2015-07-29 22:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
weneverwin
weneverwinUser Name/Nick: Siobhan
User DW:fiercebadrabbit
AIM/IM: blitztsunami, plurk: fiercebadrabbit
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Todd Tolansky/Toad
Series: X-Men: Evolution
Age: 17
From When?: Shortly after the conclusion of the series. No canonical death, but Todd almost dies all the time. He fell off a roof and didn't bounce.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Todd is a thief, a vandal, and a bit of a thug, but the overt criminality is more symptom than disease. He's an angry bundle of resentment and cowardice wrapped up in abandonment issues. Fairly legitimate, as he was ditched by parents and more or less ostracized from society thereafter, but he definitely didn't turn the experience into a positive. Todd trusts nobody and likes nothing. He might steal to eat, but he also steals because he likes the fleeting sense of power and even negative attention is better than none. That said, he doesn't mean anybody any harm, just for them to leave him alone, or at least be scared of him instead of the other way round. A lot of his malfunctions could be fixed by being nice to him, though it would take a long time to wear him down and get past his prickly defenses.
Abilities/Powers:
Slime Todd spits a slightly corrosive, heavy, and extremely sticky green substance. He's capable of shooting it a few feet, and it hits hard enough to hurt or at least knock over small objects. Its main use is blinding and disorienting opponents or breaking things. On board, this ability will not function.
Super Tongue Toad's tongue can extend approximately six feet from his mouth. It is fully prehensile, strong enough to leave bruises or drag people around, and sticky enough to grab small items by adhesion alone. On the barge, it will extend only a few feet and lose most of the strength and speed, reducing it from a weapon to a slightly gross way to eat.
Wall Crawling Todd sticks to everything he happens to want to. Even with clothing in the way, he can climb any given surface like a fly, support himself upside-down, and cling to people just as efficiently as inorganic surfaces. On board, he'll only be able to stick with skin-to-object contact and will occasionally lose control and stick to things without meaning to.
Assorted Physical Mutations Some of Todd's oddities don't actually serve much purpose, like his webbed fingers and toes or odd-textured, chemical-sensitive skin. His legs and spine, however, are designed to propel him to impossible heights at inhuman speeds, and when the super-jumping is over, he can fall and hit the ground from considerable heights without more than bruising. He's a freakishly strong kicker and more comfortable on all fours and hopping than walking like a normal person. Standing up straight is actually a bit uncomfortable. On the barge, his jumping strength will be lowered to higher than normal, but no more leaping to the ceiling, and he'll be injured more easily by falling.
Personality: Todd Tolansky was born to be the universe's butt monkey, and he figured it out early enough to direct his energies in equal parts to hiding from the worst of it and biting back where he could. All his vices—greed, cowardice, spite, and sleaze—and even his sparse virtues all come from his deep and often borne out conviction that everybody is out to get him. Occasionally he decides to meet his disasters head-on (and gets his butt kicked), but more often skulking and avoidance are his weapons (and he gets his butt kicked anyway).
Todd does have some basis for his belief that everything is unfair and stacked against him. Even if he weren't an obvious mutant in, classically, a world that fears and hates them, he's poor, undereducated, and a lost soul without any kind of real adult guidance who's been taken advantage of by every authority he's ever known. He's been bullied and toyed with, and even the supposed good guys of his universe have tormented him and given him up as a lost cause without too much effort. But for every extenuating circumstance, Todd has a flaw or two from the irritating to the legitimately awful. He's entirely willing to be used as a weapon (by big bads like Magneto or by tougher, more effective bullies), mean as spit, and just personally unpleasant. He's obnoxious to the point of lunacy to girls he finds attractive and obsequious in the extreme when caught out. He's a slimy little creep, and it's hard to be too sensitive to hard circumstances when he's just stolen your wallet and creeped out all your friends.
He's not all bad, though. Todd has friends, sort of. The rest of the Brotherhood, with Rogue and Tabby, and occasionally even with straight-up X-men when he has to get along. That's about it, but that's all he's ever managed. His day to day relationship with most of them is made up mainly of fractious bickering and lying around aimlessly, but there's affection buried in the teasing and stupid ideas. He's even loyal, in his way, forgiving most of their lousy treatment of him (sullenly, slowly, and silently, but it's forgiveness). You have to kick Todd a lot before he'll give up on someone who actually pays attention to him, and even then the result is more whining and mockery than lashing out.
Though being liked by Todd can be just as unpleasant as being on his shitlist. He has no sense of boundaries or appropriateness for anyone else, though he certainly likes his own personal space, and he can't keep his mouth shut or his reactions tamped down. He's a bit of a drama queen at the best of times, and acting out and bad jokes are way better than confronting actual issues. When your response to the transmogrification of a near-mother figure who may well be dead is to use her as home décor, you may have some issues to work out.
So he's not good at or smart about people. Or much of anything else, or so he usually maintains (when he isn't bragging outrageously; Todd doesn't value consistency too much). It's easier to come across as utterly incompetent most of the time, and a lifetime of abject failure does seem to back up a certain fatalism. Todd never wins, so it's best to keep expectations low. It goes with his miserable self-esteem. Even Todd misses his actual skills, making sure they're never acknowledged by anyone else. He has a precise if not particularly rapid analytical mind and a corresponding knack for mechanical problems. A repeatedly held-back teenage dirtbag who can pilot a stolen jet and reprogram secret technology on a whim has more going on upstairs than anyone would attribute to Todd. He figures things out. He just gets there at a ninety degree angle, and a little slower than everyone else. He also has a way of absorbing and retaining. He has no idea what he was supposed to be studying in school, but a lot of information floats around his head, mostly coming out by accident or in a sad attempt to impress somebody.
He's not even a total coward. All the time. Just when he's thinking about it. When it comes to super-heroic combat, he may have the lamest powers in the room, but he uses what he has to surprisingly good effect. Discretion is still the better part of valor, but there is the potential in Toad to overcome all his hard edges and shortcomings. He just has no idea how. And very little motivation. And a vested interest in being as rotten as he knows how to be, however ineffective that is.
