Name

Walter Thompson

Gender

Male

Age

24.

Appearance


Personality
Hardened. Possesses a searing hatred for discrimination. Will snap into erratic and irrational fits when angered. Hateful of his grotesque appearance.

Background

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His head rose above the bubbler, he ran a charcoal black hand across his lips. The ‘Colored Only’ sign draped some inches above his head. Adorned in a short-sleeved white button up, brown slacks, black socks, and black dress shoes, he entered the church from the back door after a brief re-hydration recess. He took the stairs up to the balcony where the colored section was and sat himself where he thought the rest of the sermon could be heard best. A frivolous pursuit. This far back in the church, all one can hear are the occasional claps from the folks below and the pastor’s occasional “Thank you, Lord!”’s humming their way up the balcony, only for the sound to be sucked up by a sea of black bodies shoveled together in rusty seats. There were black churches, but Walter wasn’t one to subconsciously and indirectly propagate the social mores de jour—legal or not.

It was the Jim Crow south. 1942. War raged overseas, and the condition of the black person in the land of the free wasn’t much ado about freedom at all. America was fighting a war on two fronts: one for the freedom of oppression from the Reich; the other for freedom of her own dark sons and daughters at home. It was this patriotism--and secret optimism that he could elevate his status as a citizen by enlisting and becoming a war hero--which caused Walter to enter the war shortly after FDR announces America’s involvement in December of ’41.

What Walter—and many of his other black servicemen—did not expect is the segregation on the frontlines. Few and far were companies mixed together. All black infantry squadrons and platoons were the first ones sent into the fray, many of their members crippled (mentally and physically), thousands more dead or M.I.A. Hundreds of company men went A.W.O.L. Not only were these all black squadrons and their individual servicemen the objects of extreme prejudice, they were also experimented on. Across the Front one could hear the rumors; hundreds of horror stories of black service members subject to mustard gas, chemical baths, and serum injections all in the hopes of creating the ideal soldier. (Un)fortunately, it worked.

Walter was one of the middling subjects, a guinea pig to a near-perfect chemical bath whose strains had been tested for months to produce radical change within human cells. As a result of the bath, his skin is forever scarred, marked with: boils, discolorations, burns, and hardened scar tissues--a testament to the inhumane treatment he and many of his fellow colored servicemen underwent for the sake of liberty. But he didn’t desert, he couldn’t—if he went home he’d be a Negro and a deserter. It wouldn’t be more than a week before the valiant White Knights were knocking on his door with torches and nooses. No. He would earn his right to be called a hero—to be called man and not boy.

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Superpower and how the character got it: Solar Empowerment: Walter’s cells became hyper-pinocytic, that is their ability to take in energy—the energy of the sun—was enhanced hundreds of times over. When Walter’s cells drink energy from the sun, his body can perform feats well beyond typical human capacity: superhuman strength, speed, reflexes, durability, energy conversion/storage, solar blasts, flight, and much more.
His powers are null come nightfall, and his cells can only take in so much energy before he must rest for several hours. If he willingly expels any absorbed energy from himself, he drains his power supply at a rapid rate.