the ticking of clockwork has such a noble, solid, loyal sound to it that it makes him think it must have a direct link to a God of Time.
His power is perfectly in line with his natural interest in machinery and technology. He could spend all his time puzzling out how to make something from the components sitting out in front of him and love doing it.
He likes writing his thoughts down on paper with pen, although he feels like much of what he writes wouldn’t make sense to anyone else and he wouldn’t show his scribblings to anyone. He likes paper and pen because it is so completely not programmed stuff that can be uploaded and downloaded and replicated and forwarded in two clicks of a button.
Background: Mercer doesn’t remember much of anything from before the day he did physical damage to the Gadget to free himself from his captors. The damage caused a cascading failure all through his brain as well as the Gadget that fragmented the Gadget’s programming and scrambled his memories, his personality, and his thought and speech processes. He is very confident that his real name is Mercer, though he doesn’t know if that’s a given name or a surname. A skilled programmer or a psychic—or both working together—might be able to help him clear the problems up, but he probably wouldn’t let them. He isn’t clear on how he escaped exactly, just that he did. His memories from a few days after that point are much more clear.He surmises that he spent an unknown length of time getting tested on by researchers, possibly to make him a brain-puppet-zombie-mutant-techie. Fragmented memories that surface up now and again give him the distinct feeling that it wasn’t savory business. He also has fragmented memories of being in school uniforms with people with accents like his, so he surmises he was normal-looking and went to school in England at some point prior to being researched on and ending up in the US.He wandered the streets, mostly getting abuse hurled his way for his mutate appearance and fleeing when threatened. Then he found his way into the back of a small computer repair shop, where he worked up a quick and temporary fix to the glitching holographic projector in the Gadget. Then he noticed a small broken robot and was drawn into working on it. The owner of the place happened to be watching and had a mind to cash in on this mutant’s power, if possible. He offered a very small amount of cash and added in the offer of letting him stay in the storage loft in exchange for the work, and Mercer with his scattered thoughts and personality agreed without even thinking that he was getting underpaid for his skills. Work at the shop wasn’t all fun and games. He had to be exceptionally careful not to let the two part-time workers see him without his holographic disguise active, and having it active made the Gadget run hot. Mostly, he would work in the shop after-hours, coming down from the storage loft when others weren’t around and do whatever project the owner had set out. He’d only turn on his hologram to slip out to get food. At least twice, it failed on him and his defensive flight mechanism kicked in, sending him running before angry-eyed men turned on him, only coming back to the shop when he was certain that no one was following him.
A member of the X-Men went to the shop to get a personal laptop repaired and spotted Mercer working in the back. Curious about the mutate, he slipped into the back and started asking Mercer questions. Mercer, cautious, was alternatively defensive but soon put at ease. He explained how his power worked, that he just looked at something and new what it needed. After this initial coincidental contact, he was contacted again and invited to work on Cerebro in New Orleans. He couldn’t pass up a good puzzle, besides that the company sounded undeniably better.
He was able to help in the restoration of Cerebro, much to his delight, and got it working. He continued to work now on security defenses for Cerebro--to keep any teleporters from stealing it away from the X-Men. He built little robots, his Mers. He made friends with most everyone, like family. He felt safe, at home. He even adopted a stray cat.
Then something happened. Something buried beneath all those fragments of old programming surfaced, and he felt himself… recalled. He wanted to stop. Wanted to tell anyone. Wanted to turn back. But he began walking, his feet guided as if by GPS. They had found him, and they had snagged him, and he didn't even know how. He fought the summons hard enough to give himself time to try to mess with the Gadget with a swiss army knife, at first hoping to do anything to get rid of this subroutine, and then…
To protect his friends, he had to forget. They were too important. He didn't want to lose them. He didn't want them to be lost. He made them fragments in his mind and scattered them in every corner of himself until all that was left was the Cog he'd once been.
Within Therizo's machine, sometimes a test subject in a lab, sometimes a technician of sorts, repairing Sentinels and being made to improve weapon designs. Several attempts were made to reprogram him, but he had a habit of throwing any personality subroutines he did not like out the window. He tended to be exactly as cooperative as he had to be, and often in need of persuasion. During one of these attempts, he overheard a conversation about his old files, and his full name--Mercer Ezekiel Chant. He filed it away, finding no opportunity to follow up, but always listening.
Time ground on, gears and cogs turning, turning, turning.
Then a familiar face appeared in his life. Marcela, made into a bio-Sentinel, came upon him, and recognized him. And, vaguely, distantly, he recognized her. She took pity on him, offered to help him escape. With a little bit of direction, he got her to crash his system protocols in just the right way that he could make a run for it.
The world was nothing like it had been before Apocalypse and Therizo began their war. Everything was in tatters. But Marcela had told him that he would find the others still somewhere in New Orleans, and his gut told him she was right. As he tried to remember their names, he sought them out… and he found them.
Personality: Mercer would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic. He displays disorganized thought and speech patterns and inappropriate emotional responses in situations. He doesn’t have the hallucinations or delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic. (Well, someone diagnosing him without knowing about the Gadget and its ability to program him might say he has delusions, and he is overly paranoid about that at times, either way.)
Mostly he comes off as being in his own world, but very conversational about it. He’ll hop from emotion to emotion or topic to topic at the smallest cue, like a hyper puppy, or he’ll stay attentive to the simplest thing for a remarkable amount of time. He loves the sound of words, word play, double-meaning, and puns. He is social, wanting to be around people but not quite picking up on when his behavior is weird to them or when they want him to go away. He is also jumpy. He does remember what he got away from this time. Though he tries not to let it haunt him, though he wants no pity, he shies away from physical contact and jumps at loud sounds.
The proper complex programming would change his personality entirely, turning him to a cold soldier or a peppy cheerleader or a suave romantic or whatever the programmer desires. He can make the programming crash if he can find a loophole in it big enough to allow him to tamper with the Gadget, but it would likely take him back to being the crazy mishmash he is currently. He doesn’t willingly want to be programmed. He’d rather be crazy but free than sane and not sure if it’s himself. At least this way, even with the random glitches that pop up, he’s dealing with it in his way and making his own new memories.
Special Notes (if any): Fragments of old programming surface on occasion. The way he crashed his system wasn’t clean. The following are a few common fragments:
His defensive subroutine was upgraded to include a string of basic self-defense moves if cornered. It favors flight over fight, however, and gives him an edge at finding exits and fleeing in a way to shake pursuit. It kicks into gear when he’s threatened, such that he tends to just book it in the face of serious danger.
If he tries to program himself, it triggers a subroutine that starts a migraine that makes it almost impossible for him to focus and gradually makes him pass out. He's gotten better at finding his way around this subroutine and has idly begun organizing the fragments of his memories, especially while he drifts to sleep.
An analytical subroutine will kick in at random, cuing him to speak in excessive detail about something he’s looking at. He surmises that there were dictionaries programmed into this subroutine to give him good words to analyze with, but they were fragmented, so his descriptions are instead random. No known trigger that he can tell.
Though Mercer's original journal and pocket watch were lost to him, once free from Therizo, he made certain to obtain replacements. He finds comfort in writing by hand, recording his thoughts and rereading them. The pocket watch's gears seem to him to be stately, always ticking forward as if guided by the hands of some ancient god of time.
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