Barge Reactions: Among Todd's many elaborate fears is getting kidnapped by shadowy forces and put to some sort of nefarious purpose. Admittedly, those fears have more to do with being dissected like his namesake on account of his mutant nature, but he'll be deeply freaked out that it's happened. The space stuff and cosmic redemption is weird, but not that weird compared to Apocalypse or Asteroid M. He'll be far more upset about the kidnapping than the science fiction stuff. He won't even be too incredulous about magic. Seems like a waste of energy. His baseline level of weirdness is enough that he won't worry that much about anything other than being stolen by some kind of creeper with an agenda. There might be a toad dissection in the future. He doesn't know there won't be.
Alternate timelines that resemble his own world may be emotionally more difficult, but Todd's not an introspective guy. Other dimensions. Sure, whatever. Another dimension invaded his school dance one time. There were dinosaurs. Most fun he's ever had at a high school sponsored event.
Todd will be copacetic about new realities, but less philosophical whenever he has to cope with being aware of any alternate of himself. There's a real fatalistic streak in him; he is who he is because everything's stacked against him and there's no way it's his fault. Evidence to the contrary will alarm him a lot more than magic and outer space.
Path to Redemption: Todd's actual bad guy shenanigans are usually petty. He steals, breaks stuff, and fights with other teenagers when the adult who feeds and houses him tells him to. He does often set out to be a jerk, but any serious harm he's ever managed to do is mostly by accident. His actual behavior is the symptom, not the disease. He steals because he doesn't generally have any other way to take care of himself, vandalizes because being helpless and abandoned pisses him off, and is a good little minion to the supervillains because he's jealous and spiteful and sometimes it gets him fleeting approval.
In short, Todd's sulky, inept evil grows mainly out of never being valued or even having his basic needs well provided for. This isn't to say that the magic of friendship will heal everything right away. He doesn't trust easily, burned too many times, and will be confused and suspicious of most offers of kindness. He's had a few friends, but the Brotherhood was ordered together and their relationships are fraught and a bit superficial. Todd's never really felt like any of the guys liked him for his own sake or would go to a lot of trouble for him. He might want to be loved, but first he'd have to learn what that is and how to accept it. A lot of patience and persistence and the capacity to honestly appreciate his weird, often hidden abilities would be necessary. Knowing he's being judged puts him on his guard, and he does a whole lot of judge-worthy stuff.
History: If you can't be liked, be feared. Todd hasn't held onto much from his mom, but that little bit of advice sums up much of what relationship they had. He's charitable toward her in retrospect. Being a teenager with a freak baby she didn't ask for couldn't have been any easier than being a freak teenager who didn't ask to be born. When he was little, though, there was no way to get that perspective. His first few years, in his memories, are a muddle of screaming and hiding and slapping, interspersed with the odd moment of awkward tenderness. She loved him some of the time, did her best to keep him fed and dressed and even managed the odd toy, but she never tried to protect him. From herself, from the kind of knowledge that wasn't good for a kid, or from the world.
He certainly couldn't remember a time that he didn't know he was the reason his father left. His sleazebag, worthless, jerk father, who nobody wanted anyway, but he wouldn't have left if his kid hadn't been a freak. (Todd's tendency to inconsistent but intense emotional convictions might just be genetic.) And of course Todd was a freak, and that was the reason other kids didn't want to play with him, and when that came up conversations with his mother usually either turned into recriminations about ruining his life or, on a good day, a lecture about how he should learn to beat up all the little punks who gave him a hard time. He was old enough for preschool but not going when, without warning, she left him at a police station and wasn't heard from again for years.
He'd also be a lot older before he started to suspect she might not have been quite right upstairs, but that suspicion never undid any of the damage she'd done. She tried a time or two to get him back out of the foster system, but it never stuck. He bounced around for years, never staying with anyone long. Mutants weren't public knowledge and Todd could almost pass for human if he was careful, if he kept his tongue in his mouth and his hands in his pockets, stood up straight and stayed still. He had to learn those survival techniques himself. He had to learn just about everything himself. He'd started stealing to eat when he was still with his mother, and not even the well-meaning among his many foster parents and group home directors put in the time to notice and correct. He spent his childhood a bit feral and left largely to his own devices, a little too weird and left unmanageable and bitter. Slipping quietly through the cracks.
And so he would likely have remained if not for an advanced X-gene. He was cutting school one day to hang out in a park and throw rocks at garbage cans when a put together woman in a suit called him by name. He took her for a social worker and stuck around long enough for her to shapeshift to her natural, blue-skinned form. After he got done shrieking and hiding behind a picnic table, she glared him calm enough to explain what mutants were, what he was, and what use she might just have for him in the war to come. Being a pawn in some kind of poorly defined game of mutant-human chess didn't sound like much, but he wouldn't have to be alone anymore, and a detached, emotionally brutal mother figure had a comforting familiarity to it. He'd be a soldier if he had to be.
He was eleven years old.
Todd grumbled when Mystique moved him to Bayville from New York, feeling he was a city boy and should remain, but he learned pretty quickly to keep his thoughts to himself. She managed the legalities and slipped him into the local school system. Todd had been kept back a few years in school, a lack of consistency more at fault than a lack of ability or even effort, but he never asked her to fix that. It was easier to accept that he was dumb and just go along to get along.
She gave him a roof over his head and her dubious, usually untried protection, but not a lot else. He fended for himself, going days at a time without seeing her as he clawed his way through middle school, bullied and alone, stealing to feed himself (and buy toys he couldn't just steal; he wasn't Robin Hood) and vandalizing to relieve his feelings. She let him be, often seeming to forget he was there at all, until he entered the local high school. A year before, his protector had become the principle, which seemed weird to him, but he hadn't questioned.
Todd wasn't even really aware of the fancy academy for special smart nerds that stood on the other side of town until Mystique brought the whole thing to his attention. She set him to spying on the students from Xavier's, not something he was any good at. She hadn't really trained him for it, to be fair to him. She hadn't really taught him much of anything. His powers were so lackluster he didn't have much promise as an operative, and if he hadn't been so visibly mutant, she'd probably have ignored him completely. He tried and failed to ingratiate himself with either Scott Summers or Jean Grey until a tussle with some bullying jocks brought his mutation to Xavier's attention and Scott's. Mystique was almost pleased with him for garnering an invitation.
An invitation that didn't do him any good. He got a tryout for the X-men, but to no one's surprise, it didn't play fair. They obviously didn't actually want him. He was pretty sure Summers and Grey hadn't had to run a freaky obstacle course, pursued by lightening bolts, to attend. He was also pretty sure that the fact that he wound up fighting another new student and breaking stuff wasn't the reason they didn't even try to recruit him. An excuse, sure, but not a reason. The place was freaky and they apparently took the child soldier thing way more seriously than he was used to. He bolted and didn't come back, and the psychic in charge muddled his memories so much he couldn't even report anything useful. Mystique wasn't happy. She was never happy with him, but from that point it felt more like active distaste than the malign neglect that had served them so poorly for years.
