Nulion
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Contents
History
The Early Years
Kenneth Age was born May 20th, 29,450 AD, to parents Anton and Norah Age. His childhood life was nothing extraordinary, aside from the incredibly advanced civilization he originally called home. His mother worked as an archaeologist studying the nearby ruins of "Old Allegheny", presumably the far-future remains of modern-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father worked as a maintenance engineer to their hometown's nearby orbital elevator; a theorized superstructure that actually existed in Mr. Age's time, one that allowed the transfer of passengers and cargo directly into space via an enormous, 200 mile-long cable.
Added to his early life were his grandparents Isiah and Sarai, both immigrants to Earth from a distant mining colony world. This heritage fascinated Ken, and drove him to eventually leave Earth, to find a 'more exciting life' as an employee of the hyper-corporation responsible for mining activities on his grandparents' former homeworld. Using credentials stolen from Anton, Kenneth stealthily made his way aboard a transport to the New Allegheny orbital platform (NALEO Station), and from there to the moon, where he boarded a six-month flight from the Sol System to this mining colony world, reportedly lying at the fringes of human-occupied space at the time.
According to Mr. Age, the codename "Nulion" derives from this flight. The stasis chamber he was held in for the six-month flight time sat across from a series of piping units labeled "NULL ION CHAMBER". This image had been burned into the man's mind, and so he took a variation of it as his callsign, which he uses to this day.
A World of Blue Gold, Where Death Is Meaningless
Upon arrival on the mining colony world, Kenneth was put to work by his new employer as a shepherd of the underground. He was left to fend for himself at the very bottom-most reaches of corporate living, working in decrepit sewers where mutants and deadly, alien creatures threatened shipments of a precious, crystalline blue ore called "notum". This 'blue gold' could only be found on this world, and shipments of this ore served as the lifeblood of human civilization at the time. This ore was the key to nanotechnology that could work outside the body, and served as a kind of "fuel-conduit" to that end.
It was in these sewers that Kenneth learned how to use a sniper rifle; it was absolutely necessary to his survival. Even then, this world was notoriously hazardous to human life, and necessitated the "insurance and reclaim" technology, that rendered death meaningless to those living on that world. Upon death, the very air of this world, thick with particulate notum, could be used as a "spiritual conduit", to guide the "soul" from the point of death, into a recreated copy of the deceased's body. This process allowed the seamless transition from a state of death, back to life, without a loss or a copy of consciousness. This functional immortality has had a profound impact upon Kenneth's mental state, and can explain how such a timid man developed such prowess in combat.
Ken did not stay working at this job for long. After just half a year of working down in the sewers, he moved on to better things. He defected from the corporation, and moved to the planet's northern hemisphere, where he found work with the anti-corporate rebels that lived there. It was, after all, Ken's goal to make some sort of difference and make his family proud, upon his planned return home within the next several years.
An Unexpected Transformation
Ken eventually found work with a war council, offering his services as member of the clerical staff there. With the skills he had obtained while working underground for the corporation, coupled with subdermal augmentations and stealth-tech devices that he used to hide and perfect his sharpshooting skills beyond human levels, he became the perfect candidate for subterfuge and information-gathering duties within the war council, as well.
His life continued on this path, until a distress call sounded from a remote settlement located near a corporate-owned biotech facility. Responding to the public distress call, Ken, along with many of his comrades, attempted to subdue an enormous monstrosity that had been on a rampage. Ultimately the gigantic mutant was killed, but not without causing severe damage to Kenneth's leg, and infecting him with a manmade 'nanovirus' that is currently known by the CDC as "Lacertavirus". Refer to the "Lacertavirus" section of the dossier for more information.
This virus went undetected within Kenneth's system for weeks, causing him nothing more severe than a flu, before it began to manifest in symptoms consistent with genetic manipulation and trans-species mutation. From this point, Kenneth spent the next several years in a race against the clock to develop some form of antiviral drug, treatment, or cure to his condition, but to no permanent avail. The best that could be done, even with their technological prowess, was to come up with an antiviral drug known as "Goldenglow". This drug can disable the virus in early-stage Lacertavirus victims, but it only acts as a temporary inhibitor in a stage-three victim such as Ken. Kenneth carries at least three dosages of this drug in syringes lashed to his right arm at all times, as a safety precaution.
