This is a close approximation of what his outfit looks like, but with no branding and red stripes on the helmet.

Edmund Hickomb’s life prior to Gold Morning was a relatively simple one. Both his parents were Capes in the New York Protectorate and were often gone for long stretches of time, leaving him in the care of his Aunt Helen. He had a relatively normal life, except the fact that both his parents were literal superheroes.
Like his father, Edmund showed a natural aptitude towards gymnastics from an early age. Aunt Helen spent many hours trying to coax ed down from the roof, only to have him go clambering back up the second she turned her attention away. It wasn’t long before Ed started winning competitions. By fifteen, he had twenty medals!

And then, a little after his sixteenth birthday, Gold Morning happened. Both of Ed’s parents died in the ensuing fighting, leaving him with Aunt Helen permanently. She immediately took Ed and they both fled to Earth Samekh. Through her connections, she set the both of them up in a comfortable Apartment within Serstol.

He triggered a few months later, during a very dark period of the grieving process.

The first thing Ed did was sign up with the Junior Guard. He wanted to do right by his parents, and becoming a hero seemed like a good place to start. With new-found determination, he worked hard at it. He trained with his powers almost every day, worked alongside more experienced Capes and built a reputation as a solid, dependable hero. It wasn’t very long until his 18th birthday when he officially moved from the Junior Guard to the Final Guard, and that was the best day of his life. Finally, after so long, he’d done it. On the day of his initiation, he swore he’d make his parents proud.

As long as Edith can remember she’s had powers and had always been working for the Fallen. She’s always felt like a tool rather than a person, the Fallen aiming her destructive powers at those who would stand against them. Edith never really questioned what she was doing to start with, in fact, she had been rather numb in general.

Only after a couple of weeks did Edith really start to feel the weight of her actions catching up with her. Like some kind of haze or influence was slowly being lifted. And as she could feel more and more, she grew more disgusted with her actions until eventually, she hit her limit and fled from the Fallen.

She’s been running ever since, never staying in one place for too long lest she risks getting caught. But deep down Edith knows she’ll have to face the Fallen again eventually. It’s a day she doesn’t look forward to.

As a young man, Judah Raines, had a passion for defending his younger siblings from bullies. This passion carried on with him for the rest of his life. It drove him to join the Police at the age of nineteen.

After the designated two years on the force with an impeccable record, Judah applied for SWAT in the Denver CO area. Being one of the top students he was initiated into their ranks. He proved himself an able member and became proficient in a range of firearms as well as breaching techniques.

After three years of excellent service, he was transferred to the counter terrorism unit in Denver. Judah quickly proved himself during a raid by negotiating a unstable man with a hostage down. During his time there, Judah took a German Shepherd pup from the force and named him "Axel." He trained it as a police and attack dog. They became the closest of friends. While serving, he applied to the FBI to become a counter terrorism specialist.

The FBI saw Judah as a great asset and quickly interviewed him. He was brought into their ranks at the age of 25 and sent overseas to work with their Israeli allies. It was there he learned the art of Krav Maga. He was unable to bring Axel with him. After 6 months in Israel Judah witnessed his first suicide bombing in an airport. He lost some good friends on that mission.

Without his team, he felt lonely and isolated in a foreign country. Over the next years and a half, Judah fell into depression. He longed for human contact and intimacy, but could not reach out for help. He continued his unforgiving work schedule and drank heavily in order to distract himself from the pain.

One night at his lowest point, he seriously contemplated suicide. That's when they got a call of man who was also suicidal. Judah went to the scene, but his words were not good enough to break through the man's self-harming thoughts. Before the man pulled the trigger on his weapon, Judah willed in his mind, thinking, "Life is worth living!!"

The sheer pain and hopelessness in that situation awoke something in Judah; the ability to impart thoughts and feel others' emotions.

He had no idea what happened at the time, though he would never be the same. Judah didn't just stop drinking and feeling depressed, he felt empowered and emboldened in his roll as a leader among men. With his newfound abilities, the possibilities were vast. An idea formed in Judah. The desire stop crime not only on missions as FBI, but in the mind where crimes were conceived. The trigger changed him to the very core.

A few weeks later Judah transferred back to Denver CO and reunited with Axel. He began teaching a Krav Maga class to the men he served with. Judah took his uniform and a balaclava he had custom made. He tweaked his look to resemble more of a cape. He would call his new identity "Mantis."

After Judah Raines created the cape name "Mantis", he formed a vigilante group, Lethal Force. It consisted of multiple members who were willing to seriously injure, and even kill the scum of Denver.

After forming the team, they went to war with the major crime group of Denver. The Community led by a supervillain named "Patriarch." The villain revealled Judah's identity during a broadcast and nearly killed him before the endbringer "Behemoth" showed up.

During their lengthy crusade, Judah lost every member of his team; to death, mental breakdown, or far worse. But not before killing Patriarch in single combat. It was during this time that Judah went through what is known as a "Second Trigger."

Judah helped aid in the defense against the endbringer "Behemoth."........TBC

Lethal Force was disbanded, The Community had been defeated, Judah lost his job with the FBI, Behemoth was warded off and The Broker had been removed from power. With no perceivable goal left, Judah hung up his "cape" and took off with Axel.

For 6 years he travelled to different parts of the world to learn from martial arts masters. There he gained techniques, made peace with himself, and mastered his powers.

During his 6th year abroad, Judah felt something shift in the atmosphere. A feeling or impression. Denver was calling. Something was about to happen and he had to be there when it did.

Judah travelled back with his now aged canine and took up residence in a humble apartment near a rebuilt Cathedral. He made contact with the Capes of Denver and aided in their efforts against parahuman threats as more of an administrative role under his former identity.

Then Gold Morning happened. It rocked Denver more then Behemoth ever could. Judah lost an eye during the cataclysmic event and even his best friend. Despite this, he aided in bringing some of the refugees to their new home Samekh. Judah worked with another cape named "Sabotage" to accomplish this. To replace his lost eye he made a contract with a tinker for an advanced tinkertech eye in exchange for being called on for his services and a large cash down payment.

Picking up the pieces after an event like that was near impossible. But they all somehow moved on and made new lives in this alternate dimension. Judah realized that even during their pain, they had a powerful opportunity to create a better society.

Over the next 2 years, Judah would use his skills and powers to help bring peace to the world of Samekh, specifically Serstol. He found odd jobs as a bounty hunter during this time. Judah even worked with Sabotage to aid the downtrodden orphans and in exchange received regular upkeep on his tinkertech eye implant.

After a year of living in The Silver City, Judah began the lengthy process of citizenship. $600 and 7 arduous months later it was granted him. During thus time, Judah purchased a modest piece of property on the outskirts of the city, with his bounty money. After learning of the formation of Final Guard, Judah felt the call of duty, joining during its infancy.

Basilisk woke up like most of his kind, dazed and confused somewhere where people rarely set foot. His first memories of Earth Bet include the blistering heat of the Colorado prairie and the urge to find something or someone he had lost, though he couldn't remember what it was. Wandering through the dry grass the reptilian man tried to put to mind what had happened to him. All he could think of was that there had been a fight, one that he had soundly lost. And that loss sat uneasily in his mind until after nearly a week's worth of walking he stumbled across the small town of Haswell, Colorado. Startling the small population and gaining the attention of the single local hero within miles. A mover who mostly just chased down speeders with the local police to hand out speeding tickets. The fight was over in less than five minutes, and Basilisk felt a surge of gratification upon besting the man. He had learned what he could truly accomplish with his powers and had beaten another with their own abilities. The beast of competition within him was sated, and he spared the life of the small town hero. From there he made it his mission to find others, people with powers to shake the earth, he would find them and he would strike them down before him.

And for nearly four months Basilisk earned a name for himself, becoming a boogie man for capes that craved reputation over all other things. Hero and villain both, he tore them from their pedestals and left both their egos and bodies bruised and battered. He made his way east, planning on reaching New York where the biggest names lived drawn to the idea to challenging some of the strongest parahumans on the planet. Luckily for him he never made it to the coast. Passing through Tennessee the lone brute found himself surrounded by powered Fallen, eventually pinned and bound he was dragged to their temporary camp and subjected to hours of torture, his power dampened by one of the powered parahumans. Once the clan had had their fun with him they locked him in a barn for holding while they sent out for one of the members who could tame this monster. Later that night Basilisk awoke to the sounds of fighting, the Fallen having been taken by surprise when the owners of the farm they had taken over came back with their own powered backup. A green light eventually filled the barn, and Basilisk came face to face with his first ally. A teenage girl in punk attire who addressed herself as Blur. She worked him free and explained that they had taken out the power damper. Her friend outside was holding them off and it was time to go. He reluctantly agreed, but made a promise to himself that he was going to do as much damage as he could on their way out. The fight took nearly two hours before the Fallen were forced to retreat from the occupied space, and in that time Basilisk earned the respect of the two that had rescued him. He offered his company to them. And in doing so he was set on his path to gather a new sort of strength. Finding those that had the reputations as monsters, the ones that were dangerous and scared for their own lives. He found them, beat them if necessary, but instead of leaving them behind he offered his hand. Join him, and they would be safe. There would be a family.

