Lychinus, the Guardian
Name: Lychinus
Alias: Guardian (He hardly uses this, but his allies insisted that he needed a more superhero-y name.)
Species: Angel
Age: Unknown, ancient
Occupation: Superhero
AppearanceLychinus has a deceiving outward appearance, and an underlying form that can be considered his true form. His true form is a featureless humanoid figure of incandescent white, a body made entirely of solidified energy. He is about six feet tall and has masculine proportions. Any other features – face, skin, hair – are completely absent, as if he were a mannequin made of pure light.
His outward appearance is a secondary layer over his true form. This layer is likewise made of solidified energy, though it is vastly more malleable than his inner form. This material serves to disguise him, adapting his appearance into something more easily acceptable to the people in his environment. His default appearance is that of a man, broad-shouldered and muscular, with bronzed skin and flowing brown hair. He can change his appearance by concentrating on it, but he doesn’t have the fine control needed to believably mimic an existing person. Regardless of his form, his silver eyes remain as a testament that he isn’t human.
His disguise can likewise create clothing, usually modern, everyday clothes. These look and feel like normal clothing, but are technically a part of him, and thus have the same benefits as the rest of his body. He can quickly reshape his clothing by concentrating on it. Taking the clothing off causes it to disintegrate.
Lychinus refers to his outward appearance as his flesh suit, totally oblivious to how creepy that sounds.
PersonalityLychinus’ personality can be best described as alien. He is well-intentioned, friendly even, but he is not human, and has serious trouble understanding them. All the finer points of being human go right over his head, like sarcasm or romance. Or the fact that humans need sleep and you can’t just show up at their window in the middle of the night. He tries to understand, he just isn’t very good at it yet.
Despite his idiosyncrasies and his seemingly stoic behaviour, Lychinus has a strong moral compass and a passion for protecting the innocent. While he doesn’t really understand the feeling of losing a loved one, he knows that no one should have to go through that. A remnant of the protective nature with which his creator endowed him, perhaps.
AbilitiesPhysical Abilities. Lychinus’ inhuman body provides him many boons. He has the super strength to lift up to 30 tons, and to sprint across the ground at 200 miles per hour. His endurance is almost unlimited unless exerting himself near full capacity. His reaction times are ten times faster than a human, which he uses mainly to avoid crashing into unwanted targets when travelling at high speed (see flight). The agility of his body isn’t as high as his reflexes, so he’s unlikely to snatch a bullet out of the air.
His flesh suit has five times the durability of steel, and his core thirty times. This means that powerful attacks tend to destroy his disguise long before they deal any lasting damage. His flesh suit regenerates very rapidly, however. If completely destroyed, for instance by an explosion, it will reform from nothing in about a minute. His luminous core regenerates much more slowly, taking up to several days to restore a grievous wound. The lack of a biological physiology makes him mostly invulnerable to various effects that would harm a human, like poison, cold, bleeding, etc. Despite not having a heart or brain, grievous damage to his head or chest are the most reliable way to kill him, since that will fatally disrupt his energy field.
Flight. At will, Lychinus can cause a pair of radiant white wings to sprout from his back, made of the same material as his core. The shape of these wings is more symbolic than anything: he doesn’t actually flap the wings to fly. Rather, the wings serve to generate a kinetic field around him that allows him to hover in the air and propel himself at great speed. He can utilize this speed in sudden thrusts, accelerating to about half the speed of sound in the blink of an eye, as if he were fired from an invisible cannon. He can likewise halt his movement or change direction very suddenly, as if conservation of momentum didn’t apply to him. If he continues to fly without any sudden turns, he can further accelerate, reaching three times the speed of sound after about 10 seconds.
True Sight. While his eyes and ears are no better than a perceptive human, Lychinus has an additional sense. He can sense the life force of all living beings within a hundred miles from him. This includes humans, animals, plants, and anything else. He can technically sense bacteria, but since these are everywhere they tend to get filtered out, the same way that you don’t register the taste of your own mouth. Beings of a notably different nature, like plants, horses and humans, are distinguishable at first glance. Beings of the same species “look” the same unless inspected more closely. Lychinus can learn to recognize familiar individuals after enough exposure to their unique aura. Beings with a great amount of power, magical or otherwise, are recognizable by their stronger auras.
