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So new year, new concept
First member of my new superteam: [NAME TO BE DETERMINED]. He fills the role of the immensely strong mythical figure, with a dash of body-switching thrown in.
GUAN YU
Bio: Jesse Zhang was a Chinese-American orphan, raised by his grandfather in California. Growing up he was taught to revere the old legends and historical figures, chief among them, legendary warrior: Guan Yu. His grandfather even claimed that the shrine in their shop housed a fragment of Guan Yu’s mythical weapon, the Green Dragon Crescent Blade. Jesse didn’t think much of these stories, until the invasion.
An extra-dimensional warlord who had clashed with Pinnacle on a number of occasions finally managed to breach into our dimension and his invading forces poured in at multiple incursion sites. With Pinnacle and the established heroes busy trying to contain the breach and stop the invasion at its source, some areas were left at the mercy of the invaders. Jesse’s hometown was one such area.
His grandfather sealed up their shop and hoped to wait out the storm, but a young girl’s cries for help outside led him to expose their position. The ground forces were executing any and all living beings they encountered. Jesse’s grandfather ushered the girl inside, but was struck dead before he could make it himself. As the attackers cornered Jesse, he pushed the young girl behind him and instinctively grabbed the first weapon he could reach: the ancient blade handle housed in his grandfather’s shrine. When he held up the weapon to defend the girl, the spirit of Guan Yu within the blade sensed his righteousness and acted. Instantly Jesse was transformed into the towering legend himself: GUAN YU. He single-handedly repelled the invaders and decimated the West Coast incursion site. His actions saved hundreds of thousands of lives. When the breach was sealed and the fight over, Pinnacle approached Jesse, offering him a position on her newly formed team, an international posthuman response unit, meant to prevent tragedies such as this one from happening again.
Abilities: When he grabs the ancient blade handle, so long as his cause is just, Jesse is able to physically embody the living legend Guan Yu. Jesse is not in conscious control of this form, actually physically switching places with the deity rather than transforming into him. While one is active, the other resides on the astral plane, able to communicate with the other through telepathy.
Guan Yu possesses superhuman strength of the highest caliber, surpassed only by Pinnacle, and near invulnerability. His speed/reflexes/stamina are similarly enhanced, able to move at velocities several times the speed of sound. His beard can sense evil intent and itches when danger is near. He wields the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, a supernatural weapon able to cut through almost anything. The blade can produce mystical blue fire in its wake which Guan Yu can shape into a massive wall of flame.
Next member of the team: ÉPOQUE
Bio: Gerard Genet was a physicist from France, whose renowned work in multiversal theory and time-dilation earned him a spot on a multi-billion research project. The project entailed the construction of a massive supercollider. Gerard was to head the subsequent experiment. The idea was to make micro-breaches in space-time to study differences between the neighboring dimension and our own. However, an overzealous researcher miscalculated and the breach was far wider than anticipated. Gerard ushered the research team out of the blast chamber and attempted to manually close off the hemorrhage. His plan worked, but as the closing breach unleashed a devastating wave of of energy right before it sealed. Gerard was caught in the blast and nearly died.
He was in a coma for six weeks, under careful government observation. Upon awakening, Gerard found his body infused with the dimensional energy, able to project it from his body and warp space-time in his immediate environment. He used his abilities locally at first and only for scientific research, but more and more Gerard found himself wishing to make a difference. He started using his abilities for disaster relief, at first in France and then Europe at large. He adopted the name ÉPOQUE, trying to be like the colorful superheroes of the age, and gained notoriety within the international posthuman community.
When the invasion happened, Époque was instrumental in stemming the tide of the invading troops and helped Pinnacle seal the main breach, causing the chain reaction that closed off all other incursion points. He accepted Pinnacle’s offer to organize into a team with no hesitation.
Abilities: Gerard can release a unique form of energy that enables him to control space-time. He envelops a person/object or even himself in this energy to a number of effects. He can accelerate or decelerate the passage of time on a single object, freezing them in a single moment stretched out to hours, or forcing them to age several days in a matter of minutes. Using this aspect of his abilities on himself, Gerard can approximate superhuman speed by phasing himself into an accelerated timeline relative to the world around him. He can also his energy teleport himself and others vast distances. The larger the change to local space-time and the more mass involved, the more tiring it is for him.
