Jean-Paul Beaubier - Phase 1
This page is about the Phase 1 incarnation of the character. For other uses, see Jean-Paul Beaubier (disambiguation).
| Jean-Paul Beaubier - Replaced In Phase 2 | |
|---|---|
 Portrayed by Logan Marshall-Green | |
| Codename: | Northstar |
| Affiliations: | X-Factor Investigations |
| Birthdate: | May 26, 1970 |
| Journal: | x_northstar |
| Player: | |
Jean-Paul Beaubier has been a full-time teacher at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters and a member of Alpha Flight and the X-Men. Until recently he was at Muir Island Research Facility, undergoing treatment for psychic torture and working with his sister on relearning their powers. He returned to Xavier's seeking assistance with the emergence of a new aspect of his mutation and after the Genosha incident showed him how much work was left to be done, he left for Europe and familiar faces. He was killed during the Dark Phoenix Saga in 2015.
Contents
Details
Character Journal: x_northstar
Real Name: Jean-Paul Étienne Beaubier
Codename: Northstar
Aliases: Jean-Paul Martin
First Appearance: July 13, 2004
Date of Birth: May 26, 1970
Place of Birth: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Citizenship: Canadian
Relatives: Jean-Baptiste Beaubier (father, deceased), Melisande Beaubier (mother, deceased), Louis Martin (adopted father, deceased), Jolie Martin (adopted mother, deceased), Raymonde Belmonde (father-figure/mentor, deceased), Jeanne-Marie Beaubier (twin sister)
Education: Undergraduate degree of English Studies and Comparative Literature from Université de Montréal and a Masters degree in Comparative Literature from the same. He also has a minor in History, specifically French Canadian, that he received credit for whilst earning his undergraduate degree.
Relationship Status: Single.
Occupation: Employee at X-Factor Investigations. Formerly a professor at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
Team Affiliation: X-Factor Investigations. Former member of Alpha Flight. Former member of the X-Men.
Biography
Hard Knock Life
At the age of two, Jean-Paul’s biological parents were killed in an automobile accident. Separated from his twin sister, he was adopted by the Martins, who were distantly related to his mother. However, they also met an untimely end when Jean-Paul was five years old. He was quickly placed in foster care, but due to the emotional trauma he’d suffered so early in life he was neither demonstrative nor overly affectionate toward his foster parents. In fact, he was quite prone to acting out, which made it nearly impossible to find him a permanent home. Jean-Paul was bounced from foster family to foster family, none of them equipped to deal with the trouble he inevitably caused.
His behavior only grew worse as Jean-Paul got older, progressing from a chilly disdain for those who had taken him in to outright disrespect and rebellion against his foster parents. At the age of thirteen, after a particularly violent confrontation with his current foster father, Jean-Paul ran away. He spent nearly three months subsisting on the streets of Montreal, seeking shelter where he could and doing everything possible to avoid being found and put back into the foster system. His days were spent picking pockets, scrounging through dumpsters for scraps of food, and stealing from open-air market vendors while he spent his nights sleeping in the doorways of shops, alleys, and abandoned buildings. Jean-Paul was always looking over his shoulder, desperately lonely and entirely unwilling to admit that.
To make matters worse, Jean-Paul’s mutation began to assert itself during this period of his life, making him somewhat quicker on his feet than most. That might have been seen as an advantage, especially where his pick-pocketing and theft were concerned, however the mutation brought with it an increased metabolism. This caused the boy to begin to slowly starve on a diet that wouldn’t have been adequate for a normal human his age.
This all came to an end, though, when Jean-Paul attempted to steal from a book vendor patronized by Raymonde Belmonde, a local business owner whose work wasn’t necessarily all on the up and up. Belmonde grabbed Jean-Paul’s wrist to halt him, causing the boy to punch him. However Belmonde was more alarmed by the horrible condition the boy was in than by the violence he’d demonstrated. Warily, Jean-Paul accepted the invitation Belmonde extended to him for a hot meal. He was surprised, though, when Belmonde also managed to extract a promise from the bookseller to not involve the police – that act took most of the fight out of Jean-Paul, which made getting him to speak of his history a bit easier than it would have been otherwise. Over the course of the promised meal, Belmonde did just that – and wound up deciding that it would be for the best if the boy didn’t return to the streets and or his former life in the foster care system.
Belmonde managed to call in a significant favour from a local politician, who pulled the necessary strings to establish Belmonde himself as Jean-Paul’s legal guardian. He took on the task of civilising the suspicious young man with gusto, introducing Jean-Paul to literature and art. While Jean-Paul never took very well to formal schooling, he read every book in Belmonde’s possession, awakening a love of reading that has continued to this day. This curiosity extended into other things, leading him to enjoy simple puzzles as well as more complex games like Rubic’s Cubes.
