The Gourmand

The Gourmand
Player: @Bluhman
"Methinks you need a bigger weapon, boy."
Character Build
Class Focus:	Melee Tank (CON/Protector/Warden)
Power Level:	40
Research & Development:	Arms
Biographical Data
Real Name:	Jacob Williams
Known Aliases:	The Gourmand
Gender:	Male
Species:	Human Mutant
Ethnicity:	British Caucasian
Place of Birth:	Oxford, England
Base of Operations:	Roosevelt City, New Jersey
Relatives:	Father: William Williams Mother: Jenny Williams
Characteristics
Age:	62
Height:	Varable; 7'5 - 16 feet.
Weight:	Variable; 412 - 1832 pounds
Eyes:	Green
Hair:	Red
Complexion:	White
Physical Build:	Rotund; Built Mesomorph
Physical Features:	Thick, fatty padding on body
Status
Alignment:	██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ Neutral
Reputation:	██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ Memorable
Identity:	Known
Years Active:	30
Citizenship:	English Citizen
Occupation:	Food Critic/Cookware Entrepreneur
Education:	Post-Graduate education
Marital Status:	Married
Known Powers and Abilities
Super-Strength, Super-Resilience, Calorie-Absorption and Regeneration, Body Growth
Equipment and Paraphernalia
Size-Variable uniform

Attributes
	Strength	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Endurance	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Agility	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Speed	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Fighting	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Projectiles	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Durability	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Resistance	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Intelligence	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Psyche	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
	Intuition	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █		Charisma	█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █
ReldinBox Template

The Gourmand is a longstanding member of the European-based superteam, the E-Team. Though it was disbanded initially in the 70's, the team has gotten back together in Roosevelt City, where Gourmand is now working alongside both old members of the team and new ones.

Origins

Early Life and Discovering Power

Jacob Williams was born to a blue-collar family in Oxford. His mother, Jenny, had spent a grueling 3 days in labor before Jacob had finally been birthed. When the baby was weighed, however, it was a wonder that she was even able to survive the ordeal; already, Jabob was weighing in at 18 pounds, and was almost three times as large as other babies in the nursery. Neither his father, William, or mother were particularly large people, but they refused to believe there was any possibility that the baby had any defects, let alone the baby was a mutant of all things.

Growing up, Jacob's demanding demeanor and yelling put a toll on his parents. All hours of the day, Jacob would be screaming for more food. No matter what his parents gave him, be it burgers or chips, vegetables or milk, Jacob would swallow it down and just ask for more. What was more troubling was that Jacob wasn't showing much signs of growth. At the age of five, he was barely 2 feet tall, and certainly looked malnourished. Seeing doctors all around the city, the Williams' finally came across Dr. Tim Perry, an expert in mutant biology. Perry suggested that there was a very good basis for Jacob's demands for food, especially given his stature. Given that he was not growing despite all the various meals he was receiving, Perry suggested that they try another variety of food; perhaps something that a person wouldn't normally eat. However, considering the paltry origins of the family and the toll that Jacob's demands had put on them, the Williams' were in no position to use their finances to try and get some sort of exotic food source.

Jacob's father, William, had been hard at work at the Knight Aero Company, whose production and efforts had paid off and proved the company to be very successful. In light of this, William was invited to a 5-course company dinner to commemorate the newly-achieved international status of the company. With such generous portions and the number of individual courses, William decided that he would get some of the food packaged (much to the shock of some of the company executives). Taking home with him a well-seasoned Filet Mignon, William stuck his leftover meal in the refrigerator. Jacob, somehow catching wind of this leftover meal, took it for himself and downed it in a single, mighty gulp. In an instant, Jacob grew from a height of 2 feet to 4; he had literally transformed from a sickly, scrawny dwarf to a healthy, plump child. Not only this, but Jacob's demands for food didn't occur for years to come, and he continued to grow at a high rate, showing himself to be unusually strong and swift for his age and build.

Jacob, with every odd year or two with a fancy meal, remained bright and attentive at school, passing the GCSE test with flying colors. With his sophisticated palette and impressive athletic properties, he was welcomed into the Oxford University, where he took up hobbies in boxing and wrestling, and learned techniques in cooking and entrepreneurship. Graduating from Oxford, Jacob Williams started up his own company in London, eventually finding fame as a cookware tycoon and acclaimed food critic.

