Stellar Aegis
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| A young woman with a vast, new destiny... | |
| Stellar Aegis | |
| Player: @ArchStrike | |
| Origin: | Natural |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Peacebringer |
| Security Level: | 13 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Hoshiko Takamura(Human)/Aegis of Innocence(Kheldian) |
| Known Aliases: | "Hoshi" / Elder or "Old Beast" |
| Species: | Kheldian/Human amalgamation |
| Age: | 21/ancient(10,000 years+) |
| Height: | 5'5" |
| Weight: | 125lbs |
| Eye Color: | Blue-Gray |
| Hair Color: | Black(Purple-Black with coloring) |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | Asian-American (Japanese descent) |
| Occupation: | Former surgical-intern |
| Place of Birth: | Seattle, Washington, USA / Unrecorded |
| Base of Operations: | King's Row (presently) |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Father/Mother/Sister(older) |
| Known Powers | |
| Luminous Blast and Aura w/subsequent powers | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Shape-shifting, flight, energy manipulation, specialized medical skills | |
| Equipment | |
| Cell Phone, PPD Scanner, Hero-uniform | |
| Under Construction | |
Contents |
Character History
Lost Kheldian Sage
With a lack of true history written of many of the elder Kheldian's beginnings and exploits, it's only truely known that Aegis was originally one of the first chosen teachers and guides for the relatively inexperienced Khelds that required the blending. The choice of host is one that must be made with utmost care. To assist in the selection and transition, guides were posted throughout the galaxy by the Kheld hierarchy. Aegis, already being one of great age and wisdom, a positive and merry outlook and with a supreme understanding of alien lifeforms and their psychological make-ups made him the perfect guide and teacher for the young. It was a station and duty that he held with pride and dedication and was one that he held for untold millennia.
His name begins to crop up again, after his falling off of the racial radar for some several thousand years, as a roustabout and journeyman. One that wandered...his focus having fallen from guiding those of his own kind to helping to guide those of other races along their own lifepaths. The concept of fate and predestined nature was one that spoke deeply to him now, and with such as his guide he came to believe in the purity of what humans would eventually name "chaos theory", the idea that out of seeming disorder and random occurance, order and structure can not only be seen but fostered and formulated. It was, with this in mind, that he struck out into the vast black and sought his perceived destiny...that of vagabond sage and wandering protector of those that would receive his gift of the blending.
After many different lengths of host-lifetimes, he began to notice a disturbing fact of his existence in more and more alarming clarity. He...was both a blessing to those he joined with ...and a curse. The blending was such that as both he and a host joined, not only was a new being created..but the original was dissolved into the whole, for both himself and the host. Many was the time that he found that families, friends, those that "he" would come into contact with would react to the new Kheld/host with fear/loathing/misunderstanding/hate/loss/sorrow/and any host of other emotions and actions that were most often to the detriment of the host's happiness. Far to many was the time that upon releasing the bond, the death of the host was one surrounded by shame, singularity, nothing at all what he'd come to understand of each host's species ritual and concepts/hopes. The dissolution of the bond was one that filled him with supreme and penultimately profound sorrow, for not only the loss of they that had shared all with him, but for the being that had effectively ceased to be as he'd come to know it via the memories of the host. It was as if he had been privy to the death of the same being, intimately, twice in one lifetime. After several thousand human generations, it became a burden too heavy for even such a preeminently wise and self-actualized being to bear.
After the death of one host in particular, he decided that the only course of action was to seek a host of extremely long natural lifespan..and seek to find a median to settle his conundrum. Taking his leave from all contact with Kheldian society and any that knew him, he opened his mind and heart to what he'd come to call "the whispers of the universe" and taking an astral form, lept into the great void to allow fate to bring him to what he hoped to be the place that he could find the answer he so desperately sought.
Without destination or direction, he randomly wandered into a star-system containing hundreds of worlds. A behemothic solar system that had not known the touch of outside influence and one where he was to find a race of beings that fit his needs perfectly. They were without name, without relations (as their reproduction was one of mitosis, family meant little) and being possessed with a supernatural sense of the universe around them had dedicated themselves to the halcyon life and pursuit of the inner-self and it's relation to the cosmos. Upon finding one of advanced age and great wisdom devoid of any leanings to power-worshiping or designs for glory, the merging took place...but with odd results.
