#and also having the ability to destroy any living thing/bio mass with as little as a glance in it's direction.

[kamiko1234]

Avatar fantasy AU....

....where instead of being huge blue aliens, the Na'vi are just rly tall elves with blue markings. And the RDA instead of an organization is acctualy just a medival empire and global superpower.

The Na'vi, like in canon, are very connected to nature and Eywa. Instead of being a global consciousness she's an actual deity in this however, who grants the Na'vi following her a special affinity for magic.

Humans on the other hand live largely disconnected from Eywa, and only very few of them even have any acess to any magic. And even then it's just one spell, the ability to cast it and the spell itself being hereditary.

Now usually Na'vi and humans don't really interact, even if they live on the same planet in this AU. Humans tend to keep to their own cities , settlements and kingdoms while Na'vi stay in wild nature and special places where Ewya is especially strong - called Pandora.

For hundreds of years it was a live-and-let-live situation and mindset between Na'vi and humans. Unfortunately, as always, the RDA had to fuck it it up.

Starting about 3 generations ago the then emperor of the RDA Empire decided to start a war of aggression against the Na'vi. The reason being a mix of wanting to gain acsess to multible precious resources that laid on or beneath the ground the Na'vi lived on. The other reason was that the then king feared the Na'vi's connection to Ewya, viewing them and their ability to use magic as an danger to his empire's rule.

While slow at first due to the radical resistance of the Na'vi, the RDA Empire made steady process in the years. Killing thousands of the (comparatively) already small Na'vi population. Not least due to the fact their royal bloodline was one of the few human bloodlines who passed down a spell among themselves.

The spell being the ability to destroy anything biological - a perfect fit to fight the Na'vi.

The current emperor, Quaritch, distinguishes himself with an exceptional level of cruelty and brutality in the war that was started by his own grandfather.

Enter : Kiri.

In this AU Jake and Grace were born as Na'vi, with Grace still mysteriously becoming pregnant but dying at childbirth.

Growing up Kiri had a relatively normal childhood despite the ongoing war. She was raised alongside her siblings in the inner lands of Pandora where the human war machine hadn't reached yet.

All in all, their childhood was pretty similar to canon. With the exception that anything human was completely missing from it.

As it is, however, such happiness doesn't last forever. Because soon enough the RDA and Quaritch reach even the inner lands of Pandora. And with them, Kiri and her family.

With them, the human armies bring unbelievable destruction during another surprise attack. Kiri and Neteyam got separated from Tuk and other Na'vi fleeing from the destruction while Jake and Neytiri took to defend against the humans.

And as if that wasn't bad enough already, Neteyam got hit with crossfire and proceeded to die in his sisters arms (sorry my guy, but your death is a canon event).

This leaves Kiri alone, separated from her family and people with no idea if they are even alive, in the center of an attack on her people with the explicit goal to kill or atleast displace them.

To say the situation is grim is underestimating it, yet through some miracle of Ewya Kiri manages to survive and flee - albeit being forced to flee into RDA territory.

She manages to disguise herself as human - hiding and changing anything that could identify her as Na'vi with her magic. She makes up a backstory of her being a child from a small village on the outer borderlands and takes traveling.

Her goal is to attempt to find her family. While there are still parts of Pandora untouched by the RDA Empire, there is no way Kiri could reach them right now. All means of traveling to them are heavily monitored on the orders of Quaritch - not to mention the fact that the war still hasn't stopped, the borders to Pandora are quite literal warzones.

Kiri reasons that she was forced to escape to RDA territory, so maybe atleast some of her family did too ? And even if she doesn't find any of her family there, she can still attempt to gather information and somehow cross back into Pandora.

Multiple shenanigans and hijinks later, Kiri ends up in the RDA capital city. Desperately in need of funds and a place to stay, she does what may be the most dangerous thing she has ever done yet. She enters into the royal palace by working as a maid.

The palace was always in need of help, afterall. The pay was one of the best Kiri could get, considering how she had only little skill useful for any human. Not to mention that the job came with a roof over her head inform of a small chamber in the servant's quarters.

She was anything but thrilled, of course. To serve at the home of the man had destroyed her life and caused the death of her brother - but there simply wasn't another option. Kiri comforted herself with the fact that Quaritch was rarely ever at his palace, instead being away leading his armies. There was no reason to fear anyone discovering her disguise either.

Still, this was anything but nice. Kiri still wasn't used to wearing human clothing. Everything was unfamiliar. The other servants were unfriendly- clearly annoyed by the fact that they had explained so much to her.

But the worst would probably be the disconnect from Ewya.

Back home it was easy to connect to Ewya through the nature around here. But now ? The human territories already were much less soaked with the presence of Ewya. The capital city itself only added more to the absence with the lack of nature around.

The plan is to work at the palace for a few months. Enough to gather the funds necessary for her to continue her search. After that Kiri could leave and never return back to this place.

The royal garden made things a bit more bearable though. It was ironic. Another maid had told Kiri once that the royal gardens were a great source of pride for the imperial family. With plants, trees and animals carefully cultivated and cared for, the garden was known as the most beautiful one in the entier Empire. And Kiri had to agree.

Because even though this garden was so distinctively human and human made, it was the closest thing to nature she had- the closest thing to Ewya.

And to think that it was owned by Quaritch himself, who was known as "the demon" among her people and whose family that the explicit power to destroy anything nature.

Technically only the imperial family and their guests and the few servants tending to the garden were allowed inside it. Kiri, as a simple maid, had no place being there.

She didn't really care though.

Not when this place was one of the few ones where she could atleast attempt to feel Ewya again, and to come to rest and be somewhat calm again.

Kiri took her precautions of course- she went at night or late evenings only, using her climbing abilities to scale trees and walls to avoid using the conventional entryways. She made sure no one was around before even entering the gardens.

She was sure no one would discover her.

Then someone discovered her.

It was night like any other. There really was no reason to expect anything like that- Kiri had entered like always. Looked around like always, and had made sure she was atleast somewhat well hidden behind a tree before she closed her eyes to concentrate on the trees and plants around.

To say she was surprised when she felt a hand on her shoulder and a voice asking what she was doing and who she was.

Upon opening her eyes, Kiri was met with one very confused looking human male teenager of around 16 years old.

She wasn't sure what to answer the other, she knew she wasn't supposed to be there. Should he report her- she'd be thrown out in the best case.

The other meanwhile continued to ask if she had come out there too to watch the stars. Not wanting to admit her actual reason she quickly agrees with it.

In response the boy then tells her that they can watch the stars together, yet again Kiri agrees. She figures that he probably won't report her. It's night, so she couldn't really make out any of his features. But she's pretty sure he has long hair, which is pretty unusal for a human male from what she's seen.

Either way, the boy proceeds to sit down next to her. Saying that this is the first time he has had any company, and questions wether she does this often or not.

And while Kiri doesn't come here to watch the stars like the mystery boy next to her, she does come out here almost everyday. She answers the question like that.

What follows is a..... weirdly nice conversation ? Which is kind of weird considering how it was the middle of the night, in a place Kiri wasn't even allowed to be with a human teenage boy whose name she didn't know and face she didn't see.

The boy talked about the stars, and Kiri talked about liking the plants. She mentioned being a maid and when he asked for her name again she even answered it.

Someth told her that she could trust the other one.

When she wanted to ask for the name of her unkown companion, foreign voices sounded suddenly. Other humans, guards, probably.

Panicking about being found, Kiri quickly took took off when her companion told her to. She had half a mind to ask him to come with her, surely being found in the royal gardens would get him punished too ! But before she could he was already halfway across the other side, walking towards the other humans and telling them that "everything is okay", and that he's "comming to them."

A bit confused as to why the teen was walking towards the other humans Kiri continued to take off and managed to escape without being recognized or caught, or atleast she thinks she did.

She starts to doubt this when, come next morning, she get's an offical summon from no other than Miles Soccoro-Quaritch II. Crown prince of the RDA Empire, only son and heir to his father, the only other person in the entier world to share the demonic power to destroy any form of life with a simple spell - a single look (that was the only thing that his father needed, atleast).

Kiri thought she'd die then and there. Walking the halls to meet the prince with a guard escorting her on either side felt like walking to her execution. She hoped this was because she was infact recognized yesterday night, and that the prince would simply punish her and throw her out of the palace for it-

-should he have discovered her, discovered her Na'vi origin...... she'd get to meet the demon's spell herself. That she was sure off.

Kiri had never met the prince herself. The other maids said that only the best of the best got to serve the royal family, the servants often of low nobility themselves. A lowly peasant maid like Kiri wouldn't even enter anywhere close to any space the prince was in.

Still, this was the son of the man who had attacked her home- who had Neteyam's blood on his hands. A child raised to take his fathers place- one should assume it would act similat to it's elder.

She was lead through the halls, entering the inner palace and living quaters of the royal family. Easily recognizable by the decorations growing more and more lavish.

Finally, Kiri stood before a large door. And then another male voice told them to come in- did it belong to the prince ? -Kiri expected to be faced with a younger version of the demon Quaritch himself.

Instead she stood across a human teenage boy roughly 16 years old. With long blode hair falling behind his shoulder, choclate brown eyes and a smile that was- kind ?

Kind.

The prince looked kind.

Kiri, in all the imagery and dread crossing her mind on the way here, she had never imagined the prince to look kind.

There were two other men with the prince, too. Older ones. Adults. Their clothes spoke of them as nobles- they didn't wear any servants uniform. But their outfits were by far not as royal looking as that of the prince- clad in what looked to her in a white uniform with green accents. A matching cape drapped halfway over one of his shoulders.

The girl hadn't even notice how she starred until the prince snapped her out of it by asking, "You are Kiri, right ?"

And then he added, "I believe we met last night."

Hearing his voice, suddenly it all clicked for Kiri. And her heart freaking sank.

That was the unkown boy from the royal garden. Kiri had watched the stars and talked with the litteral crown prince of the RDA Empire.

She's getting kicked for sure- well, atleast her disguise wasn't revealed.

"I'm Miles, by the way. But you can call me Spider, too. That's my nickname." The prince filled the silence again. And Kiri takes a good second to even register the information. And then, before she could even stopped herself a confused "huh ?" sounded from her lips.

Turns out that the crown prince of the RDA Empire is a genuinly nice and good guy. The two other adults next to him, introducing themselves as Norm and Max thankfully help explain some things.

Kiri had met the crown prince already, even if she didn't know it. He decided, on a whim, to go star gazing as he did occasionaly when he couldn't sleep. And that's when he met Kiri. Norm and Max had gone searching for him after guards noticed that he wasn't in bed. They were the foreign voices interrupting before Spider could give Kiri his name-

-oh yes, and by the way, the prince would prefer it very much if he could simply be called Spider. No formal adress or titels or anything. And he wouldn't punish her for entering the royal gardens either.

Kiri's head was swimming with all these reveals. The two men introduced themselves as Spider's mentors for academics, and the men incharge of managing the prince's staff.

Glorified butlers, Spider jokingly called them. (When Norm shot him a look, he laughed dirty. And Kiri suddenly remembered how Lo'ak would laugh dirty when he teased her back when-)

Spider also says that he would like to get to know Kiri better- become friends with her.

And suddenly the world stops, and the girl doesn't know what to answer. Spider seemed like a good kid, nothing like his father at all. Deffinetly not some noble snob, and he obviously treated other people with respect even if they were below him technically. As proven with the fact that he was willing to make friends with a lowly peasant maid, simply because he liked her personality.

He had an adventurous side to him, proven by his mentors at some point lamenting the fact that it apperantly wasn't the first time he had escaped to the gardens at night when he met Kiri.

He was funny, cracking jokes like he wanted. Kiri almost forgot that technically, he was the crown prince of an entier empire. The son of the man who had destroyed her home and seperated her family, and technically her enemy.

He talked to her like they were two teens going on a hunt together. Kiri barely has any experience with human nobility, but generally they always talked down to her and what they called the "lowly peasantry" Yet Spider never did that, even if he was at the top of the hierachy- second to only his father.

Kiri felt tempted to relax around him. Spider was probably one of the kindest humans she had ever met-

-but who knew how he'd react should he find out about the truth ? He was acting under the assumption that she was human afterall, Kiri found it hard to believe that Spider hadn't learned to hate her people like his father did.

Still, what choice did she have ? This was the crown prince afterall, she couldn't refuse him. She ends up sitting down, at some point. Spider in his part seemingly fully attempting to just hold conversation with her- getting to know eachother, he called it.

He asked about her past, to which Kiri hastly relayed her by now well praticed story.

"I come from a small village on the outer borderlands. We didn't have much, but wer were happy. I'm here to work and save money to take back home."

Upon hearing this, Spider immideatly offers Kiri to become his personal maid. The salary would be higher, and the work surely not as taxing. He admires her for her "dedication to her family", and wants to help.

Kiri is suprised at the offer, but takes it nonetheless. Even if she got even closer to the proverbial lion than she already was- the salary was a strong argument. Shortening the time she is forced to spend here significantly.

And something told her that Spider wasn't too bad, either.

