First Player

Player: @First Player

In a city where even the baristas wear capes and sidekicks are graded like AP classes, Miles Benedict was born at the bottom rung of a ladder most people could fly up. Miles grew up in Kings Row, a crumbling neighborhood tucked under the neon skyline of Paragon. The kind of place where collateral damage is a weekly occurrence and cleanup crews don’t show up until long after the last fistfight between titans has settled. Raised by his mother Marcy — a nurse who worked nights, raised Miles on a steady diet of discipline, hope, and video games. Not because they had much—just a beat-up secondhand console and a CRT TV held together with duct tape and dreams—but because to Miles, games were more than just escape. They were systems. Patterns. Logic puzzles wrapped in explosions and power-ups. He didn’t just play them—he hacked them. Rewrote them. Made his own mods before he could legally ride the subway alone.

Miles’ mutation didn’t come with fanfare or a dramatic transformation. It wasn’t flashy. He didn’t shoot lasers or lift buildings. But at age eight, he started fixing things. Not just "kid fixes VCR" kind of stuff. He understood how machines thought. He could pull a drone apart, reverse-engineer it, and then rebuild it. He didn’t know what “quantum logic loops” were. He just did them. His brain became wired like a schematic. He could "see" how things worked, and better yet, how they could be improved. Like synesthesia for engineering. Code spoke to him like music. Circuits danced under his fingers. He didn’t even know he was a mutant until age eleven, when he fixed a broken, high-end prosthetic limb in under three minutes using scavenged wires, gum foil, and an old Walkman motor. He felt how it should work before he even knew what it was. The limb’s owner? A retired hero who walked away shaking his head and saying, “Kid, you’re either gonna change the world… or blow it up.”

And then, when he was 15, The Battle for the Multiverse took place. Miles watched his own block burn while Paragon's heavy-hitters fought like kaiju with capes, punching gods in the face and tossing skyscrapers like dodgeballs. In the middle of the chaos, barefoot, bruised, and bleedng, Miles scrambled through debris and grabbed whatever he could find—old drone parts, twisted steel, even a busted gauntlet some hero probably dropped. In minutes, he had a janky but functional exo-blaster on his arm. It couldn’t fire lasers, but it could lift a support beam and stabilize a crumbling wall. It could save lives.

And it did.

He pulled a half-dozen people from the rubble that night. Not with muscle. With ingenuity. While the capes played tug-of-war with titans, Miles did something rare:

He looked down instead of up.

When the smoke cleared, he wandered into the wreckage. Not to gawk—but to salvage. In the debris, he found a a crate full of old, discarded Sky Raiders gear. He reverse-engineered it in a week and made something better. He realized then: no one was coming to protect his part of the city. The elite treated the little guys like NPCs.

"First Player."

It started as a joke. A handle he tagged on his prototypes. In a city full of second-string sidekicks and legacy heroes, he was playing solo, on hard mode. No backup. No cheat codes. Just him.

And if the game was rigged? He’d rewrite the code. In a city where everyone’s waiting for the hero to show up, he was going to be the first to press start.

He doesn't want fame. He doesn’t join teams. He doesn’t even apply for registration. That infuriates the old guard. But his designs? They’re ten years ahead of government labs. Villains trade blueprints of his tech on the darknet trying to reverse-engineer him. He builds in secret, appears like a glitch in the system, and vanishes before the credits roll.

As a kid he used to zap bugs with a homemade taser made from an old blender, a mini-fan, and some chicken wire. When he was twelve he shut down his middle school's entire computer network to get out of English class. At sixteen, he was manipulating ATM's into giving rather than receiving.

Miles is fiercely smart but totally self-taught. Raised in a city where power and privilege go hand-in-hand, he’s learned to make brilliance look like improvisation. He’s constantly underestimated—and he likes it that way. It gives him the edge. He thinks five steps ahead, but still pretends he’s winging it.

Miles didn’t grow up dreaming of capes and catchphrases. He just wanted to survive—and help others do the same. Becoming a hero wasn’t about justice or legacy. It was about necessity. And now that he’s in it, he’s constantly questioning what being a hero actually means.