At the height of his power Basilisk's gang, known as the Unbalanced Scales, had settled themselves as a mercenary team, focusing on collecting bounties. Working for those with the money to afford them they set about taking the most dangerous jobs they could. And extending the offer to join them to the monsters they were hired to find. By the time Gold Morning had happened Basilisk had nearly ten other parahumans working underneath him, loyal to the end of the world. Until they were scattered across the multiverse.

Penelope Arianna Diamantis began the inchoate stages of her life in Greece in the city of Athens. Born to two loving but dissatisfied parents who wanted more for their child than they'd had for themselves, Penelope's earliest years were spent blissfully ignorant of the misery her parents toiled in. For three years she simply went on with her life as she was taught to do so, before things came to a head and her parents decided that Penelope's future simply did not lie in Greece, and that the ideal of the American dream was something that they could give to her to secure a future beyond the mundane (and, perhaps, that they might be able to live vicariously through her). So her parents packed up all of their worldly possessions, cashed in all of their savings, and uprooted their life for stronger soil and greener pastures. The move to America was not, truth be told, an enormous deal to a young Penelope. At the age of three she really didn't comprehend the gravity of her situation, and she was still young enough that picking up a second language was something she'd be able to do with relative ease--it wasn't like she'd exactly mastered her mother tongue, yet. There was plenty of hope for her to be able to live a normal life.

And, for the best part of her childhood, she did. Many immigrants came to America for the promise of betterment, and though they were from different cultures they had all moved to this place and their newfound interest in the culture that awaited them served as a bond of commonality for them to create a community from. Penelope grew up in the very heart of the proverbial melting pot that American culture had come to be, straddling the line betwixt native and outsider, and thanks to the relative lightness of her skin and lack of truly affected accent blending in with the caucasian natives just enough to have what could be considered an easy time of it. Normality, relative to her situation, prevailed for the large part. She coasted through school, not at the top of her class but fairly close, and participated in the grand game of ignorance that was high school politics without too much in the way of fuss. Being naturally pretty and reasonably intelligent got her quite far, and thanks to her own clique of similarly talented friends she managed to avoid internalising too much in the way of self-loathing that so many seemed to exit high school with. She got a job for herself waitressing in a local diner fairly early on, and though the pay wasn't great and the work was palatable at best her parents had rather emphatically impressed upon her the importance of working hard to achieve the so-called American Dream so that they could have a chance at rising from immigrants to the landed middle class. Penelope came to resent the work not because it was difficult, or dull, or that she was underappreciated--her resentment stemmed from the fact that the life that her parents had to work so hard for was really not that special. The ideal of the American Dream was very real to them, but she had never really known the hardship they'd experienced in Greece. She only knew that she had to fight for what the privileged kids simply had given to them, and though she was too young and too naive to really understand what she was feeling it created within her a knot of discontentment that would fester over the coming years.

University was another story entirely. Her home town of Castle Rock, Colorado was not where she'd want to spend the rest of her life, and though she had simply considered moving to Denver and ekeing out a life for herself there, her parents urged her to attend higher education. The knot of resentment tightened within her, and she capitulated to their requests if only because she supposed that it would be advantageous in the future and that they had poured all of their money and effort over the years into making it happen for her. She got a coveted spot at the University of Columbia for Financial Law, and her life seemed to be on the up and up. Her freshman year was spent, as most are, partying as hard as she could get away with while still keeping up with her studies--and she did a damn good job at the former, though decidedly less so at the latter. She was used to working for what she had, but the level of difficulty was something that she'd never really been introduced to before, and her exultation in the glow of newfound social prestige and self-discovery precluded her from giving as much effort as she'd have liked. Her second year was spent reversing the damage she'd done to her grades in the first year--and a part of that process was learning about the minutiae of the financial world and the forces that ruled it. Penelope's life had been blessedly easy compared to some of her childhood friends, and the more she learned about the nature of the world that her parents had sacrificed so much to bring her to weighed heavily upon her.

It would not be right to say that Penelope became depressed, but as her second year progressed and the work demanded more and more of her the knot festering within her became a tangle of thorns. The understanding of privilege, and how she was absolutely surrounded by it, tightened the knot within her—she simply could not understand how her so-called peers could bear to simply go about their lives without acknowledging the inequality in the world. She became more and more outspoken about the disparity, championing justice and respect for those who the wealthier ignored or treated with outright contempt, and soon earned their ire herself. She had never particularly valued them, so their displeasure did not initially faze her—and those she fought for became stalwart allies that she could rely on. She became part of a close-knit group of friends, pariahs who would one day set out to change the world in some small but meaningful way, and struggled against the subjugation and discrimination that lurked in the periphery. She became extremely close with a few of her classmates, third-years called Alana and Yvette in particular, and much of her increasingly limited free time was spent discussing how they could fix the broken system and bring the oligarchy crumbling to the ground.

Would that group of friends have held fast, Penelope would likely have gone on to become a well-adjusted and successful individual. She might have, in some small fashion, achieved her goal and lived her life the way she had dreamed that she was going to—but it didn’t. One by one, the idealistic sparks she’d admired in her friends were snuffed out or, worse, they graduated and went on to be hired by Wall Street companies, working against their supposed principles for profit. Each of these betrayals, however small, was a new thorn to add to the knot within her. As she got through her third year, a process already inherently taxing thanks to the intense demands placed on law students, the strain of the unresolved hurt and betrayal begun to tear holes in even her closest relationships. Yvette was the first to distance herself from Penelope and her group of would-be revolutionaries, first claiming that she needed to dedicate more of her time to her studies before gradually scouring her social media of any contact with the group and reinventing her image as a would-be corporate lawyer. These things happened, of course—Penelope had experienced that betrayal before, enough times that the pain was almost insignificant—but Yvette’s betrayal hurt her in a way that she had never imagined possible. With Yvette gone Alana soon followed, even going so far as to speak out against her former friend in an attempt to secure a lucrative position after her upcoming graduation.

Without a strong core of support, Penelope’s group of compatriots fell apart within a matter of weeks, and all of the scorn that had been reserved for the group was focused solely on her. It did not take long for her to become a social outcast, practically disbarred from every group of so-called “proper” individuals, she turned instead to the internet for companionship. It did not take her long to find friends, but they were fleeting, fair-weather friends—as friends on the internet were wont to be. She craved their attention and companionship but the pain she was in caused her to push them away, and soon even that release was denied her. She went into her final year fully and truly alone. As a last ditch effort, Penelope tried the one thing that she had not yet managed to do, the one recourse left available to her—she tried to attend one of the many protests rising up against the biggest corporations, but the demands of her final year were simply too great. She resolved to graduate and attempt again, and try to cope with the pain as best as she could.

And then, after what felt like an eternity, it was the day of the protest. Penelope was ready. She was here, taking real action, among her peers--people who felt the way she did, who understood what she did, and wanted to bring a brighter tomorrow to the world. But even here, the betrayals she'd suffered tore at her from within. What had started as a mere knot fuelled by a hint towards the inequality in the world had developed by now into a twisted patch of briars that had made her every waking moment a trial in just how much pain she could endure--and what she had hoped would rid her of those feelings seemed to be ineffective. In that moment, she looked around and saw her fellows chanting their slogans and hoisting their placards into the air, and time seemed to slow for her. This was the most that she could ever really accomplish. No matter how much she tried, no matter how hard she worked, no matter what she put herself through... it would never be enough. These were all just ordinary people who needed something to blame for the state of their lives pouring their hearts and souls into an ultimately futile act and she was one of them. She was just another face in the crowd, just another body on the pile, just another pointless name in a pointless list.

The realisation knocked the air out of her lungs, and for a solid thirty seconds she simply could not bring herself to breathe. Surrounded by perhaps the most motivated people, who felt what she felt, and still they were nothing? If they were nothing, what was the rest of the world? The questions thrummed in her skull, her blood pounding in her temples, and just as she thought she was about to pass out from the lack of air her lungs found their rhythm and tried to compensate for lost time. She gulped in great mouthfuls of air, spitting them out almost before she'd actually managed to get them into her lungs, and cried out to the heavens in rage and despair. All she'd ever wanted was to hold these people accountable for what they'd done, for the damage they'd caused, to make them feel all of the rage and misery and pain that she and countless others felt... and then, the final and greatest betrayal—Yvette and Alana, working for the company she was protesting, walking out of the building hand in hand. Had it been anyone else, perhaps she would not have been so hurt. Perhaps she could have coped, perhaps it would not have broken her—but break her it did, and in that moment of betrayal, and alienation, and pain she triggered.

