Right, now I can finally blabber about my characters. In all fairness the only reason I did this was for the character section, I don't know where the last two segments came from. Now as most people know good characters are key to a good story and a good grasp of their motives and various mindsets are vital. I never had a clue about any of mine, but its sound advice anyway.

As I said quite a while ago now, for most of my characters I came up with a shell concept and then essentially let them run from there. I should probably be worried that my characters essentially constructed themselves without me consciously putting much thought into it, but I'll just put it down to insanity and leave it at that.

Anyway as you can probably guess from that I didn't particularly get a good handle on most of my characters for a while, and I still don't understand Cam very well. Regardless of this most of my characters have a good undercurrent of thought and every so often I'll get this flash of insight as to just why they do these crazy things. For example it took me a year or so to realise Weird was so empathetic because she can pick up on people's emotions, (I'll explain how later).

Now let's get started before you start thinking I'm totally insane.

Hawk

Now Hawk is a fun character to write and his is the voice that flows most easily. This may be because he is the most often compared to me, or simply because he's a genuinely funny guy that's got just the right balance of action, comedy and drama.

He's got just about the right blend of personality to flow easily; he's not overly violent like Kit, or wracked with misplaced guilt like Weird; he isn't overly arrogant, or at least what he is arrogant about is usually justified. He's got a good sense of humour and doesn't angst like Soph. The only other character that is as fun to write is Gale and even she has a few self confidence issues she got from Toad Boy, who I now really regret existed even though he served a valuable purpose.

Hawk does have his flaws though; he's overly dramatic, not horribly bright and does have this tendency to do the first thing that comes into his head. Actually that last bit's a lie, the thought entering his head happens on average three seconds after he starts acting. Some would say this is a disadvantage but it's gotten him out of more scrapes that it's gotten him into, though to be fair most of those were caused by him acting before thinking anyway.

I guess in truth Hawk is almost a perfect action movie star though he'd like to think he has a little bit more common sense. Actually it was the whole hero thing that made me make him such a klutz on the ground, simply because I wouldn't have been able to stand him if he'd been perfect at everything and neither would any of the others. The whole computer uplink thing kind of ruined that, but by then Hawk had more or less got modesty down pat. Though as a side note I maintain that because of the computers, it's now fully possible for Hawk and Weird to recreate all the stunts from the Matrix, save for leaping the gap between buildings; they could do that already anyway.

Another particular flaw of Hawk is his relative blindness to other people. Oddly I think this is a product of his upbringing rather than his personality, as any other incarnations of him I've made are perfectly fine in this respect. It doesn't have a glaring effect on the story but there are some fairly obvious things in the Hawk and Gale moments he should have noticed more. Any improvement in that respect is due to them actually being able to talk to each other now rather than just tap out messages.

Another thing Hawk has little skill at is forward planning. This was one of the few conscious decisions I made on his personality and it was part of my aim to make the Freed distinct from the book, namely splitting the role of carer, and hero, that Max seems to have. Now Hawk's ineptitude at planning is more noticeable in the earlier arcs where he isn't getting terra flops of processing power. And I think the longest he spends planning at any one point, is the day I made him walk to the Lab to rescue Gale and the others. In all honesty he would have been there in minutes if it hadn't been for Rainbow. Anyway it's a shame you rarely get to see Gale controlling the group, which she really does do well when there's no particular crisis. Unfortunately Hawk tends to focus on the interesting stuff and the only time you really see Gale in command is in New York. Another 'oh well'. Don't worry she gets her own space ship to strut about on in her next incarnation.

Now I should probably do a little bit on Hawk's particular power and the complexities behind it. Pull up a chair, this may take a while.

Hawk is capable of inducing and detecting micro currents within circuitry and then making sense of what these signals are telling him. In a funny way, it's very similar to Angel in the book, though she does it with neurons rather than copper wires. Still both of them are scary, though Hawk loses that particular contest as most people don't run on Windows. But, when you consider that most of important stuff: militaries, governments, banks and everything else down to traffic lights are controlled by computers, well then you realise why I give Hawk two weeks to take over the world.

I'm not sure at what point I actually decided to personify the computers, its one of the few major decisions I regret, mostly because it's the most impossible thing in the Freed, and yes I get that that's its got some pretty stiff competition. The actual idea of computers randomly gaining sentience is fairly laughable and that's why I put limit on their intelligence to about that of a four year old or a household parrot. They do have that collective intelligence thing, but that would stand up about three minutes against Hawk if he was actually trying, and this brings me nicely onto the range of Hawk's power.

