Unconquered Son
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Once, it told him, it answered to many names, but the last pagan Romans called it Sol Invcitus, the Unconquered Sun.
Once, it told him, it stood as protector and nurturer of life, patron of soldiers and saints, a burning eye in the heavens standing vigilant watch over humanity's daylight hours.
But if you tell Dr. Vic Samson something, there's a good chance he won't believe you. A hungrily inquiring mind is the lasting consequence of being brought up by academics, and he's adept at finding doubts and points of criticism about just about anything.
He doesn't believe in gods. He's studied too many of the religions of too many fallen civilisations to place any stock in the power of divinity to save you from catastrophe.
All he knows is that when he touched a long-forgotten memento from one of his father's digs, he heard something -- an old, wise, powerful voice, claiming to be that same fiery force that spoke to so many ancients before him -- speak to him.
"Your people have forgotten the fire that nourished you and held back the long dark before the dawn of the world. But the torches flicker and falter in the wind. The blackness threatens to encroach once again.
The spark must be reignited. The fire must burn once more. They must again know the might of the Unconquered Sun. They must believe. They must have hope.
And you, Victor Samson, will give it to them."
Contents
Origins and History
The Medallion
It begins with a carved disc of unidentified stone with some crude symbolism of unclear meaning on the face and eight etched lines radiating outwards from the centre like sunbeams, small enough to fit into your palm. It has no direct provenance in the archaeological record, but many similar items have been discovered all over the world across time and space. Today, it would be easily mistaken for a charm picked up in a new age store or ordered from an online artisan.
In 1984, it came out of the earth in a dig in Armana, Egypt, but its placement in the sand was too recent for it to have been there since ancient times. Instead, analysis suggested it seemed to have been deposited at that most significant site in the Cult of Aten at some point in the twentieth century, but a botched attempt to carbon-date it seemed to suggest that it was much, much, much older, more ancient even than the site that was being excavated -- perhaps as old as humanity itself.
It is not known what it said to Colin Samson when he laid his hand upon it, but it was enough that he immediately locked it away and, seemingly, tried to forget. It was amongst the personal affects that were left to his son after his death, and would have gone unnoticed had its Voice not been heard when his hand brushed over it.
Victor has come to theorise from his father's notes surrounding the stone's placement in the soil that it was buried there in recent decades, and intentionally, perhaps to be found again, perhaps to be 'returned' to a site associated with a particular solar deity's cult. The logical assumption is that it was buried there by a previous Unconquered Son, although why he or she would try and abandon the powers and gifts granted by spiritual symbiosis with the Entity remains a question that troubles Victor's sleep.
The Boy
The Scholar
The Man
Character and Personality
Victor Samson
A polite, private man with an offbeat sense of humour, it's unsurprising that Victor was raised by a pair of professors -- he seems eminently suited to the role. His genteel demeanour, however, hides an acute critical mind.
The Entity
Far removed from the mortals it claimed to have once presided over and protected, the force that Victor has tentatively termed the Entity operates on a level apart from humanity. It has claimed to be many solar deities throughout history, but most readily identifies with the ancient Egyptian Aten, or particularly the Roman Sol Invictus. Whatever moral code it adheres can only roughly be mapped onto our own, and its thoughts are driven by altogether different principles than yours or mine. Vic's communions with it give him the impression that its mind is incomprehensibly ancient and vast, yet singular in its urgent pursuit of its motives. It claims, at least, to have humanity's best interests as its foremost concern, preoccupied with some grave impending catastrophe or existential threat to life on Earth that it refers to only as 'the Coming Dark', and to fight it, the Unconquered Son's mission is to inspire hope and courage through deeds the mortal world. Given the Entity seems to feed on and draw strength from these feelings, its motives may not be entirely altruistic, but it nonetheless sees its and the Unconquered Son's role as vital in averting this coming doom.
Those Who Came Before
Victor is not the first bearer of the Medallion, and in all likelihood will not be the last. His bond with the Entity has joined his soul indirectly with theirs, exposing him to their memories and the echoes of their thoughts and their traits. Priests and kings, heroes and conquerors, soldiers, thieves and exiles have all had thrust upon them the mantle of the Unconquered Son throughout human history, but in death their wills and experiences seem to have been subsumed fully into the Entity's cause. Occasionally, he finds his mind reaching out to touch one of theirs through time and space, and finds in them a source of strength and resolve.
Powers, Skills, and Weaknesses
The Medallion's Blessings
With a cry of Ave Sol Invictus!, Victor is capable of assuming the form of the Unconquered Son. Encased from head to toe in interlocking plates fitted to his skin, he appears at first to be a taller, more muscular version of Dr. Samson, but the changes are not merely aesthetic. His eyes glow a fierce white and his very presence seems to warm and illuminate his surroundings, even in relative darkness. Moreover, a series of abilities are bestowed upon him:
Superhuman Strength When transformed, Victor's body fills with the same mighty force that drives the movement of the spheres around our sun. The Unconquered Son is currently capable of lifting up to fifty tons and counting, bending steel like rubber, breaking through reinforced concrete with minimal effort and landing mighty blows on superhuman targets.
