Turo Karjalainen

by **Seamus McAndrews** March 22nd 2023, 11:56 pm

TURO KARJALAINEN

"En todellakaan välitä vittu." (I really don't give a fuck.)

The Bio

Real Name: Turo Karjalainen
Renegade Name: Thunder
Title: N/A
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Age: 19
Gender: Male
Race: European/Caucasian (Finnish)
Hair: Blonde, nearly white in the light
Eyes: Icy blue (Right eye); Blind/Cut out (Left eye)
Height: 6'8"
Weight: 230 lbs.
Blood type: A-

The Looks

Turo Karjalainen is a rather sound example of what one would expect a young Finnish man to look like. He bears a strong and defined jaw, blonde hair that can look almost as white as the frozen snowy hellscape he hails from in certain light, and an icy blue eye that might make him hard to distinguish from a White Walker. His skin is especially white, and he bears a broad-shouldered, somewhat long-limbed, and rather lean-muscled athletic build.

The primary distinguishing feature about him, besides the eyepatch worn over his left eye or his extremely thick Finnish accent, is his height. Standing at a solid 6'8", Turo is a taller and more imposing figure than most, and the rather piercing gaze from his one good eye gives the impression of having your very soul stared at. Turo's resting expression is cold, deadpan, and devoid of most emotion, with his lone eye hiding a mixed-up torrent of either unaddressed or rampant feelings, several of which are derived from trauma.

Turo's clothing style is the opposite of varied. He mostly wears greys or blacks in terms of clothing color, and usually prefers some form of jacket over whatever shirt he wears. His footwear never changes; it is always a pair of pitch-black steel-toe combat boots with thick socks to match, no matter the occasion.

The Personality

Turo has a rather deadpan personality to everyone he initially meets, which matches his resting murder face perfectly. Turo does not appear to be a very happy young man, to say the least. He is highly introverted, hates most people (especially Americans, unfortunately), and is practically silent towards those he first meets. Due to his inability to speak beyond simple conversational English in a country where English is the primary language, Turo is even more hesitant than a regular introvert to speak to people, especially because of the deep-seated worry that he'll meet another prick like the one that put out his left eye. On the flipside, though, Turo bears a strong sense of morality, and absolutely refuses to use the wider and more destructive aspects of his power if he is aware that either children or animals could be in the line of fire.

The Story

Finland was always a cold place, especially out in the rural spots. It was a beautiful land, but unforgiving with its raw harshness. As such, it was no secret that those who survived Finland's harsh winters would end up hardier than most, and that the land itself had a better chance than some others to produce some solid superpowered people. Turo Karjalainen was one such child, born under auspicious signs to one of Finland's highly rural Suomenusko (Indigenous Finnish pagan) communities. As Turo was birthed into the world, he caused a very minor seismic event in the community, shaking up the houses of his village, but thankfully not causing too much damage. On his back, Turo was born with a conspicuous mark in the shape of a bear's head, vastly different to anything that would be considered a regular human birthmark. The village of Turo's birth viewed him with mixed feelings; on one end, Turo was clearly born with the favor and blessings of their chief god, Ukko, god of thunder, whose chosen animal was a bear, but on the other end, Turo's latent power could quickly prove to be cataclysmic if not controlled properly.

As Turo grew up through his childhood, his seismic and vibrational powers began to further manifest, and from an early age, Turo could move objects in his house, form small "quake bubbles" around his tiny child hands, and other minor forms of seismic manipulation, including minor earthquakes. Despite his parents' efforts to keep the secret of Turo's powers within the community (which was successful until the boy was about 11 or 12), word unfortunately spread, primarily through the words of drunken patrons at the local inn, who were proud their community produced a child so blessed by their highest god. This information was picked up on by a planted informant belonging to a radical Lutheran militia group operating in the rural area near his village, who then found out exactly what had been causing minor seismic events in the area as of late.

After doing some scouting, the radical Lutherans raided the village in the dead of night, beating down any who resisted with cudgels and grabbing Turo out of his bed. As soon as the boy woke up, he was knocked out again, so that he couldn’t use his powers within the village and risk causing unneeded destruction. Turo was then taken back to the militant’s “base” of operations (little more than a rundown building that the militia had taken shelter in), where he was tied to a chair and made to eventually wake up. One of the militiamen grilled the child for information about his community and people, the religion he was raised on, and how he might’ve gotten his powers. Turo answered the way any of his other fellow Suomenusko villagers would have: That he was of a community of indigenous Finnish pagans, that he was raised on the veneration of the old gods (especially Ukko), and that he was seen as “blessed from birth” by Ukko due to his strange mark and his thunderous seismic powers, the sound of which was identical to the crackling of thunder and lightning.

