Name: Jason Bao
Alias(s): Galahad, Alpha 1 Victor, EXCALIBUR-4
Age: 23
Affiliations: CIA Special Activities Division Project EXCALIBUR II (Formerly)
Factions: Underground Movement
Description:
Jason Bao is a young Asian man of average height with black hair, brown eyes, and harsh, angular features. Muscular and athletic, Jason's body is lean and fit. Generally wearing a well-tailored suit of outwardly average quality and a pair of fake glasses or sunglasses, Bao's appearance is cultivated to make him seem as average and unremarkable as possible. His fingerprints have been burned off via acid, and his eye color is modified by a pair of shaded contact lenses
Powers:
Vibration ManipulationJason's powers allow him to sense and control the vibration frequency of the objects that he touches. All matter in the world vibrates at a certain frequency--normally, this happens at the atomic level and isn't noticeable to human beings, but Jason's powers allow him to sense them that frequency and increase or decrease it at will. Theoretically speaking it would be possible for him to simulate Absolute Zero conditions in objects or cause massive earthquakes, but the amount of physical exertion this would take would be pretty much impossible. Still, Jason's power is flexible and has a variety of uses. As part of his training, Jason has memorized the level of resonance at which many common substances break apart, including concrete, steel, human flesh, etc. By touching that substance and inducing this level of vibration, Jason is capable of destruction on a relatively surgical scale against structures. His power can also be used in more brutish ways, including sending pulses of force through the air that slam into people and can deliver almost 250 pounds of force at his strongest, and causing localized earthquakes that can level a city block of unsupported buildings (but only mildly inconvenience people out of that range).
Jason's power's primary limitation is the amount of physical exertion it costs him--for whatever reason, his ability's demands on his body are incredibly intense, and using them makes him tire easily. Treatments he received as part of Project EXCALIBUR helped alleviate this to an extent, but doing something like causing a blockwide earthquake for more than a few minutes is still enough to cause him to almost collapse in exhaustion. Furthermore, Jason's powers are difficult to control--he tends to cause harm to himself when performing tougher actions like taking apart very sturdy structures, as the vibrations he causes tear apart his own body, causing things like fractures and internal bleeding/bruising in his arms that it can take a while to heal.
Skills:
-Trained stealth and espionage agent
-Speaks fluent Chinese and Korean
-Exceptionally skilled at close-quarters combat
-Firearms expert
-Does not feel pain
-Bodily chemical reactions have been retooled to optimize Jason for combat
-Reflexes, metabolism, and bone durability have been boosted by drug treatments
Flaws:
-Brain has been tampered with. A lot.
-Amnesia of life before 16
-High School kidnapdrop-out with associated level of education
-Heavy PTSD
-A bunch of psychological issues associated with his "training"
-Needs to take pills every week to maintain effectiveness
-Needs to take pills every month so his body doesn't reject his modifications and cause...bad things
-Needs a lot of food to stay energized
Equipment: Suits, glasses, a lot of untraceable bills of cash from his EXCALIBUR days, USP .45 pistol, serrated knife, various pills
Ranking: A
Brief History: Project EXCALIBUR II (There is no EXCALIBUR I, that's a ruse) was a blacker than black secret CIA project that was a predecessor of, and later competitor to, Project Genesis. EXCALIBUR II was structured around identifying and "recruiting" metahumans who could be plausibly disappeared from civilian life and molded into small teams of deniable wetworks operatives. Naturally, "recruiting" oftentimes meant some sort of kidnapping, which was what happened to Jason Bao.
Jason was the son of a Chinese father and a Korean mother living in Houston, and was fairly unremarkable up until his kidnapping by EXCALIBUR II II. When he was 16, he volunteered for a scientific experiment at a local university his mother worked at which was supposedly testing for genetic susceptibility for Parkinsons--in reality, this was an EXCALIBUR II front meant to identify promising test subjects. Jason tested positive and publicly died in a car crash a month later. EXCALIBUR II secretly took hold of him and brought him to a black site where he was subject to a series of tests meant to aggravate his body into manifesting his metahuman powers via causing high amounts of stress and trauma. After about a week, Jason's powers finally manifested and EXCALIBUR II got to work.
