• Michelangelo Murphy Maddox I, II & III, villain, hero and researcher (part-time for TALOS), well-known
• All three of the Mads have two powers, often mistaken as one. Suffice to say, they are “mad scientists”, although the first Mad specialized in biological creations, the second was far more interested in robotics and the youngest has inherited the genius of his forefathers and applied it all to medicine.
  • The first power is the Intuition meta-trait, Mechanic subclass. The Intuition trait is a psychic trait, partly related to Precognition, allowing an instinctive grasp on a certain subject. Mechanic subclass refers to those gadgeteer geniuses who make what they make my mutant esper insight.
  • The second power is the Artificer meta-trait, a reality warping power. It allows one to create things that would violate natural laws so long as the maker has a working theory as to how, even if that theory is complete bunk. The more natural laws an “artifact” violates, the more likely it is to fail or go haywire, possibly in a cataclysmic way in either way.
  • As one might imagine, having both of these powers is somewhat frustrating, not to mention taxing on the mind as insight into the inter-workings of reality freely mix with unreal fever dreams. (As a result, all three Mads have difficult to touch minds.) It becomes an exercise in frustration in testing which of their creations are duplicable by someone else or are power by a field of twisted reality.
• All three mads have managed to procure some method of youth, #1 by biochemical engineering, #2 by mostly being a robot at this point and #3 by being in his early thirties with some healthy living. As a result, they all look the same, you would suspect that they are brothers. Caucasian, thin, crazy red hair that refuses to be tamed and… those eyes. Multicolored, multilayered rings of irises, that expand and contract when they are in the throes of creation. All three also favor labcoats.
• Personality:
  • Mr. Mad 1 is bombastic as all hell. He makes grand entrances, makes speeches and performs genetic experiments for funzies. He says he does it for science, but he’s actually just a sadist. Back in his youth, he’d lead his monstrous creation from the front but became more shut-in as he aged.
  • Mr. Mad 2 is here for HIGH ADVENTURE. If it weren’t for his strong moral compass, and different aptitudes, you wouldn’t be able to tell apart father and son. He really does seem to have a passion for the science, but also appears to be a thrill seeker.
  • Mr. Mad 3 is basically Dr. House. He has very little of the joy or dramatics his forefathers display. He’s sarcastic and sullen. In the throes of creation, he seems enraged rather than enraptured.
  • Yeah, I know, I’m a little blank on these guys. Maybe I’ll write more in the future.
• The first Mr. Mad came unto the scene right after WWII, terrorizing his way across Europe with an army of monster, usually made from the people he capture. At first he was pegged as a left-over Nazi scientist, but when they finally caught up to the guy it turned out he was American. He evaded authorities there and smuggled himself back to the States. There, he popped back up every now and again, because one of his experiments escape or he let it loose for testing, he needed some material or money, or he was bored.
  • So in the early 50’s he had a son, possibly a clone. In the mid-60’s, his son had a “rebellious phase” where he messed about with robotics and heroics. Maddox Sr. couldn’t decide which was worse. Junior never grew out of this phase at all, taking upon himself his father’s moniker to “clear the family name”, and setting about a permanent career of super-heroics, becoming a thorn in his father’s side.
  • In the mid-80’s, Mr. Mad 2 had a brief affair with a super villainess that he totally swears he was trying to reform. She abandons him with the baby, who appears to be a xerox clone of his father, possibly due to Sr’s genetic tampering. Michelangelo Murphy Maddox III proves to be nearly as rebellious as his father, refusing to muck about with all this cape-and-spandex malarkey. He wants to help people, yes, but his place is in the laboratory, not duking it out on the streets. Despite actually EARNING a doctorate, unlike pa or grandpa ever did, he is still called Mr. Mad 3 by many, which he bears with grumbling. Partly to assuage his father, Michelangelo attached himself to TALOS, doing research work for them while funding his own projects in medical miracles.
  • At some point, Mr. Mad 1 became obsessed with mysticism and the occult. He never truly touched it, but he did perform a series of genetic experiment on hapless subjects to create a series of metahumans loosely based upon the 7 Deadly Sins. (More on them later.) In a one time deal, Mr. Mad 2 & 3 worked together, with TALOS backing, to bring down #1 once-and-for-all. They found him a gibbering mess, as one of his experiments had scrambled his brain in rage for what he done to them.
  • As of last week, Mr. Mad 1’s asylum cell was found empty except for the gutted remains of his attending nurse. His whereabouts are unknown.

• Sasaki "Sakura" Suzu (Surname first), TALOS Agent (mostly non-field, public asset status), semi-public
• One of Mr. Mad 1's Sins, she was designed to be a nigh unstoppable killing machine; shapeshifting, regenerating, adapting, shifting between something like The Hulk and Alucard, with lots of claws and teeth and eyes. She was made to be capable of merging and devouring the flesh of others, interacting with it on a cellular level. He used psycho-hypnotic therapy to condition her into this role. She managed to overcome the conditioning, compartmentalizing it to a sequestered segment of her mind, called upon only in desperate need upon the muttering of an activation phrase.
  • Instead, she's adapted her abilities to the role of a healer instead of killer, just a healer involving lots of body horror as her own body merges with a damaged one, supplementing their own bodily functions with her own and adapting her own regenerative cells to their body. The process is slower than her own regeneration, and being fused with just one person is straining enough. She's had terminally ill cancer patients, and other such diseases, tossed her way and she was unable to help most of them, them dying under her care. Plus, it was found on the first try that it took her upward to a month to purge viral infections from her system.
  • Healing minor injuries, up to broken bones, that's painful for them both but anything major that might involve a full body fusion releases a slew of powerful pain killing hormones.
  • By accident or design, a minor project psychic ability was awakened in her. She's managed to tie it to the murderous programming hidden in her brain. She will use this as a non-lethal deterrent against assailants first, showing them exactly what she will do to them if she has to actually get violent.
• Tall The genetic modification worked on her made her, in her natural for, nearly eight feet tall. Fair skinned, black hair, black eyes.
• Demure, caring, she wants to be a pacifists but knows when a situation no longer allows this, especially if it threatens people under her care. She is body shy, especially self-conscious about her new height and especially her powers, how hideous they are or embarrassing when she has to make full naked contact with another body.
• Before Mr. Mad 1 got his hands on her, she was a nurse, working on trying to upgrade her degree to become a doctor. He picked her for the irony of making a killer out of a healer and would have been disappointed to find out how she disobeyed his programming. After her captor's descendants, well, descended upon him and freed her and her fellow victims, Dr. Maddox presented her (and a few of the others) with an opportunity in TALOS.

