| Tin Star |
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| Portrayed by Lou Diamond Phillips |
| Statistics |
| Full Name |
Thomas Nashoba |
| Age |
25 |
| Height |
5'10" |
| Build |
Lean and Athletic |
| Eyes |
Brown |
| Hair |
Black |
| Factions |
None |
| Occupation |
US Marshal |
| Alignment |
Hero |
Claim to Fame
Tin Star is not a name that has appeared in the papers, but if you have access to the right classified sources, the code name appears in a number of incidents involving metahumans and the Paranormal that have been resolved - one way or another - by the arrival of a certain US Marshal. .
Reputation
Thomas is known in the Service as a driven younger Marshal with a stunning case record over his six years of service and, it is rumored, special abilities that land him the tough assignments. It's hard to argue with his results. It's also hard to argue with the fact that he's had two partners killed and three crippled in the course of his four years.
Biography
Thomas Nashoba was born in Oklahoma, to Choctaw parents as a member of what is legally known as the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. As one of the better organized and funded Indian groups, Thomas had what could fairly be called a regular American childhood. There are, of course, some things that are different when you live on an Indian reservation, but none of them seriously hampered his childhood. As he grew up he become more and more interested in law enforcement and after graduating high school he applied for (and was accepted to) the tribal police force.
It was a week after getting accepted to the force that Thomas had a dream – an odd, life changing dream. He found himself in the street of Tombstone, Arizona… 150 years before, talking to a grizzled looking sheriff. The Sheriff introduced himself as Justice and claimed that he was a primal force that had been released by a pair of Indian medicine men shortly after the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. They had intended to bind and steal them, sapping the white man’s drive to expand west. Among the other things they’d sought to appropriate, one was the spirit of the grim, determined lawmen that struggled to keep order in the white man’s settlements and were among their fiercest protectors. They failed, but the forces they had unleashed in the aftermath did not vanish into the Aether. Unchained from their bonds on the other side of the Veil, they set to work finding mortal agents to act for them. Justice had chosen Thomas. And no, it wasn’t up for discussion.
He might have just passed it off as an odd dream except in the following weeks and months odd things started happening. He’d get strange bursts of strength or start seeing odd things: phantoms in the night, echoes of crimes past. A few months after graduating he came upon a bank heist. It was violent and as the first responder on scene he and his partner were outgunned. When his partner went down the change just kind of… happened. The rest of the incident is a blur in his mind. Shooting, apprehension. Maybe some property damage… The end result was six perps taken in alive and two dead. Heck, it made the papers.
Things got stranger after that. He did, with the help of more dream visits from Justice, learn how to control what he does. After three years on the force, at the age of twenty one, he took the unusual step of trying out for the US Marshals Service selection program and earned a spot in the training program rather handily.
Fast forward four years. Thomas is a Deputy Marshal in the Investigative Operations Division with a slot on the Special Operations group. He’s had more and stranger cases than agents with twice his time in service and his abilities, whilst controversial, are an undeniable asset to the Service in certain sensitive situations. Now recently transferred to the New York station to handle Tri City area investigations, he has a caseload full of fugitives that are as potent, if not more so, than he. If nothing else, this promises to be very, very interesting.
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Character Details
Intense is the word most often used to describe Thomas, followed closely by driven. The man is not exactly unpleasant. Indeed, off duty he can be downright fun. But get him on a case and he seems to become another person: Focused on the hunt and often distant. It's a result of his connection to Justice, the personality of the spirit influencing his own, not that this is commonly known or makes it any easier to deal with.
