Post by Cordite on May 8, 2009 10:11:13 GMT -5
Supervillian alias: Cordite
Gender/Sex: Male
Age: 17
Height: 5'4"
Physique: Slim, pale.
Costume description: Cordite appears as a man dressed in a blue-and-black body suit that appears to be composed of overlapping flexible polymer plates of armor. His helmet completely encloses his head and hugs his skull. It is featureless and flat, aside from seven small sensor apertures that appear in its face. These sensor apertures can be seen, with some variation, throughout Cordite's suit, along with several hard nubs that appear to be plugs of some kind. There is no emblem.
Powers/Abilities:
Pseudo Techno-organic assimilation and superior mental processing capability.
Through concentration, Cordite may sprout, from anywhere on his body, what appear to be silvery 'roots' from his skin. Utilizing these roots, he can partially assimilate himself with mechanical objects, from guns, to cars, to plumbing. This power was not inborn, but was added as a result of the HECATONCHIRE augmentation program.
Cordite's immense capability for parallel processing and multitasking, and by extension, his immense natural intelligence, is, however, inborn. Cordite possesses the capability to fire dozens of weapons systems in battery and volley, perceive out of multiple sensor systems without disorientation, while simultaneously piloting a vehicle. When wearing his suit, known as the Carapace, this multitasking ability multiplies, as well as allowing him to possess a nearly 360 degree field of vision (the result of the sensors planted throughout his suit). The suit also acts as body armor, protecting him from rifle caliber threats (but not heavier antimateriel rounds), and increases his strength such that he may carry a half a ton of equipment.
Cordite is limited by several factors.
First, in order to assimilate something, he must be able to enter its internal workings. Furthermore, Cordite is still human, and does not think digitally. He cannot 'upload' his consciousness into a computer, nor can he use his roots to hack. At best, his roots give off crude electrical signals, which only equipment designed for him can respond to. In other words, Cordite can mostly only assimilate mechanical objects, digitally run ones like fly-by-wire planes or computer fired guns require special adaptations to successfully assimilate.
Second, Cordite follows conservation of mass. In extending his roots, he converts muscle and internal viscera into his metal extensions. In doing so, he sacrifices the use of whatever tissue he converted. This means there are some things he cannot convert. He cannot convert his lungs, heart or brain, because that would mean death, and he cannot convert his skeleton, because it is not a soft enough tissue. He can convert other organs, such as kidneys or liver--- temporarily, but he risks long term damage in maintaining such an advanced state of assimilation. While he can stretch his own tissue into miles of wiring and vines, this is a risky proposition, and he prefers to use the built in liquid metal supply in his Carapace instead of his own body.
Third, Cordite is physically weak, weaker than an ordinary human. To fire a large bundle of assimilated weapons alone, he must generally brace them on the ground, rendering him immobile, or use a smaller group of weapons, in order to move. With the Carapace, this gets a little better, but his strength does not approach that of more endowed supers.
Home City: Mercury City, currently Walsh(temporarily taking a break)
Citizen Alias: Andrew Cheung
Backstory:
Andrew Cheung was born an underweight and undernourished infant to impoverished immigrant parents. His doctors did not give him a hopeful lease on life when they first looked at him, and predicted chronic shortness of breath and physical illnesses in his life to come. Unable to shoulder the burden of another child, especially one so needy and weak, Cheung's parents entered him into a US state adoption agency, after which he was entered into an orphanage.
There, he stayed for three years, until his immense intelligence and capability for multitasking and spatial thinking attracted the eye of the then-shadowy VEIL government agency (Vital Enforcement and Intelligence Laboratories).
Interested in his capabilities, VEIL kidnapped Andrew, using a 'terrorist bombing' of the orphanage as a cover-up for his disappearance. Along with countless other talented children, VEIL entered Andrew in the unambiguously unethical VISCUS program, a military program designed to produce a coordinator capable of handling the usage of the largest single military investment the United States had seen.
The construction USS Midway, the first and only in the line of the enormous Midway class battleship-carrier hybrids, was organized and produced by the military division of EGOcorp, EGOarms, in a lucrative multi-billion dollar contract that was without a doubt awarded not due to the usefulness of the excessively large warship-- two whole miles long-- but due to the string-pulling of ex-generals in both EGOarms and government institutions like VEIL and the Department of Defense. The ship, capable of delivering devastating railgun barrages, short and long range missile fire, and fielding hundreds of unmanned supersonic stealth bombers and fighters, was largely panned, from the start, by a rightfully skeptical public as more an exercise in phallic imagery than a sensible government project.
For one thing, no crew and no captain could adequately control the entire thing. There were simply too many weapons systems, too much information, too much stuff in general for any ordinary human to handle, the latency between reports made dry-runs of the ship's operations too slow. Normal carrier groups were proven to be far more efficient.