• Anna O'Allen, TALOS Agent, secretive
• Her codename is a misnomer, as clairvoyance is one of the few psychic powers Anna doesn't have. TK, telepathy, empathy, precognition (the short term kind), postcognition, farsight. Besides the more elementally aspected psychic powers, the more esoteric ones and aforementioned clairvoyance, she probably has that psychic power and normally on the above average end of the scale compared to the "cape community". This puts her on the quite high end to everyone else. Her telepathy alone brute forced its way past the mental defenses of the Watcher twins and Umbra when tested, although she had to be right next to them to do it.
  • She has no ears, no tongue, no eyes, no arms or legs. Unless she's actually focusing, she cannot casually use her powers to replace their function. She's usually blind, deaf, mute and motionless unless she concentrates on not being at least one of those things. Despite how much raw power her abilities have behind them, she hasn't gotten to the point where she can use them unconsciously.
• A small waif of a thing, completely hairless and pale in complexion. Also, her aforementioned conditions.
• She can be a bit of a spoiled brat, even though she also has class. Cultured and used to being pampered, she is an American princess, or used to be. Her new condition has left her embittered, and she'd really delight getting her hands on a bad guy, especially one that used people like playthings, and rip his mind to shreds.
• The youngest child of the O'Allen family, a rich and influential family, to say the least. She wasn't any heiress, to inherit the fortune, but from a young age she sought to pretend she was, always acting prim and proper, unlike her wild child older brother, who vented steam from the pressures of responsibility with wild nights at clubs and scandalous affairs. Still, some time after her sweet sixteenth, her brother managed to talk her into "living a little" and sneak into one of those clubs he loved. Her drink got roofied and she woke up in someone else's bed. No, no, strapped to a steel gurney.
  • Mr. Mad 1 chose such a high-profile target out of sheer arrogance, to better reflect the Sin he wanted to represent. That he had a haughty princess to boot was just the cherry on top. During her transformation, parts of her body atrophied away. She was the one who broke free of his controls and scrambled the mad scientist's mind. Hours later, the descendants break in too late. Through Michelangelo, she chose to hide with TALOS, unable to face her family as she is, so she's presumed dead.

• Ivy "Zana" Rushbough, hero, known
• Ivy has become a free-roaming hydrokinetic spectral entity. She inhabits and controls large volumes of water, shaping and freezing them into whatever shape she desires, tending to favor humanoid shapes. She also has control over a relatively smaller number of carbohydrates and other kinds of molecules with which she can make a "skin suit" out of when she returns to her original form, nigh-perfectly imitating a human body but returning to a watery state upon an effort of will or massive damage to it.
  • She can actually make her "skin-suit" look like anyone. Indeed, she's subconsciously changed it into a more ideal version of herself. She can selectively transform parts of her body into but she can control water outside her form. Her consciousness must travel through an aquatic connection.
  • With her mental presence suffused throughout her whole body (or whatever body of water she's controlling), getting a telepathic lock on her is difficult. I sure do love my mental defenses.
  • She's more construct than human now, so the usual suite there, no longer needs to sleep, eat or breathe, doesn't age and won't be permanently affected by environmental extremes.
• A big girl. Yes, this is her idealized self. She was always proud of her body. She has strawberry blonde hair that she prefers to wear in a French-braid.
• Proud and confident. A bit of a Bunny-Ears Lawyer, competent and full of good ideas, but tending towards random trains of thought. She believes in helping other people, unreservedly, although the fact that she's now a construct and doesn't need as normal people do certainly helps with the bills.
• The first of the Mad 1's Sins. For her, he just nabbed some husky woman eating a Big Mac and called it a day. His notes regret both how un-philosophically refined his choice was and the power he gave her doesn't quite gel with it besides "the ocean swallows everything". He got better with his choices, both in chosen victims and their designs, after that. When the descendants rescued them, she rejected the offer to join TALOS and just went off to do her own thing.

J-Team "Envy"