It was during this time that Belmonde also introduced Jean-Paul to the pastime that would quickly become the young man’s greatest passion – skiing. By fifteen, Jean-Paul was a top contender in multiple events. By sixteen he was a shoe-in for the upcoming winter games. Jean-Paul received his high school equivalency at seventeen, but put off attending university in favour of pursuing athletics. It wasn’t until years later that he chose to pursue higher education.
At sixteen, Jean-Paul sought and gained his emancipation from the foster care system. Though he had grown to trust Belmonde, Jean-Paul recognised that his guardian was not a young man and, therefore, was not willing to take the chance of being at anyone else’s mercy should something unfortunate and unforeseen happen to the older man.
While competing in the 1988 Olympics, Jean-Paul won four gold medals and made more of a name for himself in the sports world than he had before.
Sanguis Redux
Jean-Paul was contacted by James MacDonald Hudson of Department H after their background check of Jeanne-Marie turned up the fact that she was the twin sister of the famous skiing champion. He was initially uninterested in their offer to join the Flight Program. When the Department H representatives hinted that they knew of his mutation, Jean-Paul was prepared to walk out of the interview. However, that was when they introduced him to Jeanne-Marie. Her existence and participation in the newly-formed Flight Program was intriguing enough for Jean-Paul to grudgingly agree to give the Program a shot and he joined them as Northstar.
He and his sister were the youngest members of the training program at the time and Jean-Paul’s powers, as well as his desire to prove himself the best in these odd new circumstances despite his youth, quickly made it clear that he could be a great asset to the Flight Program. His arrogance, attitude, and complete impatience with the team dynamics, however, made it uncertain as to whether or not he would be. It was one of Jean-Paul’s new teammates, Walter Lankowski, who seemed to have the most success befriending the young hotshot and bringing him around to the idea of working with the team for a more noble cause than his own glory. This friendship, however, was not destined to last to the end of training – Jean-Paul took Langkowski’s attentions as an indication of something more than simple overtures of friendship, while Langkowski’s interest in the speedster had been motivated by his romantic feelings toward Jeanne-Marie. Unsurprisingly, this revelation soured Jean-Paul’s friendship with Langkowski and was a source of constant strife between the twins. Jean-Paul was simultaneously jealous of his sister’s happiness and fearful that her new beau would mean she had no more use for the brother she hardly knew, anyway.
Thanks to the conflict with his sister, the disintegration of his one friendship within the team, and the knowledge that his mutation would become a matter of public record once his training was complete, Jean-Paul found the prospect of officially joining Alpha Flight less and less attractive. He decided to quit the program, only to have his plans disrupted when his sister’s dissociative identity disorder manifested during a life-fire training exercise, reducing her to her panicked Jeanne-Marie persona and nearly causing disaster.
Despite what Jean-Paul considered an unacceptable risk to his sister’s well-being, Department H insisted that her condition was manageable and indicated that, should she wish it, she would be allowed to remain with the program. Trying to talk his sister into leaving with him proved fruitless and, as he still did not trust the team or Department H to have his sister’s best interests at heart, Jean-Paul opted to stay with Alpha Flight in the hopes that he could eventually convince Jeanne-Marie to leave. With his course now set, Jean-Paul took the initiative to out himself as a mutant in 1990, citing his own reasons for doing so and leaving the team, along with Department H, out of the initial publicity. This meant that he had to return the gold medals he’d won in the 1988 Olympics, but once Jean-Paul fully understood what he was, he came to the conclusion that there was no way he could know whether or not he’d unconsciously used his powers to aide him during the competition.
Later that same year, Jean-Paul made another attempt to reconcile with Jeanne-Marie, offering to take her to Montreal for a weekend to see the neighbourhood where he’d grown up and to meet Belmonde, whom he viewed as the closest thing to a father-figure he’d ever had. The visit was going well, only to take a tragic turn when Jean-Paul took his sister on a tour of Belmonde’s bistro, including the upstairs apartment. When they returned to the front of the business, it was to find Belmonde being menaced by a local thug named Ernest St. Ives who had been hired as the muscle in a kidnapping and extortion scheme devised by Belmonde’s own daughter.
Unbeknownst to his employer, St. Ives possessed an uncontrolled death-touch. St. Ives tried to make sure he got away by threatening Belmonde, but the old man fought his grip. St. Ives tried to immobilise him with a hold on the back of his neck, but that first touch killed Belmonde. The shock of witnessing the murder caused Jeanne-Marie’s timid persona to emerge again, which distracted Jean-Paul just enough for St. Ives to recover faster than him. He dropped the body and took Jeanne-Marie as his new hostage, thus ensuring his escape.
