"A good friend once told me that you need to meet each day like you're immortal. That nothing can kill you or keep you down. Sound familiar? Yeah, didn't think so."Y O U R A L I A S
| N A M E: |Nathan Kay aka Cloudchaser
■ YEAR-YEAR | In the Beginning
Nathan was born in the Canadian province of New Brunswick to a single mother that worked at a bank. It wasn't until he was a few years old that his mother realized he was different from other children. At the age of 3, he lacked the ability to see things very well. A doctor diagnosed him as being born blind. It was hard to deal with for his mother, but Nathan's life went on all the same as she did her best to support him. As Nathan grew older, it was determined he wasn't entirely blind, but was still close enough that he was heavily impaired. By the age of eight, he began to display signs of mutation as objects around him started floating. His mother told him he was a mutant, but never explained why she knew this so easily. From then on, Nathan's life was spent learning about his powers and discovering that his mutant genes were the source of his perception issues. It made things easier knowing he could use his powers to see better, but mutants were frowned upon, so once his eyes began to emit a white fog, things got harder on the already disadvantaged boy. Roughly a year after his powers were in full development, Nathan's mother put him in contact with some other people that she knew that were also mutants.
One day, he met three people who all had powers. Before then, he never met another mutant, but he learned a lot from them. To Nathan's eyesight, they looked nearly identical to his mother, as all four of them glowed a strange white color, where most people didn't. All of them talked for hours, and the three of them eventually mentioned that they were a "superhero team." Nathan had heard about them before, like the Avengers in the states, but he never thought he'd run into someone like that. They were called Blackhawk. The three were known to the outside world as Marble, Behelit, and Adamant. They used codenames to keep their identities secret, but Nathan had never heard of such a group. Meeting Blackhawk changed the trajectory of Nathan's life for better or worse, but to the discomfort of his mother.
Marble had the power to produce a handful of small spheres that he could use to teleport from one to another by setting them up. Each sphere was another point to shuffle people across an area with. Behelit had superhuman agility that let her scale buildings in seconds, and could retreat into a pocket dimension. Adamant had indestructible arms that could punch through solid steel without so much as a scratch. Compared to the near-blind telekinetic boy, his mother's friends looked like the stuff of legends. Their conversation spanned most of the day, but Nathan could remember Behelit pacing around rather anxiously for most of it, saying they needed to remember how long they were here. His mother seemed to share her concerns, and they had to go soon after. Marble gave Nathan a way to contact him, but specifically said not to tell his mother about it. He handed Nathan a folded up note with a phone number and a tiny green ball that glowed the same as him.
Shortly after Blackhawk left Nathan's home, the police showed up at his door asking rather intensely if he had seen a group of people that looked like his mother's friends. The police gave him a verbal description of four people rather than three, but before he could say anything, his mother told the cops that she saw them drive towards a nearby city, except they didn't drive anywhere. They vanished into thin air in front of Nathan half an hour before then. Nathan didn't fully understand what was happening at the time, but he had a suspicion that something was up, so he consulted the internet. Very slow and extensive google searches, read through an electronic braille pad, turned up very little about a group called Blackhawk, except for news reports saying they were in rather distant parts of the country at random times. One article said they were in San Fransisco when another said they were in Vancouver the next day. All that Nathan could gather was that something was odd about them. He tried to text Marble afterwards, but it took him days to read the phone number well enough that he could understand it.
■ 2001-2014 | Chance of a Lifetime
Two days after Nathan met Blackhawk, he woke up to the sound of yelling at roughly 3am. He flew down the stairs to see his mother in front of multiple dimly-glowing police officers pointing guns at her. One of them took a very callous shot at the young mutant who suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and missed slightly. That, however, was the point at which the floor seemed to erupt into the same pattern of light that Nathan's mother glowed with, and the floor became a wall. Nathan realized what knew deep down: His mother was also a mutant. She screamed for him to run, and the first thing he did was fly back up the stairs, scramble for his phone and desperately punch a message into his phone. Even after he managed to work out Marble's contact information, he only responded to Nathan every now and then, saying he rarely got service where he went. The message, a simple "We need help," went through, and less than five seconds passed before the Blackhawk trio was suddenly standing in his room. They all went downstairs to help his mother, and Adamant immediately started swinging at the police officers, completely unphased by their bullets. In the chaos, he heard Marble yell the word "Jotun," which his mother responded to. She told them to take him away from here, that Nathan "couldn't stay with her anymore."