• James "Jimmy, Jamie, Jonesy, Johnny, Jacob, Jason, Jolanda, Janith…" Brooks, TALOS Agent
• James touches upon a host of semi-sapient extra-dimensional entities and brings them into this world, creating bodies for them out of ectoplasm. (Mongrel believes he might be magic and these entities are some heretofore discovered form of dream spirits.) These bodies start out as mirror images of him, but given time he can resculpt them into something new. The personality of these spirits are also copies of his own, but they've indicated that this is more a "role" they play. James can reach into their minds a "rewrite" their personalities to better suit what he needs.
  • So far, he can only bring in three of these entities into this dimension at a time. He can make them appear anywhere in his line of sight. It's easier to grab individuals he's grabbed before, but they normally become pretty set into the personality and form he gave them the first time, attached to their "role". If he wants to create a new one, he needs to grab a new spirit.
  • When one's body is damaged enough that it should die, it will dissolve back into its component ectoplasm (in a shower of gold sparks), flash fading back to its transdimensional origin and the mind banished back to its home plane. James can also dissolve these bodies at a touch. Either way, they pass through him first, as the portal to their reality and he gets all their memories when that happens.
  • Since the ectoplasm he works with behaves like a real flesh when set, or some other organic matter, he needs extensive knowledge of anatomy to build the bodies he builds. Thankfully, he has Dr. Maddox as a tutor and Mad 1's notes to go through. He's experimented with creating women, as well as bodies suited for sports, combat, sneaking and all sorts of goodies. He's normally limited to baseline-ish limits.
• He greatly resembles his cousin, Jimothy Brooks, except taller, paler and with gold colored eyes. He didn't quite look like that before the experiments though.
• A high-functioning autistic as well, he's approached his inability to social communication with an overabundance of good cheer and scripted joke responses to common small talk. When things go off script, he gets nervous and emotional. He's built a few of his "clones" to be simply be better at social situations than him. He does tend to look down on himself, in private more now, and always see everyone else as better than him. That he can MAKE people better than he is is a dubious consolation.
• Jimothy Brook's American cousin, younger by two years. He had the metagene present in him as well, but it laid dormant. He expressed jealousy over his cousin's powers and at power in general, and most everyone else with physical and mental advantages to him. Mad targeted him for that and remade him into a being that could only make more people better than him.

• William "Willow" Oak, businessman, part-time hero, sub-contractor for TALOS
• William, not to be mistaken for William Watchman, accesses a similar host of extra-dimensional thought entities that craft bodies of ectoplasm coming into this world as James. The difference is how and what precisely. Where James uses himself as a portal, William uses himself as an anchor to partially, temporarily merge their dimension with ours in the immediate area around him. These entities are fully sapient, if alien, and more aggressive than James's spirits, but like James's they seem to feel an unnatural amount of loyalty and fealty to their summoner. (Mohan thinks they are the nightmare spirits to James's dream spirits. He also admits that it might be entirely semantic what you call them and "aggressive thoughtforms from a Hell-like plane of psychic energy" is as equally valid as "nightmare spirits", if more wordy.)
  • William may attempt to attract a certain kind of entity. It's easier if he knows the precise species of nightmare spirit he's trying to get but failing that he can send out a general call for something he needs. While the portal is open, other nightmare spirits might spill through. They're still loyal and obedient to William, it's just that they do so according to their own alien whims, following what they believe is the spirit of his commands, rather than the letter, who might excuse abhorrent behavior to themselves. IE, violent cannibalistic warrior spirits set to guard a town might tell themselves, "The master won't miss one townsperson. As long as the town's intact, it should be fine if sate myself a little." Each species is alien in a different way too, with their weird obsessions and desires, some of them inimical to human life. William (and Mohan) has spent a great deal of time communing with these spirits and learning precisely what sort of tasks any given species can be safely set too.
  • There are unique spirits, usually mightier or particularly esoteric in their abilities. Lesser spirits treat them as demigods, as they are ageless and carry great influence. Besides their quirks, they often demand some sort of offering or service in exchange for their own, but once sated are quite loyal. There seems to be ranks among them, and the higher the rank, the greater the power, and the greater the offering they demand. These spirits will make themselves known to William with one-time free services, slipping in when he merges the worlds, answering a general call they feel they fit or substituting a specific call they think they can fill better. Afterwards, they will give their name and explain what their price is.
  • There is some kind of limit to to when and where he can merge the worlds, and how long he can maintain the merge. It's not arbitrary like one might suspect of magic, but based on natural and scientific confluences. Something to do with the Earth's magnetic field, solar flares from the sun and the natural weakening of the quantum loom (or the veil, if Mohan is talking). TALOS possesses the technology to reproduce these conditions. On his own, William relies on waiting for these things to happen on their own. He can sense them, as part of his powers, and it's a slow week when he can find one a hour's drive away that about to form in time for him to have a merge for at least a few minutes. It's a dice roll what will emerge and answer his psychic call, however. Once here, the spirits don't even have consistent times they can maintain their form here, but will be aware upon stepping through how much time they have and will inform him. (TALOS's tech can produce more consistent result here as well) William's HQ is on a spot that can allow some entities to crossover for a few minutes on a bad day, but that's one of the few such stable spots he's found.
• William is an African American. Since his transformation, he shrunk a few inches below the average and his hair turned permanently straight, giving him an odd-look, as if his hair was straightened. His eyes are now purple.
  • When he starts merging our worlds, the surrounding area becomes darker, although it's difficult to notice if it's already dark. It gives off an aura of foreboding. Strange shape flicker at the edge of vision until the materialize in full. The nightmare spirits are predominantly pitch black with purple highlights, although they also display other soft colors, like green and blue, with the occasionally spot of red and white. Never yellow, although those that have been to this world enough times have become attracted to that color for clothing for its rarity in their world.
• Sullen, introverted, moody. He wants for things, for power, for money, so he is ambitious, but not callously so. Give to the world, and the world will give to you, that's his philosophy, but first he needed the power to give much.
• William actually went looking for power. He wasn't one of those Cape Chashers, at least he didn't think he was. He was trying for a more "safe" way to gain powers. Mad 1 I.D.'d him as his "Greed", and offered the boy precisely what he wanted. Mad 1's notes indicate a philosophy that Greed is merely a proactive form of Envy, so he copied the powers he had given to James but linked to a far more aggressive plane. Only under Mr. Mad's captivity did he realize what the hell he got himself into
  • Once free'd, William opened up business, but tempered a bit by his experiences. He carefully sets out some of the entities to protect his part of town, normally a pack of some of the more brutal ones under the supervision and command of a more intelligent and gentler species, but even that is slow going as earlier attempts nearly ended in disaster. Mostly, now, he contracts the entities out to legal businesses; construction, tutoring, entertainment, escorting, he's found a number of species for a number of uses. He practically works pro-bono for TALOS, charging a token fee for the service of his entities.

