Template:Featured Articles/19-2008

100px Cannonball: Sam Guthrie grew up on a farm in Kentucky, the eldest of a multitude of brothers and sisters. His father died when he was young, and his mother has been running the place alone ever since, though recently her health has been declining and Sam has been returning home on a more regular basis to assist her with the farm and family. Upon the death of his father, Sam took on the 'man of the house' role, leaving school to work in one of the local coal mines. Sam first discovered his powers as a teenager when he was trapped in a collapsing mine while working. He was able to blast out using a burst of thermo-kinetic energy that manifested as a rocket-like propulsion device. He was discovered by Professor Charles Xavier after a little incident (about which Cannonball's fairly secretive) and brought to the school. Sam attended Xavier's as a graduate student and TA, acting as a bridge between the older staff and graduates and the younger students. His easy-going nature and love of children were especial assets in that regard. He experimented with his bisexuality in the form of a tentative flirtation with Piotr Rasputin, but then began a relationship with Alison Blaire. They drifted apart, however, under the demands of Sam's loyalty to his family and the team. He was away frequently in 2003 and 2004, either returning to the family farm to assist his mother or completing his pilot's training as part of his X-Man duties. When Alison later began dating Haroun, Sam suffered pangs of jealousy and regret, recognizing he had let a chance slip him by. The arrival of his sister Paige at the school, whilst a happy event, led to tension between the siblings. Paige blamed him for abandoning her and the family, for which Sam felt guilty, and Sam disapproved of Paige's romantic choices, especially when she began dating both Jono Starsmore and Angelo Espinosa at the same time. They fought about this, and the relationship never really was the same again. Sam was marginally more successful with his brother Jay, despite the latter's hostility and persecution complex - the brothers eventually were able to work past mutual misunderstandings about lifestyle choices and became closer than they had previously. As Cannonball, Sam participated in numerous X-Men missions over the years, proving himself to be capable, ambitious and calm under pressure. This led him to become second-in-command to Cyclops, a position Sam both revelled in (he had hero-worshipped the older man for some time) and found frustrating, as Cyclops had a tendency to take too much work on himself and not use his XO to his fullest capacity. Sam taught Flight, Government and American History at the school, and shares a suite with Kurt Wagner, with whom he shares a sense of religious faith and family loyalty. In September 2007, he received news that his mother had taken a bad fall and injured herself. After some argument, he was able to convince her that he would come home and help around the house since she was unable to move around. Sam's power creates a field of unknown energy approximately four inches from his body and anything he's in contact with of approximately equal mass. This field has a unique property of reacting with oxygen and carbon dioxide to create an exothermic combustion reaction. Sam has enough instinctive control to direct this reaction downwards along the length of the field as thrust, but cannot summon the blast field without the combustion reaction happening. This character is currently unplayed, but is open for applications. If you are interested in applying for this character, you can contact the mods at x_moderators @ googlegroups . com and you can find the application form here.