thomas âtommyâ shepherd // SPEED.
name. Thomas âTommyâ Shepherd faceclaim. Diego Tinoco affiliations. Young Avengers, Nomads birthdate & age. June 9, 2001 // 20 species. Mutant identity. Secret
traits.
LOYAL:Â Tommyâs not really used to having people who would go to bat for him, to be honest. Sure, thereâs been a few years of being on a team, but that doesnât override a lifetime of the oppositeâwhich means that if Tommy thinks he can trust someone, then theyâve got a ride or die for life. He may act detached and, in his own goofy way, standoffish, but Tommyâs the kind of guy who would bury a body for someone that he isnât even that close to. Snitches get stitches, you know? Itâs the kind of prison loyalty you get used to after years spent in and out of juvie.Â
SELF-SUFFICIENT: If nothing else, Tommy is pretty independent! For better and for worse, a lifetime of having to take care of himself means that he is more than capable of providing for himself (and others, should the situation arise). As much as he jokes about how badly he wants to marry rich and never work a day again, Tommy is pretty streetwise and can get himself out of a bind⊠usually without causing too much trouble. Sure, that means his credit score is shot to hell because he took out a credit card to pay a lawyer after he got arrested once and didnât have the funds to pay it back, but what does he look like he is, middle class? The point is, heâs fed and sheltered and heâs good at keeping himself in check in a bind. If he were to get separated from the rest of the gang in some kind of catastrophic event, he could take care of everyone. And himself.Â
UNDERSTANDING: Some of these hero types kinda⊠have a moral superiority complex. And Tommy finds that exhausting! He is Not The One. Sure, he has a unique perspective on the matter, but Tommy knows more than anyone that having done bad things doesnât mean that youâre inherently bad, and heâs quick to give others the benefit of the doubt. While he may not be immediately trustingâhe doesnât believe people right away, and it takes him a long time to truly open up to folksâhe is the kind of person who believes that intentions matter and that people arenât defined by their pasts. Everybodyâs got some baggage; whatâs the point in getting hung up on it?
FLIGHTY: Is Tommy deeply loyal? Yes. Is Tommy deeply unreliable? Also yes. Sure, he would do anything for his friends, but that doesnât necessarily mean heâll show up on timeâTommyâs still not accustomed to having to really answer to someone, and because heâs so fast, he has a tendency to wander off⊠and then get distracted and stay wandered off. His brain works faster than most peopleâs, so he might follow the trail of a thought (literally) before whoever heâs talking to has finished a sentence, which has gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion.Â
VOLATILE: Unfortunately, Tommyâs temper has always been the source of all his problems. Angry outbursts are common in those who arenât used to being heard, and Tommyâs entire childhood has been marked by neglect and worse; while he often has a goofy, fun-loving exterior that can get as good as he gives with teasing, a misplaced word or a teasing insult that cuts a little too deep can send him swinging straight into rage. Itâs a minor issue when itâs a spat between friends; itâs a bigger issue when heâs vaporizing his school or dealing with his massive issues with authority.
RECKLESS: Remember that âunreliable, thinks faster than everyone else and will run offâ thing? Yeah, it becomes MORE troublesome! Tommy thinks fast, but that doesnât mean heâs great at thinking before he actsâhis bodyâs just too fast, and heâs going to start moving before someone can stop him. It doesnât help that he has a compulsive need to keep moving lest his debilitating insecurity catch up to him (sure, most people canât outrun their mental illness, but what about the fastest guy alive?), and heâd rather run headfirst into danger without a strategy and figure it out later than stop long enough to start lingering on self-doubt.Â
abilities.
SUPERSPEED:Â the name of the game. Tommyâs maximum speed is unknown, but he can easily run faster than the speed of sound, over water, etc.; he takes a lot of pride in having been able to run from the US to Genosha and searched the island faster than Billy was able to teleport there, sucker. His physiology is also adapted to allow him to run at such speeds without suffering from the friction or reduced oxygen, as well as somewhat reduced impact effects. He also has superhuman stamina to allow him to keep moving at incredible speed for several hours.
ENHANCED STRENGTH:Â With great speed comes great leg strength. Speed can lift about 1 tonâs weight with his lower body strength, and even his upper body is strong enough to bear about 800 pounds â mostly under duress. Itâs not, like, his preferred state to be in, holding 800 pounds.
ENHANCED PERCEPTION:Â Look, when youâre moving way, way faster than everything around you, it kinda feels like the rest of the world is in slow motion. Tommyâs mind processes regular information at speeds aligned with his physical speed, allowing him to be aware of his surroundings while moving (the rest of the world literally does appear to be in slow motion) â and to react just as quickly, giving him lightning fast reflexes. This also means that he can, for example, read entire books in a very short timespan and remember what heâs read.Â
MOLECULAR ACCELERATION:Â The major difference between Tommyâs abilities and Pietroâs is that Tommy can create hyperkinetic vibrations that accelerate the molecules in matter and can make them, uh, explode. It also means he can accelerate his own molecules enough to pass through solid surfaces! But mostly the âblowing stuff upâ part. (Pietro can sort of also do this, but Tommy can do it from a distance, therefore he is cooler and also better, thanks!)Â
WEAKNESSES. He is still, you know, broadly human; while his body can withstand extreme friction and he can dull the effects of sudden impacts, he is still painfully mortal and woundable in all the usual ways: a punch, a knife, a gun, an energy blast, a broken heart. He is also frankly unaccustomed to people being as quick as he is, and so can be caught off guard by anyone whose speed comes anywhere close to his. âŠAnd heâs an impulsive, reckless dumbass, his fatal flaw.
headcanons.
