Normally appears as a light colored male with a beard, he favors long ranged attacks and stealth. Of all the souls, he is the most prone to wander and explore. He is also the most technically minded.
These souls, still mentally connected as they were in the original hive, have manifested themselves in several realities where they fight evil just as before. The connection has been twisted by evil, however, cursing the individual parts of the hive to never meet. They know each other's thoughts and motives, they think along similar lines, but no matter how hard they try they can never see each other face to face.
Each character is described by referencing a part or tool of the original being. Their original being did not have any body parts in common with us and, for the most part, our language is incapable of describing their functions within the being but these metaphors serve to point us in the right direction. The members call themselves the Pantheon of the Being.
Da Sloth - Eye of the Being
Normally appears as a light colored male with a beard, he favors long ranged attacks and stealth. Of all the souls, he is the
most prone to wander and explore. He is also the most technically minded.
Zloth - Fist of the Being
The appearance of Zloth has varied greatly over the Multiverse but he has been male more often than not. He favors a
direct "smash first, think later" approach to evil. It is thought that the Zloth portion of the being delivered the final blow
of the great battle and thus has suffered the most from the evil being's dying stroke.
Tesslah - Magic of the Being
Tesslah has normally been a dark, bald female. She uses all forms of magic, particularly those relating to electricity, to combat evil. Either she or Zloth have always been the most powerful part of the Being in each world that has hosted a manifestation.
Mhary - Staff of the Being
Mhary has only appeared once - in Anarchy Online as a staunch and bureaucratic wielder of mental attacks. She refused to see
the evil of the organization she followed, even though it was plain. Zloth named her the Wand because, though having a high
IQ, she "is as dumb as a post, and twice as rigid" when it comes to telling good from evil.
Windy - Wing of the Being?
Windy is something of a mystery. She has a very firm grasp of gravity and weather and can use these powers to render her enemies helpless,
yet she has trouble actually doing much damage to even helpless enemies.
Others in the pantheon had no knowledge of her until she appeared in Paragon City and promptly gained more power
than Zloth and Tesslah combined (though they are catching up now).
Pockets of the Being
Not all parts of the original hive mind had great power, intelligence, or desire to do good. Some act as little more
than servants and have been used through the Multiverse to organize stockrooms and accounting. The Pantheon can only
even think of their names with great difficulty, with one exception...
The pocket named Booo found himself as the only portion of the hive in a particularly strange world. He was apprenticed to an even stranger mage who, though good, had a strong tendency to take over the minds of those he came in contact with. Though Booo tried to combat evil alongside the mage, he mostly just got in the way, got killed, or (most often) both. Before the mage could start possessing his mind, which would have likely affected the entire Pantheon, he fell into a wormhole and found himself in the land of Dereth which had plenty of Pantheon representation. Once reunited with his masters, he soon returned to his more familiar role of stockpiling.
The being's manifestations happen in a way that appears to be relatively normal in the world in which they appear. A dark, bald woman named Tesslah has some affinity toward electric power. A warrior named Zloth uses some blunt instrument to wage battle. The person’s name sometimes raises eyebrows but they are otherwise relatively normal people (or whatever). Then, sometime in their early adulthood, they become ‘infused by the Pantheon’ – meaning that their corresponding piece of the hive mind crashes into their psyche. In a matter of seconds, they are aware of all the other parts of the being, the being's past, and its desire to do good.
Some concern has been raised that the infusion process takes over the minds of innoncent people. This is true in a sense, but not a very good sense. Though these individuals appear to have come about naturally on their world, they are actually arranged by the curse's power. In our sense of time it appears as if the person is born, lives through their childhood, then is possesed by some part of the being, but that isn't how the cause and effect is really working. When the portion of the being hits a universe, it causes a suitable person to be born a few decades earlier.
