Michael "Mickey" McMillan

Michael "Mickey" McMillan is a character in The BATTLE of the CENTURY, the seventh Season Intermission battle.

Description
Mickey's not a big guy, not in height, not in weight, and no matter how hard he tries, there's nothing about him looks intimidating. His face is all angles, and he might look decent if his black hair hung past his ears in a sheet instead of making itself into a curly, inch-deep mass. It might also help if he wasn't stuck with the family's uniform; see, a white tee with dark blue jeans and a black leather jacket might work on a biker or a hitter, but when you share a weight division with a mop, trying to look tough doesn't work so well.

Items/Abilities
As a member of the Soto family, Mickey's got a few advantages over your average John Doe. There's the basic lack of concern for old age or long-term injury, sure, but any Soto has a claim to that. Mickey's speciality is making a duplicate of himself. It takes a minute or two, and it's not exactly the most pleasant procedure, but when it's done, there's two of him standing around, and the only way to tell the two apart is that only one's up to making more. (I mean, yeah, they know the difference, but if they wanted to pull something, you'd be hard pressed to know which one's which.)

Biography
One coffee break. That was it, just one coffee break. If some jackass in an observatory had gotten back to his desk in time, things would've turned out differently. But no, Jackson Asswell had to go and dawdle with the creamer, so he missed his shot to give someone in charge the heads-up about a rock headed on a course for the planet. Thanks to him, the thing hit an illegal subnet satellite before anyone official could notice it, and it ended up cracking into four chunks and catching the attention of some junkie hacker in Seattle instead. From there, it was all downhill: hacker tracks meteorite chunk to the next state over, hacker's dealer agrees to drive him out in exchange for half of whatever they can sell it for, dealer shoots hacker and takes the whole score back to the local gang to pay off a debt, and the gang dissolves when someone gets thrown through a wall and people realize the rock's something special.

No one ever really worked out why it is the rocks did what they did. Some religious nuts went on about how it was meant to raise the worthy to enlightenment or something, and boatloads of nerds online shat themselves talking about alien civilizations, but in the end, it never really made much difference what brought the things down; all that mattered was that physical contact with a rock gave you weird abilities. While no two people got the same specific bag, each chunk of the meteorite passed out its own set of generics on top of an individual's own thing. Every Soto's got some measure of resilience in him, even though it doesn't always come out the same way.

Anyway, within two weeks, the Seattle underworld was being run by a guy named Dmitri and a bunch of bruisers he'd brainwashed into taking orders. By then, Miami and Berlin were in a fit as well, and it didn't take much longer for the three cities to end up as hubs for exploding criminal networks, the Sotos and the Gewitterwolken matching pace with Dmitri's goons and snapping up territory as fast as they could read the map. A fairly constant stream of divers went out to the mid-Atlantic, but as twenty years came and went, it was only extreme optimists thinking they had a shot at finding the last rock, and there weren't loads of optimists left after two decades of gangs running the streets and impotent governments doing jack about it.

Unlike lots of cities, Chicago never really found itself wholly owned by one faction or another. The Sotos got there first, but Dmitri took Milwaukee early on, and as soon as the Gewitterwolken got Detroit, they started poking their noses into the Windy City. The Sotos had to bring a fair bit of manpower to bear on the south end of town to keep the cloudy-assed Germans from encroaching, and when they did, Dimitri tried to take advantage, managing to get himself a foothold just inside the Illinois border before Tony Soto himself came up. Eventually, the conflict went from a full roiling boil to a relatively-calm simmer, and despite things staying the same for more than ten years after that, two weeks couldn't pass without someone trying to push into someone else's territory.

Michael McMillan had been five when the rocks first came down, and his dad's garage ended up burning to the ground twice before the kid was old enough for a driver's license. (Not that not having a license made much of a difference any more.) Unfortunately, the third Molotov stuck, and when Michael was left looking for food and shelter a few months shy of eighteen, he was picked up by Jerry Soto, bona fide cousin of the Miami kingpin himself. The local Sotos eased the kid into things slow, but by the time he turned nineteen, they had him jacking cars and pulling lookout duty like life-long family. Jerry, good friend to the kid that he was, even gave him the generous offer to be on the next road trip down south after his quick thinking got two members of the family clear of a Gewitterwolken ambush.

The rock wasn't all that impressive up close, but getting shot in the leg on the way out of Florida and not even limping by the time he got home made up for it just fine. From then on, he was a Soto through and through, and whether it was planning a getaway, rigging cars, or sending himself on a walkabout in hostile territory, he was in the game.

When he disappeared, though, not many folks got too worked up over it. Losing him was a tactical loss, sure, but there was that one kid fresh from Joliet, he had some skill with a wrench, didn't he?