The militiaman, unsatisfied with this answer, beat the boy, demanding better answers to his questions. While he might’ve expected this to get Turo to talk more, he instead triggered a meltdown from the lad, which manifested in the form of a total outbreak of his “macro-scale” seismic abilities. The result of this was complete destruction of the building, as well as a sizeable portion of the surrounding area, with every militiaman inside either ripped apart from the vibrations or crushed beneath the rubble. Thanks to shielding from his quake powers, Turo was left mostly unharmed, save for the beating he received just before his meltdown. Thankfully, Turo had a bit of a blackout right after he was struck by the militiaman, so the most traumatic portions of the incident mostly skirted past his psyche and out of his memory. Turo was recovered by his village not long after, since his abilities had always been the exact opposite of subtle, and taken back home. Turo’s parents and the rest of the community held a meeting within their main hall about what was to be done about the child, and an agreement was met: Arrangements would be made with a Finnish-American community that the village’s leader had contact with, and Turo would be sent to America to live with them, but would also obviously still be allowed contact with his people back home.

At the age of thirteen, Turo arrived in northern Minnesota, to a semi-rural Finnish-American community, who took him in due to the notice presented to them before he was sent over. Turo was enrolled in a school in Saint Paul, where he felt like a fish out of water. Not only was he in a community of people his village would barely consider Finnish (due to their Lutheran religion and Americanized culture), he had to go to a school full of kids he didn’t know how to talk to. Turo struggled greatly with the English language, to the point of distasting it immensely, and barely learned how to converse in the language by the mid-point of the year, much to the amusement of the meaner portion of his fellow students.

Around this time, though, as school let out for spring break, an older bully (no more than seventeen years of age) from within the school tailed Turo and stopped him in an alleyway, armed with a screwdriver. Turo couldn’t understand much of what the bully was spouting towards him, but he knew it was undoubtedly unkind. The bully grabbed Turo and gouged his left eye out with the screwdriver, but in response Turo did something he could not have fathomed, and did not actually mean to do: Turo inadvertently formed a highly condensed bubble of seismic energy (later termed by him as a “quake bubble”) around his hand and punched his bully in the stomach, when he only meant to put a tiny bit of power behind it. The result Turo expected was for him to knock the air from his bully’s stomach, allowing him to fight back further and then get treatment for his blinded eye. Instead, what happened was that the quake bubble was FAR stronger than Turo bargained for, and the bubble turned the unfortunate older adolescent into a fine red paste/mist, splattered along the walls of the alleyway, which were also extensively damaged. In a panic from the loss of his eye (but not having just taken another lad’s life), Turo ran to a nearby hospital, bleeding heavily from his lost eye. Covered in blood that mostly wasn’t his, Turo had to almost lie to the workers and say he was attacked, but managed to put off his attacker. Turo was admitted to emergency care, treated accordingly, and his eye socket was patched up. Sadly, the eye itself could not be saved.

As he recovered in the hospital, the young Turo was visited by his foster family, and he told them the same half-truth. They were glad that he was okay, but they were distraught that his eye was put out. Moreover, Turo seemed even more introverted than he was when he first arrived in America, as if whatever happened to him caused him to emotionally retreat and shut down. Since that day, Turo refused to further learn English or about American culture, requiring his foster family to communicate with him practically exclusively in Finnish. Turo also refused to go to that same school again, or any school nearby due to the incident, and his foster family decided to homeschool him, which seemed to make him far more comfortable.

Six years later, Turo is a nineteen year old young man, and his social mannerisms have not changed much from his traumatic incident. As introverted as ever, Turo mostly sticks with his foster family in America, seeing as he can’t easily afford to buy his own plane ticket to move back to Finland, and he hasn’t got a clue what would happen to his family if he actually went back. Feeling like an outcast, Turo does freelance hero work where he can, and tries his best to actually put his mostly untamed abilities to good use.