Desperate to find a way to make the Midway ships click with the public and with the consternating President, VEIL launched the VISCUS program.
Drilled for four years on a constant regimen of advanced mathematics and engineering, far beyond a graduate level, as well as tactics, strategy, and logistics, 80% of VISCUS 'recruits' died of overwork, abuse, or were lost to insanity and suicide. Cheung was among the few who survived this early stage of the program, and was left mostly mentally intact, at that.
Then came a breakthrough. A Dr. Akatsuki, a VEIL scientist with few moral platitudes, discovered the technology behind what would become the basis for the HECATONCHIRE augmentation, and, in a two year process, applied it to the remaining 20% of the originally thousand strong group. Only one boy survived. The rest were twisted, consumed, or torn apart by the augmentation.
Cheung, the lone survivor, felt something he'd never experienced before, for he'd known nothing else-- hate. The agony of the augmentation turned him against his masters, and for another five years his resentment festered.
Then came the day of the christening. Cheung, placed within the interface-chamber of the USS Midway for the first time, was ordered to shove off into the harbor of Mercury City, as a part of its christening celebration. Nobody knew, of course, of the tortured soul behind its helm, and it was perhaps this unknowing that pushed Cheung over the edge. He fired his weapons into the city, launched his planes, and in his wrath created the incident that would come to be known as the Mercury Bay Massacre. After an entire week of fire, the military finally destroyed the wayward Midway, and the shadowy actions of VEIL were revealed in a massive public furor. The existence of Andrew Cheung, the Midway’s biological core, was never revealed, however, and Dr. Akatsuki and many VEIL operatives were never tried, and many received cushy jobs as professors at universities or received contracting works in other fields. To this day, the wreck of the Midway remains in Mercury Bay, too large to be removed (though it is thoroughly disarmed at this point).
Cheung, however, survived, and burning with resentment, he set forth with a new name-- Cordite, the substance that propelled bullets. Operating online as a gunrunner, Cordite slowly amassed arms and made a name for himself robbing banks and destroying EGOcorp labs, until one day, he vanished. The FBI had no idea where he'd went, nor did any other government agency.
Andrew had wanted to try his had at an ordinary life, and now, 17 years old, Cheung is a nondescript, painfully shy highschooler enrolled in highschool in Walsh.....
Cordite's alter-ego, Andrew Cheung, is not the same as the Andrew Cheung that was abducted into the VISCUS program. Here, attending high school in Walsh, Cordite is simply Andrew Cheung, the painfully shy, haltingly speaking engineering nerd who lives alone on an allowance from his parents, who work abroad.
Cheung's parents are divorced rich industrialists who do administrative work in Africa and Japan, and therefore send him money every so often to keep him afloat as he receives an education.
At school, he receives top marks in math and sciences, but struggles with English and social studies. He is unsociable and keeps to himself, though he is also nondescript enough to avoid being bullied as well.
Unbeknownst to most of his peers, who never speak more than a passing word to him, Cheung is living as a weary and tired Cordite in disguise, a basement laboratory filled with weapons no more than a few flights of steps from his living room, his Carapace armor hanging in his closet....
Other:
Resources--
As a gunrunner and supervillain, Cordite possesses several lairs, as well as many more safehouses from which he operates. These, even the lairs, are small, designed to be acceptable losses in the event of discovery by the police, or a do-gooder. Inside most are well stocked armories and laboratories, as well as precision equipment and supplies that Cordite uses to repair the Carapace, a suit of his own creation, and to rearm. His stockpile of supplies and equipment is great, as Cordite has enjoyed a lucrative career in the few years he has operated as a public enemy.
Personality—
As Andrew Cheung, Cordite is socially inept, awkward, and shy—a result of the lack of socializing in his brutal childhood. He is a shoddy liar, and escapes detection not by glibness or a silver tongue, but by hefty preparation and meticulous carefulness.
He considers himself a principled person. Unbeknownst to the general public, Cordite greatly regrets his outburst at Mercury Bay, the devastation of which he saw first hand as he escaped, under cover of the irradiated nuclear smoke of the burning Midway. As his masters had never intended for him to ever see more than four people, they had not gone through the trouble of stamping out his sense of empathy, and it dug into him all the more keenly as a result of his loneliness.
Cordite is not, however, above killing men in uniform. In his raids, outside of the Mercury Bay incident, he’s claimed the lives of dozens of security guards, police officers, and military contractors who have stood in his way. That’s without counting the numerous EGOcorp employees he’s killed out of sheer disgust for them, or the half dozen low-level superheros he’s offed in his career. He makes a point, however, to avoid killing women and children, a vow he has been shown to go to extreme lengths to ensure.
Cordite is extraordinarily wrathful toward those he deems to be players in the shadows, and seeks to hunt down every ex-employee of VEIL and kill them--- preferably slowly.