But at least after that he wasn't quite so alone. Mystique's war, whatever it was, was kicking into gear, and she began to recruit actively. Todd soon shared his home with entirely too many angry, neglected teenagers with powers they couldn't handle. He didn't trust them, but for the first time he had someone to like. Freddy was as weird as he was and the easiest person to get along with he'd ever met. Lance was a little bit of a closet good boy, but fun when he felt like it and less of a jerk than he had to be. Rogue was beautiful and dangerous and generally wanted him dead, exactly his kind of lady (for reasons no doubt too Freudian to contemplate). Pietro was a brittle pain in the ass, but he fit in just fine. Friends! Sure, they spent all their time being sent to fight the increasingly numerous X-men, and Todd consistently got his butt kicked, but he didn't mind the outlet for his aggression, or see anything too wrong with adults sending teenagers to fight to solve their disagreements.
Most of the significant events even in that circle passed over Todd. He helped precipitate an escape from another dimension once by irresponsibly playing with unknown technology and never really found out about it. He didn't get a chance to try to keep Rogue in the Brotherhood of Mutants, not that he really thought he'd have made a difference to her leaving, given a chance. He got to back up his team and even take part in a few real fights (against the wilderness and supervillains, rather than other high school students), but never got any glory. Todd wasn't really allowed to be part of things even when he was right in the middle, but he didn't think he deserved any better, and at least he had somewhere to be.
It was weird finding out that Mystique had a boss, though, one she was as scared of as he was of her. Weirder to find that the boss, the scariest and baddest of all scary and bad mutants, also thought their problems would be solved by making high school students fight, this time just to win a chance to be part of the great Magneto's super important mutant experiments. Todd didn't question. He was too used to being a pawn. He just set out to start a few fights and, predictably, get beaten.
So he didn't get to go to the special mutant party Magneto was throwing. And he ended up with his first chance to really make a choice of his own initiative. He wound up helping the X-men of all people, opposing Magneto. Who was Magneto to him but one more powerful jerk messing with everyone else? Todd, just once, wanted to get back some of his own. He'd been used and he was tired of it. He helped (a little) and Magneto's creepy space-palace of mutant-betterification (Santuary on Asteroid M, but Todd felt he was better at naming things) crumbled to nothing. He helped a little. Maybe it didn't change a lot, but he had just a touch more backbone after that.
Lucky, because after Magneto was knocked out of the sky by a combination of hubris and eye-lasers, Mystique left her boys to fend for themselves. He felt only the slightest twitch of betrayal. She had better things to do. Who wouldn't? He fell back into hanging sullenly around school, sparring with the X-men for no good reason, and doing what Lance said. He had a little more backbone, but not to much that he didn't like having orders to follow. He even went along, despite his better judgement, when the other guys decided to try (and fail) to reveal mutants to the world. He'd rather have stayed the half-secret that a freak like him could be, but he wasn't going to give up the only place he'd ever sort-of belonged just for that. The X-men kept the plan from going off, and Todd was secretly a bit relieved.
He was disappointed with himself when he realized how much he missed Mystique. She wasn't all that helpful or the slightest bit nice, but she'd meant stability of a kind. Without her, the Brotherhood fluctuated, briefly gaining a runaway X-man in the form of the lovely and terrifying Boom Boom (with them so little time that Todd never even really developed much of a crush on her), losing Lance for a little while to an attempt to join the enemy (that didn't work out), fighting a few legitimate threats and a lot of X-men with no hope of help. Their home began to disintegrate around them and without any more revenue than stealing and hoping, things began to fall apart. Todd spent the time quietly afraid that he'd lose his strange, half-beloved home, bitter and uncomfortable as it sometimes was. How long could they last?
About as long as it took Mystique to come wandering back, as it turned out. She returned without bothering to explain where she'd been or why or making any apology, just that Magneto was now the enemy (whatever, as far as Todd was concerned). She also brought along a secret weapon in the form of another new mutant, Pietro's frighteningly powerful sister.
Ah, Wanda. Wanda, beautiful and terrible. Wanda, alpha and omega. Todd had always been in the habit of falling in love with any girl who looked at him for more than a few seconds, especially if they wore a lot of spikes and injured him frequently, but Wanda had to live in the same house with him. It was great. If Todd was aware anywhere in his messy little head that a romance should mean something other than constant pining and unwanted attentions followed by pain, he kept it hidden from himself. He didn't really expect any better, though he also didn't let up his clumsy, misguided pursuit. This was a rough period for most of the Brotherhood, but Todd only paid a little attention to the mutant politics, to Pietro's family issues and Lance's weird striving to be something better than a thug, because he could always stare at Wanda instead. Until she threw him down a flight of stairs or dropped a couch on him.
Todd ignoring things had never been able to make them go away, though, and Magneto had more plans than forming his own collection of teenagers to send to fistfights. He arranged for the violent and messy reveal of mutant existence, artfully pitting the Brotherhood and the X-men against a giant sentinel robot. In broad daylight. In New York. So that secret was out. Mutants went from secrets to outlaws, and several of their own had been captured. Todd found himself working with the X-men again, this time back in the comfortable position of lackey, to free captured mutants. He even got to help Wanda a little with her single-minded vengeance on her father thing, which made him feel useful. Eventually they even attempted to return to their lives.
Which didn't work very well. The Brotherhood was in shambles, once again without Mystique (thanks to the X-men, this time, though she didn't exactly come home to help them the moment she could). And without Pietro, who'd turned out to be a double agent for Magneto. One more betrayal, the sacrifice of pawns. Todd was getting numb to that stuff, investing himself more and more in caring for the other boys and Wanda. They were almost family, and he almost believed they'd be okay. When mutants were allowed back to school, they moved together, and when that blew up in their faces, they had each other.
Until Magneto decided that it'd be a pity to waste any footsoldiers and sent Pietro back to the Brotherhood, this time in command. The demands on them were simple. They had to prove themselves, and then they could work for the big guy. Lance tried to make a principled stand and question why they'd want to be used by someone else, but Todd didn't even try. Apparently they'd always be working for somebody, and they'd be okay if they could stick together. He was even glad to have Pietro back. He was a bully and a traitor, but Todd didn't expect anything better of anybody, and more broken, mismatched, dysfunctional family was always good.