Zloth
Zloth was a great and terrible warrior-king in the times of the Dark Ages. He was cunning, brutal, and interested in little
else other than furthering his own power. In the course of pillaging a village, he captured a powerful wizard named Xox, imprisoned
him, and threatened to kill him. The mage bargained for his life by promising to build him a mighty suit of armor and Zloth
accepted.
Xox tried to escape Zloth’s dungeons several times but never even got more than thirty feet from his cell. The dungeon was largely unguarded but was full of hidden traps that would launch spikes, pour boiling lead, or even crush anyone who dared brave the passages without knowing the exact paths to take. His magical powers could warn him that the traps were there but not with enough accuracy to show him the right path. Then Xox thought of the armor suit he was building. Why couldn’t he don the armor himself and use it to escape? The huge set of armor would be anything but comfortable for the smaller mage but, if he used his magical skills to the utmost, he could walk right through those traps.
It took years to build the huge, black armor suit but he did it. Xox requested a large piece of metal for his finishing touches then put on the armor. When the lone guard opened his cell door to give him the metal, he crashed through the door and ran (as well as a wizard can run wearing armor five sizes too large) through the dungeon. His magical abilities kept him from springing most of the traps and the armor was strong enough to shrug off the spikes and the lead from the ones he missed. A flaming oil trap made breathing difficult but Xox managed to get through before he suffocated. At last, he was out the door and into the open air!
Then a trap door opened up and Xox fell into a small pit neck deep in water. The pit couldn’t have been 10 feet deep but the walls were smooth - the wizard was trapped. He quickly wove a spell of levitation and began to float out of the pit, only to be smashed over the head by Zloth’s huge morning star. His spell broken, Xox crashed back into the water.
“How could I possibly have missed this trap!?” sputtered X as he got his head back above water.
“Perhaps,” said Zloth in a voice that was at once booming and conversational, ”because it is no longer a trap. It used to be but, after so many years without anyone getting even close to the door, we never bothered to maintain it. The locals use it to catch rainwater now.”
“I thank you for demonstrating the effectiveness of this fine armor, Xpx, but now it is time to hand it over. I promised you your life for this armor but, since you seem all too willing to take my armor from me, I have no qualms about taking your life from you.” And with that, unseen hands poured gallons more water into the pit. It wasn’t nearly enough to fill the pit but it was enough to put the water just over Xox’s head. Xox was able to leap and get a gulp of air but knew he would tire quickly. The armor was light, probably light enough for a very strong man to swim in, but he was not nearly that strong. There was no way he could weave a spell while jumping for air, either. Death was inevitable so Xox spat out a curse for Zloth then let his lungs fill with stale rainwater.
Zloth had the armor fished out and wore it into his next battle. Seconds into battle, he vanished in a puff of green fog.
Xox’s curse wasn’t a typical wish for bad fortune. Instead, it acted as a beacon to any other wizard anywhere in time to summon Zloth and bind him. It was the magical equivalent of writing “For a good time, call…” in a public restroom, and it didn’t take long for an aspiring Circle of Thorns energy mage to spot it and use it.
The energy mage failed to protect Zloth for the summoning, however, which left him exposed to all the magical energies used to pull him through time and space to the caves below Paragon City. The energy tore into ZLoth, eating away both mind and body. Even the enchanted armor was altered from dark, foreboding black to a rainbow of color. It was then, as his mind was boiling into the ether, that the Fist of the Being possessed Zloth.
When he arrived in present time, the old Zloth was all but gone replaced by the Fist. The mage, realizing his mistake, took Zloth for dead. For the armor to survive such a botched journey had to mean it had massive power but unfortunately the armor was now fused shut. It may be nearly indestructible but, without being able to get inside, it was just an indestructible paperweight. The armor, with Zloth still inside, was propped up against an old, crumbling column in the armory to act as additional support until a more powerful mage could examine the armor.
There was very little left of the old Zloth’s mind for the Fist to use to understand his new universe. After a few days, though, he got his bearings, grabbed a morning star out of the armory, and escaped the Circle of Thorns cave into Paragon City.