Unconquered It is unclear how much of this owes to the Unconquered Son's abilities and how much can be attributed to the armour that encases him when he assumes his empowered form, but Vic has thus far demonstrated superhuman degrees of resilience and endurance. He has proven capable of withstanding impacts and crushing pressures that would crush the bones and liquefy the organs of a powerless individual. He is further able to shrug off extremes of temperature and various forms of directed energy attack. As his powers are magical in nature, they also impart a degree of resistance to sorcery.
Power of the Sun As the Unconquered Son, Victor's body is constantly radiating heat, light and the raw, divine power of the sun. Although the majority of this energy is sealed in and contained by his mystical armour, he nonetheless seems able to utilise the power of the sun in concentrated bursts, but this ability remains unrefined and limited. With focus, however, the Unconquered Son can land burning blows that can reduce armour to molten slag beneath his touch, melt projectiles before their impact on his body, or even cast forth this solar energy to heal and harm. He can also take a moment to channel this energy through his body in order to rejuvenate himself or briefly increase his durability or strength.
Radiant Presence An entirely involuntary ability, the Unconquered Son seems to have an inspirational effect on morale that supersedes even the expected reaction to fighting against or alongside a solar-powered superhuman warrior and may be some kind of empathic projection. Heroes working with the Unconquered Son in battle have reported feeling emboldened and heartened by his mere presence. Victims rescued by him from disaster zones have attested to the mildly soothing effect he had on their panic and fear. For his part, Victor is deeply uncomfortable with the nature of this power.
Solar-Powered In what some jokesters have termed photosynthesis, the Unconquered Son is physically empowered and invigorated by contact with the sun. He is at his strongest when the sun is at its highest in the sky, and shows no exhaustion or sign of needing food or rest from actions undertaken under daylight. Even as his strength wanes somewhat through the night, he appears to be capable of storing this energy in reserve to sustain him throughout nighttime activities as well. In effect, in his empowered form, Victor requires neither sleep nor sustenance.
The Voice The Unconquered Son, if he so desires, can engage in constant telepathic communication with the Entity that grants him his powers, the same being that claims to have inspired the cults of various solar deities throughout history. Through this link, he is capable of accessing the full corpus of the Entity's knowledge and the memories, skills and lived experiences of every previous bearer of the Medallion, many of them warriors. However, for reasons unknown, the Voice can be reluctant to answer a great many of Vic's questions, and in general their relationship is fairly terse and businesslike, marked by suspicion and mutual incomprehension between human champion and would-be deity alike.
Flight The Unconquered Son is capable of defying gravity through unknown means and taking to the skies at high velocity.
"They Must Believe" One thing Vic has noticed is that these powers appear to be growing in tandem as his heroic career progresses and his name becomes more well-known. As he first begun experimenting with these abilities in relative privacy, they were relatively feeble, but have noticeably improved throughout his first few adventures (although, as it stands, he is currently no match for many of Millenium City's mighty superhumans). He theorises that the potentially divine force that empowers him draws some kind of power or even sustenance from the faith and confidence of mortal humans in it or its champion, which it in turn imparts upon its champion at incremental or exponential rates. If this theory holds out, the upper limit of the Unconquered Son's strength as his heroic reputation expands remains to be seen.
Skills
In his civilian life, Victor is a trained classicist, archaeologist, researcher and lecturer, and as the Unconquered Son he remains in open communication with an ancient Entity that claims to be several of the deities he's studied. This gives him several skills that have proven useful throughout his nascent career in superheroics:
Scholar Victor graduated in 2006 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Ancient History and Archaeology from the University of Liverpool, read for his Master's at Oxford before moving to Millenium City University to complete his Ph.D, specialising in the comparative religion of the ancient world. He is a driven, open-minded and insightful researcher, capable of dealing with a wide range of evidence and drawing informed conclusions from them. As he's discovering, there's a surprising crossover between the professions of academic and investigator.
Occult His comprehensive knowledge of ancient mythologies and religious practices has left him at an advantage when confronted with the study of magic in the modern world. While not a sorcerer himself, he is developing the ability to recognise magic when he sees it and differentiate between various schools, and in communication with the Voice and its wealth of magical and metaphysical knowledge is proving to be an adept occult detective.
Polyglot Victor is a fluent speaker of English, German as well as Classical Greek and Latin, with smatterings of Hebrew, Assyrian, Sumerian and Aramaic. When drawing upon the Voice's resources of knowledge and the lives and memories of previous Sons, he could potentially speak many more languages.
Weaknesses
For all the Entity's supposedly godly power, Victor Samson is a mortal man, and their cohabitation in the Unconquered Son's body is not always a hospitable one. They must accommodate one another and maintain some sort of equilibrium in order to operate as the Son, which has its downfalls:
Only Human If caught in his mortal form, Victor would have all the shortcomings and vulnerabilities of any baseline human and would be fully at the mercy of a superpowered threat. Given the verbal catalyst for his transformation into the Unconquered Son, he must be capable of speaking in order to assume his superpowered form, so gagging or otherwise preventing him from calling out would trap him at baseline mortal level.
