Doctor Roller

Harlan Stewart, Hal to his friends, finished his military service having served as both a Ranger and a Military Policeman. He relocated to Century Station and the CSPD was happy to have a man with his skillset on the force.

He served there for a couple of years and even married a young woman, Matilda, who was also a CSPD officer. He was up for a promotion to detective, his wife made Sergeant in record time, and things were looking great.

Then Bloody Monday happened.

The assault on the cities biggest cartel went off the rails almost immediately. The criminals had been tipped off by dirty cops. Crooks who had uzis a week before showed up in exoskeleton armor with military grade weapons. Worst of all every super powered criminal, assassin, and mercenary was waiting in ambush.

They were there ostensibly to counter the large number of superheroes involved in the raid but had no compunctions about turning their abilities on non-powered cops and civilians.

26 year old Sergeant Matilda Stewart was one of the first to die. She bought time for a group of school kids to escape their wrecked bus with her life, temporarily blinding an invulnerable super by unloading her shotgun in his face.

We he got the news a darkness was awoken in Hal that he had thought left behind on the battlefield. He stole a recoilless rifle from the armory and began hunting super villains with the anti-tank weapon. In a night of carnage he killed 17 people, arrested 0, and lost the better part of his left leg.

The loss of a limb was devastating but the guilt nearly destroyed him. Harlan was a man of principle and his wife was a moral and ethical cop. He knew what he had done broke all of her rules and worse yet violated her beliefs. But what could he do against such power?

When he was approached by a mysterious organization calling themselves ARCUS and presented with an opportunity to be on equal footing with super villains he jumped at the chance.

4 and a half years of painful and dangerous experiments later and no results to speak of had Hal, and ARCUS, ready to give up when an unexpected accident exposed the test subject to a powerful magnetic field.

Harlan, never a small man, was transformed instantly into a 7 and a half foot tall, 1/2 ton behemoth covered in dull grey metal with black eyes and massive metallic wings.

Metallurgists could only say that it was an "Unknown Alloy" and so that became the name the project was known by.

Virtually (though not completely) impervious to harm, impossibly strong, and gifted with the ability to levitate and fly through magnetic repulsion and the use of his powerful "Mega Wings" ARCUS finally had their operative.

6 months of training to grow accustomed to the powers, and most importantly how to control the transformation, and the new hero "Alloy" is ready to hit the streets.

Blackhawk


Carlos runs Ramirez Restorations Ltd, a moderately successful auto repair and restoration business in Calaverada, with three locations.  He is married to Maria; she is an accountant who operates a modest business from the Ramirez home as well as being the CFO of Ramirez Restorations. They have four children. Rico is the eldest at 22, a troubled and directionless young man who was sent off to military school at 12 and has only recently returned to the area. Lorena is 17. She is a prodigy already enrolled in the engineering program at Copernicus University. Rodrigo is 15 and has inherited his mother’s love of math. Enzo is 13, and very sports-oriented.

Angel Castenada is Carlos’ cousin. Outwardly a wealthy real estate developer, it is an open secret that he also runs the Castenada crime family. He is also Rapier, a supercriminal known for his electrosword that electrocutes as well as slashes.

Rico was in trouble from the day he was born, it seems. Unlike any of his family, he was highly aggressive and needed an outlet for that. He had to move schools twice because of fighting incidents. Despite a loving family and a stable home environment, he was a petty criminal and gang member (the Crimson Claws) from the time he was 10. When he started stealing cars, though, his family finally put their foot down and sent him to a highly-touted military school.

Unfortunately for them, the Siegestone Academy for Boys, located in the remote wilds of upper Michigan, is actually a criminal training and recruitment base providing minions to various criminal groups and supervillains. From the age of 12 to 18, Rico was rigorously trained in various forms of combat and infiltration in the brutal prison-like environment. The school had the opposite of its intended effect of tempering him into a hardened criminal: he saw what a little shit he was and determined to change. He began to formulate escape plans, but Siegestone had years of experience in boys who try to defy them; his plans repeatedly failed and he learned to lay low. Finally, he was on the cusp of ‘graduating’, and was allowed out with groups to go on real-world training missions, heists, and raids. During one of these, he alerted Chicago superhero Redhawk to his plight.