Though Pietro had to be a big jerk about everything, power tripping and taking out all his frustrations on the former friends who were now underlings. Todd was used to letting himself be bullied, but this was pretty bad, and he was perfectly happy when Wanda stormed in to attempt to get to her father through her brother. He was less happy when her quest to take out Magneto put her in danger. He pursued her and even went to the X-jerks for help. He rescued her, accomplishing something real for the first time in his life. He also came to understand that she'd absolutely never like or even respect him, but hey, nothing really good ever happened to him. He felt pretty good. He'd actually helped her.
Except that part of her peril had involved brainwashing, erasing the very reasons she'd fought against Magneto or needed his help in the first place. Todd tried to snap her out of it for all of a few seconds before Pietro stopped him and convinced him it was for the best if she had happy memories instead of the real ones. Never overburdened with an ethical sense and used to following orders, he agreed, but that stole away most of the triumph of helping his unrequited lady-love.
It wasn't long that he could enjoy being not at all tolerated by the newly calm Wanda. Trouble was kicking up in thw wider mutant world in the form of Apocalypse, a mess Todd never tried very hard to understand. Ancient mutant, extra scary powers. From his perspective, one big bad was very much like another, since they could all squash him without really noticing. He only objected in particular to whatever juju was going on when the problem came home. Both Mystique and Magneto seemed to have gotten themselves killed (or disappeared, or whatever, no one explained anything to the Brotherhood, least of all Toad), leaving them without guidance or even the slight protection either had ever offered. Pietro, Lance, and Wanda could all in their way keep things moving, but it was a scary time to exist in a world that contained not only something that could take out the biggest bullies he knew but in a world where anti-mutant sentiment was mounting. When he had the tougher guys to hide behind he didn't worry too much, but he'd been born a target, and mutant-hunting parties were becoming a semi-sanctioned hobby pretty fast.
They almost had a breakthrough when Wanda's powers derailed a subway train and the boys rescued everyone onboard, more or less accidentally. Todd only helped anybody because he stopped to steal a wallet, and the positive attention that followed initially alarmed him more than anything else. He realized pretty quickly that he liked it, though. When self-preservation following their own mistake was interpreted by a fickle public as heroism, Todd jumped in front of the cameras much more willingly than he'd hauled an old beggar from an exploding train. Being a famous good guy came with material rewards and people being reasonably nice, two entirely new sensations. He certainly lacked the moral fiber and common sense that might have stopped him from going along with a plan to cause more accidents they could save people from. Of course it didn't last, the plan was revealed disastrously, the Brotherhood and mutants in general wound up more reviled than ever, and they didn't even get to keep the reward they sort of had earned. Had he been a more introspective soul, Todd would have seen a metaphor for his whole existence in the disaster, but as it was, he just whined and pretended he'd never cared about people liking him, smiling honestly with his friends when they were praised, maybe even getting to use talents he barely admitted to having. That was stupid.
Having a tiny part in saving the world was kind of a comedown after that. The Apocalypse thing kept happening, and the Brotherhood refused to help. Todd didn't have much to do with the decision, except in defaulting to cowardice and self-interest as usual, but Wanda decided to help. She'd never particularly belonged to the group, just orbiting them when it suited her, but Pietro was apparently still protective of the sister with the way more impressive powers. And Todd distractedly in (an emotionally-stunted moron's approximation of) love with her. They decided to follow after all. Todd got to steal and pilot a jet, which cheered him up considerably, and as he'd learned back on Asteroid M, at least when you teamed up with the X-men, you kind of got to win. Apocalypse was defeated. No one explained how to him, and it didn't change much, but hey, stealing a plane.
And life went on. Everyone hated mutants, nobody paid a lot of attention to the Brotherhood boys when they weren't breaking things, and Todd went back to dragging himself carelessly through life, hoping no one was paying enough attention to hit him.
Sample Journal Entry: Not a lotta bugs onboard.
Sample RP: The room was a disaster for all five senses, the kind of mess that must be striven for to be achieved. Any teenager can leave clothes on the floor and trash in the corner. It took a special talent to stick socks to the ceiling and bury a broken kitchen chair in twinkie wrappers. He didn't even eat twinkies that much. Okay, and easy to shoplift, but after a while he'd started collecting the junk on purpose to add to his art installation. The creatively assorted filth was a fortress and a statement. And also way easier than cleaning things.
The bed didn't appear to be occupied, or at least occupied in particular. About half of the little mattress was taken up by undifferentiated piles. Magazines and books made up more of the mess than one might expect, but ragged clothes, second-hand action figures, part of a toaster, dirty dishes, a backgammon board, and half a bag of chips were visible just in the top layer. The rest looked like lumpy blankets scattered more lightly with the same kind of debris. Todd could curl up pretty small, though, and he crawled halfway out and tumbled to the floor without disturbing the mess much. A sketchbook and a coffee cup followed him out of the bed and whacked him on the head, but he barely noticed.
This was exactly the room he'd usually have gone to bed in, in other words, and the closest thing to a home he'd ever known. He didn't have any reason to think too hard as he rolled onto the balls of his feet and took a short hop to see if his fly traps had attracted breakfast. Actual food was hard to come by and tended to get snapped up by the faster and stronger. Jars, trash, and cellophane were pretty easy and kept him in enough bugs to start the day. He had a small farm under the window.
The traps were there, but oddly empty. And the window... Did not seem to exist. He performed an elaborately stage-worthy double-take. Nope, nothing. He was pretty sure he'd remember breaking the window and covering the space up with something, but there was just nothing there. Plain wall, peeling paint and bared drywall, a blank space between crookedly taped pictures of bands, cars, and girls in bikinis.
He'd never had a lot of faith in his mind, but he didn't really feel like losing it. He looked around frantically to see if he'd somehow gotten turned around in his own bedroom. Nothing. No window, no distant sounds of Bayville, slow incusions of edible insects... No creaking of the house or voices from the others.
“Freddy? Alvers? Pietro? Wanda!” What began as a low whine slipped gradually to a fevered little shriek as he added worries about Wanda being somehow imperiled. That gave him the ersatz courage to bolt for the door instead of hiding under the bed. Not that there was a lot of room down there.
