Casey Jones

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OOC SECTION
Mun name: Parcel
Personal journal: caligraphunky
Age: 26
Contact: Plurk : Caligraphunky
Pronouns: female
Other characters: N/A

IC SECTION
Name: Casey Jones
Canon: TMNT 2012
Canon point: Season 3, just after Casey Jones vs the Underworld
Appearance: In and out of costume
Age: 17
Gender: Male
Personality: In some ways Casey Jones is exactly the kind of snotty little punk he looks like. He's more likely to introduce himself with a thrown object and a "think fast!" than a handshake, and it's always an accurate first impression. Overbearing and bratty, he loves to push people's buttons, even when he likes them. Especially when he likes them. He's also the kid who apparently spends a good deal of time in his room, writing in what amounts to an angry poetry journal and playing knifey-fingers with the Bowie knife he keeps stabbed in his desk. He simply has no filter on his actions, partly due to the many, many blows to the head he's taken over his life, but mostly due to the fact that Casey Jones simply cannot just sit still.

Let's not beat around the bush: Casey is, in so many ways. a crazy person. He goes apparent months without interacting with a non-mutant/non-crazy person so it's easy to forget, but he's crazy. This is the ordinary high school kid who looked at monsters and aliens running around his city and decided to do something about it personally with no training, old wooden hockey sticks and a taser he made out of a potato masher. He's the kid who took on a man made entirely of acid with a rusty metal pipe, chased down a robot ninja with a hostile turtle ninja and made him his best friend, and tried to take on the entire New York criminal underworld by himself. Casey Jones is (if only by virtue of burying his deeper feelings and thoughts) a simple creature, happy when he gets to fight, happier when he gets to fight a lot, happiest when he feels like the fight is for a just cause.

For all of Casey's punk bluster, he really does have a big, open, righteous heart. He doesn't seem to have too many friends but it isn't tough to make him a friend for life. He knew one of his best friends April O'Neal for a maybe little over two weeks before deciding they were close, and he accepted the ninja turtles the moment she vouched for them. Casey's actually a surprisingly good judge of character, generally pretty good at picking out when people's intentions aren't on the up and up, but he's not judgmental. He's readily accepted mutant animals, alien-human hybrids, and a wild ninja girl as his friends and allies, sometimes even before he knows them. The only real way to get on his bad side, beyond being a jerk or a criminal, is to act like you're better than him. And not mean it in a friendly rivalry way.

Casey doesn't like to think about himself or his motives with the depth or self-reflection he'd need to realize this, but he's very insecure about his own strength and in the grand tradition of guys who have way too much to prove and don't realize it, this manifests in a powerful veneer of arrogance. He is not insecure about his powerful sense of empathy or the fact that he cares quite a bit about the people he fights for, mind, but what he absolutely, positively cannot stand is the thought that he isn't good enough to win his battles, protect the people he cares about, and, most powerfully, that he can't keep up with the people he admires. In his effort to be cool, the knowledge of his actual abilities slip through the cracks.

So he speaks in the third person about how awesome he is and picks fights that people tell him he can't possibly hope to win and makes sure that everybody knows that Casey Jones was the guy who broke up the plans of Shredder and, by extension, the giant criminal syndicates that are far more connected and ruthless then he could ever be in the hope of convincing the universe that he's the big man he says he is. In some part of Casey's unconscious mind, asking for help is an admission of weakness and so he pretends that he can handle everything, even when he can't, and he's adept at ignoring the signs that this puts his friends in danger because if there's one thing Casey Jones can't do, it's be honest with himself.

History:
As all the wiki pages I found are either incomplete or full of unworkable headcanon, so I wrote my own:

”All my life I knew I was meant for something greater. This is my calling...my destiny! A true warrior has gotta be prepared.” -Casey Jones

Not much is known about Casey Jones before his introduction proper in the show. He was just a punk teenager who tagged subways with graffiti occasionally, living with his father and little sister (no mother seems present) in a tiny New York City apartment above a barber shop. He's been held back in school at least once, and his introduction to the stranger bits of NYC was only through an unusual trigonometry tutor he lined up...