Tesslah
Nikola Tesla had long dreamed of broadcast power – the ability to provide electricity to a large region by using induction from
a tower instead of using wires to get the electricity from the power station to the electric device. In 1938, however, the
growing hostilities of WW2 disturbed him so greatly that he put his dream aside to concentrate on a new project – using
electricity as a weapon.
A mechanism to fire bolts of electricity wouldn’t have been too difficult, but Nikola could see no reason to do so. Sure it could be done, but why use electricity when bullets were already doing it just as well for a lot cheaper? So he started working on a project to actually incorporate the electric power into a human being. A spy could sneak into enemy facilities seemingly unarmed and do a lot of damage.
While brilliant in matters of electromagnetism, nobody could hope to do something like this alone. Tesla enlisted the help of several other physicists, metaphysicists, and medical researchers and brought them all together in a lab in southern Colorado that came to be nicknamed simply ‘The Cabin.’ Given that this was supposed to be a weapon of stealth, the project was kept secret from everyone, including the government agencies funding the project, while Tesla pretended to work on his old projects.
Work continued for years before the government started to figure out that Tesla wasn’t working on broadcast power any more and started inquiring as to what he was really working on. This wasn’t a good thing – Nikola knew full well that, once the government figured out what he was working on, supervillians and other criminals would find out through their moles. So he made up a story about a “death ray” technology and fed that to the government inquiries. The government loved that idea and bought into it, as did the moles within. Unfortunately, the idea of a death ray was probably even more interesting to the criminal elements. Nikola was threatened, blackmailed, psychically scanned, and subjected to a host of other ‘criminal inquiries’ but nobody could find any details on this death ray. Tragically, in 1943, Tesla was killed – probably by one of these criminal groups that had simply become frustrated by trying to discover a death ray project that did not exist.
Work continued at the Cabin, even after Tesla’s death. The problem, however, turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated. After several years, they discovered principals of physics which allowed them to greatly (though not completely) control the shape of electromagnetic fields. Without this, electric bolts could easily be diverted by a nearby fence or lamppost. While this made electricity a viable weapon, it required the user to haul around a decidedly unstealthy electric generator.
The real breakthrough came in 1984 when it was discovered that, with a few alterations to a person’s brain chemistry, a person could be given the power to tamper with the strength of the nuclear strong force via mental power. With this power, a person could break apart the nucleus of an atom or build the nucleus up to a huge size. Now they had their power source! The subject could break up atoms outside his body, electromagnetically pull them into his own body, and build up large atoms in stockpiles in his own body. Then, when a burst of electricity was called for, he could break these "battery" atoms up quickly and throw out huge bolts of electricity!
But how could they test it? You can’t very well place an advertisement in the classified section for something like this. Forcing anyone to do it was out of the question. That left only the researches themselves. Tony Gozzmer had already had the brain chemistry treatment so he was used as the first subject. After many painful surgeries were performed to implant wiring and heat protection into his body, he was able to bring in battery atoms and discharge small bolts of electricity at a target. It had worked!!
The next morning, he was found dead – poached in his own bed. The Cabin was devastated by the loss of a colleague but they dutifully did an autopsy and soon discovered the problem. The huge battery atoms had been kept together by mental force but, when Tony fell asleep, those atoms started breaking apart. The resulting undirected energy produced far more heat than the surgical implants could handle and his body temperature quickly rose well past the boiling point. People can hardly live without sleep so it was back to the drawing board.
In 1997 pressure began to mount. Even though they were in remote mountains, lost ‘hikers’ were caught on the grounds every month. One of these ‘hikers’ had a Geiger counter with him. A half-completed monitoring station was found on a nearby mountain. Worst of all, Tony Gozzmer’s grave was dug up and the body stolen! It was obvious that some criminal element had finally discovered them and was starting to sniff them out. If the team was ever going to do something, it needed to be done fast.
