Jean-Paul Beaubier

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PHASE 1

Jean-Paul Beaubier
File:Northstar.jpg Portrayed by Olivier Martinez
Codename:	Northstar
Affiliations:	Xavier Institute - Staff
Birthdate:	May 26, 1970

Journal:	Running Long Before I Learned To Crawl
Player:	Available for applications

Jean-Paul Beaubier is a full-time teacher at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Anything else is none of your concern.

Details

Character Journal: x_cynosure

Real Name: Jean-Paul Étienne Beaubier

Codename: Northstar

Aliases: Jean-Paul Martin

First Appearance: July 13, 2004

Date of Birth: May 26, 1970

Place of Birth: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Citizenship: Canadian

Relatives: Jean-Baptiste Beaubier (father, deceased), Melisande Beaubier (mother, deceased), Louis Martin (adopted father, deceased), Jolie Martin (adopted mother, deceased), Raymonde Belmonde (father-figure/mentor, deceased), Jeanne-Marie Beaubier (twin sister)

Education: Degrees in Literature and History

Relationship Status: Single

Occupation: Teacher

Team Affiliation: Former member of Alpha Flight, former member of the X-Men.

Biography

Childhood

Jean-Paul was twice-orphaned at a young age, once at age two when his birth parents died in an automobile accident, then again at five when the Martins, relations of his mother who had taken him in, met the same fate. Jean-Paul was quickly adopted, but, as the traumatized boy was not a demonstrative or loving child and prone to acting out, he was quickly given up from his first family, and passed on to others who were no better equipped to deal with the troublesome boy than their predecessors had been. Jean-Paul's behavior grew worse as he grew older, progressing from cold distance to outright disrespect and rebellion against his foster parents. At thirteen years old, after a violent confrontation with his current fosters, he finally ran away. He spent almost three months scratching out a living on the streets of Montreal. His days were spent picking pockets, scrounging from dumpsters, and stealing from vendors to live, his nights sleeping in the doorways of shops or in alleys or abandoned buildings, always looking over his shoulder and desperately lonely, though he would not have admitted to it under any circumstances. To make matters worse, it was at this time that Jean-Paul's mutation began to assert itself, making the boy somewhat quicker on his feet than most, but also bringing with it an increased metabolism that caused the boy to slowly starve on a diet that would have been inadequate to begin with.

This bleak lifestyle came to an end when Jean-Paul tried to steal from a book vendor patronized by Raymonde Belmonde, a local business owner. Raymonde grabbed Jean-Paul's wrist to halt him, earning a punch in the jaw for his trouble, and was alarmed to find that the boy was little more than skin and bones in his grip. A promise of hot food and the bookseller's grudging promise not to involve police took a lot of the fight out of the half-starved youth and, over the course of the meal, Raymonde coaxed the boy's story out of him. Raymonde ultimately decided that the boy was not going back into the care of people that had failed him so utterly and managed to call in a significant favor from a local politician, who pulled the strings necessary to establish Raymonde as Jean-Paul's legal guardian. Monsieur Belmonde took on the task of civilizing the suspicious young urchin. Though Jean-Paul never took very well to formal schooling, once the boy's mind was stimulated, it turned out that Jean-Paul had a voracious curiosity that went to work on every book in Raymonde's possession. Raymonde also introduced Jean-Paul to the pastime that would quickly become the young man's greatest passion: skiing. By sixteen, Jean-Paul was a top contender in multiple events; by seventeen, he was a shoe-in for the upcoming winter games. Jean-Paul also received his high-school equivalency at seventeen, but put off college in favor of pursuing athletics; it wasn't until years later, when being outed as a mutant forced him to step away from professional competition, that he chose to pursue higher education.

Jean-Paul sought and gained his emancipation from the foster system at age sixteen. Though he had grown to trust Raymonde deeply, Jean-Paul's guardian was not a young man and the boy was not willing to chance that he would be at the mercy of others again if anything should happen to Raymonde.

Jean-Paul competed in the Winter Olympics when he was eighteen and once held four Olympic gold medals, all of which he turned over after publicly acknowledging his status as a mutant in 1990. Jean-Paul has been out of the closet as a gay man to the public and media since 1994 as well, that announcement prompting his first sabbatical from Department H. Seeking a respite from the scandal at home, Jean-Paul time spent backpacking through the French countryside. On a whim, he applied to the D'Arbanville Circus in France and took a spot among their acrobats using the alias "Paul Martin". He developed a close relationship with the circus owner's hoyden daughter, Clementine D'Arbanville, to whom he confided his identity. He remains in sporadic contact with her.