Another member of the team, ostensibly the most powerful and team leader. PINNACLE
Bio: She doesn’t remember anything before waking up in a stasis chamber miles under the earth in a secret genetics facility. They’d implanted a set of basic memories in her brain, something to give the spatial awareness, coordination, language skills of an adult the approximate age of her rapidly grown body, but there were no emotions, no empathy, no sense of identity. Or at least, there wasn’t supposed to be.
Pinnacle was the product of decades of research and testing. During the Cold War, Soviet scientists had grew her from superhuman DNA samples using unearthed Nazi records as a foundation. They wanted her to be their nuclear deterrent, a posthuman weapon of mass destruction. But her senses had evolved past them, she perceives life in a way that we can’t imagine, holds it sacred. They thought she was unaware of her true potential. She was. Before they could put her through the planned mental conditioning, Pinnacle broke out of her bonds and began to destroy the facility, undoing years of research. Her escape triggered the automatic security deep within the facility. The facility locked all exits and unleashed a devastating thermonuclear explosion, killing everyone within… except for her. She barely survived, her abilities being in their nascent stage. After a decade or so of inactivity, recuperating and testing the potential of her abilities, Pinnacle emerged in as a superhero. She used her titanic abilities to preserve life in any way that she could, becoming somewhat of a role model for the emerging posthuman community.
It was after the invasion, when she was forced to kill her nemesis despite her moral objections, that Pinnacle knew she couldn’t do this alone. She sought out other established heroes, and some new faces, hoping to organize a team that could play off of each other’s strengths, balance each other’s weaknesses, and more effectively protect the planet.
Abilities: Pinnacle is the highest caliber posthuman known. Hers is the measure to which all other posthumans are compared. She possesses superhuman strength of limitless potential. At resting it is in the upper range of the 100-ton class, but when she truly exerts herself Pinnacle is a worldbreaker. Her bodily tissues are nearly invincible, superdense and incredibly durable. She can move at incredible speeds upwards, resting at around Mach 10, but can push herself faster with exertions. She has self-sustained flight and enhanced sensory perception, as well as a form of sixth sense that allows her to empathically sense the presence and emotional state of sentient life.
So we have our super-idealistic ultra powerful-type, our mythical warrior-person, our speedster/teleporter. What’s left for a classic superhero team? How about a telepathic alien or an ocean-dweller? How about both?!
CETACEA
Bio: CETACEA is of an ancient race of humanoid aliens, from a massive planet, completely covered in water. She has revealed little of it’s culture or history to her friends, nor what her place was within that society or if all her species possesses the gifts that she does. She was sent hurtling to the Earth in a stasis pod, adrift for thousands of years. She crash landed on Earth, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, her stasis pod automatically deconstructing itself on the molecular level (a failsafe, she guessed, to keep advanced technology from falling into the hands of underdeveloped civilizations.) She remained hidden for centuries, glimpsed by maritime travelers and inspiring legends of women in the water. In the 21st Century, the superheroine Pinnacle encountered her while saving the crew of a collapsing oil platform. Apparently Cetacea had been saving people in these kinds of situations for centuries, always erasing their memories of the event to preserve her anonymity. Pinnacle kept Cetacea’s secret for a few years, but upon deciding to form her team, she knew Cetacea’s talents would prove invaluable…
Abilities: Much of Cetacea’s abilities come from her alien physiology. She can breathe both air and water, but her body more efficiently metabolizes oxygen from the latter. Her body is incredibly durable, able to withstand the crushing pressures of the ocean, and her strength and stamina are proportionately enhanced. She has razor sharp claws on her feet and hands that are incredibly dense and can rend through rock and metal with ease. Her eyesight is enhanced to the point where she can see clearly with very little light and at many fathoms below sea-level. The appendages growing out of her head have a sensory function, and can detect electrical activity (such as in the nervous systems of living organisms) and motion in her surrounding environment.
