Born into a typical middle class family, Joshua’s mother is a nurse and father a successful defense attorney. His older sister and brother, Tanya and Marcus, were twins. Marcus was a rising football star with a bright future ahead of him. Joshua and Marcus were very competitive, but close and did everything together from videogames to seeing who could spit the farthest. Early on in his childhood Joshua showed a high degree of aptitude in mathematics, science, and art. Joshua always aspired to be the athlete Marcus was, in part because his father was particularly pleased with how exceptional an athlete Marcus was, expressing more enthusiasm for Marcus’ athletic accomplishments. Joshua’s size kept him from playing team sports. Other boys were bigger and therefore he was always overlooked. On top of that Diane, being the overprotective mom, never allowed him to play. Through the advice of a fellow classmate Joshua decided to try acrobatics to increase his agility, speed, and flexibility. He felt this would compensate for his lack of size as well as impress his father. He was a natural and won several competitions, however in spite of these achievements he felt he could never measure up to his football star brother.
Powers awakened
During a 4th of July party the neighborhood gathered to celebrate in the park. Members of a gang known as the M-80s showed up. A confrontation broke out between the neighborhood kids and the M-80s. One of the gang members pulled out a gun and opened fire on the group in the parking lot. Marcus has shot fatally. Immediately Joshua rushed to his brother’s side. When Joshua touched him he felt an immediate connection with Marcus. His psionic powers awakened, Joshua experienced his brother’s pain, fear, and despair. Experiencing Marcus’ death opened Joshua up to sensing and feeling everyone’s emotions. Because of this he fell into a deep depression and became extremely ill physically. His parents did what they could medically but his condition wasn’t really physical, but spiritual in nature. Shortly others became infected by his emotions, moving between fits of anger, sadness, and euphoria. Joshua was on an emotional roller coaster and anyone in his immediate proximity was along for the ride. At this point Joshua went through several mood swings and began isolating himself in his room. The family became deeply affected and suffered by his uncontrollable abilities. Tanya and Marcus were twins, Tanya felt she lost a part of herself when he died and Joshua’s influence on her emotions took a heavier toll on her. Unable to handle this Gregory and Martha sent Joshua to a mental institution and focused on rebuilding what remained of their family. The first couple of months they visited often, but as time passed their visits became fewer until they stopped showing up. Joshua’s presence in the mental institution threw it into states of chaos from time to time. These episodes attracted the attention of Dr. Henry Phillips, a psychotherapist assigned to the hospital to monitor unusual occurrences that may be meta-human related.
Crueller Institute
Dr. Phillips became aware of Joshua’s effect on the emotional states of others and transferred him to the Crueller Institute, a secret government institute that performs research on the brain and psychic phenomenon. A neural inhibitor chip was implanted in Joshua’s brain in order to protect researchers from his powers. Here he was forced to use his abilities on other subjects who also displayed a range of psychic abilities as well as unwitting “volunteers”. Most of the time Joshua was extremely defiant. In response, Dr. Phillips often had him beaten and tortured. Sometimes they would go days without feeding him, using food as a bargaining tool for Joshua to cooperate. Joshua spent a year and a half in Crueller until General Starke rescued him. Starke regularly maintains secret metahuman files and he decided Joshua would play an integral part in the Strand.
Combat Training
Because of Mindbender’s acrobatic ability and his love of break dancing Terrestria is training him in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art developed initially by African slaves in Brazil. This fighting style is low to the ground and primarily attacks with kicks, sweeps, and elbow strikes. Joshua incorporates break-dancing moves in his fighting, using head spins, hand spins and hand springs to evade as well as attack. Terrestria is also teaching him how to use a staff.
Powers
Psionic emotional manipulation is the ability to sense and project emotional and behavioral states on others. Manipulation of emotions and feelings of others. Emotion (a psycho-physiological state), in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action. Feeling, on the other hand, is emotion that is filtered through the cognitive brain centers, specifically the frontal lobe, producing a physiological change in addition to the psycho-physiological change. Emotions are mental states that arise spontaneously, rather than through conscious effort. Also emotions are physical expressions, often involuntary, related to feelings, perceptions or beliefs about elements, objects or relations between them, in reality or in the imagination. Mindbender can project a range of emotions such as happiness, love, anger, or fear onto others. He can make them feel tired, causing them to fall into deep sleep, shiver because they think they experience extreme cold, or pain due to a perceived infliction of injury. If the experience is too extreme the subject may actually become physically wounded with scars, heart attack or even death if the experience lasts too long.
Precognition: Recently precognitive abilities have awakened within Mindbender. This allows him to see future events, or “possible” future events before they happen. Possible because if he intervenes they won’t happen. These visions are triggered by touching items and people, but can also occur depending on the psychic resonance in his surrounding environment. Right now Mindbender can’t call forth these visions, they happen randomly. General Starke is developing a training program for possible use of this in ability in combat.
Psionic stealth: General Starke taught Mindbender a technique he refers to as psionic stealth, an ability that allows Mindbender to become “invisible”. Typically invisibility involves the bending light waves around persons or objects. Psionic stealth is a form of invisibility that involves clouding the primary visual cortex. This area of the brain is responsible for processing visual stimuli. It is highly specialized for processing information about static and moving objects and is excellent in pattern recognition. By focusing on the visual cortex Mindbender can block the perception of himself from the minds of others, thereby rendering himself invisible. However he cannot become invisible to mechanical devices, such as cameras.