Alpha Flight

Jean-Paul was contacted by Department H after their background check of Jeanne-Marie turned up the fact that she was the twin sister of the famous skiing champion. He was initially uninterested in their offer to join the Flight program and, when it was hinted that Department H was aware of his mutantcy, he was prepared to walk out of the interview. It was then that Jeanne-Marie made her presence known. Her existence and participation in the newly-formed Flight Program was intriguing to the point that Jean-Paul grudgingly agreed to at least give the program a shot.

Jean-Paul and Jeanne-Marie were the youngest members of the training program at the time, and Jean-Paul's powers and desire to prove himself the best in these odd new circumstances despite his youth made it clear in short order that he could be a great asset to the Flight Program. His superior attitude and complete impatience with team dynamics, however, made it uncertain whether or not he would be. It was one of Northstar's new teammates, Walter Langkowski, who seemed to have the most success befriending and bringing the young hotshot around to the idea of working with the team for a more noble cause than his own glory. This friendship, however, was not destined to last to the end of training -- Jean-Paul took Langkowski's attentions as something more than just overtures of friendship, while Langkowski's interest in the speedster had mostly been with an eye toward getting into the good graces of Jeanne-Marie, the twin he felt an actual romantic interest toward. Unsurprisingly, This revelation soured Jean-Paul's relationship with Langkowski and was a source of constant strife between the twins, as Jean-Paul was simultaneously jealous of his sister's happiness and fearful that her new beau would mean that she had no more use for a brother she hardly knew anyway.

With the new conflict with his sister, the disintegration of his one friendship on the team, and the knowledge that his mutancy would become a matter of public record once his training was complete, joining Alpha Flight became a steadily less-attractive proposition, and Jean-Paul decided to quit the program. His plans to leave were disrupted when his sister's dissociative identity disorder manifested during a live-fire training exercise, reducing her to her panicked Jeanne-Marie persona and nearly resulting in disaster. Despite what Jean-Paul considered an unacceptable risk to his sister's well-being, it was insisted that her condition was manageable and that Jeanne-Marie would be allowed to remain with the program if she so chose. Trying to talk his sister into leaving with him proved fruitless and, as he did not trust the team or Department H to have his sister's best interests at heart, Jean-Paul opted to stay with Alpha Flight in the hopes that he could eventually convince Aurora that leaving Alpha Flight would be for the best. His course being set, he took the initiative and outed himself as a mutant in 1990, citing his own reasons for doing so and leaving the team and Department H out of the initial publicity.

Later that same year, Jean-Paul made a further attempt to reconcile with his sister by offering to take her to Montreal for a weekend to see the neighborhood where he grew up and meet the man who raised him. The visit took a tragic turn when Jean-Paul took his sister on a tour of Raymonde's bistro and the upstairs apartment, only to return to the front of the business to find Raymonde being menaced by a local thug by the name of Ernst St. Ives, who had been hired as the muscle in a kidnapping and extortion scheme devised by Raymonde's own daughter. Unknown to his employer, St. Ives was also possessed an uncontrolled death-touch. St. Ives tried to make sure his get away by threatening his hostage, but the old man fought his grip. St. Ives tried to immobilize Raymonde with a hold on the back of the neck, but the first touch killed the old man. The shock of witnessing the murder caused Aurora to revert to her timid Jeanne-Marie persona. St. Ives recovered faster than either of the horrified twins, dropping the body and claiming Jeanne-Marie as his new hostage, which allowed him to escape.

Once hidden in one of his boltholes, Ernst contacted his partner in a panic, demanding that she aid him, but she refused and hung up on him. Jean-Paul arrived shortly thereafter, having tracked Jeanne-Marie via their mental link. The speedster was in a murderous rage, and only the combination of Ernst's healing factor and Aurora coming back to herself kept Jean-Paul from outright killing his target. She managed to talk her brother down and the authorities were contacted. Ernst was taken into custody where he quickly turned on his partner. Furious, heartsick, and with no other target left for him to lash out against, Jean-Paul rounded on his sister, accusing her of whoring herself to St. Ives to preserve her own neck. Stunned and hurt, Jeanne-Marie declared their affiliation dissolved and retreated back to Langkowski, whom she begged to help her differentiate her powers from her brother's so as to be unlike him as possible. Langkowski agreed, devising an experimental procedure that ultimately put Aurora's powers in a state of flux, severed her mental link with her brother, and caused the twins' powers to neutralize each other on contact.

