Mr. Sardonic

Mr. Sardonic is one of many Metahumans in the city. He has powers granted to him by his angelic possessor.

Description
Caleb stands a bit over six feet. Wavy, black hair frames his face. His blue eyes and a perpetual slight quirk of his mouth give the impression that he find something amusing. He sports a neat, thin mustache and dresses casually in comfortable-looking clothes. As Mr. Sardonic, he wears a spandex body-suit inspired by the comic books he read as a child. The leggings and mask, which covers his head down to his nose, are black. The shirt is white with a black collar, and is emblazoned with a black-centered golden sunburst.

Powers
Caleb's powers generate from the angelic spirit that attempted to possess him, and now remains carefully suppressed in his psyche. Some of his supernatural abilities, including his enhanced strength and physical condition, his damage-resistant skin, and his ability to penetrate gloom with his eyes, seem to be interwoven somehow into his flesh and are always operative. But others he can evoke by concentrating, or rather, letting his mental guard down in a controlled manner to allow the Divine in him to surface. One such power is a blinding flash from his eyes that he can emit should a mortal dare to gaze upon his countenance. Another is to allow the touch of his immortal body to drain the stamina from a mortal, and he uses this to good effect with his grappling prowess to subdue villains. But his favorite is to move from point to point without bothering with the intervening space. He never has been quite sure how it is accomplished, but he thinks of it as "ignoring space as irrelevant."

Skills
Most of Caleb's wilderness survival and exploration skills were honed starting in his mid-teens, when he took to the forests and mountains of western Virginia to escape the banality of suburban existance. There he fell in love with the mysteries afforded by caving, a hobby that was to change his life permanently one day. He picked up some wrestling maneuvers beginning in high-school where he joined the Greco-Roman team. These abilities were honed through college but after his transformation, he was not able to compete fairly against non-superhumans and he had to be content to practice in the field, against more dangerous opponents. His other skills are mainly academic, obtained through his liberal arts studies in college, although he never had any interest in religion until his "epiphany" as he sarcastically thought of it. After that he became a student of world religions as he tried to make sense of what was becoming of his life.

Disadvantages
Caleb finds thrill and amusement using his powers to assist the authorities in apprehending powerful criminals, and to join up with other superheroes to tackle even more potent enemies of justice and freedom. As such, Mr. Sardonic runs the risk of making nasty enemies and strives to keep his true identity hidden to protect his family and friends. To fight evil as Mr. Sardonic, Caleb must carefully allow the powers of the angel Rashnu that possesses him to be released in measured doses. The downside is that Rashnu never ceases in his struggle to overcome Caleb's Ego and thus to control his body, so that he can use it to resume his millenia-old pursuit of the demon Akvan. At first holding control was a terrible struggle for Caleb and he had to wrestle mentally in private agony to maintain himself, and ultimately to channel his possessor's qualities for his own purposes. Now both the control and the channeling are reflexive. However, when he is particularly worn down, Mr. Sardonic becomes susceptible to Rashnu's efforts and can lose control. When that occurs, Rashnu attempts to abandon the puny mortal causes that Mr. Sardonic might happen to be fighting for at the moment, to try and track down his ancient enemy. Another unforeseen byproduct is that the close proximity of defiled artifacts from unholy religions cause Caleb pain that can become debilitating over time.

Character origin
Boldness, invincibility, and wild abandon..such are the hallmarks of the young spirit. Unfortunately such tendencies inevitably turn to self-destructive stupidity when the young are either drunk, hanging out with equally young friends, or upset about a girl. It was the latter that plagued Caleb Dawes that fateful summer day in the caves of eastern Pakistan. The trip had been approved and arranged by his permissive yet rarely engaged parents, in the hopes of jolting him out of his self-absorbed brooding over the abrupt breakup with Jada. But her words still gnawed at him. Using her to prove he wasn't an elitist snob, was he! More concerned with escaping his own skin than with her needs! These jabs cut to the very heart of everything Caleb had tried to be. Perhaps this explains his foolhardy insistence on exploring the bottomless vertical shaft, when they lacked the equipment for such a descent. And thus did Caleb fall, into pain and unconsciousness. But his eyes did open again, and the blackness was not utter. It was silvery gray, which soon seemed like a near-painful light. Caleb raised himself on shaky legs and found himself in a circular, smooth sided cavern, with a tall faintly pulsing crystal in the center set in black rock, surrounded on the floor by strange sigils that made Caleb's eyes water. But he forced his reluctant body to cross them. Drawn forth in irresistible fascination he reached out one trembling hand to touch the crystal...the sensation of ice water roaring through every cell! Euphoria threatening to consume his soul! And a voice that seemed to come from everywhere, "Freedom!" Several seconds seemed to pass in which Caleb felt like a balloon stretched to bursting, and then the voice again, "Fortunate mortal, you have broken my prison, and are chosen as the vessel for Rashnu, Spirit of Justice and Holy Vengeance. Now the hunt is rejoined, and Akvan will face his Doom." With terrible effort, Caleb forced his mouth to move. "I don't...think so." Taken by surprise, the Angel found its Will forced down by that of its mortal host, and it struck back with a paralyzing mental shock that sent the young man sprawling. Thus began an epic struggle for dominance in the deep dark that lasted for two days. In the end, the man emerged as the master, possessed of strange powers he scarcely dared believe in. He called his alter-ego: Mr. Sardonic.

Personality
Caleb is self-confident and outgoing, expressing his opinions with certitude. He is warm in a sometimes overbearing way and is accepting of others, even gravitating to those with a different background than his own. However, he has a mild elitist bent against the pursuits of "the masses" (think auto racing). He is a staunch atheist. This makes his current possession by an Angel extremely annoying and spawned his first attempt at a superhero name, Mr. Ironic. After a couple of outings he decided this was lame, and changed his pseudonym to the less accurate but cooler Mr. Sardonic.

Life History
Caleb Dawes grew up as an only child in suburban Northern Virginia to a nouveau riche surgeon mother and businessman father. He was spoiled for material things but more or less ignored to do as he pleased. As he grew into a teenager he naturally rebelled against his boring, pampered upbringing, gravitating to friends and activities that were "beneath" him. The sweatier the better, and so he attempted to aggravate his family by getting into high school wrestling and outdoor recreation. Much to his annoyance his parents were supportive of his explorations in a detached sort of way and so he went further afield, gaining a special passion for long trips to western Virginia and spelunking among the caves of Appalachia. When even this failed to impress he accepted his lot and life and went off to Colonial Bay to pursue a liberal arts degree in Philosophy. But whenever opportunity allowed he still struck off into the wilderness, such as it was in mid-Atlantic America

Social Interactions
Mr. Sardonic has happened upon fellow meta humans in a number of bars and coffeehouses around Colonial Bay and its outlying suburbs, and has become friendly with some of them. Currently he is brooding upon a strange child that keeps appearing in public places, but that only he seems to be able to see. The child speaks like a normal youth but has some otherworldy quality that both resonates with and repulses the divine spirit within his psyche.

In Combat
Mr. Sardonic has not been tested in combat often. However, his skill at wrestling allowed him to assist more powerful superheroes in subduing demonic attackers on the city streets, and he managed to hurl a lifeboat at a gang of thugs aboard a ship to stop a sinister plot. He is eager to put his abilities to further test.

--Sardonic 16:30, 11 October 2011 (EST)