Hero Prime

Hero Prime began his career as Omega Extreme. In creating him, I drew inspiration from Superman, The Eradicator, Booster Gold, and eventually Neo from The Matrix, building a flawed and naive individual with a lot of power and even more to learn. Initially, his story had him visiting our time from a distant future utopia, where people had naturally developed powers and abilities that, in the past, had belonged only to heroes. As I played him, I discovered the opportunity to deepen his story, and to broaden it significantly, and he went through a number of life changes. The most stark of the changes was a revelation about his past - and his future. Despite these adjustments to his tale, he's gone through no major retcons or rewrites. Today, he's my main and favorite character.

Michael Mars (a.k.a., Hero Prime) is a former Technologist with The Zenvious Foundation. After the Foundation closed, he spent a couple years working as a special agent for Vanguard. He recently became head of a new project, working in conjunction with Portal Corps, rescuing heroes from doomed iterations of the world and bringing them to Primal Earth. This project is known only as Tangent.

The actual date of Michael Mars' birth is difficult to determine, but his given age placed him born in CE3452. The memories of his childhood are scant and uncertain, but for the first twenty five years of his life, Mike's surroundings seemed Utopian. There was no war, no conflict, no scandal. Belief systems had been distilled and meshed into a common faith that centered around the ingenuity of mankind and the benevolence of fate. The world had been set on a good and proper course in the late twenty-first century, and had prospered in the following fourteen hundred years. There was no need unfulfilled, no want that could not be attained. Humankind had achieved magnificent scientific leaps, and had even managed to nudge evolution along its path to give normal men and women abilities only "heroes" of the past had wielded.

In this world, Mike Mars was an average young man, a resident of Pinnacle City, formerly known as Denver. He was trained in luminatechnology, working on his Grandmaster's thesis. He enjoyed extreme sports, but with a twist: Michael Mars' ability to absorb and redirect energy made him nearly invulnerable to harm, which meant he could perform tasks more daring and dangerous than many others. Lava surfing and chute-less base-jumping (which meant seeing how close he could come to the ground before bringing himself to a hovering halt) were among his favorite hobbies, other than watching old recordings and reading stories of the bygone Age of Heroes.

Of that Age, one hero stood out in Mike's mind, almost to the point of idolization - a child, sent from another planet, imbued with powers by Earth's yellow sun, who grew to be the most powerful and most noble hero the world had ever seen: Superman. The Man of Steel ignited Mike's imagination, and he wished for the chance to travel back to an age long past and working alongside his hero. The first step toward fulfilling his wish came in CE3474 when Sidney Savant, a brilliantly prodigous young man specializing in quantum gravometrics, offered to open a gateway that would send Mike plummeting back in time to the early twenty-first century, right into the peak of the heroic age.

Michael Mars was born in a timeless subspace dimension known as The Core. A religious sect of the Rikti known as the Iradu had kidnapped his mother from her proper time - the early twenty-first century - in order to procure the child. His mother was rescued by a pair of unknown heroes after the child was born, but the boy was too heavily guarded and had to be left behind. Transported into a twisted branch of Primal Earth's future, Mike was raised in a creche, attached to a biotechnical system that kept him alive in a state of simulated reality while stimulating his body to negate the potential for atrophy.

By the thirty-fifth century, the Iradu had seized power on their home world and used superior numbers and advanced technology to overcome the metahumans of Primal Earth, decimating its population and enslaving its survivors. Using Earth as a platform for greater conquest, the Rikti spread throughout the galaxy, conquering world after world, seeking out and dominating all sentient life. Their plan for Mike, with his particular abilities, was unique, an experiment by the Iradu built as a weapon of mass destruction. His powers, they reasoned, would allow him to be inserted into a planetary core, absorb tremendous amounts of energy, and output it back into the core in one huge blast, tearing the planet apart from the inside.

Sidney Savant, however, managed to break free of the psionic bonds holding his mind hostage and freed Mike, sending him back to a time and place he hoped the Iradu would not look.

Completely ignorant of the truth behind his origin, Mike arrived in the twenty-first century on August 27th, 2004, appearing naked and dazed in an intersection in the rural community of Independence, Kansas. He collapsed, drained after being thrust back in time. Police and emergency medical personnel arrived and took him to Mercy Hospital, where he met Tilda Harris, charge nurse and wife of a local farmer. Though Mike appeared to have suffered a concussion and showed signs of amnesia, she convinced the hospital administration that the young man was her nephew, in town to visit. He was released into her care. Tilda and her husband, George, offered Mike a room in their farmhouse and a chance to work the farm for the remainder of the summer and fall, to help him get on his feet.

Mike remained in the Harris home for the next eighteen months, staying out of the limelight and helping George and Tilda with the farm chores. He revealed to them only little hints at his past, thinking they would find his story unbelievable. In early 2006, however, he learned of the problems facing Paragon City and confessed to his hosts that he had come back from the future, showing them what feats he was capable of performing. He explained that he had to leave, to go help the Rhode Island metropolis. With their blessing and a costume handmade by the talented Mrs. Harris, Mike arrived in Paragon City and took on the name Omega Extreme. He balanced his time between his newfound work as a hero, his job as a staff reporter for the Paragon Free Press, and an hour or so of free time each day spent at interdimensional nightclub Pocket D.