Aegis remained...as did the host. The blending had resulted in the combination of both beings into one, but amazingly their individual essences hadn't merged! At the speed of thought, Aegis began to speak at length with Aetreas (the host), excitedly as he had never had the opprotunity to do so before! Over the coming generations, the answers he sought begun to come to him in a pronounced realizations. It seemed that the strength of will and focus truly did determine one's static reality. The one thing that his host's race carried above all else was the individual. It was so well ingrained into the collective genetic memory that during the blending, it would have been lethal for the Aetreas's essence and Aegis's to truly merge. It was thus, that the psyche of the host had encapsulated itself unconsciously as a extraneous defense mechanism, unknown to exist even to the host and something that Aegis had never heard of in all his eons. This discovery lead to a new philosophical direction for Aegis. The blending need not be as intrusive as dogma dictated. It was possible for him to bear his focus, and that of the host's, towards a more congenial blending..one that preserved both as individuals rather than the now painfully invasive result of essence reconstitution.
But...as with all things, even those that possess extended life are destined to their final hour. So was it with Aetreas, his final wish for Aegis, as nearly unending as he seemed, was to continue his own journey...to fully realize his destiny and to find happiness and peace of purpose again.
Thus, it was with another great measure of sorrow, that he took the lessons of a life lived with one of startling intellect and wisdom to rival his own and broke the bond, Aetreas finding repose as Aegis had found him...near a lake, displayed on a broad expanse of rock as if napping in the waning hours of the day, his otter-like form glistening. Aegis bid the world along with his erstwhile mentor farewell and again, threw himself to the stars and whatever would await him wherever the stellar winds would blow. So it was for untold thousands of years until...
Lost Human Soul
Hoshi, as her friends in the surgery annex and for years prior had called her, was an up and coming surgery intern at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. The weather was delightful, her boyfriend was well and sure the love of her life, the people she grew up and now worked with were equally so and she readily recognized that she was truly blessed in her life. From a young age, she'd always seemed to know exactly what she wanted to do with her life, that being to help people that were suffering. She was devoutly dedicated to the line of the oath which reads, "I will do no harm" in almost a spiritual manner. Her own empathic nature was of great assistance but a singular detraction to her scholastic and professional career as, more often than not, she took just a bit too long in her diagnosis or treatment of patients. Fear of hurting them more, aggravating previous conditions, fear of missing something, the nagging tendency to feel too much for and about her patients prevented her from rising to the fore in the eyes of her instructors, yet that same "caring too much" led her into the path of fate's great devices one spring day.
One bright and lush summer day, while on staff, a child was brought into the ER with severe injuries sustained in what could only be surmised from the frantic babbling of his mother as egregious and serial neglect teetering upon abuse. Somehow, the boy had come in contact with Superadine tainted vials, and during the massive biological shock after his exposure had suffered a complete mental breakdown..resulting in a terrifying confrontation with the previous owner of said vials. The gang-member hadn't been kind to the boy. He was a bloody-pulp and it was the work of 13 painstaking hours for the ER and surgical teams to uncover the fact that the boy was going to die, regardless of anything they'd done. With a calm demeanor, Hoshi, being the only one free to talk to the mother as a full on slam of a bus crash hit the ER just then, was forced to give her the horrifying news.
She'd lost patients before. But this time, the loss resonated within her like a sympathetic harmonic in crystal. The boy was barely 11. He'd just begun ...everything. And then, in the Age of SuperHeroes, this boy suffered one of the worst violations of the body that even the attendings had ever seen or heard of. They'd brought pieces of him in in coolers. At the end of her shift, she zombie-shuffled out from the Med Center and made her way directly to the nearest club, intent on drowning the day away in a torrent of tequila-induced amnesia.
It was 5 AM the following morning when she awoke, seriously hungover, when there came a knock at her door. Wrapping herself in a light robe, she carelessly opened the door to be accosted by a trio of armed men. Ski masks were all she could see, aside from the 8-inch wicked looking blades that each carried. Without word, they subdued her and bound her in the living room. All day, as the phone rang, people knocked, and time passed as they paraded around her apartment, taking liberties with her belongings, all seeming to pass the time as if waiting for something. They told her nothing aside from a single phrase..."He's gonna regret it."
Late in the evening, a knock at the door sparked them all into seeming readiness. It was Matthew, her boyfriend of the past year. Keys jingled outside the door as he apparently fumbled the lock before opening the door to see her panicked, writhing and gagged form lurching for him, to warn him off, to get to him...anything.
