InsaneJournal

general
Full Name: Tyrone Johnson
Nickname(s)Alias(s): Ty
Codename: Cloak
Identity: In their world, Cloak and Dagger are big in the media, but their identities are not popularly known.
DOB | Age: January 7, 1985 | 23
Place of Birth: Boston, USA
Race/Nationality: African-American.
Occupation: None.
Allegiance: Vigilante.
Sexuality: 0 on the Kinsey Scale
Marital Status: In a relationship.
Appearance: No one sees Ty out of the cloak these days. Ty's ability allows him to make himself as wide or as tall as suits him, and as you can imagine he doesn't really go for the dull and unassuming. At least six feet tall, sometimes taller if the person he's talking to is sufficiently large, Ty's hidden eyes are always level or higher with the person he's looking at. There's nothing more to see except his grim, dark face from nose to chin, and then cold, empty blackness between the folds of the black-blue shroud. Ty doesn't have very much in the way of expressions, and since he rarely chooses to speak his cool, smooth voice is not often heard in conversation.

Only Tandy ever sees Ty out of the cloak. In those times of privacy and relaxation, he still favors the simple dark colors of his youth, jean and old black leather. He has never been quick to smile and he doesn't have any humor of his own, but he's caring, giving, affectionate, and intelligent in his opinions. All of this is often visible in his eyes, frank and dark, and in the movement of his body, which still betrays traces of the awkwardness of youth despite the muscle and height.


personality
Personality: Ty's problems with communication when he was young dictated a lot of his personality for adulthood. "Learning disability," some called it, but really all it meant for Ty was that he had a hard time picking up what people were saying, especially when they babbled, rambled, or spoke quickly. Reading was even harder, and after he got the basics, he very rarely came across something that was worth the effort of puzzling the meaning out. Ty didn't do well in school, nor did he try very hard to communicate with peers, who weren't patient enough to wait for what he had to say.

The best thing about making it on his own, once he ended up in New York without family or friends, was that he found out that he wasn't stupid. Not even close. Stupid people didn't make it on their own. Ty acquired a certain independence, a vindication that meant that whatever everybody else had told him when he was a kid didn't matter. Putting on weight and height didn't have any more to do with that confidence; he had it by the time he turned eighteen.

Still taciturn and sometimes overly serious, Ty's violent tendencies are really just a lack of hesitation. He doesn't hesitate before he acts; by the time he moves, he's already decided what to do. (He's more likely to choose to act than stand around, and when he does stand around, it's not him that does the talking.) Ty is not shrewd, but he's understanding of human nature: of the basic fight and flight response, the need for home and comfort, and the right to survive. He has a certain distrust of those with power and money, even though his immediate dismissal of them (shades of his youth) has faded since his association with Tandy.

Speaking of Tandy, Ty is fiercely loyal and protective of his partner, and those violent tendencies everyone talks about is nothing compared to what will happen if she comes to serious harm.

Likes: Baseball (Red Sox). Dark chocolate Mars bars. History channel documentaries. Foosball. Firework shows.
Dislikes: Drugs, unsurprisingly. Gangs. Guns. Paparazzi. Alcohol.
Hobbies: None. Ty's job is his hobby. He really doesn't have other interests. He's aware how unhealthy that is.
Habits: Crosses his arms over his chest when he's standing. When he's pissed, Ty will swear a little more than actually necessary. Considering he doesn't actually talk very much, it's fairly noticeable.
Phobias: Ty's not scared of the dark, but he doesn't want to be alone in it. Losing Tandy's pretty high on the phobia list. He doesn't like needles, either.


biography

Tyrone Johnson was born to a large family in Roxbury, Boston. He has two much older brothers that weren't exactly the supportive type, and a much younger sister the three boys ignored in favor of trying to make it in a neighborhood that was dominated by gangs and violence. If it wasn't for his brothers, Ty would have had even more trouble in school than he did. He was slow in a lot of ways: slow to speak, slow to respond to his teachers, and had difficulty with reading. Ultimately, being diagnosed as dyslexic only verified what everybody else thought about how stupid he was. Nobody was big on understanding that the communication problems didn't have anything to do with intelligence at the time. Bullies were a constant, and Ty didn't grow out of the shrimp stage until he was almost fifteen.

