Mathias Sky

Gender: Male

Age: 23

Group: Metas

Game: Dangerous

Location

Resident of Apple Tree Stacks in Roachville (Arkadia)

Job/Skills

Lab Technician at Biotechnica and Drug Dealer and Manufacturer

Mathias is a highly intelligent, practically minded polymath who grew up in the slums of Arcadia, where being clever was often less useful than knowing how to actually make things work. With the academic ability to have easily earned a full scholarship to a top university like MIT, he instead developed his talents through hands-on experience, working as a lab technician, repairing electronics and appliances, and teaching himself whatever skills he needed to survive. He has an exceptional understanding of chemistry, biochemistry, pharmaceuticals, and materials, along with strong knowledge of electronics, mechanics, fabrication, and general engineering. Mathias runs an illegal laboratory where he manufactures recreational drugs and medicines, giving him extensive experience with laboratory equipment, chemical analysis, synthesis, quality control, and improvised experimentation. He's also an accomplished fixer who can repair or jury-rig everything from furniture and toasters to tablets and specialized laboratory equipment. Growing up on the streets also taught him how to handle himself in a fight. He's a decent brawler when things get physical, but he's almost suspiciously good with a baseball bat. Nobody's quite sure where he learned it, but Mathias has an oddly impressive collection of spins, flips, flourishes, and little tricks with a bat that look like they came straight out of one of those ridiculous trick-shot videos online. He insists it's just something he picked up over the years. His greatest strength is his ability to understand how something works and then figure out how to reproduce, modify, or improve it with whatever resources he has available.

Meta License

Unregistered

Powers

Matter Alteration / Chemical Manipulation

Mathias can manipulate matter through touch, perceiving the chemical and molecular structure of whatever he touches and altering it according to his understanding of chemistry. He can reshape materials, change their physical properties, combine or separate substances, and initiate or alter chemical reactions without relying on conventional heat or other forms of activation. He can accelerate a reaction that would normally take hours or slow a violent reaction down to a crawl, making his power exceptionally useful for chemistry, fabrication, repair, and controlled destruction. The more complicated the transformation, however, the more difficult it becomes. Simple substances and straightforward changes can be performed quickly, while complex compounds, large quantities, unstable reactions, or major changes in physical properties require increasing amounts of concentration, energy, and time. Mathias can theoretically perform extreme transformations, such as producing diamond from carbon, but doing so would require him to reproduce and maintain the necessary conditions of pressure, temperature, molecular arrangement, and stability for an extended period, making it technically possible but usually impractical. Atomic transmutation is even more difficult; altering one element into another requires an almost microscopic level of precision and carries an enormous risk of failure, making something like turning lead into gold possible only in theory and certainly not something he can casually accomplish. Living matter is effectively beyond his ability to manipulate. Biology is simply too complex and interconnected for him to safely alter directly; a human body, plant, animal, or even bacteria involves countless simultaneous chemical processes that make the precision required vastly greater than manipulating ordinary matter. He can manipulate isolated materials that are normally found in living organisms, such as carbon, calcium, or a piece of bone outside the body, but cannot manipulate those materials while they are part of a living organism. In short, Mathias is extraordinarily powerful when working with matter he can understand and control, but complexity, scale, energy, precision, and time all place real limits on what he can accomplish. His power is not "he can change anything"; it is "if he understands what something is and has enough control, time, and energy, he may be able to change it."

Physical Appearance

Mathias is a tall, athletic redhead with striking blue eyes, the kind of handsome that becomes surprisingly easy to overlook when he isn't trying to stand out. During the day, he looks almost painfully ordinary. For his nine-to-five, he keeps his hair neatly groomed and wears simple glasses, a button-down shirt, slacks, and comfortable shoes. Add a lab coat and he looks exactly like what he is: a slightly nerdy, perfectly respectable lab technician who wouldn't attract a second glance in a hallway full of scientists. It's a deliberately unremarkable look, practical and clean, and Mathias is perfectly happy being underestimated.