One of the researchers, Terry Washington, was selected as the subject (mostly because she only seemed to need one or two hours of sleep per night). The surgeries were done, the brain chemistry was altered, and again the experiment worked. This time, however, Terry was very careful to use any battery atoms she built up as soon as she could. This time, the experiment was a complete success.
The team changed focus and started working with Terry to see just what she could do. Her control over atomic nuclei wasn’t perfect so she would give off heat and electricity as she lost control of battery atoms she had stored within herself. The effect was even more pronounced when she got distracted. The surgical implants protected her from her own high body heat but the heat caused every bit of hair on her body to fall out and stray electricity would occasionally leak out of her. The crackle of electricity wasn't exactly stealthy and anyone getting within a few feet of her would certainly notice the high temperature.
One rainy morning, a dozen people walked up to the Cabin. They had all sorts of metal gear attached to their bodies and one was completely enclosed in full battle armor! This certainly wasn’t a case of lost hikers - this was the Freakshow. They attacked the Cabin, killing the researchers and destroying the equipment. Terry was able to stop a few but she hadn’t had many battery atoms in her when the attack came and the Freakshow mob wasn’t likely to let her build them up. So she fled into the mountains.
Terry was devastated. The Cabin had been her home and the researchers were her best friends, but now it was all destroyed. She took what little money she had and bought a plane ticket to Paragon City to take revenge on the Freakshow and whoever might be directing them. When she got there she rented an apartment, registered herself as a superhero (named Tesslah, in honor of the Cabin’s founder), went back to her apartment, and started to build up. And up. And up! She wasn’t going to run out of power this time!
It was then that the Wand of the Being infused into her. While the infusion is quick and painless, it is quite distracting to have trans-dimensional beings infuse into your brain. Tesslah managed to regain control before she had an electrical explosion, which would have burned out light bulbs 100 miles away, but her room and the rooms around hers were ruined. She had to spend the last of her money to pay for damages.
The being was a great help to her. With the being, she was able to control more power and, best of all, she could sleep (and even be knocked out!) and still retain control. Now she could build up to the highest levels and stay that way. She could even keep the stray electric crackles to a minimum, though the heat was still noticable. The being's outlook helped her regain control of her emotions, too, so she was able to turn that desire for revenge into a passion for stopping the Freakshow and those like them instead of just barging in and killing a few.
Windy
The Stormkind originated in the mountains of northern Europe where their powers over weather and gravity helped them survive landslides
and terrible storms. Eventually, civilization spread to even the Stormkind’s remote home and the small community took part eagerly.
The Stormkind assisted in everything from military operations to making sure the weather was nice on a new king’s coronation day.
But this also gave rise to enemies. Every time a soldier was saved from an incoming arrow, it was as if two archers cursed them
for turning their shot. Every time a king’s coronation was made clear, two relatives that wanted the throne would blame the
Stormkind for providing the “pretender” king with a good omen. Those that the Stormkind thwarted rarely attacked them
directly (those that did attack directly were lifted up like a helpless rag dolls and dealt with) but instead attacked them
socially. They were labeled witches, demons, Norse gods gone wild – anything that would stick.
The Stormkind quickly became hated and found they had to hide their powers or, more often than not, simply hide themselves from society. The following centuries were filled with stories about Stormkind being found, celebrated, persecuted, and then hiding themselves away again. Now the Stormkind are scattered all over the globe in tight-nit groups, hiding their powers. Except for Windy.
Windy (legally Wendy Black, though she considers Windy to be her real name) was born and raised in Tonganoxie, KS just west of Kansas City. She was rather mischievous young girl and prone to using her powers for pranks and the like. Nothing really detectable, just things like making a downdraft of wind to blow her hair dry or lightening herself so she could bound up the stairs.
Over the years, however, she became more reckless. Her tendency to divert storms off course so she could go on picnics eventually started to get noticed by local weather forecasters who began joking about the “Tonganoxie Split.” This alarmed the local Stormkind and they told Windy to stop her antics before they were all found out.
