Just my luck: Martin Cliff

[Cliffhanger]

Ever had a bad day? You know, that kinda day when nothing goes quite right? You’re getting ready for class and you can’t find your homework, even though you’re sure you had tucked it into your notebook. Then you’re pulling on your shoes and one of the laces breaks, and you don’t have an extra, so you fudge it and try to tie the broken ends back together. And as you’re headed down the stairs, carrying your knapsack, the shoelace comes undone, so you pause to lean back against the wall to fix it. And just as you get the lace back together, you notice the “Wet Paint” sign. You walk across campus, and the other kids laugh at the fact that your butt is covered in white paint, and then out of nowhere you get hit with a Frisbee. And finally, you get to class, and you sit down, hearing the still-wet paint make a moist noise against the chair, and to top it all off, you get hit with a pop quiz. So you reach into your knapsack to get a pen, only to find that one of them must have broken somehow, because now your fingertips are covered in sticky black ink.

Everyone’s had a day like that, right? Well, probably not just like that. But you know what I mean, right?

But you’ve had a good day, right? You’re on your way to class, and you haven’t done your homework at all, so you’re ready to catch hell, but then it turns out that the teacher is sick. And the sub they got is totally unprepared, so he just plugs in a movie. And on your way to lunch, you find five dollars on the sidewalk. And lunch was supposed to be meatloaf, but the ovens were on the fritz, so instead they just ordered up a million pizzas from Bruno’s. And the girl you like is walking by, carrying her tray, and you say hello just like always, but then suddenly she’s sitting down across from you, and she tells you that all the rest of her normal lunch friends are on a field trip, and can she sit with you? Then after school, you’re headed over to the mall, and your hat gets blown off your head, and it flies right into some guy’s face, and it surprises him so badly that he walks into a telephone pole. And you run over, trying to apologize, but the guy takes a swing at you, but he slips, and he winds up breaking his fist against the telephone pole again, and as he’s yelling at you, suddenly the PPD shows up, and they realize the guy is really Captain Slaughter or something and they’ve been looking for him for weeks. And so they give you a medal at City Hall.

Well, okay. So you’re never had a day quite like that, either.

But I have. I have days like those all the time. I can’t help it. It’s just the way things work, and it’s been that way forever. You think I won my 5th-grade spelling bee cause I’m a great speller? I would get “conceal” and my opponent would get “phlegm.” Or when I broke my arm when I was twelve, do you think I was doing something exciting? Nope—I was having a piano lesson when one of the piano’s legs cracked and it fell on me. Yup. Been this way forever.

I suppose it’s no great shock that things started to get worse a couple years ago, which is when my parents took me to get tested. What we found out was that the laws of probability just don’t work right when I’m around. The guys at SERAPH were all sorts of excited about it. They made a joke and called me “Mister Heisenberg” which I had to look up later. But basically, I’m like a walking luck charm, good and bad.

I guess that’s what drew me to start taking pictures: the best photographers need a little luck to get that great shot. When things were bad, I got lots of blurry images of my thumb on the lens. But when they were good, I got pictures of people and nature right in the middle of the most amazing stuff—once, I got my film confiscated cause I caught a certain hero right while he was changing out of his mild-mannered secret identity in a phone booth.

I’ve been at Saint Joe’s for about a year and a half now, working with the Coach a lot to bring my powers under some sort of control. I won’t go into it, but it involved a tennis-ball launcher and a blindfold, enough said. Finally, a month back, he said I was ready—if I wanted—to qualify for a Security License. How could I pass that up? Better pictures, for one thing.

OOC
Martin is (for lack of a better way to put it) an NPC that has become a PC. He's not new to the school, he's new to patrol. Until now, he's just been one of the other hundred kids on campus. He's been working for the SJS Flier for almost the whole past school year, mostly as a photographer. He took the photos of the Homecoming Game last fall. He's been working to get his powers under control enough to qualify for a SL clearance, and recently, it finally happened.

Also worth mentioning is that Martin's "entropic probability field" can affect people around him-- after all, that's part of how he makes the bad guys miss. However, it's not an ambush tool. I'll never insist that anyone lose their keys, or find a five-dollar bill, or get hit by a bike messenger because the bike blew a tire, or have a passing bank robber slip and toss the sack of money right into someone's hands. It might happen to NPCs in fiction pieces, but it will never happen to a PC unless you want it to. Now, if anyone wants to experience bad or good luck in Martin's presence, I will always play along. If it's some major thing you want to have happen, just send me a tell and we'll work it out. Again-- play with it if you want to, but I'm not going to start dictating what happens. By the same token, if I see an opportunity, I might send you a tell and ask if something can happen. If you say no, I won't be heartbroken, I promise.

[Cliffhanger]

Updated!