Departing Reality Itself
Kenneth's life continued for years afterward. His mutations progressed to the point where he no longer identified as a human being, and suffered severe social problems as a result. To the best of Mr. Age's knowledge, no other such beings existed alongside him, therefore he was alone in his predicament; a manimal caught alone in a sea of humanity.
The most important event to unfold in Kenneth's home reality took place in 29,485 AD, when Kenneth was tasked by the war council to infiltrate and collect intel on a highly experimental power-generation facility, far from civilization. The infiltration proved to be a complete disaster, as an attack on the facility by a third party resulted in an explosion powerful enough to have torn apart the fabric of Kenneth's reality, depositing him, battered and hurt, into another time and dimension.
A New Reality
Kenneth awoke in the desolated ruins of a major city borough in Rhode Island, circa 2011 AD. He was lit on fire, his armor systems had failed, his equipment broken, with little to no clue of where he was, what had happened, or if he had actually died in that explosion. He quickly found himself to be in another reality altogether, trapped some 27,000 years in the past. This new reality, known as "Primal Earth", became his home for the next year.
As he came to grips with losing more or less everything he had ever known (including his functional immortality), and dealing with the sudden existence of magic and supernatural creatures that flourished in the reality of Primal Earth, Kenneth's mutations continued to worsen. He struggled that entire year with attempting to satiate his burgeoning tendency to lose himself to feral, reptilian urges that threatened to reduce him to a creature unfit to live among human civilization. Fortunately, Kenneth was helped by several friends from his former reality, who had crossed the rift between times and realities in the aftermath of the explosion, to find him. Included among these select few travelers was Katelin Phare, a nanotechnician who, at the time, had become Kenneth's love interest. Katelin had been described by Mr. Age as a 'fierce, frightening, yet utterly brilliant woman, able to invent or fight her way out of any problem imaginable'.
Katelin's most pressing problem at the time was figuring out how to preserve Kenneth's humanity, even as he further transformed into a reptile, both physically and mentally. Her plan for preserving Mr. Age as we know him today involved a two-pronged assault upon his urges, and his mutating genetic code. Katelin had managed to chemically 'wind down the mutations', resulting in a brief period of time where Kenneth could have actually been considered "cured" of his viral transformation. The second method of helping to preserve Ken was via the usage of an impulse-controlling "symbiotic implant", that would be transferred from Katelin's abdomen, into Ken's. This implant would aid in the suppression of instinctual urges that, by that point, had already damaged Kenneth's personal relationship with many of his friends beyond repair.
It is very prudent to make note that one of these friends would go on to become very important to Kenneth's life in the current reality; that of Mathieu Carver, alias "Shadow". Shadow, a former resident of Primal Earth himself, is a young lion cub who at one point during his childhood had been forcibly transformed into a lion. Considering Kenneth's prior inability to identify with those in a situation similar to his own, it is only natural that these two formed a strong bond that would later strengthen.
As the social climate around Kenneth and Katelin continued to disintegrate, the two made the decision to attempt finding another reality where, perhaps, they would be able to more effectively fit in. Katelin used her talents to construct a machine that could function as a trans-dimensional portal, and sent Kenneth in first, as a scout. That portal wound up leading to this reality. Due to unforeseen circumstances though, it was the last time the two would ever see one another. Something terrible would happen to the reality of Primal Earth, and it would take Kenneth a long time from that point to even realize it.
Millennium City
Kenneth made contact with this reality in the fall of 2012, and was followed this time by no one. He was now two alternate realities and 27,000 years removed from his home, and the stresses of transdimensional travel had begun to weigh heavily upon him. He had no money, no shelter, no way to make contact with Katelin again to let her know that he was okay. For nearly four months, Kenneth lived off of scraps left behind by muggers in the back alleys of Millennium City's Westside district, holding up thugs and criminals, only to steal from them what they had taken from innocent people, so that he could survive. His first residence in Millennium City was that of the one-star "Quali-T Motel" in the Westside district, his bed and board paid for by money scrounged up by his aforementioned thieving of other criminals. He was eventually found by the Westside division of the MCPD, and forced to undergo screening and registration, if he wished to continue living in the city. While it was noted in Kenneth's file that his services to apprehend known thugs were appreciated, his lifestyle of then living off of their thievery was not. He was forced to find suitable housing, as well as an actual paying job, as another condition to continued living in the Millennium City metropolitan area. It was during this time that samples of Lacertavirus were first drawn from his blood and sent to the CDC for scanning and processing, and Kenneth's status as known extradimensional was made official.