User DW:
fiercebadrabbitAIM/IM: blitztsunami, plurk: fiercebadrabbit
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Todd Tolansky/Toad
Series: X-Men: Evolution
Age: 17
From When?: Shortly after the conclusion of the series. No canonical death, but Todd almost dies all the time. He fell off a roof and didn't bounce.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Todd is a thief, a vandal, and a bit of a thug, but the overt criminality is more symptom than disease. He's an angry bundle of resentment and cowardice wrapped up in abandonment issues. Fairly legitimate, as he was ditched by parents and more or less ostracized from society thereafter, but he definitely didn't turn the experience into a positive. Todd trusts nobody and likes nothing. He might steal to eat, but he also steals because he likes the fleeting sense of power and even negative attention is better than none. That said, he doesn't mean anybody any harm, just for them to leave him alone, or at least be scared of him instead of the other way round. A lot of his malfunctions could be fixed by being nice to him, though it would take a long time to wear him down and get past his prickly defenses.
Abilities/Powers:
Slime Todd spits a slightly corrosive, heavy, and extremely sticky green substance. He's capable of shooting it a few feet, and it hits hard enough to hurt or at least knock over small objects. Its main use is blinding and disorienting opponents or breaking things. On board, this ability will not function.
Super Tongue Toad's tongue can extend approximately six feet from his mouth. It is fully prehensile, strong enough to leave bruises or drag people around, and sticky enough to grab small items by adhesion alone. On the barge, it will extend only a few feet and lose most of the strength and speed, reducing it from a weapon to a slightly gross way to eat.
Wall Crawling Todd sticks to everything he happens to want to. Even with clothing in the way, he can climb any given surface like a fly, support himself upside-down, and cling to people just as efficiently as inorganic surfaces. On board, he'll only be able to stick with skin-to-object contact and will occasionally lose control and stick to things without meaning to.
Assorted Physical Mutations Some of Todd's oddities don't actually serve much purpose, like his webbed fingers and toes or odd-textured, chemical-sensitive skin. His legs and spine, however, are designed to propel him to impossible heights at inhuman speeds, and when the super-jumping is over, he can fall and hit the ground from considerable heights without more than bruising. He's a freakishly strong kicker and more comfortable on all fours and hopping than walking like a normal person. Standing up straight is actually a bit uncomfortable. On the barge, his jumping strength will be lowered to higher than normal, but no more leaping to the ceiling, and he'll be injured more easily by falling.
Personality: Todd Tolansky was born to be the universe's butt monkey, and he figured it out early enough to direct his energies in equal parts to hiding from the worst of it and biting back where he could. All his vices—greed, cowardice, spite, and sleaze—and even his sparse virtues all come from his deep and often borne out conviction that everybody is out to get him. Occasionally he decides to meet his disasters head-on (and gets his butt kicked), but more often skulking and avoidance are his weapons (and he gets his butt kicked anyway).
Todd does have some basis for his belief that everything is unfair and stacked against him. Even if he weren't an obvious mutant in, classically, a world that fears and hates them, he's poor, undereducated, and a lost soul without any kind of real adult guidance who's been taken advantage of by every authority he's ever known. He's been bullied and toyed with, and even the supposed good guys of his universe have tormented him and given him up as a lost cause without too much effort. But for every extenuating circumstance, Todd has a flaw or two from the irritating to the legitimately awful. He's entirely willing to be used as a weapon (by big bads like Magneto or by tougher, more effective bullies), mean as spit, and just personally unpleasant. He's obnoxious to the point of lunacy to girls he finds attractive and obsequious in the extreme when caught out. He's a slimy little creep, and it's hard to be too sensitive to hard circumstances when he's just stolen your wallet and creeped out all your friends.
He's not all bad, though. Todd has friends, sort of. The rest of the Brotherhood, with Rogue and Tabby, and occasionally even with straight-up X-men when he has to get along. That's about it, but that's all he's ever managed. His day to day relationship with most of them is made up mainly of fractious bickering and lying around aimlessly, but there's affection buried in the teasing and stupid ideas. He's even loyal, in his way, forgiving most of their lousy treatment of him (sullenly, slowly, and silently, but it's forgiveness). You have to kick Todd a lot before he'll give up on someone who actually pays attention to him, and even then the result is more whining and mockery than lashing out.
Though being liked by Todd can be just as unpleasant as being on his shitlist. He has no sense of boundaries or appropriateness for anyone else, though he certainly likes his own personal space, and he can't keep his mouth shut or his reactions tamped down. He's a bit of a drama queen at the best of times, and acting out and bad jokes are way better than confronting actual issues. When your response to the transmogrification of a near-mother figure who may well be dead is to use her as home décor, you may have some issues to work out.
So he's not good at or smart about people. Or much of anything else, or so he usually maintains (when he isn't bragging outrageously; Todd doesn't value consistency too much). It's easier to come across as utterly incompetent most of the time, and a lifetime of abject failure does seem to back up a certain fatalism. Todd never wins, so it's best to keep expectations low. It goes with his miserable self-esteem. Even Todd misses his actual skills, making sure they're never acknowledged by anyone else. He has a precise if not particularly rapid analytical mind and a corresponding knack for mechanical problems. A repeatedly held-back teenage dirtbag who can pilot a stolen jet and reprogram secret technology on a whim has more going on upstairs than anyone would attribute to Todd. He figures things out. He just gets there at a ninety degree angle, and a little slower than everyone else. He also has a way of absorbing and retaining. He has no idea what he was supposed to be studying in school, but a lot of information floats around his head, mostly coming out by accident or in a sad attempt to impress somebody.
He's not even a total coward. All the time. Just when he's thinking about it. When it comes to super-heroic combat, he may have the lamest powers in the room, but he uses what he has to surprisingly good effect. Discretion is still the better part of valor, but there is the potential in Toad to overcome all his hard edges and shortcomings. He just has no idea how. And very little motivation. And a vested interest in being as rotten as he knows how to be, however ineffective that is.
Barge Reactions: Among Todd's many elaborate fears is getting kidnapped by shadowy forces and put to some sort of nefarious purpose. Admittedly, those fears have more to do with being dissected like his namesake on account of his mutant nature, but he'll be deeply freaked out that it's happened. The space stuff and cosmic redemption is weird, but not that weird compared to Apocalypse or Asteroid M. He'll be far more upset about the kidnapping than the science fiction stuff. He won't even be too incredulous about magic. Seems like a waste of energy. His baseline level of weirdness is enough that he won't worry that much about anything other than being stolen by some kind of creeper with an agenda. There might be a toad dissection in the future. He doesn't know there won't be.
