ANDREW HIMURA: When Andrew was born to the daughter of a Hiroshima survivor and her husband, his golden eyes plainly marked him as a mutant-- and in those days, the Japanese government was quietly turning up and asking parents of known mutants to turn them over to the government. The Himuras were not willing to give up their son. Instead, they fled to the United States, moving first to Greenwich, CT (it's near Westchester County, and it's mostly rich white people but with a high Japanese population), and from there to the suburbs of upstate Connecticut.

Andrew had three strikes against him in the suburbs where he lived. He was an obvious mutant, he was Asian and he was bright-- but not the kind of bright kid that Asians are stereotypically expected to be. He was not quiet and studious. Instead, Andrew constantly challenged the teachers, and did not seem to feel that simply being a teacher necessarily made them smarter than him. When his parents tried to force him to show some respect, and listen to teachers even if he felt they were stupid, he insisted that he owed no respect to people who couldn't do their jobs right. Andrew got into a lot of trouble with other kids, and the teachers rarely supported him, since he was frequently contradicting them too (unfortunately he was usually right when he did.)

When he was a teenager, two things became obvious to Andrew which further alienated him from those around him. The first was that he realized he was gay. The second thing was that he realized his vague unease with other people's words, all his life, was actually a mutant power to detect lies, and although he had had it all his life it became focused and very powerful when he hit his teen years. Andrew became incapable of lying, because lies profoundly disgusted him. He also became incapable of what little social interaction he had been capable of, since he couldn't tell white lies, either. The closet was never an option for a boy who couldn't lie; Andrew came out shortly after realizing his sexuality, and proceeded to suffer hell in high school, until he decided he couldn't take it any more and ran away to San Francisco, where his uncle (fearing that he too might have mutant children) had immigrated to.

The Himuras despaired of their gay mutant son, but they loved him and sent him money, even if he refused to do anything to make his life easier, such as not tell teachers to their faces that they were morons. Andrew fit in a bit better in San Franscisco, where neither gays nor Asians were any big deal, though he never quite got rid of the chip on his shoulder.

As an adult, Andrew is an investigative reporter. He has learned how to tell lies in the course of his investigation (claiming to want to buy a house to research discrimination against mutants, for instance), but still can't tell white ones. As a result most of his relaitonships don't last. (Gay men are just as susceptible as women to "yes, your butt is getting fat.") He is brutally honest and highly intelligent. Andrew is extremely liberal and extremely opinionated, but will challenge PC when it becomes dishonest (he has no patience for any imposition on free speech, even if it's speech that insults him personally.) Also, although he is strongly opinionated, he can be swayed by a person who has facts and absolute belief on their side; he's not dogmatic or inflexible, just stubborn.

Andrew is highly involved in the causes of anti-discrimation for Asians, gays, and mutants. He's opposed to superheroes on the grounds that they promote the divide between ordinary humans and superpowered beings, thus feeding anti-mutant hatred (even the human ones). He's in favor of Carolyn Xavier's anti-prejudice stance, but if he ever heard her in person he'd figure out that she's concealing something major and would decide to hunt it down and expose it. He's blunt and in-your-face about his opinions and his identity, a workaholic, extremely arrogant, and deep down convinced that no one likes him, because, well, not too many people do. He's also quite good-looking, and wears his hair long, and this gets him lots of dates (the unusual eyes don't generally detract, not in San Francisco); but they don't stick around. Andrew doesn't hit on people unless his powers tell him they're interested.

Andrew's power is the ability to detect when people are telling the truth as they believe it. (Yes, there's another character in the MU with that power, and they're Asian no less, but Andrew is actually an MU/XXY port of an original character of mine from another fandom.) He cannot do this over electronic media; he needs to hear the speech in person, although, for some reason, his power is partially effective over the telephone. (It's likely quasi-telepathic, and therefore requires either physical proximity or a personalized connection.) People who believe in what they are saying can tell him things that are untrue and he won't know, but he can catch any deliberate lie, half-truth or creative rendition of the truth. By now he's good enough at it that he can get it out of speeches too even where he can't use his mutant power, simply because he's learned so extensively what people sound like when they are lying. Creator: Alara Rogers.