Once he’d gotten to one of his safehouses, St. Ives contacted his partner, Belmonde’s daughter, in a panic, demanding that she help him. However, she refused and hung up on him, having learned of her father’s death. Jean-Paul arrived shortly thereafter, having tracked Jeanne-Marie via their mental link. Only the combination of St. Ives’ healing factor and Jeanne-Marie’s more stable persona coming to the fore kept Jean-Paul from killing the man outright. She managed to talk him down, then contacted the authorities so that St. Ives could be taken into custody. St. Ives quickly gave up his partner, Belmonde’s daughter, leaving Jean-Paul furious, heartsick, and feeling very isolated.
With nowhere else to channel his anger, he rounded on Jeanne-Marie, accusing her of whoring herself out to St. Ives to preserve her own life. She declared their affiliation dissolved, retreating to Department H and her relationship with Langkowski. Begging her lover to help her differentiate her powers from her brother’s, Jeanne-Marie managed to convince him that it was for the best. Langkowski devised an experimental procedure that ultimately put Aurora’s powers in a state of flux, severed her mental link with her brother, and caused the twins’ powers to neutralise each other upon physical contact.
For his part, Jean-Paul managed to hold himself together until after St. Ives’ trial and sentencing. He then fell into a self-destructive spiral of alcoholic binges and one-night stands in an effort to keep the emotions associated with Belmonde’s death and his estrangement from his sister at bay. It took an HIV scare to snap him out of it and, while he wasn’t sure what was worth living for, Jean-Paul was entirely certain of the fact that he didn’t want to die whilst wasting away in a hospital bed. He approached Jeanne-Marie once more in the hopes of salvaging their relationship and, to a limited extent, they managed to forgive one another. They remained infamous for fighting and reconciling throughout their time in Alpha Flight though.
It was at this point in his life that he chose to pursue higher education, applying to and being accepted by the Université de Montréal. There he studied Literature and History, earning an undergraduate degree in English Studies and Comparative Literature before going on to receive his Masters in Comparative Literature.
Jean-Paul spent some time backpacking through the French countryside after being outed as a gay man in 1994 and, on a whim, joined the D’Arbanville Circus there using the alias “Paul Martin.” He took a spot amongst their acrobats, where he quickly learned the ins and outs of being a trapeze artist. It was while he was with the Circus that Jean-Paul developed a close friendship with the owner’s daughter, Clementine D’Arbanville. He confided his true identity to her and they remain in somewhat sporadic contact.
The final blow to the twins’ relationship came in December of 2003 after they made plans to spend Christmas together. Jeanne-Marie decided to bring Langkowski along, since their on-again, off-again relationship was on once more. Neither twin had the faintest idea that Langkowski would propose at dinner that first night. Jean-Paul suddenly found himself alone at age 34 without much of a future, still half in love with and half despising his sister’s new fiancé. Visibly shaken, he gave Jeanne-Marie and Langkowski the cold shoulder.
Hurt that her brother could not be happy for her on such a joyous occasion, Jean-Marie confronted Jean-Paul about his behaviour, sparking a harsh argument between them. The argument boiled over into recriminations and accusations, ending with both Beaubiers convinced this was the end of their partnership.
Alone again and at the low point of a depressingly familiar cycle, Jean-Paul came to the decision that he could no longer continue his work with Alpha Flight. He resigned from the program in January of 2004.
Enter: Second Chance
Not long after parting ways with Alpha Flight, Jean-Paul received a job offer from Charles Xavier. Though the opportunity was unexpected, Jean-Paul was intrigued and relocated to Westchester, NY with his cat, Delphine. He soon developed a protective mentorship with Clarice Ferguson. In addition to his teaching duties, Jean-Paul began to train with the X-Men, thinking he could at least put his tactical training with Alpha Flight to further use. It turned out to be a wise choice – only a month after his arrival, one of his students, Shiro Yoshida, made a suicidal attempt to burn out his powers. Though Jean-Paul managed to keep him from plummeting to his death, he absorbed a lethal amount of radiation during the rescue. It was only due to an application of mystic healing by Amanda Sefton that Jean-Paul survived. Even so, he spent an utterly miserable span of time in the medlab recovering from the effects of radiation poisoning.
In September of 2004, Jean-Paul was once again reunited with his sister after she appeared on the school’s doorstep. Sam Guthrie found her and took the disoriented woman to the infirmary so she could be checked out. There, Jeanne-Marie proceeded to mistake Henry McCoy for Walter and attacked him, stopping her assault only when Jean-Paul came down to retrieve her. Despite the fact that Jeanne-Marie’s DID had left her more mentally unbalanced than ever, the twins once again reconciled and Aurora remained at the school.
