nightcrawlcrss

[nightcrawlcrss]

“you want me to help you brush up on your german?” a simple request answered with a simple question. usually he wasn’t asked questions about his native tongue, so it was interesting to be asked in assisting someone with their german. kurt gave it some thought, mulling over it quietly. it’s not like there was any reason for him to turn the offer down in any way. eventually, he gave the other a warm smile. “well of course, anything i can do to assist you really. anything you’re struggling with i’d be more than happy to help you with.”

[nightcrawlcrss]

“'vega-superior?' please, be serious.”

hidden away in the castle in bavaria; kurt wagner, the soft-hearted x-men

the basics

full name: kurt wagner ( formerly kurt szardos )

alias, if any: nightcrawler

classification: mutant

nationality: german

age: 27 years old

date of birth: 15 june 1995

hometown: bavaria, germany

current location: new york, new york

gender: cis male

pronouns: he/him

occupation(s): former carnival/circus trapeze artist, x-men, and avenger

affiliations, if any: x-men and the avengers

the physical appearance

faceclaim: dev patel

hair type: curly

hair color: brown

eye color: brown

height: 6′2″

weight: 189 lbs

build: buff and slender

the story behind him

in the form of a german noblewoman, the shape-shifting mutant mystique married baron christian wagner. meanwhile, she had an affair with the mysterious azazel from la isla des demonas and became pregnant with their child. azazel told her to raise their child as if it were the count's. a heartbroken raven agreed and, while christian did become suspicious as to the baby's paternity, his sudden "accidental" death ensured no one else heard his suspicions. the baby was born visibly mutated with blue fur all over, pointed ears, iridescent eyes, and a prehensile tail. due to the shock and the strain of the boy’s difficult delivery, she lost concentration and accidentally revealed her true form. word spread of her and the baby's condition and mother and son were chased by a torch-wielding angry mob. mystique passed out and left young kurt floating down a river during her escape.

miraculously, the baby survived and was saved by margali szardos, a sorceress and romani queen, who became a fortuneteller at herr getmann's traveling menagerie. margali took the baby back with her to the circus. kurt was never legally adopted by anyone but was raised within the circus, mostly with people who had no prejudices against "freaks" save for the ringmaster, herr max getmann. she acted as kurt’s unofficial foster mother. he grew up in max getmann's circus and his two closest friends were his "adopted" brother and sister, ,argali's natural children stephan and jimaine szardos. later, kurt and stephan forged a true friendship as they grew older, and stephan knew that his magical heritage might lure him to evil one day. so, stephan had kurt promise him a blood-oath, that if he ever killed without reason, kurt would kill him as well. long before his teleportation power emerged, he had tremendous natural agility and by his adolescence he had become the circus' star acrobat and aerial artist. circus audiences assumed that he was a normal-looking human being wearing a demon-like costume.

as he got older, kurt's abilities drew less and less of a crowd until one day, herr getmann could no longer afford to keep him sedated between acts and decided to sell him. fearing the worst, margali worked with armen freilich to free kurt. As he fled, he accidentally knocked over a torch, igniting the circus. getmann and his men chased kurt through the forest and were about to shoot him in the face when he teleported for the first time. astonished and pleased with his escape, he wearily made his way to the nearby father wagner's church. two days later, he was discovered and welcomed and he happily found a home trading shelter for labor. one evening, armen burst in the door, apparently being chased by getmann and his goons for escaping. father wagner tried to stop them from taking the boys, but the men proved too strong and set the church on fire during the brawl. kurt ported armen to a nearby farm before going back and beating on getmann. just as he was about to kill getmann, father wagner reminded kurt of his humanity. with the tides turned, getmann and his men took aim to kill both kurt and the father but were frozen. professor charles xavier had arrived and taken control of the angry mob's minds, programming them all to remember kurt dying in the fire.