What happened that day went on to be known as a tragedy. Overcome by a rage so strong she was essentially an animal, Alana de Vere tore out Yvette Sinclair’s throat with her teeth and injured at least three others before having to be fatally shot by the police. The protest ended with SWAT intervention, and many more injured or killed before the day was out.

After the experience, Penelope moved back to Denver, ostensibly to take a break from her rigorous studies and get some experience in the financial world before beginning a job hunt in earnest, having been denied the connections she could have gotten at Columbia. The truth was far simpler: if she were to take advantage of her newfound power, she would need experience and she would need resources. Both would be better off if accrued far away from one of the financial powerhouses of the world, and she could use her home state as a testing grounds for her greater plans. With a little under a year of practice, Penelope decided to forge a cape name for herself. She took the name Adrasteia for herself and began using her powers to enact vengeance on the rich and, where possible, redistribute their assets to the poor. She accomplished very little, on a global scale, but enough to become intimately familiar with her powers and help those that she felt she could help.

And then, years later, Gold Morning happened.

Penelope eventually made her way to Samekh and set about looking for work in the only capacity that her talents allowed for--the practice of law. Penelope arranged for a deal in which her citizenship would be granted immediately provided that she worked for the government in immigration law. Despite a lack of formal training in the matter her skills, natural talents, and power allowed her to do the research quickly and tug the heartstrings of the right people to ensure that she was a formidable lawyer, even in a subject that she had not specifically studied. After completing six months of work her bargain was over, but the comfort of the job was such that she decided to continue in her work--if only because she felt she could genuinely help those that needed it. She has not bothered to join anything parahuman related just yet, but the principles upon which life on Samekh were founded have already begun to grate on her as an unnecessary relic of the past, in some ways worse than Bet ever was, and is biding her time until something about it can be done.

Ana’s time spent in Denver was actually a lot more enjoyable then she’d anticipated. Training wards wasn't what she’d seen herself doing, though the Denver wards were a nice group of kids. Unfortunately, the good times weren’t going to last that long. It turns out figuring out that the top heroes on the planet are “massive dickhead hypocritical mother fucker assholes” (Ana’s words) is a pretty easy way to make you ditch the PRT/Protectorate.

So that’s exactly what Ana did. With her sister at her side, the pair took their own new stance on crime fighting, a much more violent one at that. It wasn’t too long before Manifold and Charm’s brutal methods of pacifying criminals got themselves a bit of a reputation. It was this reputation that pushed Ana to change her cape name, she’d gotten tired of being Charm anyway, Arson sounded much cooler.

Not long after changing her alias Ana decided she wanted to get her hands on some guns. She figured the time for punching was over, guns were just as good at handicapping people as her fists were, they just had more range.

Things only got worse when Scion whipped it out and started obliterating everything.

Golden morning was yet another turning point for Ana, so much loss and death pushed her a little over the edge. If it wasn’t for Ellie Ana would probably not have gotten citizenship.

Arson and Manifold earned their bad reputation back in no time after she resumed her cape work. The Final Guard was just as stiff and stupid as the PRT, some people just can’t appreciate how Ana and L operate. Though their bad rep didn’t just end with the Guard, villain’s were not keen on having their kneecaps blown off.

Outside of the Cape scene, Anastasia prides herself in the effort she puts into maintaining the small farm that she lives in with her sister. Ana frequently delivers free supplies to orphanages and homeless shelters.

Son of Gerald Stromer and Annemarie Weilbach Stromer, sibling of three. Lantern Jack alias Manfred grew up in a conservative, but extraordinarily wealthy household in Saxony. Being the only boy among four children, Manfred suffered from the pressure of having to live up to his strict father's high expectations from a young age. When one of his sisters (middle sister, Ingrid Katalin 'Cathy' Stromer) triggered as a Tinker, Manfred's father doubled down in a desperate attempt to regain control over her.
This led Manfred to have an audience with Cauldron at age fourteen.
After gaining powers, Manfred took the opportunity to escape with his Parahuman sister. The two started a Mercenary Operation, with Manfred going by the cape name 'Irrlicht' while his sister went for 'Placoderm'. During this time, they mostly took legal jobs, such as acting as bodyguards for political figures.
Resentment between the siblings was still too high for the Operation to be of any success. Placoderm joined the Meisters, a local Protectorate-equivalent, while Manfred alias Irrlicht remained a mercenary, usually working in moderately shady jobs for high-end clients.
The 'Echidnagate' event of 2010 caused then Irrlicht trouble when a Monster cape going by the alias Engel publically accused him of being one of the vial capes. This led to Irrlicht getting scapegoated and vilified in the German cape scene, leading to his actions being regarded with more scrutiny and his base of customers dwindling until only a vast minority of clients from the legal side of the law remained. Irrlicht blamed Placoderm for this.
On January first of 2012, Manfred decided to never use his powers again. Irrlicht officially died, while Manfred returned home, tail tucked between his legs, to start working for his father in a non-cape job.
On January 20th, Khonsu attacked. Manfred used his powers but decided to abstain before getting anything done.
On June 24th of 2013, Manfred briefly met Scion.

Following GM, Manfred decided to track down his unpowered sisters, who left his childhood home during his days as a mercenary. While his youngest sister works(/worked) as a lawyer in Earth Zayin, his eldest, one Annalisa 'Liz' Stromer, went to Samekh, where she acts as a politician of low prestige and middling importance. Manfred himself got citizenship mainly thanks to her, tho he still has to do some 'community service'.
About 4 years after the death of Irrlicht, Manfred decided to rebrand himself as Lantern Jack. The reference to the infamous American villain Jack Slash was unintentional, though he sometimes claims otherwise.

Picture:

Enki’s life before their trigger is largely a blur: a collection of disconnected thoughts, visions, sounds, faces, feelings, and memories. From what little Enki can gather, his life was simple, but fulfilling nonetheless.

“It was a life lived in relative peace. It was nothing special, but I believe he was happy to be with his loved ones. His home was hot, and beset by sand and minor conflicts on all sides. His home disappeared when Zion came, but the war didn’t. No, that only seemed to get worse. ”

When the Warrior came, there was little the boy could do. He watched as his loved ones and his home were obliterated within moments. He thought himself lucky not to have perished along with most of the others, but his thoughts on the matter soon changed. Connection to the outside world was lost, and people had become desperate. The small skirmishes that occasionally broke out had snowballed into war, and somewhere along in the chaos, he found himself, along with dozens of others forced to fight.

He was no fighter, though, and it wasn’t long until he found himself dying. The moments preceding it were especially blurry: a mix of shouting, explosions, the sound of a building crumbling and distant gunfire.

He hadn’t quite died, but with his body ravaged as it was, there was little he could do but agonise and wait for true death to set him free. It was then that a connection was made. However, it was too little too late, and as the boy was being crushed and burned further and further each second, the shard made a decision.

“It adapted.”

The boy’s body was little more than scrap by now, so it drew on nearby points of reference. Men or women, it didn’t discriminate. Some functions would be lost in the process, but the shard deemed these unimportant.

Of course, any and all liabilities were taken care of. Its internal structure (with the exception of its brain, of course) could be changed as long as its externals remained the same, so it became more streamlined. A simple core in the centre of the body to replace most other organs, with a hard shell to protect the single weak spot.

Its brain was mostly gone as well, so that needed replacing, too. Of course, the earlier references were useful here as well. The Corona Pollentia had remained intact, so it simply spread and grew to replace the 70% that was gone.

The body was still frail and weak, however, so it needed a way to protect itself in situations of danger. The body was made variable, and the core would serve as a veritable engine to increase the body’s capabilities.

But there was still trouble. The brain had been reconstructed, but the data lost was no irrecoverable. The data in this one was unique to it, so it couldn’t simply base it off of others of its species…

The shard waited. Its work up until now had been rapid; it would have been embarrassing to lose its host in a moment of indecisiveness. But now it had time, so it waited. It observed. This last matter was no small issue, and it wouldn’t settle for a rush job.

However, as the shard waited and observed the happenings around it, the world changed. At some point, Zion had died, and the world had died with it, though that was no issue; there were myriad others just like it, after all. After a while, the shard realised that there was no true solution to its problem, and so it did the only thing it could.

“It settled.”

There was no other course of action to take besides settle. A vacant mind wasn’t ideal, but there was potential there.