Gender/Sex: Male
Age: 17
Height: 5'4"
Physique: Slim, pale.
Costume description: Cordite appears as a man dressed in a blue-and-black body suit that appears to be composed of overlapping flexible polymer plates of armor. His helmet completely encloses his head and hugs his skull. It is featureless and flat, aside from seven small sensor apertures that appear in its face. These sensor apertures can be seen, with some variation, throughout Cordite's suit, along with several hard nubs that appear to be plugs of some kind. There is no emblem.
Powers/Abilities:
Pseudo Techno-organic assimilation and superior mental processing capability.
Through concentration, Cordite may sprout, from anywhere on his body, what appear to be silvery 'roots' from his skin. Utilizing these roots, he can partially assimilate himself with mechanical objects, from guns, to cars, to plumbing. This power was not inborn, but was added as a result of the HECATONCHIRE augmentation program.
Cordite's immense capability for parallel processing and multitasking, and by extension, his immense natural intelligence, is, however, inborn. Cordite possesses the capability to fire dozens of weapons systems in battery and volley, perceive out of multiple sensor systems without disorientation, while simultaneously piloting a vehicle. When wearing his suit, known as the Carapace, this multitasking ability multiplies, as well as allowing him to possess a nearly 360 degree field of vision (the result of the sensors planted throughout his suit). The suit also acts as body armor, protecting him from rifle caliber threats (but not heavier antimateriel rounds), and increases his strength such that he may carry a half a ton of equipment.
Cordite is limited by several factors.
First, in order to assimilate something, he must be able to enter its internal workings. Furthermore, Cordite is still human, and does not think digitally. He cannot 'upload' his consciousness into a computer, nor can he use his roots to hack. At best, his roots give off crude electrical signals, which only equipment designed for him can respond to. In other words, Cordite can mostly only assimilate mechanical objects, digitally run ones like fly-by-wire planes or computer fired guns require special adaptations to successfully assimilate.
Second, Cordite follows conservation of mass. In extending his roots, he converts muscle and internal viscera into his metal extensions. In doing so, he sacrifices the use of whatever tissue he converted. This means there are some things he cannot convert. He cannot convert his lungs, heart or brain, because that would mean death, and he cannot convert his skeleton, because it is not a soft enough tissue. He can convert other organs, such as kidneys or liver--- temporarily, but he risks long term damage in maintaining such an advanced state of assimilation. While he can stretch his own tissue into miles of wiring and vines, this is a risky proposition, and he prefers to use the built in liquid metal supply in his Carapace instead of his own body.
Third, Cordite is physically weak, weaker than an ordinary human. To fire a large bundle of assimilated weapons alone, he must generally brace them on the ground, rendering him immobile, or use a smaller group of weapons, in order to move. With the Carapace, this gets a little better, but his strength does not approach that of more endowed supers.
Home City: Mercury City, currently Walsh(temporarily taking a break)
Citizen Alias: Andrew Cheung
Backstory:
Andrew Cheung was born an underweight and undernourished infant to impoverished immigrant parents. His doctors did not give him a hopeful lease on life when they first looked at him, and predicted chronic shortness of breath and physical illnesses in his life to come. Unable to shoulder the burden of another child, especially one so needy and weak, Cheung's parents entered him into a US state adoption agency, after which he was entered into an orphanage.
There, he stayed for three years, until his immense intelligence and capability for multitasking and spatial thinking attracted the eye of the then-shadowy VEIL government agency (Vital Enforcement and Intelligence Laboratories).
Interested in his capabilities, VEIL kidnapped Andrew, using a 'terrorist bombing' of the orphanage as a cover-up for his disappearance. Along with countless other talented children, VEIL entered Andrew in the unambiguously unethical VISCUS program, a military program designed to produce a coordinator capable of handling the usage of the largest single military investment the United States had seen.
The construction USS Midway, the first and only in the line of the enormous Midway class battleship-carrier hybrids, was organized and produced by the military division of EGOcorp, EGOarms, in a lucrative multi-billion dollar contract that was without a doubt awarded not due to the usefulness of the excessively large warship-- two whole miles long-- but due to the string-pulling of ex-generals in both EGOarms and government institutions like VEIL and the Department of Defense. The ship, capable of delivering devastating railgun barrages, short and long range missile fire, and fielding hundreds of unmanned supersonic stealth bombers and fighters, was largely panned, from the start, by a rightfully skeptical public as more an exercise in phallic imagery than a sensible government project.
For one thing, no crew and no captain could adequately control the entire thing. There were simply too many weapons systems, too much information, too much stuff in general for any ordinary human to handle, the latency between reports made dry-runs of the ship's operations too slow. Normal carrier groups were proven to be far more efficient.