Though he was relieved to see his sister again, Jean-Paul was dismayed by her precarious mental state, a condition apparently exacerbated by months of mistreatment at the hands of the doctors within the mental institution where she'd been committed by her former fiancé, Langkowski. Beyond sharing that bit of information with Jean-Paul, his sister would say nothing of what else had happened while they’d been separated and refused to talk about Langkowski.
Only three months after arriving at the school, Jean-Paul departed Xavier’s School for his sister’s sake, feeling it would be best for them to return to Canada so Jean-Marie could be away from the relative chaos of the school.
Exit: Sure Footing
Upon leaving Xavier’s, Jean-Paul retired to his home in Laval with Jeanne-Marie, hoping the quiet, semi-rural environment, combined with the presence of someone she trusted, would help quiet the turmoil in her mind. Jean-Marie’s mental state continued to deteriorate, swinging from dangerously fractured to guilt-wracked lucidity. She alternately cursed or attacked Jean-Paul, then pled for his forgiveness or begged him not to send her away. Spurred on by equal parts arrogance and concern, Jean-Paul obeyed her wishes.
After an incident that led to Jeanne-Marie literally killing his cat with kindness, Jean-Paul became reluctant to leave his sister alone for more than a few minutes. This resulted in a deepening of their unhealthy co-dependence. Finally, Jean-Paul’s smothering devotion caused Jean-Marie to lash out, leaving him unconscious, battered, and bleeding. In the aftermath of the attack, Jeanne-Marie had a moment of lucidity during which she realised what she’d done. Horrified, she alerted James and Heather Hudson to her brother’s condition and fled. She left Jean-Paul a brief note, stating that she intended to come to peace with herself alone or die in the attempt.
Jean-Paul searched for Jean-Marie for over a year, but his efforts were in vain. At last, he decided to move forward with his life, though there was a part of him that remained braced for his sister to return out of the blue once more and scatter whatever peace he’d manage to find.
New Lease, Old Life
Lacking any other direction in his life, Jean-Paul contacted Xavier about possibly returning to his teaching position at the school. Despite the fact that there were fewer students in attendance than during his previous tenure, Xavier seemed willing to have him back on the staff and Jean-Paul returned to the school in November of 2008. He spent the remainder of the fall semester acting as an aide to other teachers, quickly renewing old friendships with Scott, Shiro, and Nathan whilst trying to decide whether or not he wanted to rejoin the X-Men. He was, unfortunately, unable to reestablish his former ties with Clarice Ferguson.
It took some time to acclimate to life at the mansion after years of near-hermitage, but in January of 2009, Jean-Paul finally decided to return to teaching full-time rather than rejoining the X-Men. He reached this conclusion after participating in a mission during which several allies of the X-Men who had been presumed dead were found alive.
As his initial teaching stint at the school had lasted less than three months, Jean-Paul had more than a few doubts as to how well he’d take to this second attempt. However, to his surprise, he found himself enjoying both the literature classes he’d been assigned and his interaction with the students themselves. Among his students, he struck up especially close bonds with Noriko Ashida, whom he tutored in the finer points of living as a speedster, Catseye, and Johnny Gallo.
In early April, the Sûreté du Québec contacted Jean-Paul, informing him that Ernest St. Ives had escaped from prison and managed to once again take hostages. Attempts to negotiate with the man had failed and St. Ives had made it clear that he would speak only with Jean-Paul, even going so far as to threaten to kill hostages if his demands were not met. Despite knowing that this was almost certainly a trap, Jean-Paul responded to the call. Upon his arrival, he found that St. Ives had taken an entire family hostage in their own basement. St. Ives released two members of the family, but kept back the third, an old man, for the purpose of goading Jean-Paul and tormenting him with reminders of his failure to prevent Belmonde’s death. In the end, St. Ives moved to kill his hostage with his power, but Jean-Paul managed to kill him before he could. Jean-Paul was detained by the Canadian authorities for several days of questioning, but the homicide was ultimately deemed justifiable and he was released without being charged.
Deeply shaken by the experience, Jean-Paul opted to spend some time on Muir Island with Nathan Dayspring and his family. His return to the school wasn’t the quiet affair that he might have hoped for, since the Stepford Cuckoos had skimmed the information about Jean-Paul’s absence from Johnny Gallo’s mind after the boy inadvertently eavesdropped on a conversation between Scott Summers and Jean-Paul himself. They began spreading rumours through the school that led Jean-Paul to make a statement on the journal system so he could set the record straight.
Shortly after his return from Quebec, Jean-Paul struck up a friendship with Jake Gavin. That friendship quickly transitioned into a physical relationship. However, despite the fact that the two shared an affinity for good books, good food, and good sex, Jean-Paul hoped for something a little more committed and the thought of that sort of commitment made Jake skittish.