Energy Beams. Lychinus can fire destructive beams of energy from his hands or eyes. People tend to call them lasers, but that doesn’t really cover it. They’re actually directed projections of heat and kinetic energy, which ionize and propel the air molecules along their path. Through a combined application of heat and force, the beams can burst through concrete and melt through steel with ease. Targets resistant to the heat may still be violently propelled back by the impact. These incandescent white beams are about a foot in diameter and travel at the speed of a bullet.
Energy Structures. Lychinus can draw part of his energy reserves out of himself and shape it into a physical form, similar to the material that makes up his body. He can create something simple, like a sword, in about a second. Larger constructs, like a protective wall, can be made with more time and effort. By default, these structures have the same durability as his flesh suit (though they always look white and radiant). With a greater time and energy expenditure, he can instead create them with the same durability as his core. The structures remain in existence as long as Lychinus maintains a degree of concentration on them. When he dismisses them, he reabsorbs most of the energy used in creating them, unless the item was destroyed or severely damaged beforehand.
Sunlight Dependency. All of Lychinus’ superhuman abilities are fuelled by an internal reserve of energy. This energy is regained not by eating or sleeping, but by absorbing energy in the form of sunlight. Other light sources will give him a small amount of sustenance, but are vastly less efficient. If he somehow went without exposure to light for a long time, he would gradually weaken, and eventually die. This is of little relevance to a fight normally, but it can be a weakness in certain niche scenarios. If it’s night time and Lychinus is already weakened by a difficult fight, he will remain weakened until sunrise, unable to regain his energy without exposure to a great amount of light.
In addition to passively absorbing light all day to refill his reserves, he can also actively absorb it to lighten the energy cost of using his abilities. When he heavily exerts himself (by flying really fast, using his energy beams, etc.), he will actively drain light from the area around him, causing it to turn dimmer. This energy is then immediately directed into the activity in question, reducing the amount of energy that must be drained from his reserves. As such, Lychinus’ stamina runs out about 30% faster at night, or in areas without sunlight.
HistoryLychinus’ past is shrouded in mystery, because he himself has lost most of his memories. What is known, mostly from ancient occult texts, is that a long time ago on Earth, a group of powerful beings came into existence. Where exactly they came from is unknown, but it is speculated that they were created by an even greater force, one that might have later become known as God to various human cultures. The original name for these beings is lost, so they are now referred to as angels, for their striking resemblance to the biblical namesake. These angels were once the protectors of Earth, and Lychinus was one of them.
But the protectors’ reign was threatened in the fourteenth century, when a cosmic being known as Noxus the Defiler came to Earth. In addition to killing half the European population with what was later rationalized as the bubonic plague, the Defiler corrupted the angels’ minds and set them against one another. The details of this conflict are lost to the ages, but the aftermath is evident. Some of the angels were slain, while the others were incapacitated in a near-death coma, hidden away in the corners of the Earth for centuries. The Defiler eventually left the Earth, perhaps driven away, or perhaps of his own accord.
With the angels’ presence rendered moot, they eventually faded into legend. Their absence lasted until the 21st century, when a stirring of power, perhaps caused by the growing prominence of superhuman beings, awakened a trio of angels from their slumber. They were Chalybs, the Angel of Steel, Ustrina, the Angel of Fire, and Lychinus, the Angel of Light. But the three were not the same as before. Whatever trauma they had faced had shattered their memories. Confused and without purpose, the three went their separate ways.
Ustrina was driven mad by the damage that had been done to her psyche. After a streak of murderous outbursts, she was stopped by the new defenders of Earth and driven away into the void of space. Chalybs was neither mad nor evil, but he found the new rulers of Earth to be weak and incompetent, and intended to take their place. He became one of Earth’s newest and greatest villains, amassing power and influence in hiding until the time is right to cease control. Lychinus, on the other hand, was found by the new defenders of Earth early on. His good nature was still intact, so he accepted their offer to join them, retaking his role as defender of the Earth, while seeking for answers about the destruction and return of the angels.
