Information
Name: Hubert Roxwell
Cape Name: Replicant
Theme Song:
Aspects
High Concept: Mad scientist of justice
Trouble: What is this thing you call "personal space?"
Origin: Knock knock knockin' on Heaven's door
Growth: I will master biology!
Adventure: Punching baddies in the face... FOR SCIENCE!
Bio
Personality: Hubert isn't a man that likes or enjoys subtlety, despite his power being perfectly tailored for exactly that. He prefers that everything he does be done with pomp and pizzazz! If it's worth doing, it's worth putting a little excitement into, no? Otherwise what's the fun in being a superhero? No seriously, your entire life is managed by the PRT, you're regularly expected to battle it out in life or death skirmishes against powerful villains, every few months nigh unstoppable godlike killing machines destroy a city, and your social life outside of the Protectorate is pretty much nonexistent, so you've got to take life by the balls where you can! He's known for putting on airs, attempting to be as dramatic as possible in his superheroics. To him it is both a coping mechanism for the truly horrible state of the world, but also a way that he hopes can inspire others. Aaaaaand he uses it to distract from how horrifying how powers can actually be, so it's great from a PR standpoint too.
Under the bravado and excitement, Hubert is as mixed up as anyone else. He still carries a lot of baggage from his trigger event, particularly since it never really went away and he's just had it on pause. He knows that if he ever misses a medication treatment, it could spell his death. Having that hang over his head every day has led him to contemplate what's important and understand his priorities, but it has also made him more reckless than he needs to be. He can occasionally throw himself against an enemy that he has no hope of beating because in his mind, he's already a dead man walking and has survived this long, so eh? Why not?
As a side affect of gaining his powers, his shard has an instinctive desire to spread. This manifests in his behavior through a lack of understanding personal space, and on occasion the right of consent. He'll stand uncomfortably close to people, get right in their face, or touch someone when the social cues would suggest otherwise, but he will also take samples from people without asking (they'd surely agree once they understand how this benefits my research!) in order to experiment with. In fact, he seems to be completely incapable of comprehending that a person wouldn't immediately agree, so anytime he is caught or reprimanded, he becomes highly confused. If pushed too far, this confusion can become irritation, which can become anger, which can lead to him lashing out. Only when he lashes out, it's with a new plague.
History: Born and raised as the fourth son (with three older sisters!) of a lower middle class family, he really had to be loud and assertive, or even aggressive, in order to be heard in his household. This was not a state of affairs that he particularly cared for. Not that he didn't love his family, he did, but never having enough money to make ends meet, to get his own clothes and toys, for the family to go out and do things? That sucked. A lot. Perpetual poverty was just a real shitty place to be. Still, they made things work and it wasn't too bad.... Until...
When Hubert was half through his fifteenth year, he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. The family already had no money to survive, so this was devastating. He lived through two years of radiology and chemotherapy, but it didn't help. It progressed to stage four and became metastasized, splitting cells into the bloodstream. After two years of long, hard battling with his illness, the doctor told him and the family to get his affairs in order, he wouldn't survive another month.
Years of torment came to a head in that one moment when he was told there was nothing that could be done and he was going to die. In the middle of the night, in his hospital bed, Hubert triggered. Suddenly he saw the world in a whole new way, his mind operated completely differently than it had before. Hubert unhooked himself from the IV and heart monitor, then snuck around the hospital stealing machines and bacteria culture samples. In his room he tore them apart and rewired the machines into something new, where he placed the different bacteria. After a full night's work the morning nurse came to check on him, and to the nurse's shock he was in the process of injecting himself with something! Hubert tried to communicate to her what was going on, that he had designed a strain of bacteria that exclusively ate cancerous cells and it was now his only method of survival, but the tumor in his throat made communication a wee bit difficult. Orderlies came to restrain him and doctor's came to test just what the hell he'd done to himself. Nobody seemed interested in his body language trying to get something to write with. Their tests could ruin his new cure! The bacteria was still in infancy, and if they screened him wrong, gave him a dose of radiation this early, or the wrong medication, it could kill his last chance at survival!
That's when the PRT showed up. A single officer entered the hospital and met with Hubert on the grounds that a thinker-type hero had detected his trigger event. Finally someone was willing to listen to him and he was able to write down his story. The doctors were immediately ordered to unrestrain Hubert, and he chose to join the PRT officer to discuss the matter of his being a parahuman with his family. He immediately accepted the offer to join the Wards, despite the dangers. His birthday was in three months anyway, so it wasn't long before he graduated to be a full force Protectorate hero anyway. That was six months ago. Hubert, now known as Replicant (because it was the only name related to bacteria and viruses he could think of that didn't make him sound like a bio-terrorist) has been a cape for nine months now. Despite his mastery over microbiology, he has yet to find a suitable cure for his cancer, and the bacteria don't survive for long. He lives every day knowing that if he doesn't take a dose nearly every day, his tumor can grow back and kill him stone dead. But hey, he's very open and public about his illness, and that gives him a lot of popularity with certain demographics!
Abilities
Tinker 7 - Hubert is a highly specialized tinker that works with microbiology and the technology directly associated with that study. In fact he is so specialized that he is incapable of grasping what other tinkers find to be incredibly easy even if outside their field of expertise, like laser guns. However what he lacks in broad understanding he more than makes up for in sheer potency. Flesh eating bacteria? Easy. Make it airborne? Child's play. Infectious on skin contact? I can do that in my sleep. Have it also infect the optic center of the brain so that the infected sees colors inverted? Did that yesterday. You get the idea. Bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms come quite easy to him, as do methods of dispersing these pathogens. It's not all horrible doom and gloom, though. After all, every person on earth is filled with beneficial bacteria that are required for living, right? And he can make, alter, replicate, and create new strains of these as well. So far the only limitation he's shown to have thus far are the incubation period (he can't make a single organism reproduce into billions overnight), and his own morality (though admittedly that he can play loosely with).
Brute 4 - Not a result of his trigger event at all, Hubert was given a brute classification after the fact once he had experimented on his own body extensively. While he isn't able to operate on himself as thoroughly and revolutionary as well as a more broad bio-tinker like the infamous villain Bonesaw, he has introduced multiple strains of new organisms to his body that have benefited him greatly. The benefits are as follows:
- With intensive effort, lift an average car overhead
- Greatly improved reflexes/reaction time
- Ability to see microorganisms without the aid of a microscope
- Limited regenerative properties (Will heal a gunshot wound in a matter of minutes instead of days, cannot regrow lost limbs... But he's working on it!)
