Artie Maddicks

PHASE 1

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

The speechless 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 Sophomore 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. 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 and 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 Tunnellers 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.

Life At The Mansion

Artie has been at the school for as long as older students such as Kitty Pryde and Theresa Cassidy.When Sarah Morlocke arrived, she identified him as one of the tunnel-dwelling Morlocks who had somehow survived the massacre.

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. He will be a sophomore in the coming school year, no longer one of the 'little ones'.

He's taken 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. He has recently been moved to the boys' suite following a series of fights with Leong.

Artie has, with some notable exceptions such as the British Invasion and that time with Jamie's evil dupe and thit savage land, 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

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 extremely 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 two by three metre size gives him a splitting headache. The largest two dimensional shape he's made to date was roughly the size of a garage door and basically consisted of a couple of stick figures. 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, not as legible text. He'd probably find copying a painting much easier. 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 can also make three dimensional figures but, again, the larger they are, the less detail they have, and right now, he cannot make even sketched up cartooned figures larger than about three feet tall 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.

Plots

2003

X2

2004

Gangsters

Skippy (plot)

2006

X-Men Mission: The Perfect Nanny

2007

This Savage Land

Meta

Player: Bounce

E-mail: 150 px

Player Icon Base: Freddie Highmore

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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