Scott Summers

## Personality

Scott doesn't generally feel a need to interact with those around him, he doesn't trust most people, and he has years of practice ignoring them.  He's on the quiet side, not speaking unless he has something to say.  However, when he does talk, he can have an acid tongue and a wicked sense of humor.  He lacks patience, and has been known to tell Xavier that his “role on Earth is to control the inferior morons around” him.  He's a control freak, and neat to the point of obsessiveness.    He's exceptionally attentive, paying attention to small details in people's behavior so as to better predict what they'll do in the future, and he's not above using that knowledge to his advantage.

However, under his extremely prickly exterior, he has a hero-streak a mile wide.  Scott dislikes injustice, and hates to see others pick on people weaker than them.  At Essex house and his former schools, he got into fights more than once that way.  He's also been known to write vitrolic hate mail to to CPS about the state of the child welfare system.  He hates lying – though by necessity he became extremely good at it – and as a result will be honest to the point of complete rudeness.

Scott is extremely competitive.  He hates to lose, and if he can't win, he'll cheat.

## Powers

Optic blasts.

Scott absorbs solar radiation and uses it to open a portal to the non-Einsteinian universe which in turn generates the force blasts that are emitted from his eyes. The blasts are only force, they don’t emit heat at all – canons, not lasers. At full power Scott’s optic blasts have the power of several kilotons of TNT. At least, that’s what he has emitted thus far. He has the potential to release blasts powerful enough to split small planets, but he never has and doesn’t quite believe it’s true.

Scott can, to some extent, control the intensity of his optic blasts. By relaxing or contracting the muscles of his eyes he can release a blast soft enough to just sting (really badly) or one that can punch through layers of titanium alloy. Without conscious concentration, Scott’s optic blasts naturally will have the force to punch through a wall, or a person if they’re too close, but not through thick metals. With the visor his control is immensely increased. He can narrow and widen the beam he emits at his leisure – but this means needing to have excellent hand-eye coordination.   Like other forms of light, which have properties of both waves and particles, Scott's optic blasts can be bounced off of shiny surfaces like a laser could. Doing so requires hitting the exact right angle however, as a head-on shot will simply blast through whatever the shiny object was. Scott's mutation, as a side-effect, has given him an uncanny ability to measure trajectories and perform immediate geometry and trigonometry.   Scott’s body emits a psionic field that dissipates his own optic blasts (which is why his eyelids haven’t been blasted to pieces) – if struck with his own power the blasts merely dissipate against him.

Due to a head injury he received as a child, Scott cannot “turn-off” his optic blasts. As a result he is dependent on external aids (the glasses or visor). Due to the fact that Scott’s mutation his solar powered, prolonged sun deprivation shuts the portal, blocking the influx of non-Einsteinian energy. It is theorized that this would make Scott extremely ill, though he has never kept him out of the sun long enough to find out. His mutation has also rendered him colorblind (he sees everything in shades of red).

## Talents

Scott has an automatic ability to judge spatial relationships, angles, and trajectories – making him a whiz at trigonometry – but that is primarily related to his mutation.  He's of above-average intelligence, and is a natural-born strategist.  Scott has never lost a game of chess or Risk.  At least, not against anyone who wasn't cheating.  He hates working with other people, but he's never let it stop him from taking charge if it was needed, and when he's been a group leader, he's done quite well.

## Interests

Music: classic rock, mostly, but also grunge, metal, and the odd acoustic guitar piece.

Books (Scott loves to read): Art of War (Sun Tzu), Nietzche, Origin of Species, Foundation Trilogy (Asimov), Marx, Dune (Herbert), The Prince (Machiavelli)

He'll watch TV or movies if he has to, but he doesn't have a particular affinity for it.  Scott has partially adopted the Mets as his baseball team, but is otherwise uninterested in sports.

## History

Scott was born to USAF Maj. Christopher Summers and his wife Katherine in Anchorage, Alaska. He enjoyed a typical military brat’s life until he was about 10. That summer his father, a professional test pilot and the originator of Scott’s love of planes, was flying the entire family back from their family vacation when something went horribly wrong. The plane somehow caught fire and, in a desperate move to save her children, Katherine strapped the only two parachutes on her sons and pushed them out of the plane.

Scott’s parachute was hit with flaming debris on his way down, causing him to fall faster than was really safe. He hit the ground hard, resulting in a bad head injury.   Scott spent a year comatose in a Nebraskan hospital.
When he woke up, he was told his parents were dead and his brother had been adopted. It was a lot to take in. After a brief period of medical rehabilitation, Scott was sent into the foster care system.  He was unable to be permanently placed because of the “brain damage” stamp in his file, not to mention his age. No one knew, at the time, what the brain damage was, exactly – but nobody wanted to adopt Scott as a result. He spent time in various group homes within the state, eventually ending up in the Nathaniel Essex group home. One of the managers there was Jack Winters, better known criminally as Jack O’Diamonds, who took and interest in Scott and, ultimately, offered to foster Scott himself.

While he was living with Jack, Scott began to experience severe headaches and disabling migraines. His school sent him to a specialist that discovered that ruby quartz lenses would make the pain disappear.  The school didn't have many opportunities to observe how things were working, though, in the long term, because Jack – furious that Scott had even reached out for help in the first place – quickly pulled him out of that school, and moved.  And so it went, switching places every few months, enrolling in school so as not to arouse suspicion and then leaving it again, once guidance counselors began asking questions.   After all, the unusual injuries and bruises the withdrawn teenager always seemed to have struck school personnel as red flags.

After a few moves, Scott's headaches became something more.  One of Jack's associates, unhappy with the boy's behavior that night, smacked him back and, as his glasses were dislodged, Scott blasted a hole through him.  He immediately slammed his eyes shut, and eventually tested out the glasses' ability to stop his optic blasts; luckily, they did.  Fearing police attention, Jack and his cronies (with Scott's help) cleaned the whole mess up.

Jack wanted to use Scott’s mutation in his criminal activities. And, though Scott originally refused to do so, he was eventually “persuaded”.  Thus began an unsolved string of robberies in the Omaha area, which local authorities attributed to some kind of organized crime, and the tabloids claimed to be the work of a man with “laser eyes”.  That was how Charles Xavier found him, interrupting one of Jack's heists.  With all the actors telepathically frozen, Xavier offered Scott an escape that he didn't entirely trust but that was still better than he life with Jack. Jack came to in a bank surrounded by cops and entirely by himself.  He made a deal with police, turning over and testifying against his accomplice, a demolitions expert going by Guero Cooper, in exchange for a lighter sentence.

And thus, Scott Summers became the very first student at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.