Now Hawk doesn't entirely realise this but his actual range is biased on what he can observe (for reasons that will be explained later) but, since when he's connected to a remote computer he is technically observing it, the only limit on Hawk's range is how many places he can conceive of at once, and that value keeps getting larger as he gains control of more computers. Scary huh? Especially as he can essentially pass through any kind of computer defence, like a hot knife through butter.

Some random facts about Hawk. Hawk is actually shorter than Gale by a good margin and about the same dimensions as Tapper; on the other hand Gale is pretty big anyway. It's really just the way they were built. Hawk is also naturally good at flying (unsurprisingly he's a pilot in his later incarnation) and while his shape helps, most of the stunts he comes up with are incredibly difficult and it is pretty amazing seeing he's only been flying about a month at the beginning of the Freed. His learning curve for flying that you can see running throughout the book, is partly because of the extra practice he's getting, and mostly me getting my head around the dynamics more. As a side note on Hawk's flying he has this tactic of going for his enemies wings. Sensible, but I realised that in one sequence he imitates a natural falcon almost exactly by ramming his shoulder into an Eraser while diving. The odd thing about this is that I found out that's how falcons hunt, several months after writing that incident.

My characters know too much.

Gale

Gale is another interesting character to write and I've said before that I only really got a grasp on just what she was like when I did that short section from her perspective. Now as a person Gale is confident, has a strong personality and is very much a natural leader, the only reason she tends to leave Hawk to lead during the fights is that he is inexplicably better at them. Some day I have to do a bit with Gale leading, as it's always Hawk being the hero for some reason; maybe it's me being lazy as it's so much harder to write a secondary character.

Distracted again, anyway Gale, in my head rather than the cannon, is the kid that talked to Max at the end of the first book, took charge of the children as they escaped into the subway tunnels and she, Hawk and Jay were instrumental in saving from them an Eraser ambush. I'll let you guess what Toad Boy was doing during that sequence. (No, you haven't missed this bit, I haven't written it, maybe someday I will.) As a leader Gale is pretty good, she has a healthy amount of common sense and her plans work more or less as frequently as Hawk's; Hawk just comes up with them faster and yells them louder.

Unsurprisingly Gale is quite smart, though shares in the emotional blindness that everyone from the lab seems to suffer from. I think she usually can read more from a situation than Hawk and her later incarnation has her friends with just about everyone, so I guess she is actually at heart a sociable person. She must be reasonably good to run a group of fifty people, even if there was some desertion in the ranks. She was always the popular one anyway, then again liking Toad Boy is difficult, he just makes you think his opponent is worse.

Actually Toad Boy, while Gale never really acted like she cared, was a huge influence on her, especially as she had little or no self confidence to begin with. I think she was fairly close to giving up when the Erasers showed up. Heck I've never heard her so defeated. In a way it's odd introduce a character with a glimpse of a hardly seen aspect of their personality, especially as she is fundamentally someone who never gives up. I think that might be another occasion of my characters being far more complicated than they ever had any right to be, as I'd barely been thinking about Gale for a week by the time I wrote that.

Now maybe I can think of something to say about Gale's stubborn streak. Well it's a side effect of the confidence she's built up I guess, she's so used to being the one giving orders as she's the only one that does, that on average she's most often right. Okay that's a crap reason, Gale's stubborn because Gale's Gale, okay? Also she's rather used to getting her own way for some reason, I don't quite know quite how this bit fits into her time at the lab, but it does explain how she slipped into the leadership role quite easily and why she and Hawk tend to butt heads at the worst possible times. Well, they call them the worst possible times but personally I like the fact that both of them can still be snapping at each other while fighting for their lives. I think they might be getting desensitised over fighting for their lives anyway; Hawk's beginning to enjoy it.