Two Wills The extent to which Victor can exert control over his own body as the Unconquered Son is limited, kept in check by the demands of the Voice and the compulsions of the strange Entity it seems to represent. Its inhuman desires are not always in line with his own -- for example, while Victor will do all he can to avoid collateral damage, the Entity, obsessed with the grander picture of the cosmos, is sometimes not so careful. While the two minds can usually achieve consensus and work together, their mutual incomprehension can lead to internal conflict and occasionally outright battles for control. The Entity loses much in the way of dexterity and its ability to understand and interact with mortals if Victor is uncooperative, whereas Victor risks outright losing his powers in the thick of combat if he does not abide its will.
"They Must Believe" Victor believes that the Unconquered Son's powers are directly proportional to the amount of confidence, faith and belief the population of Millenium City has in him. This, he believes, serves as a functional substitute for the worship and devotion the Entity may once have received from its mortal subjects. As such, it stands to reason that if he were to recede from the public eye for whatever reason or his reputation were to become tarnished, his powers would be diminished. As they stand, his relatively marginal fame as a hero means that his abilities are limited.
Immortal Warrior with a Mortal Mind As the Unconquered Son, Victor serves primarily as a conduit for the Entity's power -- while its own mind incomprehensibly ancient and vast, his is painfully human. On more than one occasion, he has been compromised by psychic attack, at which point the Entity has withdrawn many of the abilities it bestows upon Victor until such a time when he has recovered. It seems loathe to let its power fall into the hands of any mortal but the one it has chosen, so any successful attempt to take control of Victor's mind can result in most of the Unconquered Son's powers becoming neutralised. While the Entity is capable of exerting limited control over Victor's body if his mind is subdued or unconscious, it is just as likely to abandon him temporarily.
Equipment
The Medallion and its Gifts
The Medallion A palm-sized stone disc etched with radiating lines, suspended around Vic's neck by a length of twine and hanging down over his chest. Contact with the Medallion was responsible for establishing Victor's psychic link and spiritual unity with the Entity calling itself the Unconquered Sun. It is, in effect, the source of his powers. When he enters the Unconquered Son's form, the Medallion is the source of the radiant power that erupts from him: it fuses to his chest and begins pumping divine energy through him. When transformed, it is visible on the Unconquered Son's armour as a glowing light in the centre of his chest.
Solar Plate When Victor cries Ave Sol Invictus!, solar energy begins pouring out of his body in all directions. Out of this corona of fire and light, a suit of armour emerges, as though forged instantaneously out of thin air by this divine fire. It consists of a fully articulated set of interlocking segmented plates that seem to have been painstakingly sculpted to the figure of a tall, muscular human male, silver and gold in colour but composed from an indeterminate alloy. They seal themselves around his body to contain these energies, although wisps of light escape from the tiny gaps between the plates at all times. This armour appears to provide a significant component of the Unconquered Son's superhuman invulnerability, and as it is summoned when Victor transforms could effectively be considered part of his empowered body. Victor does not appear to be able to remove the armour while in his empowered form, but would have no reason to.
Other Equipment
Relationships
Friends/Allies
Enemies
General Perception
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Trivia
- As described above, the cynical Victor has attempted to rationalise why the Voice has instructed him to inspire hope and belief in the denizens of Millenium City, and so has developed the theory that it draws strength from human emotion directed towards it. Even 'gods' need sustenance, and having an earthly avatar provides humanity with an icon or symbol through which their faith can feed it. His empathic projection, he believes, represents this force's attempts to further feed off mortals in the vicinity of its champion. If it is indeed fuelled by belief, then Vic is also dimly aware that his eternal cynicism and scepticism regarding the Voice's claims to divinity might well be withholding his true potential.
- Vic has struggled morally with using the full force of the Unconquered Son's strength against his mortal human foes for fear of causing them permanent injury or death. The Entity, it seems, could care less for this eventuality, but in order to mitigate this risk, Victor sometimes takes to charging his blows with rejuvenating solar energy. They're still strong enough to seriously injure and incapacitate, but this energy will begin to heal the damage he's inflicted almost immediately after his fists connect, which minimises lasting harm.
- Although Vic is not always capable of distinguishing the individual identities of previous Sons from the amalgamated well of their thoughts and memories at the Entity's disposal, it seems to count the Pharaoh Akhenaten and the Roman Emperor Elagabalus amongst its previous servants. Victor is somewhat dubious of this claim, but admits that this would certainly explain their respective attempts to centralise their state's religion around their solar deity of choice.
- Although an archaeologist by profession, Vic has never fully disentangled himself from what initially drew him to the study of the ancient world, Classical philosophy. He is particularly interested in the Stoic school of Greek and Roman philosophy, and has several passages from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations committed to memory.