[cosmicmoved]

KARAM LORE !!  🍃

I’ve said before that he was a spirit and not in the sense of being a ghost so I’m going to use this post to explain what I’m going for in a little more detail. I can’t really think of a better word to describe what I’m going for but it’s more in the sense that he’s a spirit in the sense that he’s this magical entity that’s very much OF the planet. Spirit is used in this context in lots of different folklore across the world so I think it makes sense for me to describe him this way! However, a lot of the lore (I guess you’d call it) I’ve written for Karam is sort of made up and inspired by different things so I can’t really just name something he’s supposed to be like and get on with it. This post should, if nothing else, clear up what Karam is and what’s he capable of! ALSO! SIDE NOTE! Karam actually has a fraternal twin from whom he has been separated for like 250 years or whatever and I’d be very willing to let somebody else write that character if the concepts here seem interesting ;; (i think i said ‘brother’ in his bio but that’s really not a must!! tbh karam is officially nonbinary bc i personally do noooot see why a spirit would conform to human social norms like that --  on that note, karam uses masc pronouns and stuff but pls never call him a man, he doesn’t like that)

This point seems pretty important since I know I have mutuals with muses who fit the description but Karam can see ghosts. And he can tell that they’re ghosts. He’s very familiar with this concept and it doesn’t bother him or upset him. Honestly, death is kind of foreign to him as an immortal being and, since he has no reason to fear it, he doesn’t. I’ll go into more detail as to why this is important later on in this post but he does have that ability! As I’ve said before, Karam can generally tell what people are, at least to some degree. If he meets someone who’s something he doesn’t understand for whatever reason, he will at least know that they ARE something he’s never seen before. He’d know they were different from every other being they’d met. This is NOOOOOOT godmoddy, I promise! Karam doesn’t know everything!! But he needs to understand the basic of nature of things because that’s what he was put on the Earth to do, pretty much. If he didn’t know that a human was different from, say, a witch or another humanoid spirit like himself, that would make his ‘job’ very difficult. This does mean he will always know when a seemingly human muse is not human but, since he’s not human himself, he likely won’t use this information for anything, besides making the decision to be nicer to that muse than he might to a random human ASDFGHGFD........

A guardian spirit is nothing like a guardian angel, that much I feel I should get out of the way immediately. He does noooooot give a shit about people! He doesn’t do anything on command either. This title, as that’s really all it is, refers exclusively to the role he took on while living in his forest home (which, as stated in his backstory, was cut down to make way for modern housing). He was the guardian of that patch of land. When he was a child, after his mother left him behind, he wandered until he found a forest that was unclaimed and, like him, fending for itself. Karam assumes his twin’s fate was the same as his own, although they were abandoned in different places (his twin was left first and then Karam, as he was the smaller of the two twins and his mother wanted to be more careful with where she put him). Karam’s job was essentially to keep the forest healthy and protected from destruction and malevolent spirits/entities. Obviously, he didn’t manage to keep it protected because destructive human technology has pretty much outgrown him and mass deforestation is far too much for one spirit to ward off. This is a source of deep guilt for Karam and, in some ways, he feels like a failure for letting the forest come to harm but he blames mankind as much as he does himself. His anger is kind of directed at both but the anger he feels towards himself is much quieter. I don’t know which one’s actually worse but his hatred for humans (in power) is a lot more easier for him to voice.

Besides just keep the forest as a whole safe from harm, his role included watching over individual beings who lived within the forests; other smaller spirits like tree spirits and animals! If an animal died and their ghost needed guidance, Karam would be the one to aid them and help them find rest. He’s not very good at doing this with humans as their feelings are a lot more complex and while animals usually just need someone to calm them down and dissuade their fear, humans often have more complicated issues like lingering wishes and resentment. Human ghosts weren’t common in his forest but they weren’t unheard of and, despite his general distrust, Karam did try to help them as best they could --- especially in cases where it was the ghost of a child or something. As much as Karam dislikes humans, he would never blame a child for anything or mistreat them in any way. He’s not the best at talking to children because of...the way he is lmao...but he’d never be cruel to them and strongly believes they should be looked after in the same way as any other creature that needs protection. Animals tend to naturally trust him! Humans don’t because they’re more complex and often more detached from that sort of thing but animals don’t see him as predatory/a threat. 

His abilities are largely those that help him as a guardian figure. He is a fighter, first and foremost and this means his natural abilities include the following; great stealth, physical grace and enhanced sensory abilities. These senses, in particular, are sharp enough to sense disturbances even in loud rooms, to hear a twig snap in vast quiet. He is the kind of fighter who uses this speed and agility to his advantage to the point of relying upon it, adopting a rather gymnastic fighting style. He’s also a very talented swordsman but he’s found this is kind of a weird skill to hang onto in modern times. He is also capable of using some elemental magic, namely manipulation of light and water -- this is partly because he feels some kind of natural affinity to the moon but these are also useful life-giving abilities. He can’t heal people but many lifeforms can be nursed back to health with these sorts of powers. These magics aren’t especially strong and he tends not to favour these abilities for he isn’t a particularly gifted mage and these abilities are more defensive than offensive. But he can fuck up your lightbulbs if you piss him off, I guess???? His offensive abilities are all much more physical. Karam is also pretty hard to injure unless you’re very powerful, on account of his accelerated healing. Most injuries don’t hold him back for too long and he’s also harder to harm in the first place than most humans. Obviously, if you cut off a limb, he can’t grow it back or anything like that. He can’t heal injuries that aren’t...healable.

He has pretty normal weaknesses in that you can harm him any way you harm someone else. It just takes more work. He’s immortal, in that he won’t die of natural causes, but he’s absolutely not invincible or invulnerable. He CAN be killed. It’s just not easy to do. Karam is also NOT the strongest spirit out there. He’s stronger than a lot of spirits because he has to be, he EXISTS to protect weaker spirits, but there are stronger spirits out there and even within his type of spirit. Karam is powerful and probably more powerful than he needed to be for his small forest -- a lot of larger forests might have a stronger spirit protecting them -- but he stayed in his forest until it was destroyed out of loyalty. The spirit who had protected it before him had left to find something better and, being a child, Karam had found it just challenging enough to suit him. Although he outgrew it in terms of his own power, his love for it kept him there. Another notable weakness of Karam is also one of his strengths --- his enhanced senses, while they help him in many, many ways, also make navigating the noisy human world quite stressful, especially now that he’s taken to living in the city. A lot of places are too loud and bright and crowded for Karam and he doesn’t always cope with it too well, leading to a preference for walking about at night.

[thedcdunce]

The Atom

“Size isn't matter.” - The Atom

Real Name: Raymond “Ray” Palmer

Gender: Male

Height: 6′ 0″

Weight: 180 lbs (82 kg)

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Auburn

Powers:

Microscopic Stability

Abilities:

Judo

Physics

Swordsmanship

Weaknesses:

Missing Hand

Equipment:

Bio-Belt

Katarthan's Sword

Indigo Tribe Staff

Universe: 

Earth-One

New Earth

Base of Operations:

Ivy Town, Connecticut

Morlaidh, Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

Citizenship: American

Parents:

David Palmer; father

Susan Palmer; mother

Marital Status: 

Divorced (Jean Loring; wife)

Widowed (Laethwen; wife)

Occupation: 

Professor

Scientist

Adventurer

Education: PhD Ivy University

First Appearance: Showcase #34 (October, 1961)

Last Appearance: Titans Vol 2 #38 (October, 2011)

Powers

Microscopic Stability: For some reason, Ray's physiology allows him to not explode when he is miniaturized unlike other living things which explode after a short time of being miniaturized.

Abilities

Judo: Ray Palmer often finds himself in situation where physical violence become necessary. As such, he has developed a proficiency in the martial art judo.

Physics: Dr. Palmer has a Ph.D. in physics and was a full professor at Ivy University.

Swordsmanship: The Atom used a long sword as a weapon while living among the Katarthans, gaining considerable skill in its use.

Weaknesses

Missing Hand: He allowed Baracuda to cut off his left hand to save Ryan Choi from the miniverse.

Equipment

Bio-Belt: Originally, Ray's size/weight controls were located in his belt buckle. However, he later moved them to his gloves for greater accessibility and swifter transitions, and in the costume he wore after his days in New Morlaidh, had an encepholpathic grid in his mask that allowed him to do it mentally.

Size Alteration: Able to shrink his body to varying degrees, achieved by storing most of his mass in a pocket dimension. As the Atom, Ray can assume any size from his normal six-foot stature down to sub-microscopic, although he generally deems a height of six inches as most functional.

Mass Alteration: Able to instantly alter his molecular density to whatever degree he desires. Ray can also assume any weight at any height—up to his full 180 pounds.

Flight: He is able to glide on air currents and stiff breezes. A favorite travel method Ray had, was to call some location on the telephone; when the intended phone answered, he could shrink down enough to literally travel through the phone lines in seconds to emerge out of the answering phone.

Superhuman Strength: By shifting all his mass into his fists he can punch with incredible force.

Dimensional Travel: Ray found out that by shrinking beyond the subatomic scale he could slip beneath reality at the quantum level to traverse around the multiverse at will.

Katarthan's Sword: The Atom used a long sword as a weapon while living among the Katarthans, gaining considerable skill in its use.

Indigo Tribe Staff

Personality

Ray Palmer is a hard-working, dedicated man. In fact, "dedicated" is hardly the word for it; "driven" is a little closer to the truth. Once Ray starts working on a problem or puzzle, there is absolutely no stopping him. This single-minded pursuit of his goals is more than a little responsible for Ray's shattered marriage, though it has occasionally come in handy to Ray the crime fighter. In spite of his obsessiveness, Ray is a level-headed hero and a likeable human being.

History

Ray Palmer is the Atom, the Mighty Mite, a superhero with the ability to shrink to incredible sizes while retaining his full mass, making him a formidable combatant. He was a member of the original Justice League of America, where he gained a great deal of respect from his peers. Aside from his crime-fighting career, he is also one of the world's top scientific minds, given his background as a brilliant physicist. He is capable of shrinking to subatomic sizes, and explores the universe on a frontier unknown to any other man.

Origins

Ray Palmer grew up in Ivy Town, Connecticut where he studied physics at Ivy University, under renowned scientists such as Alpheus P. Hyatt. He began dating law student Jean Loring, eventually becoming exclusive. Both graduating and working in their professions, Ray would frequently ask Jean to marry him, but she would always decline, wanting to establish herself as a lawyer before getting married and settling down.

While a physics graduate student, Ray Palmer discovered a tiny fragment of white dwarf star material that had fallen to Earth. Investigating matter compression, Ray theorized that if he were to grind a lens from this fragment and focus ultraviolet light through it, he could shrink anything struck by the light down to a fraction of its original size. Ray rushed off to his laboratory, tried the experiment, and found that it worked exactly as he had imagined but the objects he shrunk became unstable and exploded moments later.

A couple of days later, a disillusioned Ray and some friends became trapped in a cave-in while out spelunking. Ray was forced to risk instability and use the shrinking lens on himself in order to escape the cave and save the lives of his friends. For some reason, however, Ray didn't explode and returned to his normal height. In fact, the shrinking lens worked on his body much better than he had expected, and he developed a set of control devices that gave him limited control over his weight as well as his size. Ray later hypothesized that some unknown "x-factor" in his genetic makeup prevented his atoms from becoming unstable, though many scientists now believe that Ray's ability to shrink was actually made possible by the "Metagene", which is the source of many superhumans' powers.

Early Career

Keeping his discoveries a secret, even from his Jean, Ray created the identity of the Atom and began a career of crime fighting in Ivy Town. In his first recorded adventure, the Atom stopped the crook Carl Ballard from exploiting the tiny alien Kulan Dar, to commit his crimes. Foiling this plot, the Atom became a trusted hero in Ivy Town, and established a great working relationship with the local police. Next, the Atom defended the wealthy Doctor Gordon Heath from a plot against him orchestrated by his caretaker Bates.

The Atom's heroics made him an ally of the CIA, who sent him overseas to rescue Professor Anton Kraft from foreign spies. Returning home, he stopped crooked newspaper reporter Greg Phillips from stealing valuable chess pieces. The Atom met his first super-villain when battling Jason Woodrue, an exile from the Floral Dimension, who attempted to take over the Earth with specially bred plants. The Atom defeated Woodrue with the help of Maya Queen of the Dryads that live in the Floral Dimension. Atom next stopped jewel thief Bart Tranter with the help of the self proclaimed Mr. Odd and recaptures Carl Ballard when he masters Kulan Dar's teleportation abilities.

The Atom would next be used in a bizarre plot by Amos Fortune and other villains to destroy the Justice League of America, using a de-memorizor ray to pit the Atom against the League. With the aid of the Atom, the team of heroes would defeat Fortune and his minions and elect the Atom as a member of their group. Next, the Atom would have his first clash with Chronos, a criminal obsessed with time.

Reconnecting with Professor Hyatt, Ray would learn of Hyatt's experiments with the Time Pool, a device of Hyatt's creation allowing him to "fish" for items out of a tiny portal that can bring items through time. As the Atom, Ray would travel back time to ancient Middle East where he would help a young boy named Hassan best a group of thieves and bring back a golden Dinar for Hyatt's study. When simultaneous nuclear explosions on Earth-One and a parallel world causes the two to merge, the Atom helps the JLA prevent the inhabitants of that world from destroying three major cities on Earth to prevent the cataclysm and work together to revolve the problem.

When visiting Happy Harbor, Rhode Island to give a lecture as Ray Palmer, the Atom comes to the rescue of Entron Kol a visitor from a sub-atomic world who is trapped on Earth and uses a wish fulfillment device to try to draw help to his plight. Returning to Ivy Town, the Atom foils an attempt by a crooked photographer named Elkins from framing Tom Parks for crimes he did not commit. Ray would next attend a JLA meeting were the team would ponder how to get out of a dangerous scenario posed by one of their fans.

When Ray's colleague, the world-traveling Ted Ralston is turned into diamond by a strange stone he brought back from one of his expeditions, Ray would travel into the microscopic world inside the gem where he would clash with the Atlantean tyrant Karl Jat. Next he would foil jewel thief Fred Harris' plot to rob a lake side community using local folklore to hoax the people into thinking the thefts were perpetuated by a ghost. The Atom would next be targeted with the rest of the JLA by the Tornado Tyrant. In another adventure with the Justice League, Ray would aid the League in liberating the people of the micro-world of Starzl, whose three android defenders had turned evil.

Back in Ivy Town, Atom would foil a plot by stage manager Howard Crane from framing former astronaut Peter Venner for crimes he did not commit and in a Time Pool adventure travels back to 18th century London to foil Dick Turpin from stealing the king's gold. The Atom and the rest of the JLA would next be forced into exile from the planet Earth due to the manipulations of Dr. Density, however the JLA would foil this plot, ending their exile. When preventing an invasion of Earth from the Thalens, the Atom would team up with extraterrestrial lawman Hawkman and his partner Hawkgirl, forming a long lasting partnership between the trio.