For underneath the streets of NYC, living in the sewers, are giant adolescent turtles training to be silent warriors of the night. In other words, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! And the turtles are not the only mutant creatures out there, because the small brain-like alien beings making the mutants, the Kraang, have been working to take over the earth for thousands of years. At the same time, the arch enemy of the turtle's Master Splinter, Shredder, was setting up his ninja clan/criminal syndicate in the middle of the city, joining forces with the Kraang over the course of events. Casey was aware of the aliens, having lived through the first invasion attempt they made, but he did not become part of the story proper until he met one April O'Neil.

April had signed up to tutor students struggling with math, of which Casey was probably the most struggling of that sort. He didn't even care about the class, he just didn't want to be kicked off the school's hockey team. It just happened that, in the middle of their study session, they were attacked by a mutation gone wrong: a giant hulking mass of organs in a jar with acidic hands, a casualty of the Kraang's and Shredder's experiments. Casey and April escaped, this and a second attack on the two of them by robot ninjas, cemented his friendship with her.

But Casey was not satisfied now that he knew there was danger out there that threatened his new friend, her family and his own. He made the decision to become a crime fighting vigilante then, improvising a costume and weapons out of old sporting equipment and a homemade taser. On his very first night out he happened to come across members of the Purple Dragons gang mugging a man. His attempt to put the fear of god into them was cut short, however, by the interception of one of the turtle ninjas, Raphael, who felt Casey was going too far in his quest for justice. Casey disagreed and they fought each other to a standstill. Not willing to let this ride, Casey tracked down the turtle again, and followed him back to his hideout. However Casey was followed by one of the Shredder's robot ninjas. Casey found three other turtle ninjas (Leonardo, Donatello, and Michelangelo), a giant rat (Master Splinter)...and April O'Neil, who convinced Casey that the turtles were friends.

At that point, the robot ninja summoned more of the same and attacked. Casey fought alongside his new friends to prevent the turtles from being discovered, and they welcomed him as part of the team. Though there were rough patches, Casey's life for the next year became a rush of battles alongside the turtles against the forces of the Kraang and Shredder until the Kraang's attempted second invasion. The turtles, April, and Casey fought hard and...lost. Injured and broken and minus Master Splinter, they fled the city to April's grandmother's house to heal and recuperate.

It took months, and they were under constant assault by mutants during that time, but they eventually went back to take New York from the Kraang. The turtles happened to discover that the Kraang's mutations could be undone through a chemical. They headed off to successfully stop the invasion, while Casey and April were left behind. And frankly, that chapped Casey's ass something fierce. Upset that he was left out of the fight, Casey single handedly went after the second half of the biggest threat to NYC: Shredder.

Shredder had been using the chaos of the alien invasion to expand his grasp to the mobs and gangs that clutter the city like so many toenails on the bathroom floor, and Casey was determined to stop them. Unfortunately, he managed to get into more trouble than he was willing to handle, and inadvertently gave his identity away to every important operating criminal in the business. Time will tell how badly that will come back to bite him, but in the meantime, life in NYC was returning to life as close as it ever came to normal...

Aspirations: Casey styles himself as a “solo vigilante hero of the night,” (his words) though whether his skills are there yet or not is up for debate. This is based around both of his major aspirations: to protect the people he cares about and to be special. Casey's decision to take on the forces of evil entirely by himself was motivated by the need to protect his family and friends, and a more subconscious desire to be important in some non-normal way. He wasn't born special, and if he doesn't work at it, he knows he'll never be.

Fears: Casey seems to have a fear of not being taken seriously. Nothing gets him more hot under the collar being kept behind on a mission or mocked. Casey more or less constantly feels the need to prove himself, and believing that he hasn't done so to those whose opinions are important to him just makes him go to more insane lengths. There's an undercurrent that the person Casey really needs to convince is himself, but he's too teenage boy-like to realize this.

He also has a genuine phobia of rats. It's less powerful now that he knows a giant humanoid talking one, but it's still pretty strong.
Inventory: Casey will have his crime fighting gear (hockey sticks, baseball bat, mask and padding) and his journal (AKA his De-Composition Book)

Magic: Fire
Reason: It matches his personality, wild and uninhibited, flashy and difficult to stop once it's started, as well as providing something that his lousy attention span can handle learning. It also matches his aspirations thematically, as fire magic is one of the most common kinds of magic I.E. it's not “special.”

RP samples: Right here!
Notes: