Player Name: @DocTachyonPrimary Character: Midnighter
Secret Identity: Lucas Trent
Status: Active JLU
Age: 38
City: Midnighter considers himself a ‘Citizen of the World’ but lately he’s been hanging out in Bludhaven.
Day Job: Full time Superhero.
Powers:Enhanced Physiology: Midnighter’s augmentations have granted him superhuman physical attributes that make him difficult to best in combat.
Super Strength: Midnighter’s strength is a force to be reckoned with. His strength is enough to physically rip apart non powered opponents, and he can go toe to toe with most metahumans.
Super Speed: While not being able to touch users of the speedforce, Midnighter is brutally fast -- at maximum effort, he can briefly go fast enough to be invisible human eye. At more typical speeds, Midnighter is still able to outmaneuver and flank most non-speedster opponents. He has a history of dodging bullets and occasionally deflecting them with his bo-staff, but he has been tagged before.
Durability: Largely as a factor of his enhanced speed and strength, due to the extra-dense musculature installed and the improved bone structure to support said musculature, Midnighter is more durable than an average human. Piercing damage is still as effective as it is on most, but he shows particular resistance to blunt force trauma. He’s walked away from high falls and has staggered away from being run over.
Healing Factor: Midnighter can heal much faster than an average human. This factor is not fast enough to come up during the duration of a typical fight, but he won’t stay down and out for long.
Combat Computer: Easily Midnighter’s greatest asset is his mental combat computer, which may make him seem to have a sort of precognition to the unlearned. He has computer hardwired into his neurons which supplement his already impressive speed and reaction time. The onboard computer allows him to run through combat situations thousands of millions of times with different permutations before he fights them -- Midnighter likes to say that if he
can win, he will. The computer also has sensors to detect electrical activity in his opponents brain to better predict and counter their moves.
Weaknesses: -EMPs will mess up Midnighter’s day. It will immediately shut out his onboard computer. He
has fought without it, but it’s a major handicap and he’s not used to going without.
-Bullets. He’s great and dodging them and on occasion deflecting them, but he has trouble with too much dakka at any one time.
-Instinct Fighters/Insane Opponents. His combat computer’s computational aptitude and brain scanning falls apart at unhinged opponents. If
they don’t know what they’re about to do, he won’t either.
-Fast Opponents. Anyone that thinks or can react faster than him is also a problem, as his computer will be unable to predict them.
-Psychics. If someone puts a whammy on his brain and his computer goes down, he’s in a heap of trouble.
Skills: Hand to Hand Combatant. Midnighter has exceptional training in hand to hand combat, to supplement his already impressive powers. He has shown particular aptitude with his twin nightsticks and bo staff.
Driver: Midnighter can operate most types of civilian vehicles, and is a certified pilot.
Stealth: Midnighter has some stealth aptitude, but he prefers rushing opponents and getting close and personal.
Appearance: Midnighter stands at a titanic 6’5” and weighs in at 170 pounds. He has something of an acrobat’s build -- his musculature is well defined, but not overpoweringly so. His shoulders and overall frame are a bit too large to be completely described by the name, but his nimbleness and speed make ‘acrobat’ a fitting title. Almost all of his body, spare his face and neck, are criss crossed with stretch marks and surgical scars; these marks are a direct result of his augmentation procedures. When unmasked he wears his short, brown hair loosely, with little care for its style beyond a basic ‘windswept’ look. He shaves regularly, but can sometimes be seen sporting stubble.
In terms of his costume, he wears almost all black; a long overcoat weaved with kevlar, a black bodysuit, black utility pouches, black half-mask, etc. The only part of his ensemble that stands out from his otherwise monotone palette is his chest armoring, covering most of either pect. It is silver, and prominently features a crescent moon icon.
BRIEF Bio: (I tried my best to keep it brief.)
