FIREDRAKE (Siggismund Auerbach/Lofwyr)

Siggy is already 79 years old, but is showing no signs of slowing down, appearing as a 45 year old bald man of sturdy build and well over 2 meters tall with a forbidding aspect. He remembers World War II, having been young at the time and having fled to Switzerland to avoid the war, finding the Nazi creed disturbing on many levels (having a Jewish mother helped). He operated as a banker for many years, the only sign of his potential being his slow aging and his dreams of flying on leathery wings and doing strange and unfathomable things at night. In one dream, he would feed on an entire cow, apparently being some enormous creature, in another he would launch a devastating gout of flame at a German vehicle in the mountain passes. He found the dreams frightening and yet strangely appealing, speaking of them to no one, not even his wife of 30 years, who died of a brain tumor in her 60’s. He continued working at the bank throughout the war, doing his best to stay out of the whole affair, ensconced in his Swiss neutrality, but moved in 1977, the year after his wifes death, to America to take up a career as a teacher of German, history and English as a second language, after his banking job fell through during an economic slump. He also did a brief stint as a private eye, but this lasted very briefly as he lacked any real skill in investigating anything other than a persons financial history, which led to his final

job as an investigator for a credit union, which he now oversees.

It was during a routine mugging while walking home that Siggismund snapped and his MR Node finally consciously expressed itself, his body changing and warping into the form of a 3 meter winged dragon-man with a 9 meter wingspan and a fiery breath! His assailants barely got away alive and the gunshots from the one who tried to slow him down felt like pinpricks and stopped hurting within moments. Sure that he was dreaming again, Siggismund took to the sky, but the senses of his new form where unfamiliar and the smells and sights and sounds of the city bewildered him, as well as the cables and clotheslines and similar flight hazards and he ended up falling back into the alleyway ignominously. In short, his would-be muggers escaped without incident. He waited to wake up, but he seemed to be awake, the incident lacking the purity of his dreams of unfettered flight, clear night vision, etc. So he entertained the idea that this could indeed be his waking life and that he could be an actual dragon of some sort. With effort over the next half hour, he managed in part or momentarily to revert back to human form, and was exhausted by all his unsuccessful form-shifting by the time he reverted to his normal form. His clothing he observed remained undamaged and he sighed at the incongruity of this ‘magic’ and went home and thought the matter over for the rest of the evening, changing form several times in an hour just to make sure that it hadn’t been some strange one-time delusory happening.

In the morning he called in sick, prompting his employees to send cards and flowers, since he hadn’t called in sick once in the last seven years. He travelled to the nearest Rashoud center via a rickety car that he never used (being the ultimate skin-flint, despite his vast resources from his long lifetime of careful investment) and when quizzed on his past, whimsically recalled a favorite character from a novel, a Mr. Long from Tea with the Black Dragon, and put down that he was in fact a dragon taking the form of a man for a time, making up some names for himself and his imaginary dragon-parent. As expected,

the officials stopped asking annoying questions at this point and went on to help him quantify his ‘quantum abilities,’ treating him like a potentially dangerous psychotic, which fit his mood entirely. The sensory problems he had developed in his initial manifestations have abided, but he knows that this is a temporary measure, soon he will have to embrace and learn to deal with the enhanced senses of his ‘transform’ (as his trainers have taken to calling it). He is certain that his form is only the tip of a larger iceberg, as he feels that the form in his dreams is more powerful still!

On an intellectual level, ‘Firedrake’ knows that he isn’t a real dragon, that he is just a man whose MR Node expressed many, many years ago in a minor way with only his ‘Adaptation’ appearing initially, followed by his expression, many decades later of his draconic form. He entertains the notion that he may actually have unconsciously changed once or twice in his earlier years and is searching over WWII records to see if in fact any rashes of cattle disappearances or unexplained Nazi troop losses near the Swiss border occurred, but he has found to evidence to confirm if his dreams have any basis in reality as of yet. Nevertheless, he derives some enigmatic glee from pretending to be a real dragon observing mankind from time to time, especially when the questioner irritates him in some way.

Thus far, only his Mega-Stamina and enhancements and, surprisingly, his fiery breath attack are usable outside of his ‘transform.’ He is certain that he could develop means to express his strength and senses in his ‘human’ form, if not perhaps even his armor-like defenses or odder abilities. He is certain that no physical law should allow him to fly for instance, so it is quite possible that even his flight could be adapted to function without his wings. He is pretty sure that he could learn to use that tail, too. His discovery that he can operate underwater for hours on end is something of a mixed blessing as he has never much liked the sea...

After almost 8 decades, his life has taken wing and Siggismund is enjoying the years of childhood that the second World War stripped from him. He is delighted with what the Rashould center has taught him about his abilities, but finds Project Utopia a bit unsettling. He would be far more comfortable with them if they incorporated, the idea of not-for-profit work offending him on some mercenary level.

THE VOICE (Jeffrey Carpenter)

Jeff was always something of a user, but not nearly so good at it as he thought. He would usually be prone to attempting to talk (or bullshit) his way out of something, and could claim truthfully that he had never actually been in a fight, as he had managed to weasel his way out of every confrontation in his young life.

He was a senior and had talked a few members of his fairly large circle of friends into hitting a less than savory neighborhood to ‘cruise.’ A batch of ignorant and mouthy middle class white kids walking into the middle of a street gang psyching itself up to smash a rival gang, and looking for some faces to smash, was not quite what he had intended for the night out.

He tried, he fast-talked, he bullshitted, he even tried to intimidate, but there was no chance, bats and chains flew into his body and the bodies of his friends and as a leg smashed into his side and his world exploded into fresh pain, through a bloody mouth, spitting out the remnants of a chipped tooth, he cried out “Stop!” Only it didn’t come out as ‘stop,’ it came out as some strange croaking sound that was both guttural and sibilant at the same time. It sounded nothing like the word ‘stop.’

But everyone present seemed to recognize it, and obey. He shakily reclaimed his feet, even grabbing the arm of the kid who had been kicking him to steady himself, he saw that everyone was frozen. The gangbangers who had been surrounding his friends like vultures stood with their arms raised, staring at him as if waiting for something. His friends, some with arms raised to shield themselves, one running for her life, had all stopped moving and turned to stare at him as well. His head felt like it was split open from the first bat-hit, and he couldn’t see out of one eye because of the swelling and the blood from his scalp, and yet he briefly felt a rush of anger, of contempt, of superiority to all of them. The feeling faded as quickly as it had come, replaced by fresh waves of pain, and he quickly gathered up his friends, telling them to come with him as he moved away from the young gangsters, who turned to look at him expectantly as he turned to lead his friends away, dropping their makeshift weapons to their sides.

At the sight of them moving, even so much as to drop their weapons to their side and turn their heads to him, he was consumed with panic, and he and his friends ran all the way to the bus stop. They fled to their homes (and family doctors), never wanting to return to the darker side of the city.

Over the next week, as the stitches healed on his scalp and the bruised ribs stopped hurting, Jeff was out back testing his new authority on his moms cat, delighted that even a simple cat could understand these words and would obey them (mostly). His friends made a show of saying hi in school, but no one would come visit him at home, everyone afraid of what had happened and what it meant.

Since the incident was reported in varying levels of accuracy by his friends, the recruiters were knocking at his door soon enough, and he found that most of them where just as unable to resist his strange words that spoke to their most primal selves, being as obedient as his

mothers cat, although they would remember and sometimes resist his whimsical instructions.

The masters came a long time ago. Descending through the clouds in a silvery sphere, their scientists pronounced that the saurian life-forms would be ready in a few millennia, with some of them already showing rudimentary signs of communication and intelligence. The retrovirus was designed and seeded over the planet, settling into the tiny brains of the saurians, implanting them with the masters tongue, and the primal need to obey the masters. The mission leader strode confidently from ship to test the success of the project, and standing boldly before a large carnivorous saurian attempted to command it in the tongue of the masters, triggering the new structures within its brain to recognize and obey his words. Perhaps it was a perfect success, and only this one saurian reacted poorly or the brain-structures did not form perfectly, but in either case, the mission leader was eaten and the tyrannosaurus obliterated a second too late by the energy weapons of the second in command. Protocol demanded that the experiment be scrapped, and while scientists scrambled to create a virus that would affect the tiny mammalian creatures (which computer analyses indicated was most likely to survive to become dominant next) the ship ascended into space, and maneuvered an enormous asteroid into collision vector, ensuring the extinction of the saurians that had resisted their modification. They then released a similar agent to modify the brain-structures of the mammalian life of earth and left a satellite in orbit around Saturn to keep track of the development of the species.

Ages passed, and the satellite began picking up signal broadcasts indicating that the life of earth had evolved to the point of creating radio waves. It relayed this information to the masters home-world, but the masters had long since been slain in a slave-revolution, so the new caretakers of their world ignored the data. More years went by, until a news report on CNN included a super-being known as ‘the Voice’ using his mutant linguistic abilities to order a gunmans surrender. This information was flagged as important by the satellite and send on, and the former slaves on the masters homeworld took interest. Their masters were dead, or where they? They now had a hint that one of them might still exist on this distant world, disguised as a ‘human.’