Desperate to find a way to make the Midway ships click with the public and with the consternating President, VEIL launched the VISCUS program.
Drilled for four years on a constant regimen of advanced mathematics and engineering, far beyond a graduate level, as well as tactics, strategy, and logistics, 80% of VISCUS 'recruits' died of overwork, abuse, or were lost to insanity and suicide. Cheung was among the few who survived this early stage of the program, and was left mostly mentally intact, at that.
Then came a breakthrough. A Dr. Akatsuki, a VEIL scientist with few moral platitudes, discovered the technology behind what would become the basis for the HECATONCHIRE augmentation, and, in a two year process, applied it to the remaining 20% of the originally thousand strong group. Only one boy survived. The rest were twisted, consumed, or torn apart by the augmentation.
Cheung, the lone survivor, felt something he'd never experienced before, for he'd known nothing else-- hate. The agony of the augmentation turned him against his masters, and for another five years his resentment festered.
Then came the day of the christening. Cheung, placed within the interface-chamber of the USS Midway for the first time, was ordered to shove off into the harbor of Mercury City, as a part of its christening celebration. Nobody knew, of course, of the tortured soul behind its helm, and it was perhaps this unknowing that pushed Cheung over the edge. He fired his weapons into the city, launched his planes, and in his wrath created the incident that would come to be known as the Mercury Bay Massacre. After an entire week of fire, the military finally destroyed the wayward Midway, and the shadowy actions of VEIL were revealed in a massive public furor. The existence of Andrew Cheung, the Midway’s biological core, was never revealed, however, and Dr. Akatsuki and many VEIL operatives were never tried, and many received cushy jobs as professors at universities or received contracting works in other fields. To this day, the wreck of the Midway remains in Mercury Bay, too large to be removed (though it is thoroughly disarmed at this point).
Cheung, however, survived, and burning with resentment, he set forth with a new name-- Cordite, the substance that propelled bullets. Operating online as a gunrunner, Cordite slowly amassed arms and made a name for himself robbing banks and destroying EGOcorp labs, until one day, he vanished. The FBI had no idea where he'd went, nor did any other government agency.
Andrew had wanted to try his had at an ordinary life, and now, 17 years old, Cheung is a nondescript, painfully shy highschooler enrolled in highschool in Walsh.....
Cordite's alter-ego, Andrew Cheung, is not the same as the Andrew Cheung that was abducted into the VISCUS program. Here, attending high school in Walsh, Cordite is simply Andrew Cheung, the painfully shy, haltingly speaking engineering nerd who lives alone on an allowance from his parents, who work abroad.
Cheung's parents are divorced rich industrialists who do administrative work in Africa and Japan, and therefore send him money every so often to keep him afloat as he receives an education.
At school, he receives top marks in math and sciences, but struggles with English and social studies. He is unsociable and keeps to himself, though he is also nondescript enough to avoid being bullied as well.
Unbeknownst to most of his peers, who never speak more than a passing word to him, Cheung is living as a weary and tired Cordite in disguise, a basement laboratory filled with weapons no more than a few flights of steps from his living room, his Carapace armor hanging in his closet....
Other:
Resources--
As a gunrunner and supervillain, Cordite possesses several lairs, as well as many more safehouses from which he operates. These, even the lairs, are small, designed to be acceptable losses in the event of discovery by the police, or a do-gooder. Inside most are well stocked armories and laboratories, as well as precision equipment and supplies that Cordite uses to repair the Carapace, a suit of his own creation, and to rearm. His stockpile of supplies and equipment is great, as Cordite has enjoyed a lucrative career in the few years he has operated as a public enemy.
Personality—
As Andrew Cheung, Cordite is socially inept, awkward, and shy—a result of the lack of socializing in his brutal childhood. He is a shoddy liar, and escapes detection not by glibness or a silver tongue, but by hefty preparation and meticulous carefulness.
He considers himself a principled person. Unbeknownst to the general public, Cordite greatly regrets his outburst at Mercury Bay, the devastation of which he saw first hand as he escaped, under cover of the irradiated nuclear smoke of the burning Midway. As his masters had never intended for him to ever see more than four people, they had not gone through the trouble of stamping out his sense of empathy, and it dug into him all the more keenly as a result of his loneliness.
Cordite is not, however, above killing men in uniform. In his raids, outside of the Mercury Bay incident, he’s claimed the lives of dozens of security guards, police officers, and military contractors who have stood in his way. That’s without counting the numerous EGOcorp employees he’s killed out of sheer disgust for them, or the half dozen low-level superheros he’s offed in his career. He makes a point, however, to avoid killing women and children, a vow he has been shown to go to extreme lengths to ensure.
Cordite is extraordinarily wrathful toward those he deems to be players in the shadows, and seeks to hunt down every ex-employee of VEIL and kill them--- preferably slowly.