Midnighter’s early life, as far as he can recall, consisted of long periods sitting in labs while scientists poked and prodded him while injecting him with as many exotic chemicals as they could find. He may have been there as early as birth, though he has no way of knowing -- He was a part of a cohort of about two hundred other children, involved in a Super Soldier program run by one Henry Bendix. His memories, along with the memories of any survivors of the program, seem to begin at around age ten.
Midnighter’s days consisted of round the clock procedures and laboratory testing. The augmentation was a slow and greuling procedure -- he’d receive daily injections, bolstering his growth and muscle mass
that much more each time to eventually allow him to reach super soldier potential, and ideally, go even further beyond -- by age thirteen he had the body of a full-grown Olympian athlete. In his nights and any off time Bendix could find in the augmentation regime were slotted with advanced classes in battle tactics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and history. Along with the other children, Midnighter was also subjected to rigorous battle training, usually with live rounds against expendable human trainers. A few of the children Midnighter trained with displayed Metahuman abilities, and he found that these children were rotated to a different schedule of some kind.
As the years drew on and Midnighter’s teens gave way to his early twenties, he was sorted into a fireteam alongside five other children and deployed to a number of so-called ‘Danger Zones’. Midnighter’s team was dropped into Bialya, in a bid to assassinate one Col. Rumaan Harjavti, the then-leader of the burgeoning nation. After a critical failure to infiltrate the Capitol building, resulting in the death of a team member, Midnighter was forced to call for exfiltration of himself and his team. Bendix’s people refused, and insisted Midnighter drive the team forward. After forty-eight grueling hours of nonstop combat, Midnighter alone arrived in the home of the dictator and completed his mission. Bendix’s refusal to pull the team out had cost four good men and women their lives, and Midnighter refused to be a party to it any longer -- he needed to plan a breakout.
But he was beaten to the punch -- Shortly after his mission debriefing, a metahuman codenamed Sun King escaped and compromised the facility. In a pitched battle against overwhelming odds, a handful of test subjects escaped the premises, the bodies of their brothers and sisters having been spent to ensure their escape against Bendix’s legions of goons.
In the following years, Midnighter would lead a tumultuous life, establishing an identity for himself as ‘Lucas Trent’. He used this identity primarily as a means of inquiry into what little information he had on the other escapees, in a hopeful attempt to reconnect and hunt down Bendix. It is during this time he truly developed the identity of the ‘Midnighter’. After learning that his actions in Bialya had resulted in the installation of a new dictator, the ‘Queen Bee’, he set out to undo his mistake, and interrogate the Queen for whatever she knew about Bendix. With a costume loosely inspired by the Bat-Man of Gotham(minus those ears, of course), Midnighter spent years in Bialya trying to get at Queen Bee alone -- every time he’d get close, he found himself warded away be her pheromones. During this time, Midnighter grew sympathetic to the plight of the Bialyan people; he broadened his scope from Bendix and his cadre to all elements of criminality that infested the Bialyan streets.
After his pilgrimage to Bialya, Midnighter spent a dozen-odd years traveling the world in search of information about the other survivors and Bendix himself, solving problems and annihilating criminals as he went. His string of murder and mayhem across the Middle-Eastern and European Countrysides did not go unnoticed. During a stint in Vlatava, Midnighter was attacked by the forces of Count Vertigo. The local dedicator assumed Midnighter was there for him, after hearing tell of the vigilantes work in Bialya. After massacring swathes of Vlatvian(?) soldiers, marching for Verito's stronghold, the League came down on him.
Midnighter would later profess that he put up a good fight, but those who can put up a ‘good fight’ against a Kryptonian are few and far between. The League didn't exactly oppose his attack on Vertigo, but they weren't keen to let him slaughter soldiers working for a paycheck to get to him. He was left to stew in a cell for six months, until the Batman came knocking. The Leaguers had resolved to take down the Queen Bee -- and no one knew Bialya better than Midnighter.