| Spirit of the Law |
| Thomas is connected to a conceptual force of Justice. When actively invoked it infuses him with the power connected to the very concept. Doing so offers him access to a variety of superhuman abilities and also changes his appearance to that of a rural county sheriff: Duster, wide brimmed hat, bandanna and a visible star badge pinned a colored, button down shirt. His eyes also glow bright yellow, though is features remain otherwise unchanged. While in this form he is a supernatural being and has access to a variety of abilities related to Justice’s purview, though these are subject to some limitations. (See Mortal Shell for the primary one) |
| Purview - Ethereal Arsenal |
| Justice does not allow its business to be interrupted by small things like lack of equipment. When Thomas transforms, the transformation immediately equips him with any law enforcement gear appropriate to the situation within some limits (See Period Pieces for details). Furthermore, he can create any hand held pieces of equipment he might need – again within limits – from the Aether. Doing so, however, taxes his reserves of power and cannot be done indiscriminately. |
| Purview - Rough and Ready |
| While transformed, Justice empowers Thomas to meet the threats that he faces. By default he’s roughly in the same arena as an enhanced human (Black Widow, for example) in terms of strength, endurance and toughness. He can increase it to a maximum of six tons of lift capacity for strength and endurance/toughness equivalent to somewhere between Captain America and Ironman. Increasing his physicality though, costs him some of his reserves as does protracted exertion at higher levels and this is a common way for him to tire himself out. |
| Purview - Silver Bullet |
| There are lots of things that regular old bullets don’t hurt in any meaningful way. Maybe their hides or too thick, or perhaps they’re armored or maybe they simply heal the damage too fast. Justice allows Thomas to sidestep problems like this by imbuing his weapons, be they mundane or summoned, with supernatural potency. While so empowered the weapons fire what appear to be bolts of silvery energy that strike with incredible force, rending flesh, bone and the connection between spirit and body. If wielding a melee weapon – nightstick, crowbar, baton, what have you – the effect manifests as silver witchfire around the edges of the weapon instead and has much the same effect. Creatures with vulnerability to silver, light or justice often find these attacks equally baneful. Empowering a weapon costs him some of his reserves, but once empowered any ammunition loaded into it is empowered as well and does not cost him extra effort. Summoning it on the other hand… |
| Purview - The Shield |
| When the innocent are in grave danger, Justice can empower Thomas to push himself beyond even his usual supernatural limits and become invulnerable to mundane harm and most forms of supernatural or metahuman harm. There are a few caveats to this. Firstly, he can only become so while acting to protect an innocent from harm. Second, this ability rapidly drains his magical reserves. He can go from full to depleted in about five minutes flat, if really pushed. Third, this is not true invulnerability. Truly cataclysmic forms of harm can indeed hurt him, though at that point the harm done to the Thomas is probably the least of his problems as any form of attack sufficiently powerful to breach his shield is almost certain to cause extremely extensive collateral damage. |
| Eternal Vigil |
| Even without the transformation Thomas recovers from injury remarkably quickly. Anything short of a broken bone or third degree burn usually heals in a day or so. More serious internal injuries heal in between a few days and a week, depending on what they are and how serious. Wounds would be otherwise lethal or permanently disabling can take longer to recover from, but he will make a complete recovery given enough time. If he’s willing to burn some of his reserves, he ‘displace’ a wound off himself entirely, though doing so causes a minor manifestation of Justice: Lambent eyes, or a glowing ‘Star’ badge on his chest are the two most common. The effort it takes to banish a wound scales upward with the severity of it. |
| Relentless Pursuit |
| Thomas’ innate connection to Justice has given him a keen insight on the ways of those who seek to avoid him. This gives him a number of minor perks related to his job. The most obvious is an uncanny ability to ferret out clues, details and little bits of information to help him piece together a crime scene or deduce the next move of a fugitive. In confrontations with fugitives or other criminal types this insight manifests as an intuition about what they’ll likely do in the next short period of time – could be anything from a few seconds to a few minutes to an hour, depending on the relative definition of ‘short’ for the situation – and allows him to act, or coordinate the actions of teams and individuals, with sometimes frightening predictive accuracy. |
| In the Name of the Law |
| Thomas has extensive training from the US Marshal’s service in marksmanship and hand to hand combat and his position on Special Operations Group mean that he’s more trained than one might expect even of a US Marshal. His martial arts in particular is heavily Judo and Jujutsu based, as the live capture of fugitives and other criminals is always preferable. |
| Civil Servant |
| Government work doesn’t pay super well, but Thomas is sensible enough that he’s got enough personal resources to live comfortably. He’s got a car, a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood of New York and enough expendable income to have himself a bit of fun when not on duty or dealing with the fallout of one or another of his cases. . |