Matthew merely smiled. Looking about the room from the doorway, he nodded to each of the masked assailants and entered as carefree as you please.
"I guess...", he said as he approached the whimpering, aghast and befuddled woman before him, "..that this is where I say,'I'm sorry'."
Smiling in a way that froze Hoshi's blood, he slapped her with all the force of a sledgehammer sending her flying across the carpet of her living-room, her head thumping soundly upon the floor and stunning her so fully she couldn't feel the fractured jaw he'd given her. Matthew was, unbeknown to her, a member of the Tsoo clan and was using her as a direct link to the activity and daily working structure of the Medical Center, the experimental lab there-in being one of the few outside Paragon experimenting with a HIGHLY controversial treatment for chronic pain and shock trauma during surgical procedures. The synthetic cocktail being tested was one that would bring enormous profit should the formula be stolen and the test batches, already measuring in the kiloliters, be spirited away for distribution through Tsoo channels.
It was then, as the criminals hounded their planned theft that Seattle PD burst into the apartment...the resulting firefight, struggles, and then finally her release, the trial, her poor ability to respond to such an emotional strain and violation all worked their way to her falling out of the surgical program. Taking a job as a temp till she could get her feet back underneath her was her only viable option. Months passed. Hoshi became withdrawn. Her shine from a year prior was gone, replaced by the lack-luster tinge of someone afraid of her own fate. Try as they might, her friends and family could not seem to reach the sterling, vivacious woman they knew to be languishing inside of her, until the day that took her from them entirely.
It was a Thursday, approximately 7:30 in the evening...when her feet hurt, her hands ached, her eyes throbbed and all she wanted was to sleep till her shower the following day when there came another knock at the door. Her ears perked as she heard the scraping of something metal upon the outside of her door. She stood. Moving towards the counter where her purse lay, the small can of pepper-spray within what she sought as protection as the door burst in, revealing yet another home-intruder. He was large...in a way that most humans cannot achieve without being Samoan. His clothing was disheveled, his hair mussed terribly, discoloration patched his hands and ...that smell. A tang that hit Hoshi at the core of her being. She knew that smell. Blood...fresh blood. She spun to make a desperate dash for the phone next to her bed.
He lunged after her, his crazed eyes the last thing she saw before his hand, sticky and raw slammed over her eyes as the pair slammed into the wall behind her. Her screams filled the night.
Destiny has it's way
Hoshi sat in her now bland and almost empty apartment. Her belongings, pawned for rent. The condition of the rooms mirrored her own bleakness and empty feeling as she sat on the throw in the center of her bedroom, the bed next to her lacerated and destroyed from yesterday's night terrors. She shook as she reached down to her side, lifting up the .38 caliber pistol she'd been so low and desperate for she'd traded some of her soul to get. Loading each round into it's slot in the cylinder with a slow and methodical motion, her face seemed waxen. A far off expression, as if she were no longer there cast over her features as she spun the cylinder with a drunken motion and proceeded to immediately place the barrel to her temple. The load was what she'd been told was a hollow-point...having more than enough power to insure that special placement of the weapon to her head wasn't necessary. She couldn't muster the effort to think of all the ways it could go wrong...all the things she'd be missing...all the people she'd be failing or hurting. She just didn't care anymore.
Aegis started in his insubstantial form, pulsing through the cosmos at ungodly speed. There, a light, fading though it was, it was there and it was what he'd been searching for. He felt himself tear through nebulae...past black-holes...through the heart of a blazing red giant and through the rubble of a planetary system still coalescing as he accelerated for the dimming spirit, so desperate to get to it before it was too late.
A single tear welled up in her left eye, trailing a path down her immaculately made-up face. Her hair was perfect, though for all the good it'd be in a minute, she wanted to leave those responding to the gunfire with as presentable a victim as she could, her fugue blinding her to the reality of the situation. She had convinced herself of the delusion that it'd make it easier for the mortuary and her family. No sense in making anything harder for anyone else. This was her mess. She was tending to it.
The click-click of the hammer pulling back resounded in the room like a redwood breaking in-half.
Aegis neared...so close...tunneling through the quantum strata of the universe like a bloodhound on PCP. Mesons and Gamma-rays tore into him, tachyons burst through him and still he soared. Like a streaking ethereal missile locked on it's target.
He burst into extra-dimensional brilliance within the now barren confines of the Hoshi's bedroom, unseen and intangible, but still...he'd made it. Now all he had to do...