At night, however, that version of Mathias seems to disappear. He trades the glasses and button-down for a goth-punk aesthetic, wearing his red hair spiked up, heavy eyeliner around those bright blue eyes, and a battered red leather jacket that has been repaired, altered, patched, and reworked so many times that calling it a jacket barely does it justice. It's practically a custom piece now, covered in signs of its history and modified with hidden interior pockets where Mathias keeps his "store." The rest of his clothes follow the same underground-raver aesthetic, dark, practical, and designed to move comfortably through packed clubs and warehouse parties. He spends his nights bouncing from one underground party to another, and unlike his quiet daytime appearance, nighttime Mathias is much harder to overlook. He knows the scene, knows the people, and somehow always seems to know exactly where the next party is.

Personality and interests

Mathias has an old soul hiding behind a dry sense of humor and a sarcastic mouth. Although he is a twin, he has always carried himself like the older brother, taking on a natural sense of responsibility for his family and quietly shouldering whatever needs to be handled. He doesn't see it as a burden or sacrifice; to Mathias, taking care of the people he loves is simply what you do. His priorities are uncomplicated: food on the table, the rent paid, the bills handled, and Serena safe. Beyond that, he honestly hasn't spent much time thinking about what he wants for himself. Most of his life has been spent worrying about tomorrow, leaving very little room to stop and ask what he might want from it. Mathias isn't bitter about the opportunities he never had. He knows he could have gone to college and probably excelled, but he also knows he wasn't going to walk away from his family just because he had the chance. He made his choice and doesn't regret it.

He's patient by nature, something that comes naturally from both chemistry and years of learning that some things simply cannot be rushed. Mathias tends to approach problems the same way: observe, think, figure out what actually matters, and then work through it. He's rarely impressed by his own intelligence because, to him, being smart is simply how he functions. He doesn't have much opportunity to show off or discuss the things he knows, so he mostly keeps it to himself—though Serena's homework mysteriously always gets finished. He shows affection more through what he does than what he says. If Mathias cares about you, he'll fix your broken tablet, make sure you've eaten, walk you home, find your medicine, or quietly solve whatever problem is sitting in front of you without expecting praise for it.

Growing up in the slums has also left him with a natural distrust of authority. He's seen firsthand how quickly people can decide that someone from his neighborhood is trouble before ever bothering to know them, so Mathias tends to assume that institutions and authority figures are looking out for themselves first. His job is different. He likes working as a lab technician, enjoys the science, and appreciates the steady income, but at the end of the day it's still a job. A reliable paycheck is a luxury, and he doesn't take that for granted.

Socially, Mathias is more comfortable than his quiet daytime appearance might suggest. His work as a drug dealer has made him good at meeting people, reading a room, and navigating different crowds, and he genuinely loves the underground rave scene. Around people he considers "his kind," he's much more relaxed and openly himself. He's still sarcastic and dry-witted, but he's also capable of being loud, playful, and surprisingly social. If life were simple and he didn't have a family to worry about, though, he'd probably be perfectly happy staying home with some popcorn and Netflix. His responsibilities and the life he and Cyd have built around raising Serena simply don't leave much room for that kind of quiet life.

Mathias and Cyd are partners in every sense of the word. He may have the eldest-child mentality, but he doesn't treat her like someone who needs to be protected from every problem. They share the responsibility of keeping their family together, and that means they can butt heads just as easily as they can work together. Serena tends to get a little more freedom from Mathias because, in his mind, they survived worse growing up and she's not exactly likely to come up with anything they haven't already done themselves. Cyd is usually the one keeping a closer eye on Serena, which inevitably puts the sisters at odds sometimes and occasionally leaves Mathias caught somewhere in the middle.

For all his competence, Mathias has one major flaw: he carries too much. He is so accustomed to being the person who handles things that he rarely notices when he has taken on more than he should. He doesn't ask for help easily because his instinct is always to think, *I can handle it.* And most of the time, he can. The problem is that eventually there is simply too much to handle. Mathias is good at making sure everyone else has a tomorrow, but he has never really stopped to consider what he wants his own tomorrow to look like. If someone asked him right now, he might honestly shrug and say, "I dunno. Rent paid, everyone's fed... maybe a nap." And he'd mean it.

Favorite food

Waffles and Fried Chicken

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This character is owned by: Winters