Matthew Nix

MATTHEW

## **CHARACTER INSIGHT:**

Matthew Nix is tall and lean with thick chocolate, brown hair accompanied with wide brown eyes. He is male with a complicated persona including emotional troubles, quiet mannerisms, and a repressed dark side.

**NAME BREAKDOWN:**

* **MATTHEW:** Greek origins; a gift from above.
* **NIX:** A warrior of the sea.
	+ **NICKNAMES:** Matty, Matt
	+ **FORMER NAMES:** None.

**ADDITIONAL:**

* **BIRTH SEASON:** Autumn.
	+ **ZODIAC:** Aquarius.
	+ **ELEMENT:** Fire.
	+ **BIRTHDATE:** February 15, 1995.

## **APPEARANCE:**

Matthew Nix is tall and lean (6'0ft), what he lacks in heavy mass is made up for with sculpted muscle, intelligence, and wit. His chiseled features are framed by his prominent jawline, plump lips, and deep brown eyes which are defused by the heavy shape of his eyes which give a more appeased expression. His voluminous brown hair is most commonly swept back or to the side, or charmingly unkempt. His torso and sternum are loosely scattered with faint yet long scars he has accumulated over the countless fights served as a vigilante.

## **PERSONALITY:**

Matt Nix, for lack of a better term, is complicated. As a child, he felt immense guilt and loss: blaming himself for the death of his father as well as feeling lost after losing his sight. He was both heroic and selfless even as a child, as was shown best when he saved an elderly man from being hit by a truck, at the cost of his own vision. Nix has "daddy issues" with both his actual father Jack Nix and his subsequent father figure, having lost both either to death or from being abandoned. His subsequent father tried to raise him to be coldblooded but suddenly abandoned him when Matt started expressing filial affection; this abandonment and rejection has left Murdock with difficulty forging real emotional connections, despite his determination to not let that abandonment define him.

While fighting crime, he can be very brutal and heavily injures criminals in such manner as breaking their bones. He has hospitalized multiple criminals in this regard, with the first man he beat up having to eat through a straw for a month. However, he has avoided intentionally killing anyone so far and limits himself to hand to hand combat and sticks so as to not inflict lethal injuries, even if this results in himself getting injured during fights. He usually attempts to avoid killing people, and has yet to kill anyone so far, as he believes he's on thin ice as it is and that doing so will make him no better than the people he's fighting. Matt believes that the people he's up against deserve a second chance, to try again. As he believes that there is goodness in people.

Despite his reluctance to kill, Matt has, on occasion, when sufficiently infuriated or when the situation is dire, thrown away his concern for the well-being of his opponents. As a Catholic, Nix experiences a lot of guilt and soul-searching over his actions when he allows his anger and contempt for violent criminals to cause him to enjoy beating them bloody, and he frequently wonders whether he is doing the right thing in the eyes of God or whether he is allowing evil into his heart.

## **POWERS:**

* ENHANCED SENSES: Despite being blinded as a child, Nix's remaining four senses, besides sight, are enhanced to a superhuman level, resulting in them becoming radar/sonar-like. He claims to constantly feel numerous things, including balance, direction, minuscule changes in air density, vibrations, and blankets of temperature variations, that are usually imperceptible to human beings. That, combined with his acute hearing and olfactory senses, allows Murdock to evaluate his surroundings in what he describes as an "Impressionistic painting" of the world around him, which, according to him, looks like "the world on fire". His superhumanly enhanced senses grants him tremendous awareness of his surroundings on a wide range, this makes him extremely alert to danger.

* ENHANCED HEARING: Like a bat, Nix's hearing is extremely acute, he can clearly hear conversations, heartbeats and even breaths from several meters. He is able to hear and memorize the sound of a watch ticking, and hear bones shifting as she breathed. Murdock can focus on what he hears. He can hear shifts in the heart rate. Hearing the changes in people's heartbeats allows Matthew to predict how they feel and what actions they'll take, such as attack or run.
	+ *Echolocation:* Matt possesses an exceptionally advanced form of human echolocation. He is able to detect objects in his environment by sensing echoes from those objects, by actively creating and listening for sounds - for example tapping his cane, stomping of his enemies' feet, raindrops, ticking from a watch, tumbling of a safe's locks, rattling chains or even a person's heartbeat. He can interpret the sound waves reflected by nearby objects, accurately identifying their location and size.

* ENHANCED SMELL: His incredible olfactory senses which are even sharper than a dog allow him to detect the scent of for example, stale cigarettes and cheap cologne three floors above him and through several walls.

* ENHANCED TASTE: Matthew was able to tell that a friend of his had ripped open some of the stitches on her back, due to tasting copper in the air from the blood of her open wound. His subsequent father figure taught him how to train this sense, which allowed him to pick out every individual ingredient of the ice cream he was eating, including that the milk used came from three different dairy farms, and that the man who served him used a certain type of soil in his garden.

* ENHANCED TOUCH: Matthew can feel the presence of those around him through vibrations, air currents and body temperatures. He can dodge attacks and projectiles by feeling them cut through the air, creating ripples of currents only detectable by him. He locates enemies through walls and from different floors by feeling the vibrations they make from moving, such as their footsteps.
	+ *Enhanced Thermoreception:* Matt can sense changes in heat in the environment.
		- *Electroreception***:** Matt is able to detect electric fields, similar to a shark. When out on a mission, Matt was able to find a hidden room by feeling an electrical current coming from behind the wall. He could hear the electricity buzzing inside the wall and felt a stop in the current where the mechanism for unlocking the secret room was.