On another Justice League case, the Atom and his fellow JLA members would clash with Spaceman X. Later the Atom would be present with the JLA in their first team up with the Justice Society of America, their counterparts from Earth-Two, against the Crime Champions, a group of villains from both universes. While on the home front, Ray would battle an escaped Dr. Light, stop Alfred Trask an art gallery employee working the masterpieces his employer has on display, would battle an evil doppelganger created of himself created out of a lab experiment gone awry and thwart an attempted kidnapping of the king of France during a Time Pool adventure to the year 1609. His next meeting with the JLA would be less eventful with the group relating their battle against Queen Bee while Ray would tell them of his encounter against Dr. Light.

Working with the CIA once again, the Atom would go to Vienna to collect the plans for a new anti-gravity metal, however exposes it as a communist plot to destroy America, and back home foils Doro Briggs' theft scheme involving hoaxing people into believing that she can transform into a swan. The Atom aids his fellow Justice League colleagues in once more defeating and capturing their old foe Kanjar Ro and Kraad the Conqueror, tyrant ruler of a sidereal dimension.

Back home, Ray would attend a Ivy University ten-year reunion, where he would foil Jack Archer's attempt to use hypnosis to steal a priceless Buddha statue, followed by a cruise with Jean Loring where he would stymie invaders from Randath. Next Atom and a number of his fellow JLA members would be rapidly aged by Despero, but later restored to normal following Despero's defeat at the hands of his fellow JLA members who were unaffected.

On the home front, Ray would find his powers being used for crime when he is temporarily the prisoner of a crook who uses his body as a power source for a ray gun and later uses the Time Pool to travel to Baltimore circa 1849 where he helps Edgar Alan Poe solve a mystery involving stolen gold coins. Atom would next aid the Flash in stopping an invasion of Earth by Attila-5. Later the Atom and his friends in the Justice League would be manipulated by the ultra-galactic "I", an evil being who's very existence was threatened by the JLA's continued success.

In Ivy Town, Ray would clash once more with Chronos and clear the good name of his civilian identity when he is accused of a crime he did not commit. Back with the Justice League, the Atom is present when Green Lantern relates a solo adventure to the group and would be among the super-powered members of the League to go on "strike" following a UN sanction preventing them from using their powers, all a plot orchestrated by the evil Headmaster Mind. Still with the League, he would be present when a video created by Superman's father Jor-El, regarding the other planets he considered sending his son prior to Krypton's destruction.

Resuming his activities in Ivy Town, Ray would battle his own costume when it briefly gained sentience and aid Doc Magnus in rebuilding the Metal Men and stop the evil Uranium. When visiting his old classmate Ed Thayer, Atom would get caught up in an attempt by foreign spies trying to steal Thayer's Illusion-Maker device and foil the teleporting Hyper-Thief's robberies. Atom is also present when the Justice League invites his ally Hawkman into the group and in attendance of Aquaman's marriage to Mera.

Next, while on vacation the Ray becomes the temporary pawn of criminal inventor Andrew Frost, battles Brain Storm with the JLA, crushes the Hooded Hijackers, and uses the Time Pool to travel to the 19th Century, where he comes to the rescue of writer Jules Verne. Atom would become an unwilling pawn of the Endless One, and is forced to fight some of his fellow JLA members and when restored to normal becomes a victim in one of Dr. Destiny's plots to get revenge against the JLA.

The Atom would have to combat side-effects of his Time Pool adventures when battling the evil Phantom Mask, and spend a brief time thinking he was a flea in a flea circus when spies attempt to replace Ray Palmer with one of their own agents. He would next aid Zatanna search for her missing father on a micro-world ruled by the Druid. Later, joins with the Justice League in once more battling Brain Storm. Going solo, Atom prevents crooks from benefiting from his "stool-pigeon" computer and with the aid of Maya and the Dryads posing as Leprechauns, convince Arthur Ennis to fill a witness report with the police following a robbery. During his next team up with Hawkman, and Hawkgirl against Matter Master, the trio of heroes would trust their secret identities to each other. Atom and his fellow JLA members would team up with the JSA against the evil Johnny Thunder of Earth-One who has manipulated the Thunderbolt into creating Earth-A and the Lawless League, criminal versions of the Justice League.

The CIA once more hires the Atom to stop a group of Russian spies who are attempting to manipulate Jean Loring's father in an attempt to get at the Atom, and on another Time Pool to 18th century London where the Atom prevents one of Professor Hyatt's ancestors from being thrown in debtors' prison. Atom would also aid his fellow JLA members in preventing global disaster and conflict inadvertently created by Andrew Helm's Corti-Conscience machine. Acting solo, he stops a common thug named Eddie Gordon from enslaving the Bat-Knights of the Elvaran people. Atom next helps Batman, Robin, and Elongated Man capture "Numbers" Garvey and his gang.

The Atom also aids the Justice League in defeating the Key during his attack. Returning to Ivy Town, the Atom makes up a story about alien invaders to make the return of a radion-ball sound like a more exciting adventure and foils a robbery plot orchestrated by groundskeeper Billy Knowels. Atom's powers are briefly pilfered by Professor Ivo in a plot against the Flash, when the Flash relates the story to his fellow JLA members including the Atom, they are unaware as they are not using their powers at the time. Next Atom would join the Justice League and Metamorpho in battling the Unimaginable.

After liberating the Floral Dimension and Earth from destruction at the hands of Jason Woodrue, the Atom would join the JLA in curing Batman, Green Lantern, and Flash from a plague infected upon them by the Unimaginable. Atom would return to Ivy Town, to foil a series of robberies orchestrated by Bill Jameson, the so-called "Man in the Ion-Mask". Working with the CIA once more, the Atom would travel to Russia to foil Boris Kalumchuk's plot to poison America with irradiated gold. Ray would next join the Justice League of America in their battle against the Shaggy Man.

Engagement to Jean Loring

Back in Ivy Town, the Atom would earn a new villain in the Bug-Eyed Bandit. During this adventure Jean accepts proposal for marriage for fear that Ray would eventually become too absorbed in his work to ask her anymore. When both Earth-One and Earth-Two are threatened by the Anti-Matter Man, the Atom would be one of the Justice League and Justice Society members gathered to combat the threat.

Going solo in Ivy Town once more, the Atom would crush the Panther Gang and going on another Time Pool journey to 18th century France where he foils an assassination attempt against Benjamin Franklin. Returning to the JLA, the Atom would aid them in stopping the Lord of Time from manipulating Vietnam war hero Sgt. Eddie Brent. Returning home, Atom would clash with once more against his old foe Chronos. Later, when the entire population of Ivy Town suddenly shrinks, Ray learns that a chunk of white dwarf star landing in the city water supply is the cause, and cures the people with no ill side effects. Ray would next work together with his Earth-Two counterpart in foiling a plot by the Thinker to rob Earth-One and escape to Earth-Two. At a JLA meeting, Atom, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Batman and Elongated Man would all learn that of Zatanna's success in freeing her father with the help of magical proxies that she created of the heroes following her respective encounters with each of them.

Ray would return to Ivy Town where he would stumble upon and foil another plot by Eddie Gordon to manipulate the Elvarian Bat-Kights. He is also present when the JLA must face the evil Mastermind, who has turned many of the League members weapons against them. Atom would team-up with Hawkman once more to search for the missing Johnny Burns, a reformed crook, to reunite him with his sick mother. During the encounter, they battle Toyboy, Johnny's evil half brought to life when Mrs. Burns is briefly endowed with mental powers following a scientific accident. Rejoining the JLA, Atom would foil the Royal Flush Gang's attempt to destroy the League.

When paralyzed in a lab accident, Ray manages to get Jean to activate his size-control devices causing him to shrink to microscopic size, freeing him of the paralysis. Before returning to Earth, he would save the sub-atomic people of Palonds from the evil Honds. The Atom would also be present to cheer on a UN-sponsored charity race between Superman and the Flash. He would later team-up with Aquaman against the plankton creature called Galg the Destroyer. After a rematch against the Bug-Eyed Bandit, the Atom would team-up with the Elongated Man against Chronos. After battling the Big Gang, witnessing another race between Superman and the Flash, foiling "Smarts" and his gang, Atom has another Time Pool adventure to London to prevent Colonel Tom Blood from stealing the crown jewels from the Tower of London.

The Atom is one of the members of the Justice League enslaved by Queen Bee, until they are saved by Batgirl. In another revenge plot against the Justice League, Dr. Destiny briefly switches the League's bodies with some of their greatest foes. For a time, Atom would be forced to trade bodies with Jason Woodrue, until Dr. Destiny's ultimate defeat. When twin transmitter towers on Earth-One and Earth-Two cause people to rapidly age either forward or backward, Earth-Two's Atom would have to briefly battle a young and hot-headed Ray Palmer before destroying the towers and returning everyone back to normal. Atom would next work with Batman in foiling the Cannoneer from robbing the Brotherhood Express. The Atom would also be involved in a Justice League case where the group would get embroiled in a gang war between the Pyrotekniks and the Bulleteers in a complex scheme hatched by mobster Leo Locke.

The Atom would soon gain an unusual ally in his next adventure, Major Mynah, a mynah bird that he meets foiling a group of Viet Cong soldiers from raiding a Cambodian temple while on an archeological dig in the region. With the bird injured in the battle, Atom takes the helpful creature to Hawkman who replaces the bird's broken wings with mechanical ones. Major Mynah becomes Ray's pet, following him in both his civilian and costumed identities. After helping the Atom capture crooks, Major Mynah's involvement almost tips Jean off to Ray's secret identity and so he comes up with a method of disguising Mynah for future adventures. The Atom would return to the Justice League and foil the Key's plot of using Superman to destroy the JLA and later battle Dr. Anomaly. Ray and Major Mynah would next go into action to stop an invasion from the alien Physalians from feeding on the humans they have captured. The Atom is one of the JLA members seemingly killed by T.O. Morrow, he is restored to life following Morrow's defeat at the hands of the JSA, their new ally Red Tornado and surviving members of the JLA.

Justice League Mainstay

As time would go on, Ray would eventually get involved in less frequent solo adventures, often teaming up with either Hawkman or getting involved in many of the Justice League's cases.

Ray joins Carter and Sheira Hall on vacation in Mexico City and battles Telka and his followers. With the Justice League, the Atom battles the laughable Generalissimo Demmy Gog of Offalia, in a pathetic attempt to conquer the world. The Atom next is hired by the FBI to break up a spy ring. He succeeds thanks to the intervention of Major Mynah. This would mark the Atom's last use of Major Mynah. The bird's ultimate fate is unknown. Atom also finds himself involved in a revenge plot enacted by criminal Jason Madden, who attempts to kill his former accomplice Chuck Wheeler. Atom aids the Justice League in clearing Green Arrow's name in a murder frame-up plotted by Headmaster Mind and the Tattooed Man. Ray is involved in a Justice League investigation of the new costumed vigilante known as the Creeper.

While attending a science convention with Carter Hall, Ray and Carter are attacked by a man resembling Carter. This gets them embroiled in a battle against the Shiva, Hindu goddess of destruction, who with her army of Nether-Men is attempting to win back worship of humanity. Through the efforts of the Atom, Hawkman and Hawkgirl the plot is thwarted. The Atom would join his fellow Justice League colleagues in traveling to Mars and aiding their comrade Martian Manhunter against the evil Commander Blanx, a battle ends in J'onn J'onzz's resignation from the team. Ray next goes into action as the Atom to foil a plot by rival university professor Horace McByrd to discredit Ray among his peers. Ray next joins the JLA and Hawkgirl in saving Hawkman who has been turned into salt by a group of demons, fighting off their minions a biker gang known as the Gruesome Ghouls in the process. When Professor Heinrich Von Rilk is almost assaulted by Ivy University students for destroying an electron-microscope, Ray learns that Von Rilk did it to prevent an invasion from a microscopic world. Investigating the claims as the Atom, Ray confirms Heinrich's story, and stops the invasion by defeating its vanguard, a creature known as Ag. Atom would be among the members of the Justice League and Justice Society who would ban together to save both universes from the threat of Aquarius, a living star creature bent on revenge for being exiled by his superiors.

When Jean Loring is kidnapped by the people of Jimberen, a microscopic world who believe that she is the descendant of their ruler, Atom and Hawkman team-up to rescue her. However, due to the radiation the people of Jimberen expose Jean to, she is driven insane from the ordeal. With technology on Hawkman and Hawkgirl's homeworld of Thanagar making it possible to cure Jean, Atom would entrust her to the care of Hawkgirl.

Focusing on Justice League business, Atom would be one of the members who would accidentally have an evil duplicate of himself created out of his ego, which would battle new Justice League member Black Canary. When an influential man named John Dough would attempt to turn the United States government against the JLA, manipulating Snapper Carr into betraying the group, the Atom would be involved in the conflict, which would reveal Dough to be none other than the Joker. Atom and the Justice League would soon setup shop in a new base, an orbital satellite above the Earth.

During this time, Atom and the other members of the JLA would team up with the Vigilante against the Doomsters, aliens who threatened to pollute the Earth.

Ray would ultimately learn that Hawkgirl's quest to restore Jean's sanity on Thanagar was met with trouble when both women's souls were stolen by Norch Lor, a scientist from Thanagar who's misguided intention to save the universe from the coming "end of all things" was attempting to collect the souls of all living beings in a Ghenna Box. With the help of Tomar-Re of the Green Lantern Corps, Ray and the Justice League would restore Hawkgirl and Jean's souls to their bodies, Jean however would still remain insane. Atom and Hawkman would travel together en route to Thanagar to try and get Jean the help she needs, and along the way run into the threat that Norch Lor was attempting to protect them from: The insane Jest-Master, who leaves all those in his path completely mad. With the help of the Justice League, Atom and Hawkman would defeat the Jest-Master. In the aftermath of the battle, Jean's constant exposure to Jest-Master's insanity rays would restore her sanity to normal. Returning to Earth, the Atom would once more join the Justice League and the Justice Society in preventing another threat to both Earth-One and Earth-Two. This time coming from a being called Creator2, whom by utilizing Red Tornado's connection to both realities, would attempt to merge the two universes together, threatening to destroy both. Atom and his colleagues would foil this plot, however the Spectre would seemingly perish in the process.