And then, finally, after what felt like ages, its host was finally allowed to wake.

They wandered, roaming the desolate landscape endlessly, with no reason or rhyme. They knew some things, of course. They knew of the shards, and of the entities, and of humans as well, though their knowledge on the latter was lacking.

As they wandered, they found remnants of the humans that had lived here. They donned clothing, ate food (none of it tasted good, for some reason). Their greatest discovery, however, was the library. There, they spent months reading and learning about the world of humans in as many books as they could find. Of course, a lot of the books were no longer usable, but it was still quite the find.
After all, it was in these texts and stories that they’d found their name.

“Enki… yes, Enki. I like this name.”

During their travels, Enki learned how to use their powers in various ways, be it for travel, or for defending themselves.

As time passed, Enki learned more and more about the world and of its inhabitants. Eventually, they found other places where humans still congregated, though those were few and far between after Gold Morning. Enki’s journey eventually lead them to discover a portal to a different world.
The promise of a human civilisation similar to what they’d read about previously was intriguing to say the least, and so, after much time, Enki found themselves on the other side.
Who knows what this new world will bring?

Replace the star with an orb, swap out the cape for a helmet and the equipment mentioned below, and reduce his build to that of a moderately fit teenager, and you have Werelight.

Damien was always the odd one out in his family. The youngest of two siblings, Damien was a bit more inclined to be adventurous, rebellious, than his parents and older sister. His older family members liked the town of Burlingon, they enjoyed managing their small restaurant, and they were satisfied with their lives. Damien, however, was less enthused by the prospect of becoming a cook--he wanted his life to be more interesting than that. Nonetheless, he still loved his family, and when they managed to fully reconstruct their business in the wake of Behemoth's attack through sheer effort and determination, he couldn't help but respect their resilience.

Damien's relatively ordinary world was upended, along with the city of Burlington as a whole, when Gold Morning arrived. The end of the world brought with it chaos, instability, and a wide variety of problems looming on the horizon. Damien’s parents, convinced that they would be able to adapt and carry on, refused to join the fleeing refugees; Damien’s sister was held back from leaving by her deep-seated and selfless desire to help rebuild Burlington. Damien, in contrast, was growing increasingly worried about the city’s highly uncertain future.

Tensions grew when, six months after Gold Morning, Damien’s sister died during an ill-fated search and rescue mission in the middle of the first winter. The loss created a growing rift between Damien and his parents. Damien saw his sister's death as evidence that Burlington would only become more inhospitable with time; his mother and father retorted that abandoning the city now would be an affront to everything his sister had stood for. It took Damien a while to realize that arguing was fruitless, that his parents’ minds couldn’t be changed. However, while resource shortages grew and violent skirmishes involving gangs and scavengers rose in frequency over time, his reluctance to abandon his remaining family members always won out over his apprehension.

A little over a year after his sister’s death, an increasingly delicate truce between two major factions in the area fractured. Damien had heard the rumors and the gunshots at night, but he was still blindsided when a gang pursuing a Changer stormed through his neighborhood, killing everyone they encountered in an attempt to ferret out their enemy. As armed soldiers combed through the area, he took refuge in a shed. He was close enough to see the building he knew his parents were in--close enough to watch the gang members enter the building, and to hear the gunshots followed by silence.

In the midst of his grief, two thoughts crossed Damien’s mind. His parents should have listened to him. And there was no way he would be able to escape the notice of incoming soldiers with a hiding place as obvious as the shed. He was going to die.

Damien's thoughts resurfaced from an instant of oblivion to find a large, crystalline orb hovering in front of him. Help me, he asked it. The orb responded eagerly. He only realized he could tell it to stop after he had taken advantage of the diversion to escape and unintentionally left five dead or crippled gang members behind him.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Damien made it through the hundred mile journey westward to Denver. Aspiring to follow in the footsteps of his selfless older sister, he donned a mask and became a cape, making an effort to protect the community of refugees who were still waiting to immigrate to the Silver City. He soon caught the attention of the Final Guard, and after agreeing to join their junior division, his citizenship application was fast-tracked. Now seventeen years old, Werelight is determined to do his best to protect Serstol...even though he knows that in the end, none of what he’s been through was worth losing his family for.

Snooper :<

Charlotte Dunning was a bit of a quiet kid when things started in her early schooling days. She didn't particularly stand out against the crowds of her classmates, but she wasn't ever unable to make friends. They were just few and far in between, though one person always stayed her friend throughout all of her schooling years. He was named Chad Bradley, and he quickly became the closest friend that Charlotte had ever had.

The two did everything together, whether it was watching a scary movie, planning a surprise party, or even if it was just hanging out. They were an inseparable bond that some had tried to break when it came down to the occasional clingy boyfriend, but it was inevitable that their efforts were unsuccessful to the highest degree. The two were a testament to unending friendship, and such persisted when Golden Morning happened. Heck, you could argue they got closer as they started living together, since the only people left in the family were Charlotte's sister and herself, and Chad had nobody in his own anymore.

-------(Copy Pasting Trigger Event)-------

One day, your friend brought up how cool it would be to be like those heroes from years ago, with superpowers and everything. You stated a distaste for the idea, quoting that the rumored hell that they would have had to go through to get the powers wasn't worth it.

Things changed when your friend told you that he was gonna try and get powers then by running up to the villains publically attacking and trying to stop them. The shriek of anger and concern for your friend is still burned in your memory as you helplessly watched him be killed by a blast of light from one of the villains. You could feel your heart sink to your feet knowing that he wasn't getting back up, and the guy you knew as an effective brother was dead on the ground in front of you. What made matters worse, your shouting gave away your position, and you saw the boots of his killer stop right in front of you.

Unsure whether you want to be angry at him for trying, sad that he's gone, or scared that you're about to see him again, you find yourself receiving the very thing you didn't want...

-------(History Resumes From Here)-------

The villain could hardly figure out anything before his ass smashed into the concrete beneath him, a hero made of pink and blue colors appearing in front of his face. Of course, he attempted to retaliate, but as he brought his arms up to shoot at the new parahuman, his face started to burn up as he was smacked with a beam of light, leaving a scalding burn all over his cheek. His goons could hardly make a move as they all began to succumb to the same fate, being knocked out from an overabundance of pain. As the authorities started to show up, Charlotte had fled the scene, unsure how they would react to a new parahuman in the scene of a K.O'd gang.

When she got home, she finally figured out how to exit her hardlight form, and once she did she felt a wave of immense satisfaction. She was still crushed and broken from the events that transpired earlier, but she felt that, if Chad was around, he'd be patting her on the back and saying she did good that day. Frankly, that's what had mattered in the end.

Despite Charlotte not wanting to have the powers originally, she took up the name Aesthetic, using that for her cape persona. Sure, she doesn't necessarily like to fight, but if she can help make the world a better place for others so some people don't end up like Chad, then she'll gladly duke things out.

---

Cynthia was born Michelle Johnson in a small town in Colorado in very poor circumstances. Her parents were meth cookers and Cynthia was the fifth child they had popped out in order to qualify for ever increasing government assistance, which they turned around and spent on drugs. It wasn’t until the little Michelle had grown to age five that her parents were found out, arrested, and she was placed in the foster care system.

The young girl might’ve thought that being in foster care would have been a better life for her, but she was tossed into an uncaring and unfair system that favored babies and toddlers, while older kids (and especially those with behavior problems, such as a girl coming from a meth house) were left to be traded around between various homes that ultimately didn’t want to put in the work to really get to know them. For more than a decade the little Michelle was moved from home to home, each with completely different values and expectations and problems of their own. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad. Occasionally the family would try, but found her disposition to be too much of a hassle, so off to another house she’d go. Sometimes it was horrible. The worst she can recall was a couple that took in eight foster children, including her, and gave them all the same small bedroom to share. Dinner every night was the same: 2 cans of cold soup they would have to split. The home was very minimalist so the couple could spend all their money, including the government foster stipend, on lotto tickets. Of course they never won. Nobody ever won in that house.

Young Michelle survived by trying to mentor any kids she came across younger than her. They were all in it together, after all. Helping out the less able boys and girls was the only way to keep herself focused, keep herself sane. In houses that wouldn’t provide for them, she did her best to provide the only way she could: by stealing. At night she’d sneak out and pick pockets or shoplift from convenience stores and bring back her bounty to her foster siblings. Sometimes she’d get caught. Sometimes the person that caught her was more caring than the system that trapped her and let her take it. Most of the time they didn’t.