Mnemovore: Infirm Of Mind
In June of 2009, Nathan and Jean-Paul were ambushed by Taygetos personnel on their return from a trip to assist with an Elpis-involved athletics program in Moldova. The mission was headed by a telepath called Shrine who intended to capture Nathan. However, during the ambush Nathan was inadvertently teleported away when Shrine’s indiscriminate mental attacks caught his own team’s teleporter in their wake. Having lost their primary target, the Taygetos operatives took Jean-Paul instead, transporting him to one of their safe houses in a secluded part of Romania.
There, Jean-Paul was telepathically interrogated and tortured by Shrine in the hopes of turning him into a weapon that could be used when Nathan inevitably attempted to rescue his friend. However, due to an unforeseen disruption during the reprogramming process, Shrine found his weapon turning against him. By the time the rescue team arrived, headed by Jean Grey and a recovered Nathan, the Taygetos personnel were dead. The speedster, who had been driven to a psychotic break by Shrine’s mental violations, responded to the team’s presence by trying to kill them much the way he’d killed the Taygetos personnel.
The X-Men subdued Jean-Paul and stripped the safe house of any useful information before Shiro razed it to the ground. They then returned to the mansion where Nathan, Jean, and Xavier began the difficult process of restoring Jean-Paul’s mind. The friendship between Nathan and Jean-Paul was critical to this process, as it was only the trust that Jean-Paul had in the other man that allowed Nathan to venture deep enough into the speedster’s mind to locate and preserve the parts of Jean-Paul not despoiled during the reprogramming process.
Once Jean-Paul regained control of his own mind, the full weight of what he had done to the Taygetos personnel, combined with the lingering images of atrocities that Shrine had implanted in his mind, proved to be too much for him to cope with all at once. Within a week of his return to consciousness, he broke off his tenuous relationship with Jake and attempted to commit suicide. Xavier rightly felt it best to install partial memory blocks in Jean-Paul’s mind so that he could deal with the aftermath of the event at a rate that his still-healing mind could bear.
Jean-Paul’s traumatic experiences at the hands of Shrine and the Taygetos personnel forced open the long-dormant mental bond with his sister, Jeanne-Marie. Feeling her twin’s distress, she managed to track him down and the estranged siblings were, once again, reunited. Jean-Paul and his sister resided at the school, each trying to acclimate to life there while he attempted to come to terms with what had transpired in Romania and resumed his teaching duties.
They soon discovered that, due to some as yet unknown factor, most likely to do with Jean-Paul’s torture and the subsequent repairs to his mind, the twins’ powers ceased negating each other. When they touched skin to skin, they could once again create a pure, white light – a part of their combined powers which had been lost after Jeanne-Marie asked Langkowski to alter her powers in 2004.
Desperate Times
After Shiro’s psychotic break in Japan and Jean-Paul’s participation in his rescue, Xavier suggested that it would be wise for them both to travel to Muir Island for more intensive therapy. Jeanne-Marie accompanied them so that the twins could work with Moira MacTaggart to better understand their powers. The three relocated in September of 2009, bidding temporary farewell to the school and their friends there.
As part of his therapy, Jean-Paul agreed to begin systematically working through the events that led up to his kidnapping and torture. An unforeseen consequence of this therapy wound up being that some of the blocks Xavier put in place in his mind loosened, shifted, and settled somewhere else in his mind. About a month into their stay on Muir this caused him to lose the ability to create the light that he and Jeanne-Marie had just recently begun to explore with Dr. MacTaggart’s help. It was a loss which upset Jean-Paul intensely. He also began having nightmares about his torture, something which kept him from sleeping well.
It was during another therapy session while attempting to regain the ability to create light with Jeanne-Marie that a series of implanted memories surfaced and triggered a visceral reaction from Jean-Paul. That reaction took the form of a full-body concussive blast. The unfocused energy didn’t harm anyone, but it severely unnerved Jean-Paul and he called an immediate halt to all the therapy he’d been taking part in, effectively cutting himself off from Jeanne-Marie. Unable to cope with the distance he’d put between himself and his sister, Jean-Paul decided to leave Muir Island.
In short, he fled.
Desperate Measures
After flying across the Atlantic, a feat which left him exhausted and in dire need of rest, Jean-Paul collapsed in a motel in Virginia before picking up where he’d left off somewhere in his late twenties. He began yet another downward spiral of self-destruction. He drank to dull the memories he didn’t want to have, had sex to make himself forget that he was alone, and avoided people he used to know. Ashamed and wanting nothing more than to return to the way things once were before he was tortured and lost himself, Jean-Paul found himself moving from one city to another.
