Iceciro/EarlyYears
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Contents |
Iceciro's Early Years
Iceciro - once Chad Avant - is at the same time one of the youngest, and one of the most cruel villains in all of the Rogue Isles.
Additionally, only under very rare circumstances would characters have access to this information. I would consider it a personal favor if you would discuss the contents of this OOC with me before using it in any rp - scarce few people know of Ice's personal motives, and it develops the character more for him to struggle through his problems through social interaction and not revisiting his past at this point. I am putting it here for the sole purpose of letting everyone understand his motives and where he really comes from - and to point out there's more to him than just a little punk.
Your time is appreciated - now on to the good stuff!
War Begins!
Born Chad Avant, Iceciro was your average child in Paragon City - as average as it gets in such a place, anyway. No super powers, no desire for heroics, just average. Something changed during the Ritki Invasion, however. In 2002, at the age of 11, he was outside when it began. The resulting carnage of the initial assault had a deep, dark effect on his very soul. He watched as the apartment building that his family lived in was leveled by a Ritki plasma blast. Less than seven minutes into the war, he went from a normal boy with a loving mother and father to an orphan.
He watched the heroes come in to attempt to stop the invasion - and his last moment of hope was crushed as the Ritki pushed back, crushing the resistance into the ittiest of bittiest of peices. And for six months, he lived on the streets, behind enemy lines, watching the Ritki. It was not a super feat, merely luck and a will to survive that allowed him to persevere, watching the Ritki move, watching their technicans work, and eventually sneaking out and taking a suit of Ritki armor from them during a time of a particularly fierce Hero backlash.
The Gauntlet
Chad had never been any more intelligent than average, but watching the Ritki work, watching them move and react, and paying particular attention to how they worked on thier armors, he gained a slight understanding of the way it worked. The last month of the war saw him working non-stop on a device of his own design, a device that would ensure he was no longer on the losing end of the power struggle. Or for that matter, any struggle. And thus, the first part of his technology was created - the components he pulled from the suit, the result of trial and error, and his new life were all condensed into one item, a small gauntlet.
He had tested his gauntlet on Ritki. In essence, the weapon was simple. Ritki suits drew on their wearers personal power - mental, magical, physical, whatever special talent the wearer had - and used them to power all the functions - the heavy shielding, the detection systems, even down to the weapons the Ritki carried. Chad had, in effect, reversed the circuits, though the actual process was much more involved. Instead of drawing on his powers, the gauntlet allowed him to draw the powers of others. What had started as a power amplification system had become, in Chad Avant's hands, the ultimate weapon to use against super-powered individuals.
And it wasn't long before he got a chance to use it. A small Ritki group was sidetracked by the power emissions of Chad firing the glimmering beams at the walls, trying to get a hang for the arc and flow of them, and burst through the door of the abandoned house. Chad looked at the Ritki soldiers and merely grinned. The first time he felt the shake of his gauntlet as the leeching beams contacted the armor of the Ritki, he knew he would never be the one without the power. When the last Ritki of the squad hit the floor, gasping, drained of all energy and even the power to breathe properly, they knew it too.
Tough Decisions
Looting the Ritki armors from the dead aliens and barring the door harder than before, Chad secluded himself while the heroics of Alpha and Omega Squadron were ending the Ritki threat. Only eating when absolutely necessary, never stopping his work, his body wasted away, while his mind became progressively more acutely aware of the way the Ritki technology worked, more so than most of the combat technicians of the Ritki themselves. As the Heroes were outside pushing back the Ritki, Chad became acutely aware of a conundrum that would terrify most normal people, but he approached it with the calmness of one who had lived with the daily fear of death, who had seen everything that mattered to him taken away in an instant, and who had promised himself no matter the cost, he would never be weak again. Not ever.
The work was done painstakingly, there would be one chance. The new gloves would work, or he would never be powerful. Not even powerful - he wouldn't survive, not that Chad would have chosen to survive with one of his arms missing, in any case.