Heroism

Milly Petunia (Aka. Cerise Cupcake) after Mr. Williams' verdict

Jacob's break into the world of superheroics was fairly spontaneous, especially given his then comfortable lifestyle. His work as a critic was published in upper-class magazines in the United Kingdom. Invariably, the chef's he judged to be the best went on to work at five-star establishments or otherwise start up their own; to be looked upon in a good light by Mr. Jacob Williams was the ultimate blessing you could receive as a cook. This information lead many cooks to try their hand at impressing Mr. Williams, including a certain Milly Petunia, a middle-class baker and pastry-cook from Cambridge.

Going in for an attempt to please Mr. Williams, Milly had prepared a 3-tier cake for the hefty connoisseur. One bite in, and Williams deemed the cake too sweet, too unrestrained, and entirely lacking a necessary subtlety of taste or style. Though Williams did not publicize his panning of Milly's work, she was still devastated by the criticism. So devastated, that she had changed. From that day forward, it was pretty clear that Milly wasn't in her right mind anymore. Crafting weapons and traps from her cooking tools in her bakery, she became known around the Cambridge area as The Cerise Cupcake. Taking with her what gadgets she had crafted, she began her rampage towards London to take Mr. Williams hostage. Feigning innocence by giving Williams a 'new cupcake recipie' to try out, Milly had actually fed the critic a powerful anesthetic to knock him out.

Williams came to inside Milly's mysterious workshop, where she would torture him until Williams would agree to give her his economic empire. Naturally, this backfired. Though Williams was solidly bolted down to a metal operation table, Milly had grossly underestimated his strength, and he easily broke free of the tables' shackles. Taking out exploding torte bombs and mousse flambe, Milly assaulted Williams nonstop, but nothing seemed to work against him; his bulbous body just seemed to shrug off every attempted attack. Williams, not one to easily forgive when knocked out and taken to some shady workshop, swept her right off her feet and delivered her to law enforcement officials, putting the maniacal cake-maker behind bars.

Following the ordeal, Williams attempted capture and escape were made public in national news, with Williams offering a majority of the details that had happened on his escape. It was now painfully clear that Williams' strength and endurance edged into some sort of supernatural territory, and strong pressure came in from many parties for Williams to take action. Indeed, given the rising criminal rates in the city of London and elsewhere in the world, it seemed like a logical choice. When Williams caught wind of the E-Team and their search for new members, Williams wasted no time, putting together an outfit and taking up the moniker of The Gourmand.

Gourmand was a key member of the E-Team. Being the only member who was capable of great feats of strength and withstanding powerful assaults, he was monumental in blocking attempted attacks by villains such as The Cobalt Cavalier. Not only this, but Gourmand had gained close ties to a number of his working partners: Avalon, son of the CEO of the Knight Aero Company, became close friends with Gourmand and the two eventually formed a joint-company back in London. With Scout, Gourmand was noteworthy for teaching her how to fight in melee combat and also gave her a few tips on how to impress Avalon. Gourmand's collaborations with Deadbolt were probably the most important; being a talkshow host, Deadbolt soon found himself having Gourmand as a regular guest and judge on his broadcast. It was largely through him that Gourmand managed to get internationally famous.

It was in the early 70's that Deadbolt was single-handedly taken down by the Cobalt Cavalier in Moscow. Gourmand, who had been incapacitated by food poisoning, was powerless to stop the occurrence, and with the team's leader now dead, the E-Team soon disbanded. Gourmand soon left his heroic life behind him, got married to Teresa Merchant, an uneducated but nice woman from London, and settled down to raise a family alongside his flourishing company.

In the US

40 years later, The E-Team would be revived by Dr. Voltsz in Roosevelt City. Voltsz proceeded to re-form the group by slowly contacting all the old members of the team to meet up in the American City. The goal of the reformed team was to disarm a Gravity-Bomb within city limits, and hopefully prevent the entire city (as well as perhaps the fabric of reality itself) from being annihilated. Gourmand was perhaps the last to be roused to action; given the family he had now raised, he was quite reluctant to leave them behind without supervision. When his servants assured that they would do their best to keep things straight back at home, Gourmand set off to the US to meet his old colleagues.