years later, the texas millionaire amos jardine, who ran a large circus based in florida, heard of the circus kurt worked for and bought it. jardine intended to move its best acts into his american circus. however, he demanded that kurt be placed in the circus' freak show. appalled, he quit and made his way towards winzeldorf, germany, where stephan was. he discovered that stephan had gone mad and had brutally slain several children. two nights after leaving the circus, he found stephan and fought him, hoping to stop his rampage. in the course of the struggle, he unintentionally broke stephan's neck. then the villagers of winzeldorf, who assumed him to be a demon who was responsible for the child killings, discovered kurt. they were about to kill him, when they were all psionically paralyzed by professor xavier, who had come to recruit kurt into the x-men. he agreed to join the group, but before they left for america, he and xavier went to the bavarian circus so that kurt could explain to margali about stephan's death. however, margali was not there and she held him responsible for murdering stephan.

he helped xavier and cyclops rescue the original x-men from krakoa. after most of the original team left for a time, kurt, along with fellow new recruits storm, colossus, wolverine, banshee, and thunderbird, stayed at the xavier's School for gifted youngsters as members of the new x-men. the second group of x-men were mostly adults and required no tutoring from professor x, but trained in the use of their powers, in the danger room.

at this time currently, kurt is in new york and occasionally works with the x-men, but a majority of his time is dedicated to the avengers!

skills and power

master acrobat: kurt is an olympic-class acrobat thanks to his flexible spine that allows him to perform contortionist-like feats and to go long periods in a semi-crouching position without injury.

master combatant: he is a skilled hand-to-hand combatant and a master at fencing, which he can even perform with his tail, which is strong enough to support his entire body weight. martial arts training.

aviator: he has served as the team's pilot and, with wolverine, has also been the mechanic of the x-men's blackbird jet for a long time.

medic: he has been the team medic when there weren't any qualified x-men around to do so.

multilingual: he is fluent in various languages due to his youth traveling around europe as the star performer in a circus and knowing the language of wherever they were that week was very handy. he was a member of the x-men when professor xavier telepathically taught the team russian and japanese. kurt also speaks english, french, spanish, krakoan, and italian, as well as his native german.

teleportation: ability to teleport himself, the clothes he is wearing, and within limits a certain amount of additional mass which is in contact with him. he teleports by displacing himself into the brimstone dimension, traveling through it, and then returning to his own dimension at a certain distance from his point of departure. he consciously determines his point of return. the entire process occurs so quickly that he is unaware of being in the brimstone dimension at all. he guides himself through the brimstone dimension by a subconscious, natural direction-finding sense. although kurt controls his teleportation ability with his conscious mind, his power to teleport is not psionic. rather it is the result of an unknown biochemical/biophysical reaction which he triggers mentally.

when he disappears in teleporting, he leaves behind smoke with a stench reminiscent of burning brimstone. this is a small portion of the atmosphere of the brimstone dimension that escapes while the aperture is open. his teleportation is invariably accompanied by the muffled sound of imploding air rushing to fill the vacuum left where kurt's body was, creating his signature *bamf* sound.

kurt’s powers automatically displace liquids and gases when he arrives in the course of a teleportation. his powers will not displace solids, however, putting him at risk for materializing inside solid matter, causing serious injury or death. as a consequence, he typically teleports only to places he has been to before or knows the layout of, or line-of-sight teleportation (even though his actual range is much further). his intuitive spatial awareness allows him to track his movements instinctively and with greater precision than the average person, helping him to pinpoint locations for a "blind" teleport.