In a “good Catholic house” she earned a nickname, “Sin.” They’d tell her that because your actions are forever stained on your immortal soul you were your actions, so she was nothing more than a sin. She had learned not to take to heart anything bastard fosters had to say, but she admitted that she actually liked the name. Once Michelle aged out of the system she legally changed her name to distance herself from her birth parents, becoming Cynthia Rose as a point of pride. Cynthia because it contained “sin” in it, and Rose to symbolize the hope of new beginnings.

Now living in Denver, the 18 year old Cynthia got a job as a barista in a cafe, making coffee and tea for customers and couldn’t have been happier to be fully independent. When you’re in customer service, you’d be surprised what people say assuming that you aren’t listening or don’t care. One day, a few months into her job, she overheard some people from the local gang that basically ran Denver: The Community. She was wary of them, of course, but how they talked about the group as one big caring family appealed to her in some way. She became distraught. Should she report this criminal activity? Or should she approach them? Ultimately Cynthia decided on a middle ground between the two: she followed them silently, unseen, to get to know more. She tailed them to a remote location and slipped inside, where a number of the Community had gathered around for some sort of event. There was the man who never showed himself in public, the leader of the Community: Patriarch. Flanking him were all three of his lieutenants, Xolotl, Eyeblight, and Limbo, but a fifth person stood with them, a small mousey looking girl with an extremely unpleasant looking face, as though she were in a constant shitty mood.

Cynthia’s perceptions of the world changed that night as she witnessed Patriarch giving a presentation of some sort of liquid bottle which was ingested by the young girl. It gave her powers! Not super flashy ones, nothing immediately noticeable, but a potent thinker ability to guide her actions toward creating negative emotions in others. Cynthia had to flee that night to avoid being spotted, but the young girl came up in the news shortly after. The media called her Troll, and she was instantly the nastiest of the Community’s enforcers, with the city believing a number of suicides could be traced back to her (though this wasn’t proven for a few years). She immediately hit the books and the web to find any record of this phenomena, these powers in a bottle, but came up with nothing. Nada. Zilch. It seemed that she had a conspiracy on her hands.

Over the next few months Cynthia spied on the Community as much as she could in an effort to track down the source of these powers. She came into contact with their goons more times than she could count, so she decided to don a mask and costume herself to keep from being recognized. If she could blow the lid off of this case, then she knew that she’d have done something that truly mattered! She wouldn’t be some worthless daughter of a drug dealer, some lost child in the world, she would have accomplished something nobody else could! Unfortunately it never did work out that way.

Cynthia got closer, eventually even catching a meeting with Patriarch with some strange woman in a fedora. The meeting was short and involved the woman handing over a case to Patriarch and telling him that this would be their final business transaction, so he should be careful as to who he used the new powers on. Patriarch seemed annoyed but he didn’t dare to cross the woman, just saying he’d really have to think about it and told one of his goons to put the box in a storage site. The two parted ways and Cynthia went on the pursuit of this woman knowing it would be her last and final chance to make headway in this investigation. The fedora lady ascended a ladder to exit the meeting place, so Cynthia followed quickly. However as soon as she reached for the top rung the woman reappeared and pushed the ladder down. Cynthia fell back, arm reaching out to grab her quarry, but she never had a chance. This conspiracy, these shadows she had been chasing, it had completely turned on her in an instant. The lady vanished, completely out of reach. The answers were now completely out of reach. She wasn’t good enough. As Cynthia fell down to the ground, she triggered in her despair.

Head pounding, seeing spots, Cynthia came to in the same spot she had landed, only this time there was a gun in her face. One of the Community goons was barking some kind of order she couldn’t hear due to still being groggy from the impact. All she could make out was the gun and exactly how it was designed. Instinctively, in a flash, her hands reached up and blurred around the weapon while still in her assailant’s hands. Startled the man pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. He blinked and realized he only held the pistol grip: the rest of the weapon lay on the floor. In his confusion Cynthia got up and ran, the man giving chase after a moment of recollecting his senses, though the chase was short lived. Through superior physical training Cynthia got away.

Over the next several months Cynthia practiced with this new power of hers and thought of what she could do with it. Locks meant nothing to her whether they were mechanical or electronic. Security systems were easily disabled. In fact anything was easily disabled, and what’s more she retained all the details of anything she took apart! Giving her costume a bit more design work Cynthia took to the streets as a not-so-common cat burglar. She hit up banks and the homes of the wealthy to take what she felt was better spent on the less fortunate (keeping a sizable amount for herself, naturally). Even tinker designed security systems were easily dismantled! She became a thief for hire for any who would pay her (usually the Community, which she loathed but put up with because she always hoped one day to get another lead on that conspiracy). Her escapades earned her the public name of Sabotage, which she took to quite well. After all, even when captured by the heroes the prison transport designed by the local tinker Decoy couldn’t hold her!

Thanks to how Decoy’s tinker powers worked (everything connected to a single large scale communications system) in conjunction with her own powers, Sabotage was able to monitor communications from the Denver PRT and Protectorate and learned a great deal about the city she never would have known before. This information she kept to herself, never letting the other villains of Denver know what she had access to. She was a humble thief, but others? Best they never find out.

Then came what she expected to be a big break in her search for the people that gave out powers. In a villain meeting hosted by a fellow calling himself the Broker, he handed out some of the very same vials! Cynthia didn’t show her reaction at the time but it unnerved her tremendously. She finally had another chance! Obtaining one of the vials, she gave it to a close confidante in the foster system, a girl 2 years younger than her, who took the cape name Circuit. At the same time she left a message for one of the Wards about this Broker bastard, but found she could never use his name without suffering an extreme headache. He did something to her. Probably everyone at that meeting.

Behemoth arrived shortly afterward during a time when the Community was waging war on the city. Sabotage and Circuit helped out as much as they could and Patriarch died in the event. The next few months changed the shape of Denver entirely as the Broker’s plans nearly came to fruition, but he was defeated. In the aftermath Cynthia hung up her suit and cowl in order to focus on college. She had decided that she really wanted to help those like her in a more meaningful way: by working to change the foster system from the inside. The next several years were nothing but school and work. Even the Echidna Incident, which revealed the conspiracy she fought so hard to unravel, wasn’t enough to pull her back into the world of parahumans.

Then Gold Morning happened. There isn’t much to say during this period that isn’t said by everyone else. Scion attacked and slaughtered billions across multiple worlds. They fought back. Then Khepri took control of everyone and they won. In the aftermath Cynthia worked to save as many lives as possible, escorting refugees to Earth Samekh. She established a loose association of others in the process, including one Judah Raines, formerly known as Mantis. Once the smoke had cleared Cynthia set up shop in Serstol. She worked long and hard toward citizenship status, aided by her degree and experience in social services (something which was no doubt in very high demand with the influx of refugees). Cynthia established her own orphanage in Serstol which catered specifically to the care of children who had lost their parents in Gold Morning, but found that support for these poor kids to be lacking in the city’s blatantly unfair systems that favored citizens and seemed to despise outsiders. Once again she found herself stuck in a broken and uncaring system. No more.

Once again Synthia donned her costume as Sabotage. She became a thief now for the express purpose of helping her children not only survive, but thrive in this world. Money, tinker tech, anything that could help would help. She got together with her old associates and told them what she would be doing. That day she founded The Lost, a loose association of individuals that wouldn’t necessarily always go out together on missions, but would look out for one another. Would look out for the children. Circuit joined her, while Judah (now SWAT) agreed to be a silent ally. Whatever trials and tribulations Samekh would throw their way, Synthia knew only one thing: the children need not fear.

Born in 1993 to Hannah Burkley and Tomas Quinn, Kelly was a healthy baby boy. The earliest years of his life went by, surrounded by family and family friends, people who loved and cared for him. They fostered his playfulness and joy, instilling in him an enthusiasm that would last for many years to come. Like this he transitioned into kindergarten and pre-school, meeting new friends and faces; encountering new situations and learning as he did so. While there were hiccups here and there he became beloved in his way, the joker, the little troublemaker--harmless, cute, hilarious, endearing.

As the years passed he evolved from this point, becoming perhaps what one might consider slightly less harmless, playing pranks on his family and peers. Minor things, designed to illicit joy and do little to no real harm. It made him friends wherever he went, but alas with his parents moving from time-to-time he’d lose them. So it was that he had few truly close friends growing up, teaching him to survive largely on its own. Of course, the attention of his peers helped significantly, allowing him to thrive, feeding his ego and his boldness. Studies fell to the wayside and though he didn’t fail many classes, his parents noticed. He found further escape in comedy, planning elaborate pranks, making up new jokes, researching and practicing improv. They were all tools to bring joy to others and attention to himself.

