Foxhound (Graham Buckner)
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overview
Foxhound has never been a big name among the spandex set, but he has nonetheless been around for a long time. He spent several years as a covert government operative before going public as a superhero in 1974. He is a natural telepath, but the general public is unaware of this fact because he has gone to great lengths to suppress that power, choosing instead to focus on honing his body and perfecting his skills as an archer. He has fought street-level thugs and world-class threats alike, and seems to prefer a team environment despite his protests to the contrary. Currently, he is serving as Tennessee's active representative to the U.S. government-affiliated team known as The Statesmen, at the rank of Second Lieutenant.
Personality
Foxhound is a perfectionist above all else, and cannot accept the idea that there are some things that hard work alone just can't achieve. As a result, he has no patience for whiners and beggars, and no sympathy for anyone who offers excuses for the way they are or the things they don't have. He is hardest of all on himself, and is one of those people who rises early and keeps to a rigorous schedule of training (rumor has it his wedding was scheduled late in the day so that he wouldn't have to cut his routine short). He is a great believer in schedules and rituals because they keep his day orderly, and order is very important to him. His obsession with order and tidiness have led some to speculate that he suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but he lacks the uncontrollable compulsions that are often characteristic of the condition. He is very protective of his body and mistrusts doctors and medicines, often going out of his way to avoid medical treatment unless it is absolutely necessary.
Foxhound is also openly contemptuous of those fellow heroes who use flashy powers, claiming that they're taking the "easy route" even though he is fully aware that these so-called "superpower shortcuts" require a great deal of time and effort to master, as well. He's just far too stubborn to allow himself to change his mind about the matter despite the evidence to the contrary -- possibly because admitting that wielding superpowers is a worthwhile effort would also mean admitting to himself that he has no excuse for not developing his own powers all these years.
Despite his tendency to rub people the wrong way on first meeting, he generally becomes more tolerable once a person gets to know him because he relaxes and eases up on them once he gets to know them. There are heroes from all stripes of life that he deeply respects, though he rarely admits it, and despite his frequent complaints about them, he enjoys working with young rookie heroes. He feels a certain responsibility to train them up right.
His ex-wife describes him as "high-maintenance, but worth the effort most of the time", and that is probably the most polite way to describe him, in a nutshell.
Appearance
Though average in height and weight, Foxhound is in excellent shape, particularly so for a man his age. He has the body of a gymnast and phenomenal upper body strength thanks to years of firing a bow with a heavy pull. He is sharp-featured, with a receding hairline of hair that is technically still salt-and-pepper, though it's becoming more salt than pepper these days. Typically he keeps a neatly-trimmed goatee and moustache.
Though the material of his costume has changed a couple of times over the years to keep up with advancing technology, the color and design of it has not changed one bit in thirty-five years.
Abilities
Archery
Foxhound is one of the best archers on the planet, and is particularly adept at using his skills in a combat setting -- drawing, pulling, and firing rapidly, strafing, selecting the right arrow from his arsenal as quickly as possible, firing accurately at erratically-moving targets, and other similar skills. He employs an arsenal of specialty arrows, such as sonic arrows and taser arrows, though his favorite is and always will be the plain old traditional sharp pointy kind.
Telepathy
Psychic abilities come naturally to Foxhound, though he only allowed himself to train with them in order to learn how to control and suppress them. As a result of his intentional suppression, his powers have remained weak and have even, on occasion, seemed to disappear completely, only to return to him in an unexpected, uncontrolled burst when his life has depended on it. His son Wyatt inherited his father's powers, and long-term exposure to the boy (now a grown man using his telepathy freely thanks to his mother's encouragement) drew Foxhound's own abilities out to the point where he can no longer completely ignore their existence. With the heroes and villains around him becoming increasingly powerful, he has been forced to utilize his telepathy more and more, and his psychic potential at this time is unclear.
History
Graham Buckner was a self-made man. Through his own hard work, he had overcome the less-than-ideal circumstances of his youth and emerged with his head held high -- a stubborn, proud young man with no patience for whiners or beggars, a man who had learned to excel athletically and academically not because he was naturally gifted with skill or intelligence, but simply because he wouldn't accept anything less than perfection from himself. If he had to work ten times harder than someone else to be as good as them, then so be it. He relied on no one else for his successes, and blamed no one else for his failures.
And then... he discovered that it might have all been a lie.
As it turned out, Graham was a telepath, and while some might have been overjoyed to discover that they had superhuman powers, he was horrified. What if he had been unknowingly reading minds all along? What if all those answers that he thought he studied for had been unintentionally plucked from the mind of the teacher? What if he had accidentally read the next move of his opponents in games, so that his success was not due to his own hard-won skills, but to telepathic "cheating"?
The government took him on as a superhuman operative, and Graham allowed them to train him in the use of his telepathy -- not so he could use it for their benefit, but so that he could control and suppress it. Still, now that it had been planted in his head, the idea of being a superhero appealed to him. It was a rigorous, challenging lifestyle, and there were so many things in the world around him that needed fixing. So he took advantage of all the government training and facilities at his disposal to train his body in addition to his mind. Archery had always been his favorite sport (so delightfully precise!), and he like the idea of dispensing justice using nothing more than his own body and a simple weapon made with his own two hands. Originally he went by a different designation, but his stubborn, dogged pursuit of his prey eventually earned him the codename that he would keep forever afterward: Foxhound.
Eventually, he parted ways with the government. His superiors felt that he was limiting himself far too much by refusing to properly develop or use his telepathic powers, and he was far too pig-headed to change his mind about it just because they said so. He had a mission in life now, though, so he made the transition from mostly-covert government operative to the more colorful world of superheroing, marking the change by designing the black, orange, and white costume that he would become recognized by for the next thirty-five years.
Life since then has been one fight after the next. Despite his tendency to alienate people with his high expectations, near obsessive tidiness, and caustic tongue, he tends to gravitate towards a team environment. It's the most efficient way to get things done, after all (when done right), and he feels a responsibility to fix his fellow heroes, as well. In his opinion, too many of them rely on fancy superpowers at the expense of good old-fashioned hard work. Those closest to him know that most of his complaints are just smoke and ash and mean nothing -- he actually has a much higher opinion of most of the people he associates with than he'll ever admit. He's not the sort of man who gives praise easily.
He has never retired from active duty in all these years, though he did briefly fade from the spotlight when love unexpectedly struck him and he married and fathered a son. No one was really surprised that the marriage didn't last -- after all, Graham Buckner is not the easiest man in the world to live with -- but he and his wife parted on more-or-less friendly terms. He still has feelings for her, but won't admit to it. Their son is a young man now and an up-and-coming superhero in his own right.
And now, somehow, Foxhound finds himself a sixty-year-old superhero who doesn't really know how to do anything else, and probably wouldn't quit even if he did. As time has marched on and the villains have gotten bigger, nastier, and more powerful, and the heroes around him have grown in power to match the threat, he has been forced to tap into his long-ignored telepathy on more than one occasion, and he's finally -- finally -- exploring the side of himself that he has rejected for so long. He never expected to live this long, and isn't really sure how to face the looming threat of old age. He's in amazing shape for a man his age -- better shape than most men half his age -- and yet every morning when he looks at his face in the mirror it becomes harder and harder to ignore the fact that someday -- maybe in five years, maybe ten -- he's not going to be able to do this anymore. What happens to him then?
The prospect of death doesn't, and has never, frightened him, but the idea of being forced into a quiet retirement after a long life of constant action secretly terrifies him.