The Powers

Turo’s abilities are threefold, although one is far more in-depth than the others. His first set ability, the bread and butter, which has many subsets, is his seismic manipulation. Much like Whitebeard’s Gura Gura No Mi from One Piece, as a strong example, Turo can manipulate seismic energy, or “quakes”, on a widely varying scale. This power can take a variety of forms, all of which can be classified as “subsets” to the power. The subsets of this power are as follows:
- Turo can form condensed “quake bubbles” around his hands or objects he's holding, which he can either launch at an opponent or use in melee range to enhance the power of his strikes. These bubbles match the power of his macro-scale quakes, but are much less damaging to the surrounding area.
- Turo can form a “quake shield” around himself that protects him from physical harm lesser than or equal to the force of his own power.
- Turo can summon full-on quakes and seismic vibrations, which he can scale to either lightly damaging a building, all the way up to causing catastrophic damage to a wide residential area.
Simply put, for a much better and more detailed idea on Turo’s ability and general power scaling, take a look at Whitebeard from One Piece. Turo can do pretty much the same things he can, because both of them have seismic manipulation as their staple ability. For more specific scaling, a city shall be used as an example, given his biggest demonstration of one of his powers was in one. Turo's quake punch, even with an attempt (albeit a failed one) to drastically hinder its output, easily turned a 17 year old, healthy, relatively well-built adolescent male into red mist and paste. His wider-scale seismic power, if he were to let it fly and not put too much control on it, could easily cause widespread destruction and devastation to places on the scale of entire cities. In no uncertain terms, Turo can very readily be classified as a "city-buster".

Another ability Turo bears is his indomitable willpower, brought on by an over-driven manifestation of the Finnish concept of “Sisu” (The Finnish concept of stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness) as well as the after-effects of the slight but not total mental shutdown from the “screwdriver incident”. In essence, emotional and mental manipulation, be it mundane or magical, won’t really work on him too easily.

The third ability Turo has is heightened durability, mostly for the purposes of handling any unforeseen consequences of his power. As an example, if Turo were to go over the time limit (10 minutes of collective use per day) of his power usage, he “only” suffers a series of hairline fractures along his hands and arms, the amount and severity of which depends on exactly how much he overextended. This stands in stark contrast to what would happen if he didn’t bear high durability, which would be total destruction of his arms.

The Weaknesses

As much as Turo is effectively a walking force of nature, he also bears a great many drawbacks that both limit him from being a god (which is boring), and explains why parts of his power are not as consistent as one might think when initially reading it over.
- Mental Illness: As has been described in detail in the backstory, Turo is quite mentally unwell. Not only has the trauma of losing an eye and unwillingly obliterating a teenager within his own school forced a bit of an emotional shutdown, but it has also hampered general control of the upper end of his power, as well as dampened his willingness to use the “macro-scale” of his abilities. This trauma manifests further in both a rather undeveloped level of social skills, as well as an inability to converse in English beyond a basic conversational level.
- Animals & Kids, Keep Them Safe: Another hindrance to Turo’s power usage and control is the possibility of a child or animal being caught in the crossfire of the upper end of his abilities, and if he is aware of either being in the vicinity, then he will outright refuse to use his most destructive moves until that issue is mitigated.
- Overcharge: Turo’s power usage has a time limit, which resets (along with injuries caused from overcharging) at the beginning of each day. The time limit is ten minutes of collective usage, which means Turo has a daily “budget” of power time that he has to be extremely careful not to go over. The moment his time limit is up, Turo knows, and if he is in the middle of performing a usage of his power, he will be forced to make a choice: Cease usage immediately, or let his move fly. If he puts only a little bit of his power into that move, his hands will only gain a bit of light hairline fracturing. If he puts the maximum output into his move, his hands and arms will suffer heavy hairline fracturing, and daring to overcharge further bears a risk of rending his entire body apart from within, for such a force of nature contained within a young man’s body comes with heavy costs and consequences. His only saving grace is that his injuries heal with each daily reset, but this is less of a big blessing and more an assurance that he doesn’t die so soon.
- Force of Nature: Turo is (supposedly) blessed with the power of the high thunder god of his people’s indigenous pantheon. Regardless of what his religion or metahuman science might say, Turo was born with the power of a force of nature contained within his body. Such a power is volatile, but can also be immensely destructive, helpful, or both. As a result, the upper end of Turo’s offensive seismic powers (his shields are quite easy to control, thankfully) are quite difficult for him to rein in, and fine-tuning the output of his offense requires a particular degree of focus. If this focus is broken somehow, then Turo’s offensive maneuver can very easily fly out of control, resulting in far more damage than he ever would have intended. Once again, recall the incident with Turo’s bully; Turo meant to disorient and incapacitate, but due to the pain from his injury, his power output went haywire! The consequences of a breach of focus are almost always catastrophic, leading Turo to need to toe a very fine line with how he uses his power.

