Artie Maddicks

PHASE 1

Artie Maddicks
Portrayed by Matthew Lewis
Codename:
Affiliations:	Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, New Mutants - Student
Birthdate:	February 17, 1994
Journal:	x_artie
Player:	Bounce

Artie has been a student at the school since 2002, using his telepathic holograms to communicate with others.

Details

Character Journal: x_artie

Real Name: Artie Maddicks

Codename: None

Aliases: None

Occupation: Student at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters

First appearance: X2

Family: Unknown.

Date of Birth: 17th February, 1994

Place of Birth: Unknown

Citizenship: Now American

Relatives: None known: very little is known about Artie's earliest years with the Morlocks. He has no known surviving relatives.

Education: Artie is currently a Junior at Xavier's school. His entire formal education has been spent at Xavier's, in its various incarnations, studying at times with other students and, at others, on his own when there were no other students of a similar age at the school. He studies American Sign Language off campus and has since early secondary school, as his inability to talk means that he will need to be fluent in sign when he leaves the mansion for college or work, building on his earlier lessons with Doug.

Relationship Status: Single

Occupation: Student

Team Affiliation: None

Biography

Childhood

Artie was born in 1994 but he knows almost nothing about his childhood before he came to the mansion. He somehow survived the Morlock Massacre when he was only two and was cared for by the survivors for a period after that before arriving at the mansion when he was presumed to be about eight years old, though this is at best a guess based on his weight, height and medical history. He remembers very little from those years, with the experiences almost completely divorced from his current life. What he does remember is fragmentary: he was frequently cold and hungry and was taught that darker places were, by definition, safer. He remembers once watching people ice skate in a park from a distance and being afraid of rats.

He barely remembers Annalee, the Morlock empath who fostered him as a child and he doesn't remember the pressure that the survivors eventually forced her to abandon him: with so few survivors after the massacre and the bulk of those not Morlocks but Tunnelers who saw themselves as being at war with the upworlders, it grew harder and harder for Annalee to justify keeping him in the face of their opposition. She was, eventually, forced to abandon Artie at the Mansion in October, 2002 but gave no indication as to his origins. His inability to speak meant that, by the time he could communicate easily, he remembered little of where he'd come from. Annalee may have helped with that, by placing an empathic block in his mind that makes those early memories more distant than they would have been otherwise. The most dominant memory from those years is that of her abandoning him to the mansion's custody.

Life At The Mansion

Artie has been at the school for as long as older students such as Kitty Pryde and Theresa Cassidy. He, along with other students, such as Jubilation Lee, was abducted by William Stryker's commandos and held captive at Alkali Lake for several days before being rescued by the X-Men. The trauma of that event, combined with Jean Grey's death and witnessing Logan leave Stryker chained to a helicopter caused him to become somewhat withdrawn over the following years.

When Sarah Morlocke arrived, she identified him as one of the tunnel-dwelling Morlocks who had somehow survived the massacre, arriving at the Mansion in 2002.

At the school, he originally shared a suite with Doug Ramsey and Jamie Madrox, becoming roommate and inseparable best friend to Miles Blaire when he was brought to the school by Alison. Sarah later identified Miles as another Morlock, however he too had no memory of that life. With the departure of Jamie, Miles and Alison to the West Coast Annex and Doug's job with the Snow Valley Memorial Center for Mutant Affairs, Artie lost most of his friends. He roomed for a while with Leong Manh, brother to Shan, and along with Leong's sister Nga and Shiro's little sister Leyu, is one of the school's floating population of students. A sophomore in the 2010 school year, he was no longer one of the 'little ones'.

Artie has, with some notable exceptions such as the British Invasion and that time with Jamie's evil dupe and that one time they were chased by dinosaurs in a park for a couple of days, avoided being caught up in many of the misfortunes that the older mansion residents. The younger students were always more closely supervised on trips to New York, and, when they weren't given their own, age appropriate activities, he was often simply unable to attend, having caught chicken pox twice, twice broken his wrist skateboarding and because he suffers from severe, chronic tonsillitis as a result of the changes to his throat and neck caused by his powers. It's harder than normal to remove them but time and growth of his throat have lessened the problem over the years.

He took Scott's absence hard - the man was there for so much of his life and, even during his worst moments, was a stable, constant presence for Artie. It topped off what has really been quite an awful year, with Alison ending up in Muir after becoming one of Apocalypse's Horsemen, Death.

She'd kept ties alive between himself and Miles for the past few years, making sure that one or the other of them was always able to visit at least twice a year, and this, combined with email, IM and video chats meant that they remained friends, if not as close as they had once been. Alison's ...troubles formed a catalyst of sorts bringing the boys together again through Miles' worry about his mother and Artie's concern about a woman he sees as an aunt.

He's moved on from that in the past few months, keeping his ties to Miles and forming friendships with some of the more recently arrived students in addition to the friendships he already had in the mansion. Artie has grown apart somewhat from the students he studies ASL with, as they see him as somewhat of a mutant freak, resenting his inclusion in a Deaf school by virtue of his hearing status. He also moved to the boys' suite following a series of fights with Leong, shortly before Leong and his sister moved out and later, roomed with Julian Keller.

Artie worked through his Junior year of school in 2010. He resents the need to have an aide/translator there for several hours each week in order to assist in his classes: while many of the mansion's residents have some ASL, none are fluent and keeping purely to written text limits his participation in class. He envies those students with more readily "useful" and cooler powers and finds the fact that he constantly has to mediate his communication through formats that others can understand, seeing it as laziness that they won't learn the right languages to make things easier for him.