Nathan was only 13 when this happened, but before he could even get a word in about what she meant or who Jotun was, his abstract vision was washed over with Marble's strange pattern, and he along with Marble, Behelit and Adamant were gone. In the blink of an eye, they were transported a hundred miles south towards the border of Canada leading into the state of Maine. The trio told Nathan everything. His mother used to be a part of Blackhawk under the name Jotun. She was a terrakinetic, and left them years ago on bittersweet terms when he was born. Blackhawk was wanted by the Canadian government, accusing them of treason and authorizing kill-on-sight orders on each of them. Blackhawk told Nathan that Jotun was more than capable of defending herself from those cops, but he couldn't stay with her anymore. Adamant told the kid that they all owed his mother a life-long favor for something she did for them in the past, and so he became one of them. Everything felt like a massive blur for the boy, effectively losing his only family member and being taken in by fugitive being the least of the things on his mind.
Nathan didn't have anywhere else to go, so he officially joined Blackhawk. From then on, he was known to the world as Cloudchaser.
■ 2014-2019 | High Above the Clouds
Blackhawk was a group hated by two separate governments, but loved by the people they helped. The group used teleportation to bounce from Canadian province to province, and American state to state in a matter of minutes. Some mutants in the world took to using their powers for evil, and Blackhawk made it their job to help people against such mutants as well as anyone who would do harm to the superpowered population. In the early days of mutants, hatred fueled the masses, and attacks on the small population were to be expected. Whenever Blackhawk heard of these assaults happening, they'd show up to stop it and protect the endangered. "Evil" mutants that posed a threat to everyone around them were met with four-to-one fights which Cloudchaser took part of. Adamant always hit the hardest, but Cloudchaser couldn't be touched. These fights typically resulted in people being saved and a certain "villain," as they called them, being beaten into the dirt for someone to contain. Propaganda spread about the infamous group, calling them terrorists who brutalized their own people, despite the government of both countries having little sympathy for mutants in the first place.
The next five years of Nathan's life were spent running alongside Blackhawk, who became his closest friends. He never heard from his mother again, and he only assumed the worst. Being 13 when he effectively went rogue in the eyes of two countries meant that he never finished, or even got used to high school, and being the only kid on the team made the difference more noticeable. It was just something he had to live with, since his educational potential was already compromised from birth due to his vison. Over the years, he learned how to use his powers to fly, and he quickly fell in love with soaring through the open sky, thousands of feet above the ground, faster than a train. Despite the chaotic circumstances of his childhood, and the fact that Blackhawk never stayed in one place for very long, Cloudchaser felt alive in every sense of the word. His trips into the states let him see a lot of the world that he wouldn't have any other way, and he had control of his life despite being visually impaired. Best of all, the boy was nothing short of a
hero. The public opinion of Blackhawk was always in flux, but everywhere they went, Cloudchaser was met with respect by people who heard the stories. In a world that scarcely knew mutants truly existed as an entire population, Blackhawk was talked about with the same level of sincerity as the Avengers in America or Alpha Flight in Canada. They went out of their way to avoid the attention of either team, as that level of publicity could have been detrimental to them and their ability to lose attention quick with Marble's power.
■ 2020-2021 | End of an Era
Cloudchaser received a text message saying, "It's me, Jotun. I know it's been a while, but I'm okay. I miss you." What followed was a conversation between the two, and eventually she said she wanted to see him again after all the years. The rest of Blackhawk felt suspicious of it, so they used a password to confirm it was really her. Behelit took the phone and asked, "Where did we all meet?" The response was, "The west coast, in Behelit's slipspace." The response was legit, so they planned to meet at a specified location. Two days of blinking across the country with Marble's power, across the northern border and into British Columbia later, and Blackhawk was coming home to somewhat familiar territory. They found the address and waited for Jotun to show up. To Cloudchaser's eyesight, the area they were in, a park in the early morning, was glowing with the use of a mutant power, but it didn't look like the pattern of his mother. The ground glowed with a pattern resembling thorns bristling outwards, like blades of grass that shivered in the wind. The park was completely empty, and it was noon. Things didn't add up, and Behelit was planning to drag everyone into her pocket dimension if things went wrong.
That was when they heard the guns.