He's a self-confessed video-game addict. Everything from consoles to MMO's, to retro arcade games like Pac-Man. In fact, when not kicking super-powered ass or tinkering away in his lair, it's a good bet Miles is hanging out in one of the many arcades around the city. Just don't ask him to hit pause.

• Gadgeteer Genius - With the ability to intuitively determine how anything mechanical works, and by this point, after years of exposure to all manner of gadgetry, Miles is able to whip up practically any manner of gadget you could possibly imagine in no time flat. Even with just a box of scraps. He'll make it work.

• Mr. Fixit - It doesn't matter if he's never seen it before, has never seen anything like it before, is unfamiliar with its working principles or doesn't even know the stuff the box is made out of; Miles will be able to repair it.

• Flying Firepower - With his rocket boots and his energy blasting power gloves, Miles usually functions as ranged support in combat.

• Rich Idiot With No Day Job - Miles started up his own tech company, Extra Life Solutions, as soon as he turned eighteen and has licensed many of his prototypes and inventions. A multimillionaire by the age of twenty-one, Miles has no need to work a day job. He divides his time between chilling with his girl , developing new and innovative technology, fighting crime, and of course, playing video games.

SUPER KNOW-HOW:

Miles possesses the power to intuitively understand the operation of any mechanical device and subconsciously/effortlessly create a schematic in his mind. Backed up by the ability to visually perceive mechanical energy in action, this power allows him to instinctively recognize the potential and functional uses of any machine or technological device in his visual range, a skill that combined with his natural intelligence gives him the ability to conceive, design and build highly advanced mechanical devices and operate, modify and disassemble existing technology or create countermeasures for it with little effort. He's capable of MacGyvering complex devices or weapons out of mere scrap.

POWER GLOVES:

Engineered to project energy blasts from their palms, Miles power gloves were originally just a pair of standard Sky Raiders gauntlets, however he’s upgraded and modified them so many times over the years they no longer resemble the outdated tech they began as. He’s modeled them after Nintendo's Power Gloves.

HUD:

In combat, Miles wears a high-tech visor that displays a hologram-like heads-up display that monitors such things as the energy levels of his gear, health readouts, mini-maps, etc. Miles has customized the layout of his HUD to mimic first person shooters, with targeting reticles, objectives, threat-identification, and his enemies defenses.

POWER SUIT:

In lieu of any physical superhuman abilities, Miles wears a lightweight, all-purpose combat suit (that is easily worn underneath his clothes), made from an imperivum-mesh weave material. The experimental material protects Miles from stabbings, while a high-tech "Power Belt" is incorporated into his suit that projects a thin force field around him and allows Miles to withstand more powerful impact forces like energy attacks, and gunfire.

SAVEPOINT:

In the south side of Kings Row, hidden beneath a derelict arcade, sits a crumbling relic from the golden age of coin-ops called Pixel Palace. From the outside, it’s just boarded-up windows and a flickering neon sign that sometimes sparks the letter “X” into “Piel Palace". A custom-modded arcade cabinet of "Galaga" in the back corner is actually a biometric scanner. Entering a specific combo (Konami Code, naturally), along with a palm scan and vocal password (“First to play, last to quit”) triggers a shift in the floor. The cabinet drops down like an elevator. Cue 8-bit chiptune music. G.G. (or good game), an AI with the wit of a speedrunner and the patience of a cat on Red Bull, maintains the base. She appears as a holographic avatar on most displays, switching outfits based on mood, game genre, or sarcasm level. A large bank of monitors capable of doing anything from monitoring crisis points around the city to playing the most advanced of video games. The base also possesses a high tech workshop, where Miles repairs his gear and builds new devices.

HIGH SCORE: Casey Peterson. His fiancé, the love of his life, his Player Two. She's on another level. Literally. Miles never really had any serious girlfriends before Casey, but when he met the ivory-haired bombshell, it was all over. To Miles, she's the only girl that matters. Even if she's got the mouth of a sailor and the aggressiveness of a pissed-off pitbull.

AGLOW: Lilah Brenner. She's an artsy chick Miles met years ago. An artist and tattooist, Lilah's personality is just as colorful as her wardrobe. Miles admires her artistic talents and endeavors and also does tech work for her every now and then.