Redhawk investigated, was captured, Rico helped him escape, and Redhawk dismantled the school. Redhawk also took the young man under his wing, and Rico became Bluejay, his sidekick.

 As Bluejay, he was occasionally in the field but he was mainly a researcher, backup, and lookout for Redhawk. Redhawk continued to train him in hand-to-hand combat and various other crimefighting skills. He also channeled the boy’s aggression into self-improvement and discipline. He supplemented the Academy’s brutal and practical fighting style with Kyokushin school techniques and philosophy.

Rico was an adult after the dissolution of the school, and he opted not to return to his family except for Christmas and Thanksgiving. He told them he had a good job doing training in Chicago, and he planned to remain there for a time. He was also under investigation and observation by Federal authorities, since he’d been an advanced member of the Academy – they wanted to make sure he was not a supercriminal in the making – and he did not want to burden his family with that.

When Angel Castenada’s men tried to recruit his two younger brothers, though, he knew he had to return to Century Station. He retired as Bluejay at 20 and moved back to the area. Through a recommendation from Redhawk, he was recruited by ARC:US as an ‘analyst’. Because he wanted to spare his family from reprisals by Castenada, he kept a secret identity when he created his Blackhawk costume and identity. He has tentatively reconciled with his family, but his relationship with both his father and mother is cool and distant. His father is very disappointed that he won’t be taking over the family business. His siblings are much more accepting when he visits, though, and sometimes he ‘babysits’ his younger brothers when his parents need a night out and his sister cannot.



This message was last edited by the player at 03:15, Wed 18 Oct 2023.

He woke to pain and thunder. He realized, first, that he was in a wooded copse and not in his bed. His second realization was his lack of clothing. Assuming something must have gone wrong, he forced himself upright and looked for his pursuers. He saw none. Stumbling, he began to work his way back to… where? He had no home. Another wave of pain brought him to the ground, and he woke, again to thunder.
He wasn’t sure how far he walked before the pain brought him down again. This time, the nightmare drove him back to consciousness. Even though he was awake the blood and the screaming tore at him. He looked at his hands, expecting weapons and gore. But there was nothing. The rain steamed from his naked, fevered flesh as if he were on fire; it must have washed the horror away. Now, he broke into a run.
There was a small house across the plain, maybe they would have a phone. The rain had stopped. He kept running. When you’re not used to it, the distances in open space can be deceptive. He must have run for over half an hour before he approached the farmhouse. The deputy sheriff that had just arrived probably drove the entire way from the county jail while he’d run to the house.
The first thing the deputy asked, “what’s wrong with you” had sent him back into his nightmare. He was in the process of eliminating the bodyguards and the lab-coated woman had tearfully cried “what kind of monster are you”. He answered the deputy, saying, “I’m a monster.”
Wrapped in a blanket and sitting in the deputy’s car, he fought for something to stabilize his spinning thoughts. He needed something familiar to get back to his self. Something that would trigger a memory that wasn’t about pressure points, breath control, or fields of fire. He couldn’t remember what he looked like, when he tried a plethora of faces and methods used to create them almost overwhelmed him. Even his voice was a tool manipulated to obscure the truth and appear to be someone, and something, other than he was. All this he told the deputy.
The deputy, open-mouthed, said, “just use the mirror”. So he looked in the mirror. The blank thing looking back was the last straw. Something inside him snapped, and he wept. At the hospital, the therapists helped him rebuild his shattered self. He realized, during this time, that he was afraid to return to his old life. The abilities he had discovered would have made him extraordinarily efficient at mayhem, but he had no stomach for it. Discovering ARCUS would pay for opposition to that sort of mayhem made it exactly what he needed.
He needed a name, and a code name. As it wasn’t the first time he made himself into a new person, those came easily. Hopefully, he could help ARCUS and they would help him.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:11, Thu 16 Nov 2023.