Fleets began to assemble and converge against that eventuality…

TOTEM (Thomas Brightsky)

Thomas was born in a car accident that claimed the life of his single mother outside of Port Angeles, Washington. He was a sickly child that few expected to survive, but his grandfather, the tribal shaman of the nearby Makah reservation claimed that the spirits had great things in store for him and called upon each of the animal spirits for their blessings. It was during the childs sickness that the shaman saw something behind his eyes and realized that something was very different about this boy. He consulted with a ‘real’ doctor, suspecting some sort of growth in the boys brain and was told that no signs of cancer had been detected. But he remained sure of what he had seen and as the years grew on, he trained his grandson in the ways of each of the animal spirits sacred to the North American tribes. Grandfather made him run to keep up with deer, wrestle with horses and bulls, swim in the icy seawater or try to snatch food from the beak of the quasi-tame raven that followed the old man around. Thomas was only a teenager when the old man, in the throes of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking led his young charge too close during an expedition to observe a brown bear foraging (the old man kept track of the native wildlife in an unofficial ‘game warden’ role). The bear felt threatened by the boy’s presence and the old man barely got himself in the way and died at the claws of the bear as Thomas was borne to the ground by a searing pain. When he was able to stand and the red haze was gone, his uncle was long dead, the body of the mauled bear beside him. His hands were covered with the bears blood as he dug his grandfathers grave with his own hands, tossing aside boulders the size of his head like they were pebbles.

He then returned to the reservation and announced that grandfather was dead and that he would be taking on his role as shaman, and that he would be henceforth working alongside the tribal police as needed, demonstrating his strength by the simple expediment of dropping the 400 lb bear carcass he had carried home on the ground and walking to his uncles home.

He studied grandfathers journals and determined that he had gained the strength of Bison-Woman, the fleetness of foot of Brother Caribou, the low cunning and ferocity of the Wolverine and Coyote-Trickster. From lowly Rat he gained the ability to resist disease and toxins, and from the mighty Orca-Killer he gained a superhuman endurance and resistance to harm. The senses of the Giant Owl and the wings of Sea Eagle are now his, along with other gifts besides, and he knows that there are more tricks he has yet to master… He knows that the strength of the bison is but a taste, and that the Whale-Singer has greater strength still, so he steels himself body and soul to assume that strength.

CADUCEUS (Leo Sitelli)

Leo seems awfully mature for a 23 year old and has in fact been all over the world, having gotten his PhD in Archaeology on a dig to the ruins of Troy. His colleagues had noticed long before that he never seemed to get tired or sore or suffer any of the assortment of bumps or bruises everyone else seemed to accumulate by the end of the day. He even was checked into by his team-leader since it was assumed that if he was never tired or sore, the most logical reason would be that he was not really doing any work.

It also became something of a running gag that he gave great massages after work and he soon found himself doing this for almost everyone! (The camp Medic flew into a drunken rage one night over how everyone went to Leo with their problems and was sent back to the city, ostensibly until a replacement could be found, but since no one ever really ever got hurt or sick, they never got around to it.)

Leo didn’t help the gag, since he would prattle on about life-energy transfer and therapeutic touch and similar stuff while working, his father having been a serious student of holistic therapies. He had grown up in a crumbly old brownstone in London, watching a parade of seemingly sane, rational people coming to his father to receive ‘the healing hands’ and leaving feeling so much better about themselves. Really the idea that one person could help another in this way was no stretch for him to grasp.

Finally, it all became too clear when Leo and 2 other students fell through a 1500 year-old floor into a subchamber and one of the students landed very badly, her ankle twisting with an audible snap. He instinctively reached out and asked what was wrong, trying to immobilize her ankle the best he could when the room seemed to brighten a bit to all concerned (the faintest glow produced by his healing not being visible except in this lightless place) and she brushed him off and got up on what both Leo and the other student present knew had been a broken ankle moments before. She took some convincing, over an X-ray of her ankle, clearly having been fractured, and a few beers, they determined the course of Leo’s future.

Leo hated leaving archaeology, and they hated seeing him go, but he knew that he couldn’t just live his dream when he had the power to help thousands of people. He couldn’t just think of himself.

When he was offered a spot on the Greek super-team, he accepted under the condition that the Greek government would allow people of any nationality to come to whatever Greek clinic he chose to be based at to receive free treatment. He would not allow the Greek government to restrict his talents to their allies-of-the-moment, nor to use him as a bargaining chip or to profit by his gift. They squinted at the implication (and abandoned any plans to that effect) and welcomed him on board, figuring he would still be of the greatest benefit to the nation in which he resided and the PR coup would fall their way and not to the benefit of some other nation.

THE MACHINE (Sara Park)

Sara has always felt like an outsider. Her older sister had done it all before her, her younger brother was the baby and got all the attention. She felt like she didn’t belong in her own family, she was just the ‘extra girl.’ At school her grades were mediochre, and her friends gathered together in a gaggle of over a half-dozen to sit around and just gab and occasionally smoke or drink if they could sneak something illegal into the mix. She was in her junior year of high school, still with no strong feelings towards her family, nor towards her clique of friends, nor with the slightest motivation to ever go anywhere in her life. Her friends had found a new place to gather after school, where no one messed with them or told them to quit loitering or asked if they were old enough to be smoking, drinking, whatever. Detroit was full of old buildings, and a few that had been started in better economic times that had never been finished as their construction funding dried up and moved south. They had been hanging out without incident for over a year on the top of a six story shell of iron that had partial floors and supports, no walls or power or plumbing worth mentioning, as the superstructure was all that had been built before the firm that was moving in, moved on. Hanging out on the sixth floor, with the wind blasting through them, they would sit and smoke pot and toss down any beers or sodas they had lugged up the structure. They used to make impromptu campfires from the bits of lumber and cement bags that had been atop the structure, but the winds made that unpredictable, as sparks would flare up and fly in any direction without warning. That and the supply of burnable stuff was sparse up here, and no one was interested in hauling more up the six floors. Sara was never a popular girl, always unsure of herself in conversation and insecure about her body image because of the few extra pounds she carried from her basically sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy diet. She would sit quietly while the others talked, often eating a snack or sipping a drink or taking an extra toke to hide her reticence.

Sitting up here, sharing a joint with some of her so-called friends, in the middle of one of her rare self-pitying ruminating on her utter lack of job skills, ambition, potential, true friends or hope, Sara was already in a somber and self-analytical mood, not for the first time criticizing her own shyness for her lack of friends or ability to interact meaningfully with her family, when she got up to hand the joint off and a freak gust of wind caused her to lose her footing and stagger right off the edge of the building.

She felt only a mild annoyance at first, not registering, nor particularly caring, that she was about to die, since she had been talking at the time and was put out more at being interrupted in mid-thought than at her impending death. She just seemed to stop, the impact on the rebar-studded concrete below her being sudden, but not nearly as painful as she had thought. She felt broken, as if the impact had been so much that she had flown all to pieces for one breathless instant. Seeing blood on her belly, she reached out and in one delirious moment, felt a piece of the rebar that had penetrated through her body from kidney to belly, as a hard cold piece of blood-slicked metal protruding from her stomach. She choked back a laugh at the thought that she was so broken that her cold dead machine guts were coming out. She then blacked out from a wave of agony.

It was hours before the EMTs cut her off of the rebar, trying to work carefully around her, as she had broken almost a dozen bones, including her back. At first they had almost written her off, and were waiting for her to die, but her body clung to life with a ferocity that her mind could never have matched. She awoke screaming a dozen times from the pain as they attempted to shift her off the rebar, or lift her enough that they could cut it from beneath her. In the hospital she raved and thrashed feebly, surprising all expectations of her hardiness. It was during the weeks that followed that the doctors working on her case determined that she was indeed a Nova, as her body was repairing the damage at an accelerated rate, and at times something seemed to push them away so that they could not hurt her anymore.

She reacted like an animal, and for days at a time no amount of force would allow a doctor anywhere near her body, if not for her own enhanced stamina, she would have died from lack of treatment in her own hospital bed, with a dozen medical professions held away from her bed by a force that was at times opaque, at times invisible, but always unyielding. At other times she would be caught off guard and the strange defensive shield would be gone, and she could be aided. But at the sharpest pain, she would scream and her doctors and nurses would be hurled aside by a powerful force, in the second manifestation almost killing an orderly, as he flew with enough force to shatter the window and begin to fall out of the building (he managed to grab the window frame and was pulled in by others in the room). At that point, the doctors threw up their hands and left her in her protective cocoon to heal on her own, only once managing to sneak in and inject her with a quantum-suppressing drug long enough to reset a broken arm she was healing incorrectly.