Cetacea is also a vastly powerful telepath. She can the read thoughts and memories of others. Because she cannot physically vocalize human language, she projects her voice into the minds of others as a form of communication. Offensively she can release devastating blasts of psionic energy or impose her will over the minds of her opponents. In times of severe stress Cetacea has been able to release telekinetic force on her environment, but this ability is wildly uncontrolled so she does not tend to use this ability unless given absolutely no other option.
Had to be done
For Jeff’s contest on the blog.
EDIT: I wanted to try my hand at a simpler more graphic version, just because I’m bored at work awaiting feedback on a project. Here goes:
Mythical warrior, time-manipulator, super-idealist, oceanic-telepath, and now for a… supernatural street vigilante!
ISHMERAI
Bio: Reuven Saunders grew up in a tightly knit Jewish Orthodox community in Brooklyn. His father held a job that called for frequent travel to Israel. Despite Reuven’s questioning, Mr. Saunders never went into specifics about his line of work. Reuven eventually gave up altogether, thinking it to be inconsequential anyway. Until the day Mr. Saunders brought his work home with him. It was just after Reuven’s 17th birthday when he noticed something was wrong. His father came home from his monthly business trip, but seemed distant. Colder. He began to act erratically. He was short tempered. Irritable. Reuven had slept over at a friend’s house the night before it happened. He returned in the morning to find the house eerily empty. He heard his father crying from the basement. Without thinking he headed downstairs to find his father covered in blood, standing in the middle of the mutilated remains of Reuven’s mother and three siblings. He had a gun in his hands. Reuven was frozen. Upon noticing him, his father turned and shoved the gun into Reuven’s hands. “Do it.” he begged. “Please. It won’t let me. I tried. Do it.” Reuven tried to stammer something but Mr. Saunders, grabbed the barrel of the gun and shoved it against his forehead. “I can’t keep control. DO IT!” As he yelled the last sentence, something in his face changed, his eyes went black and his expression turned grotesque, the voice seemingly not his own. Reuven’s trigger finger twitched in shock. His father was gone.
Reuven remembers his uncle coming down the steps moments afterward. Collapsing into his arms. Screaming until he passed out. Soon after he learned the truth. His father was an exorcist, apparently a family legacy. Traveling the world to perform cleanses and banish evil spirits and demons. On this last occasion he had been successful in exorcising a dybbuk from a young woman in Tel Aviv, but the demon had clung to the back of his mind, waiting and watching, until it could take control and exact its revenge, forcing Mr. Saunders to murder his own family. Reuven asked his uncle to train him. When his uncle had taught him all that he knew, Reuven travelled the globe, seeking out masters of other faiths, training his body, mind, and soul to their utmost potential.
He became the keeper of the night, ISHMERAI, combating the supernatural wherever it threatened the innocent. In his career he also used his skills to combat more earthly evils as well. Pinnacle invited him to join the group, feeling the need for a human presence to keep them grounded.
Abilities: Ishmerai is still a mortal human being, but has trained his body to peak conditioning. He is a master of krav maga as well as several other forms of unarmed combat. He can perform several forms of tactical and ritualistic magic, but his lack of natural magical talent precludes him from performing any especially powerful mystic feats.
His weaponry and attire has undergone ritual enhancement. Ishmerai’s clothes can absorb light, plunging his immediate locale into darkness, while his mask allows him to see in complete shadow with perfect clarity, as well as through illusions and enchantments. His hat gives him resistance to possession and telepathic intrusion. His boots allow him to defy physical law, walking on upright surfaces or upside down. He wears the Breastplate of Ariel, an ancient artifact that can project a forcefield around its wearer or manifest a massive lion composed of astral energy to combat spirits. He wields a pair of sanctified revolvers, with enchanted ammunition. The bullets are inscribed with various seals to various effects (ie: multiplication, homing onto a companion seal, concussive round, phasing through solid material for a set time period, incendiary, elemental shrapnel, etc.)
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