Another quickie sketch.

Cliff does not start off well early in my story. In fact, his early life was pretty miserable with having to witness his father being murdered in front of him, his mother losing custody over him due to depression/drug abuse induced child neglect, and suffering constant harassment in foster care. Being poor, having lost his family, and poor treatment by peers and a couple of the foster care staff was what developed his insecure nature as a child.

He is above the average size for his race and age (he’s about a foot larger than most other minotaur children his age). This and his early child obesity lead to his peers constantly teasing his middle name by putting emphasis on the “ton” in his name or making it into a weight reference. (CliffTON or TENtons). It also does not help that the children mocked his late father by joking at how he was a stereotypical fat, donut munching cop. This hits especially home on him as he knew his father was greatly respected with the peers among his force. The above three points are the primary reasons he began bullying others; to both make them as miserable as himself, and to make him feel even larger than he already his.

He was quite a crude bully. He would often harass, steal, or even outright physically abuse others, especially the children who mocked him beforehand.

He developed his size shifting powers earlier than most mutants in the story due to the amount of stress in his life. After practicing a bit, he would even go as far as to enlarge himself to the size of an adult minotaur {~8’5”-9’5”} and beat up the ones he despise most. These were mostly other bullies he could not take on before at normal size before due to being outnumbered and/or outmatched, which was sometimes the case before he developed his mutant power.

When he encounters Oto for the first time, he merely disliked him initially because he was fairly rich. This behavior escalates into pure jealously and hate when he finds that Oto is too an orphan, but is happy that he has someone to care for him. It takes a bit of time, events, and a few 3rd party intervention to change this.

As a child, he is easily recognized by his thick blue unibrow. Naturally, this was also a viable target by his rotten peers. He later in life gets fed up with it and has the middle part of his brow plucked to stop this nonsense once and for all.

Cliff is MUCH smarter than he appears to be, and even he doesn’t realize it. It’s usually his bulling and insecurities that get in the way of this fact.