the longer the distance over which he teleports himself, the harder and more exhausting it is for him to make the teleportation "jump". it is easier for him to teleport between north and south (along earth's magnetic field lines) than it is for him to teleport between east and west (against the magnetic lines). under optimal conditions, teleporting only himself and his costume, he can displace himself a distance of about 2 miles east-to-west, and up to 3 miles north-to-south. making a vertical teleportation upwards is difficult and dangerous, fighting against both the electromagnetic and gravitational fields. he has made a vertical teleportation "jump" of one mile by pushing himself to his physical limits. before his death kurt was able to port hope and himself from las vegas to san francisco which is 585 miles and he was weakened and near death at the time. some time after his initial resurrection kurt appeared to have expanded on his teleportation abilities able to make longer jumps than before without the aid of the bamfs, having warped 7853 miles all the way from dubai to the savage land in antarctica, and again traveling 2936 miles from prague to al-qasr in egypt. More recently, before his rebirth by the five, pixie stated that his teleportation distance has increased a "crazy" amount. Having teleported from krakoa to rub' al-khali, saudi arabia with two people effortlessly (even though he had never been there, it wasn't a blind teleportation since the coordinates were psionically placed in his mind).

his momentum is retained throughout the process of teleportation: he arrives with whatever amount of inertia he left with. for example, if he were falling from a great height, he could not teleport himself towards the ground in order to save himself; he would land with the same velocity that he teleported with. he can subtract this inertia by teleporting short distances upwards (as though taking two steps back for every one forward).

the limits to the mass that he can carry with him while teleporting, and the limits to the distance over which he can teleport himself with additional load is unknown. when he transports a passenger over even moderate distances, they both feel weakened and ill, to the point of exhaustion. teleportation over further distances could be fatal. through practice, kurt has increased the mass he can teleport with him. (he once teleported himself and storm from the center of a small island into the water just off its coast without harming either of them). the upper limits of this capacity are as yet unknown.

he can use his powers offensively by grappling with an enemy and teleporting him or her in a series of rapid jumps. the strain of these "multiple ports" can exhaust foes without superhuman endurance while he remains strong enough to continue fighting. some time after his resurrection kurt appeared to have expanded on his teleportation abilities able to make longer jumps than before without the aid of the bamfs, having warped 7853 miles all the way from dubai to the savage land in antarctica.

beacon teleportation: before and after his resurrection, he has created for himself a rather unique means of expanding his teleportation range. through the deal he made with his father's own nightmarish gremlins kurt now has the capacity to lock onto their trans-spatial displacement signature as a means of warping to their exact location regardless of whether he can see where he is warping or not. enabling him to teleport over global or even cross dimensional distances so long as he maintains the connection with them, in his own words "anywhere i go they can go" and vice versa.

subconscious spatial awareness: he has a very limited subconscious extrasensory ability that prevents him from teleporting himself so that his feet, for example, would materialize below the surface of the local ground. because this ability is so limited, however, he will not teleport into any place that he cannot see or has not seen in the past. if kurt teleported himself into an unfamiliar area, he would run the risk of materializing partially or entirely within a solid object. if too much of his body materialized within a solid object, he would probably be killed.

as part of his power, he has also exhibited a limited ability to sense the teleportation of other beings.

micro-suction discs: he can stick to objects with the surface of his hands and feet. this enables him to scale surfaces.

flexible bone structure: his bone structure allows him great flexibility. he can remain in a crouched position for a long time and perform contortionist type feats without causing any damage to his spine.

camouflage: he has limited abilities to blend into shadows, both as a result of his indigo fur and his connection to the light-bending attributes of the dimension through which he teleports. this is also the explanation for why he constantly appears in shadow, even in direct light.

prehensile tail: he has a tail allows him to grab onto objects with relative ease. his tail is strong enough to not only support his body weight but also lift an adult man completely off the ground. it is deft enough to fight with like a sword or blunt object.

night vision: kurt's always glowing eyes grant him a marked degree of heightened night vision as well.

superhuman agility: his agility, balance, and bodily coordination are enhanced to levels beyond the human body's natural limits.

superhuman reflexes: his natural reaction time is enhanced to a level beyond the human body's natural limits.

immortality: he cannot return from the afterlife due to sacrificing his soul in order to resurrect himself. this means kurt cannot die by any natural means. although he did die on a mission in space when he was consumed by a corona, but was later resurrected by the five.