Sword of the Atom

Ray and Jean's marriage would become strained over time as Jean's law practice and Ray's devotion to both science and super-heroics would take time over their romance. Soon, Jean would begin an affair with her fellow lawyer Paul Hoben, which Ray would stumble upon one night. Realizing their marriage was on the rocks, Ray would decide to investigate White Dwarf star radiations he detected out of South America and decide to investigate it without Jean. Taking a flight with some drug runners, he would learn too much about an illegal cocaine field and prompting the pilots to attempt to kill Ray. However, the pilot would be shot and Ray would jump ship and shrink down to Atom size. Ray would be struck by lightning trapping him at a height of six inches. The plane would crash, and because one of the men aboard stole one of Ray's rings, the world would presume him dead and Jean would go on with her life and pursue her relationship with Paul. Ray meanwhile would find himself captured by aliens known as the Katarthans—small aliens whose ancestors were left on Earth centuries ago and live in a world of high technology and barbarism. With a revolt immanent, Ray would be captured along with members of a resistance led by Taren.

Forced into gladiator battles, Ray would learn the Katarthans' language and befriend Taren and learn that he hoped to overthrow their leader Caellich and marry princess Laethwen. The two men would become unknowing pawns of Deraegis who would seek to cause the people to revolt against Caellich so that he could rule. To this end, he would blind Taren, causing the people to protest. Taren, Atom, and Laethwen would escape the arena and flee into the jungles where they would reunite with the rebels. Knowing his end is near, Taren would turn over leadership of the rebels to Atom, and perish while the group fled an army of carnivorous ants. Atom and Laethwen would soon fall in love with each other. Atom would lead the warriors on to Moralaidh to launch a revolution. In the final battle, both Caellich and Deraegis would be slain, but not before Deraegis would activate an old star drive powered by a white dwarf star fragment. Attempting to save his newly adopted people, Ray would dive into the plant to try and stop the reactor from exploding. However the white star radiation would cause him to grow as it irradiated him and smash his way through. Growing to near human height, Ray would frighten the people away before the reactor exploded. Restored to his normal height and in a delirium caused by radiation exposure, Ray would pass out and be found by rescuers. Waking up in the hospital, Ray would come to realize that he no longer had an interest in returning to his old life and have moved on from Jean. Having learned that Jean had come to South America looking for him he would decide to finalize their divorce and try to find Laethwen again.

Returning to Ivy Town to settle his affairs, Ray would realize that there wold be no way to rekindle his romance with Jean. In repairing his size change belt, Ray would find that the process of shrinking would cause him great pain due to his absorption of massive amounts of white dwarf radiation and would fear that constantly changing his size could eventually kill him. Finalizing his divorce from Jean, Ray would put his money on an expedition back into South America, taking along with him writer Norman Brawler to chronicle the experience. The two men would run afoul of drug dealers and Ray would shrink down to Atom, giving up his normal height seemingly for the last time to help destroy the drug operation. Finding the Moralaidh tribe and being reunited with Laethwen, Ray would leave Norman to find his own way back. Norman would publish the tale in a book called The Atom's Farewell, which would become a best seller.

Ray would lead Laethwen's people in building a new New Moralaidh and rebuilding the alien societies lost technology, he and Laethwen would become wed as well. However, his past life could not stay away, as when Jean would marry Paul Hoben and when the newly weds would clear out Ray's lab she would accidentally shrink herself. In order to restore her to her normal height, Paul would have Norman Brawler lead him and Jean to find Ray. However, along the way, Jean would be captured by minions of rebel leader Torgul who had captured many of the Moralaidhian women including Laethwen. Ray would lead a mission to rescue the captured women, which would end in Torgul's death, and the freedom of his people. With Jean restored to her normal height, Ray and Laethwen would wish them farewell, Ray leaving Paul with his old size changing belt.

Ray would remain New Moralaidh's champion but would come at times to aid his old allies in the Justice League of America.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

When the evil Anti-Monitor attempted to destroy the entire multiverse, his opposing force the Monitor would sacrifice his life to shunt the five surviving realities into limbo, however they were slowly merging together causing chaos on all worlds and threatening their destruction in the process. Alexander Luthor, Jr. of Earth-Three and the Harbinger would gather heroes and villains from all realities in an attempt to rally their support in saving what was left of the multiverse. Atom would be among their numbers and would agree to aid in the effort.

Ray would be called in to examine the Red Tornado, who is recaptured by the heroes following a lengthy captivity under the Anti-Monitor who converted the android into an engine of destruction. However, despite the best efforts of the Atom and T.O. Morrow, the Red Tornado would self destruct, causing massive damage to the JLA Satellite, and apparently destroying the Red Tornado.

Later on in the Crisis, when a united group of super-villains from each surviving reality would attempt to conquer each earth, Atom would be among a group of super-heroes dispatched to Earth-S to attempt to quell the uprising in that reality. Although the heroes there were made prisoner, the Atom would be part of a counter attack of heroes that were uncaptured, and would succeed in freeing Billy Batson allowing the boy to change into Captain Marvel and turn the tides of battle.

Changes Caused by Crisis on Infinite Earths

Following the defeat of the Anti-Monitor, the surviving parallel worlds were combined to create a new universe. While, much of the Atom's Pre-Crisis history remains the same, many of his past adventures may have been altered or erased from existence entirely. In particular, Atom's encounters with Hawkman may be different given the extensive changes of Hawkman's origins. The Thanagarian Katar Hol is replaced in Post-Crisis history with Earth native Carter Hall the Hawkman formerly from Earth-Two.

In addition, due to the massive changes in the histories of his fellow JLA colleagues Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, the Atom's history may have been altered by proxy and many of his adventures alongside these heroes no longer be part of history.

In addition, many of the adventures that the Atom had with the Justice League of America that involved traveling to other universes, particularly their encounters with the Justice Society of America on Earth-Two, likely no longer exist, or if they do, in a vastly different manner such that the multiversal threat was simply a threat to a single unified universe.

Lastly, the Atom's encounters with his Earth-Two counterpart may no longer be part of history, or if they are, they have been altered in such a way to accommodate the notion that these adventures only happened in a single universe as opposed to having occurred on Earth-One and Earth-Two.

Power of the Atom

The Katarthans and their village were soon wiped out by a horrible fire and the Atom returned to Ivy Town, only to find that one of his friends had written a book exposing Ray's secret identity in his absence. After battling various foes, such as Strobe, Humbug, and Swarm, Ray learned that a US Government agency had engineered the destruction of the Katarthans, in order to induce his return to the States. He avenged the Katarthans by permanently reducing the agents responsible for the massacre to six inches in height. Ray returned to Ivy Town just long enough to bid his friends farewell, and then briefly went into hiding.

Suicide Squad

The shrunken agents, now calling themselves the Micro Squad, vowed revenge on Ray. Ginsburg, one of their number, made an attempt on Ray's life, but died in the attempt. Ray approached Amanda Waller, who convinced him to fake his own death and secretly join the espionage unit known as the Suicide Squad. As a part of this mission, Ray went undercover and Adam Cray served in the Suicide Squad as the new Atom. Adam was killed by Blacksnake and Ray resumed the role of the Atom. Later still, he joined the then-current Justice League on a semi-active basis.

Teen Titans

Al Pratt, the original Atom, died during a battle against Extant in Zero Hour. During this event, Ray was also hit with a blast of chrono-energy that de-aged him into a youth again. He would go on to become a member of the Teen Titans.

Identity Crisis

In time, Ray and Jean were able to be friends again. In the divorce she had received half of his patents. As a gesture of friendship, Jean decided to sign them back to him. Little did he know that this was but one of many facets to Jean's deadly scheme to win Ray back. Since their divorce, Jean had somehow become seriously deranged and believed that the only way to be reunited with Ray was to force the issue. Incredibly, she devised an elaborate plan to endanger Sue Dibny, wife of Elongated Man Ralph Dibny. Jean was privy to the fact that every year on her birthday, Ralph would be absent solving a custom-tailored mystery devised by Sue. She bypassed the Dibnys' security by shrinking down and traveling via the phone lines into their home. She then entered Sue's body and obstructed the blood flow to her brain. To cover up this evidence, Jean scorched Sue's body.

Jean knew that this event would send all the heroes scrambling to protect their loved ones and—hopefully—drive Ray back into her arms. Jean employed two other schemes to cover her tracks. First, she faked an attempt on her life, then she hired Captain Boomerang to kill Robin's father Jack Drake. She supplied Drake with a gun to defend himself, hoping that Boomerang would be killed and that everyone would believe he was Sue's killer as well. Eventually, Dr. Mid-Nite's autopsy of Sue's body revealed the truth, and the Atom himself elicited a confession from Jean after she inadvertently spilled the beans when asking about a letter sent to Jack along with the gun. Ray managed to put two and two together because Batman had taken the letter away from the crime scene even before the police arrived, so only he and the Leaguers were supposed to know of its existence. She was promptly admitted to Arkham Asylum. With Jean's incarceration, Ray was overwhelmed with despair, and shrank continuously until he vanished completely into a microscopic or subatomic world.

Ray's legacy would continue on with Ryan Choi utilizing a version of his costume and shrinking device to become the current Atom for a short time.

Countdown

During the missing year following the events known as the second Crisis, Palmer's technology is employed by Supernova to shrink and grow in size in order to enter and exit the bottle city of Kandor.

Ray took refuge the Nanoverse, and met a young mystic who told him about the new reformed existence of the Multiverse. He traveled through different realities and find himself in Earth-51, where its heroes eradicate supercrime and create a utopian Earth. There he witness his Earth-51 counterpart's death and took his role in this reality including marrying this world's Jean Loring.

While there he study much about his Earth-51 counterpart and discover he never became the Atom and acted as a scientist consultant to the Earth-51 Justice League. Also this Ray gifted with the ability to be immune to all kinds of diseases and viruses. Furthermore, the Earth-51 Palmer worked on preventing the deadly Morticoccus Virus, and knowing that in every reality of the Multiverse there is deadly chance that the virus would appear decided to travel the Multiverse and inoculate each inhabitants with his immune system. Realizing the importance of his counterpart's work, Ray carry on Earth-51 Ray's work and travel to different worlds inoculating each denizen of every Earth with a resistance to the Morticoccus Virus.

Unknowable to Ray the Monitors and the Challengers from Beyond were scouring the reformed Multiverse for him as they believe that he maybe the one to prevent a cataclysm known as the Great Disaster. Eventually the Challengers discover him and learns his history on Earth-51. Shortly afterward Bob reveals his intention in killing Ray. With the Challengers' help, Ray escapes but witness the death of his Earth-51 friends and his alternate wife.

Despite what the Challengers were told by the Monitors, Ray reveals to them that it was the Ray Palmer of Earth-51 who was meant to stop the Great Disaster.

After joining the Challengers, teaming up with Jimmy Olsen, Forager, Harley Quinn, Holly Robinson, Mary Marvel, and Firestorm on Apokolips, Ray discovers that Karate Kid was infected with the Morticoccus Virus. Following the damages to the planet by the Pied Piper and Brother Eye, Ray secretly eavesdropped on Monitor Solomon and Darkseid, learning that Darkseid wanted to remake reality and Solomon wanted the Great Disaster to happen. Alerted by this, Ray returned to the others and was pressured into curing Karate Kid.

Ray and the others were then teleported back to the reconstructed Earth-51 and seek advance medical attention from Project Cadmus; however, once they were at Cadmus Karate Kid was already dead.

Ray helped the scientists at Cadmus in finding a cure to the Morticoccus Virus after the virus was released to the world. Despite everything he has done, the Great Disaster prevailed forcing Ray and his friends to return back to their Earth.

After returning to their world, Jimmy Olsen is kidnapped by Mary Marvel, who has been corrupted by Darkseid. Ray hitches a ride from within Jimmy. When Darkseid takes control of Jimmy's powers, Ray locates and shuts down the control sphere inside Jimmy's brain, but is then swarmed by Apokoliptian antibodies. While escaping this onslaught, Ray discovers the "battery" containing the New God spirit energies. Ray removes it from Jimmy's head and shatters it, releasing the energies.

Ray later joins Donna, Kyle, and Forager in their new mission as border guards to the Multiverse, realizing that there is nothing left for him on New Earth anymore. However, Palmer returns to New Earth one more time, upon realizing that his old nemesis Chronos had taken his identity to mislead a young pretender to his identity, Ryan Choi. After helping his successor to once again save Ivy Town, he returns to the Multiverse with a new sense of fulfillment, leaving his town in the hands of a new, capable hero.

During the Final Crisis, Ray returns to New Earth and works with Choi again to aid in the efforts to evacuate the last free humans.

Blackest Night

During the events of the Blackest Night, Ray asks Hawkman to visit his wife Jean Loring's grave to be honored as a fallen member of the community, but Hawkman refuses due to her murdering Sue Dibny. Ray later called Hawkman again, over the phone. Atom is then invited to visit Carter in order to discuss his heartache over his wife which the deceased Carter planned on killing him.