Unfortunately the "help" his brothers provided ended up being the support of the local gang, whose territory was the width of ten blocks--until they moved up against a Latin neighborhood near Ty's junior high school. The gang made Ty uneasy, but a bunch of hormonal teenage boys with guns made everybody uneasy, and for some time he pretended it didn't. He appreciated the support of the Streets when they stopped the harassment after school, however, and his brothers were proud when he went through early recruitment. The violence started to escalate after Ty turned sixteen and culminated in a real crisis when the Streets loaded up to hit a corner on the border of their territory. Ty knew one of the Latinos from a few blocks down; they went to junior high together. The guy tutored him in biology. So Ty warned him.

The gutters ran with blood that day, but Ty wasn't around to see it. He took off, because he knew it wasn't going to take long for the heat to turn. Ty ended up in New York, squatting and scraping a living through theft. One night he chose the wrong building to sleep in, because when he woke up (with a hell of a headache) he was in a dark shipping container with a bunch of other people--hobos and druggies, mostly, but with a runaway here or there, and none of them knew how they got there.

Days, or weeks, or maybe months passed. The thugs with guns worked with a bunch of guys that had "dealers" written all over them. Ty and the others were convenient lab rats for some experimental drugs, and the black days interspersed with hallucinations were some of the lowest of Ty's life. He thought it was just another hallucination when one of the other prisoners exploded in beams of white light. The small blonde had been part of the group that had been clustering together whenever they could, and before Ty knew what he was doing, he had pulled her behind him.

More dark, but this time, it was a new type of darkness, and when Ty and the girl, Tandy, opened their eyes, they were safe in the unfamiliar tenement again. Detox was another new low, but afterward, Ty was strong in a whole new way. He was angry, too, angry enough to use the new darkness at his command. Tandy came along with him when he went after the crew on the boat, probably because she didn't want him to go alone, and maybe because she was scared about what he wanted to do.

Details aside--the two of them took that crew apart. They almost took the boat apart too.

Ty and Tandy took the next year to put their lives back together. Tandy went home to scream at her mother, and Ty went home to visit his family. One of his brothers was dead and the other already in prison, but his sister was smart: scholarship material. Ty's parents had very little to say to him, and he even less to say to them, but at least they didn't hate him.

"Cloak and Dagger" hit the media a year or so later. Ty was still angry, angry at the people that had made the shit they'd injected into them, angry at the people who were now manufacturing it, angry at the people dealing it and just plain angry. The pair started taking apart the drug trade from the ground up. They've helped out many of New York's big names, like Spiderman and Daredevil. They were offered a position with Xavier's New Mutants (which they turned down), and worked with other hero groups. For the most part, however, the pair work best together against the lowlifes who didn't need superpowers to make life hell for other people.

earth 514
In brief: Earth 514 is currently in a state of upheaval as the traditional United States Government attempts to deal with mass popular knowledge of mutantkind. After a catastrophic conflict between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, Magneto is in a coma and Professor X is currently (willingly) incarcerated for his attempted murder. Unless in the service of the government, vigilantism is illegal, and all mutants must be registered. Cloak and Dagger are quite boldly anti-registration and fully pursuing their anti-crime activities in defiance of the United States government and it's mutant criminal division, H.A.M.M.E.R. For more information, see Dagger's "History of Earth 514".

Tandy and Ty were removed from their timeline just before they fall into a H.A.M.M.E.R. trap, which was destined to go horribly wrong and result in a severe chemical spill, which would then trigger an out-and-out war.

profile survey was made by Jammer and tweaked slightly by Irish.