Grumman

<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Grumman</default></title>

<image source="Image"></image> <image source="image"></image> <group><header>Basic Information</header> <label>Civilian Name</label> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Gender</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Death</label> <label>Age</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Post-timeskip</label> <label>Ward start</label> <label>Relations</label> <label>Family</label></group> <group><header>Professional Status</header> <label>Occupation</label> <label>Classification</label> <label>Unique Features</label> <label>Alignment</label>

<label>Status</label><format>

Alive

</format>

<label>Location</label> <label>Teams</label> <label>Previous Team(s)</label> <label>Base of Operations</label></group> <group><header>First Appearance</header> <label>Worm Debut</label> <label>Ward Debut</label></group> </infobox> Eric Stodt<ref name="PRT Quest"/>, aslo known as Grumman, is a member of The Protectorate.

Personality

Liked by all his teammates. He still feels regret over his father's death.

Appearance

Eric is described as a short, mildly overweight man with features typical to trisomy 21 with dark hair.

Abilities and Powers

Eric can toggle between two Breaker states; one granting exceedingly maneuverable flight abilities, the other turning him into an immobile artillery platform.<ref name="PRT Quest">PRT Quest document</ref><ref name="list">Wildbow's Parahuman List</ref>

In his mover state, Eric can effectively turn on a dime, moving at roughly eighty kilometers an hour. In one power test, he collected twenty-four of thirty flags in dense four-acre woods in three minutes, losing track of the remainder only when they were moved from their pre-set locations by the force of his wake. He can fly through solid concrete or meet bullets head-on without being harmed.

As a blaster Eric is fixed in place but can project vast numbers of missile-projections. He can level a ten-story building in eight seconds, taken one floor at a time.

History

Background

Erics trigger event accidentally killed his father, trying to get out of a lake after swimming he misunderstood when his father stopped him. When he switched into his breaker state for the first time he tore through his father.<ref name="SB2">Keep in mind, also, that one shard gives different abilities based on the nature of the trigger and the individual.

Example: Shard 'Cross'. For the entities, it's a toolkit, a low-energy response to general hazards, allowing the entity to quickly switch swathes of shards to new tasks to deal with environmental hazards. The entity hasn't devoted much attention to it, beyond a few safeguards, so it finds a high crisis area & time with a 'glance' of its power and looses the shard, plotting for its arrival time & location.

Shard Mien reaches a host. It then travels to a new, younger, host, developmentally disabled Eric Stodt. It locks on, it gets a grasp on who the host is, and it summarily lets that part of itself die off, burning out to form the corona pollentia. Sit dormant for some time, if the arrival of shard to host didn't coincide with the trigger time. The trigger event happens, the shard recognizes the event from the state of the host and from context, the flood of stress responses, and so on. A now-twenty year old Eric is in the lake, his father shouting at him to swim, refusing to let him climb the ladder back up onto the dock. Eric is screaming incoherently, panicking, and every time his father pries his fingers off the ladder, he really thinks he's going to die. His father isn't even recognizable at this point, in the anger and midst of the danger.

The trigger reads Eric. Who is he? How does he generally respond to situations?
The trigger reads the situation. What form does the danger take? It's partially environmental, it's driven by a desire to escape, his life is threatened by a distinct enemy.

The shard then discards everything it doesn't need, distilling things down to one efficient task, suited to Eric. Where it wasn't already programmed with inherent safeties (Manton effect) and limitations, it uses Eric's stored knowledge to generate a kind of grasp of what it needs to do.

Eric becomes a breaker, transitioning between two forms. Because of the nature of the problem and of Eric himself, he doesn't get a form that returns him entirely to normal. He has one form where he's essentially a living artillery platform, unable to move, but capable of devastating firepower, and one form where he flies at stunning speeds, capable of turning on a dime, durable. A living bullet.

And one man in a bad situation is left standing on the beach by his family's cottage, steaming as the water is burned off his skin, having flown to freedom and obliterated his father, realizing what he's done.

If the shard hadn't left Eric's father to go to Eric, however, what might have happened? Eric's father might have triggered in another 'between a rock and a hard place' scenario, probably would have been a breaker, but might have picked up a breaker power that turned him into a living focal point capable of refocusing heat and cold over large areas (another environmental hazard the shard was tasked with facing), another form where he could manipulate gases on a similar level, and a third, clearer self identity might have left him with another form where he was more clearly human. Because the answers to the trigger question and to 'who is Mr. Stodt' is different from 'who is Eric Stodt'.Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles (scrolldown)</ref>

Story Start

He has been looking for a change in venue for some time, and put himself in for a transfer.<ref name="PRT Quest"/><ref name="PRT92">The list is far from complete, but some parahumans expressing interest in a change of location, who might see your department as viable include:​

[...]

*PRT_GRUMMANToggles between two breaker states, one granting exceedingly maneuverable flight abilities, the other turning him into an immobile artillery platform. GRUMMAN has mental impairments that limit and impact his ability to interact with press and public, as his speech and reasoning is clearly limited, but he remains loved by all teammates, and has yet to have a black mark on his record. - Department Sixty Four, PRT Quest thread i p92</ref>

Trivia

• His shard is known as Cross or Mein,<ref name="SB2"/> was part of a scrapped Weaverdice concept.<ref name="SB1">I wondered where I wrote that. I thought it was an example for the Weaver Dice game that I scrapped & rewrote. - Wildbow on Spacebattles</ref>
• May well be the first original hero with Down syndrome.<ref>"Meet the World’s First Comic Book Superhero with Down Syndrome" (May 6, 2017)</ref>

References

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