He was caught up in the events of Dungeons and Derangements and rejoins the New Mutants in May, 2010 and creates a firm friendship with Dori over several months. He also strikes up a friendship with Megan following her return to the mansion in December.

He rooms withMatt Murdoch from March 2011 and his discontent with aspects of his life continues to show up as he runs into some issues relating to his mutation at the other school he attends, getting suspended for fighting and tries to use his powers to buy alcohol. He begins powers training with Marie-Ange and uses his powers to play tricks on both Kyle and Laurie Collins.

Back To Where It All Began

In April 2011, Artie begins to regain his childhood memories about his life with the Morlocks, with his old foster mother Annalee and the Morlock Massacre. He runs into his old foster mother, Annalee, now living on the streets in District X and has an awkward first meeting with her. It quickly turns into a friendship with Annalee, who is terrified at the thought of losing her son again, using her powers to create a deep and abiding sense of loyalty toward her in Artie. He begins to cut school in order to visit her and starts using his powers to run small scams to get the money he needs to properly look after her so that she doesn't, as he said, have to eat "dumpster food". (This later backfires, with Mr Haller discovering that Artie covered his absences with a series of forged notes stating that he was suffering glandular fever and Artie finds himself facing summer school.) He is also briefly caught up in Afterlife, and finds himself holding a tea party for a long dead child ghost.

In May, Artie visits Sarah M. after a powers training session to talk to her about reconnecting with Annalee and isn't happy with the response as she says that there's nothing left for them in that life and advises him to move on. Artie ignores her and, a week later, while visiting Annalee, he tells her about some of the less safe elements of his life at the mansion, as his returning memories are making him increasingly paranoid and leaving him feeling continually unsafe. Ten days later, the next time they meet, she offers to let him come and live in the Tunnels again, this time reinforcing the offer with her empathy. Artie is left believing that the only sensible course of action is to lure the other New Mutants into the Tunnels where Annalee will turn them into Morlocks, recreating the family she lost in the Massacre.

Artie introduces Nico to his mother a couple of days later while at a District X working bee and there's an interaction between her powers and Annalee's, with Nico's powers boosting the range and strength of Annalee's powers to previously unseen heights. Later that day, Artie and the New Mutants have a chat and decide to move down to the Tunnels like Annalee wants. Their absence noticed, a band of X-Menset out to rescue the kids. Annalee was eventually taken her into custody and later declared unfit to stand trial and remanded to psychiatric hospital.

The combination of the Annalee's manipulation and the X-Men's actions deeply upsets Artie and he picks a fight with everyone on the journals, in particular Kyle, Molly and Matt. Matt eventually becomes fed up and beats up Artie, cracking his ribs in the process. The two have had little to do with each other since then.

Artie eventually makes things up with Molly though he still has trouble reconciling his past with his current life in the mansion and remains paranoid and wary, withdrawn from the other students and wanting to leave as soon as he turns 18.

He started to look for his birth mother in August 2011.

Powers/Abilities

Artie has a blue, forked tongue, much like a lizard's or a snake's, which renders him unable to speak. He is compensated by the ability to project images or 'psychic holograms' of varying complexity - this ability has improved over time, and his images have become gradually more realistic from the basic 'stick drawings' of his early life.

It's not yet known what the limit to Artie's power is as he is able to use it only whilst he is actively applying attention to them. Practice and his mutation mean that he tests as a genius in the spacial awareness part of IQ tests, despite being average everywhere else. He can create both two and three dimensional holograms but, in both cases, they decrease drastically in detail as they get larger. He's limited both by the amount of detail he can visualise at any one time and the fact that displaying anything over about a three by three metre size gives him a splitting headache. He can produce very detailed, realistic images but cannot copy a page of print text as anything other than a pattern of light and dark on a page, though that does ensure that the text itself is still legible: it is simply that, while projecting it, he sees the entire page as a single, discrete image and would not be able to isolate individual words without first doing that on the original text. That said, he can project several words at a time onto a background and can make his images move but finds this easiest with simple images simply because he has to be able to visualise every line in them at once, something that becomes much harder when they're moving. For the most part, he works to a roughly A2 to A3 size with minimal detail to his images in every day life - anything else is too slow for communication.

He's taken to experimenting with detailed small-scale images, with Doug catching him attempting to forge a $20 note, making fake ID and cheating at cards.

Artie can also make three dimensional figures but, again, the larger they are, the less detail they have and, again, finds his more detailed images much easier when he has a model to work from: he might be able to mimic some of Marie-Ange's imps and follow their movements, as long as they don't move too quickly and aren't too detailed.

He's limited to line of sight for his projections at the moment but will be able to be expand to places he can't see eventually as long as he can visualise it and he's got a range of about 50, 60 meters right now. But, beyond that, people outside his line of sight or beyond his range can still see them.

Equipment

Artie is never without some means of non-verbal communication, such as a laptop, a text phone, or a notepad and pen.

Plots

2003

X2

2004

Gangsters

Skippy (plot)

2006

X-Men Mission: The Perfect Nanny

2007

This Savage Land

2010

Dungeons and Derangements

2011

Afterlife

My Long Forgotten Son

Mortimer Toynbee's Electric Funkedelic Boogaloo

Meta

Player: Bounce

E-mail: 150 px

Player Icon Base: Matthew Lewis

Meta Trivia

Artie was introduced to the game as an NPC and was initially socked by Frito, then made into a mod sock. He was also one of the only NPCs with a journal x_artie (Charles Xavier is the other.)

The PB was changed in 2009 on account of Artie not being ten years old any more, and there not being a lot of older images of Bryce Hodgson out there.

In March 2010 he was apped successfully by Bounce.

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