Halfblood Hill Application

[the_futurist]

PLAYER
Name: Amanda (Isonen)
Musebox: paradoxwalking @ DW

CHARACTER
Name: Anthony Edward "Tony" Stark
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Age: 16
Demigod/Hunter/Satyr/Nymph: Demigod - Son of Hephaestus (because that's a shocker.)

Demigod abilities:

Tony has always been exceptionally skilled at all things mechanical and electronic in nature. He built his first working circuit board at the age of four. His first working engine at the age of six. He can do the math in his head and it's always right. Computers and machines have always responded exactly as he intended them to. He never really thought anything of it, but once he could get his hands on something mechanical, it made sense to him. He knew how to use it, how to fix it, how to improve it. He is a master of physics and electrical engineering (and is a year away from having the PhDs to prove it, in spite of his youth). Tony also possesses excellent hacking skills and groundbreaking AI and robotics knowledge.

These abilities were always attributed to his genes, assuming that Howard Stark was in fact Tony's biological father. His abilities make even more sense once it became known that his father was, not so coincidentally, the god of these very abilities. The god of the forge, the inventors, the tinkers: Hephaestus.

He's been told he has ADHD, but to him it just seems that not much is worthy of his undivided attention. He is perfectly capable of focusing 110% on those things he does find important. But they are few and far between.


Personality: Tony is brilliant and cocky, charming, flirtatious, and damaged.

Tony Stark is brilliant. Yes, his brilliance is a part of his personality. He views everything around him with a critical eye, assessing to see what use something has to himself, how he could improve it, and what presence it might have in his future. Most things are discarded. Some things are kept to be improved upon. Others stick around because he can't seem to shake them. He is always attempting to predict the future, and is often quite good at it. Not in the vague, oracle sense, but in the sense of what sorts of inventions would be most useful or lucrative in the next few years, or what sort of image should be projected to further a career, which kind of punch should be thrown to render an opponent unconscious in the most timely matter, those sorts of things.

As it stands, his brilliance has also given him a fairly enormous ego. At the age of 16 he is less than a year from graduating MIT with two (2) PhDs, in physics and mechanical engineering. He's also not entirely unattractive, and due to rigorous training from his mother and various other staff of the family, has a fatal level of charm, when he chooses to employ it. He's beautiful, he's brilliant, and he knows it, so he wears the mask like the armor it is, because people can be put very much at ease by hating this exterior, and this he uses fully to his advantage. If you play the part like you cannot be touched, others are much less likely to try, and if your mask is convincing enough, most will not care to see behind it.

While charming and flirtatious, and knowing exactly how to play people to get what he wants, Tony does not have an abundance of friends. Or any at all, really. His reputation has a tendency to precede him, dissuading those who have heard of him from trying to break through his shell at all. And what a shell it is. He was raised by parents for whom he never felt good enough, and it seemed as though the more he excelled in school, in his abilities, in life, the more they seemed to be frustrated or even disappointed in him. He has come to expect nearly everyone in his life to only come to him when he has something they need.

Sometimes this means he does his damnedest to acquire whatever it is that is in demand so he can pretend to have friends for a while. Alcohol, the latest movies or games, other slightly less legal substances. He liked to party, to forget the world for a while.

Sometimes he'd just shut out everyone altogether, cutting all social ties and focusing on school, on his inventions, on whatever it was that gave him a feeling of worth, for a time. He constantly struggles to find his own identity, one that isn't tied to a name he was born into. A name for himself that he alone owns.

He is younger than he feels and more damaged that he'll admit even to himself. He doesn't know how to accept a compliment gracefully, and much less how to except a hug or genuine affection. The first would be accepted with arrogance, the latter with absolute bafflement and possibly an offensive joke. He'd rather not need other people at all except for a paycheck, but he can't seem to stay away from them.

Throw into all that the recent loss of his mother to a fatal car crash (Howard barely survived and is at the present time in a coma), and the even more recently revealed truth that his father is literally a Greek god, and you've got a little more of an existential crises than even this 16year old is equipped to handle gracefully.

On the surface, Tony is arrogant, sarcastic, cynical, flirtatious, charming, and absolutely untouchable. Underneath, he's all of those things, and terribly lonely, jaded, and starved for actual affection and worth.

Just don't expect him to be mature about it.


AU History:

Tony Stark was born brilliant, born with the expectation that he would be brilliant, and yet never seemed to live up to his father's expectations. Howard Stark was a technological titan, creator, owner, CEO of Stark Industries, one of the best known, if not the best known, weapons manufacturing corporations in the world. His wife, Maria, was a charming ingénue of a well-to-do family, and together they were quite the power couple.

However, even in a their modern generation, they were still expected to produce an heir and it was a very slow going. Both underwent fertility treatments, seemingly to no effect. Until, by all accounts miraculously, Maria conceived. The result, nine months later, was Tony.

As was expected, Tony grew up in the family business, and his skills were more than encouraged: they were required. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he rarely faltered. At the age of four he created a working circuit board. By the age of six he could design and build a working engine. Everything mechanical seemed to come to life at his fingertips. Maria seemed at odds with her reactions: sometimes pleased, encouraging, sometimes distant, worried, as if she didn't want to praise his efforts, with no explanation. Howard, for all appearances, seemed to see little more than dollar signs and status. he was sparing with praise and generous with criticism.