As he entered high school his studies fell behind even further and his focus on popularity and comedy became even more pronounced. Yet, for some reason, people started responding with less enthusiasm. He came to the conclusion that his act had gotten stale, so he decided to escalate. Initially this did lead to more adoration among his peers, but eventually he went a half-step too far, dividing the school with the nature of his grand prank. Unsure how to deal with the disappointment of some and the amusement of others being so at odds he spent some time without doing anything drastic. He’d gotten in enough trouble for the first prank, so he needed to lay low for awhile. Weeks, then month after month he spent planning, laying groundwork for his grand performance. Sometimes he could barely contain his laughter when he imagined everyone’s faces.

Eventually…finally the day came for him to set the wheels in motion. Practically giggling all the while he set things up for lunch time when everyone would be there and he’d get the greatest shock and the inevitable laughter that would follow. He lay in wait, skipping class, risking everything for a grand joke that would wow everyone in the school. The time came and people began filtering in, little by little, and then all at once as those who had seen passed the word. The tension built and then once everyone had filtered in he sprung his little trap revealing his masterpiece and himself all at once.

There was a beat...and then another, but rather than seeing the comedy inherent in his piece, all his peers, even the teachers and staff, stared in silence. He frowned to himself even as it dawned on him, slowly, then all at once, that he wouldn’t be getting laughter. First, on their faces, was confusion and shock, and then disgust. Some fled, others threw up, and many more simply turned their glares on him. He wanted to throw up, he wanted anything other than all of the hatred and pity and revulsion that he saw in their gazes. He floundered, opening his mouth to explain, but finding he couldn’t speak.

Why had he done this? Why wouldn’t they stop looking?!?! He wanted to scream, yell at them to stare at anyone, anything else. Tell them to give him a break! It was just a prank guys. No big deal! He didn’t. He couldn’t. In his inability to do anything, to redirect their attention, to escape their gaze, and similarly...in his total inability to understand why they were all reacting this way, he triggered.

In the aftermath he used his power for the first time, adding insult to injury to get out and away from the crowd. In tears, he fled the lunch hall and hid in the men’s locker rooms. Eventually, the staff found him and he was escorted to the office, his parents were called, and he was promptly suspended. Confused, ashamed, and depressed Kelly was forced to endure the anger of his usually so supportive parents. With the decline of his grades and now this...this ”acting out” as they put it, well he wasn’t just on thin ice anymore. He was submerged and drowning. He felt like it too and eventually he took to using his powers just to avoid the notice of his parents. They never knew and after a few botched attempts he figured out how to get rid of his duplicates without banishing them and causing his parents significant discomfort. After all, he’d done enough already.

For his time suspended, well, he spent it as if in hiding. Essentially grounded, he forced himself to do the homework and project’s supplied. He’d need to to graduate, his parents said, and apparently that was the only way he might redeem himself in their eyes. Slowly, the focus, as well as his new hobby, brought him out of his deep slump. He found friends online and, for the first time, properly explored the complex web that was the interactions between hero, villain, and civilian. It all seemed like one big play. Like a joke, but at someone else’s expense.

After a whole semester of good behavior--and time back at school--his parents eased off their punishments and life tried to return to some semblance of normal. Of course, things were irrevocably changed, after all...none of his peers would so much as look at him without disgust, pity, or apathy in their eyes. Eventually he took to just ignoring their gazes, their judgement. They didn’t matter, just him and his jokes. Yet...despite all his efforts, they held him back a year. Fortunately though, despite the slump, they let him earn additional credits and he graduated halfway through the next year. By then, he’d pulled himself out of the deep well of trauma and even started socializing again, using summer school as a new place that he could test the waters.

Though half a year late, Kelly graduated from high school in a sort of unofficial way, getting all the necessary documentation, but no ceremony or farewell. Though he missed his peers and the many people he’d once considered friends, he also knew that those relationships were beyond repair, though he never really came to understand exactly why. In the interest of moving on he applied to a local community college, his parents unwilling to send him abroad to another state, but very insistent on his going. Fairly onboard with the idea he started a new school life, this time intent on making things work.

All in all, college was stressful, but having had to struggle and work so hard near the end of high school--and during the ensuing summer--it came more naturally to him than it may have to some. In much of his free time he studied or went out with friends, but behind closed doors he made use of his new powers, making quite a bit of headway in understanding how they worked while simultaneously entrenching himself more deeply in the knowledge of the world he knew he would one day become a part of. After a year of college, struggles and successes both, he needed an outlet, and so he began living a double life of sorts. It was hard, he lost sleep, and some classes suffered, but it helped. He’d go on nightly outings, in a poorly made costume and mask. He soon found that when he was out he didn’t have to hold back...he could do whatever he wanted--and with the assistance of his power he’d never have to pay the price.

Feeling like things were turning up for him, Kelly continued his experimentation, becoming more and more bold even despite the worrying things that came on the news on occasion. However, essentially all at once things took a drastic and dangerous turn for the worse, starting with Scion’s first attack in Earth Bet, and playing out in what would become known as Gold Morning. By and large, Kelly found himself almost totally powerless during the events that transpired, essentially being relegated to help evacuate civilians, scout, or assist with medical aid where possible. It was a horrifying four days, but ultimately he was always rather far away from the conflicts themselves, due entirely to the nature of his powers.

So it was that when things eventually concluded he was left in a corner world with very few other people and little in the way of resources aside from what they could find in the surrounding wilderness. So it was that, for a year he built something with the others who were trapped there with him. They got along well enough and together they got through it, settling into a new life. He found that his power was fairly useful for hunting, allowing him to quietly sneak up on animals and then create a duplicate to stun them before he acted. So, by necessity he learned to hunt, he learned to survive, give medical care to injuries minor and major, and all-in-all function relatively well in a community. Still, beneath the surface he itched for civilization, for interaction, for comedy. For how things used to be. He thought, quite often, about his parents and the friends he’d made in college...wondering if they’d made it. Hoping they had.

Kelly never found out, but he did find a portal. Having been searching far and wide for over a year Kelly and his compatriots finally stumbled upon a portal that--ostensibly--lead to what appeared to be a more populated world. While many had no desire to leave the home they had made, the place they had become accustomed and comfortable in, Kelly felt differently. So it was that he prepared traveling rations and equipment before setting out for the other world.

Later he would come to learn that the alternate Earth was known as Earth Samekh and that what beckoned was a place both better and worse in equal measures. Perhaps the first thing that stood out to him was the sheer quantity of process around getting to the alternate Earth. No matter, he had time and once he was in the queue he could easily fend for himself. Eventually he got his documents filled out, boxes checked, and it was a month or three after that that he finally reached Serstol proper. The Silver City, they called it. A fitting title, he thought. Of course, he had more important things to consider...like survival...citizenship...fostering a new identity. It was going to be a hard time for awhile, he surmised.

• Kelly gets into Serstol, but not as a citizen seeing as he has no money to his name.
• Meets and works with (Tuuj’s character) Penelope to get his citizenship. The two forge a close friendship over this period.
• Kelly works on getting money, partially illicitly via parahuman activities, all very low key and spaced out enough that it’s hard to track him down.
• Penelope and Kelly eventually reveal the fact that they are parahumans to one another.
• They decide to form a partnership.
• They form a team.
• Present day.

Notes: He does have an apartment and a job, but I do not know the nature of the job just yet. He lives not in the center of the city, but midway between the center and the outskirts. He’s had some cape activity, but he is in no way a known element as of yet. Has likely had interaction/”business” with the Lost, but is not directly affiliated with them.

May insert other details if bonds are forged beyond just Penelope.

pervert

Kendall Banks started their life out as a single child to a pair of very busy parents, both of who loved Kendall but just weren't around enough to make them feel the love. After Kendall could be independent for themself, they did a lot on their own around the house, like cooking, cleaning, and the standard homemaker duties. The kid rarely missed class, but one day back in 2005 they got hellaciously sick, and was told by their parents to stay home from school in order to spend the day trying to overcome the sickness. Their mom gave them all the medicine they needed in the morning before they left for work. There was a big flaw in the plan that Kendall's mom had, and it was how Kendall had nothing on their stomach that morning as the sickness just made their appetite disappear, pretty much.

From there on, the day slowly devolved into chaos and disorder. Their temperature kept rising past worrysome levels, their entire body was paler than milk, and they had the sinking feeling of nausea riding in their gut the entire day until they couldn't take it anymore. Kendall slogged herself out of their bed and onto the floor before dragging themself down the hall to their bathroom, crawling up against the bathtub, and just hurling as much bile as they could into their bathtub. Eventually, bile stopped coming out, but they still kept vomiting and vomiting up a sticky black substance that they were unfamiliar with. Thus, the birth of Mastar came about.