Finding His Feet
Mr. Age's first home was with a metahuman known as the "Flamer", real name Andrew, a fire-oriented metahuman housed in the City Center district. After a short amount of time a second roommate shared housing with Andrew and Kenneth, a human transformed part-way into a winged lion known as "Hawk" (Real name: Kyle). Interestingly enough, Kenneth claims to have also known the Primal Earth iteration of Hawk, claiming that his personality was different there, but his appearance was exactly the same. While Andrew performed heroic services for the people of Millennium City and Hawk worked as a courier, Kenneth eventually found a job as a freelance mercenary for the fringe merc group known as Advocatus Diaboli, putting his supernaturally-precise sharpshooting skills to use in a multitude of blacklisted, covert ops in and around the Millennium City area. The files regarding Mr. Age's activities during his time with Advocatus Diaboli are not public record, and what little record there is has been redacted to the point of irrelevance. Still, Mr. Age insists that during his time with Advocatus Diaboli, he refused to take on any job that would result in the loss of human or metahuman life.
His time with Advocatus Diaboli would be short-lived, however. Due to health problems incurred as a result of his ongoing transformation into a reptilian creature, and complications arising from his cold-blooded metabolism keeping him from his duties during the harsh Michigan winter, his employment contract with Advocatus Diaboli was terminated.
It was around this time, however, that Kenneth made contact with another extradimensional outcast he had first met while in Primal Earth, Mathieu Carver, aka "Shadow". Despite the curious physical differences Shadow displayed from his Primal Earth incarnation (he was younger, somehow), the two formed an almost immediate bond, now that they were both stranded away from their home realities. With Kenneth's newfound wealth as a result of his job with Advocatus Diaboli allowing him to finally live on his own, he took the orphaned Shadow in as an adopted brother, and went about filling out the needed paperwork to make it official. While it is not common to allow extradimensionals custody rights, in this case, it was two extradimensionals attempting to take care of themselves. The city government quickly agreed to allow Kenneth custody of Shadow, since the less time and civic resources spent on the extradimensional population, the better.
Finally, a Family
Despite losing his job, Kenneth could now consider he and Shadow to be an actual family. The two were inseparable from one another, and stuck by each other no matter what came their way. Even after Kenneth had been fired from his position with Advocatus Diaboli, the duo did their best to make do. It wasn't long after Ken had been fired that Jason "Killshot" Harper, of Harper Security Solutions took interest in bringing Ken in as a valued member of his organization, utilizing Ken's nigh-unparalleled talent for making the mark with his sniper rifle. Under the umbrella of Harper Security Solutions, Kenneth trained and bettered himself.
During this period of Ken's life, he met a woman who would become his new love interest, Margaret Brown, aka "Kuro Hiryu". Kuro, as she insisted she be called, shared in Ken and Shadow's history the fact that at one point she was an ordinary human being, mutated through VIPER influence into a human-dragon hybrid. Despite Kenneth's dwindling hope at the time that Katelin would someday come to Millennium City to be with him again, Ken needed a person like Kuro in his life. She became his strength, the person who could hold him together as his situation became ever stranger, and ever more difficult to keep in control. Kuro, a woman of immense strength even before her transformation into a dragoness-human hybrid, was exactly the thing Ken had been hoping for ever since he became stranded on his own.
Together, the trio of Kenneth, Shadow, and Kuro made what could be called a true family. Things really were looking up for Ken, for a time.
The Liberators
If you were to ask Mr. Age what one of the best things to happen to him was, oddly enough, his answer would be when Jason Harper, his employer, went missing. While Jason was a dear friend to Ken and would eventually be found alive and well, his abduction without a trace, and the fruitless search to find him, meant Ken had no choice but to search for work elsewhere. That was when he came into the fold of the super-group "The Liberators". Ken felt at last like he became a natural fit to a group, like he had truly belonged somewhere. It was the very thing he had been searching for, for nearly a decade, spread across three separate realities and 27,000 years of time. Of course, the process of 'fitting in' did not happen overnight.