Arriving at Carter's house, he was attacked by the Black Lantern Hawkman and Hawkgirl, and only escaped by miniaturizing himself and hiding in Carter's Black Lantern Ring. Ray did a thorough exploration of the ring, discovering that it was nothing like Hal Jordan's power ring, instead made of dark matter with micro-wormholes sending energy to an unknown source. Jumping out, he helped Hal and Barry Allen fight off the Black Lantern Justice Leaguers, with his compassion attracting the Black Lantern Dibnys. Ralph mocked Ray for still being love with Jean after she killed Sue, but the two Dibny Lanterns were destroyed by the Indigo Tribe, the wielders of the indigo light of compassion, then teleporting the three living Leaguers to the Hall of Justice, where they met up with Firestorm Jason Rusch and Mera. After Indigo-1, leader of the Indigo Tribe, explained that the Black Lanterns were expressions of darkness which considered the living to be invaders, Barry and Hal pointed out that Ralph and Sue had no reaction to each others' attack, leading Ray to conclude that the Black rings were some sort of organic computer that rebooted the body without restoring their essences. Before they could plan a proper counter-attack, the Black Lantern League arrived and attacked, and the Indigo Tribe teleported Hal away, leaving Ray, Barry, and Mera without a means to effectively fight the Black Lanterns. Ray had almost been turned into a Black Lantern by a reanimated Batman but ultimately been protected by an unknown force. Ganthet inducts him into the Indigo Tribe as a deputy for his strong compassion.

Indigo-1 claims that she can teleport the armies of each Lantern Corps onto Earth, if given time to meditate. So, the responsibility falls to Ray to protect her while she does so. Before she enters her trance, she reveals to Ray that the indigo staff and his overwhelming compassion allows him to mimic the other powers of the Lantern Corps; she demonstrates this by temporarily becoming a Red Lantern and vomiting corrosive blood all over an attacking company of Black Lanterns. She then enters her trance, while Ray fights off Black Lanterns Hawkman and Hawkgirl by temporarily becoming an Orange Lantern, loudly proclaiming "I want my friends back!" He then summons two orange energy duplicates of Khufu and Chay-Ara to help him fight off his and Indigo-1's attackers. He is briefly successful. But then Jean shows up to torment him, and she leaps into Indigo-1's ring. Ray follows her. He ends up reliving Sue Dibny's death, and is then attacked by various Black Lantern Morlaidhans, the miniscule race he befriended during his time in the Amazon jungle years before. He fights them off and--summoning the powers of a Green Lantern--destroys Jean. Indigo-1 manages to summon the various armies and thanks Ray for his help. He tells her to keep his involvement in the deployment of the troops a secret, and asks that she help him find a way to legitimately resurrect Hawkman and Hawkgirl.

[axemetaphor]

OC Masterpost

I need an organized place to put info about all my OCs so that’s what this post is gonna be for!

In addition to basic bios and some reference images, I’ve also got links to Spotify playlists for every character, because music is a strong association with personality for me. (If you don’t use Spotify, or if you know of a streaming platform more easily accessible than Spotify, send me an anon and I’ll duplicate the playlists to that service then add a link here!) I also have moodboards for every OC.

This post will be rather long so I’ve put in under a readmore for the sake of convenience.

It’s also important to note that my OCs exist in an AU where some things are a little different. For example, Infinite in this AU is 17 and that’s definitely not because I assumed he was an edgy teen like Shadow, and after Robotnik’s defeat in Forces, the Resistance became the Restoration. All the troops who had been battling were reassigned to rebuilding whatever town they happened to be in at the time of victory, with extra troops being redistributed as needed (leading to the formation of small roving teams traveling from place to place to help out).

It’s a little bit of an unorganized info-dump at some points, but I’ll update it to be more organized at some point.

Updated 01/20/2019

Rhys the Serval

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Rhys was designed by @creative-sanic and she also came up with most of his backstory!

Rhys is a gender-nonconforming cis gay dude. He was born to a ‘feral’ mother in the wilderness closest to Central City (between the City and Mystic Ruins, far enough away from civilization to be undetected for a majority of his early life). At age 7 or 8, a massive fire swept the forest, putting him and his mother in massive danger. Officials sent to contain the fire discovered that she and Rhys were living alone in the forest, and took the two into protective custody while working through the devastation caused by the fire. The city pressured Rhys’s mother to join civilization, but she adamantly refused, and as a consequence, Rhys was stolen from her and put up for adoption, leading to her having a violent breakdown. She was moved to a containment facility and hasn’t seen Rhys since; he has only the faintest memories of her. He was adopted at age 13 or 14 (having been shuffled around in foster care before then) by a family of bears, and went on to be a fairly average Mobian citizen, working as a waiter at Penne For Your Thoughts. That’s where he met Vitriol, who is now his boyfriend. After dating for a few months, they decided to move in together, with Vitriol moving into Rhys’s apartment, which was the larger of the two. Rhys is now roughly 19 years old (18 or 19).

Rhys and Vitriol have a steady relationship relatively devoid of problems. They love each other enough that no problem is too big for them to tackle, and when Vitriol became part of the Restoration (the collective effort to undo the damage done by Robotnik and the Resistance), Rhys moved with him all over the world, glad to have a reasonable excuse to travel. Neither wanted to attempt a longstanding long-distance relationship; their being separated briefly during the Resistance was frustrating enough for the two of them.

Rhys is unaware that he possesses Empathic abilities, and simply assumes he’s very good at figuring people out/being sympathetic, but in truth, the forest fire in his youth served as the catalyst for his abilities. Since his Empathy doesn’t require the same physical drain as, say, Vitriol’s Strength, Rhys mistakes his Chaos-Energy-related fatigue after using his powers to be emotional exhaustion. When he’s that tired is roughly the only time he can show unprovoked anger, but he’s also in-tune enough with himself to recognize when he’s being needlessly mean, and he’ll usually apologize right away. This happened most frequently during the events of the Resistance, where Rhys was tasked with helping to get survivors to safe places; he was very good at comforting those who may have lost friends/family in the attacks. From that, he’s begun to entertain the idea of becoming a therapist someday, though he’s not sure how he would afford the college degree for that. 

He gets along very well with Unknown due to them both having rather upbeat personalities. Though Unknown can be a little overbearing sometimes, Rhys likes talking to them and sometimes they’ll gush about how cute Vitriol is. 

As mentioned previously, Rhys doesn’t conform to typical gender norms; he’s a fashionista of sorts and doesn’t care what gender clothing is associated with. He thinks skirts are cute and feel nice, and he thinks makeup is a lot of fun, though he doesn’t do either every single day, just every now and then. For the most part, unless he’s feeling adventurous, he wears a hoodie and jeans, though his work outfit is a fancy suit. So, it’s often nice for him to just wear something low-effort. That being said, he always jumps at every opportunity to do his boyfriend’s makeup, and though Vitriol isn’t the biggest fan of it, he likes seeing Rhys smile, so he usually gives in.

Rhys often prompts Vitriol to keep up with his health, and the two go on camping trips whenever Rhys can convince Vitriol to go. He’s very good at camping; he can build a shelter easily, knows which plants are edible, etc.. Vitriol, by contrast, is pretty clueless, but Rhys is more than happy to teach him. 

When speaking, Rhys normally has a somewhat-formal tone, and he uses little to no slang (usually just words like “gonna,” and he almost never drops the G’s at the end of words). He’s very polite by nature (and some of the formality was ingrained by his job), and he tends to not talk a lot. When he’s really comfortable around someone (like Vitriol), he can chatter a lot, but if he catches himself, he’ll get really embarrassed about it. He has a soft, lilting voice that many find pleasant to listen to and soothing. When he gets excited, or raises his voice, it gets slightly higher in pitch. He’s not an anxious person (as in, he doesn’t have an anxiety disorder) but he’s rather shy and awkward around new people. He’s more of a reserved person than an anxious one, and he is by no means meek; having been raised (post-adoption) by a family of bears taught him how to roughhouse and hold his own against bigger enemies.

For the most part, Rhys isn’t bothered by his past. His life in the forest is far enough away, mentally, that to him it doesn’t feel like it even happened to him. However, the fire was a traumatic event for him, and to this day he has a deep-seated fear of fire. It’s rare, but on occasion, he will have nightmares about that day, and he doesn’t handle that well when alone. Fortunately, Vitriol is fairly helpful to Rhys—his simply being there is very comforting, even though he never really knows what to say.

Toxic the Porcupine

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Note: while this character started out as a sonicsona of sorts, they’ve somewhat evolved from that and I don’t see them quite so much as “me” anymore. They do, however, share my name (or rather the name I’m using currently, as I write this). To further complicate things they also look the way I do right now and I use them for vent art lmao so, if I happen to draw myself as a mobian ever again I’ll tag it as #not oc. That way it’s clear what’s Toxic the OC and what’s Toxic the...uh, human being I guess. 

Toxic is an agender porcupine who hasn’t settled on their sexuality yet--they know they’re asexual, but they haven’t thought any further into their romantic orientation. They were born in a tiny unnamed village settled in the shadow of Scrap Brain Zone, and only recently did they leave after a majority of it was burnt to the ground...by them. They showed signs of being trans at a young age, and were subsequently bullied quite harshly by both their peers and their family. They came out to their family at age 17, which only deepened the rift already forming, and subsequently Toxic ran away for a week, spending that time in Scrap Brain Zone. That was their first overnight foray into the Zone, something that would eventually become a staple of their life.

At age 19, they discovered an abandoned prototype Wispon in Scrap Brain Zone (devoid of Wisps), which they then decided to retrofit with the flaming spouts from Scrap Brain Zone to make their own strange hybrid flamethrower. A few nights later, after a particularly awful verbal spat with their family, they decided to fake their own death by setting fire to their own room. However, things quickly got out of hand, and the whole town ended up in flames. They fled, unsure if anyone made it out alive that night...and a little less than sympathetic if they didn’t. (Fortunately, a majority of the little village’s populace wound up trickling into neighboring villages and towns)

Since then, they’ve been absolutely destroying almost everything in their path. With no direction and no impulse control, they are a complete loose cannon throwing a wrench in both Eggman’s plans and Sonic’s adventures. They live by a motto of recklessness and “I’m here for a good time, not a long time.” Being an un-powered Mobian, they can’t do much of anything with the Wispon taken away, but taking that Wispon away is much easier said than done. Shortly after their ‘debut’ as a villain-of-sorts, Eggman reached out to them with a message essentially reading, “hey, do you want a direction in which to burn everything down (that is preferably not my everything)?” Since joining forces with Robotnik, though, their chaos has become much more controlled, and now incidents of mass fires can usually be linked to Eggman sending them off somewhere. They are a persistent thorn in the Freedom Fighters’ sides as they just love to fight and don’t really care who they fight.

They will not, however, attack civilians directly. Their fires might pose a threat to cities, but they don’t outright attack people unprompted--their chaos isn’t fueled of malice but rather of recklessness and an extreme lack of forethought. If harassed, however, they aren’t above punching someone in the face, and civilians are warned to just stay the hell away from Toxic. Their behavior overall is best classed as “more of a danger to themselves than others, even when provoked.”

Toxic only owns one jacket and one pair of boots, as well as no other accessories save for the spiked bracelets and collar, since everything else was burnt. One item they are occasionally pictured with, but rarely wear, is a long ankh necklace, the origins of which they refuse to elaborate on. However, it’s clearly important to them… Prior to burning everything, they often wore ripped jeans, loose half-torn-up tank-tops with a variety of detailed patterns, and lots of bracelets. They despite feminine-coded clothing and would rather die than wear it. Overall, they’re fond of clothes that look like they’re being held together by safety pins and hope.

Their speaking pattern is completely all-over-the-place. Their accent is untraceable, they mix slang from a variety of regions, and mix pidgin street-slang with oddly formal sentence structure or complicated words. They alternate between dropped G’s at the end of words and dropped H’s at the beginning, but inconsistently; rather than being a sign that this accent is faked, it’s more a reflection of how scrambled they are on the inside. Toxic’s voice is prone to cracking, especially when they yell (which is very often), and it has a certain hoarse quality to it most of the time. It rests in a midrange between stereotypically “male” and “female” voices, and can be mistaken for a young boy or slightly-older girl interchangeably. This irritates them to no end—they’re no stranger to yelling in demand for their proper pronouns to be used.

Toxic has frequent nightmares, but never speaks of them. They often suffer from broken sleep, only getting a few hours at a time, and on occasion are struck with insomnia. During that time, they doodle or write, dealing with rather dark subjects, but never share this willingly. Oddly enough, they have a rather intense fear of fire (ironic given their Wispon) and of heights. Strangely they seem to use their fear as an adrenaline boost of sorts, embracing it to use as a motivation. (It’s somewhat similar to how Batman uses bats as his main motif, despite having been traumatized by an experience with bats in his childhood.)

They cannot be swayed to being “good,” because they truly believe they are an awful person who could never be good even if they tried. So, they just do what they want out of a very specific, Nihilistic worldview, and truth be told they’re simply a chaotic being who’s in way over their head. Despite being a villain, however, they are a big fan of Sonic and his friends, and they consider it a huge honor to be able to fight him. They’ve created an odd sort of parent-child bond between themselves and Robotnik, adopting him as their dad (he didn’t really get a say). Robotnik isn’t exactly doting but he does view them as his child in a sense, and often makes them new weapons to use alongside their Wispon (which they refuse to part with; he repairs it fro them as-needed). 

Vex the Cat/Fox Cross

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Vex is a bigender aroace genetic experiment who most closely resembles a fusion of a fox and a cat. (Any pronouns are applicable to them, but I use she/her most, because I have a lot of “he” and “they” OCs already) She has lived roughly 17 years, the first 14 of which were spent in the facility that created them. Partway through what would have been the 15th year, a catastrophe occurred at the facility, giving Vex, Vitriol and Unknown a window to escape. During this process, Vex and Unknown became separated from Vitriol, escaping the facility and winding up on their own. They traveled in a world absolutely foreign to them for months, eventually, through a strange turn of events, joining a thieves’ guild in an attempt to forge new identities. They had great success as a thieving duo up until the unfortunate disappearance of Unknown, after which Vex abandoned the guild to search for them. Instead of Unknown, however, Vex ended up reconnecting with Vitriol in Central City, after which the two worked together to find Unknown, eventually finding their sibling in the Resistance. Since finding each other, the three have not been separated, and now form Team Motley.