When Tony was about 10 years old he had a screaming match with Howard. Tony wasn't passing his private courses quickly enough, wasn't spending enough time on schematics, was making too much noise, had exploded the fifteenth microwave, the usual argument. At some point, Tony had enough and, repeating a dumb line he'd heard on a tv show, yells at Howard, "Whatever, like you care, you're not my real dad!" and storms off, leaving Howard yelling obscenities at his back, more perturbed at the insolence than anything else.

It's not 'til Howard turns around to catch the look on Maria's face that something clicks into place. Tony can hear the yelling from his room on the next floor up, but can't make out the words and doesn't even try.

Maria eventually tells Howard exactly how Tony was conceived. It was a girl's night out, she was out at a bar, at a club, dancing with her friends, actually able to just let loose. When a man approached her. There was just something about him. He seemed to know exactly who she was. And offered her what she wanted most: a child. She didn't really believe him when he said he was a god. Who would? It wasn't until few years later, after Tony's incredible abilities began to manifest, that she received a phone call to meet the same man again. She agreed, but refused to come alone: Jarvis, the trusted butler, and friend, was her escort. (This detail she left out, for Jarvis' sake, so that he could look out for her son without added suspicion.)

And the man explained once again, exactly who he was: Hephaestus. A 'god.' He warned her that there were going to be greater troubles for her and her child than simple infidelity. There were going to be monsters after her son, figuratively and literally, and he would need to be protected. His abilities were going to be well above average. And so were his difficulties. She wanted to believe this was all a joke, that this man was deranged, wanted to call the police and get a restraining order... but she could feel the truth of it. And after that day had done everything she could to protect her son, from the background.

She'd lived in fear that Tony's exceptional abilities would bring too much attention, though his looks being so remarkably like Howard's seemed to assuage any lingering doubt. She'd convinced Howard to install heavy security systems, to protect the art, their research, their home and antiques. He saw reason in that, and as such, any monsters that may have come after Tony seemed dissuaded. He was protected.

However, once Howard knew the truth, that his wife had been unfaithful and his son was not truly his son, and in fact, would most likely surpass him in intelligence and renown one day... well, Howard became even colder than before. But also even more distant.

Maria pulled away for many years, leaving Tony to his tutors and studies and designs. He had the best of everything, anything he could ask for, and whatever could not be provided, he built for himself. Well, as best as he could. It didn't always turn out exactly like he meant it to, as countless electrical fires, explosions, and singed eyebrows could attest.

When Tony was 14 years old he enrolled in MIT. That's when the trouble really started.

Maria tried to convince him to study from home, do online courses, something, anything not to leave the protection of the home. Tony, of course, wanted to be out of that place, where he'd felt smothered and held at arm's length all at once for his whole life. He would not be swayed, so Maria offered a compromise: "Take Jarvis with you." So, he left, got in on scholarship even though he could have afforded the tuition entirely on his own, and every day came home to the butler he'd known his entire life. Little did he know the man was also his bodyguard.

He'd barely made it a week before he was attacked in an alley on the way home by what appeared to be a rabid dog. Jarvis had appeared just in time to whisk him away to safety. Tony was suspicious, but grateful, so he didn't press the issue. Until something similar happened a couple weeks later, always when he was alone, and Jarvis would swoop in to help him escape, back to the security of the apartment.

He demanded answers. Jarvis knew the reasons, but it wasn't his story to tell. He explained that Tony had enemies, because of his father, but gave no more detail than that, and Tony assumed Howard had pissed somebody off, not exactly a shocker.

The cycle continued. Tony went to classes, studied, tinkered, partied, debauched and generally made a name for himself as an arrogant bastard, dodged rabid dogs and meth'ed out hobos on his way to and from school, and went home for holidays and required company bullshit.

He did his best to live like an adult, independent, carefree. Alone.

When he was 16, just before summer, Tony received a call. His parents were in a car wreck. Howard had been driving. Maria had been killed instantly. Howard had been whisked away to the hospital, deep in a coma, and unlikely to awaken in the near future.

All hell broke loose. Board members wanted Tony to finish school even earlier, take over designing where his father left off, "just in case" he didn't snap out of the coma. He emphatically refused. Obadiah Stane took over management of Stark Industries and allowed Tony to continue his studies, only contacting him when he needed a new design, and attributing the credit to Howard, who was moved back to the Stark's manor under constant observation by a nurse, though for all media purposes, was claimed to be coherent enough to continue churning out designs, but not well enough to be seen by the public. Grieving. Healing.

Nothing but lies to keep investors happy.

A few months after his mother's death, Jarvis sat Tony down, told him in no uncertain terms to shut up, and told him his origin.

Predictably, Tony called bullshit.

And Jarvis laid it all out for him. Explained his abilities, his attackers, his mother's distance and his "father's" coldness. Then he told Tony the most brutal, shocking fact of them all: he was going to summer camp. Even if he had to be drugged, dragged, and stuffed in a trunk to get there. The attacks had only increased and it just wasn't safe for him to stay in the city any longer. Tony finagled and managed to convince Jarvis to let him remain at MIT just long enough to finish finals, then take a break on terms of "family responsibility" or some other (convincing) bogus excuse.

So, with less than a year to go at MIT until he has a double PhD, Tony Stark finds himself dropped off at Summer Camp for Magical Bastards in the middle of effing nowhere, in December, parentless, friendless, and pissed as hell.

What could possibly go wrong?