Homo Sapiens Astra.  That is what Doc had called the subjects.  It's what they had the chance to become.

Ever since she'd been young, Inez had been fascinated with space.  Sally Ride had proved that women could be astronauts.  But, Inez didn't just want to just go to space, she wanted to drive there herself.  So, that meant becoming a pilot (which she did at age 13, when she got her license to fly small turbo-prop planes).  But, it also meant that she needed to fly jets and fast ones.  Which meant that she needed to join the armed services, since her family could never really afford to get her that type of training in the private sector (they weren't rich and didn't own private jets or fund any racing teams).

Though she might not be the brightest bulb on the tree, Inez studied hard and was able to become a combat pilot, flying a number of sorties and getting trained on both VTOL aircraft and helicopters.  When the opportunity came to volunteer for an experimental program that might offer the chance to go to space.  Well, Inez jumped at the chance.  She breezed through the waivers that said something about chemical and radiation treatments, and side effects that might include illness or death and went straight to the part where there were plenty of opportunities to pilot experimental vehicles into the exosphere and beyond - into outer space itself.

Your hands will be the ones that will reach for the stars.... the Doctor's words echoed in her head as Inez steered the sleek X-17g shuttle into its parking orbit.  She high-fived her co-pilot and called down to mission control to go over the checklists and then get ready for the first EVA of the mission.

In the middle of the bustle of preparations was when the creature struck.  It came out of nowhere, the sensors never saw it coming, and then it was upon them.  Bathed in radiation, the monster started to eat through the hull and seemed drawn to proprietary (and extremely dangerous) drive fuel.  With the shielding breached, Inez and her crew were exposed to lethal levels of radiation.  But that was the least of their worries as some of her teammates were torn apart by the rampaging creature.  Only quick thinking and a not-inconsiderable amount of luck allowed a few of the crew to escape in rescue pods (many more died that day in space).  Seeing the experimental shuttle crumble like tissue in the grasp of the monstrous creature was the last thing that Inez saw from her pod's viewport before she passed out.  The survivors' pods were recovered from the Southern Sea a few hundred miles south of Rapa Nui.

But even though they had escaped certain death on the crumbling ship, they hadn't really escaped unscathed.  All of the survivors were diagnosed with multiple cancers upon return and were suffering from debilitating sickness upon return to Mother Earth.  Whether it was the creature, exposure to drive fuel, exposure to radiation of space, or the battery of special treatments they had been undergoing as part of the program (or likely a combination of all of them), the crew were all dying.  And dying horribly, at that.

Your hands will be the ones to hold the Destiny of Man in your grasp.... more words echoed in her head, tears welling up her eyes even as she gripped tight onto Dawkins' hand.  The skin was dry and crackled under pressure.  The muscles were weak and emaciated; a shadow of their former selves.  Inez remembered first meeting him when the program had started.  They'd shared a few beers and bonded over their military service.  And their love of space.  But now, his grip was weakening as his life flowed from his body.  He'd not taken well to the latest set of treatments to try and save their lives.  And though Inez felt extremely, poorly herself; her fellow volunteer had faired much, much worst in this last round.

Dawkins died that night.

Inez could barely stand at Dawkins' funeral.  She was certain that she was going to follow him (as the other ten or so surviving volunteers had done over the previous four months); she was the only one left of the dying dozen.  Her black woolen cap covered her bald head.  And her gravelly voice had faltered twice during the eulogy, forcing her into long awkward pauses.  The noise from the 21-gun salute had almost been too much for her to bear in her extreme and weakened state.

Your hands will be the ones that will touch the stars....  The light was almost unbearable.  It was blinding.  It burned.  At least, it would have been so for anyone else.  The chamber walls were over a foot thick of hardened steel, surrounded by lead plating, reinforced and surrounded by even more steel.  And the scientists that were running this final set of tests wouldn't know the results until the chamber's fusion coils that had generated the miniature captive sun, of sorts, had cooled and the waves of radiation had subsided.  No sensor could withstand the conditions inside the chamber.  In theory, nothing could withstand those conditions.

