Eric Hargrave / Derecho

Real Name/Alter Ego: Eric Hargrave

Alias/Stage Name: Tyler Hook

Age: 44

Workplace: Freelances in a variety of trades, from the mundane to the outright, insanely dangerous... though is keenly interested in participating in various performance arts.

Appearance:

Personality: There is little to nothing Eric Hargrave would not do. Dangerous, embarrassing, benevolent, malevolent (if forced to violence), for fun or as work, you can bet Eric will be one of the first people to sign up for it. He is friendliest to those that are equally friendly to him, though on a whole tends to be on the fence around people he doesn’t know. A lot of his social interactions depend upon person, place, and objective of the moment, and he tailors himself depending upon those criteria. He is also very protective: anyone even so much as looking at a family member or friend oddly will be subject to his wrath. Mr. Hargrave is not a very nice man once he’s pissed off.

At his core Eric is an informal, high-energy personality and a bit silly-crazy when attempting to entertain or cheer up someone that is down. He’ll even do something potentially embarrassing at his own expense to get them up and laughing, very occasionally stepping outside the circles of family and friends to lend some light to even random people on the street. Seeing people down, depressed, or upset deeply disturbs him, and has disturbed him since childhood. If he cannot cheer a given person up he will leave if he feels his antics are unwelcome, rather than sit there and sulk with the other person... But you can bet he’ll be back with a bigger and better attempt to coax a smile out of them yet!

His being raised in a mafia family on the run from their own does not surface in his personality very often. In fact, a lot of times Eric discourages his background to have a role in his life as of the here and now. When it is needed he will summon it up, but until then tends to keep it as deeply buried as possible. In his opinion, burying it helps to keep him appearing more like a bystander than a target – the closer he is to danger, the further he is from harm. Being the youngest in the family aids in his being the least actively sought Hargrave sibling, yet even still he doesn’t stay in one place for too long other than the watchtower, since he does have powers he uses for the side of good.


Powers:
Air and Wind Manipulation – Can manipulate the generation, movement, and force of air. This ability may make it seem like he possesses telekinesis or the ability to fly, but in reality he is simply relying on a current of air/wind to make these tasks possible.

Sonic Scream – Any villain that enjoys screaming would do best not to get Eric to do so. His screams amplified with this ability can be used either benevolently or malevolently, and the following list comprises of some but not all of the uses that Eric has discovered: vocal projection without any aid from a microphone or loudspeaker, sonic force-field, shatter breakable objects, the ability to incapacitate or overwhelm foes with the noise, and, if powerful enough, can render anyone in hearing range unconscious. While he theorizes it may be possible to blow someone’s eardrums out and/or make their head explode from there, he chooses not to see if it’s possible both due to the effort that would be required and because he is not quite that malevolent, even to those he so sorely hates.

Sublimation – The ability to turn into a mist or fog, inherited directly from his father. Eric is the only one of Damian Hargrave’s children to possess this ability.


Weaknesses:
Simply put: No air or wind, no powers. He requires at least a light breeze or some movement of air other than breathing to already be present. Stick him out in a desert or anywhere where the wind is 0 mph and he will be rather stuck. Put him in an air lock and release all the oxygen and he’d also be in a bit of a pickle. Needless to say he might not volunteer to be an astronaut no matter how cool that would be.

In the event of being manually, medically, or otherwise unable to use his voice – a gag, someone covering his mouth, or coming down with laryngitis, to name a few things – one will find that that puts an end to any ability generated by Sonic Screaming.

Sun or excessive heat can harm him in mist form, via evaporation, if he stays in that form for too long.

Is allergic to the following: Penicillin, pet dander, fish (shellfish and seafood notwithstanding), and wool.

Lactose intolerant, though loves ice cream and milkshakes


Other information:
- Impulsively drawn to and thus has an extensive collection of scarves, hats, and rings.
- Has a love of bright colors or patterns that will get one noticed no matter how hard one tries for the opposite.
- Highly attracted to danger or dangerous-looking activities and people.
- Keenly interested in the Performing Arts; may eventually pursue a formal career in acting or singing.
- Has no pets, due to allergies
- Not married; no children that he’s aware of
- Nicknames for Baby Gail: Babydoll, Baby/Missy G, G, Birdy-Girl
- Nicknames that he uses toward Adult Gail: Doll, Babydoll (rarer than Doll), G, Missy/Lady G... still occasionally calls her “Birdy-Girl” out of love and to get a reaction.
- Secret Meeting Places (when Gail was little and ran away): Unicorn Fountain at the Pixie Park in good weather; WonderCafe in bad weather.

Information on Family [Not Previously Stated]
- All of his siblings have powers. Alice (Nova) controls fire, Rozetta (Tempest) controls water, Marilyn (Quake) controls earth, and he controls air. Eric personally finds this neat yet funny.