Alternate timelines that resemble his own world may be emotionally more difficult, but Todd's not an introspective guy. Other dimensions. Sure, whatever. Another dimension invaded his school dance one time. There were dinosaurs. Most fun he's ever had at a high school sponsored event.
Todd will be copacetic about new realities, but less philosophical whenever he has to cope with being aware of any alternate of himself. There's a real fatalistic streak in him; he is who he is because everything's stacked against him and there's no way it's his fault. Evidence to the contrary will alarm him a lot more than magic and outer space.
Path to Redemption: Todd's actual bad guy shenanigans are usually petty. He steals, breaks stuff, and fights with other teenagers when the adult who feeds and houses him tells him to. He does often set out to be a jerk, but any serious harm he's ever managed to do is mostly by accident. His actual behavior is the symptom, not the disease. He steals because he doesn't generally have any other way to take care of himself, vandalizes because being helpless and abandoned pisses him off, and is a good little minion to the supervillains because he's jealous and spiteful and sometimes it gets him fleeting approval.
In short, Todd's sulky, inept evil grows mainly out of never being valued or even having his basic needs well provided for. This isn't to say that the magic of friendship will heal everything right away. He doesn't trust easily, burned too many times, and will be confused and suspicious of most offers of kindness. He's had a few friends, but the Brotherhood was ordered together and their relationships are fraught and a bit superficial. Todd's never really felt like any of the guys liked him for his own sake or would go to a lot of trouble for him. He might want to be loved, but first he'd have to learn what that is and how to accept it. A lot of patience and persistence and the capacity to honestly appreciate his weird, often hidden abilities would be necessary. Knowing he's being judged puts him on his guard, and he does a whole lot of judge-worthy stuff.
History: If you can't be liked, be feared. Todd hasn't held onto much from his mom, but that little bit of advice sums up much of what relationship they had. He's charitable toward her in retrospect. Being a teenager with a freak baby she didn't ask for couldn't have been any easier than being a freak teenager who didn't ask to be born. When he was little, though, there was no way to get that perspective. His first few years, in his memories, are a muddle of screaming and hiding and slapping, interspersed with the odd moment of awkward tenderness. She loved him some of the time, did her best to keep him fed and dressed and even managed the odd toy, but she never tried to protect him. From herself, from the kind of knowledge that wasn't good for a kid, or from the world.
He certainly couldn't remember a time that he didn't know he was the reason his father left. His sleazebag, worthless, jerk father, who nobody wanted anyway, but he wouldn't have left if his kid hadn't been a freak. (Todd's tendency to inconsistent but intense emotional convictions might just be genetic.) And of course Todd was a freak, and that was the reason other kids didn't want to play with him, and when that came up conversations with his mother usually either turned into recriminations about ruining his life or, on a good day, a lecture about how he should learn to beat up all the little punks who gave him a hard time. He was old enough for preschool but not going when, without warning, she left him at a police station and wasn't heard from again for years.
He'd also be a lot older before he started to suspect she might not have been quite right upstairs, but that suspicion never undid any of the damage she'd done. She tried a time or two to get him back out of the foster system, but it never stuck. He bounced around for years, never staying with anyone long. Mutants weren't public knowledge and Todd could almost pass for human if he was careful, if he kept his tongue in his mouth and his hands in his pockets, stood up straight and stayed still. He had to learn those survival techniques himself. He had to learn just about everything himself. He'd started stealing to eat when he was still with his mother, and not even the well-meaning among his many foster parents and group home directors put in the time to notice and correct. He spent his childhood a bit feral and left largely to his own devices, a little too weird and left unmanageable and bitter. Slipping quietly through the cracks.
And so he would likely have remained if not for an advanced X-gene. He was cutting school one day to hang out in a park and throw rocks at garbage cans when a put together woman in a suit called him by name. He took her for a social worker and stuck around long enough for her to shapeshift to her natural, blue-skinned form. After he got done shrieking and hiding behind a picnic table, she glared him calm enough to explain what mutants were, what he was, and what use she might just have for him in the war to come. Being a pawn in some kind of poorly defined game of mutant-human chess didn't sound like much, but he wouldn't have to be alone anymore, and a detached, emotionally brutal mother figure had a comforting familiarity to it. He'd be a soldier if he had to be.
He was eleven years old.
Todd grumbled when Mystique moved him to Bayville from New York, feeling he was a city boy and should remain, but he learned pretty quickly to keep his thoughts to himself. She managed the legalities and slipped him into the local school system. Todd had been kept back a few years in school, a lack of consistency more at fault than a lack of ability or even effort, but he never asked her to fix that. It was easier to accept that he was dumb and just go along to get along.
She gave him a roof over his head and her dubious, usually untried protection, but not a lot else. He fended for himself, going days at a time without seeing her as he clawed his way through middle school, bullied and alone, stealing to feed himself (and buy toys he couldn't just steal; he wasn't Robin Hood) and vandalizing to relieve his feelings. She let him be, often seeming to forget he was there at all, until he entered the local high school. A year before, his protector had become the principle, which seemed weird to him, but he hadn't questioned.
Todd wasn't even really aware of the fancy academy for special smart nerds that stood on the other side of town until Mystique brought the whole thing to his attention. She set him to spying on the students from Xavier's, not something he was any good at. She hadn't really trained him for it, to be fair to him. She hadn't really taught him much of anything. His powers were so lackluster he didn't have much promise as an operative, and if he hadn't been so visibly mutant, she'd probably have ignored him completely. He tried and failed to ingratiate himself with either Scott Summers or Jean Grey until a tussle with some bullying jocks brought his mutation to Xavier's attention and Scott's. Mystique was almost pleased with him for garnering an invitation.
An invitation that didn't do him any good. He got a tryout for the X-men, but to no one's surprise, it didn't play fair. They obviously didn't actually want him. He was pretty sure Summers and Grey hadn't had to run a freaky obstacle course, pursued by lightening bolts, to attend. He was also pretty sure that the fact that he wound up fighting another new student and breaking stuff wasn't the reason they didn't even try to recruit him. An excuse, sure, but not a reason. The place was freaky and they apparently took the child soldier thing way more seriously than he was used to. He bolted and didn't come back, and the psychic in charge muddled his memories so much he couldn't even report anything useful. Mystique wasn't happy. She was never happy with him, but from that point it felt more like active distaste than the malign neglect that had served them so poorly for years.