The report of the pistol rang out with the finality of a judge's gavel. The woman before him, jerked harshly to her left...copious amounts of her gray-matter splattered onto the wall across from her. The weapon in her hand spun round her index finger lazily and she slumped like a puppet with it's strings cut to the floor with a dead-weight thump. For a millisecond...Aegis's soul wailed in a pain and sorrow that few lifeforms since the Big Bang have experienced.
For an energy-state life-form, that can be an eternity.
Yet, the spark still lingered. Fading swiftly, nearly gone entirely, yet there was life left in the savaged form before him.
With titanic effort, Aegis forced his consciousness down into the sub-ether, straining to collect and trap the waning life-force and essence of the being whom he'd just seen take the most drastic and pointless of all actions unto themselves. Rabidly, with every ounce of concentration he could muster, he let no filament of the spark-of-life to degrade with massive infusions of his own energy merely as a stop-gap as he weaved the mindscape that would allow him to contact what remained...
"Introductions"
Hoshi's eyes blinked. She found herself laying on her back in a featureless, sterile, white environment devoid of even a horizon. She looked around. It continued all around her.
"What...?", she said in a creaking voice that startled her almost as much as her surroundings. Her voice reached her ears as a sort of dull echo, lacking reverberation.
"...is going on here?", a gravelly and older voice, tinged ever so lightly with the accent of the Orient (which, specifically, she could not guess just then). "Why don't you tell me? Eh?"
She turned around sharply, scanning the limitless sea of white around her as it began to take form, as if mist were turning to gleaming, smooth, white walls of unnaturally pure alabaster, ceiling and floor to match. Moments later, she was standing in what appeared to be a gymnasium sized room made of the material. A blurry form, without edges or structure seemed to hover across the "room" and she heard the voice speak again.
"You've no need to be frightened. I'm not God, nor demon or Devil."
"Then who are you? Where are we? What..", she started to say.
"Child, child, child. An old one like myself can still only answer one question at a time. Heh heh heh", the blur pulsed at her, seeming to be the source of the voice. "I am, to answer the first in a way that you can reference, merely called Aegis. We are, to answer the second in a way you can grasp, together here, in which only you and I may be."
"Where is that?", she interrupted boldly, trying to overcome her shock and befuddlement by projecting a defensive front of authority with this strange being, nevermind the circumstance.
"Child, please...", the voice began, beginning to develop a more solid and centered structure as the blur slowly moved forward towards her, it too also seeming to take on more definition but only just.
"I'm not your child, and if you're about to claim to be one of.."
"One of what? One of your ancestors, perhaps?"
"...How did..."
"How did I know you were going to say that, Hoshiko?", the voice asked, still taking on more of what one would expect of someone else nearby saying anything. The blur continued to draw near, still more definition becoming apparent. It was beginning to resemble the form of a man, she thought. Small of stature, but a man, none-the-less. "You could say that right now, we're rather close to one-another. In many ways, closer than any most any two beings can be. Try to relax a bit, get yourself centered. Maybe..."
"...some breathing exercises? I...that's what you were about to say, wasn't it?", she said, the expression of confusion and surprise melding into a rather unique look on her delicate features.
The blur halted, seemed to shake a moment, then a healthy and hearty chuckle came now directly from it as it's form and edges morphed into focus to reveal an older gentleman, Chinese in ancestry, with matted hair and a roughly worn Chinese peasant's tunic on over ripped baggy blue-jeans and Birkenstocks. If he was human, Hoshi might have said he hadn't shaved in days and one eye seemed to squint habitually even as he laughed his way into focus. "Ho! Hahaha! Very good!! Even after so much damage, I managed to find your core, and you managed to hold yourself together!". He clapped once in a celebratory manner and stepped closer, causing her to back towards the wall behind her.
"Look, I...I don't know what the hell is going on here, but ...uh...I'm a doctor. I'll be missed. You don't want to do this with me, they'll come looking for me and...my fiance' will have a bounty up as soon as they know I'm..."
The grungy little man flashed forward within inches of her, looking directly into her eyes and said, "..gone? Eheheh, you've a wealth of knowledge and wisdom locked up tightly...up here", he punctuated the last with a light tap on her temple before backing off, turning and taking a few steps as he continued,"But, what really should concern you is...what isn't up there anymore."
Hoshi backed into the wall, "What are you talking about?", a definite tremor of her voice betraying her sudden and inexplicable fear at the answer the little man would give.