For his part, Jean-Paul managed to hold himself together until after the trial and sentencing of St. Ives and his partner, then fell into a self-destructive spiral of drinking and one-night stands to keep the emotions associated with Raymonde's death and his estrangement from his sister at bay. It took an HIV scare from one of his former partners to snap it out of him; while he wasn't sure what he had worth living for, Jean-Paul was entirely certain that he didn't want to die wasting away in a hospital bed. He approached his sister once more in the hopes of salvaging their relationship and, to an extent, they managed to forgive each other, though they remained infamous for fighting and reconciling throughout their time in Alpha Flight.

What seemed to be the final blow to the twins' relationship came in December of 2003 after they made plans to spend Christmas together. To Jean-Paul's surprise, Aurora decided to bring along Langkowski, with whom she had been long involved in an on-again, off-again relationship, to participate in the festivities. Neither twin had the faintest idea that Langkowski would propose at dinner that first night. Jean-Paul suddenly found himself thirty-four, alone, still half in love and half despising of his sister's fiancee and with little of what he considered a future. Visibly shaken, he turned cold to his sister and her new fiance. Aurora, hurt that her brother, the man she loved most in her life, could not be happy for her on such a joyous occasion, confronted Jean-Paul angrily about his behavior, sparking a harsh argument that boiled over into recriminations and accusations and ended with both Beaubiers convinced this was the end of their partnership. Alone again at the low point of a depressingly familiar cycle, Jean-Paul came to the decision that he could not continue on as he had for so long and resigned from Alpha Flight in January 2004.

Living At The X-Mansion

Not long after parting ways with Alpha Flight, Jean-Paul received a job offer from Charles Xavier to act as a teacher and counselor at his school. Though the offer was unexpected, Jean-Paul was intrigued by the opportunity and relocated to Westchester with his cat, Delphine. He soon developed a protective mentor relationship with Clarice Ferguson, a shy young student. In addition to his teaching duties, Jean-Paul began to train with the X-Men, thinking that he could at least put his tactical training with Alpha Flight to further use. It turned out to be a wise choice -- only a month after his arrival, one of his students, Shiro Yoshida, made a suicidal attempt to burn out his powers. Though Jean-Paul managed to keep the despairing boy from from plummeting to his death, he absorbed a lethal amount of radiation during the rescue. It was only due to an application of mystic healing by Amanda Sefton that Jean-Paul survived, and even so, he spent an utterly miserable span of time in the medlab recovering from the effects of radiation poisoning.

In September 2004, Jean-Paul was once again reunited with his sister after she appeared on the school's doorstep one morning. She was found by Sam Guthrie, who took the disoriented woman to be checked over in the infirmary after she passed out in his arms. There, Jeanne-Marie proceeded to mistake Hank McCoy for Walter, attacking him in the medlab until Jean-Paul came down to retrieve her. Despite the fact that Jeanne-Marie's DID had left her mental condition more unbalanced than ever, the twins reconciled and Aurora remained at the school, refusing to leave her brother's side. Though he was relieved to see his sister again, Jean-Paul was dismayed at her precarious mental state, the result of several months of maltreatment at the hands of doctors in the mental institution to which she had been committed. Only three months after he arrived, Jean-Paul departed the school for his sister's sake, feeling that it would be best to return with Jeanne-Marie to Canada, away from the relative chaos of the school.

After Xavier's

After leaving Xavier's, Jean-Paul retired with his sister to his home in Laval in the hopes that the quiet, semi-rural environment and the presence of someone she trusted would help quiet the turmoil in her mind. Jeanne-Marie, however, continued to slowly deteriorate, her mental state swinging from dangerously fractured to guilt-wracked lucidity. She would alternately curse and attack her brother in her worst hours, or plead for his forgiveness and beg him to not send her away, to not let others see her in her misery. Spurred equally by an arrogance that lead him to believe that he could cure his sister on his own and a deep concern for her mental state if she should perceive herself as abandoned again, Jean-Paul obeyed her wishes.

After an incident that lead to Jeanne-Marie literally killing his pet cat with kindness, Jean-Paul became reluctant to leave his sister alone for more than few minutes, fearful of what she would do to herself, all the while deepening their unhealthy codependency. Finally, her brother's smothering devotion caused Aurora to lash out in a full fury, leaving Jean-Paul unconscious, battered, and bleeding. In the aftermath of the attack, Jeanne-Marie came back to herself. Horrified by what she had done, she alerted James and Heather Hudson to her brother's injuries and fled. She left Jean-Paul only a brief note stating her intention to come to peace with herself on her own or die in the attempt.

