Here I come!
Name: Maxim Emillianov (Called Max)
Gender: male
Age: 33, well not quite, there are still a couple of months to go.
Appearance: Max has one of those more or less average faces with dark hair and brown eyes you pass by everyday without having taken any specific notice of them and he has long taken no more effort to change this fact. He is about 186 cm (hails to the SI) tall – with the daily +/-2 cm fluctuations – and a good proportion of mass distributed all over. Should he wear a tight t-shirt or the occasional top-tank, one could see the relatively thick arms, which are due to the welding rather than real workout. He enjoys playing soccer, but as a fun game and not anything serious. As a native of the Karelian Ski resorts, he does enjoy this winter sport to great extents, but it has proven to be too costly in exile.
Superpower: Photonic Realization
Basically, in the beginning it feels like Maxim's sense of sight has expanded to light (= electromagnetic waves) of all possible frequencies, making his brain take in input he could impossibly process, since he has now sensors seeing more than the (for humans) visible range of light. Then gradually, the massless corpuscles of light will be perceived the same way we perceive mass, in other words he would start to sense their interactions with other particles, and eventually be able to control or manipulate these interactions. This means above all a change in his visual apparatus, so that it is not so easily overloaded, meaning that he could for instance stare at the sun or right into a pointer laser.
Level one: He sees light, all of it; not only infrared and ultraviolet, but radiowaves, microwaves, x- and gammarays etc. It would of course take him time until he can make any sense out of it all, and find out about all the new colours he never knew existed.
Level three: He can see photonic interactions, be it the scattering of light, absorption, x-ray radiation or else, it all looks to him the way we see a bus driving off the station, rain drops bouncing off the ground, etc. If trained well, he would be able to gather immense amount of information about his surroundings at this point, like for example spectroscopic analysis.
Remark: This is by no means like the other power, where one could see electromagnetic communications and decode them. When we see a torchlight, we could guess from what source it is coming and in which direction the source is found, but we can not say by how much Watt and what kind of bulb is producing the light.
Level five: Now it would not longer be about rays of light or waves, it is the point he starts to realize the light quanta, the photons. It is when the quantum logic becomes »apparent« to Max, the way we realize Newtonian mechanics. Among others, he will for example gain a sense of distance about stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters etc, since the Doppler effect and gravitational lensing will become part of processing his visual input.
Weakness/drawback: First of all, the amount of information his brain has to process all the time will take him long to get used to, and even after that, he'll need a great deal of education and some time again, until he knows what it is that he sees. His sense could also be blended by similar radiation, or even more intensive one of close enough frequencies.
History: Maxim was born in the
Karelian Isthmus, in the urban region of
Toksovo, close to Saint Petersburg, in Russia. Sometime in his school years he discovered painting as a hobby and sometime after highschool he found out about his best friend Viktor's sexual orientation, which grew to be a much bigger problem in Russia than the friends believed back in their late teenage years. This made Maxim become an LGBT activist, trying to secure a better future for Viktor and others, which led to him trying to portray the isolation, violence and fear they were put through in his paintings - still seeing them as a hobby and a means to let out the anger and the frustration though. With the attacks on homosexuals rising, he encouraged his best friend to leave the country – seeing no other short term solution to the rising violence –, and in order to further demonstrate his support he sought refuge together with Viktor. So they left Russia 3 years ago and have been in the States for the past two.
The day before the bus ride... was yet another exhibition he was practically forced to participate in. Not that Max detested the idea of his paintings finding an audience, but he preferred to go back to working as a professional welder – like back in Russia – than being dragged from an exhibition to another and from open debates to interviews on activism and homosexuality in Russia. It made him feel like an exhibition piece himself, something for »show and tell«. He was specially tired of his mediocre paintings receiving too much praise and people trying to interpret all sorts of philosophy or painting style he had never heard of. Sometimes people made him sick and sometimes he just wanted to live normally, and he wanted Viktor to live a normal life, too.
But for now he had to keep smiling, and entertaining people who made him feel tired, and angrier at the situation in Russia than he already was. The same old questions about the colours he used to emphasize certain lines, about the brutality of ignorance he had seen – in Russia, of course – about how he and his friend liked the US, or if they intended to get married – oh yes, most cases assumed he had to be gay to stand for gay rights. There were some who wanted to be nice and told him how much they just loved Russian accent, or tried saying a few words in Russian.
"You should really stay for the after party", said a woman in her fifties he was talking to with dreamy eyes and a smile which seemed to endlessly stretch over her face. "I would love to", he replied, using one of the most useful English phrases he had learned in the US, "but Viktor and I are starting this new project... with a couple of others... and it is a mess..." He tried his best at hand gestures while talking, in order to emphasize the necessity of him leaving for home. "Oh you've already made friends with other couples? That should be nice, maybe it'll make the both of you start to feel more welcome." Max just tried his dashing smile this time.
"It's just such a pity", said another one of the artists from the exhibition, a fashionable hipster about the same age as Max. Now he tried shrugging with the shoulders while closing his eyes for a split second and reopening them. "I guess it can't be helped... and we brought this really exquisite Vodka." And then there was that. He knew people meant well but the fact was that Max had never enjoyed drinking Vodka and ever since he had left Russia, the urge to not drink it had only grown stronger. "Next time", Max's answer came quickly, trying the dashing smile again, "I'll tell Viktor, as well," he said, thinking if he should have used »too« instead of »as well« also wondering if he had to explain that he meant telling Viktor about an after party or whether it was clear enough.
"Well good luck with the new project then", said the hipster, giving him a generous hug, which confused him even more when he tried to reciprocate.
"Thank you."
"And let me know if you need connections to make it work out", offered the older woman as they kissed goodbye on the cheeks.
"Thank you, and we'll sure ask you."
And so he left the gallery, not knowing whether to be disappointed or satisfied with his own work, or whether Viktor and he had gained something from all this, or rather suffered a great loss.