The endless parade of doctors, health officials, Project Utopia personnel and psychiatrists numbed her, and soon her protective shell seemed to be more often opaque as well, so that she would lie inside a bubble of white force, while people outside knocked and called out to her futilely. She came to the conclusion that she was essentially a machine, that she always had been a machine. She could not love, nor hate, nor feel at all, and that was how she had been built. That moment that she had seen the metal protruding from her body had been the sign, she had never been able to relate to anyone because she had never really been one of them anyway. She knew that as her protective shell could shield her from others, so too was the machine invulnerable and undetectable. She would embrace the machine, no longer questioning herself for being unable to understand people or to empathize with their meaningless concerns. Most of her so-called friends never came to the hospital (since they were either in trouble for being in such a dangerous off-limits site in the first place, or had managed to conceal the fact that they had been there at all and didn’t want to bring suspicion on themselves), which only served to reinforce her notion of the artificiality of her entire life. Even the people she had hung out with for a half-dozen years where not really her friends. Machines don’t have friends. The Machine doesn’t need them.

Yet she was a teenaged woman, despite her denials, and she had spent her life craving fellowship. She still felt things, as her pain and shame over her hospital stay proved. She is a person torn by the very notion of humanity, and now she is on the cusp of a new existence, which only complicates the situations. If she could never even figure out to be a human girl, how on earth is she ever going to deal with the complications of being a Nova?

CONJURER / SUMMONER (Wesley Pierce)

Wesley was born and raised in Waterbury, New Jersey. Never much for anything physical, the meek and sheltered child read voraciously as a child, finding lots of interesting books of his grandfathers in the attic and sheltering himself up there to hide from his parents and poring over the old texts on all sorts of black arts.

He took up stage magic as well, finding a pleasing symmetry to being able to lie to his parents about reading grandfathers ‘old books of magic’ and show them the tricks to back up what he was supposedly learning. He tried once or twice to do a magic stunt at school to show off for a girl but got a black eye from a jock who thought he was her boyfriend. He had begun to hang out with a goth crowd that was willing to overlook his odd pseudo-mystical crap, so long as he could show them how to palm cigarettes and insult people in latin. He usually spent most of his time with them in a desperate attempt to find a group of his own, since he never really clicked with the intellectuals, lacking the will to try at anything. But even with these black-clad Byron and Cure fans he felt uncomfortable, like he didn’t belong.

Soon the headaches began, and he began to have unsettling dreams at first of other worlds and growing pulsing dark hearts in shadowed places. The dreams soon were replaced by waking dreams in which things would happen in the night. He would wake up trapped in an invisible prison and pound and struggle until it would vanish as he snapped fully awake, or he would start suddenly to a touch on his leg and find his bed filled with snakes, which would vanish as he would throw himself out of bed screaming.

It was about this time that his spirit guide appeared to him. He appeared as a shapeless manlike form, but his voice was distinct and clear. He explained everything to Wesley, how the night prisons were in fact the spells of protection that had been placed up to protect him from the demons that sought to tap his power or taint his soul and that the snakes were a case of his own fledgeling skills seeking anywhere for something to protect him!

He also explained the principles of sacred geometry to Wesley, things he had recently read, but not really taken very seriously, especially going into the nature of circle magic. Soon, Wesley was able to craft his own circles of protection (which his spirit guide insisted was the first thing he had to learn), then he was taught to summon and conjure various creatures in his own defense, although the spirit guide admitted that this would be easier if he left a good hour in advance, something about the resonances from his home dimension interfering with the ability to conjure creatures from any other world. It took over a year before Wesleys spirit mentor failed to come to him any more, but by this point he had learned how to craft circles of protection on the fly, summon almost anything he could conceive or even transfer himself across gulfs of distance, an ability he used with great abandon, so much so that he was finally caught on vacation in the carribean without

a passport and locked up in a cell with a camera facing it, keeping him from getting the privacy that he preferred for his ritual uses. So he was caught on camera drawing a circle on the floor, incanting a ritual and vanishing through a doorway in the floor. Of course, the police already had his identification by this point and so his secret was out.

CHAMPION (Sir James of Malebrionte?)

The man who calls himself Sir James of Malebrionte presumably doesn’t look anything like he did in his pre-Eruption existence, as no record of his previous life has been found. To be fair, he usually wears archaic plate and mail armor, wields a greatsword and speaks in an archaic-sounding dialect of French or English. His flesh is the gray of stone, with a cool, hard texture thereof, and his eyes burn like orbs of fire and despite his outlandish claims of having been a knight serving a mighty alchemist back in the 16^th century and being gifted with the powers of the four elements to better serve his lord and placed into a 400 year sleep, it is generally assumed that he is a loon. Anachronistic sayings and words occasionally crop up and even his name is taken straight from Mallory’s La Morte D’Arthur.

But for all that he seems to have repressed his pre-eruption life completely, to the point of creating a whole fantasy persona, his co-workers agree that he has great power and dedication towards the concept of the betterment of mankind. His talents do represent the claims he has made, that four elixirs were created, one for each of the four elements. He claims that the blue potion of wind gifted him with sovereignty of the skies, the green elixer of the seas conferred upon him the ability to survive underwater, or indeed in almost any environ, never thirsting and moving as swiftly underwater as he could in air, the ruby draught of flame allowing him to project the fires of judgement upon the damned, while the black oil of the earth made his skin into stone, hard and strong as a man of granite.

He arrived to ‘take service’ with the Project of his own volition, carrying his armor, weapons and a few handfuls worth of spanish doubloons that it can be safely assumed he found in the depths of the sea, since his powers allow him to safely traverse said depths.

IMPACT (Marcus Dominici)

Marcus is a fanatical fan of Errol Flynn and carries a cutlass (and usually wears a mask, even though his identity is a very poorly kept secret). In his mundane life, his parents left him a sizeable fortune, which he has mostly squandered in between his charitable endeavors, poor fiscal management and love for excess and opulence, forcing him to turn to merchandizing his likeness to keep his mansion in the family. Even then, he remains in debt, requiring some high-profile cases to increase his marketability. In combat he is reckless, not caring one way or the other for his own safety, as even before his eruption during a skydiving accident (in which he greyed out in the middle of his jump and never got around to deploying his chute until the ground was far too close for it to matter), he was an afficianado of various extreme sports. Truth to tell, he is young and rich and jaded, looking only for a thrill. The whole rogue motif comes from his odd taste for brocade and hose, and his reckless spirit comes as much from boredom as anything else.

COPPERTOP (Cameron Kyle)

Cam was one of a million kids who don’t want to grow up in their hick backwater slices of nowhere to sell cars at their dads lot to other redneck yokels. But his grades weren’t outstanding and his football performance didn’t make the cut for recruiters to come knocking down his door. He lasted a week at the car lot after graduating high school before he drove the 45 miles to the nearest town with a recruitment

center and signed his life away, desperate to just get out of Nebraska.

At Ft Sill, he underwent the most grueling experiences he could imagine, making him wish many times he could still be a car salesman, but he wasn’t going to go

home. Not ever. He would endure anything rather than go home and admit defeat. So he stuck it out, and when he came down with a lung-rattling flu, he kept it to himself and kept going, up at 0 dark hours to run wheezing for hours, his drill sergeant not caring why he was lagging behind, just yelling at him to keep up. When he dropped it hardly came as a surprise to some of his buds, who had been trying to convince him to go to the infirmary. His heart stopped twice en route to the base and once again in the infirmary itself, the first times it being his sergeant who performed CPR until the medics arrived. Each time he came back, it got harder, his skin seemed perpetually clammy and the medics didn’t initially notice that it was getting almost slippery, assuming that it was the sweat. After they used the defribillators on the third massive heart failure, the changes became obvious, as Cameron jerked awake with skin of glistening steel and nearly killed the attending medic with a single hit

Fortunately for the rest of the medics present, his sergeant was still able to shout him to order and he instinctively obeyed the screaming man. Everything got complicated at that point. The Marine Corps refused to show him any special treatment, but the basic training was kind of a joke with his enhanced Stamina, since it was primarily based around pushing the grunts to exhaustion to break and redefine their limits. He dedicated his new life to the Marine Corps and got promotions at a regulation-defying rate, his ‘special’ status being a gift of his new Nova abilities and his own dedication.

Sgt Cameron Kyle, now called ‘Coppertop’ for his coppery skin and metallic reddish-brown hair (which now has the consistency of steel wool), is the now one of the select men that the US Military calls on when it has Nova problems that require Nova solutions, and he is able to handle normal missions like no other man!

BLADE (Karl Auerbach)

Karl only remembers back 3 years when he woke up in the laboratory in South America. He was fully grown at the time and had a computer made of some form of organic goo embedded in his skull, a tiny bit of it sticking like gray putty out of his skull above his left ear. He could stick the end of any I/O cable into that putty and use Alter Data on that machine, it being some sort of omni-interface, to which he was linked. His mind had encyclopaedic knowledge of hundreds of skills and knowledges, although surprising gaps also existed, and he knows that he is only using a tenth of the potential of the organic super-computer in his brain. Most people in his situation would wonder where he came from or why he had lost his memories (or whether he had every had them to lose in the first place), but he really doesn’t seem to care. He hacked around for a while, found the Project Utopia public files and decided that this was where he belonged.

