Billy Kaplan

This page is about the Phase 2 incarnation of the character. For other uses, see Billy Kaplan (disambiguation).

PHASE 2

Billy Kaplan
Portrayed by Joe Locke
Codename:	TBD
Affiliations:	TBD
Birthdate:	December 21, 2008
Journal:	xp_wiccan
Player:	Ben

"AllpossibleworldsAllpossibleworldsAllpossibleworlds..."

Many residents of the Xavier Institute know a Billy Kaplan: a 20-something student at Columbia University, moonlighting as the Manhattan-based vigilante the Asgardian. But that was not the real man.

Details

Character Journal: xp_wiccan

Real Name: William "Billy" Max Kaplan

Codename: TBD

Aliases: N/A

First Appearance: February 6, 2015

Date of Birth: December 21, 2008

Place of Birth: New York City, NY

Citizenship: USA

Relatives: Dr. Jeff Kaplan and Dr. Rebecca Kaplan (parents), Jacob and Eric Kaplan (younger brothers), large families on both sides

Education: Halfway through high school

Relationship Status: Single

Occupation: Student, part-time crew at the Hokey-Poké Bowl

Team Affiliation: TBD

Biography

The Dream

Billy Kaplan has only a handful of fragmented memories of his earliest childhood in a small village orphanage in Bulgaria. He was only four when his adoptive parents Jeffrey and Rebecca Kaplan came into his life. The New York couple had fallen in love with the country during a Doctors Without Borders project. On their return to the States, the childless couple decided to adopt an orphan from one of their stops on their trip, and after the legalities were complete, young Viliam found himself on a transoceanic flight that would forever change his life.

Although his parents were always open about his adoption, Billy grew up as a typical New York child. His parents, being highly-educated themselves, took an active role in Billy’s education, making sure he had the best schooling and extracurricular activities. They traveled frequently during the summer, often on humanitarian trips similar to the one that led them to Billy, so he has seen far more of the world than your typical college-aged student, including many of the world’s injustices. Although he still doesn't have a clear idea what he wants to do after college, in that sense, he follows in his parents’ footsteps, and is currently pursuing a Human Rights degree at Columbia University, (complimentary tuition courtesy of his mother’s professorship).

Billy turned to defending the streets of New York in his spare time, and soon discovered he wasn't alone in his quest, meeting the Spider Men and Daredevil. He was soon tracked down and nearly apprehended by SWORD agent Clinton Barton, but Clint let him escape at the last minute, seeing nothing wrong with what Billy was doing. He and Clint stayed in touch and overtime formed something of a friendship. Eventually Clint dragged Billy to the mansion, where he met Amanda Sefton and agreed to be her teaching assistant for her magic lessons.

Billy settled easily into mansion life, making friends and finding out quickly he wasn't immune to the strange happenings of the mansion. In August, Clint recruited him to help examine a mysterious object and ended up having to fight fish people when Namor accidentally activated the object. He got through a few months before he found himself being grabbed by Topaz to help save a bunch of wayward students in way over her head. It wasn't a bad life all around, however.

The year brought with it more interest, starting with a bad magical interaction that led to the entire magical contingency shrinking down to microscopic size. Thankfully, they were able to fix it. Not long after, he, along with the rest of the magic people, discovered a strange black and white pebble that turned out to be the calling card for the Winding Way. In October, he helped rescue Clea and Topaz, who had been kidnapped by a mysterious force to another dimension. 2018 was similarly quiet.

The Truth

None of this was real. In 2015, Billy Kaplan was really just a 6-year-old living with his cardiologist father, psychiatrist mother, and infant twin brothers in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Like many other children, he had a wild imagination and frequently fantasized about being a grown-up hero, especially in the aftermath of M-Day. Unlike other children, Billy is a mutant reality warper, fueled by chaos and uncertainty. And the death and rebirth of the multiverse following the Dark Phoenix attack created an incalculable level of interdimensional cosmic chaos accessible to Billy.

He did not even know what he was doing. One night he went to bed and dreamt of himself as an adult, flying across New York City and flinging bolts of lightning at criminals. The next morning, his father commented on a news story about the NYPD apprehending several electrocuted pickpockets. A similar dream the next night, and more confirmation the following morning. If Billy were more than just a 6-year-old child, he might have noticed the pattern. Instead, he just thought the debut of this new crop of street-level superhero was cool and paid it no further mind.

The truth was while Billy slept, his burgeoning mutant powers tapped into the cosmic chaos and created his idealized young adult hero. This Shazam! golem acted autonomously, unaware of his own nature, never giving thought to his own periods of dormancy when the real Billy was awake. But those periods became less frequent very quickly, as the magic that created this adult golem stabilized and allowed him to live his own life. Soon, the child Billy was asleep more often than not, ignorant of his double life when conscious.

Billy’s parents took him to a variety of specialists, concerned that he was gravely ill. But no amount of scans or tests or clinical trials found anything wrong. Billy was physically healthy and mostly lucid in his brief moments of consciousness. All the Kaplans could do was keep their son comfortable.

Ultimately, time was on their side. As the multiverse stabilized over the next couple years, the energy available to Billy dissipated, and he could not maintain the astral projection as much. By the spring of 2018, about 3 years after this ordeal started, the spell was gone and the now 9-year-old Billy seemed no worse for the wear. He has no memory of his counterpart’s experiences.

