Lord Borealis
From Handbook of the Union Universe
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| Lord Borealis in flight | |
| Lord Borealis | |
| Player: @Ammon | |
| Origin: | Science |
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| Archetype: | Dominator |
| Level: | |
| Primary Set: | Ice |
| Secondary Set: | Ice |
| Epic Set: | |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Arthur, Lord Buckley |
| Identity: | |
| Aliases: | |
| Species: | Human - originally |
| Date of Birth: | |
| Age: | |
| Height: | |
| Weight: | |
| Build: | |
| Eye Colour: | |
| Hair Colour: | White |
| Skin Complexion: | Blue |
| Distinguishment: | Twirling moustache |
| Medical Status: | Steampunk Cyborg |
| Financial Status: | Varies |
| Religion: | Agnostic |
| Sexuality: | Effective Eunoch |
| Marital Status: | Widowed |
| Known Relatives: | Deceased |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | British |
| Ethnicity: | Overgrown Smurf? |
| Legal Status: | Illegal |
| Place of Birth: | England |
| Education: | University. Masters degrees in biology, physics, and engineering. |
| Occupation: | Scientist |
| Group Affiliations: | The Hyenas |
| Base of Operations: | Secret |
| Residency: | Secret |
| Known Powers | |
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| Known Abilities | |
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| Equipment | |
| Powered mechanical armour and life-support | |
| Awards and Collections | |
| ' | |
| Licenses and Certificates | |
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| IC Accessibility of Article | |
| ask @Ammon | |
Character concept / User contact info - no heading
Contents |
[edit] Affiliations
The Hyenas: Lord Borealis signed up with the Hyenas partly on a whim. He'd been a keen hunter in his youth, and the Hyenas offered interesting challenges both to his skill and to his science. The high payoffs for successful missions help fund some of his more personal projects.
The League of Righteous Destroyers: How Alicia Barzini, the Dark Pistol came to know of Borealis, and invite him to her gathering is unknown. Certainly some would have viewed Borealis as being of a lower league of villainy, especially some like Romanov and Balthory. However, his brilliant mind has earned him some strong respect within the group.
[edit] Personality
In a single word: Bitter.
At the icey heart of Lord Borealis is a true tragedy. The kind that everyone can see coming, and feels can be avoided, and yet somehow everyone is forced to reach the tragic end anyway.
Forced to become a monster of his own making in order to survive an accident, Lord Borealis is trapped by circumstance as surely as he is trapped within the life-supporting armour he devised. He feels that fate treated him with extreme cruelty, and so he treats the world in kind.
Another apt word is: Twisted
Borealis has been alone far too long. It has affected his mind beyond recall, and made him react to others with such a fierce inner desperation that he must constantly fear rejection, which in turn makes him overreact and reject others - often harmfully. As a result, he is aloof, disdainful, and isoltes himself, preventing rejection at the price of preventing all closeness too.
Frustrated by the half-life he has, and the permanent loss of the plaudits and celebrty he once enjoyed, Borealis is a dangerously bitter and twisted man. The kind who often makes up for his own inability to achieve a happy life by ensuring that no others can either.
An equally applicable word is: Genius.
While the term genius is most certainly overused, Lord Borealis is one of the most brilliant minds of any era, and tempered with the extreme practicality of an engineer. He is an intellectual giant in most company, and this has made him somewhat disdainful of others.
His intelligence-fuelled egotism does occassionally cause him to underestimate others, but in the vast majority of cases, he truly is far above other scientists and thinkers. He's sometimes something of an intellectual snob, and more than intelligent enough to know it and deal with it.
[edit] Motivation
Self sustainment.
Lord Borealis has very few pleasures left to him in life. His extreme brilliance caused him to survive a fate that might in fact have better killed him. Instead he survived to suffer inhuman solitary confinement, pain, and hardship. Forced to create a monster from himself and his science.
Since then, food and drink provide no pleasure, company is just the precursor to rejection and betrayal, and he is imprisoned within the masterful engineering of his suit that sustained him when his lungs froze and frostbite set in. The only pleasures left to him are emotional, such as the pleasure he takes in utilising his scientific and engineering skills to attain impossible ends, or more darkly, the perverse pleasure he takes in destroying those who offend him.
[edit] Powers
[edit] Primary Powers
Utilising the extreme cold that is now his natural resource, Lord Borealis can weild the powers of extreme low temperature to literally freeze his opponents, turn the strongest metal brittle, or trap victims entirely in crushing ice.
[edit] Secondary Powers
Using the same natural resource of his own super-frozen core, Borealis can freze the elements present in air to create quantities of super-frozen material to throw at his foes, guided and empowered in its trajectory by the small gravitic motors he uses to fly.