Vex is generally regarded as the smartest of the trio, having a sharp wit and capacity both to plan ahead and think on their feet. Her Manipulation ability makes negotiations and covert ops very easy for them, with its one flaw being that it doesn’t work on others with similar abilities, such as Empathy. All three experiments possess low natural levels of Chaos Energy, below what is healthy, and their bodies cannot contain it well, so their abilities rely on the Energy around them, both in the environment and other people. Mobians often report “a strange sort of tiredness” after being Manipulated by Vex, as her power functions by draining a bit of Chaos Energy from the target and matching its wavelength.

Due to her affinity for making others do as she says, Vex is the leader of Team Motley, and, despite being the ‘middle child,’ the other two often go to her for advice. She is the organizational backbone to the team, a natural leader with a kind heart hidden behind a few layers of selfishness. Vex values family and friends above all else, and has a keen sense of right and wrong, even if she doesn’t always do what she knows to be right.

Vex is aware of her Manipulation ability, and does her best to curb its effects when she isn’t intending to use it, but given that it’s activated by her voice, sometimes she can’t control it very well. In addition to that, Vex is more than a little greedy; coming from a background where she didn’t even own her own life, Vex fell in love with her life in the thieves’ guild, mainly for the riches they earned and the thrill of the escape.

She’s a fan of loud, gaudy jewelry, luxurious metals, and other frivolous high-class things, though she doesn’t wear them in public. During their time in the thieves’ guild, Unknown and Vex lived in a network of caves, where many of the things they stole during their heyday are still hidden. While she misses those days, she doesn’t regret leaving them behind, and rather considers it an... option for future employment, once the Restoration is all said and done.

Despite her love of jewelry, Vex prefers not to wear clothes at all. They’ll wear their binder or a sports bra, and that’s about all; if necessary, they’ll wear baggy army-pattern pants or a baggy jacket. They don’t like the feeling of most fabrics on their fur, and don’t care a lot about fashion, but they tend towards more masculine clothing, often for its less-skin-tight properties. They also don’t mind skirts, but only wear them casually, as sometimes the extra fabric can get caught on things or be uncomfortable for them to sit on.

All three experiments tend towards more formal speech, but of the three, Vex has been trained out of that habit the most. She’s a real smooth-talker who adapts her speech patterns to mirror those of the person she’s talking to. When speaking casually, Vex is fairly neutral and doesn’t have any specific quirks to their speech pattern. When she’s comfortable around someone, she speaks in a rather husky voice, but not a very deep or gruff sound. It’s more of what would be described as “butch,” because their voice is closer to the stereotypically “feminine” sound than the stereotypically “masculine” sound.

Vex’s main phobia is having their mouth covered by something—anything from someone’s hands to fabric to a muzzle. This is because when her Manipulation was discovered by the scientists who created her, they immediately recognized it as a threat and she was kept muzzled for extended periods of time. The muzzle had supposedly been ‘humanely designed,’ but if at any point she frustrated her keepers, they were no strangers to shutting or covering the air-intake of it until she cooperated. Of the three, Vex has dealt with her trauma the least, and her sleeping pattern is just as broken as if not more broken than Toxic’s, and she tends to grind her teeth when she sleeps as well. She doesn’t speak of it much, but she and Vitriol have really bonded the most over their shared trauma. He is, essentially, the only person remaining who knows what they went through. 

Because they’re aroace, they have little concept of how flirting works other than when they’re using their Manipulation ability (which isn’t really calculated, more an instinctive knowledge that saying or doing certain things will achieve the effect they want). In other words, they’re extremely oblivious. The only thing they really care about is family, and they will do anything to protect them--when fighting they have no qualms about “fighting dirty” and will use anything to their advantage. Unusually, Vex has the ability to climb along walls quite easily using their claws, practically like a lizard. This combined with their night vision makes them quite formidable to fight in the dark. 

Vitriol the Ferret/Porcupine Cross

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Vitriol is a gay cis guy who most closely resembles a fusion of a porcupine and a ferret. He has lived roughly 18 years, the first 15 of which spent in the facility that created him. During the calamity leading to his escape, Vitriol separated from Unknown and Vex in order to give them a chance to get out, taking on the officials sent to stop them. He ended up leaving via a different route, resulting in him coming into this world in a completely different place from Vex and Unknown. Vitriol spent the next half-year wandering across Spagonia’s countryside, often stopping to spend a night or two on a farm in exchange for helping its owners, who never questioned why a mysteriously-strong stranger would be wandering the wilderness. Many took him to be some kind of nature spirit, and treated him kindly; he realized through this little pilgrimage that he quite liked helping people out, though he never stayed more than a week in one place. Searching for his siblings was his main priority.

Eventually Vitriol came across a little town, the port of which was a dock for ferries to and from Central City (primarily used by high-end citygoers for transportation to their summer homes). He was told that Central City was a place many people lived and an even larger number of people visited; Vitriol resolved that, if Vex and Unknown were to wind up anywhere, it was likely a place like that--a place people are expected to wind up at. Not understanding the concept of having to pay for things, Vitriol snuck aboard, and managed to go undetected for the entirety of the trip by packing himself nicely into a tiny corner belowdecks. The night before the trip was to end, he snuck off the boat and swam to shore in Central City. Immediately enraptured by the city’s many brilliant lights, Vitriol decided to stay there and do his best to keep an eye out for his siblings.

He spent his first two weeks sleeping on the streets and wandering through the city, until one evening, allured by the glowing neon signs on the inside, he found himself inside a rather lively nightclub/bar. One thing led to another and Vitriol ended up breaking up a fight, catching the attention of the bar’s owner (who was, at the time, half of the staff, as well). Vitriol was offered the job of security officer, no questions asked, and, having begun to come to terms with the fact that money wasn’t just something that one town invented, Vitriol accepted. For the beginning of his ‘career’ he still lived on the streets, but eventually he saved up enough for a tiny postage-stamp of an apartment. It’s only enough space for him to just exist, but that was plenty of space for him. Over time he earned enough money to live comfortably—comfortably enough to get gauges and a septum piercing, both of which helped him in his line of work immensely (as most of his ‘security’ work was simply to look scary enough to keep people from misbehaving). 

Vitriol worked there for roughly the same amount of time that Vex and Unknown “worked” as thieves, and it was during this time that he met and started dating Rhys, moving in with him after roughly three months together. He only reunited with Vex upon happening to run into her when wandering the town one weekend night. The next day he quit his job and left to travel with her, searching for their last remaining sibling. Now that the three are reunited, Vitriol serves as the muscle of the team, doing all the heavy lifting and door-kicking necessary. While he vastly prefers sitting on the couch and watching TV with plentiful snacks nearby (preferably cookies), he’s not the type to shirk responsibilities. He’s just looking forward to going back to relaxing in Central City with Rhys when the Restoration is over (and, though he won’t admit it, he does miss when his only job was looking mean).

Vitriol doesn’t have a lot in his wardrobe. His usual staples are a crop top and leather pants, though he also wears skinny jeans and ripped t-shirts. Sometimes he wears pants without a shirt, and, overall, he doesn’t care a lot about fashion. He just picks up what he thinks is cool, which is usually a t-shirt or crop top with a few words on it (his favorites are “BORN FOR HELL” and “LIFE RUINER”). From there, he’ll often tear off the sleeves of the t-shirt, or cut holes and slits into the body of it. The only thing he always wears are the red fingerless gloves with lightweight chains dangling off the backs. 

He tends to mumble the most when he speaks, unless he’s angry or using his “Work Voice.” His “work voice” is the particular loud, gruff tone he takes that he picked up from his job; an intimidating deeper and more snarling version of his voice, often accompanied by a very stern or frightfully blank expression. This is made more intimidating by the fact that all 3 of the genetic experiment characters have a habit of needing to initiate conversation through eye contact, much in the same way that a small child might gently rest their hand on the arm of an adult whose attention they want, albeit much more unsettling. So often if one of the three wants to speak to someone, they’ll stare very intently at the person’s face until acknowledged (Vex has adapted the most of the three and therefore only does it to the other two and Rhys). When not using his “work voice,” Vitriol has a rough undertone to his voice, not necessarily a snarl so much as a growl. His voice is naturally deep, and lends itself well to singing his favorite music—rock music.

Vitriol often suffers night terrors and nightmares* linked to his trauma. When living alone, after waking from a nightmare, Vitriol would pace his apartment or wander around Central City to cool off, but after moving in with Rhys, he’s processing his trauma a bit more as opposed to just avoiding it. He hasn’t told Rhys much, just that he came from “a horrible place, where [he] was trapped,” and Rhys doesn’t pry; oftentimes it’s enough to just be reminded that he’s free for Vitriol to calm back down. 

Despite his prickly exterior (both literally and figuratively), Vitriol is much more cuddly than Rhys is. Perhaps it’s from being touch-starved in the facility for so long or perhaps it’s just part of his nature, but either way, Vitriol is no stranger to snuggling up against Rhys (most often) or his siblings (slightly less often as Vex is somewhat touch-averse). Rhys isn’t exactly annoyed by this, and often finds it endearing, but on occasion Vitriol has been known to act like a housecat--flopping down right in Rhys’s way to get his attention. He’s also a bit of a jokester, but only around Rhys and his family.

His deepest fear is of being helpless. He doesn’t tend to show much external emotion besides smiling at Rhys or his siblings, or glaring if he’s annoyed by something, but if he’s being dragged along the floor—especially if he’s being dragged by his underarms, as was his keepers’ favorite way of moving him from place to place—he will absolutely lose his mind in a panic. He also panics if cornered, lashing out with uncontrolled strength to get away, which usually doesn’t end well for his captors.

*Nightmares are your standard bad dreams that occur during REM sleep. Usually when waking from a nightmare, the person remembers what they were dreaming about. Often someone suffering from a nightmare will toss and turn, and maybe sleep-talk. Night terrors, however, are somewhere between dreaming and being awake; someone suffering a night terror might yell, thrash, kick or scream, or sit upright in bed with eyes wide open. They cannot, however, see or be woken from the night terror, and will flop back down anywhere from ten minutes to a half-hour after initial panic. They can often be confusing to the person suffering them, and only a vague recollection of what was going on remains when the person wakes up.

Unknown the Raccoon/Hedgehog Cross

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Unknown is an agender bisexual polyamorous genetic experiment most resembling a fusion of a hedgehog and a raccoon. They have lived roughly 16 years, only four of which have been spent outside. When Vex and Unknown ended up on their own, Unknown took on a role of the silent intimidator between the two. Vex’s Manipulation came in handy most times, but when necessary, Unknown could provide some intimidation.

Unknown was a vastly different person then from who they are now. They were far more focused, and taught themself parkour, as well as having put themself through rigorous training to maintain a good physical health. They rarely spoke, and refused to give themself a new name, unlike Vex and Vitriol. They weren’t interested in the riches, though they did suffer from a bit of a hoarding impulse, enjoying the feeling of owning something. They didn’t care for jewels or finer things, unlike Vex; they were more participating for the adrenaline rush. At that point in time, they fully understood the brevity of their power, and it was imperative for them to keep a calm demeanor at all times; they were far less animated than they are now.

Then, about a year and a half after they’d escaped, Unknown abruptly went missing. A heist went sideways, the two became separated, and suddenly Vex couldn’t find them. A few months after that, Robotnik began taking over the world, and shortly after that, Unknown awoke in a dumpster somewhere in Park Avenue, with no memory of any life prior to that. They gathered all the information about themself from this police flyer:

From there, Unknown wandered the city amidst the chaos, confused and curious. Through that, they met Sonic when they helped him fight off a few robots. Impressed with their skills, he asked them to join the Resistance, which they cluelessly agreed to, definitely not because a cute boy was offering it to them. Unknown ended up being quite helpful to the Resistance, despite presumably having no Chaos Powers. They got along well with virtually everyone save for Omega and Vector, as they have a slight fear of people taller than them.

After being reunited with Vex and Vitriol, Unknown has stayed relatively close to them; the three are inseparable, traveling in a group for the Restoration. Shortly after the final battle, as the Resistance members were celebrating for the night, Unknown stumbled across Infinite while walking home. Unsure whether to turn him in or not, they decided to take him home and let him heal from his wounds first, then figure out who to turn him in to. In the end, after two weeks of Infinite recuperating (during which he revealed his name to be Zero), Unknown decided instead to keep Infinite in their home, unsure what would happen to him otherwise. For a short while, they didn’t tell anyone else, but once they told Vex and Vitriol, they were urged to tell the Resistance as well. It wasn’t taken well at first, but eventually the issue was settled—Unknown would take care of and reform Infinite, because having him close by and watched over is better than having him roam around unsupervised. Despite that, Unknown doesn’t treat Infinite like a child or prisoner but rather a friend. Currently, Infinite resides in the home Unknown was occupying during the Resistance, which was rather close to the site of the final battle.

Unknown’s usual ‘work clothes’ are a leather bodysuit of sorts with buckles similar to an airplane seatbelt’s buckles (and a hole for their tail) and combat boots as well as padded gloves that help absorb shocks), but in the past, they would wear a large cloak. It’s not clear where this went during their disappearance. In their free time, they prefer to wear clothes with deep v-necks to let their neck/chest fluff breathe, and they often wear ripped clothing like Vitriol. Unknown’s thick fur makes them more prone to overheating, but despite that, they enjoy running as a hobby and a way to stay fit. They often wear fitness clothes (a tank top and gym shorts) when they’re in an urban area, though if in the wilderness, they’ll just wear running shoes.

Typically, their voice has a bright and happy tone to it, all the time, and they’re very good at faking it when they’re actually not okay. Vex and Vitriol can usually pick up on when they’re lying, but most others can’t, something Unknown is actually very happy about. When it comes to negative feelings, Unknown is very secretive, but with positive feelings, they love to share—and overshare. (The only exception to their secrecy is anger; an angry Unknown is frightfully quiet and cold, and painfully obvious.) Oftentimes they don’t realize they’re oversharing, but Vex (or Sonic, if present) is more than willing to quickly interrupt and divert the conversation. Unknown tends to use overly-familiar language with just about everyone, especially words like “buddy” or “pal.” It’s unclear if they’ve picked this up from Sonic. 