The Items

Turo doesn't have much in the way of items, except the previously-mentioned clothing on his back. No gun, no super-suit, no special gadgets. Just him.

The Minions

Turo has no "minions". At the moment, he is an army of one.

The Fluff

Usage of Turo’s powers visually manifests as cracks in the air, and audibly sounds like the crackling and rumbling of thunder and lightning.

The RP Sample

(This sample is taken from a scene in an ASOIAF roleplay server called The Three Dragons, in which I played a character named Durran Baratheon. Everything posted below is my response ending out the scene in question, since my two roleplay partners left the server before it was completed, and it thus fell to me to end it.)

Durran wasted no time at all after using his horned helm to gore and fling an entire warhorse aside like it was nothing to him. His next immediate focus was on Cleotus, who came towards him with two arakhs. As the melee continued in chaos, and the six men chased and occasionally struck down the skirmishing archers in the woods, the tide began to become a good bit more even as the Stormlanders held their ground. As Viserys and Cass worked their way towards their target, Cleotus saw fit to try his hand at taking the Stag down himself. Cleotus danced around Durran, sending forth probing slashes with his dual arakhs, but finding no purchase. Durran analyzed Cleotus' defense, and after a few seconds of the dance, found an opening in Cleotus' positioning and footwork. With a lunching step forward, Durran swung his hammer from a blind angle, the head soaring past Cleotus' blade-dance defense and smashing into the center of his torso. Cleotus sailed backwards and slammed into a tree, all life and breath knocked out of his lungs and heart. Cleotus could only let out a blood-curdled chuckle as his soul rapidly left him, his innards mushed to stew by the blunt-force trauma. An Essosi legend, struck down in a skirmish on some woodland road.

Durran continued on his warpath, smashing his way towards Viserys as soon as he caught sight of the Brightflame entering the battle. Corpses and gore and blood flew across the field as Durran made a beeline for his next target. In no time at all, Viserys stood before him, the Brightflame's heavy infantry smashed aside, and the Stag offered no quarter to this hated foe. Before Viserys could truly process what was happening, his kneecaps were shattered by a low strike of Durran's hammer. Setting the head on the ground, Durran forced the first four fingers of each hand into Viserys' mouth, who squirmed and reached down to pull a dagger. Even as Durran got peppered with poisoned arrows, some of which found purchase in the few weak spots of his armor, he didn't relent.

Durran declared plainly to Viserys, "I know it was you, and not your brother. Aelor was a horrid liar."

With that, Durran pulled his hands in opposite directions. With an immense level of force exerted from the pulling, Viserys was quite literally ripped in half. The men around looked upon this sight with horror, and many of the opposing retinue were driven into a mixture of despair and rage. Durran got practically focused on by the archers, and started to get peppered with even more arrows. So many, in fact, were lodged in the weak joints of his armor, that Durran began to look like a partial hedgehog. The fatigue-inducing poisons, which accelerated his heartrate, messed with his head, and forced a sense of tiredness on him, were kicking in badly as the battle went on. In time, Durran's soldiers all lay dead, and those who were left of Cassandyr's retinue from the melee and woodland skirmishes tried to face him. Durran ran forward without a care in the world, shrugging off more sleeping poison than any man should've been able to.

Those who were left in the skirmishes, however few in number, retreated to get more men from the camp. Cass was mostly hale and hardy going into this, while Durran had been feathered with arrows and riddled with other poison-induced slashes. The fact Durran still stood would be baffling to any witnesses. Cassandyr took an evasive stance and slashed with surgical precision at Durran's weak points, some of which connected due to the intense fatigue Durran was plagued by. Each strike that landed only made him a bit slower, and Cassandyr's natural evasive quickness meant that he was in no position to take a lethal shot from the Stag. All Cassandyr got was a graze from his fist, and even the force of that busted Cassandyr's eyebrow open. The duel went on for minutes, maybe hours, but by the end, Durran stood still. Somehow, even in unconsciousness, he hadn't fallen over. After a bit more time, the skirmishers came with reinforcements, who took Viserys' corpse and Durran's unconscious body back to the camp.