- Alice is the only solid Hero, Marilyn is the only solid Villain, and Eric and Rozetta tend to be the neutrals – Eric being more for good, and Rozetta being more inclined to evil.

- Rozetta and Marilyn are twins, aged 46


Superhero or Supervillain: Hero, though tends to walk that fine line of gray

Supername: Derecho

History:
Eric Hargrave was very obedient and appropriately fearful as a child from a mafia family in hiding. However, most of this early fear was due to the hypersensitivity children tend to possess when it comes to the emotional states of family members and other individuals around them. Being the youngest child, he doesn’t recollect having a father at all and thus has little to no understanding or concept of why they needed to hide, or what it was truly like to be a Mafioso. However, he did worry like mad whenever Alice took off and seemed to vanish into thin air. He was always closest to his eldest sister: Rozetta tended to bully him with her powers of water manipulation and prehensile hair, and Marilyn treating him with marked indifference and a roll of the eyes whenever he spoke to her.

Heavily influenced by various spy movies and cartoons as an older child, Eric began to collect various articles of clothing – mainly scarves and hats – and would often go around the house or out in public “in disguise” on wild, fictitious “secret missions”. This collecting of hats and scarves, as well as the wearing of them, still survives into his adulthood. At times he still even moderately considers himself to be incognito even though he is technically the least actively sought-after member of the Hargrave family. The mafia does not possess any current photos of him and thus have no idea what he would look like despite today’s technology of aging a photograph.

As Eric entered his teens he began to act out a bit more. He no longer saw the point in hiding just because “mama told me to”. He would often go out to hang with friends or on dates and not return until late at night. Witness Protection guards would warn him he was in trouble with his mother mere minutes before receiving a tongue-lashing from the woman herself.

When he was sixteen he hadn’t come home until the next day, complete with a set of items that had not set well with his mother: a pack of cigarettes, a tattoo, piercings in both ears, and a faint hint of alcohol on his breath. The state of the young man was enough cause to create an enormous argument to erupt between mother and son. Despite having been grounded for a whole month, Eric ran away the next day and refused to speak to his mother ever again. He sought legal assistance to get his own place and be his own person, “divorcing” himself from his mother. It would be the last time he ever spoke to her.

Needing a way to support himself as well as go to school, Eric acquired several various odd jobs here and there part-time in addition to finishing out his high school days at Kent High. Despite his legal counsel managing to get him his own set of Witness Protection agents the young man was determined to elude them at all costs and thus never stayed in one place for too long before finding another location to crash. Most often he stayed with friends, hid out in the Trinity Church, or arranged some other legal or not-so-legal housing accommodation. It wasn’t until he graduated that he discovered Heroes were more than welcome to lodge in the watchtower. Eric did not go to college, nor ever considered it. He has enough experience through his various on-demand odd jobs that he considers and often declares himself a “jack of all trades, and master of none.”

Despite having no desire for contact with his mother, Eric did keep regular tabs on Alice. He never knew that most of what he was up to was often related to their mother. It had been the only thing that kept Gail Hargrave sane for the five years after her “little boy” ran away.

He attended the Nightingales’ wedding, and was one of the first ones to RSVP for the occasion. Eric would’ve been the one to give Alice away, but she had already asked Leighton’s father if he would do the honors, instead. Throughout Alice’s dating phase with Leighton, Eric was genuinely interested in how the relationship was progressing. He also observed Leighton’s career keenly due to his own desire to go into the performing arts. From his side of the fence Eric feels he gets along very well with Leighton. Although Eric didn’t have much money at the time, his wedding gift to the couple was rather lavish: a set of glassware (stemware, tumblers, mugs, etc) made of a glass that changes color in the light, and accented with Austrian crystals. All of the items matched (or almost matched) but they were not in a pre-packaged set. He refuses to say how he managed to acquire such items, other than to say he’d been hanging onto them for a long while and thought the couple could use them more than he.

Eric was even in the waiting room when Alice was in labor with her first child. He did not feel he had any business being in the delivery room, nor did he even want to be in there. Despite observing the married bliss of his sister and brother-in-law, Eric had no desire to marry and start a family. He liked living on the wild side too much to settle down. It was with a half smile, half (hidden) cringe that he responded to the suggestion of naming the baby girl Gail. Between his own foolish teenage mistakes and never having said good-bye to his mother, the name had initially bothered him but said nothing about it... preferring instead to make one-sided amends at his mother’s grave and move on with his life. He loves his niece to pieces, and can’t imagine her with any other name. In his eyes, the newborn baby and her parents’ naming of her helped him with his inner demons far more than any other friend or counseling, or alternative aid had been able to.

