Artie Maddicks

PHASE 1

PHASE 2

Artie Maddicks
Portrayed by Jay Baruchel
Codename:
Affiliations:	X-Force
Birthdate:	December 5, 1992

Journal:	xp_artie
Player:	Al

Artie has been a student at the school since 2002, using his telepathic holograms to communicate with others. He is now working with X-Force and learning forgery.

Details

Character Journal: xp_artie

Real Name: Artie Maddicks

Codename: None

Aliases: None

Occupation: Student at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters

First appearance: May 14, 2003 (referenced)

Family: Unknown.

Date of Birth: 5th December, 1992

Place of Birth: Unknown

Citizenship: American

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

Education: Artie graduated from Xavier's School in 2012. 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 studied 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: X-Force

Biography

Childhood

Artie was born in 1992 but remembered very little about his childhood for a long time. His mother Catherine died when he born and shortly thereafter, his father Carl moved to New York. Once in New York, Carl entrusted all care of his child to a nanny, Stephanie Smith, while he searched for a cure to his son's mutancy. That search later evolved into other, illegal, research on mutants. It is unclear whether Stephanie abandoned Artie in Central Park or was empathically coerced into doing so. Carl, at that stage unwilling to have the police look into his life in any way, bribed Stephanie to not mention the disappearance of his son and moved again, first to Houston and then overseas.

Artie, now being fostered by Annalee, the Morlock empath somehow survived the Morlock Massacre when he was seven and was cared for by the survivors for a period after that. For a long time he remembered very little from those years with the experiences almost completely divorced from his current life. What he did remember was fragmentary: he was frequently cold and hungry and was taught that darker places were, by definition, safer. He remembered once watching people ice skate in a park from a distance and being afraid of rats.

He barely recalled Annalee and didn'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. He was presumed to be about eight or nine years old, though this was at best a guess based on his weight, height and medical history, though corroborated by a later story of “choosing” his own birthday while in the tunnels. For a long time his most dominant memory from those years was that of her abandoning him to the mansion's custody.

Phase 1

Life At The Mansion

Artie has been at the school since 2002, and 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. It was another piece of the puzzle, with Artie himself not remembering any of this.

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 Research Center, Artie lost most of his friends. He roomed for a while with Leong Manh, brother to Xuân, and along with Leong's sister Nga and Shiro's little sister Leyu, was 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'.

In addition to studying at the mansion, for many years Artie also took ASL lessons in New York City as he is unable to talk and would otherwise be forced to always rely either on mechanical communication or his powers.

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 suffered from severe, chronic tonsillitis as a result of the changes to his throat and neck caused by his powers though 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 2008, 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.

Artie moved on from that, 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 saw 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 envied those students with more readily "useful" and cooler powers and found the fact that he constantly had 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 rejoined the New Mutants in May, 2010 and created a firm friendship with Dori over several months. He also struck up a friendship with Megan following her return to the mansion in December 2010.

He roomed with Matt Murdock from March 2011 and his discontent with aspects of his life continued to show up as he ran into some issues relating to his mutation at the school he studied ASL in, getting suspended for fighting and tried to use his powers to buy alcohol. He began powers training with Marie-Ange and used his powers to play tricks on both Kyle and Laurie Collins. He was finally beginning to explore the limits of what he could do with his powers, rather than simply using them for communication.

Back To Where It All Began

In April 2011, Artie discovered that the vast majority of his childhood memories had been empathically suppressed by Annalee. This kicked off the events of My Long Forgotten Son. He ran into his old foster mother, Annalee, now living on the streets in District X and had an awkward first meeting with her. It quickly turned into a friendship, with Annalee, who was 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 began to cut school in order to visit her and started using his powers to run small scams to get the money he needed to properly look after her so that she doesn't, as he said, have to eat "dumpster food". (This later backfired, with Mr Haller discovering that Artie covered his absences with a series of forged notes stating that he was suffering glandular fever and Artie found himself facing summer school after flunking out of most of his classes.) He was also briefly caught up in Afterlife, and finds himself holding a tea party for a long dead child ghost.

In May, Artie visited Sarah M. after a powers training session to talk to her about reconnecting with Annalee and isn't happy with Sarah's response. She said that there's nothing left for them in that life and advised him to move on. Artie ignored her and, a week later, while visiting Annalee, he told her about some of the less safe elements of his life at the mansion, as his returning memories of life in the Morlock tunnels were starting to influence the way he saw the world and were making him increasingly paranoid and leaving him feeling continually unsafe.

Ten days later, the next time they met, she offered to let him come and live in the Tunnels again, this time reinforcing the offer with empathic coercion. Artie was left believing that the only sensible course of action is to lure the other New Mutants into the Tunnels where Annalee would turn them into Morlocks, recreating the family she lost in the Massacre.

