Resurrection Man

"Me, I'm not in their league. Probably wouldn't want to know a nobody like me."

Mitchell Shelley is marked as dead in most records. That doesn't stop this apparently "dead" man from walking, however. Despite this, he doesn't bother hiding his identity. He just doesn't like to call attention to himself. Vague reports, and blurry pictures and video of a man with a wide-brimmed hat and a tattered longcoat are about all that are available.

Resurrection Man is just a nickname. No one even really uses it, including Mitch.

Status: Current Power: Flight Death From: Shot to death by automatic weapons When: Prior to on-grid tenure

Background
Mitchell Shelley was born in Viceroy, South Carolina. His father, Preston Shelley, was a very well-to-do lawyer who was known for his rigid stance on principles. He would refuse cases from people he did not believe were worthy of his talents. Generally these were people he believed hadn't earned their freedom. Mitch's mother died when he was four, leaving Preston with their son Mitch. He quickly hired a live-in housemaid/nanny to see to the care of his son. There was just one problem. Preston believed in self-reliance so stringently that he would purposely miss major events in Mitch's life because he wanted to ensure that his son could stand on his own two feet. A notable example was when Mitch fell out of his treehouse at six years old and broke his arm. Mitch's father didn't go to the hospital with him. Conchita Alvarez, the family's live-in housemaid, did.

Conchita was more than a nanny to Mitch, she was a surrogate mother. She loved Mitch like Preston didn't seem to. Mitch would confide in her things that he wouldn't THINK of telling his father. Like that he had memories that weren't his. He remembered things from World War II, from the Crusades, from ANCIENT EGYPT even. Conchita believed these were his past lives, and they discussed them in great detail.

However, Preston didn't approve of Conchita encouraging Mitch's "flights of fancy". That sort of nonsense wouldn't help him in life. So he fired Conchita and made her leave the house. Unable to take care of Mitch alone, he sent the boy off to a prestigious boarding school. There Mitch got the finest education... and began to nurture the seeds of hatred for his father that would shape his life.

Since Preston wanted Mitch to follow in his footsteps so bad, Mitch did-- he became a lawyer. But where Preston wouldn't touch cases like defending mobsters from embezzlement charges, Mitch was all over those. He decided that Preston's rigid, principled upbringing had done nothing but lose Mitch everyone who ever cared about him. So, unlike his father, Mitch took ANY case. Much to said father's chagrin.

He quickly came to the attention of a mob boss by the name of Don Aldo. It didn't take long before Shelley was running a handful of Aldo's operations. But he kept his private life and personal life separate at first, and managed to get himself married to a beautiful blonde by the name of Paula. But when Aldo started to place more responsibilities on him, he started working longer hours and staying at the office later and later. Paula became lonely and began an affair with Richard Bessley, Mitch's law partner.

Things didn't get better when Mitch decided he wanted out. There was too much responsibility, and it was killing him. Not only that, deep down he knew it was wrong, and his conscience wouldn't let him continue. All of the transactions and business that had happened, he kept logs of. He kept them on computer disks, and kept a backup copy in the trunk of the tree in his father's house.

It was all set, and he was about to go with his evidence to the police and request immunity. But he made the mistake of confiding in Richard. See, Richard and Paula were on the take too, and they didn't want to see all that work go up in smoke. So Richard and Paula called John Keach, a detective in the Viceroy P.D. who was also working for Don Aldo. Richard arranged to be out of the office one day, and Keach arranged an "accident". The gas main until Mitch's office exploded, destroying the building and killing his secretary. And, they figured, Mitch too.

But Mitch wasn't dead. He had brain damage from the explosion, and didn't remember who he was. So he wandered, injured and confused. Until someone picked him up. Picked up a bunch of homeless people, actually. These were not good Samaritans, though, as they claimed to be. These were people from a place called "The Lab". Unimaginative name or not, they had some very serious things going on in their facilities. These people were experimenting with nanomachines, trying to find the secret to immortality. Mitch was just one more in another load of subjects.

And so Mitch was subjected to these experiments. And like all the others, after the experiments were completed, he was killed. That's how The Lab did-- they experimented on these homeless people and then killed them, to see if any came back to life. One did-- Mitch. The one in charge of the experiments was a scientist named Hooker, who had an inoperable brain tumor; he joined The Lab because he felt betrayed by God because of the brain tumor after his life of service to others, and hoped the Lab could find a cure for it.

Hooker thought the secret must be in Mitch's blood, so he made a serum out of Mitch's blood and administered it to himself. It did not have the intended effect. In fact, it drove him insane. In the ruckus Hooker caused, Mitch managed to escape, but his memory was even more muddled than before.

Still unable to remember anything, even the experiments that had been done to him, Mitch just started moving. He knew someone was after him, but not who, or why. He didn't even realize he was anything other than normal until he ran afoul of a gang in a city called Crucible. The gang was about to use a crowd with young children as an object lesson that the area was THEIR turf; said object lesson required a car and automatic guns.

Mitch LITERALLY flew at them-- apparently his gift was flight-- to stop them. They shot him instead, and he fell into a landfill under a highway. Suddenly he got a flash of memory, a "slideshow" of quick snippets of his life. Amongst them was a snippet of a woman calling him "Mitch" and saying he was due in court at 1:30. He remembered an explosion. And then he died.

But he didn't stay dead. He woke up. And when he did, a rat startled him into clearing a wide swath of junk from around him with a blast of air. Mitch could hardly believe what was happening to him. But all he could do was go on. And just hope he wasn't going insane...

Personality

 * Jaded - After everything Mitchell Shelley has been through, he's become quite jaded and cynical about how life works. Life is ruled by Murphy's Law -- namely, if the solid waste has any possibility of hitting the ventilation systems, it will...and with the most explosive result possible. Don't expect the best, he figures; why get disappointed? Just expect the absolute worst that life has to throw at you...because that's exactly what's going to happen.


 * Untrusting - Mitch never knows who's going to be the next representative of the Lab to come after him. Or what beautiful woman could be one of the Body Doubles in disguise. Or when the next mob car spraying bullets from a machine gun is going to cut him in half. As such...it's not in his nature -- or his best interests -- to trust every Tom, Dick, and Harry that walks up to him....


 * Unfazed - There's nothing like dying and waking up a few minutes later to really put one's 'OH MY GOD' gauge out of commission. After finding out he can't die, there's little that can really faze him at this point. Don't expect a huge reaction to the news that the skies have opened up and started raining blue raspberry-flavored cotton candy. His usual response? "...So?"


 * Reckless - The fear of death is a healthy thing for humans. It keeps humans...well, alive. Unfortunately for Mitch, even if he tried, he couldn't die permanently. So the fear of death does not apply for him. This leads him to take chances, and to go up against enemies that he doesn't stand a chance against. Yes, many would say he has brass. Or even brass ones. But that also means more deaths are very likely in his future....

Logs

 * TBA