To help him reacclimate after his long mystery ailment, the Kaplans moved out of busy frantic New York to the sleepy suburb of Eastview, New Jersey. Children are resilient, and between therapy and private tutoring, Billy mostly caught up on the years he had missed, ultimately only having to be held back 1 year in school compared to where he should have been. Which was no problem for him. It meant he was among the first in his grade to become bar mitzvah (setting the tone for all the parties that followed) and to get his driver’s license.

As of the 2025-2026 school year, Billy is enrolled in a small private Jewish day school where he is a junior. He lives as normal a life, if somewhat busy, as he can: academics, a part-time job at Eastview’s famous Hokey-Poké Bowl, extracurricular theater, late-night Denny’s trips with the other theater kids, and therapy. He has not told anyone, even his therapist, about his burgeoning powers. That is his own great burden to bear, and he is terrified to confront the possibility that he caused his own childhood crisis and thus is responsible for the worry and woe his family underwent.

Physical Characteristics

Billy is a little taller than average and very skinny; his grandparents never fail to comment on his weight and eating habits. He has typical Ashkenazi features: pale skin, curly dark brown hair, and brown eyes. He has prominent eyebrows with a scar over the left one from a failed attempt at learning to skateboard (never again). He has 3 ear piercings, one on each lobe and a third on his right helix, and wears cheap jewelry like steel rings and necklaces.

He dresses to conceal his body. Baggy clothes (except for skinny jeans), layers, dark colors. He loves a good hoodie that he can drown in. He wears a little makeup, mostly dark eyeshadow, and paints his nails (black, of course).

Powers

Chaos is not destruction and decay. It is the unpredictability of life, the miracle of the unexpected. It is as creative a force as its twin, order. Chaos is possibility.

Billy’s mutant power is the ability to channel entropy to warp reality. At its most basic, Billy is like Wanda and can make the improbable probable. And at the other extreme, this ability lends itself to magic, like Amanda and Topaz, specifically an unusual school called chaos magic, by which a practitioner can manipulate chance and randomness to make their whims a reality. Chaos magic is not governed by incantations, gestures, or items of power, but by the practitioner’s willpower and force of personality. (D&D wild magic sorcery vs wizardry.)

He manifested as a young child, creating his wish-fulfillment adult self that lived semi-autonomously for about 3 years. Even when that spell ended because the energy needed to sustain it was no longer accessible, his powers remained active; there was no putting the magic back in its bag once it was let out. He has since been persistently followed by vague bad luck, unusual annoying occurrences that he at first chalked up to chance. Things like his pencil rolling off his desk and under a table where he can’t reach it, choosing the one undercooked piece of chicken from the dinner platter, cell phone going from 50% power to dead after just a single TikTok, or always hitting every red light when he’s in a hurry. This is the result of his body continuing to take in chaos but not having an outlet. This bad luck aura will vanish the more Billy actually uses his powers regularly, and then he’ll only have his own awkwardness to blame for when fortune fails him.

He first became aware of his powers a few months ago. He’d had a particularly rough day and begged the universe for just a little respite, and all of a sudden, his luck turned. He soon learned that with intense focus, he could sometimes make things go his way. But it’s all still so new that he does not understand how his powers work or their full scope. Currently without much effort, he can do basic things like levitate objects (and himself, but only a couple inches off the ground) and shoot lightning, which shocks him as often as not. He’s picked up some occult books from the library, hoping magic spells will give him an idea of making things happen, but no luck yet with that. Like many mutants, stress and trauma can trigger uncontrolled power expression. (He failed his first driver’s license exam because he accidentally reversed the orientation of his car while parallel parking.)

Ultimately, there are three guiding principles for effective use of his powers:

   1. The wilder, more chaotic, less predictable a situation he is in, the more energy he can access and thus the greater an effect on reality he can elicit.
   2. Grander actions require concentration and a clear mental picture.
   3. If Billy cannot control the influx of energy, it turns back on him in unpredictable and often dangerous ways.

So, the more chaos, the more Billy can do, but also the more difficult it becomes to maintain his focus, and thus the more likely the energy will fizzle out, or worse, go completely wrong and backfire. This could range from inconveniences like conjuring a rain cloud over his head to disasters like explosions or, at the most extreme, tearing a hole in reality.

Billy’s power signature is blue, manifesting as glowing pupils, arcane sigils around his hands, and a blue crown on his brow.

Equipment

None

Trivia

Billy’s bar mitzvah Torah portion was parshat Shemini (Lev. 9:1–11:47), which covers the deaths of High Priest Aaron’s sons. In 2022, that was read on March 26. This is more than 3 months after Billy turned 13, and while it’s atypical to have a bar mitzvah celebration so far out from their birthday, this can be chalked up to the Kaplans changing synagogues when he was 10ish and delaying a date reservation in case he got “sick” again.

External Links

xp_communication posts

xp_journal posts

xp_logs posts

xp_newscast posts

Plots

2015

It’s Greek To Me

2016

Something Slender This Way Comes

2017

Honey, I Shrunk the Magic Class

Dark Dimension Homecoming

2018

Family Reunion

Meta

Player: Ben

E-mail:

Meta Trivia

Formerly played by Matt (player) from 2015 to 2018. Picked up by Ben in 2025.