Now Gale's power is a stripped down version of Weird's and works on the same basic principals as Hawk's though that's kind irrelevant, as how I have the powers set up they're all a derivative of telekinesis anyway, or more precisely ESP. Anyway Gale could do in principal everything that Weird can but she doesn't have the same kind of range that Weird has, and so generally has to make do with less impressive stuff. Also, while she'll probably kill me for this, she is simply not as smart as Weird and hasn't been practicing for nearly as long. In addition she doesn't make the quasi logical link between kinetic energy and thermal, and thinks that making lights is fundamentally different from throwing someone across a room. This isn't actually particularly surprising, but it is wrong, and Weird's smart enough to do particle physics in her head so naturally figured that out. It took me months to actually come up with how she was doing all these amazing things.

Now, Gale's random facts; Gale and Hawk lived in cages next to each other and so were actually quite friendly at the beginning of the saga and I do have one or two funny stories with them in a few joint trials but they're for another time, and I haven't given them much thought. Gale's base bird was going to be an albatross, (Hawk's a falcon, Tapper's an owl, Cam's a parrot and Weird's a raven) but I changed this once I had a better understanding of her. She's not really a solitary bird, actually she's the closest thing the whole group has to a carer figure and is the only one who doesn't think a balanced meal is one you can spin on your finger.

And with that revelation onto Tapper.

Tapper

Tapper (How many times can I repeat her name before someone tries to kill me?) is probably one of the least well known characters to the audience, and that's because she really doesn't have the personality for an action. She's quiet, unassuming and not particularly brave or violent, though I am aware that one time she did actually break an Erasers wing before he even knew she was there, but that was a defensive thing.

In all honesty Tapper usually has the best survival reflexes of the group and tends just not to be there when it all goes to wrack and ruin, that or she's accelerating away at top speed. The only times she really gets involved in fights are when it's unavoidable, or she stands a good chance of winning. You'll remember she stayed very close to Weird during the huge dog fight. I'm not particularly saying that Tapper's a coward; she and I both like to call it intelligence, and in all honesty I'd be in the next state if I saw that many Fly Boys, but she knows she's not the best fighter and so tends to stay out of the way.

It's odd in a way; Tapper's specialist skill is actually origami, closely followed by her skill with games of all kinds and her phenomenal memory. Not one of these were actually engineered by the White Coats, and the only thing they ever really gave her was a freaky neck that she doesn't particularly use because it creeps people out. She has little need for a three hundred and sixty degree view to spot her prey. Despite all these totally non action related skills, Tapper does rather fill the gap in the group dynamics as 'the smart one' and even beats Weird in that particular competition. Maybe because Weird understands special relativity, but that has no bearing on their lives (or really shouldn't), and Tapper can sensibly read a road map. See its all relative.

dodges pun police

Now one of the big issues with Tapper is her lack of a power, I kind of came to the decision that she wouldn't particularly be able to do anything spectacular as nothing seemed to fit her personality. Ultimate power like Weird doesn't quite add up, and I don't think she'd ever particularly use the ability to throw people through walls, so she's left being plain old Tapper with the occasional odd flare.

Tapper does seem to play off the plot devices more than anyone else though, if something total random is going to happen, she'll be the one to do it. Looking up in the satellite photo is a good example and I have no idea where she found a glass of water to throw over Hawk in Freedom to Fail. Maybe she's just naturally plot convenient or has some kind of fourth wall warping power. That or I'm lazy and like putting in these random jokes.

Anything else about Tapper? Well she does have a particularly good memory. I downgraded it a bit from the fully photographic she had right at the beginning but its still enough for her to card count with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Her skill with board games is mostly due to her being smart and a quick learner, and not some kind of supernatural ability though she does have the uncanny ability to spot when either Gale or Weird have been messing with the die. Observation is one of the particular skills she's had genetically enhanced, along with her superb night vision, but she consists mostly on her own abilities and actually learnt more from the self defence course Hawk got off the internet than anyone else.

In random facts, she and Hawk are the only two who really spent any time learning about the world, mostly because she's pretty well camouflaged when she's got her hood up, though she struck a better balance between learning and family. I never actually decided about most of my characters families come to think about it; Gale and Hawk tend to keep that kind of thing secret. I'm not quite sure why but it at least saved me from having to come up with a load of redundant back stories. Tapper's parents moved to England anyway.

Cam

Cam is the one I say I know the least about, I'm fairly sure this isn't true as I've just found out how little I know about all of them. In a way there isn't a horrible amount to know about Cam: he's a slightly hyperactive ten year old, he's got wings and is currently involved in fighting a global conspiracy so can get his hands on some pretty heavy fire power. Actually he does seem to randomly acquire weapons; he's used assault rifles in two separate story lines, was involved in a major gunfight and somehow managed to pick up flash bangs during their first raid on the lab. Hawk still hasn't quite worked out how Cam had time to find the armoury and raid it for the brief moment he had his back turned.