He moved to their main headquarters in Ades Abeba without a seconds thought, stopping only to get some clothing (since he didn’t seem to have any in the lab) and arrange himself a plane ticket and passport via his rather prodigous hacking talents. Exploring his vast memory en route to the Medellin airport, he realized that he spoke Spanish and Kiswahili and had access to Atlases full of data about the locations he was in and was headed, along with hundreds of others.

He showed up at Ades Abeba and displayed his intellect and skills with some data he had pirated from the local OpNet en route, knowing before his trainers that he was home. He recognized parts of the building, although no one present recognized him, he was sure that he had either been here before or that whomever had force-dumped all this information into his head had been here before.

Going by the codename Blade, Karl (having taken the name Karl Auerbach

from a labcoat abandoned in the place of his ‘birth’) moved into training, since his talents weren’t particularly suited to combat, even though he could usually keep himself alive in training scenarios with the more combative Novas. He occassionally displays his areas of greatest ignorance in human social interactions, almost like the newborn he is in mind. His body seems to be around 20-ish and is in perfect condition, seemingly unable to retain an ounce of body fat and being the aryan ideal of tall, blonde, blue-eyed perfection.

Despite a small flock of advances from various co-workers at various times throughout his training, he seems oddly restrained when it comes to developing relationships. His rapid-fire analytical bluntness often drives away anyone attracted by his looks, as he is unashamedly open about anything that crosses his mind, having not yet developed much tact or subtlety. His tendency to think about several things at once, and quite absently ignore anyone who is not saying anything he considers important, comes across as extremely rude to most people.

WRAITH (John Stuart)

John was raised in Manhatten, his father working on the floor in Wall Street as a broker and his mother working part-time at a deli until his birth. In school he really didn’t draw much attention and he had no competing colleges vying for his attention. He ended up joining the Police Department and was in his third year when a fleeing suspect locked him in a burning crackhouse in his dash for freedom. Panicking, John walked through the sofa-barricaded door and panicked further to see bullets fly from the perps through his body to impact the wall behind him. He tried unsuccessfully to shoot back, and failing that, to strike or grapple his attacker, but he seemed to be a ghost, and it wasn’t until long after his assailants had fled that he discovered how to turn solid again, also long after the other people trapped in the building, the former ‘clients’ of the drug-peddler, had died of smoke inhalation.

The feeling of helplessness overwhelmed him, but the people at the Project Utopia center showed him how to control his ‘ghosting’ and also that he had other talents besides. When he returned to the force after several months furlough, he was provisionally accepted back, finding out from his partner that the drug-peddler who tried to kill him had already been found dead, probably having been killed by one of his rivals in a turf dispute, robbing any possibility of closure from this drama. Instead he threw himself into his work, eschewing any sort of ‘costume’ (especially since he had learned how to wrap his quantum field around another to make them intangible also, and was more than able to handle changing his uniform) or codename, although the streets soon chose a name for him, calling him the ‘Wraith’ since he seemed like a vengeful spirit to those he pursued, often sinking through walls to cut someone off before solidifying into an impervious juggernaut when they ran out of bullets.

He’s not sure when he will have saved enough lives to wake up not smelling the sickly sweet stench of burning flesh or hear the feeble

thumps on the barricaded door or hear the cries for help that will not

come in time from the dying addicts, but he will continue until he does.

ALLOY (Olaf Takehashi)

Meeting Olaf is an exercise in wierdness. His mother was a leggy SwissAir stewardress and his father an executive of Dai-Ishi Kingyo, a Japanese banking concern which had business in Switzerland from time to time, causing his father to run into his mother several times by coincidence as he had to make over a dozen personal trips to BankSuisse and she seemed to be a ‘travel hostess’ on the flight as often as not. After his first wifes untimely death of a brain tumor, she sat with him, sensing his uncharacteristic reticence to be a warning sign, he was usually so open and so funny. He had no chance to talk about his feelings to anyone in his homeland, and the chance to open up to this foreign stranger seemed right.

Nine months later, Olaf Takehashi was born, a gangly big-boned child with mixed Eurasian features and a shock of platinum blonde hair.

It took him almost 3 years to ‘wrap everything up,’ but he eventually left Japan and ‘retired’ to work in Switzerland (at a bank, of course) and she ended up quitting her job to raise her ‘international love-child’ full-time, although they chose to have no other children. He had another pair of children from his first wife however, and while they remained in Japan (and were 15 and 18 years older than Olaf), their rare visits with their half-brother confirmed the opinion that he was some sort of half-breed mistake, an impression that his emotionally subdued father either never knew about or never felt comfortable

dealing with. So, between the kids at school treating him different and his own family often considering him an outsider, Olaf got into body-building, seeking to build an identity for himself at an activity he could do alone.

He bulked up quickly, which is hardly surprising since he would go straight from school to the gym and stay there until it closed, not really caring to go home and deal with his oddly distant parents.

It was during an international bodybuilding competition that a Spanish

competitor he had reported for using steroids got his revenge by jabbing him with a syringe full of steroids (he wasn’t trying to kill Olaf, he was just an idiot and figured that exceeding the ‘safe’ dosage would make him even more likely to fail the piss test). The situation was only exacerbated by the fact that Olaf was using an experimental toy in the gym that electro-tensed someones musculature and his competitor thought it was funny to boost the settings to where Olaf couldn’t even get up in the process, figuring that he would stay so hard and so tense for so long that he’d be like jelly and unable to compete.

If he hadn’t erupted about 30 minutes after his ‘friend’ cranked the tensor, injected him and locked the door, his heart would have exploded.

The Spanish competitor ended up in jail for attempted murder, since the

jury felt that either of the two things he did were enough to qualify as an attempt to kill Olaf and that ignorance could only justify one of them.

Olaf joined Project Utopia almost immediately when they came knocking,

he had no regrets about leaving his sad parents, which even he could

see had nothing in common and didn’t belong together.

BALLISTIC (Max Caldwell)

One of the five founding members of the original (now defunct) Beach Patrol super-team, Max Caldwell (who didn’t bother with a mask or secret identity) was also the last to leave when the original team broke up. A native of Phoenix, Max seemed to just wake up with super-powers one day and thought little of it, in fact, a case could be made that he hasn’t really though about much of anything, ever. One of those people to whom everything just seems to come, Max is a guitarist for a semi-sucessful local band called the Black Knights, is in pre-med or pre-law (he has yet to decide) at UCLA, and spends his copious free time scoping out the ‘hotties’ in Malibu, playing beach volleyball, life-guarding or tossing a frisbee.

Given his nearly limitless capacity for ‘babes’ and ‘brews’ and war-stories about babes or brews he’s had in the past, it would seem that Max is a poster boy for a beer commercial (and has in fact been in several). He’s even shallow enough to identify with the protagonist in the average Tom Cruise movie.

He’s currently in a quasi-monogamous relationship with fellow Black Knight backup vocalist and Nova, Marguerite LaValle, called La Sone in her native Quebec City.

LANCER (Keri Waters)

Keri was the first member of the original Beach Patrol to actually break with the rest, ostensibly because she was badly hurt during a super-conflict. But her teammates know that she chose to get hurt in that battle and may have even been trying to kill herself, uniting (seemingly in agreement for the first time ever) to convince her that this was a bad idea.

Her problem with the group and the root of her depression is a deep tendency towards co-dependence issues, which were neither satisfied by her fling with the extremely casual Ballistic, her more serious relationship with Splash, her roller-coaster friendship with her violent sparring partner, LA Doll or that emotional void that called itself Sea Lion. Everyone she hung around with on a day to day basis was in some way narcissistic, self-absorbed, psychotic or just plain inhuman, and the toll on her attempting to give and give and get nothing in return pulled her into a neuroses of her own making, a trap which nearly killed her. To this day, most of her ‘friends’ have no clue how much they are responsible for that day she fell from the sky.

Her seemingly clingy ‘over-intimate’ nature being a desperate reflection of how helpless and un-loved she feels when she is alone.

As with all of the former members of the ‘first team,’ Keri can call upon any of her old teammates and they will drop everything to come to her aid, but they no longer hang out exclusively.

SPLASH (Jerry Mathias)

Son of a wealthy SoCal businessman and his immigrant Mexican domestic,

Jerry is consumed by feelings of inadequacy from a lifetime growing up in a house working for his half-siblings and expected to never tell them of their relationship (since obviously his father wasn’t supposed to be having a fling with the maid). The words were never said and Jerry never felt that he did anything worth his father coming out and saying to him or his half-brothers who the ‘maids boy’ really was. And he never worked up the nerve to ‘out’ his father, but ran around cleaning up after his brothers and maintaining their cars and boats and mowing the lawn and cleaning the pool while what he knew festered within him.