"You haven't asked me...why you're here", he said, hands clasped behind him as he still stood with his back to the young woman.
"So tell me...", she nervously asked, her body beginning to tremble out of her control, beyond any reason she could fathom for it's doing so.
"The answers to "what's going on here" and "why you're here" both are simply that you have arrived at a crossroads along your life-path. A crossroads that only exists by your volition and my intervention. I intervened because I sensed a great deal about you, from farther across the universe than I can explain to you just now and when I found you, well, your volition had it's say. I apologize for interfering with your choice, but, I believe it's for the best...sincerely." the man said, honest regret coming off of him in almost palpable waves.
"What choice? I can't remember anything..", she kneaded her fingers into her left temple, "..and I've got a splitting headache...Ow! Feels like it's getting worse."
"It will, I regret, unless I hurry things along. I can't maintain your essence forever like this. I'm frankly surprised that I succeeded at all.", the man shrugged as he turned, his expression serious and focused. He gestured lazily towards her feet. "That was your choice."
She looked down, and had memory slam into her like a train with afterburners. Round after round of it, crashing over her like a succession of waves, each more intense and vibrant than the last. The pistol. Her pistol. Her bedroom. The shot. The sudden silence and abyss of nothingness swallowing her...
She blinked. It had passed, and there she sat, back against the wall and the pistol in her hand, just as it had been in the memory.
Confusion reigned supreme in her mind a moment. Had she really done it? Was this all real? How? Shouldn't she be dead? She didn't feel like she was so desperate to stoop to that, but now...she remembered it clearly. As if looking back on events years past.
"That was the choice that led you here.", the man said, kneeling before her, an expression that one could only say was as closely approximating tenderness and concern as the man's lazy-eyed facade could produce firm on his features.
"I intervened to give you another."
"How?" she asked, wincing slightly.
"Ha! It wasn't easy!", he grunted, a conspiratorial gleam in his squinting eye.
Personality
Hoshiko
Aegis
Characteristics
A Unique Blending
Unlike most Kheldian joinings, Aegis has taken it upon himself to master a method of the blending that is not a true amalgamation of both entities. This is looked upon by more that a few Kheldians as a perversion of a sacred bond, the blending being something endemic to the species and central to the belief structure of the race (if one may call it that). As far as Aegis knows, in all his many eons of existence there's been no other Kheldian that's fused with a host in such a manner, but he does accept that there's been much time since he's been privy to the host of his own races achievements.
Both Hoshi and Aegis share in and are able to access the memories and feelings of the other, but it's not an immediate access. Both are self-contained beings within the host body, access to the other is given, never taken aside from a more profound but still surface sense of the other's mental/emotional state. Use/awareness of the body is Hoshi's...Aegis's access to the same is reserved for when/if a change in form is required, though he can assume control of the body in the event of emergency. It's a devoutly held belief of his, however, that this is NOT his body, and therefore it's not his to usurp at will. To do so would be to interfere with the natural progression of the host and a violation of Hoshi's self-volition, something that would shame him to his core.
Communication between each is effectively instantaneous. The nature of the bond between Hoshi and Aegis has produced a connection that reaches beyond the mere mental faculties of either being, entering into what the Buddhist refers to as the "mindstream". From time to time, Hoshi may be seen glancing off to her side for a moment and only a brief moment, as if she's heard something, only to return immediately to whatever is at hand without missing a step. This is endemic of the mindstream's temporal displacement. Both she and Aegis are fully capable of having a five to twenty minute or days long conversation in what appears to be the blink of an eye to anyone else. What she sees when she glances "towards" Aegis in her perception is one of two images. The first, of Aegis's light-form...his "true self". The other, and more usual of the two, is that of a smaller, drooping faced Chinese man in either a well worm brown casual jacket and tie or in more comfortable style in Chinese peasant wear.
- (Imagine Victor Wong as Egg Shen from "Big Trouble in Little China", with a slightly more personable and empathic nature.)
Abilities
Weaknesses & Limitations
Along with all the standard physical limitations and weaknesses, though the essences of both individuals are unique and still intact in their own forms within the host body, the energy of both has bonded to such a degree that the sentient aspects of both are, unknown to either, joined by karma to each other...the streams of consciousness of both beings not totally merged, but yet belonging to life-paths that are now parallel, co-mingling, and finally...convergent. This is a permanent bond, so completely profound that should Hoshi die, Aegis will as well and vice-versa. This is also unknown to either.
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