Despite his rather shallow appearances, Cam has the most complete back-story of all my characters, namely he is the lone survivor (he thought) of his test group and so is keenly aware just how lucky he is to be alive. Because he's male, he chooses to cherish his gift by having as much fun as possible and this is usually in the form of fighting with someone or shooting at something. Actually this is probably an over simplification of Cam's personality but he's always there leading the charge and getting in way over his head, so there's got to be something behind it all. Maybe he hasn't gotten over the coolness factor yet.

Anyway Cam is fairly fun loving and has recently discovered he can bend light with his mind (that's make stuff disappear to you and me). I think he would have preferred the ability to throw stuff through walls but he's beginning to get the hang of it and I actually gave his power a use in the final chapter. (You see, I can be kind.) If anyone's actually interested the whole camouflage thing is basically the conscious bending of light around a person or object, Rainbow and Mir don't quite grasp that but Cam's had it explained to him by Weird and so he has a bit more control over it. The actual amount of light he can affect at any one time is a little limited but he's working on it and has actually managed to cloak an entire playing card now.

There's not much else to say about Cam except that, does anyone remember he changes colour? Hawk doesn't pick up on it much as he is a) used to it and b) not that observant and I also kind of forgot but I've always like the concept of him wearing his emotions on his skin somewhat, though I think everyone should very worried that Cam goes pale orange just before a fight. Happy, angry and excited all mixed together.

Weird

Ah Weird, I was looking forward to this, now Weird is, as you've almost certainly realised by now, the sweetest kid in the universe and hence I gave her the keys to destroying the planet, and if she's smart enough to avoid doing that, possibly reality. Why did I do this? Well in all honesty I never thought it would go that far. Weird originally had a plot of a convenient gift that allowed me to throw them into some scrapes that they wouldn't be able to get out of normally (hail of gunfire anyone?) but it quickly evolved to the point where I was starting to write the Freed around Weird rather than the other way around. You'll notice I'd nicely set up another mental block for Weird over using her powers by the end of the Freed, but she's far too curious for that to last her long.

Now an interesting part of Weird's power is just how sensitive she is to everything; she can't read minds like Angel but her power allows her to observe anything with energy within a certain area, the human brain being just one of these things. In a nut shell, Weird has the nearest comparison to a MRI scan of everyone's brain in the near vicinity and while she's knows nowhere near enough about how the brain works for her to read minds, she can pick up on obvious things: pain, fear and other strong emotions being among them.

I'm fairly sure Weird's had this ability for some time, even if it was just subconsciously and this goes to explain her remarkable empathy towards just about everyone, even people trying to kill her at the time. Personally I'm amazed by this strength of will, but I suppose Weird's fairly used to having things just not happen if she doesn't want them to.

When not in her apocalyptic mode, Weird is very much still a little girl and I guess she shares quite a few traits with Soph though she's not quite that sheltered, or suicidal for that matter. She is mostly fun loving and has in total used her power more for hers and others' entertainment than fighting. Unfortunately she has this tendency to panic when in combat which results in her doing something way beyond her limits and passing out. The scary thing about that though, is by the time she tries a similar thing again she'll be able to do it with relative ease.

Like Hawk, she has this tendency to go with the first plan that comes into her head. Nine times out of ten it's a good plan but Weird rarely stops to think of the alternatives, and so will sometimes do something massively complicated when a simple alternative will do. Her tendency to act very quickly is partly learned behaviour from Hawk, whom she idolises to some extent, but mostly because she really is very smart and usually her subconscious will come up with a good plan before she's even started thinking about it. This is rather different from Hawk who tends to work on his instincts, and because Weird's plans are so complicated they tend to fall through more often. Hawk doesn't have a plan; he wings it from step one and it only looks like he had some kind of brilliant scheme at the end.

To Weird's mind she is the group's protector and while no one actually expects her to save them every time, she has technically saved their lives the most often and takes it as a personally failure every time a member of the group gets hurt. She has this attitude for rather obvious reasons and it's simply because she could save everyone if she just had time to think. Hawk nearly dying was to her mind, entirely her fault, not to mention all the kids at the warehouse. In a way this is rather common survivors' guilt but Weird knows for certain that she could have saved them if she was just strong enough.