Mostly? Tommyâs here for the free food. Just kidding; Tommy was technically summoned to play the role of emotional support child to Wanda, a thing he has a lot of mixed feelings aboutâif only because every time he roasted Billy for being like, âyou just donât understand her like I doâ about Wanda, it turned out he was kind of right, while Tommy was happy to shrug off the similarities and weird coincidences. But it is true that in a world that no longer has room for superpowered beings who want to live their lives in peace, âapathyâ and âstaying out of itâ are no longer really options. Heâs also lonely, but like hell heâd ever admit that one.
 Absolutely did not sign the Accords!!! Tommy has ENOUGH issues with the government crawling up his ass to go willingly sign away his rights like that. REGISTER? No, thanks. That gets in the way of his ability to âget away with doing stuff,â thank you very much. Frankly, Tommy is hesitant to register for anything that would get him put into any kind of database, period, especially as a mutant with a criminal historyâbut everything that went down with the Accords certainly did not inspire confidence.Â
Another great reason to be willing to relocate to Sokovia? Tommy is effectively homeless. He wasnât welcome back home after he broke out of SuperPrisonâand frankly, didnât want to go back thereâso for some time he made an attempt at normalcy by moving in with Billy and Billyâs extremely normal family. It⊠didnât really work out. They are extremely nice, and Tommy still makes a point to stop in for dinner and stay for a few days because he has some manners and heâs not about to wholly disrespect the amount of care and compassion that Mrs. K showed him. But a curfew, a sort-of-mom who expected him to be home for family dinner every single day at seven p.m., sharp⊠none of that really worked for him. He wanted it to! He really did. He wanted to be able to fit into their lives. But at the end of the day, Tommy just felt suffocatedâand the lingering sense that sooner or later, he would fuck up the whole thing, earn their ire, and wear out his welcome, so he bailed before that could become a problem. In the meantime, heâs been squatting in a house in New Jersey with an old ex-villain who basically has dementia. Why, whoâs your roommate?
Speaking of an old ex-villain who basically has dementia! Tommy has become a great homecare nurse. This is a pretty unexpected turn of events for someone who is pretty selfish and was once called a sociopath by the person he thought knew him best, and for someone who loathes doctors and labs and medicine of any kind. Taking care of Master P gave Tommy purpose in life when the Young Avengers couldnât really keep operating, and he feels pretty guilty about abandoning him, actually. That means Tommy will still sprint across the whole of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to check in on the guy and make sure he isnât stuck on the ground because he fell over and couldnât get up and to make sure heâs eating and all. Pandemoniumâs not completely incapable of taking care of himself or anything, but he forgets.
After the Young Avengers broke him out of juvie, Tommy never bothered to return to high school. Itâs that olâ âfitting in with normalcyâ thing again, and a desire to keep himself off the âgridâ as much as possible. He did, however, receive his GED, but he hasnât bothered with trying to go to collegeâtoo expensive, first of all. Second of all, not really worth his time.Â
Tommy does have a superspeed mutation, yes, but itâs a little more complicated than thatâhence his ability to vibrate molecules around him at range. As a product of Wandaâs soul, Tommy contains traces of magic within him, too, and it is the source of his abilities; Tommyâs superspeed is its own kind of reality warping, not dissimilar to time magicâhe can move quickly by changing the world around him, so to speak. But practically, itâs superspeed.
In that vein, slowing down can be⊠a challenge. When you start doing everything faster than the speed of light, it can be difficultâat tims, agonizing evenâto operate at a slower pace than everything else; imagine going from the internet speeds we have now back to dial-up. This became a huge factor in why Tommy struggled to maintain real human connections: people just couldnât keep up with him, and he didnât want to have to slow down for them. Joining the Young Avengers helped that a little as for the first time he met people who kind of understood him, but his attention span is shot to all hell, and he still struggles with a distinct lack of, uh, patience.Â
biography.
It all started with a curse. Frank and Mary Shepherd never really wanted a kid; Mary Shepherd can distinctly recall the moment she saw that little pink plus on a pregnancy test (and the second test, and the third, and the fourth) and burst into tears, damning whatever God was listening for giving her this problem that would make her body unrecognizable, belonging to someone else; for another mouth to feed; for forcing her into a marriage she didnât really want. The whole fling with Frank had been hot-and-cold, intense passion and even more intense fighting. Sheâd hid the pregnancy at first, until her then-boyfriend inevitably found out and promised to be the best goddamn dad the world had ever seen. They may not have had much, but they would have love, and wasnât that everything in the world?