For a few months after, Kendall worked with her best friend Ryan to create the persona Mastar, withwhich she fought crime as an independent hero and vigilante. For a while, they remained unrecognized by the public and Protectorate, until a faithful charity event held in Denver where a local gang interrupted to shake things up. It was that day when one of the strongest heroes in Denver, Inkscape, had expressed his upset that Mastar wasn't a proper hero for the Protectorate. Kendall later returned home and, after a bit of heart to heart with their mom, the fourteen year old was finally allowed by their parents to enlist under the Wards program as Mastar.

Then a few weeks passed before Behemoth attacked the city of Denver. Thousands upon thousands of people died that day, with a fair amount of those being various parahumans from all sides of the law. Despite the numbers, the Wards had managed to survive without any casualties, but Mastar was the worst one affected by the attack, being sent into a nine day coma after being crushed under rubble while their parents slowly lost their lives in the hospital within the same week. The attack left Kendall scarred massively along the side of their face, with their entire right eye and ear missing with no hope of regrowth.

(That's the current in CoD as of writing this history. It may be updated in the future.)

Kendall stuck around in the PRT, eventually graduating from the Wards and becoming a full hero. Somewhere along the lines, Ana and L split from the PRT entirely and took up a bad reputation. Kendall wanted to join them, but reluctantly stayed at the PRT to take over their role of training new Wards up and helping them figure out their powers and such. They had fun for the majority of it, and loved helping out when they could as Mastar.

Eventually, things looked up for them. They even found a boyfriend. Life was coming up a lot better than it had seemed before. Surely there was no way that anything could go wrong now, right?

Everyone that Kendall knew wasn't around after they found themself rising from the wreckage of a building. Everything just went by so fast, and things started to go south very quickly. As far as they knew, they were one of the last few people in Denver, somehow, and they slogged their way out of the wreckage and started to find their way to safety and security.

The trip to Samekh and Serstol wasn't fun. There was a lot of issues with the migration progress, from the loss of a lot of important documents to some really rude associates Kendall had to deal with. Thankfully, they were cleared within a long, but still reasonable time, and successfully immigrated onto Earth Samekh within a short while after that (though it was still a bit of a wait). Later they found themself in Earth Samekh, smack in the city of Serstol, and when they saw a familiar face of an older friend walking away from an orphanage one day, they just couldn't contain themself and ran towards them in joy.

Since then, Kendall's been helping out on the farm that Anastasia maintains, offering their services as a farmhand and friend in exchange for a place to stay and feel welcome. They also do some crime fighting with Arson and Manifold, though they're a bit less brutal than the other two are and have maintained a better reputation as a result.

Malorie fell in love with her idea of a perfect family, and then found a man she thought she could build it with. They married, and she discovered difficulty in the relationship. She became pregnant to hold everything together, and for years she managed her family carefully. She and her daughter were occasionally beaten, but Malorie was determined to make her relationship work. She used blackmail and threats to control them as well as she could.

Gold Morning struck, and things went badly. More than every, her family was falling apart.

While moving to her new home in Samekh, riots began. She lost her daughter in the crowds, and as she always feared, her husband turned against her. She thinks that she got her powers sometime around that moment.

Only a few weeks after this incident, Daisy Ripper murdered her former husband. She doesn’t know if anybody ever found out it was her. She didn’t really care. At the Lodge, she frequently talked about her past and her regret for her lost family, expressing a desire to start anew. She was approached by the Fallen soon after, and she latched onto them and their beliefs. She was quickly taken into the fold of her new, more perfect family.

Daughter of Justin Timothy Armstrong and Louise Appleton Armstrong. Valerie had a pleasant early childhood, initially living in Bristol. She was introduced to her best friend for the following years at her third birthday, a mixed-breed puppy going by Maxwell. When Valerie was 9, her family moved to Springfield, Illinois. She still sometimes peppers her language with Britishisms.

Valerie had trouble making new friends following her move. After a few years, she picked up sports. One of her peers invited her to a team of Baseball-players. This team initially provided Valerie with the support and social structure she desired, so she leaned further into the sport than she would've during more normal circumstances. Being a quick learner, she eventually surpassed her team. As a result of her quick growth and cocky behavior, resentment on the team grew against her, culminating in pushback and occasional sabotage from teammates. After the negatives started to occur so often that she could no longer chalk them up to anything but malicious behavior, Valerie decided to try leaving her toxic environment for a different team. On the day before an important tryout, Valerie found herself locked out of the training grounds. The straw that broke the camels back was in place, she triggered at age 13 due to the stress caused by systematic sabotage, angry at the once nurturing environment and how it held her back.
One of Valerie's teammates was injured during the aftermath of her trigger event, law enforcement in the form of the Parahuman response team got involved. Due to her high cooperativeness, the PRT assisted Valerie with legal matters. 'Coil' was her codename during this time, she decided to keep it.
Valerie was tentatively banned from the baseball try-out on account of her new-found powers.

Following her trigger, Coil became the designated Ward of her town, making up the local PRT branch with about 90 non-powered personnel (excluding janitorial staff) and an Alexandria Package Master going by the name Pern (with Maxwell sometimes acting as an honorary part-time volunteer). Coil picked her name without knowledge of the deceased Brockton Bay based villain, which led to a few enthusiastic lessons of Supervillain trivia from Pern. Valerie became somewhat of a cape geek thanks to Perns influence, soon putting immense amounts of research into local (and semi-local) capes. She became somewhat of a fangirl for a few.

Coil participated in three Endbringer battles. Two of them against the twins, one (briefly) against Khonsu on his second outing, mostly using her powers to knock Blasters and fellow Shakers out of dangerous areas. She chickened out during the first battle, didn't follow Khonsu after he teleported away for the second and got injured in the third. After her battle, Coil decided never to attend any Endbringer fight again.

During the end of the world, Coil was almost entirely useless, going almost catatonic and hunkering beneath a heavy oaken table during the worst of Scion's rampage. By the time she built up enough courage to act, the fact that nothing could be done was evident. The Armstrongs decided to go on an impromptu road trip. This adventure was cut short when Khepri enrolled Valerie. Coil only really helped by feeding biomass into random Capes with power synergy. She was among the Parahumans who required medical attention during the battle, but luckily one of the healing capes had her handled.

After the end of Gold morning, Coil took the shortest route back home and met up with her family. Once they were done raiding her old Wards base for costumes and bidding Pern farewell, the Armstrongs decided to migrate to a new world. Initially shooting for Gimel, they ended up on Samekh instead. The Armstrongs bought a property around the outskirts of the silver city. Valerie initially took the by now very old Maxwell on daily walks (sometimes using her powers to settle disputes around the local area), but the daily walks slowly turned into weekly walks. Most of her local area is protective of her, meaning that while being technically unmasked, Coil's civilian ID is mostly a well-kept secret (with new people being introduced to the secret on a biweekly basis).

Recently, Coil found out that according to the first guard, she had acted as an independent vigilante for the past few years. While trying to finish the mountains of paperwork necessary for becoming an official independent hero, she learned about the Junior Guard and decided to sign up, citing her status as long-acting Wards captain of the PRT in a state capital.
(Her technical truth was caught, leading to many people learning that Chicago was in fact not the capital of Illinois.)
She is one of the newest Junior Guards and unsure about how to interact with fellow Parahumans. Coil is not used to having to work with capes that have poor power synergy with her.

As of now, Valerie and her family members are not citizens. They fulfill most of the requirements for application.

(Director Armstrong of the Boston PRT is her third cousin twice removed, but the two have only ever seen each other on family trees.)

James Clairville and Sarah Collins, a performer and an artist fell in love and married. A year or so later in 1993 the two had Kari who they lovingly nurtured. James, an actor, and Sarah did their utmost to support eachother and their daughter, doing double duty as they worked and raised her. Truly things were sometimes a blur in their household, but more importantly it was always warm and fun. Of course things became even more interesting as Kari matured, for as she participated in school her parents found that she was truly gifted. So, naturally, they edged for her to carry on in their footsteps, encouraging the arts--writing, acting, painting, singing, it hardly mattered, “just pick one,” they’d say. Seeking approval, Kari did so, taking part in little plays and helping design costumes. This trend carried on from her early schooling into middle school until finally her burgeoning personality could not simply conform anymore.

From then on Kari let what she’d long hidden beneath the surface out into the world, a curiosity not for the arts, but instead for what her parents would think their polar opposite. For, unlike her parents, Kari’s passion was the world, math, science, history and as she got older she only leaned into her passions more. In school she excelled, skipping a year in middle school and going into high school earlier than most. She was a nerd, but she found some acceptance among peers, as, while her parents supported her, they could not ever really understand her passions. Kari’s were just too different from their own. Of course, high school ended too soon as she breezed through courses and wowed both her parents and teachers in a frenzy wrought of diligence and ambition. She wanted to be a scientist, to enter the field of tech and much fell away as a result. Hobbies that she’d kept up with since childhood drifted away, only resurging as she required the skills honed through them.