| Federal Funding |
| With the proper paperwork and justification Thomas has access to the resources of the US Marshal’s service. It takes a bit of hoop jumping and dealing with red tape to get most of it, but given time to bring it to bear, it’s frequently more useful than any metahuman ability. |
| Virgil |
| Thomas’ dog, Virgil, sort of adopted him on a case and simply will not leave him alone. It has such an unusual propensity to turn up in places it has no right to be able to enter that Thomas eventually asked for and was granted special dispensation to put him through police dog training so at least he’d be helpful at work. Unusual ability to find Thomas anywhere notwithstanding, Virgil is a very ordinary if very bright and somewhat mischievous Belgian Shepherd (Groenendael) with standard canine unit training. Until Thomas transforms that is. Then he becomes a crimson eyed hellhound on par with his master. |
| Lawman |
| As an actual peace officer, Thomas is bound to abide by certain matters of procedure and due process, regardless of what he may think on the matter. Additionally, those who have fled his pursuit, or know of those whom he has caught, may bear grudges or simply recognize him at times when going unnoticed would have been a great benefit. |
| Frontier Justice |
| Thomas makes a good conduit for Justice partly because the two are so alike. His notion of justice does not always conform to the letter of the law and sometimes he finds himself conflicted between doing what procedure says he should and what he believes to be the best thing for everyone involved. |
| Controversial |
| While not riding the edge between doing his job and getting fired, there is no question that Thomas is a controversial asset to the Service. His Metahuman nature is on record for starters – if not precisely common knowledge - and that’s something that some of his fellow Marshals have fairly strong opinions on, not all of them positive. The fact that some of his fugitive cases wind up coming in dead rather than alive hasn’t precisely endeared him to his superiors despite the fact that he has one of the best capture rates in his division. Finally, he has a tendency to become embroiled in cases and incidents that are messy and destructive and the PR fallout from these has been as much negative as positive. He’s a good Marshal and a good peace officer… but oh lord is he a paperwork headache sometimes. |
| Mortal Shell |
| Justice can only empower Thomas so much without killing him or fundamentally altering his nature. Furthermore Thomas must act in accordance with his patron’s nature in order. The upshot of this is that his magical ‘battery’ is finite and when it’s gone he can expect to wait a while before he gets any juice back. No quick fixes on this one (barring an infusion from someone very, very powerful). Generally speaking a full shift of performing his duties (roughly eight hours of work) will refill him completely. This does occasionally make him look like a workaholic during times of danger. |
| Period Pieces |
| Justice will only provide Thomas with weaponry from roughly around the 1920’s. This means he cannot simply summon, say, a .50 caliber sniper rifle or nonsense like that. Note that this still means he can get his hands on some pretty impressive firepower. Tommy guns were a thing back then, for example, as was the infamous BAR, but if he needs anything modern for whatever reason (say tear gas grenades), he’ll have to get it from the Service. Justice is a little more forgiving about non weapon gear. Tactical radios and hooligan tools are both things he’s had to call upon in the past. |
| Arcane Beacon |
| Thomas’ innate connection Justice gives him marks him quite indelibly with magic that can be sensed by anyone with a whit of arcane senses. While himself, it’s not horribly obvious what he is, just that he’s magical or magically touched in some way. Then transformed, however, the power of Justice acts as a literal shining beacon to everything around him that has the ability to sense. It has brought trouble to his doorstep more than once as creatures that would prefer to stay hidden take preventive measures. |
| Arcane Vulnerabilities |
| Because Thomas’ abilities are, essentially, a form of magic, they can be countered by those who know what they’re doing. Defenses that are proof against magical attack will prevent his weaponry from biting as it should and it is possible, with a lot of power and the right knowledge, to banish Justice’ manifestation causing Thomas to revert to mortal form or even sever his connection to the spirit entirely. It’s not easy, one must overcome the immense arcane of might of Justice itself to accomplish the latter, but it could be done. |
| Thousand Yard Stare |
| Justice drives Thomas pretty hard, and he’s already a pretty driven guy. Between tracking down regular fugitives, tangling with metahuman criminals and brushes with powers from Beyond, he’s seen a lot of things and no one can say it hasn’t affected him. He’s had two partners killed in the line of duty and seen several marshals or other peace officers retire with crippling injuries sustained from cases he was involved with or operations he supervised. It’s made his usual joi de vivre strained of late and those in the know may have reason to suspect he’s one really bad case away from some legitimate problems. |
Relationships
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Name |
Relation |
Information |
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Character Name |
Friend |
Insert a description of the relationship here. |
Notes
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