Fetish Fuel/Nightmare Fuel "Lust"

• Samuel Austringer, TALOS Agent (Interogation, mostly)
• Telepathic shapeshifting. More specifically, he pulls outs a person's deepest desires or worst fears and transforms into them. He will also, appropriately, produce an empathetic aura of lust or fear. While many meta-telepathic defenses can shrug off the aura, the method by which fantasies or fears are pulled out is quick and subtle that it by-passes them. (So tested on the Watcher twins, Oracle and Umber. Only Umber managed to send false signals.)
  • He has a instinctive telepathic read on everyone around him on what exactly will get a given reaction out of them. Besides fear and lust, this read is easier to block. This is a passive affect he can't turn off, at least not without trying. It's not mind control, but it damn near comes close.
• In his normal form, he's a small scrawny black kid, can't be older than his early twenties but still looks like he qualifies for "kid".
• Quick and witty, he's a social butterfly and loves to be the center of attention. The fact that he can now feel the effect he has on people and is more intrinsically aware of all their buttons has only increased this.
• Sam's day-job was illustration, selling drawings to people. He found a lot of his commissions was fetish stuff and he always liked to give the audience what they wanted. He also liked to draw horror themed things and enjoyed the visceral reactions he could get out of people. Mr. Mad 1 tracked him down through his cyber profile and kidnapped him in the dead of night, to transform him into his "Lust". According to his notes, Mad though nabbing some prostitute or porn star, especially a woman, was being intellectually lazy. He also, originally, designed him only to draw upon lust, but Sam ended up with a power over fear based on his own mental proclivities.
  • When the descendants free'd them, he accepted a position at TALOS in Interogating prisoners. He continues illustration work on the side, but the TALOS job is a lot more lucrative. On occasion, TALOS has pressured him into doing field work. Nothing dirty or bloody, but some spy-work after he used his talent to get in close to a target.