After the League’s successful takedown of Queen Bee, Midnighter found her sorely lacking in Bendix information. The mission wasn’t a total bust -- The League had, begrudgingly, cleared him of his crimes. He worked out a deal with them -- if they helped him hunt down Bendix, he’d adopt the Batman method of savage beating instead of his own Midnighter-patented Spine Ripping. The League ultimately agreed, and their professional relationship grew closer and closer. A particular favorite memory of Midnighter's from this time is when he was paired with Wonder Woman to resolve the Kasnian civil war for what seemed like the twentieth time. Amazonians, Midnighter noted, fight like no other humans alive.
Midnighter was called in to help fight Doomsday. As he was dropped in, his combat computer flared and warned him that his odds of victory were nigh impossible. Midnighter figured 'nigh' was good enough. He received four shattered limbs for his trouble, and got to see what some of his innards looked like. After the monster and the Kryptonian died, some of Midnighter's blood was administered to Superman to try to revive him, to no avail. At this point Midnighter was welcomed to the League with full membership, to try and pick up the pieces.
Story Arcs: All Along the Watchtower(JLU Mission): Midnighter and the rest of the League discover a massive approaching spacecraft -- easily large enough to cause an extinction level event. It’s up the League to see just what lurks aboard this massive Carrier...
House of the Rising Sun(Solo): Midnighter has been contacted by a woman calling herself Jenny Sparks, implying she has information regarding the man codenamed 'Sun King' responsible for his breakout.
War Pigs(Team-Up): Following up on a number of leads regarding the whereabouts of a group of escapees, Midnighter eventually discovers The Cohort -- A half-dozen survivors with his exact abilities. They too, hunt Bendix -- but they intend to raze Bludhaven as the start of their new campaign.
The Kooey Kooey Kooey Kablooey(Team-Up): Midnighter, Blue Beetle, and Booster Gold find themselves stuck on the South Pacific island of Kooey Kooey Kooey, during an active volcano eruption. It's up to them to save as many people as possible, find out who the hell caused this, and maybe check out that local casino...
London Calling(Solo/Team-Up): Midnighter finds himself travelling the world once more, and winds up in London[with or without a tag along or two]. There he comes across a group of 'superheroes' who call themselves The Elite. Midnighter sees a lot of himself in them, and that's probably why the League is pressuring him to shut them down...
Same Old Song and Dance(Solo): Midnighter has finally gotten the go-ahead from the League to go after Count Vertigo. They offered to send a team with him, but he insisted that it's grown personal. It's up to him to gleefully carve through any metahuman mercenaries the Count can throw at him.
Hell's Bells(Solo): Midnighter has finally identified one of Bendix's scientists -- Winslow Schott, who has since restyled himself as Toyman. He must make his way to the supervillain's base in Japan to see what he knows...
Supporting Characters: All Along The Watchtower - JLU Cast, The Blight
House of the Rising Sun - Apollo, Jenny Sparks
War Pigs - Bendix’s Surviving Super Soldiers, any interested players
The Kooey Kooey Kooey Kablooey - Blue Beetle, Booster Gold(assuming their players are interested), Major Disaster, Big Sir
London Calling - Any PC, Manchester Black, Coldcast, The Hat, and Menagerie
Same Old Song and Dance - Count Vertigo, Abra Kadabra, KGBeast, NKVDemon Thrill Devil, Mayfly, Deadline, Gunhawk & Bunny, Scarab(Maat Shadid), and I'll add more mercs that aren't too popular as I think of them.
Hell's Bells - Winslow Schott, Hiro Okumura
Secondary Character: Probably a version of the Flash or Jack Hawksmoor that reimagines them as a Century Baby of the 21st Century. They would, of course, be reduced in power level to be setting-appropriate.
Additional Notes: I understand that the way I’ve written this, Midnighter is
very powerful, but I figured I’d start high during the application process and work it down to an acceptable medium instead of starting too low and staying that way.
Also, writing this sheet out has opened my eyes to how
incredibly edgy Midnighter is, jeez.
The idea for the Kooey Kooey Kooey Kablooey is based on the plot of Club JLI(in which Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, and Kilowogg open their own casino on the living island), which I thought was hilarious.