He managed to get into a cheap college (although his father snuck him

money for this, he put it in the bank and went to the only one that offered him a decent scholarship and worked his way through it), meeting Max at a frat party soon before he erupted (Max already had and was something of a college celeb). They were surfing together, at night, drunk, when Jerry, who was a damn good surfer if he said so himself, greyed out from one too many jello-shots and rode a curl straight into a dock pylon.

And through the dock pylon and out the other side, and his speed kept

increasing as he rode through pylon after pylon and into the cliff-face

beyond and out the crest of the beachside hill into the night sky.

He fainted again at this point and his next conscious though was why he

was a half-mile away from the water with a wetsuit on and a surfboard

beneath him with another boardless surfer hovering over him looking

concerned. Max helped him figure out some of his limits, but more

importantly brought him to his sponsors, who were delighted to find

yet another telegenic Nova to market and hooked him up with a trainer

to explain and refine his powers.

Keri explained to him that he could slide between the molecules of matter, robbing it of inter-atomic energies that he could use for propulsion. Thus he could effectively ‘fly’ by stealing momentum from the air, or ‘surf’ the ground or water at a far faster rate since there was so much more inter-atomic energy for him to tap. He could also concentrate and take all of the interatomic energies (or at least try to) and effectively ‘melt’ anything he passed through!

He didn’t have to use a surfboard, but he just liked the idea of surfing down Main Street, and his Attunement is such that he can strap himself to his ‘boogie board’ and go, whether it be across (or through!) land, sea or (at a reduced rate) sky.

SEA LION (?)

The second member of the Beach Patrol to break with the group was the

enigmatic Sea Lion. In retrospect it was probably a bad idea to have him guest-star on Late Night Rave when the others turned out to be otherwise engaged, since he was the least telegenic (if not neat-looking in his own way) and certainly the least experienced at public speaking.

The conversation turned, as it so often does on late night programming, to matters of sex and the host made some comments about the well-known

affairs between Lancer, Splash and Ballistic, as well as other confirmed or rumored affairs involving all three, when the question of what he thought of all this running about came up and had he dated Lancer? His reply that he found humans to be ugly and lumpy and preferred to mate amongst his own species, the California Sea Lions, caused a furor that had animal rights activists in a tizzy!

Soon after that, failing to understand the uproar or the controversy he

returned to the sea for good, still appearing from time to time to do

a ‘good deed,’ apparently for his own reasons and not for any having

to do with media exposure (making him already far apart from his

teammates). The other original Beach Patrol members know where his sea-cave ‘lairs’ are located along the coast and could reach him if

they wanted to, and they still ‘keep in touch’ with what one or two of

them think of as a deeply disturbed or deeply misunderstood being.

L.A. DOLL (Carina St. Tropez)

Carina has been spokesperson for Barbie for several years now and seems on the surface as carefree and media-hungry as the rest of the team. But the fact of the matter is she is a young woman stuck with a bunch of over-sexed teens and 20-somethings reminding her every day of what she can never have, being frozen at a 9” height! [Quantum + Shrinking of 3, her 5’6” normal height halves 3 times, from 66” to 33” to 17.5” to just under 9”] After the media frenzy about Sea Lions unfortunate admission, she realized that even he was ‘getting it’ more than she was and her mood, already violent as she re-channeled her passions, turned ugly. She was relieved when the team split up, since she was looking

for a more violent outlet, having gotten tired of having tantrums and ripping up the expensive ‘playsets’ made for her by her Barbie sponsors (including to-scale outfits and gear, a land rover that actually works and even a palatial scale mansion with miniature jacuzzi!).

She seemed to have everything going for her in college, and is the oldest member of the former team (barring Sea Lion, whose age is indeterminate, he claims to be five, but his understanding of math is sketchy as best). She was dating some geek in the physics department when she changed her mind and dumped him for someone who paid a little more attention to her. She didn’t count on how dangerous her physicist ex-boyfriend could be and she went on to listen when he called her to the lab, presumably to listen to him whine and try to get her back, which she thought might at least be funny, and she was already getting bored with the guy she had dumped him for... It took her a while to find him, the physics lab had some weird particle thingie set up all over it and he was at the far end of the room full of humming glowing science crap calling to her.

The next thing she knew there was a blue flash and she felt like she was being crushed from all sides as her atoms collapsed in on themselves, she could feel the waves of compression within as she started to fall out of our universe, but the effect wasn’t coming from the beam of accelerated neutrons that her ex-boyfriend was beaming through her at a significant percentage of lightspeed, it was her Eruption. His attempt to kill her succeeded in screwing that up so that she was stuck at this size forever. Fortunately for him, the machine wasn’t meant to be operated unshielded like this, and he died of cancer in prison, before she got a chance to rip him limb from limb, as she spent the next year learning how to move her super-dense limbs in this world of enormous people.

STEEL WIND (Mark Washington)

Mark Washington is an unusual name for a man who stars in a Japanese

action adventure and is actually half-Korean and half-Vietnamese, and

a native of New Zealand. But, his complicated lineage aside, he chose

to be a professional wrestler in the New Zealand fight circuit but went

nowhere, but to Malaysia to study Muay Thai, hoping that the popular

martial art would make a good ‘ringside schtick’ to help him stand out

from the hundreds of other wannabe prime-time stars waiting on the wrong side of the ropes. Unfortunately, he was only 2 months into training when he came down with malaria and nearly died.

He did in fact actually die (briefly), but he considers the ravages of the disease to be a forge that remade him into the man he is today. The first change, and the one that remains scarred on him for all time, is eyes of steel, to reflect the steel that replaced his old narcisstic soul. His body-pride stripped away by the disease, which left his body a much slimmer shadow of his original 250 lb chiseled perfection, revealing a much more powerful man whose self-image wasn’t based on the steroids or hair-gel or an oil-slicked body. While his body had lost almost 100 lbs of mass from his long wasting deteroriation, he gained back about 20 lbs after his eruption, such that he was remade as a much more compact figure.

Spotted in real training by a Japanese businessman to master the more

spiritual aspects of Muay Thai, Mark was offered an unusual job. Soon

a program called The Seven Samurai appeared on Japanese television

and became a brief runaway success, spawning action figures, comics

deals and more, eventually moving to limited international success long

after the fickle Japanese markets had found a new flavor of the month.

Currently in an anime and manga run, with the original actors only

being requested for Con appearances or voice-overs (and not all of

them even!), Mark is now in Australia, where the anime-styled cartoon

series is based.

At his insistence, Mark’s character, designed to emulate the Japanese

element of Metal, was to be an actual Samurai, and he studied the

precepts of Bushido fanatically. Far more than his actual producers wanted it turned out, but it did not detract from the show and they ended up reasonably happy with his versimilitude, even if they tried to keep him in metallic form and from preaching about honor and such too much. Mark is a vegetarian and is learning the basics of Japanese brush-painting, finding the simplicity to be evokative of his own transformations.

Regarding the rest of his ‘team,’ currently also (mostly) gathered in

New Zealand to do voice-overs, Mark finds Yama to be a good friend,

if a bit sad at times, Shima to be a soulmate some days, but distant at

others, like a child, Torii to be dangerous and somewhat one-sided

in her thinking and Zhan to be quiet and reliable. The twins, Yin and

Yang seemed to be rather secretive and quite literal reflections of their name-sakes. He never found out their names, almost never saw them out of costume and has no idea where they went, having not seen

them since the month before they learned of the shows cancellation.

LAUGHING MADMAN (Yamashita Yoshihiro)

8’10” of Ainu destruction, Yama is every bit as unstoppable as he looks. On the show, representing the element of Earth, ‘the Laughing Madman’ is a boisterous lucky fool who cracks jokes at every chance, but away from his screen personal Yama is quiet and insecure. He is secretly ashamed of his freakish size that relegates him to the status of performer in the Japanese mindset, and would trade the fame and celebrity status to be a normal man, perhaps a gardener... Now that the show has been shelved and only exists in reruns and cartoon voice-overs, Yama feels that there is nothing left but to leave his quiet homeland in Hokkaido and parade his freakish talents before smelly grunting foreigners.

Recruited as a youth for shows like this, Yama has never had much of

a formal education, and feels that he has been intellectually starved.

In New Zealand, he is checking into some sort of training, but has

so far been too embarassed to mention that he wishes to see if he can

get some sort of remedial high schooling. He is trapped in a world he

fears, a world that is not made for people like him, and it is a fortunate thing indeed for all around him that he has never really been angry at another person in his short life, blaming himself for everything that he doesn’t like.