A flash of red against the white of Cloudchaser's vision was the first sign that something was very, very wrong. He saw what looked like his mother's glow, but it was red. He never saw a mutant in anything other than bright white, a set of other shapes, other people emerged from behind trees and out of the ground. The sea of white needles changed to the tone of red, and before they knew it, Blackhawk was held at gunpoint by an armed squad of 20 soldiers. Someone spoke up and addressed the group, ordering their immediate surrender pending the threat of death. Adamant tried to get an explanation out of Jotun, asking her what was happening, but something wasn't right with her. She didn't respond. Her silhouette against Cloudchaser's eyes looked... limp. Every time he looked at a mutant, they were outlined in a unique geometric pattern that represented their powers. It highlighted their movements, and to Cloudchaser, that was just how he saw the world. His mother stood hunched over, with her head slouched down like she wasn't even aware of her surroundings. Her shape normally looked like white triangles swirling outwards into infinity, but now? She was a collective of still, crimson triangles that shook in jarring ways. Finally, the boy tried to talk to her, but upon hearing his voice, the red flickered white, and she screamed louder than anything he had heard.
The ground erupted into an earthquake, and shots were fired. Blackhawk instinctually engaged the soldiers in an all out fight. Their powers and lifelong teamwork against 20 guns. At virtually random intervals only signaled by movements of Adamant's arms or Behelit's facial expression, Marble teleported them across the chaotic battlefield into just the right positions to take soldiers out. The red glow that marked Jotun's presence was lost in the chaos, but by the end of the fighting, only one person was left standing out of everyone involved in the incident. Cloudchaser himself.
Adamant, Marble, Behelit, and Jotun were shot and killed along with the soldiers, leaving Cloudchaser alone. A year has passed, and he is still haunted by the bloodshed. He was left alone with no one to help him along in the world. So, being wracked with grief after two weeks of hiding in the area, Cloudchaser flew up into the clouds, picked a direction, and simply drifted off to whatever was ahead of him. He found a place they stayed at regularly, and cleaned out every bit of money and food he could find, and then got back on the move. A year later, and the legend of Blackhawk faded into obscurity following the death of what they considered "every member." Nathan flew past public vigils mourning the loss of the heroes, but kept himself secret among the crowds with sunglasses and a beat-up hat. Along the way, he ran into two people calling themselves Cassandra and Karine. Against all odds, they knew exactly who he was and offered him a place at Instituto Nova. Nathan took it, but asked them not to tell others who he was. He would tackle that on his own time.
| S U P E R P O W E R S: |■ Power 1: Power Vision
Cloudchaser sees the world in an abstract way. To his eyes, the world is made of color and power. Mutants and the traces of their powers stand out to his eyes, which means he only has to look at a person to tell if they’re a mutant. He can follow “trails” that are left behind when powers are used, but the ability to see most of anything else is all but lost on him. Nathan can see shapes but finer details are fuzzy to the point that, for all intents and purposes, Nathan is considered blind. Nathan perceives the world in hazy outlines, and is unable to reliably distinguish colors from one another without focusing intensely.
His eyes glow white, and emit fog when they're open. There is no way for him to turn this off, so he tends to stand out.
■ Power 2: Telekinesis
Nathan can exert an invisible force on the environment to envelop things to push or pull them. When he uses this power, it's possible to feel a push from a certain direction. Nathan's telekinesis can be physically observed in the form of feeling something pushing against your skin, and to anyone else, this is an invisible presence, but to him it's like solid light is being twisted in the air. Nathan can see the presence of his telekinesis in the form of white energy, which allows him to accurately see how it is being used. This power allows him to fly and set of a sort of forcefield to block something. Nathan can use the visibility of this power as a "flashlight" to help highlight his surroundings in case his eyesight is particularly bad in a given situation.
The problem with Nathan's telekinesis is that he doesn't use it in very fine ways, he'll often find himself using it to shove a door open forcefully rather than simply nudge it open, or rattle his environment a bit too harshly to see where something is. It can also be somewhat disruptive to others if he isn't careful.
| H A B I L I T I E S: |■ Reading Braille
■ Mutant-to-Mutant Combat
■ Flying Like Superman
■ Speaks French
■ Cooking
■ Guitar Skills| M I S C. N O T E S: |■ Nathan is incapable of driving a car, for obvious reasons.
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