Clifford Crawford

The Hermit

39

Cisgender man

Clifford Calvin Crawford

Cliff, Dr. Crawford, Mr. Crawford, Doc

The League (formerly)

Rape, self-harm, suicide attempt

Human (white)

Average height and slender, lanky

Slightly underweight

Light

5'9"

Blonde

Blue

Straight and surprisingly thick, swept back from his face (but there's always a lock or two that falls free)

None, unless he's been on his lab for a few days

• When he was assaulted, he suffered a severe break to his right leg that fractured both bones in the lower leg, with one breaking the skin and the other being shattered in one part. In his attempt to keep the attack under wraps, he did not seek professional medical treatment outside of his close friend Rosalie Kent, and therefore walks with a heavy limp and a cane.

Cliff is of an average height with a lanky build--despite not being particularly tall, he seems almost spindly. His skin is pale, almost pallid due to time spent indoors, and his dark blue eyes are framed by eyebrows slightly darker than his golden-blonde hair. He's a very pretty man, like some sort of fairytale prince come to life--he has a strong, straight nose with a slight hook to it and a cupid's bow mouth, and always looks slightly lost in thought.
Cliff has not had the easiest life, and it's evident across his body. He has heavy scarring and a permanent limp in his right leg and uses a cane to aid his movement. He also has short, thin scars across his thighs and forearms from self-harm, and small needlemark scars from his myriads of scientific experiments where he is Subject Zero, as well as a fairly prominent and jagged scar on his right wrist from a suicide attempt. He almost always looks drawn out and tired, with dark circles under his eyes, and his eyebrows are usually knit with concern.

Soft and almost airy, often pauses and drifts off in thought.

• Needs a cane to walk long distances


• Heavy scarring on his leg, as well as lighter scarring--granted, almost all of this is covered up by his clothes.


• As stated prior, very pretty but often looks a bit unkempt, unless he's gearing up for a big presentation.

Black slacks, black shoes, and a white lab coat, and usually has a solid-patterned sweater on under said coat. No ties, ever. Safety goggles pushed up onto his head, sometimes with a separate pair actually covering his eyes if he's forgotten about them.

Who is Cliff Crawford? It's a question that has plagued him for years--an overachieving student given a massive grant from the local superhero league to design their weaponry, Cliff soon finds himself outmatched by his peers for the first time in his life and grows a reputation as a sullen introvert. What appears to most people as a bad attitude is actually severe psychiatric distress from undiagnosed issues brought on by both genetics and years of obscene pressure from his superiors, which comes to a head when he, as the story goes, "throttles an intern" for making a minor mistake, grabbing her by the throat and shoving her against the wall as he ranted at her before being pulled off of her by Elizaveta Lenya and promptly punched in the face. Having alienated himself from the team he's supposed to work to support, Cliff draws further into himself and his work, rarely emerging from his lab--he's brilliant and he knows it, and the highs of his mania fuel his obsessive drive to create and save. However, between psychosis and depressive episodes, his mental health deteriorates further--he begins cutting as a way to remind himself that he is still a human being who can feel pain when he either feels untouchable or miserable, and he also begins to dabble in some less-legal drugs for "inspiration", as well as smoking frequently. He's a recluse with a budget that he makes good use of, especially with his on-again-off-again assistant Marsha Kemper, a bubbly woman a few years his junior who has ideas of her own.
The League can ignore Cliff's undiagnosed and untreated bipolar disorder. They cannot, however, ignore what happens when he has a psychotic break and starts believing everyone working there is a robot trying to kill him. That gets him booted from their service into an in-patient psychiatric ward where he's evaluated and given medications to help with his issues.
Unfortunately, Cliff is something of an absent-minded scientist, and taking a bunch of pills every day does not come easily to him. He is also easily swayed by people insisting that psychiatric medicines make someone a shell of their former self, and goes through phases where he refuses to take them, which only leads to further spiraling.
And then, days after another psychotic episode, the worst day of Cliff's night occurs. Masked men break into the lab, tying up Cliff and Marsha and threatening to torture them before killing them and stealing their research. When Cliff refuses to hand over the documents, one of the men reaches for Marsha, making his intentions quite clear. He hears her scream and tells them to do whatever they want to him, just not to hurt Marsha, never to hurt Marsha, and they do. They beat and rape him repeatedly, shattering part of his leg in the process, as well as breaking multiple ribs and an arm before revealing that wanting the documents was just a ruse--what they really wanted was to torture League members without risking an actual fight, and who better to pick than the team scientist who no one liked? No matter what the outcome was, they could defame or hurt the League: if Cliff let Marsha be beaten and assaulted, the League hired a man who valued his research more than an intern. If he gave the research up, they got confidential information and also got Cliff and Marsha fired, at the very least. They didn't expect Cliff to offer to take Marsha's place, but they didn't care in the end--and in the end, they traumatized a League member beyond belief in a way that he would be mortified of admitting due to stigma and fear of how people would respond. Marsha, scared half to death, fled the scene. Cliff was found by an engineer at a nearby building named Rosalie Kenton, who tried her best to get him to seek medical help. Cliff refused, knowing that if he did, the story of what happened would spread like wildfire, and he didn't want to have to field reactions while trying to recover physically and mentally.

• 
  Incredibly touch averse, and will react by either freezing or wrenching himself away. Only Rosalie Crawford can touch him without this reaction and that's because they've worked up to it for years, and she's pretty much the one person he trusts.


• Before his leg injury, he was a frequent pacer, often walking laps around his lab as he waited for results.


• Nervous tic of rubbing at his temple, sometimes with a lot of pressure.


• As mentioned prior, Cliff is very touch-adverse, but there's two areas that even Rosalie doesn't touch without explicit verbal confirmation: anything around his hip and waist area, and his wrists and forearms. While something like a tap on the shoulder will startle him and make him uncomfortable, someone grabbing him by the wrist or wrapping an arm around his waist can trigger a panic attack.

• SCIENCE! To him, it's a skill and a hobby. His main area of focus is neuroscience, but he's interested in all of it and took as many science classes as possible throughout his education.


• Since he was very spite-driven as a teen/young man, Cliff went out of his way to learn infamously difficult branches of science for fun.


• Inventing stuff! This is mainly the Hornet's Nest but he's done other things too. They just weren't as notable.

• Bipolar disorder


• PTSD


• While Cliff exhibits some of the symptoms of OCD, he's never undergone evaluation for it.


• Likewise, Cliff suffers from psychosis, especially during manic episodes.

Cliff has no powers of his own, but he does have an invention that is his pride and joy: the Hornet's Nest, an inconspicuous wristband filled with small darts that contain an incredibly painful and fast-acting sedative--an easy way to non-fatally incapacitate an enemy while warning them not to mess with you.
Unsurprisingly, Cliff tested and perfected the formula by experimenting on himself, despite having a fairly low pain tolerance, and thus he's one of the few people who's mostly immune to its effects.