And yet Inez had been placed in the chamber in an attempt to stabilize her faltering cells and stave off death.  The radiation and chemical treatments had seemed to completely destabilize them, but there was some promising large-band EM (electro-magnetic) absorption range data that seemed to help her condition.  But the energy input required had been calculated to be enormous - and potentially (or rather likely) lethal.  So, like an actual, real Schrodinger's Cat, the lone surviving female patient from the Astra experiment was placed into the chamber and put under a set of conditions that no one knew or could predict how she would fare.  Would Inez live or die?

Inside the chamber, Inez wasn't sure if she was alive or dead, either; time seemed to stop for her - but the days had already bled into each other through the hazy delirium.  Inez doesn't really talk about the experience.  She certainly didn't say much in the debriefing and many interviews immediately following that final treatment.

But Inez did emerged.  She did survive.  And she was better than before; much, much better.  Her cells were not only stable.  Physiologically, Inez was much more sturdy; physically improved in almost every sense.  She was, in fact, for all intents and purposes, practically indestructible.  And she could fly.  Inez actually glowed constantly now.  She no longer needed to eat, drink or breathe - regular human food and sustenance were no longer truly sustaining for her.   She was powered by the Sun.  The Professor had succeeded.

Homo Sapiens Astra was a reality.  Albedo had been born.

Albedo has continued working with Doc Roller and his team, continuing to test herself and the new technologies he's developing.  She considers their work to be very important.  To learn about her powers.  For the memories of her fallen comrades.  But most of all, which she believes that the future of mankind is out there.  Out there in space - so, their work is key for the survival of the human race.

There has always been a Grey Guardian in Century Station, even before the city itself existed. It is said that the first Grey Guardian was either a Native American or a very early explorer who befriended a local Native tribe. Since then the mantle has been passed along, sometimes as long as forty years between the passing. Among the most well known Grey Guardians are:
Alistair Coghlan - a British Nobleman, scholar, and shipping magnate who funded many churches in the early city;
US Marshal Roycephus Pulisipher, a gunfighter and hard drinking law man who took up the mantle as the result of an attack on a peaceful native tribe in the early 1840's;
Richard Breckenridge, an American pilot who flew defense over London during the war with the Nazis;
and the current Grey Guardian, Hernando Escobar, a formidable man who fought in the Afghan war and has partnered with Dr. Roller and donated some of his own real estate for use by the new team of Super Humans...

This message was last edited by the player at 02:37, Wed 14 Feb.

While Alana's Origin remains something of a mystery, perhaps even to her, there is plenty of backstory about what she has done since her transformation into a humanoid robot, or perhaps construction.

The earliest parts of her backstory are a little bit harder to pin down as she spent a lot of time in the form of fairly mundane vehicles traveling around the countryside and was only rarely different enough from any other vehicle to be identified even in hindsight.

About three years ago there was a major accident involving a fuel transporting truck, a bridge, and a road full of civilians.  That seems to be Alana's first experiment in heroism as she shifted between various rescue vehicles, a fire truck, a crane, and eventually a large military ambulance to transport those who could be saved to a nearby hospital all in less time than the first responders could arrive on the scene to find a mostly safe but very confused sort of chaos.

Since then more and more smaller incidents, mostly focused on the roads in and around Century Station found themselves solved by a small female android that turns into an astounding variety of purpose built tools, vehicles, and other objects.

Jon Tashiro was trying to get through collage via his athletic scholarship. His father was disappointed he did not follow him in engineering. His mother was always proud of her child, even if he failed to qualify for the Olympics in a variety of sports. Maybe if he had specialized on one he could have made it, but his dad always said he lacked focus.

So, he went for the next best thing-sports journalism. Mostly as a video cameraman as he did not have the good looks for the anchor spot. A little too average they told him-something he hated hearing. After all, he was in amazing shape-but still did not measure up to other athletes.

