Génie

The immodestly named Génie ("genius") is the leader, founder and financial backer of the Canadian superhero team Les Champions du Québec. His alter ego, Pierre Duchesne, is generally assumed (by those who assume anything about him at all) to be a nerd who sits at home in front of a computer all day.

Description
As Génie: Génie appears to be a man of just over average height dressed head to toe in off-white laminated plastic armour, patterned in blue in such a way as to suggest the flag of Quebec. A jetpack is mounted on the back, while the forearms have mounts for weapons or other devices - which, however, are seldom the same twice.

As Pierre Duchesne: Pierre is seldom seen at all, but when he is he's a man of average height, with brown hair and eyes, a thin nose and a hint of a pot belly. His eyes always seem to flicker with thoughts that can't be guessed at. Most often he dresses in a t-shirt and jeans round the house, but he can and does dress up smartly if the occasion demands.

Origin
You've probably never heard of Pierre Duchesne, and there's no reason you should have, really, though you probably have millions of his inventions about your person.

Born in Montreal in 2020, Pierre was never exactly a normal child. He was bright. Maybe he's a "mutant" with an unflashy power, or maybe he's just that rare normal human that comes along now and then, but he effortlessly outstripped his peers, especially in the sciences. Business came a little less easily to him, but he still made his first million just out of university. Not that anyone noticed. You see, his great invention was a tiny boring circuit, that just happens to be the basis of just about every electronic device that has been made in the past ten years or so. No media interest, little interest indeed from anyone but the taxman, but Pierre was set up for life.

And so he withdrew into his nice new house and did what he really wanted to do: invent, for the sheer pleasure of inventing. For years he tinkered, making gadgets for the sheer intellectual challenge, never marketing anything. His neighbors generally assumed he was spending all his time playing games on the Net, or such (after all, he was written of as a nerd many years before). And though he was gradually growing bored of his lifestyle, he might have gone on like that for many years, had he not, one night, been burgled.

It wasn't so much what was stolen (though there were some potentially dangerous gadgets among what was gone), much less the financial loss (which he'd earn back in weeks at most). It wasn't even the principle of the thing. It was the new challenge: a new problem to be solved, one more difficult to crack than any of his puzzles till now - the social problem of crime, and especially of super-crime (a challenge more fitted to his intellect).

And so a battlesuit was made and a new superhero was born. Of course, the first villain to be brought to justice was the burglar, who now had learnt to use his stolen gizmos (on that adventure Pierre met his girlfriend, the reporter Nicole Lemieux, who was covering the story). But there was more to do in fighting supercrime, and even Génie's intellect was taxed. But as soon as he met Rocher and Flambeau, he saw the answer: a team.

Powers
Génie is a gadgeteer par excellence. His battlesuit is little more than some armour, a jetpack and a power source (and of course the computers to manage these). Beyond that, he insists on the proper tools for the job at hand on every mission - after all, for him the challenge is in inventing the proper tools. And he can invent in hours what would take most people years. In practice, he does have one or two standby devices for when he doesn't know what he's facing, but he prefers not to use them except in an emergency.

Personality
Pierre can be hard to pin down. On the one hand, he's basically a nice guy - but his intellectual vanity and belief in his own genius approach those of the most most megalomaniacal master villain. He's easy-going in some ways, and one could well believe he could just have whiled away his life playing computer games - but it just happens his hobbies are invention and crimefighting. He's generally uninterested in politics or economics - but he's an ardent Quebec separatist (a trait inherited from his parents).

Relations
Génie has done a remarkable job holding Les Champions du Québec together: they perhaps aren't the most stable of groups - he may treat this, too, as a challenge! He's on good terms with them all, though he and la Sorcière Blanche sometimes have to be careful of treading on each others' toes.

Nicole Lemieux, his girlfriend, is more important to him than he knows: she's the one who keeps him in touch with "real life". It's because of her the superheroing is anything more than just another intellectual challenge.

History
Génie has successfully led les Champions du Québec since 2050, and they are among the foremost of Canada's hero teams. However, his public support for separatism has led to some friction with the federal government, both for him personally and for the team as a whole. This has only increased since September 2056, when the Gazette suggested that les Champions du Québec would be given official status by the Quebec goverment in the event of independence.