Accepting her passion, even though he did not understand it, her father hired tutors and began the process of enrolling his daughter in college. All the while, Kari and her mother grew apart, a rift opened by what Sarah had taken as a betrayal. Once enrolled she worked hard, majoring in computer technology, intending to go into the field, designing new hardware for the world over. It was hard, but she loved it. However, just before she could graduate--though she’d been damned close--Gold Morning happened, the world collapsing around her. The months were filled with a quiet horror, fleeing, and the desperate hope that they would make it through. Eventually, they did, but not all of them. Many had been lost and among them...people she held beloved. Friends, colleagues, but most devastatingly...her mother.

Wracked by guilt and sorrow Kari and her father just tried to keep their heads up. Despite their loss they were fortunate in other ways, finding themselves in Samekh, and then Serstol, near its infancy. They settled in and her father was forced to take up menial labor--the world was not in a state to support the career he’d led before. She hated seeing him so, and she hated more the terrible loss that tore at her heart. So, naturally, she distracted herself, steeling her resolve and moving forwards. She picked up where she’d left off, teaching herself more skills and applying to jobs with a dedicated determination to ease her father’s burden and to make a difference.

After months of work she landed herself a job and immediately launched into development and customer service--using whatever spare money and resources she could to build and design something new...something that would benefit everyone. Soon her efforts earned her a proper place at her job, allowing her to leverage their resources with her skill to really begin the development of her project. Things were going well for awhile, the pay was good and she was happy, but soon misfortune reared its head. Checking her work one week she came upon an error in her work. Thinking it largely inconsequential she set about fixing the problem, replacing parts and altering code. However, the more she did the worse things got. She’d come back to it only to find things in a worse state than they’d been before. Worse still, a meeting was coming up where she was supposed to be showcasing her new product. The stress only worsened the issue and eventually things spiralled out of control, totally ruining month upon month of work. Feeling totally out of her depth and utterly overwhelmed--and baffled--by her situation she triggered, the fear of losing such a huge part of her life, and jeopardizing everything, breaking her down.

Having lost months of work and seemingly wasted resources, upper management demoted her to a junior position, shelving her project for a later date. Fortunately, they were much more understanding that she’d expected. In the interest of her mental health, they gave her a month’s paid leave and left things at that. Still reeling and feeling cast aside she spent many of those days aimless and lost. The only things that saved her were the preoccupation of experimenting with her newfound powers, research on the subject, and more importantly...escape by way of art. While not many of her mother’s pieces had survived the end of the world, they’d managed to reacquire a few. Kari surrounder herself with them and decided to give her mother’s passion a second chance.

Taking up the brush and pencil, she spread her emotions over the canvas and found that perhaps she’d never really had a particular dislike for the arts. Maybe she’d just been rebellious. Maybe that’s what had led her on this path? She wasn’t sure and it was impossible to go back and find out so instead she looked forwards. She still had a job to lead, soon, but now she had powers. She was a parahuman. Couldn’t she do so much more to affect the lives of everyone for the better?

Eventually deciding she could, Kari began designing a costume and after a time, returned to her work as well. While she has yet to rise to her former position, she still makes enough to get by. Though it is not just her former failure that has kept her from rising again, but rather that her ambitions have taken on a new form. With her costume finished and name chosen, Presidio has every intent to make the world a better...safer place and perhaps bring humanity back to its former glory.

Only time will tell whether her work with the Final Guard will truly make an impact.

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Samantha Hobbes was born January 2001 and was raised primarily by a live in nanny until the age of ten, her parents often signing her up for camps, school trips, and daily adventures. Paying their way into the young girl's heart while focusing on their individual careers. Over the course of these many summers spent away from home Samantha picked up a few hobbies that she truly enjoyed, some of which included horseback riding, hiking, nature photography, and much to the panic of the councilors that had been in charge of her did manage to sneak out into the woods on more than one occasion to try and track down animals.

Near Midnight April 3rd 2012 The parents of Samantha Hobbes are awoken to the sound of their ringing phone. Her father, a prominent prosecution lawyer, answering it to find the head of the local Protectorate team on the other end of the line and clearly agitated. The hero, supported by the team thinker, has reason to believe that one of the villains who had recently been tried and sentenced to the the Birdcage was on the move and looking for revenge. The thinker was nearly certain that there would be an attack before sunrise and that if Samantha's family were to stay in their home there was no guarantee that any of them would survive. Shocked, Samantha's father asks what he should do and is informed that they were already sending their more mobile capes that way along with a PRT van as an escort. They would be taken to the local headquarters to be watched over and protected until the villain and his team were captured.
Samantha is awoken by her mother and told that they were taking a quick trip, they were going to be gone a couple of days and she shouldn't grab anything that she doesn't need. Confused and groggy the young girl nods and gets ready before being led out of the house and towards the family's car. Her mother makes sure she is buckled in and secure before closing the door, keeping her from noticing the trio of figures standing near the end of the driveway until she watches her father approach them. As he talks his voice muffled through the car window, but something about the way he was standing felt...wrong. But after a few seconds of tired puzzling Samantha recognizes them as the local Protectorate, and when the realization that they heroes sinks in Samantha feels a rush of excitement! Her excitement only growing as she saw one of them turn her way and wave, a woman in a silver costume whose lower body is a mess of silver sparks. It is not long after this that her father is climbing into the driver's seat and the heroes take their positions around the car with a PRT Van trailing behind them.
Minutes pass and Samantha starts to doze off, her face pressed against the window to keep an eye on the two heroes she could see, the woman with her sparkler flight and a man keeping pace with two telescoping limbs, steadily falling a few yards behind then bounding ahead of the vehicle in a single step over and over. It's like a dream. But something still seemed wrong to her despite the proximity of the heroes, a kind of tension that her parents had only ever had when they had come home one day to find the front door broken open and the house trashed. It was worrying enough that despite how tired she felt she just couldn't fall back asleep.
It was in this half asleep state that Samantha realized that the man with the tinker legs hadn't caught back up to the car in a few steps and for some reason her stomach went tight. "Mom wher-" She tried to ask, but then came a slam hard enough to jar the question from her mind. Her father wrestled with the wheel as the back end of the car was struck, pushing them towards the edge of the hillside road they had been traveling, bumper scraping against the metal guard rail. The sound of screeching tires and metal drowned out her own frightened scream as she watched an arm, darker than the night sky and as thick as a tree trunk reach out from the top of the PRT Van and grab the sparkling woman from the air. The arm sent the woman crashing down, aiming to use her as a bludgeon against the small sedan only to loose grip on her as she burst into a million sparks and poured from the villainous grasp. The hand, minus it's captive, continued on its path anyway. Striking the side of the car with enough force that Samantha's door flexed inward. And in the flash of a streetlight she could see that the arm was a mass of writhing serpent like creatures molded together to form a limb. She screamed again as a feeling of weightlessness overtook her. They were off the road, falling, then came the first jarring impact. The car slammed into the earth, Samantha's seat belt locking and causing her scream to cut off abruptly as it knocked the wind from her. For long seconds the world was a tumbling roaring swirl of confusion, she could hear her father yelling, her mother screaming and all her mind could do was try to sort out this spinning whirl of near death. Flashes of red, silver, and that shadowy arm, blurred past her shattered window. Powers at war while the world around her threatened to collapse and crush her at any second. And all Samantha could do was hold tight to her seat and gasp. Until with a flash she could see someplace else. Something else. When the dizziness of the extra dimensional vision had passed Samantha found herself hanging upside down from her seat, fingers itching to reach into another space. By the time she realized she had a power the other heroes had arrived as backup and managed to beat back the villains. The newly triggered parahuman and her parents were then transferred to the PRT Headquarters for medical attention.

The following year after the attack Samantha spent nearly every waking hour trying to find time to practice her ability, to try and get a handle on it before bringing it up to her parents. Often sneaking out of the house and finding a secluded location to work at taming the wild nature of her power. It was on one of these outings that she was discovered by a patrolling hero, the tinker that had been attacked first and injured on the attack on her family now fully recovered. He announced himself and offered to watch and see what she could do while sending a message to the PRT and her parents. Thanks to his discovery and assistance Samantha was offered a position in the Wards program, which she was happy to accept despite her parent's hesitance. She was admitted to the wards one week before her birthday in January 2013 and spent most of the time before gold morning training and pushing to be put to work. By the time of Gold Morning the newly mantled Calvin Ball had only two months of experience out patrolling behind her.