Whilst in Boston, MA in December of 2009 Jean-Paul met a man named Stewart Bernard with whom he had very brief, purely sexual relations. Brief because the morning after that first night, Bernard tried to rob Jean-Paul, manually restraining him and implying that he would rape him before leaving the motel where they'd spent the night. The restraint, more than the implied physical violation, triggered another concussive blast that sent Bernard staggering backward. Once again unnerved – and now frightened of the fact that he had no control over this power and no way to understand it by himself, Jean-Paul made the grudging decision to seek help from Xavier.
Reluctant to expose himself as being vulnerable, though, Jean-Paul kept his enquiries quiet and waited to hear from Xavier as to whether or not he would once again be welcome at the mansion. One thing he specifically requested when contacting the older mutant was that he not be put on teaching duty, as he felt his powers were now too unpredictable to let him safely instruct students in any field. Mostly, though, he’s just not sure what might trigger another blast and would like to keep possible injuries to a minimum.
Prodigal Speedster Returns
Taking up residence in a hostel in District X, Jean-Paul tried - and failed - to continue avoiding people while he waited from word from Professor Xavier. However he ran into Amanda Sefton, which set off a series of events that ultimately led him to reunite with former friend, Morgan Lennox. After leading Jubilee on a very long tour of New York City in an effort to bore her to tears and demonstrate to various Snow Valley employees that he was not, in fact, a threat to the school, Jean-Paul heard back from Professor Xavier and made his return to the mansion.
There, he continued - still with very limited/nonexistent success - to avoid people, but managed to (literally) run into many former friends and acquaintances.
In February, Jean-Paul began a brief sexual relationship with John Allerdyce while juggling reemerging friendships and acquaintances. He began working with Dr. McCoy in an attempt to cope with the concussive blasts he produced when suffering through a nightmare, though he was somewhat happily distracted when Vanessa asked for his help in disposing of the bodies of several men who tried to kill her. Catseye triggered a concussive blast, though she was unhurt.
April saw Jean-Paul heading to India with the majority of the other mansion residents in an effort to assist refugees there. He helped set up the train to hold as many people as possible, working with Kevin Ford and Yvette Petrovic, and then wound up helping to repair the tracks ahead of the train with John Allerdyce - Jean-Paul kept the Imperial Guard at bay long enough for John to weld the tracks back into place. He and Kevin began a relationship, somewhat suddenly, and Jean-Paul found himself thoroughly medicated in an effort to suppress the pain caused by the burns he sustained in India.
With Jake Gavin's return to the US, Jean-Paul wound up being far more surly than usual and certainly more antisocial. They managed to smooth things over in July, though, which left Jean-Paul free to get into a semi-argument with Garrison Kane about the fact that he hadn't attended the funeral services for the members of Alpha Flight who died the previous year. He began assisting Vanessa with her investigation of Haven and the events of Butterflies and Hurricanes. At the end of July, though, whilst having a nightmare, Jean-Paul sent off a concussive blast that threw Kevin into a wall and left the Southerner with several cracked ribs.
Overcome with guilt, Jean-Paul left the mansion without telling Kevin where he was going. An incident with Jean Grey triggered another concussive blast but left him free to pursue several leads for Vanessa - out of state and very, very far away from Kevin. He returned and went to check on the Southerner, only to wind up officially breaking things off with him "for Kevin's own good." Shortly thereafter, Kevin took his mutation back from Derek Barnes and injured himself a bit more thoroughly, so Jean-Paul made him chicken and dumplings and they decided to try being just friends. Two days later, however, after a somewhat confusing conversation, they got back together.
Since Kevin was still recovering from his injuries, Jean-Paul volunteered to take his place in Red X Mission: Firestorm. He came home sooty and exhausted, but feeling something akin to content. His work with X-Factor Investigations continued and saw Jean-Paul flying to other parts of the country while trying to scrounge up some kind of information on Nicholas Gleason's whereabouts once Kurt Wagner hired the Agency after the conclusion of A Betrayal of Heart.
Same Old Story
That work came back and bit him, though, when he and Kevin simultaneously realized that they were seeing far less of one another than they had in the summer. Upon coming to a mutual, if mostly unspoken, agreement, Jean-Paul began slowly moving his things out of Kevin's suite and into his apartment in the city. Things were still complicated between them, but they both had the space they needed to accomplish their major goals.
Jean-Paul killed multiple people during the final raid on Telford Porter's safehouse while rescuing Doug Ramsey's sister in Fianchetto. He felt surprisingly little remorse for his actions and, in fact, thought he'd been quite justified given Porter's history of human trafficking.