• Princess Mei Mah, Anti-Villain, well-known
• Mei Mah, so long as she has that spear on her person, is the same class of being as the MonsterBeast, a living story inside of a person. Hers is that of the simple, violent pragmatism, the Iron Warrior.
  • Empty-Handed Pugilist Knack: The Iron Warrior has reshaped the Man-Slayer’s body until she has attained a form and muscle memory befitting the myth. She is just above peak-human and fights with an unknown martial art that lacks in either grace nor fury, but a cold, unfeeling yet perfectly placed brutality.
    • Arrow-Catching Wit: When targeted by any kind of ranged missile, her reflexes and speed will suddenly accelerate to the point when she can catch the damn thing. Just a couple of them though, a barrage is a problem.
    • I Punch Them In The Face: She does. Like, really hard.
  • Meteor Shower Style: Though the Iron Warrior spirit has come to identify with more medieval weaponry, it recognizes modern weaponry as its heir. It jealously guards against the use of other melee weapons besides itself but holds no reservations for guns, rockets and grenades. The War Dragon has fed upon this, and her mastery of such weapons has become instinctive beyond that of elite operatives.
  • Thankful Lent-Hand Acceptance: Whenever a meta-human would use an active power against the Man-Slayer, and be so foolish enough to do so right next to her, she will teach them to regret it. Grabbing a hold of them, specifically whichever part of them most closely to do with the active power, she will actually gain control of that power and turn it against them. IE, someone who shoots fire from their hand at her, she will grab hold of their hand and shove that hand in their face, forcing them to shoot fire continuously in their face. A telepath means to control her mind, she grabs their head and begins taking control herself. Any resistance they may have to their own power is temporarily overcome as she does to them what they planned to do to her.
  • Armament-Forging Soldier Sagacity: The armaments of the future are the inheritors of the world once ruled by swords, spears and arrows. The Iron Warrior must be responsible for raising them as a governess of an heiress, a farmer raises his crops. In her mind, schematics to weapons of war flow. War Dragon does not understand the sciences behind them, only how to build these tools of destructions. A nuclear bomb, she knows how to build them, in theory, but nuclear physics, energy, no. A suit of weaponized power armor, yes, but ask her to build a robot meant for building, for creating, and she will fail. The Man-Slayer, in fact, fights in a suit of powered armor.
    • Heroic Panoply-Forging Puissance: Her knack for forging weapons of war extends to magic as well. So long as the sorcery is of the sort meant for battle, she has the capability of forging artifacts meant for it. She might have enchanted her power armor as well; to what extent if at all is unknown.
  • Iron Stomach Development: Favorable metabolism. Poisons, for example, the Man-Slayer shows resistance too, especially ingested ones. Anything that would help her, though, she wrings the most out of, again especially if ingested.
    • The Stomach Knows: That which she consumes, she begin to know about, as long as she is focusing when eating it. Specifically, what affects it would have on her and if she should just shove a finger down her throat.
  • Marching Fortress Stamina: The Iron Warrior demands endurance and the Man-Slayer has given it. She has become more flesh golem than human, enduring deadly environment and long spans of time without rest.
  • Iron Will Fortress Discipline: Inside the War Dragon's mind is a literal fortress, a mental construct of bunkers, turrets, ever vigilant guards and laser grids. Any mental intrusion will have to get past a No-Man's Land of barbed wires, mines, artillery barrage, snipes, machine gun nests, break into the fortress, evade its guardian warrior and defenses and find the hidden treasure room where the War Dragon keeps her true mind. There she is, a sentinel constructed fashioned after herself, the last guardian. Only then could a telepath hope to read or rearrange her private thoughts.
  • Manslayer Shintai: [LOCKED] The Man-Slayer has yet to embrace her name sake. If she ever were too, she would lose the capability of seeing those far weaker than her as people at all. They would become indistinct shadows, each no different from the rest. In exchange, she would gain an unparalleled sense of battle, a constant awareness of the perfect way to kill everything she can see, forever.
  • Underdog-Training Montage: War Dragon may take others under her wing and train them in fighting, battle and war. Those under her tutelage find the process of learning such arts supernaturally accelerated. Those national loyalists that have raised arms by her side have benefitted from this training.
  • My Story Doesn't End Here: If she were to die, the Man-Slayer will not be kept by Death's embrace. She will fight her way out of the afterlife and return to her people, atop the corpses of angels and demons alike if need be. She’s done it once already, and the forces of the Hereafter have prepared for her coming this time. She, in turn, has prepared for her return.
  • A Reliquary For The Fire Of The Gods: The Spear is a vessel of power. Though the Iron Spirit inhabits it, the entity will shares its home with destructive magic and other forms of living energy. It need not be ritualistically prepared, the spell or what have you can simply be sunk in.
  • Extension-Of-One's-Self Methodology: The Spear's spirit and the Man-Slayer’s have grown close. When in her hands, it guides her movements and strikes deadly.
  • It Is Called Foe-Hammer: The Spear has drank deeply upon the blood of the divine, and the dripping essence left over is bane to beings that might be called demonic in nature.
  • Of Black Diamonds That Cut The World: The Spear is impossibly hard and sharp. Like, Wolverine claws here.
  • Privacy-Inhibiting Attachment: The Spear has chosen the Man-Slayer to be its wielder and will always return to her if taken away, reappearing in her hand as if by magic. However, it takes a few moments for it to be roused into doing that. Done once and it will remain wary.
  • Bloodshed With Greater Purpose: So long as the Man-Slayer fights for her stated purpose (more on that below), the Spear strikes all the harder, all the more deadly and is coated in a metaphysical venom bane to those opposed to this purpose.
  • Shearing The Tapestry: The Spear has the power to cut through immaterial things, like ghosts and stuff. If a being attempts to hide in some neighboring demi-plane, the Spear will also cut through to that, just to kill them.
• Appearance:
  • Armor◊(Albeit, better suited for her body, without the head tail, some draconic markings)
  • No armor◊ Right figure, but scales are more greenish-grey.
  • Spear◊
• Think "Warrior Princess", with equal emphasis on both. Arrogant and cruel, cultured and violent, honorable.
• Once, there were two men. Once, there was a rock. These men, with fists, went to murder each other for resources and the blood of the fallen seeped into the earth. Later, another man lifted this rock up and bashed yet another man's head in. In another time, a man tied this rock to a stick and he bashed many heads in. His son replaced that rock with a sharper rock and that son's daughter replaced the stick with a sharper stick and she had a spear. One of her descendants took that spear and broke it over his knee. Not as a gesture of peace, but of progress, for he took up a spear of solid bronze. In all that, the rock had endured. Jumping from weapon to weapon, often spears, the nascent soul of an unborn god has lived on, passed from wielder to wielder. In the hands of a god, it killed so many it never stopped dripping blood. In the hands of a mortal, it supped upon the blood of a demigod. In the hands of a madman, it oversaw the genocide of a people. The Iron Myth, the Warrior, the incarnate narrative of purest battle itself.
  • Once there was a nation to the East that worshipped dragons. Once there was a princess born with the countenance of one. She was blessed and held above all others, hailed as a savior to her people that would lead them to a glorious age. In actuality, she was a metahuman, a mutant born with merely the superficial appearance of a reptile. Anywhere else, she might've been considered a freak, but part of a royal family, in such a particular culture, she seemed like a sign from the heavens. If only. Its enemies rose, the political climate changed, the nation fell and fell hard. Some purging of the royal family here, some ethnic cleansing there, the Communist marched in and the Americans came to "save the day". In all that, Mei Mah grabbed hold of a family treasure she felt calling to her, a spear. She held it aloft and with her will, her royal prerogative, she reached out to the Iron Myth and it answered, giving her its power. Forced to flee, she vowed to see her nation resurrected, with a secondary goal of vengeance, no matter what the cost. Since then, she's been involved in numerous unpleasantries, always working towards her intended goals, gathering to her a small army of national loyalists saved from the fires.
  • She was there during the invasion, standing to defend earth alongside its heroes. She saw the Hunter become the the MonsterBeast. She died in a heroic last stand. It took her some time to claw her way out of the Hereafter. She'd been gone for a while, but back for a while too. I leave the details vague

Titanic Lore

Some of this will be information I'm repeating, but I felt the need to clear somethings up, get them written down and put them in a form Sijo can properly place somewhere.
Oh my god, this came out a lot longer than I though it would.

The First Titanic War

This is written, spoken and believed by some; that titanic narrative, stories so vast and complex that they were alive, created the universe. This is possible, for such beings are known to exist. It is also possible that it is all a fabrication. For such beings, however, just being a story might be enough for it to be true.

In the Dark Before, before the universe, nothing existed. However, that nothing included logic, such as the logic that something cannot come from nothing. Without any such rule or law to hold them back, lots of somethings started existing. These things fought and preyed upon one another for what little of nothing there was to exist in. One class of beings in this Dark were living and self perpetuating stories, the things that would come to be known as the titanic narratives.

It is said one titan before the others brought all of their kin together and convinced them to join forces, the Titan Collaborator. When this titan began to fill the spaces between the niches of their kin, giving them nuance and shape, it became the Titan Creator. This titan spearheaded the idea of a stable universe for within which their kin could rule together, without fear of the predator of the Dark. They would lead them to this glorious future and become the Titan King.

The universe they imagined was far different from this one. It would be empty of anything significant but themselves. Their would be life but a sterile one, denied agency or will. This would be a universe under the titans' complete control. This was thought to be good, to make it truly the safe haven they imagined.