With a mighty swing of a meat cleaver, he cut his left arm cleanly above the elbow. Working quickly, ignoring the spinning of the room and his own swearing, the 12 year old, more mature than any child of his age should have to be, set to work attaching a salvaged Ritki prosthetic device he had seen them grafting to thier warriors that were wounded. The smell of his own burning flesh filled his nostrils - a smell he will never forget - as he connected the odd, nearly organic metal to his upper arm. He affixed the new improved version of the old gauntlet, now a full glove with slightly articulated fingers, a complete replacement. To his horror, nothing worked. Th new arm, the arm he had put so much effort into was a dead weight at his side. The horror was only momentary, as he realized his fault - the arm was designed to feed off psionic energy, and he had none. He'd accounted for the flaw already - the pain must have clouded his mind. Flesh, nothing but a hinderance. He opened the wrist and slammed the power containment unit from the original gauntlet into the new arm and hand, and breathed one final sigh of releif as he saw the arm move - slowly, but it moved. He passed out, exhausted from the day, and the loss of blood that had gone unnoticed.
The next day he awoke in a daze, lifting his heavy left arm from the floor where he had collapsed, hungry, and to sounds he hardly remembered - the sounds of humans. His first reaction, the reaction of a frightened little boy, was to run to the door, but that was quickly repressed. He had a peice of Ritki technology welded to his arm - it WAS his arm. He'd be an experiment. He ducked out of the building quickly, figuring the severed arm and blood would be one more war crime attributed to the aliens - and they were of no use to him anyways. He looked at his right arm, looking from the metal arm, the arm that would give him power, to his weak, skinny right one. The right one would have to go soon. There was no room for it in his new self.
The First Fallen Hero
It was two years later. 2004. Chad Avant, still on the streets, still dodging anyone that might recognize his arm, had been siphoning power from lowlifes, from homeless, from anyone he could literally get his hand on. The pickings for Ritki technology were slim to say the least. Crey and the world governments had snatched up as much technology as they possibly could, and Chad had hardly gotten enough to build and equip a second arm, much less anything else. But he felt he was ready. With the remaining Ritki driven deep underground, there was one source to look to for more power. The people who had power, though not enough to save him from this fate, nor save his family. The heroes. They would be his first step, he realized, carefully releasing the energy he had stored in one of his containment units. He loaded it into his right arm, his left was to be used for weakening. The first hero to cross his path was Frostbyte. An up-and-coming hero himself, and a star for the beleaguered citizens of King's Row, Frostbyte was everything a hero could've hoped to be, except for on a destiny with his own death. As he finished off a pack of thugs, and radioed for the PPD to come pick up their unconscious, frost-coated bodies, he felt a sharp pain in his back, and he began, for the first time in his life, to become... warm. He turned around to see a boy, younger than himself even, with large metal gloves. The gloves were emitting whatever beam was making him feel so warm. Instinctively he let his mutant powers come loose, firing a blade of ice at the boy's gloves. His superhero instincts to do no permanent harm had kept him out of legal trouble, but in the end they were his downfall. His ice was more brittle than usual and merely shattered on the supertough metallic alloy found in such Ritki items. Another blast came from the left glove, and he felt sluggish. Tired, of all things, here in a battle with what he was sure was his first real antihero, a real supervilian? Why was he so tired? The teenager kept coming, slapping brittle ice shards away left and right. A hand clasped down on his neck, and he could feel the energy being pulled away into this... thing's body. He tried to form an ice spear, but all that happened was the water condensing from the air into cold mist on his fingertips. But how? As the hand clasped around the throat tighter and the world began to spin, for the first time he began to feel like a normal human, an incredibly tired normal human. His last thought in this world was wondering how the young boy was able to emulate his method of forming an ice spear... only it was so much sharper - that could hurt someone.
The spear of ice, jagged and dripping water, formed by Chad's instinctive but unpracticed use of the powers he'd stolen, went cleanly through Frostbyte's heart. The second, found it's way into his throat. Chad leaned down, acknowledging another death that was his fault... not caring for the dead, but acknowledging his own power. The power he had over others, even superheros. He put his metallic "fingers" against the downed hero's face, and could feel the suit draining everything - his mutant powers, his life force, the last vestiges of energy before the silent embrace of Death took him. The process took a few more minutes... luckily the stupid fool hadn't activated his emergency mediport before he fell. As Chad stood up, checking the readings on his gloves and seeing he had drained a huge amount of power from the hero, a light snow began to fall.
Chad couldn't help but smile as he walked out from behind the alleyway, gloved hands in his pockets, as though any other member of Paragon City. A very small part of him regretted what he had done. But he had done what had to be done, after all. The heroes had their chance, thought Chad. Now it's my turn to have power.
