William "Billy" Bensen//elevated demigod of sports

[Deleted]

* - - William. Gerald. Bensen. - - *

Name ;; William Gerald Benson
Nickname(s) ;; Billy
Age ;; born 1870, forever about 25
Birthday ;; September 9, 1870
Gender ;; male

Species ;; elevated demigod
Immortal Parent ;; Mercury
Years at Camp ;; Never went

Celebrity Claim ;; Billy Hamilton

Appearance ;;
Billy stands a solid 6’0”, looking like a beanpole. He’s only 160 lbs, so most would look at him and think he’d topple in a spring breeze. However, don’t let that get the better of you. Billy is strong (even before elevation to godhood). He seems to be all legs, which kind of makes sense since he is incredibly fast. Even walking, his strides are huge. His mother taught him always stand tall and take big steps because it’s not just efficient, but it makes people think better of you. And in the world that Billy grew up in, that was a big thing. Sometimes pride was all he had to his name. Ironically, thanks to the example of his mother, he was and still is a very humble man. His skin is like milk chocolate and, while mortal, was extremely calloused and dirty most of the time. In his immortality, it has smoothed out and, naturally, gotten a sort of golden glow to it (which he can chose to hide when incognito). His dark hair is cropped close to his head and he has a whispy frame around his chin and lips. His eyes are deep brown and rich and usually sparkle when he smiles. He used to have a very hesitant smile – understandable with his history – but these days it is big and happy.

Personality ;;
Billy is a happy guy and a people person. He was elevated for putting others first, so it makes sense that this still holds true in his immortality. He likes to go undercover so that people don’t know he’s a god. Being a god of sports, his usual haunts are sports stadiums, little league fields and inner city makeshift ball yards; he’s working on a method to get to interact with the kids who play sports in their gym class at school, but that’s a work in progress. His favorites are the kids, when they’re still too young to have been told the stars are out of reach by the beat-down adults. He likes to be that voice that says they’d be selling themselves short of they only aimed for the sky.

Billy values hard work, as it was all he knew in his mortal life. Equality is also a big thing. When he was a mortal, there was no such thing as equality. This is why he pushes for it now. Well, equality within reason. If you just so happen to be: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, a member of ISIS, or the guy with the final vote to not let Pete Rose into the National MLB Hall of Fame… then better luck next time.

Every once in a while, Billy will hit the Underworld with a baseball bat. That is to say, he’ll set up a makeshift diamond in either the Field of Asphodel or Elysium depending on the day, and get the kids who died young into a rousing game of baseball. His immortal life – though Olympus had intended him to be more professional right off the bat – is mostly focused on getting kids active.


Powers ;;
MORTAL

Speed Demon: Billy is fast, being a son of Mercury. It’s actually what allowed him to accomplish the stunt that got him into immortality. However, he was never one of the lucky ones to develop the talent of teleportation. When mortal, he was able to max out his run at 40 mph, give or take. All in all, pretty slow for Mercury kin, but one also has to take into account that hardly ever maxed himself out because he didn’t want people to know he wasn’t 100% human, so it’s very possible that he could have gone faster and simply didn’t know it.

Language & Communication: Billy was gifted with the ability to learn any language after being immersed in it for 5 minutes, since his father ruled the trade routes. However, he had no practice in this until a year before elevation, when he managed to leave the US to go to Greece for a short while. He is also a gifted speaker and, though his strong Southern draw can make people take him less seriously in different parts of the world, he is very good with words and can, if given the chance, overcome accent barriers.

IMMORTAL

Teleportation: As all immortals, he can move from place to place in an instant. (Side note, he can also now max out running speed at 85 mph, but he trains a lot, trying to get faster, so this may change.)

Strength: Though he is not remotely as strong as, say, Hercules, he’s pretty strong. He can kick a soccer/football ball from one end of the field to the other, hit a baseball completely out of a stadium, throw the old pigskin from one end zone to the other, and has multiple times broken the hockey stick on contact with the puck, and tries to avoid more physical sports like wrestling or rugby for fear of actually inflicting bodily injury on someone accidentally.


Family ;;
Marina Bensen – Mother, mortal, deceased, but not before his elevation
Mercury – Father, god of messengers (and the more traditional sports of old)


History ;;
Marina lived in southern Louisiana in the late mid 1800s. Having been unable to get that far away to the North to try to reach safety during the Civil War, she took up residence in a ruddy little neighborhood just outside New Orleans where the thick racial divide of the time was slightly more bearable because there were fewer people to divide. She ran a little home school for the local kids, since it was a poor area and there weren’t really any schools for the colored folks. After she taught herself to read and write, then taught them the same. Then she’d try to teach herself history, then taught them the same, and so on. There would always be games though. There was a junkyard at the end of the street, so she’d take them there and they’d play ball. It’s hard to tell just what attracted Mercury to her, as he is a jack of all trades among the gods. But in the brief time that she was not holding classes due to an impending storm off the gulf, that was when she met him. A hurricane was about to hit and she was doing the last boarding of her little home when a man came and asked if he could weather out the storm with her, as he was a visitor to the area and had no place to take shelter. She took him in. The storm destroyed the rickity buildings of the neighborhood and the man offered to help her rebuild her home as payment for her hospitality. With all the close contact for as long as it took to get a roof back up, it’s really no wonder they got so close. A few weeks after he left, she learned she was pregnant.