When Durran next awoke, he was in a strange camp, ran by unknown foreigners. Some of them reeked of Dornish stock. Durran gave himself a once-over. He was stripped almost nude, and his equipment was nowhere nearby. From what he could see and hear from within his cell, things were looking dire for the camp. A forty-man ambush, and three came back. Cleotus, a legendary mercenary from Essos, had his whole torso smashed inwards. Viserys, one of the two primary captains, was ripped in half, the sight of his cadaver so gruesome that Valaries was driven to suicide the moment she took a glance after hearing the news of her dear brother-husband's slaying. With a dagger, she pierced her own heart, and was dead within the next minute. In a span of a few days, three members of House Brightflame lay dead, all because of one person. Cassandyr particularly was left in a state of disarray by this. Two battle-brothers, gruesomely slain by the same person, and almost all of his men butchered in what was meant to be a one-sided ambush. Durran heard the dire conversations with his trained ears, and saw the desolate body language of the scattered mercenaries with his keen eyes.

Five men were stationed to watch the Stag, but they looked about as bored and desolate as the rest of the camp.

"We're goin' to get a drink. Jon, watch him for us, will ya?" One of the guards requested.

"Not sure about that," Jon answered skeptically. "Ya heard how many men this one killed, even when our best archers feathered him with our sleepy arrows? He even got one of our Dragons! I'm not even sure the five of us'll suffice."

One of the other guards retorted dismissively, "Oh, please, he's gotta be out fockin' cold from the blood loss and the poison! He'll not be up until we have him for ransom. Heh, then we'll kill the envoys and gut the Stag in front of everybody. That'll teach the Crown to fuck with us."
Four of the five guards walked off to go have a drink. Durran carefully tracked their direction, and noticed Jon look around with a bit of exasperation. Durran carefully inched closer to the bars of his cell, leaving his hand almost poking out. Jon never even noticed the change in position, for what was on Durran's hand interested him more. On the Stag's hand was a ring signifying him as a member of House Baratheon. Such a ring would be enough to let him retire early. Jon felt the temptation creep over him. After all, why not? Durran was clearly unconscious, right? Jon reached over, gently took Durran's massive hand, and--

CRUNCH

In an instant, Jon's head was turned upside-down. Durran sprung like a crouching tiger, moving faster than the entranced guard could react, and it was all over for him before he could process what happened. Durran rummaged through the guard's personal effects, finding a key ring, which he promptly used to unlock the door. Durran stuffed Jon's corpse in the corner and put the scratchy blanket in the cell over him, making it look as if he were still asleep. Durran then quietly gathered his bearings, looking around at the camp to see what the layout was. The big tent near the center, that must've been where Cass and (formerly) Viserys and Valaries resided. If his equipment were anywhere, it'd be there.

Durran stalked the camp, making himself appear as small as he could, and timing his bursts of movement for the moments when none could observe. Durran peeked into the command tent, where he saw a visibly stressed Cassandyr evaluating his equipment, as well as the personal rings of both Viserys and Valaries. Without wasting another moment, Durran darted forwards, catching the distracted and stressed captain by surprise. In the next moment, Durran swiftly and ruthlessly punched into the man's stomach with one hand before ripping his head off with the other. Grabbing a nearby small sack, Durran stuffed the severed head, the rings of the deceased Brightflames, and Cassandyr's own ring into it, as proof of his deeds. Durran snatched his warhammer and helm, leaving the rest of his armor behind, for he needed his escape to be quick and quiet. With his hammer, helm, and sack, Durran made his way to the horses, where he untied and promptly hopped onto the largest Dornish steed present. While he hated the Dornish, he could not deny the abilities of their steeds, which could ride for ages on end without needing to stop. Durran gently snapped the reins and kicked the horse's sides with his bare feet, urging the beast to bolt out of camp as fast as possible.

By the time Durran was gone, Jon's corpse was discovered by one of the other subordinate captains, which caused further panic in the camp. The men who discovered Jon's cleverly disguised body ran to the command tent, only to find their great leader was slumped over a blood-covered table, headless. The camp went absolutely ballistic with terror and rage. Accusations and words of dread were flung left and right, and the gravediggers even came to witness the commotion, stopping their burials of Viserys, Valaries, and Cleotus due to the disturbance. The camp of mercenaries were left in shambles. Their three greatest, including their leader and founder, were killed by this one Stag. Durran may have lost his men and that battle, but he won the aftermath, and thus the war. The ambushers were now all dead, and he was on his way to Oldtown. Bessie awaited him, and he could not keep his poor Bee waiting any longer.

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