Info/App

[manmeasand]

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Flint Marko aka Sandman
CHARACTER AGE: around 30ish
CANON ORIGIN: the Spectacular Spider-Man (2008)
CHRONOLOGY: Just after the end of First Steps / his last appearance on the show
CLASS: Supervillain-ish kinda sorta
HOUSING: Somewhere in Heropa please!

BACKGROUND:
Wiki link!

PERSONALITY:
Flint Marko has an incredibly powerful and almost limitless ability and he mostly just uses it to knock over jewelry stores with sand hammers. He can be creative when he wants to be - turning into a guillotine, making sand slides - and he can be clever, hiding as statues or coming up with schemes. But at the end of the day he tends to go back to what’s familiar without thinking about it much. When in doubt, rob something. Make your hand into a hammer. Punch.

All he ever wanted was to make a lot of money in one job. He has an obsession with getting the “big score”, to the point that it’s not really about the end result - he never talks about what he’ll do with the money. A lot of it has to do with his self-image as the guy who did it, who pulled it off. When he gets a goal he’s tenacious and determined to see it through, even if his focus acts like blinkers, letting him get blindsided.

He’s a crook, and has been a petty criminal for a long time, but that doesn’t mean he’s good at it. Until he got his powers and became Sandman, he was mostly a failure. Even after getting his powers he always seemed to lose, especially to Spider-Man. But his beef with Spider-Man was always reactionary - he puts his own goals first and foremost and if left alone he wouldn’t have gotten into fights with Spidey at all, even for revenge. But when Spider-Man consistently prevented him from reaching his goals that’s when he resorted to violence and fighting.

He’s certainly capable of violence, and wanting to crush those who get in his way - and in a good fight he enjoys himself. But deep down he doesn’t really want to hurt anyone, especially innocents. He admits this himself when he saves the people on the Oil Tanker he was attacking when he’d realized he had gone too far. He doesn’t really want blood on his hands, and while he’s no hero, he will save people if given the opportunity.

And especially since his pull point is after the boat incident, he’s been a bit shook by the realization of how close he’d come to hurting so many people just because he wanted the big score - it’s unclear exactly how that affected him in the show, but he never turns up again as a villain. He’s not going to reform, exactly, but he is going to slow his roll. Be more hesitant and careful.

He’s something of a big softie (not just literally) with a soft spot for kids and by extension, other vulnerable people. He might be a big lug, but he’s also just as likely to make cute sand castles and stick up for his buddies. But he doesn’t want to be seen as soft, so will make up excuses and insist that really he’s a big, powerful hardened criminal you shouldn’t mess with. Really.

POWER:
Sand Shapeshifting!
Flint Marko can turn partly or fully into sand and shift said sand into whatever shape he wants. Any sand he touches he can add to himself - so on a beach he can make himself huge. But on the flipside he can also lose sand - if someone cuts off his sand arm it’ll all flop uselessly to the ground. He has to maintain a connection; he can add sand to his overall sand-ness and control it from there, but he can’t like, look at sand in a box a room away and make it move. He also can’t create it, he has to use what he can get.

His sand form makes him impervious to most physical harm but it does have its drawbacks, like water (which works on sand exactly the way you think it would), sound/shockwaves (which tend to break him apart or make him lose his form), force or electric blasts etc.

In the cartoon he’s completely sand all the time but to make things more balanced in MoM here’s what I’m going to say: when he returns to his “default” form, he turns human again. If he has more sand than can fit in that body (he can compact it a lot but not a ton) he sheds it. Meaning he can’t go to a beach and grab a ton of sand and turn human again and expect to keep it around. If he doesn’t have enough sand he won’t be able to return to human form. If he spends longer than 24 hours in sand-form he’ll automatically turn back to human for at least a day (and if he doesn’t have enough sand to turn back he’ll die, for the Drama(™) ).

Injuries, illnesses and other problems are kept on the human body. If he’s stabbed as a human and goes sandy his “sand self” wouldn’t be bleed or anything. It’s sand. BUT if he returns to his human body he’s still stabbed, the wound won’t miraculously heal.