Jean-Paul searched for his sister for over a year, but in vain. At last, he attempted to move forward with his life again, though there was a part of him that remained braced for his sister to swoop in out of the blue and once more scatter any peace he'd found to the four winds.

Return To The School

Lacking any other direction in his life, Jean-Paul contacted Xavier about the possibility of resuming a teaching position. Despite the fact that the school had a much smaller student body than during Jean-Paul's previous tenure, the Professor seemed willing to have him back on staff. Jean-Paul returned to the school in November of 2008, meaning to teach and still uncertain about whether or not he wished to rejoin the X-Men. He spent the remainder of the fall semester acting as an aide to other teachers and quickly renewed his old friendships with Scott, Shiro, and Nathan. He was, unfortunately, not able to reestablish his prior closeness with Clarice, who had grown into an impulsive young woman quite different from the shy girl he recalled.

It took some time to re-acclimate to life at the mansion after a span of near-hermitage, but Jean-Paul finally came to the decision to teach full-time instead of rejoining the X-Men in January 2008, after participating in a mission in which several presumed-dead allies of the X-Men were revealed to be alive; at the end of the mission, he decided that he was out of practice with punching people in good cause and happy to remain so.

As his initial teaching stint at the school had lasted less than three months, Jean-Paul had more than a few doubts about how well he would take to a second attempt. To his surprise, he found himself enjoying both the literature classes he had been assigned as well as a certain amount of popularity among the student body (undoubtedly influenced by his habit of cooking for any student who turned up at his suite). Among his students, he struck up especially close bonds with Noriko Kikuchi, whom he tutored in the finer points of living as a speedster, even a part-time one, Catseye, and Johnny Gallo, who more or less latched on to the older mutant as a surrogate father.

In early April, the Sûreté du Québec contacted Jean-Paul at the school, informing him that Ernst St. Ives had escaped from prison and managed to take hostages. Attempts to negotiate with the man had failed; St. Ives would only speak to Jean-Paul and threatened to kill the hostages if his demands were not met. Despite the knowledge that this was almost certainly a trap, Jean-Paul responded to the call. Upon arrival, he found that St. Ives had taken an entire family hostage in their own basement. St. Ives released two members of the family upon Jean-Paul's arrival, but kept back the third, an old man, for the purpose of goading Jean-Paul and tormenting him with reminders of his past failures. In the end, St Ives moved to kill his hostage with his death touch and Jean-Paul was forced to kill St. Ives in order to stop him from carrying through. Jean-Paul was detained by the authorities for several days of questioning, but the homicide was ultimately deemed justifiable.

Deeply shaken by the experience, Jean-Paul opted to spend time on Muir with Nathan Dayspring and his family to recover, but his return to the school was not the quiet affair he might have wished. The Stepford Cuckoos skimmed information about Jean-Paul's absence from the mind of Johnny Gallo, who had inadvertently eavesdropped on a conversation between Scott Summers and Jean-Paul, and began spreading rumors through the school. In the end, Jean-Paul wound up making a public confession on the journal system to set the matter straight.

Shortly after his return from Québec, Jean-Paul struck up a friendship with Jake Gavin, which quickly transitioned to a physical relationship. Though the two shared an affinity for good books, good food, and mauling each other over the bedsheets, Jean-Paul hoped for a more committed relationship, while the very idea made Jake skittish.

In June 2009, Nathan and Jean-Paul were ambushed by Taygetos personnel as they returned from a trip to assist with an Elpis-involved athletics program in Moldova. The mission was headed by a telepath called Shrine, whose intent was to capture Nathan. During the ambush, Nathan was inadvertently teleported away due to Shrine's indiscriminate mental attacks catching his own team's teleporter in their wake. Having lost their primary target, the Taygetos operatives took Jean-Paul instead, transporting him to one of their safehouses in a secluded area of Romania. There, he was telepathically interrogated and tortured by Shrine, with the aim of turning him into a weapon to be used when Nathan made his inevitable rescue attempt. However, there was an unforeseen disruption during the reprogramming process, and Shrine found his weapon turning against him. By the time the rescue team, headed by Jean Grey and a recovered Nathan, arrived, the Taygetos personnel were dead at Jean-Paul's hands. The speedster, who had been driven to a psychotic break by Shrine's mental violations, responded to the team's presence by trying to kill them as well. The X-Men subdued Jean-Paul, then stripped the safehouse of any useful information before Shiro razed it to the ground. The X-Men returned to the mansion, where Nathan, Jean, and Charles Xavier begin the process of restoring Jean-Paul's mind; the bond of friendship between Nathan and Jean-Paul was critical to this process, as it was only the trust that the two shared that allowed Nathan to venture deep enough into the speedster's mind to locate and preserve the parts of Jean-Paul not despoiled in the reprogramming process.

