Scare

Ellis Kane was born in Salamanca, a once-charming resort town nestled in the wooded hills just outside Paragon City—a metropolis teeming with flying titans, armored guardians, and psychic defenders. Tourists came to Salamanca in the fall for leaf-peeping, ghost tours, and the annual October Hollow Festival, a weeklong celebration of spooky fun, old legends, and cheap cider. Bonfires, effigies, ghost stories, and tales of “The Hollow Devil,” a local folktale used to scare kids into behaving. According to legend, The Hollow Devil was once a man wronged by the townsfolk who came back each year as a flaming scarecrow spirit to punish the wicked. Ellis lived on the edge of town in a rundown farmhouse with his father, Reverend Malcolm Kane, a hellfire-and-damnation preacher who led a dwindling fringe congregation known as The New Dawn Fellowship. Reverend Kane believed the modern world—especially its super-powered “false idols”—was a sign of the End Times. He preached that Paragon’s heroes were devils in disguise, and that Halloween was a blasphemous celebration of chaos and demons.

Ellis, however, loved Halloween. He loved the stories, the masks, the magic. He would paint his face and sneak into town during the festival, watching costume parades and bonfires from the shadows, wishing he could be anyone else. When Reverend Kane caught him one year, he declared Ellis tainted. In front of the congregation, he condemned his own son as a vessel of “the Hollow Devil”. Reverend Malcolm Krane believed Ellis’s imagination was sinful and tried to “burn the devil out of him.” Literally. On the final night of the festival, when the townspeople were dancing and drinking cider by torchlight, Reverend Kane dragged the fifteen-year-old Ellis to the family’s rotting barn. The Reverend chained him to a support beam, surrounded him with straw, and lit it ablaze during the Halloween festival—intending to “cleanse” him under the judgment of of "purifying" fire. A baptism of ash. No one heard Ellis scream over the fireworks and laughter in town.

But something did.

As the flames roared, Ellis heard a voice—whimsical and ancient, crawling through the smoke like a nursery rhyme wrapped in teeth:

The fire didn’t kill Ellis. It changed him. When the barn collapsed, Ellis crawled from the rubble— his eyes glowing like coals. His father was later found burned alive in the pulpit of his church, face melted into a screaming rictus. On the wall, in scorched handprints: "TRICK FOR TRICK."

The town hushed it up. Claimed it was trauma. Claimed Ellis was shipped off to a hospital in Paragon. The truth? He was locked in the Ashridge Institute, a gothic asylum just beyond the city limits, buried beneath bureaucratic forgetfulness. There, they tried to "treat" him. Shock therapy. Sedatives. Arcane suppressants. But the fire never left. Neither did the voice—The Hollow Devil, or as Ellis would call him, "his better half". A taunting, poetic whisper in the back of his mind. It wore rhymes like masks. It loved Halloween. It loved pain. And it loved Ellis.

At twenty one, Ellis escaped Ashridge during a Halloween riot. The institute burned to the ground. Survivors said they saw a man with a jack-o'-lantern grin and eyes like lantern flames walking away from the flames, laughing like a madman.

Years later, whispers started in the alleys of Paragon City—of a pumpkin-masked figure who punished the wicked with fire and laughter. Who left behind jack-o’-lanterns, rhyme-scrawled walls, and no survivors. A figure who didn’t belong to the superhero community. Who made no public appearances. Who only hunted the monsters that the capes ignored.

🔥 Hellfire
Scare wields a mystical form of fire that defies the laws of physics—often referred to in occult circles as hellfire, though it doesn't come from any biblical underworld. His flames are born of rage, pain, and something older that speaks in rhyme through smoke. Unlike ordinary fire, Scare’s hellfire burns selectively: it can sear a soul and leave skin untouched… or reduce a building to cinders without spreading to the next. He can conjure it from thin air, shape it into weapons, hurl it like artillery, or thread it through walls like a crawling, sentient thing. It responds to his emotional state—flickering wildly when he's agitated, glowing cold and eerie when he's calm. In close quarters, the fire becomes a tool of psychological warfare, whispering with voices that sound like childhood fears. His control is precise, but not perfect—when Scare loses control, the fire doesn’t just burn… it hungers.

💀 Healing Factor
Scare’s body heals at a supernatural rate, but not cleanly. Wounds close with the smell of charred flesh, as if stitched together by the same flame that powers him. Bones reknit with sickening cracks, skin reforms with a blackened, smoldering edge, and he often coughs up smoke after sustaining lethal damage. This regeneration isn’t instantaneous—it’s rapid, but painful, and leaves behind strange scars that never quite look human. Even if burned, broken, or impaled, Scare rises again, steaming and laughing like something that enjoys dying. It’s unclear whether this ability is tied to his willpower, the entity that whispered to him in the barn, or some deeper flame he hasn’t yet understood. Either way, death has tried and failed. Now it just waits.

💪 Superhuman Strength
Scare possesses raw, terrifying strength far beyond normal human limits. He can hurl a full-grown man across a street, punch through reinforced doors, or tear steel with his bare hands. His agility matches his power—he moves with an uncanny, almost animalistic fluidity, leaping great distances, scaling walls, and vanishing in the flicker of a flame. He doesn’t tank hits—he endures them, like a walking furnace wrapped in burlap and vengeance. Combined with his fire and healing, his strength makes him a one-man apocalypse in a scarecrow mask. Subtle? No. Effective? Hell yes.

Scare
Scare is a chaos-wrapped paradox: theatrical but focused, sardonic yet solemn. He lives in a headspace between performance and punishment — every act of vigilante justice is both a personal vendetta and a kind of street-side morality play. His default demeanor is playful, almost gleeful, but always laced with menace. He uses rhyme, gallows humor, and scarecrow imagery not for amusement — but as weapons. They disarm, distract, terrify.

There’s a haunted intelligence behind his eyes, a man constantly calculating how to hurt the right people in the most symbolically satisfying way. He’s not a hero. He doesn’t want medals or redemption. He wants the bad people to know why they’re burning.

Underneath the mask and flames, Ellis Kane is still in there — but he’s frayed, fragile, and not entirely in control anymore.

The Hollow Devil
In Salamanca folklore, The Hollow Devil (or Smiling Jack as the locals of Salamanca called him) is an autumn spirit — or perhaps a demon — that preys on towns where people hide sins behind smiling masks. He appears during harvest festivals, bonfire nights, or trick-or-treat celebrations. Always smiling. Always burning.

No one agrees on where he came from. Some say he was once a child who was burned as a witch. Others believe he was a man wronged by the townsfolk who came back each year as a flaming scarecrow spirit to punish the wicked. But one tale always repeats: he speaks in rhyme, walks in smoke, and offers you a treat... before the trick.

In Ellis's case, Smiling Jack didn’t just visit — he moved in. The night his father tried to burn the "sin" out of him, something answered from the flames. Whether Smiling Jack is a demon, a forgotten god, a cursed memory, or an emergent psychic entity born from trauma and fire… even Ellis doesn’t fully know. What he does know is: it talks to him. It helps him. And sometimes… it laughs when he doesn’t.