Their was another titan, the Titan Hero. He was the Collaborator's first follower, his first friend, his first lieutenant and his greatest champion. His irreproachable purity and superiority had beaten back the predators of the Dark and cowed his less cooperative kin into submission. The Hero was the Creator's most trusted ally, and foresaw a future as the right-hand of the King.

There were other titans, but two did not exist. The Titan Impossibility sat waiting in a universe that had not been created yet. The Titan Shadow was a mere shadow of the Hero in a place that did not have light. He whispered in the Hero's ears and warned him that the last great challenges of his life were over. That, in a universe under their complete control, there would be no surprises. The Hero despaired, because he knew this was true.

When the Creator made to strike the universe into existence, the Hero rose up and declared himself the Creator's better. There was an explosion so great that there will never be another one like it and, in fact, it's still happening right now. The Hero became the Light and the Shadow became real. The Creator fought against the treacherous Hero, but the Hero won, the Hero always wins.

The Hero became the King and set the course of the universe towards one of agency and free will outside themselves. For their crime of daring to oppose the Hero, he ripped out the Creator's female heart and cast him down into his own body, the first Hell. There, the Creator, who had been the Collaborator, who would have been King, became the Conqueror. There he smolders in impotent nuclear rage for all time, wanting nothing more than to burn down the whole of the universe until nothing is left but cinder and ash.

The Fall Of The Light

One last challenge lay before the Titan King, to deal with his own Shadow. The Shadow, before he existed, had been the hand to give the Hero the dagger he planted into the Creator's back. Now that he was real, he sat poised and ready to plant another into the new King. He was not simply some outside force the Hero could overwhelm, but still existed as a part of him, his very own flaws made manifest.

The Light reached within himself and dueled with his Shadow. The Shadow was everything the Light was and wasn't. However, what the Shadow was above else was treachery and in that time the Shadow had only one ally he could possibly betray, himself. So the Shadow sabotage his own fight, his left hand turning upon his right. With that advantage, the Light won, decoupled his flaws from his perfection and cast the Shadow from himself. The Shadow, now real, now separate, now truly and only what the Light wasn't, now the Villain, laughed.

Now the Hero, the Light, the King, was perfect. His enemies were defeated, his friends knelt before him and he was bereft of the least flaws. Upon the declaration of this fact, he assumed his last and greatest form, The Narrative Collapsing Singularity. All person, place and plan began to fall into the event horizon of his overshadowing glory.

The Hero knew that he had become anathema to his vision of a world of agency and free will. The King convened the rest of the titans and gave them his last order. The Light was shattered by the combined might of the titanic host, and most of his shards were placed into dormancy, with some saying he became the stars in the sky.

And this is where it gets a little weird. The Titan King is still active at this point, but only as the King and then just barely. The titanic host still knelt before him as their king and obeyed his commands, but no longer could he hand out any grand edicts. His general will was followed but his aspect as the Light and Hero were dormant. Still there but also elsewhere. Like the stars in the sky, his heroic spirit may have been granted to a select few souls throughout the universe.

The Second Titanic War

In a time when the sun was young and the Earth was still a molten ball, the Narrative Titans lost a universe spanning war against heroes that rose up against them. First, the trickster heroine Kagazabi fooled the Titan Mutation's Iconic Self into devouring her. When Mutation sought to replicate Kagazabi's essence and add it to her whole, Kagazabi's essence refused to stop replicating. Like a cancer she spread, until the entirety of Mutatation's truest self was consumed, still alive and made into Kagazabi's heart. This was a might blow to the invincible Titans, but irreplicable. No other Titan had quite the same habits as Mutation and Kagazabi would be unable to fool another.

The last blow to the Titans was by the Disciple Of The Light, leader of the rebel forces, a hero who's name and visage is forgotten. That one turned against the Titan King just as the Hero had done against the Creator long ago. The Disciple Of The Light envisioned a future, a better universe, where mortal-kind would not suffer under the yoke of cosmic tyrants. For this, that one enlisted the help of the Titan Maker, the only titan to having anything close resembling empathy for lesser being and only because that titanic machine built herself some empathy and installed it inside her brain.

Next, the Disciple Of The Light captured and caged the Titan Monster. With his rage as the fire, the Maker was able to forge the Omnispear, The Final Resolution, the first weapon and the one to put an end to them all. The Disciple brandish this terrible weapon and sought to use it against the King. Spurred by loyalty, another titan hopped in the way and took the blow for the King. This titan's name was abolished from time and instead transformed into the deathless Abomination. Nailed to its last page by the Omnispear, the Abomination could not truly end but instead be dying forever.

Both sides of the war were cowed by this. Only the Shadow was not horrified and he still circles the pit of the Abomination's grave to this day, laughing. He wasn't cowed either, he is just always a coward. It was the Shadow then who sued the rebel heroes for peace, accepting their demands on behalf of the titanic host and demanding his concessions in turn. The rebel heroes, horrifed by what they had done, accepted these concessions. The titanic host, horrifed by what could be done to them, accepted this surrender.

When the dead titan become The Abomination, the concept it had created was erased from reality and no one can remember what it was. The victors of the war deemed this unacceptable and demanded the titans' first act of their conditional surrender was to sever their connection to these fundamental concepts of the universe. The titans saw no difference between maintaining and creating something, so they struck a blow against causality and made it so they were not, necessarily, the only creators of concepts or the universe as a whole.

Rippling backwards through time, this act planted vague seeds throughout the past. It went all the way back to the beginning and just a little bit beyond, once more disturbing the denizens of the Dark Before. These seeds, these new origins, truly happened, put into place by things that never had anything to do with them. The tale of the titans was thus lost except to those places outside of time, and only true to those who exist nonlinearly. The amount of existential headache this has caused is astronomical.