It was when he was covering a Olympic event as a intern cameraman that he noticed the athletes getting sick. Maybe due to the Russians hosting the events, someone had spiked some of the other athlete's food with some low level radioactive substance. Not enough to kill, but enough to sicken. Jon managed to get a known Russian agent on camera spiking the food. The Russians denied everything of course, but 'someone' sent a team to inject Jon with a lethal dose.

Jon was brought home and put into intensive care and a coma. Expect when he woke up, he was outside the city moving at over 200 mph while surfing on a path of ice. Oh, and he was now made of ice. Nobody had even seen him leave the hospital. After freaking out a bit, he finally learned how to change back. However-the ice still formed around him when he was not being careful.

As a result, he cut off most of his social life until he got better control. He does seem to be making it work...but only when he is Cryokinetic. Not being in ice form still causes random cold effect to occur. Or they seem to be anyways. So, as a result he spends a lot of time as a mobile ice statue...

"I was this geeky kid in college, and I got an internship at a lab where they studied scorpions, spiders, and ticks.  I thought it was kinda cool, even when I found out they were experimenting on them with radiation and various chemicals."
He pauses a moment, like he has to steel himself to continue telling the story.  When he continues, his quiet, raspy, Latino-accented voice is laden with emotion, even while he can't seem to look up.
"So, one night, I'm there late inputting some data into the computer, the last one there, when I discover this guy breaking into one of the labs.  He comes at me, we get into a fight.  Some containers get broken, and next thing I know, we're both covered in scorpions, spiders, and ticks.  And, boy, are they pissed.  We get stung and bitten multiple times.  The burglar, well, he died.  Anaphylactic shock.  I just got really sick and went into a coma.  When I woke up a month kater, I looked like this."
After a few moments, he looks up, making direct eye contact, which is a little unsettling.  Then he laughs, though he can't actually smile.
"And, if you believe that, I have some swamp land in Death Valley to sell you."
Actually, he really has no idea what happened.  As a kid, he was fairly smart, but no great genius by a long shot.  He played sports (gymnastics, swimming, basketball, baseball, track, wrestling), because he was surprisingly strong, agile, and durable for such a small guy.  He kept his grades up, even had time to hang around his vatos and avoid the cholos whenever he could.
He got a sports scholarship for college, working for an ambulance service while going for a nursing degree.  But, everything changed for him after he was injured playing football.
Multiple bones had been broken, revealed by multiple X-rays, but he healed fully with a surprising quickness.  Already a certified paramedic when he graduated with his Bachelor's in nursing, he was supposed to go with his family and his girlfriend to celebrate, but he remembers nothing.
He woke up in his car, in the middle of nowhere, covered in blood and gore.  Once he was over the initial shock, he discovered the gore was his own flesh, his own blood.  Then he looked in the mirror.   The only thing that seemed to make any sense to him was that he had molted out of his normal skin.  Not wanting his family to be subjected to the hideous thing he had become, he put all of the discarded flesh into the vehicle, along with his blood soaked clothes, put a lit rag in the gas tank, and sent his car into a nearby ravine.
He then walked towards Valle Lindo, finding some sweatpants and a hoodie left out to dry at a house along the way.  There, he drifted amongst the homeless and the migrant workers, becoming their protector, despite the fear that he instilled in others.  For five years he worked as a street level vigilante, helping anyone who needed it, part of it working for the VLPD, before he received the invitation to Century Station.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:42, Wed 14 Feb.

Name: Casper Tant, aka Rex Carpenter
Codename: Behemoth
Powers: Shape Shifting Monster