No, it turns out, it was not. The fighting stopped⊠for a while. Frank and Mary got married, a combination bridal and baby shower that left them with a small house stocked with all the signs of domesticity: a mobile with little animals to hang over the crib, a Kitchen Aid mixer (the ultimate symbol of luxurious suburbia. Mary never imagined sheâd have one; now that she did, she hardly knew what to do with it). But the tenuous peace theyâd brokered didnât last long, and Frank started drinking again, and Mary never wanted to have this stupid baby, didnât he remember that, didnât he remember how heâd talked her into having this baby and if it was his idea he was going to need to take some of the responsibility instead of going out after his shifts, stupid deadbeat?
Anyway, that basically set the stage for Tommy Shepherdâs life.Â
His parents split when he was young, and Mary Shepherd made the choice to reclaim her life, leaving behind the man and the kid. Frank left Tommy more or less to his own devices; he wanted a buddy more than he wanted a kid. It didnât help that Tommy was a hyperactive, rambunctious kid as it was, never mind being one starved for attention; even at a young age, it was clear that while sometimes Frank liked him, at other times, his dad found him annoying as fuck, and Tommy struggled to be able to gauge which way the pendulum would swing. When whatever shenanigans Tommy got himself into stopped entertaining him, Frank stopped paying attention.What qualified as âentertainingâ got rarer and rarer as Tommy got older, which meant he would start making grander and grander attempts for attention⊠and in a whirl of anger and every other poorly regulated emotion in the book, Tommyâs outbursts and tantrums took a turn for the violent. Prone to stirring up trouble and picking fights at school, Tommy was regularly in detention or suspended, and before he hit puberty, he already had a knack for finding himself on the wrong side of the law and inside juvenile detention halls.
Most of those stints were short stays for minor incidentsâjust enough to get a rowdy brown kid off the street, you know? But Frankâs girlfriend always had a funny feeling about that kid, his angry eyes, his unfeeling expression, the way he never flinched at gore, his stupid white hair. She was pretty convinced he mustâve been a mutant or something.
Turns out, she was right. (Or something. Tommyâs not clear on the details.)
When Tommyâs abilities manifestedâthe same day as that whole Novi Grad Sokovia thing, whatever the hell; he didnât keep up with world events enough to know how they got there, but he did know where they ended up because you couldnât escape that particular aspect of the news cycleâall he knew was that he could finally taste the air of freedom. Freedom from the crap of his daily life; freedom from teachers who loathed and distrusted him, who treated him like he was nothing but a lost cause and a trouble maker; from his dad who never wanted him around anywayâfor once, Tommyâs life could be really, truly his own.
Anyway, thatâs how he ended up vaporizing his school. It was mostly an accident. (Mostly.) No one had been insideâlate at night, zipping circles around the track field in a blur too fast for the human eye, all Tommy had been wishing for was the promise that he wouldnât have to go back to that cursed shithole. And suddenly, the shithole was no more.
He could have run away, of course. He was way faster than any cop car, and the cameras were gone. But when youâve suddenly blown up your school and reduced it to nothing but ash and scorch marks on the pavement, what the hell do you do besides stand there in awe and start laughing in disbelief? So naturally⊠he was caught. Before Tommy could really register what was going on, special ops police had encircled the premises and nullified his powers, hauling him off to a unique hell specifically for those bad kids unlucky enough to have superpowers.
For someone who already felt caged within the confines of his crappy life, you can imagine how that wentâTommy did not exactly love superjuvie from the start. When the heads of the prison realized the extent of his mutations, they saw only an opportunity. Ah, war: the mother of invention. From there Tommy became the subject of secret, probably illegal experiments, as a team of scientists hoped to bottle his speed and his kinetic vibrations into something mass producible, or else to find a way to turn him into the United Statesâ greatest living weapon. They had invented the super-soldier, after all, and that was with a regular human. What else could they make?Â
The result was that Tommy had phenomenal control over his abilities in a short amount of time, and the instant the power nullification was turned off of his cell, he did what any sane person stuck in a prison would do: he blew the door right off. On the other side were a bunch of wannabe superheroes his age, in desperate need of helpâsomebodyâs boyfriend had been kidnapped. Somebody, it turned out, who bore an odd resemblance to him; they may not have been identical, but there was an uncanny connection. (Tommy claimed not to notice. No one else was polite enough to do the same, apparently.)
So what was Tommy going to do, say no and keep himself incarcerated forever? The rest, as they say, is history: they saved the boyfriend, Tommy joined the team and adopted the name Speed, they went on their share of adventures. Tommy never returned to his dadâs house; his dad never asked about him. For a brief time, he lived with the Kaplans for lack of any place better to go, but after a few days of having to put up with Billy and Teddy sucking face and Rebecca Kaplan trying to lovingly psychologize him, it was time to go. He found some stability working odd jobs where he could get a monthâs work done in a few daysâ time and pay rent to a landlord who didnât ask questions, but as having superpowers became more and more dangerous, so did Tommyâs plans for income.
Eventually, the Young Avengers were forced to disband, and Tommy found his way back to New Jersey. Until the Mistress of Magic appeared, apparently demanding his presenceâŠÂ Â
