But at least after that he wasn't quite so alone. Mystique's war, whatever it was, was kicking into gear, and she began to recruit actively. Todd soon shared his home with entirely too many angry, neglected teenagers with powers they couldn't handle. He didn't trust them, but for the first time he had someone to like. Freddy was as weird as he was and the easiest person to get along with he'd ever met. Lance was a little bit of a closet good boy, but fun when he felt like it and less of a jerk than he had to be. Rogue was beautiful and dangerous and generally wanted him dead, exactly his kind of lady (for reasons no doubt too Freudian to contemplate). Pietro was a brittle pain in the ass, but he fit in just fine. Friends! Sure, they spent all their time being sent to fight the increasingly numerous X-men, and Todd consistently got his butt kicked, but he didn't mind the outlet for his aggression, or see anything too wrong with adults sending teenagers to fight to solve their disagreements.
Most of the significant events even in that circle passed over Todd. He helped precipitate an escape from another dimension once by irresponsibly playing with unknown technology and never really found out about it. He didn't get a chance to try to keep Rogue in the Brotherhood of Mutants, not that he really thought he'd have made a difference to her leaving, given a chance. He got to back up his team and even take part in a few real fights (against the wilderness and supervillains, rather than other high school students), but never got any glory. Todd wasn't really allowed to be part of things even when he was right in the middle, but he didn't think he deserved any better, and at least he had somewhere to be.
It was weird finding out that Mystique had a boss, though, one she was as scared of as he was of her. Weirder to find that the boss, the scariest and baddest of all scary and bad mutants, also thought their problems would be solved by making high school students fight, this time just to win a chance to be part of the great Magneto's super important mutant experiments. Todd didn't question. He was too used to being a pawn. He just set out to start a few fights and, predictably, get beaten.
So he didn't get to go to the special mutant party Magneto was throwing. And he ended up with his first chance to really make a choice of his own initiative. He wound up helping the X-men of all people, opposing Magneto. Who was Magneto to him but one more powerful jerk messing with everyone else? Todd, just once, wanted to get back some of his own. He'd been used and he was tired of it. He helped (a little) and Magneto's creepy space-palace of mutant-betterification (Santuary on Asteroid M, but Todd felt he was better at naming things) crumbled to nothing. He helped a little. Maybe it didn't change a lot, but he had just a touch more backbone after that.
Lucky, because after Magneto was knocked out of the sky by a combination of hubris and eye-lasers, Mystique left her boys to fend for themselves. He felt only the slightest twitch of betrayal. She had better things to do. Who wouldn't? He fell back into hanging sullenly around school, sparring with the X-men for no good reason, and doing what Lance said. He had a little more backbone, but not to much that he didn't like having orders to follow. He even went along, despite his better judgement, when the other guys decided to try (and fail) to reveal mutants to the world. He'd rather have stayed the half-secret that a freak like him could be, but he wasn't going to give up the only place he'd ever sort-of belonged just for that. The X-men kept the plan from going off, and Todd was secretly a bit relieved.
He was disappointed with himself when he realized how much he missed Mystique. She wasn't all that helpful or the slightest bit nice, but she'd meant stability of a kind. Without her, the Brotherhood fluctuated, briefly gaining a runaway X-man in the form of the lovely and terrifying Boom Boom (with them so little time that Todd never even really developed much of a crush on her), losing Lance for a little while to an attempt to join the enemy (that didn't work out), fighting a few legitimate threats and a lot of X-men with no hope of help. Their home began to disintegrate around them and without any more revenue than stealing and hoping, things began to fall apart. Todd spent the time quietly afraid that he'd lose his strange, half-beloved home, bitter and uncomfortable as it sometimes was. How long could they last?
About as long as it took Mystique to come wandering back, as it turned out. She returned without bothering to explain where she'd been or why or making any apology, just that Magneto was now the enemy (whatever, as far as Todd was concerned). She also brought along a secret weapon in the form of another new mutant, Pietro's frighteningly powerful sister.
Ah, Wanda. Wanda, beautiful and terrible. Wanda, alpha and omega. Todd had always been in the habit of falling in love with any girl who looked at him for more than a few seconds, especially if they wore a lot of spikes and injured him frequently, but Wanda had to live in the same house with him. It was great. If Todd was aware anywhere in his messy little head that a romance should mean something other than constant pining and unwanted attentions followed by pain, he kept it hidden from himself. He didn't really expect any better, though he also didn't let up his clumsy, misguided pursuit. This was a rough period for most of the Brotherhood, but Todd only paid a little attention to the mutant politics, to Pietro's family issues and Lance's weird striving to be something better than a thug, because he could always stare at Wanda instead. Until she threw him down a flight of stairs or dropped a couch on him.
Todd ignoring things had never been able to make them go away, though, and Magneto had more plans than forming his own collection of teenagers to send to fistfights. He arranged for the violent and messy reveal of mutant existence, artfully pitting the Brotherhood and the X-men against a giant sentinel robot. In broad daylight. In New York. So that secret was out. Mutants went from secrets to outlaws, and several of their own had been captured. Todd found himself working with the X-men again, this time back in the comfortable position of lackey, to free captured mutants. He even got to help Wanda a little with her single-minded vengeance on her father thing, which made him feel useful. Eventually they even attempted to return to their lives.
Which didn't work very well. The Brotherhood was in shambles, once again without Mystique (thanks to the X-men, this time, though she didn't exactly come home to help them the moment she could). And without Pietro, who'd turned out to be a double agent for Magneto. One more betrayal, the sacrifice of pawns. Todd was getting numb to that stuff, investing himself more and more in caring for the other boys and Wanda. They were almost family, and he almost believed they'd be okay. When mutants were allowed back to school, they moved together, and when that blew up in their faces, they had each other.
Until Magneto decided that it'd be a pity to waste any footsoldiers and sent Pietro back to the Brotherhood, this time in command. The demands on them were simple. They had to prove themselves, and then they could work for the big guy. Lance tried to make a principled stand and question why they'd want to be used by someone else, but Todd didn't even try. Apparently they'd always be working for somebody, and they'd be okay if they could stick together. He was even glad to have Pietro back. He was a bully and a traitor, but Todd didn't expect anything better of anybody, and more broken, mismatched, dysfunctional family was always good.