Rather, it took one extraordinarily difficult week, and an incredible amount of pain, to bring him closer to his new group than he ever thought he could be. This was when the leader of the Liberators, Tony "Swift" Griffins, went missing along with several of his comrades, traced to a remote island off the coast of southeastern China. Ken's first assignment as a new member of The Liberators was to accompany his new teammates to this island, to bring Tony back home.
Naturally, things went catastrophically wrong. Their well-stocked cargo plane flew directly into a persistent electromagnetic field that coated the island, downing them just off the shore. Ken now had no choice; he had to work together with his new teammates to survive that tropical island hell, to rescue Tony, and to get home to his family. It was one of the most intense bonding experiences the young man had ever felt, living and surviving together as a team as the island did everything it could to kill them. He got to know his teammates, and they came to know him, over that abysmal week. The island itself was ensconced in an electromagnetic field driven by a leaking nuclear generator hidden deep within the core of the island, a derelict research base formerly home to a supervillain in the 1960's. This man, during his time, had conducted experiments upon the island's manimal population that went far beyond any sane code of ethics; he was little more than an insane butcher, and the island's native manimal inhabitants descended from what this man had wrought. As the radiation-resistant Kenneth (his ancestors had developed resistant genetics as a result of an ancient nuclear war in his time/reality) and his companion Hellion delved into the entrail-smeared, rusted remains of the facility to shut the electromagnetic field down, another threat had been brewing with the island natives. Since being downed himself and trapped on the island, Tony had befriended a tribe of manimals on the island; a tribe that were on the brink of civil war. The younger generation took the arrival of these newcomers as a sign that they should leave the island via boat, whereas the conservative elders railed against this notion; they wanted to stay put, and live in peace on the island. While Ken and Hellion shut down the reactor, an all-out civil war broke out amongst the natives. The ensuing battle was a complete slaughter, as one faction brought derelict, rusted tanks and armaments salvaged from the facility against the other faction, who were armed with little but arrows and spears. The Liberators did what they could to stop the fighting, but in the end, the elders had gotten what they wanted, and their youth were literally crushed into obedience by the iron tanks they had brought against them.
If anything good came out of the horrible time spent on that island, it was that Ken and his comrades grew closer together. Upon returning home, Ken couldn't have been happier to see Shadow, and Kuro. Even so, Ken's return to his family was only a happy one for a short time.
A Lion Apart
Something terrible was happening to Shadow, Ken's leonine brother. Shadow would suffer random nosebleeds, massive headaches, and ultimately, a coma. His body was on the verge of failure, and the explanation was something that would finally answer a burning question within the man; what had happened to Katelin?
As it turns out, Shadow's physical differences from when Ken met him in Primal Earth were because the Shadow Ken currently knew was the product of a trans-dimensional fusion of alternate selves. The Primal Earth Shadow's "soul" was currently occupying the body of the current-reality version of Shadow, and the two were starting to conflict with one another. If something wasn't done to split the two, and soon, both would die. It was determined, ultimately, that the souls could be split apart, but that another body needed to be secured to place the soul of Primal Earth's Shadow into. Otherwise, Kenneth's brother would be trapped eternally as a wandering, bodyless phantom. It was an unacceptable, cruel fate for someone Ken had come to love so much.
It was through the effort of a mysterious moon-dwelling man, Major Nohman, affectionately dubbed "The Major" by Ken, that this incredible situation became resolved. The Major had managed to locate, through sheer skill and technological prowess, a single, disembodied paw floating amongst the void between realities, where Primal Earth once existed. The grim sight of an entire reality, the reality where he and Kate had once lived, reduced to little more than a debris-strewn void...it all made sudden, terrible sense to him.
Primal Earth, upon Ken's departure, had entirely collapsed due to some unknown calamity. Katelin, and everyone else he knew there, was dead. Shadow's spirit had been forcefully ejected from the calamity perhaps by the sheer forces involved in a collapsing universe, and merged with his alternate-reality self here in Millennium City. The only evidence this had ever happened was that somehow, his old self's disembodied paw floated alone amid the ruin of an entire dimension.
As Ken reeled from the realization at what had transpired, his friends worked to divide Shadow's melded soul, and to recreate his former body from that single paw. The result, incredibly, were TWO Shadows. One from Primal Earth, reconstructed from a frozen paw...and the other, who had always lived in Millennium City. This "new" Shadow went on to become Umbra.
Ken loved both of those lions every bit as much as when he only had one of them.