Gourmand's approach to the underground E-Team operation is far-flung from the subtlety that the other members of the team adopt. With Gourmand's hefty size and power, he's not well-suited to the intel-gathering that the other team members often carry out. The few times he is sent on a mission, though, he is very important. Usually carrying out his orders without much hesitation, Gourmand has proven time and time again to be more than a match for the majority of the Alpha Force, Roosevelt City's public superhero team.

Detailed Information

Personality

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On the surface, Gourmand is very laid-back and easygoing. He gets along well with most people and places considerable emphasis on making a good first-impression. This of course seems to be a facade for the more critical part of his personality. It's not too far from the truth to say that Gourmand is also brutally honest about many things, and can sometimes say completely factual information that he later regrets. In a somewhat hypocritical manner, Gourmand is also prone to strong emotionality, especially when watching films or reading books.

In all actuality, Gourmand's brutal honesty seems to be more a byproduct of absent-mindedness rather than genuine vitriol towards any given person. When it comes down to it, Gourmand is not very aggressive at all, and he rarely gets angry. Usually, though, when he is in the middle of intense combat or danger, he covers up intense feelings of fear or anger with a grin; that's when you know he's really let loose. Gourmand seems to be the most lively in the middle of a fight, and his ability to maintain a jolly disposition in the middle of such an intense moment seems to give him an advantage in maintaining high morale for both himself and his allies.

Combat Specifications

Gourmand's expanding abilities enable him to grow up to 16 feet tall.

Despite being built like a morbidly obese man, Gourmand is actually very fit under all that weight. Gourmand can jog at a comfortable 12 miles per hour for up to a day before getting tired, and when concentrating strength into his legs, can leap 121 feet into the air. When it comes to lifting and upper body strength, Gourmand is much more formidable; Gourmand can lift up to 8 tons of weight, and can crush stone in the palm of his hand.

On top of his incredible strength, Gourmand is highly durable, thanks to his fatty padding. His body fat seems to serve as veritable armor, capable of absorbing all sorts of shock and usually sending projectiles like bullets and rockets bouncing off harmlessly. This sort of padding extends over almost his entire body, leaving almost no weakpoints for him to be damaged by. Despite all this padding, however, there are certain energies that Gourmand is still vulnerable against, including sufficiently extreme temperatures, radiation, and sonic waves. Especially with the latter, Gourmand can be left jiggling too intensely to really take any sort of action for a while.

Perhaps his most unusual trait is his metabolism. Gourmand's Calorie-Absorption abilities enable him to apply the energy from an ingested food-source in a variety of ways, enabling him to regenerate damaged tissue, temporarily grow, and otherwise keep himself energized. Not only this, but the calorie-absorption he exhibits becomes more effective depending on the (somewhat arbitrary) quality of the food; that is to say, Gourmand gets the same amount of energy from 12 pounds of ground beef as he does from a teaspoon of saffron. The better prepared a food source is, the more effective that Gourmand can utilize its calories.

When using calories to expand, Gourmand's physical traits and capabilities improve vastly. Given enough food, Gourmand can temporarily reach sizes of up to 16 feet tall and weigh in at 1,823 pounds, with his speed and strength increasing by appropriate values. Though Gourmand can become much stronger via this technique, he cannot maintain such sizes for long, as they put considerable stress on his skin. Especially if he's taking a lot of hits in his expanded state, he runs the risk of doing more damage to himself in combat. Thankfully, his outfits have been custom-tailored to expand with his body.

The sensitive nature of Gourmand's digestive system means that Gourmand is extremely susceptible to ingested poison. Food that might lead one person to simply throw up could lead Gourmand to be bedridden for weeks with flu-like symptoms. The one exception to this rule is for alcohol, to which Gourmand's immense mass makes him very tolerant to all but the strongest of spirits.

Et Cetera

Oldest Known appearance of The Gourmand.

• The 16th 40 has consistently been a highly-defensive Might-based character.
• When taking his size-expanding abilities into consideration, he is both the heaviest and tallest character in the roster.