[edit] Additional Powers
Although lesser fools have the tendancy to note the most inhuman abilities as his primary powers, in truth his primary power is the genius intellect that he has, coupled with the learning of a keen scientist.
His own extreme inventiveness is the root of all his powers, including hs transformation into the ice-wielding thug that he could be if careful planning did not overrule the necessity to throw bits of ice like some barbarian.
Anti-gravity motors of his own design allow him to soar into the skies. His armour allows him to live and breathe far beyond his natural span, and additionally gives him the strength and stamina of a young athlete. Heat exchangers turn his own curse into a source of power for his mechanized armour, while natural condensation provides an endless supply of water for the steam powered engines within.
[edit] Abilities
Without doubt, the most dangerous and powerful of the abilities of Lord Borealis are his brilliance and inventiveness. Coming from an age where science was science, with a lot less division and chinese walls between its specialities, Borealis is a highly skilled scientist in Biology, Physics, Chemistry and Engineering.
He has the intellect to spot potential pitfalls and the wit to avoid them once detected. He especially seeks to be unpredictable, and generally succeeds completely.
[edit] Vulnerabilities
Lord Borealis is effectively a steampunk cyborg, using steam engines, clockwork motors, and classic mechanics for the technological part of his being. Like other cyborgs therefore, he has double the ways to disable him as either a purely biological or purely technological form would have.
That said, while many would laugh at steam-power and clockwork, he is as impervious to the effects of electronc jammers, and EMP attacks as any biological lifeform.
However, Borealis is dependant on the mechanical life-support of his armour, such as the mechanical lungs he created as his own lungs froze, and several organ functions that the suit likewise performs for biological internal organs that failed to survive his ordeal. Disabling either the biological or mechanical parts of Borealis effectively disables both.
[edit] Equipment
The unpredictability of Borealis extends to his weaponry and equipment. His ability to invent and field completely new and different equipment and strategies seemingly at will or whim is precisely what makes him so dangerous. There is no predicting what equipment and resources he has, or will have at any given time.
He has an idiosyncratic disdain for electronics, and most of his inventions are masterpieces of engineering completely devoid of electronic components. When one can achieve the wonders that he can with steam, clockwork, hydraulics, gears, levers and pulleys, one can't write this off as a limitation.
His inventions always pay careful attention to economy and efficiency, wasting so little energy, and reclaiming so much of the otherwise wasted byproducts such as friction, vibration, and the like, as to be almost perpetual motion machines once active. Most of his technology needs only a 'kick start' of some kind before their energy needs become very minimal indeed.
[edit] Mole Machine
The classic mole machine is much emulated. While underground travel does not offer the speed of jetpowered flight or ballistic rockets, it is far safer and stealthier in the main. With typical attention to economy, Borealis' Mole Machines are largely powered by their own friction heat and the pressure of the earth they tunnel through, combined with tapping gravitic forces against an anti-gravity power core. Quirkily, he used a clockwork starter-motor with a huge tension spring and a two-handed crank handle to wind it.
[edit] Subterranean Ballistics
Borealis uses the same high-speed tunnelling technology for two of his unique araments. The Sub-terranean Topedos (STTs) are essentially unmanned smaller versions of the Mole Machine transport devices used to deliver a large warhead at a speed somewhat faster than the larger Mole Machines. The Mole Mortar is a far smaller armament that can be carried by a man and used to fire much slower burrowing armaments that follow an underground arc to come upon their targets from below and explode. These are slow moving and thus only particularly useful against static targets. They were designed to erradicate fortified structures and gun emplacements.
[edit] Floatation Generators
Borealis has mastered the technology of anti-gravity generators and motors. He not only uses this technology to empower his cybernetic armour with the power to fly, but also to help him 'throw' packets of extreme cold from his super-frozen core.
Most interestingly, he often uses anti-gravity motors in mechanisms to tap the very force of gravity itself as a form of inexhaustible natural energy.
[edit] Cybernetics and Bionics
Borealis has extensive experience in the most unusual field of steam and clockwork powered cybernetics. His own body and armour are a testament to his skill in this field. Aside from being far more easily fuelled and much simpler to maintain, such bionics are completely impervious to EMP effects.
[edit] Chemical and Germ Warfare
Finally, as a biologist, Borealis has in the past created some trly awesome viral and toxic weapons. It was claimed, back in the sixties, that Borealis had created a true doomsday biological weapon called the Omega Strain. The claim was made by an ex-associate of Lord Borealis, Harry Kane, aka the Steel Hurricane. Unfortunately, Mr. Kane was only prepared to give details of this doomsday weapon in exchange for transmuting his death sentance to one of imprisonment. The DA refused to make the deal, and Harry Kane never revealed any details of the Omega Strain. Harry Kane was executed on 3rd October 1961 with 23 lethal injections.