After working with the rest of X-Factor, Laura Kinney more often than not, to track down several mutants who'd gone missing in District X, Jean-Paul and the team caught up with Karl Lykos in Dinosaur Bugaloo. The Quebecois wound up having a bit of his life force stolen by the energy vampire, but spoke with Laurie Collins and Dr Jean Grey-Summers to make sure he hadn't actually lost years from his life due to the experience.
March saw Jean-Paul entering into a strange, vaguely romantic triangle of sorts with his friend, Vanessa Carlysle, and a man named William Bower that they met at Zeitgeist in District X. Vanessa's participation tapered off, though, and Jean-Paul began casually dating Will while maintaining his friends-with-benefits status with Kevin Ford.
Jean-Paul took part in the X-Factor Investigation: Cathouse, putting himself in the highly uncomfortable position of essentially nonverbally consenting to Laura's particular part in the investigation. This was despite the fact that the decision to have her go inside was made without his knowledge and he was only informed of this after the fact. She was of legal age and, logistically speaking, having her placed there was for the best. The worst part of the experience for Jean-Paul was that he was put on surveillance with Crystal Amaquelin and Vanessa, watching the brothel without actually being able to do anything about what was going on inside - and given the bruises many of the girls were sporting, he knew fairly well what sort of treatment they were receiving. He managed to exact some small form of revenge when he subdued one of the main enforcers at the end of the plot.
Jean-Paul participated in Aftershocks with the rest of X-Factor, working with Laura to capture the person responsible for the seemingly random murders that began popping up across New York City. He investigated the girl's apartment specifically and found it incredibly disturbing.
Denmark via Argentina and Homeward
Continuing to work, Jean-Paul's relationship with Will faded as they spent less and less time together, ultimately ending amiably when Jean-Paul accepted a job that saw him leaving the city more often than not to see to a young socialite's protection in May 2011. When a kidnapping attempt almost succeeded, the socialite's father decided it would be safer for her to travel abroad and the Quebecois agreed to accompany her. They went first to Argentina, where another attempt was made to kidnap the girl, and then on to Denmark, where they stayed for several months. During this time, Jean-Paul had no access to the internet and was, for the most part, alright with that. He believed that, if anything important happened at home, someone would call him. However, after checking the Xavier's journals from a cafe in Denmark, he realized that was not, in fact, the case.
Vanessa Carlysle had been missing and had been found, but she was in a coma. Jean-Paul put in his notice with his employers, suggested someone to replace him, and took the two and a half hour flight over the Atlantic within hours. He arrived and met Adrienne Frost in front of the mansion, then collapsed for almost 24 hours to recoup. After speaking with Jean to get a better idea of Vanessa's condition, Jean-Paul set about stress baking, making both cookies and pies in mass quantities. He also spent a good deal of time with Adrienne, Warren Worthington, and Jean, even going so far as to take part in an impromptu birthday dinner for Jean in the Danger Room. Luckily, Vanessa was brought out of her induced coma on November 1 and, after waiting patiently, the friends were able to speak.
Jean-Paul worked small cases at X-Factor Investigations, notably the last he worked with Laura Kinney before she left the mansion to go to Georgia to be with Kevin Ford. He also occupied his time by making sure Vanessa didn't do bodily harm to the husbands of certain clients and generally getting reacquainted with life in New York. Notably, he helped Warren find space in which to set up his legal practice and became getting more interested in the ways in which he might help with the further development of District X.
Following the Genosha incident, during which he was kidnapped along with the rest of the group at the embassy but managed to escape with Artie Maddicks and later rejoin the resistance, Jean-Paul decided to leave New York to give himself some time to recover and try to work on his powers issues where he would not endanger others. His intended destination was France and the circus he had previously worked with in his youth.
Physical Characteristics
Height: 5' 11"
Weight: 180 lbs
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black
Other Features: Jean-Paul has subtly pointed ears. He has quite a few scars, several of which he acquired during his stewardship of his sister: a short, jagged one which nearly obliterated the Gemini tattoo over his heart and two razor-thin white lines – one across the right side of his throat, the other low on his stomach. There was a tattoo on his left bicep, the kanji for 'hashiru no sensei', but Jean-Paul has recently had it covered by a partial sleeve, the Tower tarot card, as drawn by Louis Royo. He also has a bite mark on the left side of his neck, given to him by Kevin Ford in the summer of 2010.
Powers
Jean-Paul is a flight-capable speedster. It is a power which manifested in his mid-teens. However, it wasn’t until he was nearly nineteen that the full extent of his superspeed and the accompanying flight kicked in. He is exceptionally agile, able to reach incredible speeds on land (500 MPH, which he can maintain for approximately four hours before needing to rest) and in the air (roughly Mach 2, which he can maintain for around two hours before needing to rest), however pushing these limits puts a great strain on his system. Ignoring the limits of his abilities will result in Jean-Paul arriving at his destination sweat-lathered, body starving for oxygen, heart rate through the roof, and all his reserves drained. In the event that such a journey was necessary he would need to rest and recuperate for a day or so, usually whilst sleeping, to fully recover. It takes longer for him to recover from excessive exertion now than it did when he was twenty-two.