All through the hot months, she carried the baby and then, as Autumn came, she gave birth to a boy and named him William. Teaching became much more limited, but she kept it up, so as young William grew, he learned a lot. His mother instilled in him the idea that hard work pays off. William did well in the classroom, but he did best in that junkyard. One day, while seven-year-old William was racing kids up and down the main dirt road of the neighborhood, the man from the storm showed up again. He gathered Marina and William and told them everything: who he was and what that meant to William. While even the camps for the demigods were white-only, Mercury told Marina how she could personally help her son, and it started with getting out of Louisiana.

Marina and young William hopped a train car headed what appeared to be west, but it instead got them north as far as Kentucky. No train lines had yet been built that crossed the northern Kentucky border, as train lines were involved and expensive, so the mother and son walked across a railway bridge over the Ohio River and kept going and going until they found a little place in downtown Dayton. Marina got a job in a clothing factory and continued to homeschool William when she wasn’t working, but he was completely alone while she was at the factory. Curious little boy as he was, he eventually started wandering the streets and would learn how high the sun could get before he’d have to head home, so he could judge how far he could go. Several times he was beat up for wandering into the wrong neighborhood. Then one day, he found a baseball field. Well, the local kids pretended it was. It was actually the parking lot of an abandoned store. He started going there every day to play. Eventually, his mother found out when he’d slid into second base and bloodied his knee up pretty badly. She scolded him, mostly because she was afraid he’d expose his heritage. She gave him a long lesson on being careful doing things that he could seem unnaturally better at, then, as she desperately wanted her son to have the good childhood she did not, she sent him back to his beloved ball field.

Years passed and William grew and got a job at a bicycle shop, but his heart was still in sports. As the 1890s dawned, on came the news that was going to change the world. For the first time since ancient times, there would be an official Olympic Games. Billy was in awe of the idea of that level of professional sports. The year they were scheduled to happen, 1896, he kissed his mama goodbye and snuck out of Dayton on a trek to the ocean. It was January and bitter cold and the travelling was hard. He’d sleep during the day and flat-out run during the night so long as terrain and population allowed. Finally he got to the ocean ports of New England. He snuck aboard a ship and hid there for several weeks, stealing food at night to keep going. Then, when he got to the port in Spain, he stole a map from a gift shop. It was a long, hard journey and it was on this journey that he discovered his ability to learn different languages intuitively. This was intensely handy, as he could use it to ask for simple things like directions or food. Eventually, he got to Athens, Greece, and the real work began.

April 6, 1896. The opening ceremonies of the first official Olympic Games. Billy took advantage of his inherent trickster skills from his father, and managed to forge a ticket. With the seating first-come, first-serve, he got there bitterly early so he could see the rumored torch. Excited was not nearly a good enough word for it. He got a decent spot and awaited the moment with eager eyes. Finally, with grand fanfare from a live band, the torch-barer came. Billy was like a little kid again, thrilled by what he was seeing.

Until what he was seeing went to Hades in a handbasket. It wasn’t clear what happened to trigger it, but in the flash of an eye, the torch’s flame had ignited the sleeve of the runner. Screams filled the crowd, but before the runner could even let go the torch that had caused it, Billy had plowed through the crowd, leapt the barrier, and tackled him to the ground to help stamp out the fire that was threatening the runner’s safety. Then there was the sound of gunshot and the world went dark.

The runner survived with only very minor burns due to Billy’s quick reaction. Billy, however, had been seen as a threat at the moment and a security guard had shot him the moment he dared get far enough from the hurt runner. Billy himself had a few burns, but the worst was the internal bleeding. He was sent to a second-rate hospital, but with the Olympic crowds, it was delayed and he almost didn’t survive the trip. He did, however, die on the stretcher waiting for a doctor. None of this did he remember.

What he did remember was waking up laying down in an enormous room that glittered with more gold and marble and expensive things than Billy ever imagined could exist. And standing over him was… the man from the storm. A debate ensued in the actual Olympic Counsel as a dazed and awed Billy was virtually silent. Mercury – and a spattering of other gods in the throne room – argued that Billy had saved the rebirth of the sacred games of old and should be honored as such. Time passes different on Olympus, so Billy had no idea how long it took. Eventually, a unanimous vote was met and he was offered immortality. Considering his only other option was the Underworld, he understandably took immortality. He was put under the care and direction of his father, Mercury, as the god of more modern-day sports like the ones he grew up playing and, to a degree, the ones he had helped in the Olympic Games.

Over a hundred years passed and really the only thing that changed was the style of the uniforms he would don when going to play sports with the mortals. He visited, and continues to visit, the Olympic Games every year they are held. He loves going to inner city kids like the ones who taught him baseball in Dayton, and getting them excited about playing sports for exercise, confidence-boosting, and plain old fun. While he doesn’t visit Camp Jupiter (or Camp Half-Blood) often since they don’t do a lot in his field of work, he does like coming every now and again. Eventually, he wants to get those stiff and stuffy Roman soldiers to realize hurting people is by far not the only way to get exercise and grow better, so he’s taking to slowly infiltrating the legion and seeing what he can do to wake these Romans up to how to have real fun.

Site Alias ;; AB
Reading;; All: PJO, HOO, KC
Roleplaying Experience ;; Probably around a solid decade.
Sample RP ;; See the army