Unlike Project Genesis, EXCALIBUR II's goal was not to enhance the abilities of metahumans they captured--EXCALIBUR was happy to work with what it already had, believing that even minor metahuman powers would probably give their agents an edge over whatever they might be going up against. The main focus of their project was instead implementing a nigh-total psychological rebuild coupled with a regimen of chemical treatments that would transform people into deadly spec ops agents--EXCALIBUR subjects had their memories erased, their nervous system altered to prevent them from feeling pain or shock, and their bodily instincts like their fight of flight mechanisms modified to make them instinctively more effective at combat. After that, they were put through a harsh program of combat and espionage training for about two years while being administered regular drug treatments to enhance their combat reflexes and situational awareness, and to keep their previous bodily modifications stable. In the meantime, they were psychologically conditioned to maintain their loyalty to the Project and to prefer death to capture. In essence, the project created perfect assassins.
Jason Bao turned out to actually be one of the strongest metahumans that EXCALIBUR took in--they had fathered only three Class A metahuman operatives during their years of operation, and Jason was the first of these. As such, some special attention was paid to him in the form of certain special modifications--Jason's powers were initially very unstable and he almost killed himself on several occasions trying to use them. EXCALIBUR was forced to administer a combination of metabolism-enhancing and bone-enhancing drugs just to allow him to use his powers relatively safely. After this, learning to use these powers took up several extra years of training, and it wasn't until 2016 that Jason Bao was finally activated as EXCALIBUR-4, the 4th agent of the project, and given the designation "Galahad".
Galahad's first assignments were domestic--he was initially assigned to silently neutralize metahumans in the United States the government didn't feel comfortable having around but wasn't able to eliminate publicly. After several years of this, however, EXCALIBUR realized that their agents' talents were being wasted--silent assassinations didn't exactly usually give them an opportunity to utilize the full breadth of their powers given that they had to maintain secrecy throughout the entire affair. Therefore, the CIA and EXCALIBUR eventually turned their attentions outward, assigning Galahad and a team of two other metahumans, Lancelot and Percival, to foreign subterfuge operations--US enemies in Asia and the Middle East were developing metahuman programs of their own and the CIA had an expressed interest in making sure that didn't come to pass. For three years, Galahad and his two other team members, supervised by a mundane CIA operative designated Arthur, fulfilled this mandate effectively, destroying metahuman research facilities in Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Libya and leaving no survivors under the guise of some sort of internal rebellion.
Unfortunately, the reveal of Project Genesis put an end to Project EXCALIBUR's operations as well. EXCALIBUR was never revealed in the bombshell that dropped Genesis on the publicly, but the CIA was sufficiently spooked by the leak and subsequent legislation that it quickly moved to terminate EXCALIBUR II before any information on it could get out. Said termination included the liquidation of all EXCALIBUR operatives, for fear that they might compromise information of the project if they were simply deactivated. Galahad and his team, EXCALIBUR Alpha Victor, were ambushed by several dozen CIA SOG operatives on extraction via ship from assignment in North Korea, killing Arthur, Lancelot, and Percival. Galahad himself barely survived the incident, managing to get the upper hand on his attackers and kill them all, taking the boat back to South Korea and then raiding a EXCALIBUR black site that was hurriedly being closed up in rage, retrieving several years worth of pills and slaughtering everyone there and then disappearing into the crowds.
Having spent his entire life he could remember as a trained assassin for EXCALIBUR, Galahad found himself wandering without a purpose, something he was decidedly unused to, and he eventually just drifted back to the US, specifically LA, to return to familiar ground. His experiences with the termination of EXCALIBUR left him with a burning hatred of non-meta humanity over his betrayal, leading him to eventually join up with the Underground Movement to gain his revenge against all of society...