Artie introduced 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-Men set 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 upset Artie and he picked a fight with everyone on the journals, in particular Kyle, Molly and Matt. Matt eventually became fed up and beat up Artie, cracking his ribs in the process. The two have had little to do with each other since then.

Moving On

Artie eventually made 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, though nothing came of that until February 2013, with the search pushed onto the backburner while he finished high school in June 2012. He continued to work on powers training with Marie-Ange, eventually becoming introduced to some of her art forger friends. He dabbled in petty crime, feeding money to the Morlocks he remained in contact with and doing what he can to look after them.

He was kidnapped by the Genoshans along with many other mansion residents but avoided captivity when Jean-Paul Beaubier grabbed him during an escape attempt. On the run with Sooraya Qadir and Jean-Paul, he eventually met up with the rescue team in the city where he found himself stealing information and supplies and using his powers to help kill Magistrates before working with Marie-Ange to combine their powers in the eventual fight for freedom.

Once home, Artie found himself deeply shaken by everything he'd experienced. He stepped up his powers training, trying to find ways to weaponise his powers and increasing the range of what he could do and began semi-clandestine shooting lessons to avoid being helpless in a fight again.

In August 2012, he was caught up in a riot while at the Joyful Noixe festival.

In December 2012, Artie was stabbed in the head when he was caught up in an attack on X-Force while staying overnight at Marie-Ange's apartment in the Brownstone and survived only because Amanda used a healing spell fuelled by the life forces of the assassins who had attacked the apartment.

After recovering, he added fight training with Sarah Morlock to his routine.

In February 2013, Amanda and Jennifer Walters contacted him with the results of their search for his parents. He learned that his father had covered up his disappearance and that Annalee had (possibly intentionally) lied about his age to him, leaving him roughly a year older than he had thought. He found this hard to deal with and shortly thereafter left the mansion to process this new information.

After drifting for a few weeks he wound up heading to Atlantic City where he decided to use his powers to cheat while gambling. He was eventually caught working a craps table in Arcade's casino. After being beaten by Arcade's security he was sent to retrieve a drive from Arcade's old lover Lorina Dodson as a way of making restitution for what he'd done to Arcade.

The attempt failed and he was captured and beaten and eventually rescued by X-Force.

On returning to New York, Artie retreated to a safe house in the Morlock tunnels for a few weeks before approaching Remy for a job with X-Force. His cover degree was as an art student and he began to learn to shoot, building up the skills that run in tandem with his powers to become a more effective member of the team, taking part in missions.

Phase 2

In Phase 2, Artie was shellshocked and traumatised by the changes to the world, slowly getting used to how things are now, continuing to work more actively with X-Force.

He threw himself into work for a year, dropping back on his cover identity as an art student as much as possible in order to infiltrate the mutant underground along the US East Coast, where his persona of a homeless low level mutant with physical mutations but no powers allowed him to slip into their confidences.

At home, he lived in the mansion with the rest of X Force, trying to ignore the new versions of people he knew wherever possible. He took part in various missions, some more traumatic than others.

His new ruthlessness was shown in Jungbrunnen.

Emotionally, he's getting by. He isn't doing well and all the distractions of work haven't hid the fact that he's closed himself off from most of his friends and colleagues over the last few years. His focus was on his work and he found himself spending more time out of the mansion than in it. He demonstrated the ways his powers can be used in Operation: Mad Men and his undercover work skills in Green-Eyed Monster. Meanwhile, his growing strength in hand to hand combat and marksmanship was seen in each passing operation.

In December, 2020, following Operation: Siege Perilous, where he saw another version of his life and, at the same time, the prohibition of talking about Day Zero lifted, he began to thaw, making ties with the mansion again, with the new mutant community centre in District X and so on.

His anti human views gradually grew stronger and more open, over the years. Following a heated discussion with Kevin about his biases in 2022, he was moved in to a more analytical role at X Force and out of day to day operational runs.

This didn't move him out of the field entirely, as he took on field roles in the team's trip to Burning Man during Operation: Bat Country and worked as a sniper during Julio Richter's manifestation.

Early in 2024, he broke his nose, cracked several ribs and sustained both concussion and whiplash during Behold A Pale Horse, hitting Death with a car during the pitched battle.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 5' 5"

General Build: Short and slim with just enough lean muscle to land this side of scrawny.

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Brown

Other Features: Long, blue, forked tongue.

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 has trained himself to the point where he can create believable (though generally static) life-sized replicas of people. 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 or reading what he has just projected.

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-medium-scale images, with Doug once catching him attempting to forge a $20 note, making fake ID and cheating at cards and larger ones, giving himself disguises and creating the illusion of invisibility and spoofing cameras.

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 can mimic some of Marie-Ange's imps and follow their movements. He's able to mimic himself and other people on a three dimensional level with a startling degree of reality.

He's able to work outside his line of sight 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. He carries a high tech speech synthesizer that translates projected text into speech and uses it to simulate talking in the field.