A year or so later, when he learned Alice had been abducted from her office, Eric flew into a rage. He appreciated Leighton keeping him informed, and went right to the scene to see what had been done. A struggle and a note was all that was really left in the wake of Alice and her assailants. Eric hovered around the police force working on the case to find Alice, though left halfway through an attempt to understand the message left behind as though he had had an epiphany. Thirty minutes after his departure, Eric dialed Le and made a very brief and hurriedly-made statement: Meet me at the station in forty-five. I’ll be bringing a bastard to pass... And don’t argue with me, brother – I know what I’m doing. Promptly thereafter he hung up before Leighton could conjure any sort of response.

While Eric had specified forty-five minutes, he was more like an hour and forty-five minutes. As promised, he entered the precinct dragging a relatively unsoiled Mafioso. To help with the interrogation, whenever the police weren’t getting a response from their captive Eric would focus sonic screams at him. However, since he knew Gail was likely in her father’s arms behind the glass, he kept the power toned down and disguised to sound like singing or making funny but loud noises so as not to upset the child any more than she likely already was with everything going on. Once they got the information out of the thug, Eric willingly took Gail and gestured for Leighton to join the authorities with a hoarsely-muttered, with a smile: “Go find your blushing bride and give her a kiss for me. I’ll be at your place with ‘Missy G’... You call me, hear?”. It was after arriving home that Eric gave to baby Gail her first scarf – an elaborate, bright red one of silk with a brocade pattern of phoenixes in flight – that he happened to have two of. They played Peek-A-Boo with the scarf until Eric received a call from Leighton, indicating things had calmed down.

Without even being asked, Eric rushed to the hospital with Gail in his arms to visit Alice. Despite his own protests that Alice should recover a little more he did as demanded and placed Gail beside her mother. It was a moment of relief for all. However, excitement returned when baby Gail attempted to warm her mother with little sparks of inherited superpowers. By the looks of it Gail was truly going to be her mother’s daughter, and Eric couldn’t help but grin with approval at the sight.

It had been a great shock to Eric when he learned about the fires erupting in his sister’s home. More and more he was starting to really hate the mafia... not that he was really chummy with them to begin with. He helped Witness Protection relocate what was left of the Nightingale family’s belongings into a new home, and often took shifts with them in guarding the family even though he was not officially trained to be any sort of guard in an official capacity. In his mind there was no way in hell the mafia were going to get to his sister and her family unless they went through him first.

Eric was a little late in learning Alice and Leighton had planned to give Gail up to a foster home. A shock and a searing pain had torn through the man the moment the news sunk in. Why had they done it? For what reason did they give away the one precious thing that mattered most to them? Numbly he listened to their explanations, accepting them after some “Mafia 101” explanations. Eric couldn’t be angry with them for attempting to do what they thought was the best course of action to protect their daughter. However, not even three days later he turned up at Social Services in attempt to adopt his baby niece. They denied him adoption rights due to his dangerous and erratic lifestyle and lack of a fixed residence. It was around this time that he learned of the Watchtower being a safe haven for Heroes. Surely Gail would be safe there... Yet Social Services still denied him, determined the life in which he lived would still place Gail at too much risk to safely condone the adoption. Changing his course of action, Eric then insisted if he couldn’t adopt that he should at least be allowed visitation rights.

It had been discussed with Alice and Leighton beforehand: knowing some family was better than not knowing any family at all... however he had to swear to them not to let slip a word to Gail about her parents being alive. He offered to keep a close eye on the little girl whenever he could, and would intervene as Gail’s advocate at even the slightest urging from either Alice or Leighton.

Eric and Gail have a healthy uncle-niece relationship, though he determinedly tries to avoid any questions regarding family since he would like nothing more than to reunite her with her parents. Yet he made a promise not to let it slip they were alive. It isn’t a promise he plans to break. To better facilitate Alice’s need to have pictures and related information on Gail, Leighton provided Eric with a camera. Eric uses this camera as often as possible to snap photos and video footage of Gail for the couple.

One particular snippet of video includes Gail as a little girl and Eric both singing the song “Pink” by Aerosmith together, with Eric occasionally providing custom “riffs” on his harmonica.

At present Eric lives a busy, semi-dangerous lifestyle. He’s eluding the mafia, eluding Witness Protection, still varying his place of residence (the Watchtower, an apartment at an undisclosed location in Superville, and Alice and Leighton’s home), and taking any job that comes his way no matter how small, large, or potentially unsafe. He dines regularly at the WonderCafe both for the food and for the chance to check up on his all-grown-up niece, whom he still can’t resist calling “Missy G” ... or risking her glare upon addressing her with the ‘dreaded’ nickname of: Birdy-Girl.

Those wishing to hire Eric for anything are advised to contact him via cell phone instead of trying to tack the man down to a particular residence or locale. Although, as mentioned above, you may be able to find him at random seated in the Café at a corner booth or the bar near where the cashier’s station and kitchen meet.