Though Pietro had to be a big jerk about everything, power tripping and taking out all his frustrations on the former friends who were now underlings. Todd was used to letting himself be bullied, but this was pretty bad, and he was perfectly happy when Wanda stormed in to attempt to get to her father through her brother. He was less happy when her quest to take out Magneto put her in danger. He pursued her and even went to the X-jerks for help. He rescued her, accomplishing something real for the first time in his life. He also came to understand that she'd absolutely never like or even respect him, but hey, nothing really good ever happened to him. He felt pretty good. He'd actually helped her.
Except that part of her peril had involved brainwashing, erasing the very reasons she'd fought against Magneto or needed his help in the first place. Todd tried to snap her out of it for all of a few seconds before Pietro stopped him and convinced him it was for the best if she had happy memories instead of the real ones. Never overburdened with an ethical sense and used to following orders, he agreed, but that stole away most of the triumph of helping his unrequited lady-love.
It wasn't long that he could enjoy being not at all tolerated by the newly calm Wanda. Trouble was kicking up in thw wider mutant world in the form of Apocalypse, a mess Todd never tried very hard to understand. Ancient mutant, extra scary powers. From his perspective, one big bad was very much like another, since they could all squash him without really noticing. He only objected in particular to whatever juju was going on when the problem came home. Both Mystique and Magneto seemed to have gotten themselves killed (or disappeared, or whatever, no one explained anything to the Brotherhood, least of all Toad), leaving them without guidance or even the slight protection either had ever offered. Pietro, Lance, and Wanda could all in their way keep things moving, but it was a scary time to exist in a world that contained not only something that could take out the biggest bullies he knew but in a world where anti-mutant sentiment was mounting. When he had the tougher guys to hide behind he didn't worry too much, but he'd been born a target, and mutant-hunting parties were becoming a semi-sanctioned hobby pretty fast.
They almost had a breakthrough when Wanda's powers derailed a subway train and the boys rescued everyone onboard, more or less accidentally. Todd only helped anybody because he stopped to steal a wallet, and the positive attention that followed initially alarmed him more than anything else. He realized pretty quickly that he liked it, though. When self-preservation following their own mistake was interpreted by a fickle public as heroism, Todd jumped in front of the cameras much more willingly than he'd hauled an old beggar from an exploding train. Being a famous good guy came with material rewards and people being reasonably nice, two entirely new sensations. He certainly lacked the moral fiber and common sense that might have stopped him from going along with a plan to cause more accidents they could save people from. Of course it didn't last, the plan was revealed disastrously, the Brotherhood and mutants in general wound up more reviled than ever, and they didn't even get to keep the reward they sort of had earned. Had he been a more introspective soul, Todd would have seen a metaphor for his whole existence in the disaster, but as it was, he just whined and pretended he'd never cared about people liking him, smiling honestly with his friends when they were praised, maybe even getting to use talents he barely admitted to having. That was stupid.
Having a tiny part in saving the world was kind of a comedown after that. The Apocalypse thing kept happening, and the Brotherhood refused to help. Todd didn't have much to do with the decision, except in defaulting to cowardice and self-interest as usual, but Wanda decided to help. She'd never particularly belonged to the group, just orbiting them when it suited her, but Pietro was apparently still protective of the sister with the way more impressive powers. And Todd distractedly in (an emotionally-stunted moron's approximation of) love with her. They decided to follow after all. Todd got to steal and pilot a jet, which cheered him up considerably, and as he'd learned back on Asteroid M, at least when you teamed up with the X-men, you kind of got to win. Apocalypse was defeated. No one explained how to him, and it didn't change much, but hey, stealing a plane.
And life went on. Everyone hated mutants, nobody paid a lot of attention to the Brotherhood boys when they weren't breaking things, and Todd went back to dragging himself carelessly through life, hoping no one was paying enough attention to hit him.
Sample Journal Entry: Not a lotta bugs onboard.
Sample RP: The room was a disaster for all five senses, the kind of mess that must be striven for to be achieved. Any teenager can leave clothes on the floor and trash in the corner. It took a special talent to stick socks to the ceiling and bury a broken kitchen chair in twinkie wrappers. He didn't even eat twinkies that much. Okay, and easy to shoplift, but after a while he'd started collecting the junk on purpose to add to his art installation. The creatively assorted filth was a fortress and a statement. And also way easier than cleaning things.
The bed didn't appear to be occupied, or at least occupied in particular. About half of the little mattress was taken up by undifferentiated piles. Magazines and books made up more of the mess than one might expect, but ragged clothes, second-hand action figures, part of a toaster, dirty dishes, a backgammon board, and half a bag of chips were visible just in the top layer. The rest looked like lumpy blankets scattered more lightly with the same kind of debris. Todd could curl up pretty small, though, and he crawled halfway out and tumbled to the floor without disturbing the mess much. A sketchbook and a coffee cup followed him out of the bed and whacked him on the head, but he barely noticed.
This was exactly the room he'd usually have gone to bed in, in other words, and the closest thing to a home he'd ever known. He didn't have any reason to think too hard as he rolled onto the balls of his feet and took a short hop to see if his fly traps had attracted breakfast. Actual food was hard to come by and tended to get snapped up by the faster and stronger. Jars, trash, and cellophane were pretty easy and kept him in enough bugs to start the day. He had a small farm under the window.
The traps were there, but oddly empty. And the window... Did not seem to exist. He performed an elaborately stage-worthy double-take. Nope, nothing. He was pretty sure he'd remember breaking the window and covering the space up with something, but there was just nothing there. Plain wall, peeling paint and bared drywall, a blank space between crookedly taped pictures of bands, cars, and girls in bikinis.
He'd never had a lot of faith in his mind, but he didn't really feel like losing it. He looked around frantically to see if he'd somehow gotten turned around in his own bedroom. Nothing. No window, no distant sounds of Bayville, slow incusions of edible insects... No creaking of the house or voices from the others.
“Freddy? Alvers? Pietro? Wanda!” What began as a low whine slipped gradually to a fevered little shriek as he added worries about Wanda being somehow imperiled. That gave him the ersatz courage to bolt for the door instead of hiding under the bed. Not that there was a lot of room down there.