Even once Jean-Paul had recovered control over his own mind, the full weight of what he had done combined with lingering false images of atrocities which had been implanted in his mind in the course of breaking him down proved to be too much for him to cope with at once. Within a week of his return to consciousness, he broke off his relationship with Jake and attempted to commit suicide. In the wake of this, Xavier felt it best to install partial memory blocks of the event, allowing Jean-Paul to deal with the aftermath of the event at a rate that his still-healing mind could bear.

The one silver lining to Jean-Paul's kidnapping was that his trauma at the hands of the Taygetos personnel forced open the long-dormant link with his sister, Jeanne-Marie. Alerted her to her twin's distress, she was spurred to track down her brother and the two estranged siblings were again reunited. Jean-Paul currently resides at the school, carrying on with with his teaching duties and undergoing continuing therapy to help him recover from the events in Romania.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 5' 11"

Weight: 150 lbs

Eyes: Arctic blue

Hair: Glossy black

Other Features: Jean-Paul has subtly pointed ears. He has quite a few scars, several of which he acquired during his stewardship of his sister: a short, jagged one over which obliterated a Gemini tattoo over his heart, and two razor-thin white lines, one across the right side of his throat, the other low on his stomach. There is a tattoo on his left bicep, the kanji for 'hashiru no sensei'.

Powers

Northstar's mutant powers first began manifesting in his early teens, but it was not until he was nearly seventeen that the full extent of his superspeed and the accompanying flight kicked in.

Northstar is a flight-capable speedster, exceptionally agile and able to reach incredible speeds on land and in the air. The overall durability of Northstar's body increases at high speeds, allowing him to withstand the ravages of wind, friction, and air turbulence. Though this aspect of his mutation provides him with a certain amount of protection from damage caused by high-velocity collisions (ie: he won't break his own neck if he runs into a wall at full tilt), Northstar can knock himself out if he slams into objects at high speeds. This increased durability also gives him a certain amount of protection from blunt-force trauma when he's moving at superhuman speeds, but knives, claws, and bladed weapons slice through his defenses easily. Northstar possesses the same vulnerabilities to the elements and injury as most humans, save for a resistance to extremes of cold. He is as susceptible as any normal human to mental attacks. His speed is not just flight, it applies to all his motion, and he is able to deliver jackhammer-speed blows and simply avoid or outmaneuver his opponents.

Northstar's mutation increases his metabolism to something faster than the human norm, a condition exacerbated by his athletic activities. As a result, Northstar's body tends to burn through its fuel quickly; he needs to keep careful track of what he eats to be certain that he's getting both enough calories to function and proper nutrition. As a side-effect of his rapid metabolism, Northstar also has a minor healing factor and recovers from injuries significantly faster than a baseline human. For example, where it would normally take a month or more for a broken arm to heal, Northstar might have full use of the limb after two weeks.

Northstar is able to hit a top speed air speed of Mach 2 and is able to maintain that for up to two hours, and a top land speed of 500 MPH for roughly twice that long. Pushing these limits is a terrible strain on Northstar's system; he'll end the journey sweat-lathered with his body starving for oxygen, heartrate through the roof, reserves drained, and needing to pass out for a day to recharge. It also takes longer to fully recover from such punishing exhertions at forty than it did at twenty-one.

Due to Langkowski's experiment, from 1990 - 2009 contact with his twin sister, Jeanne-Marie, would nullify Northstar's powers; this could last for up to a full day, but typically wore off after an hour or so. In August 2009, following the renewal of their mental link, Northstar and Aurora's powers began to function as they had originally, with physical contact between the twins resulting in an intense flare of white light.

Due to his focus on physical fitness, Northstar's endurance and strength are at peak human levels for his size and build.

Equipment

Despite his distaste for the years spent in Alpha Flight, Northstar has kept his costume from his days in the program, as it is the only clothing he owns that will not be destroyed while moving at extreme velocities.