Yama has always been somewhat admiring of Mark, filling him in as

the father he no longer remembers, completely awestruck and rendered

speechless by Shima’s unearthly grace and beauty, intimidated by the

determined and outspoken nature of Torii and distrusting of Zhan and

his brooding silences. He thought Yin and Yang, the supposed twins,

whom he only saw once out of their masks, clouds of darkness or

blinding glares, were strange, almost incestuous. He doesn’t know or

care what happened to them, since they very clearly didn’t want to be

friends and never showed up for cast parties or anything. Even Zhan

bothered to show up, even if he never smiled.

CLOUD-VAULTER (Zhan Chang)

Zhan was recruited from Hong Kong to play the role of Wind on the Seven

Samurai show. Checking with the people he worked for, they admitted that it was a very convenient bit of timing, since he was a ‘hot topic’ at the moment and couldn’t very well continue his work in Hong Kong at this time, his identity having been effectively compromised anyway.

No one on the show has the slightest idea what he used to do in Hong Kong or who he used to do it for. He prefers to keep his past far behind him, although the shows producer, Matsuo Shima, has had a few unothodox requests of his talents of late and he went missing soon thereafter.

Even when with his ostensible friends and co-workers, Zhan remained

quiet and severe, showing no overt emotion at any time. Zhan also has

an interest in the codes of Bushido and various other Eastern ways of

thought, having studied, among other things, Ch’an Buddhism, Archery,

Kyujutsu and other arts. He is quietly annoyed that a western pro wrestler, of all things, was chosen over him to portray the shows Ronin, but he understands that this was more a choice of looking the part and Chan would not be mistaken for Japanese by the Japanese viewing audience, instead wearing a mask and often having his face obscured on camera in some other manner. As such, he is personally almost unknown, especially in the west. In a conflict situation, the ‘Cloud-Vaulter’ usually moves to an inaccessible area and uses his bow (on the show), or a handgun (in real life) to pick off equipment or unarmored foes, turning into mist and scattering through his foes like ten pins when spotted.

Zhan dislikes Mark, although intellectually he understands that the man

did not choose his place, it still rankles. He finds Shima to be strange, not liking her otherworldly nature, which he considers fake, nor her childlike naivete, which he considers a fatal weakness. Yama is reliable and open in his dislike, which is just the way Zhan likes them and Torii is just as open about her thoughts, which is also comforting in its own way. The twins clearly had their own agenda, and now that Matsuo has tipped his hand by asking what might have seemed an innocuous ‘favor’ to a less experienced operative, he understands why Yin and Yang where always off at ‘private meetings’ with Matsuo and why the members of rival Yakuza gangs where often found burned to death in the night.

DRAGONS DAUGHTER (Shima Matsuo)

Matsuo Shima claims to have found ‘Shima’ walking naked along the beach

outside his home and adopted her as his own child. She has never said anything to contradict this story and treats him as a favored uncle, no matter how much the others have come to dislike him and question where his production money comes from. She doesn’t seem to recall any life before her life as his ‘daughter’ and her codename is something of a private joke, as Matsuo thinks himself quite the dragon in his own circles. She seems to have no education outside of what Matsuo has provided, biased strongly towards what his old world machismo thinks ‘a woman should know’ leaving her rather ignorant of the rest of the outside world. Entering the Seven Samurai show as the element of Water, her true home, she quickly rose to become the most popular character on the show thanks to her beauty, grace and occasional seemingly naïve wit.

Now that the show has ended, she begged and cajoled and even (vainly) tried to subtly outmaneuver her somewhat frightening and oppressive ‘father’ to let her go to New Zealand, finally getting permission from him to go away ‘for a brief time’ to do voice-over, although he has promised to come visit often. She knows far more than she admits behind her pert smile and vacant gaze, and is quite aware that Matsuo is in the local Yakuza and that the show was cancelled not because of lack of ratings, but because of the death of one of the rarely mentioned ‘twins,’ Yin, a shadow-manipulator, and Yang, a blazing solar fire-generator. She also knows that ‘Yin’ was working on ‘personal business’ for Matsuo when she met her death and that her brother

quit immediately thereafter, pretty much ending any chance at ‘Seven’

Samurai.

As for the remaining members, she has a strong attraction for Mark, which he does not seem to reciprocate, treating her like a child (and her Mentor / father seems extremely displeased by the notion, which only makes him more attractive in her eyes). She finds Yama sweet but he stutters terribly whenever she tries to talk to him and she gets embarrassed on his behalf. Chan is odd, she’s not sure what he thinks he is hiding, or why any of his friends would care, it’s not like she has produced a past for his inspection Torii seems incapable of enjoying any part of life, always wrapped up in her causes.

BOKKEN (Torri Tamako)

Born stunted yet strong like the bonsai tree, Torii Tamako was still only 13 when she was recruited into the Seven Samurai cast to represent the element of Wood (although they were not aware of her true age, she tends to act much older). She accepted the role and quickly became immersed in various causes to save the SE Asian rainforests and to remind her people how important the ‘green’ was to their everyday lives.

She is a serious activist and opposes pollution, improper hunting and fishing and most of all, deforestation. She singlehandedly crusades against the devastation of the Southeast Asian rainforests and has actually slain an assassin sent to kill her at a Greenpeace rally. Fortunately the show was already over by this point, because the images of her refusing to treat her envenomed assailant were pretty damning, stating her case far more strongly than any words she had uttered previously. Her words, “No, let him die and fertilize the trees his shortsighted masters would cut down.” earned her many enemies in the logging community, and many friends in more quiet circles. (It was determined at a trial that she did not bother to attend that she in fact could not have ‘un-poisoned’ the attacker and did not have the ability to save his life. She is thus only sought on charges of manslaughter and unnecessary use of lethal force.)

She has gone underground so to speak and is known to have been working

on new techniques to tap the power of the wood. What frightful surprise she will have for the authority or assassin who uncovers her hiding place first remains to be seen.

As for her comrades, she is not in New Zealand doing voice-overs, that’s for certain and she considers each and every one of them weak and without will. Several of them have potential, but not a one of them is willing to do anything about it. Even if they opposed her goals, she could at least respect them for standing up for something. As it is, they are a waste.

OLYMPUS (Andreas Sokoulos)

Andreas grew up in a single parent home. His mother, a chronic alcoholic, had abandoned his father, brother and self when he was just 5 and he hardly remembers her. His father worked in customs and immigration, and some lax office rules allowed him and his brother to hang around the office so long as they stayed out from underfoot, saving his father the expense of a babysitter and his sons the further disconnection of being farmed away to some daycare child warehouse while their father worked.

He developed no real interest in his fathers work, but ended up going into it simply due to a lack of motivation to go out and learn something else, since by his teen years he and his brother could do his fathers work almost as well as their dad. His brother, Darius had moved out and married and even gotten a decent job (in shipping, so not a huge departure from the family line) while Andreas was still at home living with his dad and working in the same office. They were on Darius’ new boat celebrating his wife’s announcement that they would be having their first child soon when Darius, inebriated from a bit too much celebration steered the boat into an upthrust rock while leaning back to mug for a group photo.

His eruption came moments later as he flailed semi-conscious from the

fumes of the burning boat and multiple lacerations and impacts as he

tried desperately to feel for the bottom beneath his feet so that he could steady himself long enough to get his bearings. His torn slacks felt like they were binding him and he kicked them off, so that they wouldn’t impede his swimming. Finally he felt the sandy seafloor and stood upright, eyes burning from the smoke and stinging with the salt and his own blood from a scalp wound. Finally shaking off his uneasiness, he looking around to see how everyone else had fared only to see them far below him as waves of vertigo brought his now eight meter frame thundering to one knee.

Recovering after nearly blacking out from the primal fear of heights his immense size had brought about, he seized up his father, brother and sister-in-law in a giant hand he scarcely recognized as his own and

walked them to shore with enormous strides, the waters of the Aegean

barely coming up to his waist. Despite his actions, his father was badly hurt and is still unable to stand up straight, his brother died almost on impact and his sister-in-law came through almost unscathed.

The Greek authorities approached him soon thereafter shuddering outside

of the hospital, looking into a 3^rd floor window wrapped in a sail from

the Marina, still unable to transform back and as gray as death itself.

They led a pair of Novas who had arrived by Warp within the hour from

Cairo to instruct him in how to power down and even equipped him with

some Eufiber briefs so that he wouldn’t have to run around naked if his

power manifested again. Their offers to join Project Utopia intrigued

him, although he didn’t want to make any decisions in this hour, until

he knew if his father was going to live or not. Later he accepted an

offer instead from the Greek government to be part of a national Nova

force, beholden only to local authorities and not to UN-charters and

foreign nationals and he consulted with his father before deciding

that this was for the best. He needed to stay in Greece also, since

he had decided to look after his brothers widow and his neice and

god-daughter, Elizabeth.

Currently Andreas is head of the Greek national Nova team, the Avatars

(and has been purchased a somewhat less revealing costume of Eufiber).

He has actually grown into a leader of men, since he can hardly avoid

being the center of attention anymore and he is thought to be the most

physically powerful Nova in the area.