Unfortunately within that there's also the bitter irony that she can also kill with little more than a thought, and so hates her power. At the same time though she knows that if she ever wants to save everyone, she'll need to become stronger and she's terrified of that. Of what she may become.

In the end she just wants to save everyone, be it good guy or bad guy.

There's probably a huge amount of psycho-babble behind this but I think it's because she simply doesn't want to lose anyone else. Just who she lost I'm not wholly sure, but it could have been any number of kids that died at the lab and, as far as she's concerned, she's responsible for everyone who ever gets hurt around her.

Weird does relax some times, and did so a lot more before Freedom to Fail and in all honesty I much preferred her like that before she got all moody. Maybe the whole Eraser ambush and Hawk almost getting brained thing was a bit mean, but then again I protest that I don't decide what my characters do, despite that fact I'm the one writing this story.

Okay a few random facts include: Weird's eyes are actually brown, she just made them glow green one time and forgot to turn it off. She would currently rank as the smartest being on the planet with her IQ somewhere in the low two hundreds and she's currently capable of destroying an entire city within about twenty minutes. Also she has the ability to create mass but doesn't know how yet.

Powers

Okay I've said this a few times during this segment but when you get right down to it all the powers are a derivative of the same base ability, just specialised somewhat. This is what makes Weird so powerful; she is not specialised so can do anything with a fairly equal amount of proficiency, she could never talk to computers like Hawk but she could copy the basic principals somewhat and apply them elsewhere.

Anyway all the powers at their core are a form of quantum ESP (extra sensory perception) and to put that simply, a person using it is aware of everything around them right down to the subatomic level and beyond. Now while this is impossible in reality, so don't quote me to your physics teacher, observing these subatomic particles causes them to change either position or direction. The practical upshot of this is you can control the base forms of matter and energy and so transfer energy from location to location and form to form.

Take levitating objects for example, Weird does this initially by taking heat energy from herself and the surrounding area and converting it into kinetic energy applied to the base of the object. This gives the object the energy to overcome gravity and so lift off, the same principal can be applied to any object and could theoretically be used to slow a flying object to safe speeds.

This isn't actually how Weird stops bullets though, simply because it would take a tremendous amount of energy to even stop one bullet, let alone the storms of them they come across in the Freed. Weird actually takes the energy from the bullets and throws it out in random forms, heat, light and most noticeably sound. That's why the bullets buzz as they slow and as Weird has this bad habit of leaving them dissipating after they've stopped so they end up hovering as the gravity causes them to hum slightly. I did just realise that they should appear to move if they were stopped entirely because of the rotation of the earth, but let's just say Weird's stopping them relatively.

Now interestingly enough Weird can consciously change the direction she's going in, or any object for that matter, though it's one she doesn't understand very well and so doesn't use very much. It's a shame because it does mean she could perform some truly impressive stunts, but she's still stuck with a liner view of reality and that requires an external force.

The two other neat tricks she does are her blasting them out of any given situation and her instantly killing someone. The high speed one is actually the more complicated of the two as she has to: create a vacuum between them and the destination so they wont burn up from air resistance, uniformly accelerate every atom in her target's body to some ludicrously high speed and then decelerate them uniformly back down, making sure they don't hit anything on the way. A mistake at any phase could be fatal and somehow Weird does it almost instinctively. What can I say? She's Weird.

Anyway her instant killing trick is actually very simple and almost identical to the bullet trick. All the energy in the target's brain is dissipated and they will be dead before they even realise it. It's almost painfully easy, and that's why Weird hates the fact she can do it.

Finally there are a few other things that Weird could do but hasn't figured out yet. One, she can actually convert matter into energy and that's why I claim she could destroy New York with a bag of flour, the energy output for even a kilogram of anything is astronomical. Two, she could locally slow time by making everything around her vibrate at around the speed of light and so take advantage of time dilatation, and I'm fairly sure she could create a universe if she wanted to. I'm not quite sure how as I have no idea how a universe starts, but as Weird in terms of power ranks somewhere between demi-god and 'the almighty one' I'm sure she'll figure it out eventually.

Next, a final goodbye…