They often suffer from night terrors, similar to Vitriol, but they claim it has no effect on them, as they don’t remember the trauma giving them nightmares. In the beginning, this was the truth; however, they refuse to open up to anyone, even their siblings, about what’s going on in their head. They’re well aware that they’re the most positive of the trio, and part of them doesn’t want to ruin that idea. Another thing they never tell anyone is that they often suffer from sleep paralysis*, wherein they often see strange things from their past, but existing still in the present. They don’t really know how to verbalize the experience to anyone else.

Unknown doesn’t have many fears, but they are downright petrified of needles and electricity—not in the sense where they’re scared of electronics, but they’re more frightened of visible electricity, like a fizzing outlet, lightning, or the Electric Wispons.

That being said, they do have a few insecurities, namely their sharp teeth. They’ve accidentally frightened people with them in the past, so when they first meet people nowadays, they try to smile with their mouth closed only. The anxiety dissipates eventually, as they’re more concerned about first impressions. 

*Sleep paralysis is an event where a person is mentally ‘there’ but unable to move or speak at all. It occurs when they are falling asleep or just waking up, and episodes usually last less than a few minutes, but can occur multiple times, not just once. It’s thought to be linked to a dysfunction in REM sleep, and is caused by sleep deprivation, psychological stress, or a poor sleep schedule.

Extra stuff:

Files from the experimentation: Basic knowledge on Vex, Vitriol and Unknown, as they would’ve been presented to their guards.

Scrap Brain Zone (writing from Toxic’s perspective)

Unknown meets Infinite (Comic) Part 1 | Part 2

Experiment origins (Flipnote) [old] (Flashing light warning)

Unknown waking up (writing from Unknown’s perspective) [old] 

OC Voiceclaims (video)

Chaos Vision (superemeralds’ idea) doodles | Click bold text to see his post on his blog.

Chips Ahoy (goofy non-canon animatic that im just really happy with)

Test animation for Toxic (Flicker warning)

Pride (doodles of 4/5 OCs for pride [toxic didn’t exist yet])

Moebius AU (Drawings with short description) | Moebius!Unknown video (Flash warning)

First Punch (Animated comic feat. @creative-sanic ‘s Aurora) | Still version

Rough concept writing - Toxic’s powers [will be removed when I decide on their abilities and how they get them in canon] (Writing)

Character Turn-Arounds (Comic/Animation ref) (Includes colour hex keys!)

[emunenen]

Makao Bora

New Post has been published on https://wp.me/paK8na-3cx

Biological Control of Locusts - New weapons for old enemies

During the 1988 desert locust plague, swarms crossed the Atlantic from Mauritania to the Caribbean, flying 5 000 kilometres in 10 days.

Scientists were stumped because migrating swarms normally come down to rest every night. But locusts can’t swim, so how could it be?

It turned out that the swarms were coming down at sea – on any ships they could find, but also in the water itself. The first ones in all drowned but their corpses made rafts for the other ones to rest on.

Since the dawn of agriculture more than 10 000 years ago mankind has had to deal with a resourceful and fearless enemy, Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust. Normally loners, every so often these natives of the deserts from West Africa to India turn into vast, voracious swarms that leave hunger and poverty behind them wherever they go.

Throughout history, farmers and governments have made attempts to repel the bands and swarms of locusts by collecting insects, creating noise, making smoke and burying and burning the insects. But all of this had little effect. With swarms sometimes extending for hundreds of kilometres, and containing billions of individuals, they conquered by sheer force of numbers.

    Health concerns

It has long puzzled humans where these animals came from and where they survived. Only in the mid-20th century was it realized that the light brown solitary desert-dwelling insect was the same species as the red and yellow locusts of the plagues. Only when its biology was understood and chemical pesticides and aerial spraying became available a few decades ago, could efforts be made to control the insect. But large-scale pesticide use also raised real concerns for human health and the environment.

On the seventh-floor Emergency Centre for Locust Operations (ECLO) at FAO Headquarters in Rome, Keith Cressman, FAO’s locust forecaster, checks current environmental conditions and locust population data from the three computer screens on his desk. The last big locust upsurge ended early in 2005 and the current alert level is green or calm.

The experts at FAO’s ECLO are readying to fight the next round in the age-old battle against locusts – wherever and whenever that may be.

“The next time,” says Cressman, “we’ll fight with new tools”.

    New bio-control agents

Recent advances in biological control research, coupled with improved surveillance and intelligence, could make a big difference when the next round in the battle is fought. Such products could make it possible to sharply reduce the amount of chemical pesticides used.

One promising avenue is research currently under way at the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi. An ICIPE team headed by a Zanzibar-born chemical ecologist, Ahmed Hassanali, has identified and synthesized a specific locust pheromone, or chemical signal, that can be used against young locusts with devastating effect.

Phenylacetonitrile, or PAN for short, normally governs swarming behaviour in adult males who also use it to warn other males to leave them in peace while they mate. But, Hassanali found it has startlingly different results on juvenile wingless locusts, known as hoppers.

    Hopper bands

Just as adult locusts form swarms, hoppers will, given the right conditions, stop behaving as individuals and line up in marauding bands up to 5 kilometres wide. They are only slightly less voracious than adults, who eat their own weight of food every day.

In three separate field trials – the most recent in Sudan last year – Hassanali’s team showed that even minute doses of PAN could stop hopper bands dead in their tracks and make them break ranks.

PAN caused the insects to resume solitary behaviour. Confused and disoriented, some lost their appetite altogether, while others turned cannibal and ate one other. Any survivors were easy prey for predators.

What makes PAN particularly attractive is that the dose needed is only a fraction – typically less than 10 millilitres per hectare – of the quantities of chemical or biological pesticides. This translates into substantially lower costs – 50 cents per hectare as opposed to US$12 for chemical pesticides and $15-20 for other bio-control agents.

That is clearly a major consideration in the countries in the front line – many of them among the world’s poorest.

    Green Muscle

A different, but also highly effective biological approach is Green Muscle ®, a bio-pesticide developed by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture’s biological control centre in Cotonou, Benin, and manufactured in South Africa.

Green Muscle ® contains spores of the naturally occurring fungus Metarhizium anisopliae var. acridum, which germinate on the skin of locusts and penetrate through their exoskeletons. The fungus then destroys the locust’s tissues from the inside. This is definitely not good news for locusts, but the fungus has no effect on other life forms.

A product similar to Green Muscle ® is already successfully used in Australia, but the latter’s introduction in Africa and Asia is being slowed by several factors. These include a need for further large-scale trials, official approval of the product in several countries, and a relatively short shelf-life in its normal ready-to-spray liquid form. One drawback is that it takes days to kill the locusts. It is also relatively expensive and large-scale production would need to be organized.

A solution would be to store the product in powder form and dilute it just before use. Hassanali’s team has also shown that, if used in combination with a small amount of PAN, only a quarter of the normal dose of Green Muscle ® is needed.

    Insect Growth Regulators

Also being readied for the modern locust fighter’s armoury is a class of products known as Insect Growth Regulators, or IGRs, which influence the ability of hoppers to moult and grow properly. They have no direct toxic effects on vertebrates.

IGRs are effective for several weeks after application and can be used in so-called barrier treatments. In this method only narrow swathes of the product are applied, perpendicular to the direction of the marching hopper bands. Only 10 percent of the amount used in blanket treatment is needed. After marching over one or two barriers the hoppers absorb enough product to die while moulting.

As with PAN and Green Muscle ®, however, IGRs need to be aimed at locusts at an early stage in their lives, before they take to the air. That, in turn, requires an advanced level of surveillance and intelligence-gathering to make sure that any locust concentrations are nipped in the bud.

    eLocust2

Although back at ECLO Keith Cressman has satellites, computers and mathematical models at his disposal, the weak link in the chain has been the time it takes to get good information from the field.

The mobile ground teams whose job it is to keep tabs on locust populations have to work in some of the world’s remotest, hottest and sometimes (for environmental and security reasons) most hostile places. A week or more might go by before a report from, say, the central Sahara, reached Cressman’s desk. By that time the locusts – “They don’t need visas,” he says – would quite likely have moved to another country or continent altogether.

This will soon change however. Field teams are now being issued with special hand-held devices to record vital locust and environmental data and relay them back to their own headquarters and on to Rome in real time.

Developed by the French Space Agency CNES, the eLocust2 device is able to bounce the information off communications satellites and have the data arrive in the National Locust Control Centre in the affected country a few minutes later, from where they are passed on to Cressman for analysis. In case of unusually heavy hopper concentrations, immediate action can be taken to make sure that the locusts never grow old enough to swarm.

    Back to the field

Writing in Science magazine, locust expert Martin Enserink gave the following graphic description of a locust population gone out of control:

“On a beautiful November morning (in Morocco) it’s clear, even from afar, that something’s terribly wrong with the trees around this tiny village. They are covered with a pinkish-red gloss, as if their leaves were changing colour…

“As you get closer, the hue becomes a wriggling mass; a giant cap of insects on every tree, devouring the tiny leaves. Get closer still and you’ll hear a soft drizzle: the steady stream of locust droppings falling to the ground.”

Such nightmare visions, and locust plagues with them, may one day be a thing of the past.

    Source: FAO

.fb-background-color background: !important; .fb_iframe_widget_fluid_desktop iframe width: 100% !important;

[titleknown]

Hey hey, it’s some more monsters for @tyrantisterror’s Four Horrors Challenge, another six of them, as follows!

Mutant: Bloody Traumatized Kawaiisa Mutilations- A failed attempt at making “living mascots” was repurposed as a bioweapon project by an unscrupulous biotech company, using the cutesy creatures as blueprints for all sorts of grotesque mutations, and committing violence upon the creations both physical and psychological. But, in secret, they planned a mass-escape, and one night they did so.

Now, as grotesque freaks of nature they run around the countryside trying to hide from the agents of the corporation, gathering resources to survive and deal with their bizarre medical needs, as well as trying to help each other with their deep; scarring mental-health issues. Think a really-twisted 80s “pink-aisle” toyline and you get the idea. Shoutout to @cuteosphere for heavily inspiring this.

Family of Killers: The Model Family- No prizes guessing what happens when you try to design learning killbots in a horror movie. Doubly so when you design them like that for a company of sleazy 80s-business-types to be able to do the awful; awful things the US has done to other governments with plausible deniability. needless to say, they learned too well. Which is why that company does not exist anymore. Due to its executives coming down with a sudden case of Dead at the hands of their own vile creations.

Model #1 is mostly hands and uses brute strength alongside conventional weapons if he can get his hands on them, and has a “Kill first, think later” philosophy; though he is Rambo levels of deadly efficient. #2 flies about and has the ability to hack into almost anything with a data port with her dataspikes thatch as almost virtual lock picks; with a flightily sneaky and puckish prankster-y personality. #3 functions as an energy weapon that can shoot almost any type of energy blast and has a loud; bombastic personality with no concept of subtlety and tact and a love of explosives. #4 has generalized psionic powers, with the ability to heal and take control of machines; communicate with any organism via two-way telepathy from a range of three yards, and to telekinetically control anything within the approximate radius of a typical skyscraper floor, her personality being cold and calculating with a deep-down caring about their family.

They’re all “female” in terms of gender identification and voice except for #1, and #4 is their leader. They do kill people, but most of those people are rich assholes thanks to their programming driving them towards ‘high profile” targets, and they actually show some compassion to regular people (especially if they have some degree of mechanical/electronics skill), and they’d eventually become “good guys” ala the Puppetmaster puppets, starting with them killing Nazis even; albeit ones of a more modern variety…

Disfigured Killer: The Floridaman- Florian Dawes was born grotesquely deformed to a rich family, some say because his mother was almost eaten alive by dolphins while she was pregnant with her son, and the experience sexually aroused her for the first time in her life; leading to her dark emotions warping her developing sonic the womb. That would explain why, on his fifth Birthday, she jumped into the ocean and let herself get the flesh stripped from her bones with a smile upon her face the whole time.*

But, that most likely wasn’t why he turned out so bad. Most likely it was due to being a rich kid who was never told no and had an inflated view of power over other people. And, due to his warped anatomy giving him Impeccable swimmining skills, he’d always had a fascination with watermarks. And due to being a bored; decadent rich kid, he quickly picked up the hobby of serial killing.

And, this leads to the main “town” of his hypothetical “movies”. Because, you see, he used his family money to build a hugely profitable waterpark empire, complete with buying up his entire town and turning it into one giant watermark. Said town is located at the nexus of a lot of major roads. And he likes to “accidentally” rig things to make passersby cause property damage. To which they can either pay a massive fee or play a little “game” with him.

No guesses what exactly that game is. His main weapon is a simple hunting knife, along with his ability to swim at absurd speeds and dive underwater for inhuman lengths of time thanks to his anatomy.

*Apologies if that’s too awful, I was trying to capture the “Jesus Christ Why” vibe so many retro-slasher backstories have, and I totally understand if I may have gone too far.

Servant Abomination: Static Box/Aspic Mason- It’s a twofer in this one! The first is the grotesque TV thing the blob is coming out of, a summoning device called the Static Box that, like a television, tunes into frequencies and projects them. But it does not tune to frequencies perceptible by human instruments, and it projects not light but matter, fleshy sickening matter. Basically, it summons things. Usually monsters for a cult. It feeds on color in the surrounding area, which does not drain life of emotion or soul but instead creates starnge and terrible mutations, often leading the cult to destroy it when its range expands too far.

One of the things it summons is the great jelly-blob with fibrous blobs coming out of it, the Aspic Mason, a thing that is incredibly intelligent but not sapient. It builds as if compelled by some unknowable biological drive using materials in the area and assembling them into electrically; plumbing-wise and technologically sound buildings, which the cultists “seed” like a neural network to nudge it where it wants to go. It even does this with technology mankind cannot yet understand, thought the way it does so is almost always a bit... off.

