Character Profile - Cameron Johnson

Cameron Johnson
Human (Mutant) Male

Place of Origin: Leicester, England

Physical Description

Cameron’s somewhat obsessive about his fitness, not without justification given the rigors of his mutation, but there’s also a healthy dose of vanity in there too. Well-built, well-groomed and easily confident, he’s annoyingly charming when he grins.

Personality Profile

Cameron is a pretty simple guy, or so he likes to believe. Preferring a life of action over philosophy, his interests are rooted in the physical world. With a knack for making any old clunker purr like a kitten, he embraces his role as Workshop Coordinator with a reasonable amount of enthusiasm even though he’s only agreed to join the faculty because it secures him a position piloting the Knight’s aircraft. Cameron is far more interested in the ‘direct action’ side of furthering the mutant cause and can become exceedingly restless and impatient if grounded for too long.

Despite his cockiness, and the fact that too much time deliberating can start to chaff, Cameron is mostly a decent guy. Quick to laugh, often at his own expense, he is somewhat charismatic and, at the very least, self-assured and confident in a way that conveys a true and abiding sense of courage and tenacity. Cameron places himself at risk first, so eager to protect others that he can have a slight issue with following orders if he believes he can spare a life. If nothing else, it makes him a reliable ally and a relentless and determined champion of the underdog.

Early years Biography

Cameron grew up in a fairly ordinary family, in a fairly ordinary middle-class suburb. Physically gifted from a young age, it wasn’t until the onset of his powers on the approach to puberty that his track and field aspirations took a nose-dive towards the impossible.

In hindsight, Cam has always recognised that his powers had manifested much earlier in his childhood but the unique requirement of electricity as a catalyst, and his inability before the age of 9 to intentionally initiate this, kept incidents restricted to bizarre isolations with no immediate correlation. Yes, the light bulbs always seemed to blow when he was the one flicking the switch, and he showed flashes of ingenuity that didn’t quite correspond with his average school marks, but most of the earlier clues were things only Cameron was aware of and he was too concerned with being forced to sit inside a doctor’s office, and the subsequent impact on his sporting schedule, to speak up.

Diagnosis, for Cameron, was therefore not a particularly welcome intrusion. Moments of extreme reflex-response started to accumulate witnesses, particularly his siblings, and an encounter with an electrical surge that should have caused far more discomfort forced Cameron to acknowledge that something very strange was happening to him. It took the rescue of his sister, in full view of his entire extended family, for the truth to finally come out. He was just shy of his 10th birthday.

The next few years saw the family’s typical suburban life turned upside down. Recognition was only the first step, it became abundantly clear that Cameron required help to control his powers and his parents had little to no prior knowledge to assist with his transition into the mutant community. Some were welcoming, others were terrifying, and Cameron himself went through a period of instability that cost him most of his friends and, perhaps worse, his sports. To this day, he credits his mentors at the time with redefining his purpose and it was through the development of his powers and pushing himself to see how far he could go that Cameron gradually rebuilt his life. Not before a lot of damage was done, not before his family were forced to move half a country away to escape the judgement and intolerance of a community that didn’t want to accommodate a mutant. The sacrifices still sting but, ultimately, they proved worth it.

Whilst the discovery of his mutant powers was arguable the most profound development during this stage of Cameron’s life, it was the subsequent unraveling of his entire creation that stood poised to deliver the second blow. Infertility treatment had aimed to create three offspring from the same paternity but, owing to an ultimate quagmire of security breeches and intentional stock contamination, Cameron is the result of an entire different donor to his brother and sister. With his mutant origins traced back to this paternal source, it took several years of investigation and a class action suit instigated by one of the other families for Cameron to discover he has two other mutant half-siblings, as well as several others who perished during infancy and at least one abandoned and as-yet undiscovered. His father’s identity also remains a mystery, though the act of attempting to increase mutant births by infiltrating infertility alternatives appears to have been intentional. This is a side of Cameron’s life that is very personal to his current efforts and informs a large part of why he has steered his career in the direction it’s taken.

History

And thus, despite this obviously difficult adjustment period and the turbulence of his teenage years as Cameron processed his anger towards the persecution he and his family now faced as a result of his mutant status, he has remained one of the lucky ones. Fully supported by his parents and siblings, having been permitted to immerse himself in the mutant rights movement without fear of abandonment, he is committed to being a key player in ensuring others like him are afforded the safety and freedom they are entitled to.