SHUTDOWN / AMNESIA / LETHE / MEGAERA THE JEALOUS

(Randi Patterson)

Born to a British oceanographer and a Greek research assistant on a 12 month study of the Aegean marine ecosystem, Randi was always deeply uninterested in her parents work and the ocean in general, being somewhat jealous of how much they loved the sea and how much time they spent focussed on marine matters.

She grew up to go to college in Britain, studying vertebrate biology and getting into the newly developed ‘field’ of Quantum research with the pioneer researcher in that field, a Dr Shelton Wilberforce (since gone missing). The good Dr had a penchant for picking interns almost randomly and tended to keep to an admirable practice of not publishing his findings until he was quite sure that his case was unassailable. Randi, who was somewhat mixed up with some radical feminists in her college years, applied first for the position as a man, thinking that she could get the role better if she pretended to be ‘one of the boys.’ Dr Wilberforce went ahead and interviewed ‘Randy Paterson’ the same as any other student, since gender was not part of selection criteria and chose her regardless of whether he believed her make-up job. Working for the Dr, Randi learned many things about how the MR Node worked, or didn’t work, in some cases, as the Dr was more concerned with people who had a Node, but remained unable to express Quantum powers.

It was in research on a recently erupted volunteer, a fellow research assistant actually, that Randi also erupted, gaining a resistance to the out of control matter-dissolving blasts of greenish-gold fire from the test subject and the ability to shut down her powers and render them inaccessible for a short time.

She and ‘Darkfire’ (named after her second flame blast, one of dark purple fire that could heal or repair people or items) became friends and ‘adventured’ together briefly with a third female Nova called Hysteria (who had a Psychic Strobe effect, Empathic Powers and Mega-Strength and Stamina). They broke apart after many conflicts between the somewhat manic depressive Hysteria, no-nonsense and tactless Darkfire and her whimsical lack of identity (she would change names, interests and behaviors almost weekly, which was a source of endless friction with her friends as she would ‘get bored’ and stop hanging around with them on a whim). In that time alone she used the names Shutdown and Amnesia, even masquerading as a male with the Shutdown name, but it wasn’t until she returned to her native Greece that she adopted the name Lethe and a more thematic attire. She lasted less than three months in this guise before meeting the young Portuguese heroine known as Tag and the two of them hit it off, forming the idea

seemingly simultaneously of forming a new team. They weren’t the only ones, as Randi was approached by members of the Greek government telling her that they were forming a new national Nova team and that they were thinking of a full group of such ‘Avatars’ working to defend the nation from threats both Quantum-empowered and mundane, foreign and domestic. She accepted under one condition (after talking it over with Tag), that she and Tag were part of a sub-set of the team, to be called the Furies, after the legendary Furies of Greek myth. The authorities accepted this and even introduced her to the other female member of the Avatars, the girl know only as Talon. So the Furies was born.

TAG / ALECTO THE PERSEVERING ANGER (Ariane DaCosta)

Ariane was born in Lisbon, but her parents were wealthy and had a home there, in Crete and a chateau in Nice. She grew up with private tutors and jet-setted about the Mediterranean with her parents, living a truly indolent lifestyle. After a while she noticed that her parents didn’t seem to mind if she spent some time (say a few months!) with ‘friends’ and she seemed to have plenty of those. She began to spend more time away from home, living hand-to-mouth at times in a manner that would

have shocked her parents. She found the advances of many of the boys she met in Monocco or Corsica to be interesting, for a while, and she would leave any social occasion with someone, whom she would inevitably ‘live with’ for a few weeks or months, only to move on. She bored as quickly as her parents, having progressed from naïve to jaded in a few short teen years.

It was with a couple of boys from Sicily that things got out of hand. One thought she was ‘his’ and the other disagreed, and, to her mind, both were wrong, but the argument grew heated and the liquor had already loosened what few inhibitions already existed between the brothers and the car spun out of control as punches flew and they proceeded down the side of an embankment to land on the rocks a dozen meters below with a crash that nearly killed all three of them.

Her powers manifested to save her at that time, stealing the last fleeting bits of life-energy from the others to keep herself alive as she lay there watching them die, drained by her own out-of-control thirst to live. The police arrived and were able to drag her and the bodies from the car within the hour, but she lived a hundred years in that time with the bodies of the young men she had killed.

She kept quiet about her freakish experience, claiming that it was only a ‘miracle’ that she had survived and expressing wonders when the doctors at the hospital claimed that she had experienced ‘eruption’ and that her newfound abilities, whatever they were, must have saved her somehow. She nodded dumbly and left Sicily far behind, promising to gain control of her talents and the wisdom to use them in a far more productive manner through the auspices of Project Utopia. She was recruited while training (very subtly, even she isn’t SURE what they were pitching) for Project Proteus, but she instead developed a fear

of Project Utopia and retreated to be a freelance Nova for hire. The job offer from her friend and the Greek authorities sounded like the stability she needed.

Her ultimate unspoken goal is to find a man who can think of her as more than a ‘sure thing’ and while she has found many, she has never recognized them on sight, leaping straight into bed in a misguided attempt to find ‘love.’ Her ultimate fear is that she will be consumed by hunger for the life-forces of others, a fear that could well grow into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

She lies compulsively about just about anything, her traditional ‘eruption story’ being that her father was a wealthy businessman in Rio who had agreed to sacrifice his first born child on her 17^th birthday to the vampiric demon Setothes for success in the business world, but was found dead in his spacious tropical home of frostbite after his ‘firstborn’ made her own deal with the demon.

TALON / TISOPHONE THE BLOOD AVENGER (?)

This black-feathered corvid humanoid seems to have once been human, but is far from it now. Her body is twisted and warped into the formed of a great winged humanoid creature halfway between a crow and an eagle. Her feathers are glistening black and reflect dozens of shades of green, blue and violet besides and her eyes are black orbs without any

sign of pupil or retina. Further, her form is clearly still mutating and uses obviously unnatural Quantum based means of propulsion and sonics generation as no terrestrial creature could fly in earths gravity with a 4 meter wingspan, let along turn or swoop as she does in clear defiance of laws of aerobatics. Despite having and using wings, Talon clearly doesn’t entirely need them, and can take off or land in an enclosed area quite well.

Her history remains an enigma, although she understands much Greek, and no other language as of yet. Her current form gives no other clues as to her original human form and she was initially discovered cold and bleeding from an aerial impact on a roof in Thessalonika by one of that towns police. He managed to coax the creature to take his coat and brought her food, in ever-increasing quantities when it became clear that she wasn’t leaving the rooftop and that no one else was being allowed near her. It took weeks of coaxing to get her to come down, but she insisted (to the point of sonics and vicious claw swipes!) on remaining with the officer who had been ‘nice’ to her before, a Paul Kafkoulas. He ended up finally taking her home with him, much to the consternation of his pregnant wife, but when an intruder tried to sneak into the backroom to find the territorial avian guarding the house, she changed her tune. ‘Talon,’ as she was called, has been living in this officers backroom and occasionally seems to display a clear understanding of what is being said around her, and can even mimic it on some occasions, although she hardly ever speaks on her own or in other than an assumed ‘parotted’ voice.

He was attached to the Avatars as a police laison (a substantial rise in his fortunes) mainly because it was known that this was the only way to get Talon into the team. Talon, for her part, has accepted the presence of ‘Tag’ and ‘Lethe’ around her (seeming to like Lethe more, calling Tag, ‘sick girl’ quite a bit, presumably a reference to how she saps the energy from everyone around her). As for the other team- members, Talon doesn’t like men in general, only tolerating Paul near her. The only other exception is small children, which she doesn’t seem to be able to differentiate.

ACHILLES (Demetrios Adamakos)

The man who know is known only as Achilles was a teacher of history and mythology in his native Iraklion in Crete. He had grown disillusioned with trying to explain to the children the richness of their national heritage when they were all itching for overseas jobs, american videos, european clothing and other ‘cultural debris’ as he called it. He had finally declared the futility of his entire life, wasted trying to teach the young to be proud of who they where only to watch them run pell-mell to other cultures, none so rich or full as the one they left behind for the latest anime from Tokyo, comics from Hong Kong or films from Bombay. Admitting defeat, he dressed up in the stylized armor of Achilles from the drama department, wrote out a thorough suicide note (complete with a scathing detailing of the managerial indiscretions and departmental financial ‘prioritization’ that had triggered his depression) and leapt to his death in his 53^rd year of life.

Imagine his profound embarrassment to survive the 10-meter plunge to the rocks below. He took stock of the situation, decided that he must have been lucky, and, resolved as always, climbed to the top of a 15 meter lighthouse over another 20 meter precipice to wave-crashing rocks below, hurling himself yet again to his death.

After a good sound thrashing to and fro like a rag-doll, he submerged from the weight of his cheap metallic ‘armor.’ By his watch, the professor stayed underwater for a good eight minutes before giving up and struggling to shore, realizing that this plan was also a loser.

He returned to his home, re-lit the pilot light he had extinguished in his preparations for his impending death and burned his suicide note over the gas stove while drying himself off.