It was during these frequent visits to DJ Zero's club when Omega Extreme met two people who would influence his life. The first - and probably his oldest friend in Paragon City - was Alice Littlefield. Alice took an interest in Mike due to his nature as a "Class Two Dimensional Traveler" who needed to be registered with the governmental agency under whom she worked, the BAIC. But her professional interest quickly took a back seat to a personal intrigue, and she asked him out on a date. About the same time, he met Angel Sliversky, who discovered Mike had no idea what a "date" was, and became determined to show him. One date (with each) later, and the new hero was faced with a choice: Who would he continue seeing? Weighing his options, he decided to explore a relationship with Angel.

It was during their first month together that Mike received a communique from Sidney Savant. The holographic message passed along information that shattered everything the young man knew about himself, and changed how he would see the future forever.

Savant's revelation was simple: While he didn't know the secret of Mike's birth, he did reveal that Mike had not grown up in a Utopian world, but in a biotechnical simulation designed by the Iradu. Worse still, he had been wrong about the Rikti not knowing where to find their experiment. The Iradu traced the portal, and followed it back to a parallel time on the Rikti own home world, insinuating themselves into positions of authority and power. They used their influence to sway the Restructurists, urging them to attack Primal Earth. That attack came on March 23rd, 2002, and allowed the Iradu to lay in wait for the eventual arrival of Michael Mars as Omega Extreme.

Shortly thereafter, Angel - who admitted to Mike that she, too, was a time-traveler - disappeared, and, stonewalled by her family, Mike, emotionally crushed by the perceived abandonment, believed she had returned to her own time.

In October and November of 2006, Mike enjoyed the company of Jennifer Dietrich, but also experienced his first real sense of the price of being a hero. A car carrying diplomats from the Theta42 dimension careened off an overpass in Skyway City, crashing through the outer wall of his seventh-story apartment. The diplomat was delivering a series of schematics and personal effects to Abaleno Lutrai, the Theta42 Ambassador. Pursued by Malta Operatives and caught off guard, it was sheer coincidence that placed their limousine in the living room of Michael Mars. The diplomat implored Mike to complete his delivery, and Mike followed through. As a result, he became the target of Malta attacks.

In order to protect Jennifer, he retired the Omega Extreme identity and took up residence on Vigil Station with The Guardian Force, secretly working under the name Mr. Protagonist, an alias he shared only with his girlfriend and his best friend, Bobby Thistle. The relationship with Jennifer was cut short just before Thanksgiving when she disappeared. He spent the next month searching for her, but found no clues as to her disappearance. At first he believed she had been captured by Malta, but later discovered she had taken her belongings with her. The only conclusion he could reach was that she simply left, continuing the search for answers to her own questions elsewhere.

Two months later, after leaving the Guardian Force and signing on full time with The Zenvious Foundation, he renewed his relationship with Angel Silversky. The two dated for a short time before becoming engaged; eight months later, they ended the relationship due to irreconcilable differences.

In early 2007, Mike received a bit of a shock when a child expected by Jade Bernough and Kai Keller was shown to share over 90% of his genetic markers. There was speculation that he had engaged in an illicit affair with Jade, a notion that was debunked when it was brought up that parents share no more than twenty five to thirty five percent of the genetic markers of their children. The connection between Mike and the child, however, was perplexing, especially with Mike from such a far leap into the future. The child, still in the womb, exhibited some rather interesting qualities. He absorbed tremendous amounts of energy, and seemed to be aging at an accelerated pace. While it was impossible to use an sonogram to get images of the child - after all, he would simply absorb any energy the device emitted - more primitive means were used to discover the unborn baby had a double heartbeat.

It was later uncovered that the child's accelerated growth rate was not the result of unnatural growth patterns, but of the natural process of life. Unknown to the heroes of the Zenvious Foundation, Jade had been abducted from her home on numerous occasions, snatched out of Primal Earth's timeline and shunted into a meta-chronological dimensional space, during which she was observed for weeks at a time, only to be returned to the exact second she left, her memories of the kidnapping expunged. It was during these weeks that the supposed abnormal growth of the child occurred. The Iradu, through the Rikti, eventually managed to procure the child during their last observation period. During the preparation to placing Jade on mutagenic treatments, however, an assault on their facility led by two unknown heroes managed to free Ms. Bernough and return her to Primal Earth. She was, however, bereft of child.

More was not discovered until, at the behest of Lady Grey, Mike was fighting the Honoree - formerly Hero 1, the legendary British hero and wielder of Excalibur. During the fight, Hero 1 managed to return, at least in part, to his human sensibilities long enough to tell Mike two things. First was that he was the child kidnapped by the Iradu, the product of the union of archmage Jade Ohm and the ascended Psi Monk. This, in turn, gave him a whole new family, which included a spunky, excitable little sister, Vagary Keller, who calls him her "Big Little Brother". Secondly, the Iradu had come after him - that they had been waiting for him, and would continue to try and reclaim their pet project. They called him "Target Hero: Prime". That night, he dropped all pretense and made public who he was: Mike Mars was Mr. Protagonist. The next day, he dropped the name entirely and took up a new title, one inspired by what the Rikti called him: Hero Prime.