Casper Tant was a bookish Computer Science Teacher with dreams of being Indiana Jones. His great hobby was archeological research, and he was particularly obsessed with discoveries surrounding the Titanic. He led a pretty lonely life until he met the beautiful Topaz Stahr.
She was gorgeous, and rich, born the heiress to the Biostar Pharmaceuticals fortune. What Rex did not know, was that Topaz was actually pursuing him at the wishes of her father, T.S. Stahr.
T.S. and Biostar had a new product on their hands called “Plastino” that in theory allowed the human body to repurpose itself into whatever tool it needed for any given job. Unfortunately, half of the animal test subjects who were exposed to it suffered gruesome side effects, and so the FDA had refused to allow it to move on to a human trial.
Sure that Plastino would be the silver bullet his company needed, T.S. hatched a plan to have his devious and beautiful daughter Topaz seduce a man and convince him to test Plastino on himself. She met Casper at a lecture on new discoveries with the Titanic and immediately latched he hooks into him, convincing him that the only thing standing between Biostar and a manned exploration of the Titanic wreckage was a successful test of Plastino. Casper thought she was his true love, so he agreed to the clandestine procedure.
Unfortunately for them, they GROSSLY miscalculated how much control Rex would have of his new form. As soon as the Plastino took effect Casper changed into an amorphous 80 foot tall monstrosity and embarked on a mindless rampage. T.S. Stahr and Topaz were both killed, as were the entire research team. The servers the formula for Plastino was stored in were destroyed, and the files. The entire plant and offices were leveled.
Casper’s swath of destruction finally ended when Dr. Roller intervened and discovered a way to return his control of his body. Unfortunately, enough damage was done to make national headlines. “The Biostar Behemoth” dominated the news cycle for weeks.
Seeing no other life for himself, Casper accepted Dr. Roller’s offer for assistance. He moved to Century Station and began living under the alias “Rex Carpenter” and attempting to hide his monstrousness behind his role as Dynaman. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of telling the truth of his origins to a journalist he believed was his friend, and they ran the expose on his true identity in their paper.

His secret out though, Casper has decided to own up to the mistakes of his past. He is no longer hiding his more monstrous physical attributes like his antenna, and has changed his code name from Dynaman to Behemoth. He wants people to know that he used to be that monster, and that he’s going to make things right.

Lyndsey had just finished her school, finished finals the last time, and now was looking to blow off some steam and relax.

Her friends had often gone to a old quarry where it had collected quite a bit of water, and it was always a good time.  Heading out with them in the car and laughing on the way.  The quarry was not officially open and just was made a off limits area.

The water that day looked especially blue, at the time no /one really noticed the difference from the top of the cliff.  They made a fire, roasted a few dogs and teased each other about being the first to jump off the cliff.  Eventually they convinced the recent graduate to be first this time.

Lyndsey stripped down to her bikini, went to the edge as she had done many times with her friends.  Looking down at the water 20 feet or so below, never noticed the color change.  Leaping from the cliff she fell down through the air and crashed into the top level of the liquid below.  As soon as her feet hit the liquid she knew something was wrong as the splash was way larger than normal.  Then her feet hit the next layer of it and it felt like she had jumped onto concrete in comparison.

Sinking down into the water from her jump, she tried to surface.  Coming up to the surface proved impossible, she could see the surface a few inches above her hand and no matter how hard she tried she just couldn't push against the liquid.  Eventually she gulped down the water as she couldnt hold her breath anymore.

What she didnt know was the liquid she had jumped into was a toxic chemical that had been illegally dumped, and formed a bubble in the water that she had jumped into.

Her friends above, watched her jump, and then her struggles to try and get back to the surface, then she simply disappeared from their view in the water.

Lyndsey watched one of her friends jump off the cliff as she knew she was losing consciousness, or at least she thought so.  She watched as her friend jumped squarely on top of her and then they just passed right through her.  The boy swirled around like he was looking for something, then shot to the surface.  Lyndsey could hear him screaming for her, yet, she was right there, not having lost consciousness yet.

The boy frantically looked around as others also jumped.  Lyndsey could not understand what was going on, they could not see her, yet she wasnt dead either.

Eventually her perception floated to the surface and she felt like she could swim.  Moving to the beach kind of area she walked out while some of those in the water had already swam to the side, and others were screaming her name.



She turned around and called out for them, which is when all hell broke loose.  They all turned and looked to see her as a giant walking woman of water.  some ran, others called out.

Lyndsey, was taken to the hospital where after a while she eventually reverted to human.

The experience left her shaken and unnerved before she learned to accept her powers.

This message was deleted by the player at 02:36, Wed 14 Feb.