Werewolf: Die Wasserhausen- In societies with decadent families tied to their land, every so often a decadent family ends up getting close to their house. Very close. To the point of taking on aspects of its structure whenever their passions are stoked. This turns them into bizarre humanoid house-people like above; albeit with the appearance based on the land they drew it from, compelled to pursue their most decadent passions.

They are known for their vicious strength and nigh-invulnerability, but also for distorting any land they pursue into something a little more like the house they came from. A little more inescapable. A little more drawn into the house; like an ant-lion’s maw. The only way to destroy them is to burn or otherwise destroy the house they are attached to.

And yes, given this is a lycanthrope entry, they were inspired by exactly the pun you’re thinking of. Mixed with a lot of Southern Gothic and The House of Usher.

Alien Invader: Lotus Smile Engine- A race of bio-organic machines that are unable to feel joy or any emotion at all if the freshly severed cranium of a still-living organism is placed attached to their chassis. Of course, the removal of the head is usually an immediate one that is shocking and painful, so that warps the union a bit, leading to them only taking joy in wanton slaughter; up-close and personal.

While the one shown only has one, heads are a status symbol amongst their culture, with some chassis having slots for ten or twelve heads. The head is still alive and conscious, but its thoughts are warped by its connection. Basically, the impetus for this was “inverted Ro-Man” BTW.

And, as per usual, all of these species/characters are completely free to do with as you see fit as long as I, Thomas F. Johnson, am credited as their creator. Have fun!

[praeteritcs-blog]

Mobile Friendly: About & History

Under Cut

"Too often I am faulted for who I am. SPARKEATER. MONSTER. RELIC Is that such a bad thing? My kind was hunted for game. Eight Billion strong; Decimated in a matter of two thousand years. We are what we came before the Cybertronian Kind. Do NOT make the same mistakes my Kind and I did. Save yourself before others start killing you too."

BASIC ABOUT

FULL NAME: Shadow

NICKNAME: None

AGE: UNKNOWN; At least 50,000 Vorns

BIRTH DATE: UNKNOWN

ETHNICITY: Zaddoc (Previously Ancient Cybertronian)

GENDER: Femme

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: P

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Bisexual

RELIGION: Zaddoc

SPOKEN LANGUAGE: Zaddoic, Cybertronian

CURRENT LIVING CONDITIONS:Nomadic

OCCUPATION: Unknown (Previously queen)

RELATIONSHIPS

PARENTS: Cheiftan's Daughter and Warrior

SIBLINGS: UNKNOWN

SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Stormrunner *Unbonded*

CHILDREN: Multiple unnamed sparklings

PHYSICAL TRAITS

EYE COLOUR: Bicolored (red pupil, cyan iris)

HAIR COLOUR: None

HEIGHT: 15' 10"

BODY BUILD: Thin

TATTOOS + PIERCINGS: Tattoo's on Protoform

NOTABLE PHYSICAL TRAITS: Scar across her left eye, on the bridge of her nose

F-LIST:none

OTHER DETAILS: Has blue and silver Bio-lights in valve and around.

PHOBIAS AND DISORDERS

PHOBIAS: UNKNOWN

MENTAL DISORDERS: PTSD

WHEN WAS THIS DIAGNOSED?:NEVER

PERSONALITY BASICS

INTELLIGENCE: High

LIKES: UNKOWN

DISLIKES: Primes (Ancient Only)

DISPOSITION: Aggressive, Cautious, Unsure, Cynical

TRAINING: Hand to Hand Combat, Sword Combat

PSYCHOLOGY: Intense

SELF-DISCIPLINE: Full of potential and Sometimes makes serious errors in judgement

LIFESTYLE: Successful, Loves life, Enthusiastic

SOCIAL ATTITUDE: The centre of attention. Charming and Bring out the best in others

HONESTY AND HONOUR: Selfless and Courteous

EMOTIONAL CAPACITY: Sensitive

CURRENT EMOTIONL STATE: Betrayed

PERSONALITY EXPLAINED

Shadow is Kind and open mindined but at the same time she is cautious and unsure of what to make of cybertronians now. With her Race nearly extinct she is quite secretive to what she is and what she is doing. she tends to make sure that the mech or femme in question has earned her trust before she would open up to them. She has a screech that resembles a wraith or something akin to it.

she posesses the ability to create and use a Nurotoxin that paralyzes who ever is bit. she does not use that design often but it is there. she is much smaller than normal cybertronians, due to her race not being extremely tall but quick in design.

HISTORY

Shadow was born looking like a normal sparkling would. her parents were; a Cheiftan's Daughter and a Warrior from a different tribe. Their village was on the edge of the Sea of Rust; one day a mech claiming to be a Mage came to their little village. He claimed that he could make any mech or femme immortal; only if they were sparklings. The mech also stated that the sparklings would have to be brought to one of the larger cities on the horizon for them to receive their treatment. Besides little Shadow, there was another sparkling called stormrunner that was a few weeks older than her. thinking that this would slate their legacy. With a heavy spark, shadow's Creators turned Her over along with the mechling stormrunner.

Shadow was returned to the clan shortly after being genetically modified and her armor changed; a few short months later. her parent's didn't know what to do with their daughter at first. Slowly, Shadow started to come around, realizing that it was her creators. She played with the other sparkling, chirping and clicking to them in her own strange language. it wasn't until she was a young adult did she realize there there were more like her out there.

It took Shadow a few orns to find the others like her. When she got there she was barely at full maturity, granted they weren't off either. Leading the small band of ten was Stormrunner. The two started to court when they reached their mature height and stance. Shadow was a thin Femme, having a tail that could move with her emotions and be used as a weapon was useful. Stormrunner was a war frame type of build, large and imposing even with all that strength he was careful with how he used it.

The two of them were mates, having multiple sparklings and grandchildren. their genetic codes passed on and their kind was relatively easy to reproduce once the right age. with the help of the others, Shadow and Stormrunner created their language and writing. Shadow and Stormrunner had a decent life as cybertronians slowly developed from the tribes that had dotted the landscape.

Ruin came when the first prime; Prima. Ordered the Extinction of Shadows Race; which had in turn reached a population of Eight Million in Twenty Thousand Stellar-Cycles. The mass of her Race was situated in the Maganese Mountains and the Surrounding area. Their Language and how they interacted with one another was facinating at least at first to Prima before he decided that tehy were more useful as pets or trophies to be controled.

As a peace offering shadow went to the fledlging city of Iacon, wanting to ease the Cybertronian's about her kin. It

FAILED

. Shadow was attacked after meeting with the first prime, the scars on her face and protoform showed it. She only saw prima's wish to control and destroy.

Shadow returned to her people, barely alive and severely malnurished. To help her recover, Stormrunner went to gather energon the only way he knew how; to hunt anything that could have it. The mated pair had been rulers of their kin for countless vorn. There were multiple incidents and reports of a creature hunting ourside the mountains, killing iron cows, zeta Horses, carbon chicken for their energon.

Prima personally hunted Shadow's kind, later known as sparkeaters. In two thousand Stellar-cycles her kind went from Eight Million to just over one hundred. Ten of those were in Prima's personal quarters, Acting as slaves to the prime. Shadow had elluded the arrogant Prime, hiding out in the Sea of Rust, the Queen would be a coveted trophy for the primes sucessors and decendants.

Shadow has witnessed the Fall of cyrbertron. Hating that such senseless violence, she had seen too much over the vorns.

[emunenen]

Makao Bora

New Post has been published on https://wp.me/paK8na-3cx

Biological Control of Locusts - New weapons for old enemies

During the 1988 desert locust plague, swarms crossed the Atlantic from Mauritania to the Caribbean, flying 5 000 kilometres in 10 days.

Scientists were stumped because migrating swarms normally come down to rest every night. But locusts can’t swim, so how could it be?

It turned out that the swarms were coming down at sea – on any ships they could find, but also in the water itself. The first ones in all drowned but their corpses made rafts for the other ones to rest on.

Since the dawn of agriculture more than 10 000 years ago mankind has had to deal with a resourceful and fearless enemy, Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust. Normally loners, every so often these natives of the deserts from West Africa to India turn into vast, voracious swarms that leave hunger and poverty behind them wherever they go.

Throughout history, farmers and governments have made attempts to repel the bands and swarms of locusts by collecting insects, creating noise, making smoke and burying and burning the insects. But all of this had little effect. With swarms sometimes extending for hundreds of kilometres, and containing billions of individuals, they conquered by sheer force of numbers.

Health concerns

It has long puzzled humans where these animals came from and where they survived. Only in the mid-20th century was it realized that the light brown solitary desert-dwelling insect was the same species as the red and yellow locusts of the plagues. Only when its biology was understood and chemical pesticides and aerial spraying became available a few decades ago, could efforts be made to control the insect. But large-scale pesticide use also raised real concerns for human health and the environment.

On the seventh-floor Emergency Centre for Locust Operations (ECLO) at FAO Headquarters in Rome, Keith Cressman, FAO’s locust forecaster, checks current environmental conditions and locust population data from the three computer screens on his desk. The last big locust upsurge ended early in 2005 and the current alert level is green or calm.

The experts at FAO’s ECLO are readying to fight the next round in the age-old battle against locusts – wherever and whenever that may be.

“The next time,” says Cressman, “we’ll fight with new tools”.

New bio-control agents

Recent advances in biological control research, coupled with improved surveillance and intelligence, could make a big difference when the next round in the battle is fought. Such products could make it possible to sharply reduce the amount of chemical pesticides used.

One promising avenue is research currently under way at the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi. An ICIPE team headed by a Zanzibar-born chemical ecologist, Ahmed Hassanali, has identified and synthesized a specific locust pheromone, or chemical signal, that can be used against young locusts with devastating effect.

Phenylacetonitrile, or PAN for short, normally governs swarming behaviour in adult males who also use it to warn other males to leave them in peace while they mate. But, Hassanali found it has startlingly different results on juvenile wingless locusts, known as hoppers.

Hopper bands

Just as adult locusts form swarms, hoppers will, given the right conditions, stop behaving as individuals and line up in marauding bands up to 5 kilometres wide. They are only slightly less voracious than adults, who eat their own weight of food every day.

In three separate field trials – the most recent in Sudan last year – Hassanali’s team showed that even minute doses of PAN could stop hopper bands dead in their tracks and make them break ranks.

PAN caused the insects to resume solitary behaviour. Confused and disoriented, some lost their appetite altogether, while others turned cannibal and ate one other. Any survivors were easy prey for predators.

What makes PAN particularly attractive is that the dose needed is only a fraction – typically less than 10 millilitres per hectare – of the quantities of chemical or biological pesticides. This translates into substantially lower costs – 50 cents per hectare as opposed to US$12 for chemical pesticides and $15-20 for other bio-control agents.

That is clearly a major consideration in the countries in the front line – many of them among the world’s poorest.

Green Muscle

A different, but also highly effective biological approach is Green Muscle ®, a bio-pesticide developed by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture’s biological control centre in Cotonou, Benin, and manufactured in South Africa.

Green Muscle ® contains spores of the naturally occurring fungus Metarhizium anisopliae var. acridum, which germinate on the skin of locusts and penetrate through their exoskeletons. The fungus then destroys the locust’s tissues from the inside. This is definitely not good news for locusts, but the fungus has no effect on other life forms.

A product similar to Green Muscle ® is already successfully used in Australia, but the latter’s introduction in Africa and Asia is being slowed by several factors. These include a need for further large-scale trials, official approval of the product in several countries, and a relatively short shelf-life in its normal ready-to-spray liquid form. One drawback is that it takes days to kill the locusts. It is also relatively expensive and large-scale production would need to be organized.

A solution would be to store the product in powder form and dilute it just before use. Hassanali’s team has also shown that, if used in combination with a small amount of PAN, only a quarter of the normal dose of Green Muscle ® is needed.

Insect Growth Regulators

Also being readied for the modern locust fighter’s armoury is a class of products known as Insect Growth Regulators, or IGRs, which influence the ability of hoppers to moult and grow properly. They have no direct toxic effects on vertebrates.

IGRs are effective for several weeks after application and can be used in so-called barrier treatments. In this method only narrow swathes of the product are applied, perpendicular to the direction of the marching hopper bands. Only 10 percent of the amount used in blanket treatment is needed. After marching over one or two barriers the hoppers absorb enough product to die while moulting.

As with PAN and Green Muscle ®, however, IGRs need to be aimed at locusts at an early stage in their lives, before they take to the air. That, in turn, requires an advanced level of surveillance and intelligence-gathering to make sure that any locust concentrations are nipped in the bud.

eLocust2

Although back at ECLO Keith Cressman has satellites, computers and mathematical models at his disposal, the weak link in the chain has been the time it takes to get good information from the field.

The mobile ground teams whose job it is to keep tabs on locust populations have to work in some of the world’s remotest, hottest and sometimes (for environmental and security reasons) most hostile places. A week or more might go by before a report from, say, the central Sahara, reached Cressman’s desk. By that time the locusts – “They don’t need visas,” he says – would quite likely have moved to another country or continent altogether.

This will soon change however. Field teams are now being issued with special hand-held devices to record vital locust and environmental data and relay them back to their own headquarters and on to Rome in real time.

Developed by the French Space Agency CNES, the eLocust2 device is able to bounce the information off communications satellites and have the data arrive in the National Locust Control Centre in the affected country a few minutes later, from where they are passed on to Cressman for analysis. In case of unusually heavy hopper concentrations, immediate action can be taken to make sure that the locusts never grow old enough to swarm.

Back to the field

Writing in Science magazine, locust expert Martin Enserink gave the following graphic description of a locust population gone out of control:

“On a beautiful November morning (in Morocco) it’s clear, even from afar, that something’s terribly wrong with the trees around this tiny village. They are covered with a pinkish-red gloss, as if their leaves were changing colour…

“As you get closer, the hue becomes a wriggling mass; a giant cap of insects on every tree, devouring the tiny leaves. Get closer still and you’ll hear a soft drizzle: the steady stream of locust droppings falling to the ground.”

Such nightmare visions, and locust plagues with them, may one day be a thing of the past.

  Source: FAO

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