His mutation increases his metabolism, causing it to work faster than the human norm. This condition is exacerbated by his athletic activities. Jean-Paul, therefore, burns through a great deal of fuel very quickly and has to keep a close eye on what he eats to ensure he’s getting both enough calories and the proper nutrition. A side-effect of his rapid metabolism is that Jean-Paul has a minor healing factor and recovers from injuries significantly faster than a normal human. An example of this would be that, if he broke his arm, it would take around two weeks for him to have full functionality of the limb, as opposed to the typical four weeks or more for a non-mutant.
Jean-Paul’s mutation also provides him with something akin to overall durability whilst traveling at high speeds, allowing him to withstand the ravages of wind, friction, and air turbulence. Though this aspect of his mutation provides him with a certain amount of protection from damage caused by high-velocity collisions (he won’t break his own neck if he runs into a wall at full tilt), Jean-Paul can knock himself out if he slams into objects at high speeds. This increased durability also gives him a certain amount of protection from blunt-force trauma when he’s moving at superhuman speeds. However knives, claws, and bladed weapons can easily slice through his defences.
His power has no bearing on his strength when he’s not moving at superspeeds. He is, in fact, only as strong as a normal human man of his height and build, though he’s at peak physical condition for a man his age. That said, his powers increase the speed of all of Jean-Paul’s movements, which means he’s not only capable of flight, but can also move individual parts of his body at great speed independently of one another, which means he’s capable of delivering jackhammer-speed blows to opponents. This also allows him to avoid or outmaneuver most opponents.
He possesses the same vulnerability to the elements and injury as most humans, save a resistance to extremes of cold. This resistance comes from the kinetic energy he uses to propel himself, the molecular friction within Jean-Paul’s body, which causes him to run a bit warmer than most people. He is, however, just as vulnerable to mental attacks as any normal human.
Due to Langkowski's experiment, from 1990 - 2009 contact with his twin sister, Jeanne-Marie, would nullify Jean-Paul's powers; this could last for up to a full day, but typically wore off after an hour or so. In August of 2009, following the renewal of their mental link, Northstar and Aurora's powers appeared to have begun functioning as they had originally, with physical contact between the twins resulting in an intense flare of white light. However, time at Muir Island has demonstrated that the flare of light between them is unstable, even when they are touching, and Jean-Paul left the island before more than cursory research into the problem could be done.
Jean-Paul can send out concussive blasts from his body, but this is a new development that he doesn’t understand and which he can’t, at the moment, consciously trigger. The only times he’s managed it have been when he felt threatened and as though he’d been backed into a corner – on Muir Island and then in a seedy motel in Boston, MA. Meaning, ultimately, that his concussive blasts are purely defensive and that he cannot control them.
Due to his focus on physical fitness, Northstar's endurance and strength are at peak human levels for his size and build.
Equipment
Despite his distaste for the years spent in Alpha Flight, Northstar has kept his costume from his days in the program, as it is the only clothing he owns that will not be destroyed while moving at extreme velocities.
External Links
Phase 1
Trivia
Jean-Paul hates being called JP and, since his psychotic break, only Logan has been able to get away with calling him Paul. Somehow, Lil gets away with calling him "Speedy".
He is gay, very much out, and casual about his sexuality.
He remains something of a fitness freak and wakes up at five almost every morning for two hours of exercise before starting his day.
Jean-Paul owns a bistro in Montreal's Le Village gai, though he has little to do with the day-to-day operation of the place.
He loves carrots and will frequent Chinese restaurants if given half a chance.
Plots
2004
2009
2010
A Betrayal of Heart (X-Factor investigation after the fact)
2011
Fianchetto (X-Factor raid on Porter's NYC safehouse)
X-Factor Investigation: Cathouse
2012
Meta
Player:
E-mail:
AIM:
Player Icon Base: Logan Marshall-Green
Meta Trivia
Formerly played by Ande with the journal x_vega. Apped by Suzene in October 2008, who left the game in September 2009 and who took the journal x_cynosure with her.
x_quebecois was created by the mods to avoid the loss of any more Northstar journals. Formerly PBed by Olivier Martinez.
Picked up by Cai in January 2010. She let him go in June 2012. Jinx adopted him in November 2012 but left shortly afterwards. By player agreement, her tenure was retconned to make the character easier to apply for.