The titanic host swore oaths to withdraw their truest selves from the main universe completely and forever, remaining within their own setting dimensions for all time. Their component selves were dragged with them, allowed to escape whenever they could. Their creations, their Legacies, their Franchises and their Originals, were allowed to appear when they would and roam the universe wherever they did, for as long as they lasted and for however much they were. Some thought all these allowances were intolerable and ever since force have been at work to, at least, check the greatest of these portions and, at most, put a permanent end to the titans, and damn the consequences.

Titanic Anatomy

• The Avatar "The Iconic Self" The singular half of the titan's entirety expressed into a relatively compact form. The Titan Behemoth is thought to not have one of these, as "compact" is not a thing he does. The closest equivalent is an infinitely tall mountain at the center of his infinitely large Setting. The Mutation ate the trickster heroine Kagazabi and who ate her right back from the inside out. A close human equivalent is somewhere between the brain and the face.
• The Setting "The Expansive Self" The other half of the titan's entirety expressed in an entire universe separate from our own. The Titan Monster and Juggernaut do not have one of these, as they are both things that happen to other people. Kagazabi's resides in what might be Mutation's Setting, or some fascimile of it. A human equivlanet is something like a cross between the rest of our body and our house.
• The Main Cast "The Soul Compendium" The component selves of a titan, compartmentalized parts of the titan's nuances and exceptions. These things have a personality apart from their parent titan, if their progenitor can be described as having a personality in the first place, but are ultimately of their agency and will. It is these entities, and all the lesser entities beneath them, that may actually escape a titan's setting and roam the universe, under certain conditions. They are, more so than a titan's truest self, responsible for the various creations that roam beside them. The Monster only has one, his Lead. Once, in the Dark Before, he had others, but his Lead ate them. These are roughly like different parts of the brains and different organs in the body.
  • The Lead Role "The Core Soul" First among equals of a titan's cast, and normally the closest anyone else gets to interacting with the truest self of a titan without having to face down the force of nature that is truly its truest self. Normally the same sex as the titan, the King's Lead, the Glorious Nova, the Queen Of Light And Heroes, is uniquely opposite. The Creator once had two Leads of each sex, to represent their all-encompassing nature*, but the King ripped out the female half and left the Conqueror proverbially spayed. The Revelry also has two Leads of each sex, though they are nearly one being, and represent the Revelry's hermaphrodetic duality. The Shadow has no Lead, for his Cast would betray any leader among them in a heartbeat. This part can be compared to the brain's frontal lobe or quite poetically be equivicated to the human heart. *It's said that the Creator created the concept of two genders, to create perfect duality.
  • The Supporting Cast "The Sattelite Souls" The component selves of a titan may further compartmentalize themselves into lesser selves. Unlike the unique parts the Main Cast may play, and number they may exist in, the Supporting Cast normally have a set number within six archetypes, namely six. Three are internal souls, the Main Cast members' defining self, indulgent self and reflective self, and three external souls, the guarding self, the expressive self and messenger self. The Monster's Lead ate his Supporting Cast too. These are a bit like parts of an organ, like the chambers in a heart, or the folds of the brain.
  • The Extras "The Least Souls" The numerous races that spawned within and from a titan's essence almost by accident. These things are the furthest removed from the titan while still being an extension of them in some fashion. They have their own free will and agency, or something of a fascimile of it. The comparison here may vary, to vestigial hair follicles to important but free-floating blood cells, to extensions or part of an organ like nerve cells or brain neurons.

Titanic Creations

• Legendary Mythos "The Legacies" Mortals that resonated with a titan in either some single significant moment or throughout their lives. Either way, the titan willfully reaches out to them and grants that person a lessened mirror of their own power. Acceptance is not an issue, in part because most titans cannot even concieve the possibility that a mortal would reject it. Of those few that can, they often don't care.
• Exalted Parts "The Franchises" Mortals that sought a titan in one way or another, for one reason or another, and willfully sold their agency and free will to the titan in exchange for power. The titan reshapes the mortal into a new form pleasing to them and send them back out into the world.
  • Fettered Souls "The Cameos" Usually, that's it, but the Conqueror, at least, displayed variance in this arrangement with the Warlock. By allowing Sebastian to retain his free will, the Conqueror constantly feeds his diabolical power into the mortal along with occasional bouts of his diabolical urges. In this way, the Conquerors has more directly, but still tangentially, inserted his will into the world, at the constant cost to a portion of his attention. Other Titans may choose the same route.
• Divine Novelties "The Originals" Mortal things, relatively, created wholesale by a titan. The mark of its creator is displayed in its entire being for those who know what to look for. They are, often, wholly unique, unless they went on, by design or not, to spawn usually lesser descendants or were created as a set.
  • Avatar Golems "Self-Inserts" Only after their imprisonment did such things occur to the titans. These are things crafted in some lessened reflection of the titan, made from the titan's own flesh and programmed with a fascimile of the titan's personality. Even from the same titan, these things can vary, for these beings are more concept than thing and whatever component self may claim responsibility for it may have a different idea of what their parent entity is.
  • Mantle Bearers "The Props" Many of the things the titans create are not independent things but semi-sapient artifacts that can take many forms. Many of these are "Seeds", artifacts with more immaterial existences when they rest in the essence of their hosts. Mortal entities may acquire these objects and willingly hold them, taking the power the prop holds and accepting the influence of the titan and its cast in their minds.

Anyone may feel free to suggest more.

