HUANG RENJUN

renjun is a metahuman with the ability to possess someone through eye contact, jacking their skills and powers, taking over all motor control, and accessing some surface memories. once activated, this ability renders his own physical form insubstantial while his essence is "absorbed" into his host body. he's fueled by a raw and largely undertapped psychic energy with a variety of potential other uses, but as of current can also establish mindlinks telepathetically with those whose abilities are similarly inclined.

⁍ he's limited to organic vessels (i.e. he has yet to learn how to bodysnatch androids)

⁍ he's most effective with humans and metahumans, as some aliens or supernatural beings may be A.) too powerful for him to control, or B.) skilled enough to sublimate his consciousness into theirs instead

⁍ he must enter through eye contact and is not able to speak through his host

⁍ in combat, he typically has access to the muscle memory and aptitude to use his host's skills the way they would use their own

⁍ he feels all their afflictions and experiences their weaknesses, but does not retain them once he leaves their body

⁍ if his host goes down, he cannot use his own life force energy to supplement theirs

⁍ they usually retain no awareness or memory of what he does while they're possessed, exceptions made for those with very keen mental abilities

⁍ his actual regular old fleshbag is not even a little bit enhanced, so sometimes leaving a host body is... hm, scary

⁍ if he jumps through too many people successively or stays too long, he may risk fragmenting his sense of self and forget who he is

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for the first seven years of his life, renjun lived in northern china on a steady diet of vintage dramas and yang gochi, with his grandma's favorite trot tunes playing in the kitchen and the neighbor's cat leaping to their balcony now and then to say hello. lots of kids in the area were raised by their grandparents, so he'd never thought he was unusual. families often worked dual income, sometimes in separate cities, sometimes traveling all the way overseas to earn a living.

renjun thought that was his family too.

one autumn day he has a playdate with a sticky-fingered boy from three floors down. they're wrestling over... a game console? a remote? a pack of mala peanuts? tiny, angry, potato-cheeked renjun had wobbled his lip, stuck his stubby fingers into the boy's shoulders, and glared with the intensity of a thousand suns.

that's when it happened for the first time.

it was terrifying, disappearing into someone like that. his eyes not right, his hands not right, his spatial awareness off-kilter and a head roaring with a clutter of emotions that weren't his own. where was he? who was he?

was this floating or sinking?

he - they - he - had sputtered until the panic became too much and he’d spat himself back out.

then they'd both started crying, neither of them noticing his grandma frozen in the doorway.

despite the time that they're apart, renjun loves his mother. he loves her the way you love a pretty picture on a screen, or a tinny voice through facetime, or a hole in your heart. she would come home once a year on lunar new year, and he'd fall asleep by her side to the gala playing on tv and the faint smell of jasmine.

but this time she arrives months early, and instead of swooping him up in a hug at the door she bends to look him at eye-level, lifts his small face with appraisal, and goes to speak with his grandparents. she fusses over him like normal for a week, asking cautious questions about starting school, watching him as he pets the cat out on the balcony, then leaves one morning without saying goodbye.

that ordeal was renjun's first clue that his family was extremely, extremely unusual.

so meet his mother: huang xiuzhen, psychokinetic, ex-military, and head of a private foreign intelligence agency. wily, cutthroat, with an imposing career marred only by one indiscretion.

his father, who throughout the years he has met only a handful of times, is a hitman operating under the codename punisher.

hi, renjun's the indiscretion. and it's a story he would pay good money to never, ever hear.

his idyllic life ends when renjun is yanked out of school in the middle of term and transferred with his grandparents to a district in beijing, where his mother can keep a closer eye on him. this is also how his father comes to find him.

lots of kids grow up with estranged parents. right?

it's normal that the first time you meet your father, he's breaking into your 34th story bedroom to gift you melee weapons?

it's cool that when your mother sees him there, the ensuing row destroys half the living room and shatters the screen door with a throwing knife? every family is dysfunctional in its own way...

they should talk about it, but she only gives him the greatest hits. his father is a dangerous man. the world is full of secrets. she is just trying to protect him. tell her immediately if he tries to make contact again.

only renjun doesn't.

it is unfair that your mom is a cool, secret agent like in the movies but treats you like a temporarily disarmed timebomb. it is unfair to have strange frightening powers that fracture your sense of self and no way to harness them. it is unfair to only have half of a parent who is more invested in the tug-of-war you represent than spending quality time with you.

so forget what he's told about his father, renjun wants to find out for himself.

when the man keeps showing up, renjun doesn't turn him away. even though he has an insane idea of what bonding looks like - explicit about wanting renjun to demonstrate what he can do, taking him to strange hutongs and even a dog fight once, choosing someone to goad him into practicing on, let me worry about them after, hm?

it takes a long time to convince him they were really related. renjun looks nothing like him. not from his square jaw, to his broad shoulders, to the nth metal gauntlets over his skullcrushing hands. renjun does learn for himself, that this man is terrifying, but he's also interested in him. he wants to understand him. he encourages his strange abilities and teaches him to meditate. it's more than what anyone else in his life has offered.

slowly he gets comfortable with himself. though he's fully aware his powers are best kept hidden for 101 reasons, renjun is also, like, 14. an age where school is rife with jerks and bullies. anyone who harasses his friends is subject to embarrassing footage of them pantsing themselves going viral on meipai, despite no recollection of it. renjun doesn't make the rules.

but he does make a habit of intervening. kids from families with uglier, more intimate dysfunctions than his. kids who get picked on and followed home. kids the overly friendly science teacher always looked at kind of funny.

his fixes are temporary, and sometimes the fallout is messy, and he so, so itches to do more. but this is when he starts to get a taste for righting wrongs. when he realizes he can choose to conform or he can choose justice. choose to hide himself or choose to punish.

as his power grows into itself, so looms the shadow of his father.

somewhere north of his sixteenth birthday, he visits and offers him a suit. it's a gravity sheath, shining white and black and made of tech designed to absorb targeted impact that shouldn't even be on the market. renjun isn't sure what the implications of keeping it might be, but whatever decision he makes - it'll have to feel like his own.

he thinks back to the dog fighting ring his father took him to all those years ago. no, no, you don't have to kill it, he'd coaxed. but tell you what. you make the other dog jump out of the pit, i'll tell you something your mother doesn't want you to know. renjun had never jumped inside an animal before, let alone a raging, traumatized pitbull. when the other dog lunged he'd short-circuited and whirled around, attacking the owner instead.

there was blood, there was screaming, there was a jackhammering heartbeat in his chest that was dying to expel him. boy and dog ran off into the alley until he'd tumbled to his own feet, curled in on skinned knees, and sobbed.

yeah. where was that located again?

local news breaks the story that a politician's son has been rushed to the hospital after a canine attack, linked to a dog fighting racket he hosts in the basement floor of his building.

renjun's mother comes home, furious, to two pitbulls trashing the guest room as they wrestled over a chewtoy.

she gets rid of the dogs, locks up the suit, and sends him abroad. maybe she was tired of thinning out her attention just to spare time for managing him. maybe she was determined to put some distance between renjun and the bad habits he'd built up while she ran the rest of her life. or maybe the director of the academy just owed her a favor.

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