He then reported to the local city council and announced his willingness to serve in whatever capacity could be found. After testing, it was found that not only had he become extremely resistant to any form of harm (and much to his delight, his ‘achilles heel’ was similarly protected), but also had gained near-superhuman levels of strength, stamina and dexterity, including an instinctive understanding of most of the ancient weapons of war which he had dabbled with in his stage-craft days, but never really been particularly skilled with.

There was nothing for it, but to remind all and sundry of the power of national pride and heritage, of the myths that make the modern man. He took the name of his own hero, Achilles, and stepped forward to champion the cause.

He spends a lot of his free time giving lectures and seminars on the

mythical figures of Grecian antiquity (and their Roman antecedents), and now people are paying attention, which warms his heart. He makes

the myths real and feels the sense of national self-worth rise as he has become the myth. He never holds out any false promise that fans of ancient gods and heroes will erupt like he did, as one of his own great heroes, but he is clearly living proof that it can happen…

THE PRESENCE (Manuel Rodriguez)

Manuel was the second son in his household, and discovered quite young that shit flowed downhill. His eldest brother would come home from work and have the crap kicked out of him by their father and then would come upstairs and take it out on Manny. It got to be second nature to hide or be somewhere else during these times, but he still caught up in it entirely too often. His eruption happened when he was only 14 and his father decided to save time and beat him since his brother hadn’t come home yet (and, unbeknownst to anyone in the family had run off to join a gang the day before and was never returning).

As his father’s fist rose and fell mechanically as he slurred his outrage to the world that his sons where such pathetic losers, Manny felt something break in his head and he thought that his father had finally killed him. He lashed out during the blinding pain and his father recoiled, wondering what was going on since he could no longer see where his son had gone and was flailing around now in an attempt to strike whomever had just hit him. Manny watched him swiong about harmlessly, screaming, “Where are you! You can’t hide from me, you little shit!” and realized that his father had gone completely blind, perhaps as a result of his cheap booze. He laughed, but his father didn’t seem to hear him and he taunted the enraged man by poking and slapping him as he staggered around the room breaking things in a vain attempt to find his son. The rush of being able to stand up to his father got away from him and soon he found himself striking him harder and harder, and then kicking him when he was down and bleeding before he made himself stop. He looked up at his mother in the door, staring down at her jerking thrashing husband in dismay and realized then that

she couldn’t see him either. He grabbed his mother, but she screamed and began to thrash around, screaming about ghosts and devils and he realized that he had to get out of this madhouse.

He prowled the streets for a few years, trapped in a perpetual state of invisibility, taking whatever he wanted and just sneaking into anyones home and sleeping on their couches at night. He read in a paper about his fathers shooting death a few months later, and he was certain that his brother had done it, but found himself not caring either way.

The police really had no handle on the crime spree committed by the young hispanic man recorded on security cameras all over Manhatten just taking things and walking out. He was puzzled at first to see his picture in the papers, but he really didn’t care. The police even searched the house he was sleeping in of late, since the cameras in the nice parkside apartment building had caught him entering, but the cops couldn’t find him and it was only the dog that they had brought with them that could see him, so he cuffed it absently on the way out the door past the police and milling house residents, causing a near-riot as the attack dog flipped out and pulled its handler off-balance trying to break its lead and get to Manny.

By this point Manny had scored a revolver and was prepared to blow the

offending dog away if needs be, although he has taken to carrying mace as well, as he isn’t sure he could actually kill a dog that wasn’t threatening his life. He also took to carrying around various other toys he began to swipe from police and street life, like handcuffs, figuring that he could just as easily deal with people who pissed him off without the gun, which he’d never really used anyway. It was about this time that he came across a mugging / rape happening in one of his usual jaunts around the city and decided to intervene, thinking himself pretty much immune to retaliation.

He clocked the principal assailant in the head as hard as he could with his boot, and while his buddy stared around threateningly, sprayed mace in his face. A gunshot rang out from one of them, but came nowhere near him. Still, it was enough for him to realize how close he was to getting himself killed for some chick he didn’t know and he grabbed up a wooden board from a broken pallet and slammed the shooter repeatedly in the gun-hand and then the head until he stopped moving, grabbing the gun away from his sprawled body. At that point he stopped to kick the first guy a few times and then noticed that the girl had been stabbed and was not likely to live if she didn’t get to a hospital soon. He called an ambulance himself, since he could be heard just fine over the phone, and then held her to try and control the bleeding until the ambulance arrived. Fitting into the ambulance with the EMTs seemed impossible until he noticed that the passenger seat was now open, so he sat in it and rode with them to the hospital, wanting to see if she would live.

It was at the hospital that Manny met his first other Nova, a woman who had been sent after the reports from the two thugs had drawn attention.

Manny tried to bolt when he realized that she could somehow see him, but she moved like lightning and grabbed his hands, his guns and had him on the ground in a painful judo-hold faster than he could even see. After two years living unseen and unheard among the elite of New York City, living on their scraps and crashing in their guest-bedrooms, the ‘Presence,’ as the papers had been calling him, had been caught.

Neither the mysterious Nova who had apprehended him or himself were available for comment as she whisked him away for training at a private center, all sins forgiven. To this day, only she and one other nova on the training staff have the psychic defenses necessary to see him, but he is a valued member of the team they are building.

DARKFIRE (Sharon Kestrel)

A no-nonsense chemical engineer from Australia, Sharon was not at all interested in this Nova schtick until she was offered an unbeatable deal working out her study program as an intern for a Dr Shelton Wilberforce at Oxford. He would essentially pay her way, so long as she was available 24 / 7 for his research.

She had no plans that competed with that in her mind, so she kissed her family goodbye, dumped her boyfriend of three years and moved to England. She later found out that they had met at a conference a few months before his offer and that she knew Dr Wilberforce as a rather odd duck indeed. Still, she did the work she was assigned, which was simple indeed in most cases, never really suspecting that he might have chosen her for some other purposes, not even after her ‘surprise’ Eruption with strange molecular-disintegrating powers and the power as well to re-knit severed atomic bonds.

She ended up keeping some of her talents secret, since even though she tries not be a selfish person, she knows that her Healing talent especially would never bring her a moments peace if it came out. Working with a new group of US researchers (after Dr Wilberforces rather abrupt disappearance), Sharon has been recommended to train with a team of her fellow Novas, which is hardly her idea of an ideal situation. She is not a superhero, nor does she have any desire to be one, wishing that her powers would go away so that she could return to her original scientific studies. But, never one to hide from reality, she is doing what she must to adapt to this Nova thing. And the commercial applications of her talents are dazzling between her abilities to rebuild or destroy organic and inorganic materials alike.

PROTEUS (Michael/Mikhail ?)

The person currently known as Proteus (or Michael, when it chooses to use a name) was found in a scorched heap in Arizona. He was babbling in Russian when discovered, but seems to have no memory whatsoever of that language now and a quarantine had to be imposed on his discovery as his saviors (a pair of hikers) came down with an extremely virulent infection a few hours later and both nearly died before the fever abruptly broke and all signs of the infection cleared up a few hours thereafter. Since that time he has shown no signs of contagion himself, but he is still required to submit to regular blood tests, which usually register as normal O positive blood with no odd

factors, but rarely come out as something other than blood.

His Shapeshifting abilities are all-but unclassifiable. He seems to be able to hydrate or dehydrate and compress cellular matter in a matter of seconds and can swell to twice his size or shrink to the size of a bird in less time than any natural creature could, often accompanied by a massive intake or air or water to ‘inflate’ his cells or a sudden rush of wind or splash of water as he assumes a more cellularly compact form, unlike other Shapeshifters or Sizemorphic Novas of record who can

actually create and disperse mass from some Quantum source at will.

He has a room filled with some sort of organic excretions that generate warmth and light and store liquid that he uses for his mass-changing operations, as well as similar unsettling things, and analysis on his cells while he is in a state of flux (or upon the cells he leaves behind) indicate that they are large and undifferentiated, functioning as nerves, skin, support, food and oxygen and fluid intake and distribution all at once. Unlike some more limited Shapeshifters, Proteus can assume any form or combination of forms, real or imagined with his power. So he can grow bony plates over himself like a Stegosaur, yet remain a humanoid biped, or he can form tentacular appendages without assuming the form of an octopus or squid.

His nature could only be described as mercurial, he seems at times jaded and at other times a playful innocent. He tends to sneak off to ‘play with people’ (his own words), taking on a bewildering array of forms for said purposes, imitating close friends, lovers or family with eerie confidence and a complete lack of definitive concepts of right or wrong. It is only a matter of time before his nature and talents land him in serious trouble.

Michael traditionally appears as a smooth skinned and relatively handsome dark haired blue-eyed caucasian male, but this form can be assumed not to be his ‘true form’ assuming he even recognizes such a form. While comfortable in either gender, Proteus seems to prefer the male form as a default.