Dual

• Polly Castores, villainous mercenary, thug
• Dual has both a suite of metahuman abilities and a sweet ass magic coat.
  • She has 360-degree vision, x-ray vision that combines with the former, jacked up super reflexes that borders on danger sense and just past peak-baseline physical condition without effort. She combines this with a slew of martial arts she's picked up over the years.
  • Her magic coat has wide-sleeves that lead to some kinda Hyperspace Arsenal. Weapons will appear above her wrists, ready to use, thematically in pairs. This includes two claws blades over each of her wrists and two double-barreled shotguns. She doesn't hold these things, they just appear over her wrists, ready to use. She has to stuff shotgun shells inside though, but that's the only upkeep she's ever needed to provide.
• Face◊, extremely boy-ish, add sunglasses. Coat◊, just the top-half and in a gray-blue color. On a whole, she is rather butch.
• She is the most level-headed of H & 5th and is their de-facto leader. It's through her contacts they get many of their jobs. She enjoys the challenge of her work but balances it with a healthy respect of practical realities. She has become deadly loyal to her crew.
• Polly has lead a checkered past. In her youth, she only had the 360 degree vision and a physical condition below peak-human with intense training. She signed on as a hench wench to Mr. Mad 1 before Project Eden, as his interest in the occult intensified and he wanted to spelunk some ancient ruins for arcane artifacts. He never uncovered anything concrete, but the amount of lore and clues he found proved to be of great interest. As per their agreement, he put her through some genetic enhancement procedures, unlocking the full potential of her metagene.
  • After their contract ended, Polly did some exploring of her own, did some villainous adventuring, honed her skills even further and eventually came upon the magic coat that would become her iconic piece.
  • As the criminal mercenary Dual, she ended up making contact with several like-minded supers. They formed H & 5th Gang for mutual protection as well genuine affection for each other. More than once has she had to go and break one of her crew out of jail, the same favor being afforded to her.

Brick Joke

• Minerva Mills, villainous mercenary, thug
• She is a Mighty Glacier. Her metagene transformed her into a towering amazon of a woman. High upper-tier Super-Strength and Super-Toughness. She also got her mitts on some super-science gravity boots that anchor her into place when she activates it by curling her toes.
• Here◊. Even as a supervillain, she likes to dress-up, put on make-up and be pretty.
• Minerva doesn't enjoy putting a lot of effort into thinking. When pressed, she can be quite insightful but is proven to be mentally lazy. She much rather let someone else do the cerebral heavy lifting.
  • Like the rest of H & 5th, she's developed a deadly loyalty to the rest of the crew.
• Minerva used to be a model but found the work unchallenging and dull, so she turned to crime. That's it, that's her entire motivation. She was bored. She apparently had aspirations to be a stand-up comedian but was revealed to have stage fright. She stills peppers her speech with sly, observation humor.

Blood Knight

• Maxwell Ratnoff, villainous mercenary, thug
• He wears a set of armor, breast plate and helmet, and dual wields a pair of falcata. He sincerely believes they are magical, possessed by a blood thirsty demon, but they're actually super-science, possessed by a blood thirsty AI.
  • The AI resides in the helmet, interfacing with his brain, providing him with a tactical read-out of his surrounding complete with high tech sensors and enhanced reflexes, doing a whole lot of his thinking for him. It can protect his mind from mental attacks, mostly the non-magical kind but it's not completely defenseless there either. Also has wifi and mp4 capabilities, but Maxwell doesn't know about those.
  • The breast plate projects a skin tight force field around his body, simulating the powers of a low-level TK Superman, like Superboy, without the flight. Strength, speed, toughness, that's all his though.
  • The swords also can move on their own but, integrated with his nervous system, do as he wills. They project a matter disrupting power fields, crackling with electricity as they cut through almost anything. At a thought, they'll attach themselves to the breast plate's back or fly into his hands.
• Scrawny Guy Helmet◊ Breastplate◊ Swords◊
• Maxwell primarily wants to be a bad ass who makes lots of money, and has enough of a homicidal, sadistic streak to mesh well with the Blood Knight AI. The AI wants to rip and tear, until it's done. It likes killing people, but also holds an affection and loyalty to its host.
  • Maxwell is deadly loyal to the H & 5th gang. He has this alpha male thing going on where he tries to assert himself as Brick Joke and Dual's knight in shining armor. It's embarassing but like watching a puppy piss on the carpet embarassing. They pity him.
• Max found the Blood Knight armor in the basement of some abandoned mansion. Unknown to him, it was the last creation of some old-timey mad science villain, trying to outfit his super army for world conquest. That never took off cause an old-timey superhero busted through his roof and carted him off to jail forever.
  • Max ran around being a bad ass supervillain for a while, taking over a few gangs by decimating their ranks, but his blind ambition and aggression nearly brought the heat down on his head from both sides of the law. He got picked up by Dual, taken far away and she's been slowly showing him the ropes.
  • Occasionally, the AI will take over his body while he sleeps. The rest of the gang is aware of this but have come to realize the intelligence within means him no harm. They're pretty damn sure it's not magic, considering how it tinkers with itself during these episodes, but no one has had the heart to tell him.

Matter Mind

• Edgar Chase, villainous mercenary, thug
• Telekinesis, very powerful. It's stronger than his physical body, by several orders of magnitudes, but directly proportional to his bodily strength, so he's alwaus working out. It's all he has, but he's honed it into different applications, such as flight, force fields and sonic shouts. Hand gestures and body movements are not required but he can't help but accompany any TK with them, telegraphing what he's doing.
• Muscular guy◊. Takes a lot of amusement in how people rarely see his TK coming for the build he has. Normally walks around in black pants and a tank top.
• Dual's second-in-command for his own level-headedness. He's got a bit of macho vanity going on, but tones it down around Blood Knight, mostly not to butt heads with the kid. In a fight, where he's pushed, he gets angry, fast, and gets aggressive quickly.
• Rather simple story; he grew up in a run-down rural town in Illinois. He got involved in drug running for lack of better prospects and was nearly beaten to death by a rival gang out in the woods, gaining super powers in respons. He since took up super villainy.