But it was already too late. A grad student looking for a thesis in atmospheric physics had already done the statistics and discovered that the weather forecasters’ running joke was actually a real phenomenon. When he started setting up a small weather station to try to get to the bottom of it, the Stormkind decided they had better get their bottoms into another state.
Naturally, nobody was pleased with Windy. She wasn’t outright shunned or anything but her people weren’t very happy to see her when she walked by. So, when her people moved one way, she broke away and moved to Paragon City. What a perfect place for her! With all those superheroes throwing around energy bolts who would notice a young woman whose hair never seemed to get messed up on a windy day?
She wasn’t really prepared for the reality of it, though. When she stepped out of the train station she was immediately struck by how few cars there were. The cab she hailed was a boxy thing with thick, tinted windows and was made from a metal she didn’t recognize. As her cab pulled out onto the street, a huge man wearing some kind of robotic armor fell right out of the sky, landed squarely on the hood of the cab, and jumped right back off again! Windy screamed as the whole front end of the cab bounced into the air but, in a couple of seconds, both she and the cab settled down and she saw the huge robot man pounding away on some street gang member. The cab driver wasn’t phased at all, he simply mumbled “Welcome to Paragon City.”
Windy became more and more alarmed as the cab drove on. The stories she had heard about there being a hero on every block were true all right, but that hero was a busy hero because there were three street crimes happening on every block! “This is insane! How can you live like this?” Windy asked the cab driver.
“You learn quickly enough. Homes have tight security and folks never go outside with anything of much value. Hardly anyone has a car or even a bicycle – they just get stolen. It’s cheaper to walk and pay your daily toll to the muggers.”
“Daily? You can’t even go a day without getting mugged in this town??”
“Not really, no.” the cab driver sighed. “And I guess today is your first day here.” Then the cab turned into a back alley behind a hospital. Windy tried to leap out of the car but the driver got hold of her hair and yanked her back in to the cab. “Sorry missy, but you and your luggage are my ticket out of this crazy town.”
Windy hit him with a gust of wind stronger than she had ever used before and blew him clear out of the cab. She got out of the cab and tried to run out of the alley but the cab driver was back up on his feet and this time he had a gun out. “Damn, I didn’t figure you for a cape!” he growled and opened fire. Windy couldn’t believe it – she was no superhero! She couldn’t stop bullets! But she could deflect them a little. She hit the bullets with as much gravity and wind as she could and shoved them just a little to the side, just enough so that the few bullets that did hit her just grazed her.
The cab driver didn’t waste any time. While Windy was checking herself for wounds, he scrambled back into the cab and sped off with her luggage and purse inside – everything she owned. Windy ran out of the alley after the cab but there was no hope of catching it. A policewoman saw her and came running, but she hardly got ten steps toward Windy before she was whacked over the head by a street punk who yanked her purse from her. Then the punk started running right at Windy!
Windy remembered the hospital just around the corner. She ran for it and got around the corner just as the thug started to reach for her. She ducked the thug’s grab but promptly stumbled and fell. When she looked up, though, the thug wasn’t getting ready to pounce on her. Instead he had a look of panic on his face and was scrambling to get back around the corner. Then a strange, blue beam shot over Windy’s head, hit the criminal, and he was just… gone!
The beam had come from one of two little robots hovering near the hospital entrance. Windy had seen a few of them around town but she didn’t know they could do anything like that! At least something had gone right today.
The hospital treated Windy’s gunshot wounds free of charge once she told them her story but that still left her homeless and penniless. Where was she supposed to sleep? She wasn’t going out there alone any more, but she was exhausted. So she curled up under the police bot and (eventually) fell asleep.
When she woke up, she was infused with the being. Everyone has quite a shock when they suddenly become part of a being from another dimension but this time the being was just as shocked! Zloth, Tesslah, Da Sloth, Booo, and countless other manifestations were well known but who was this Windy!? To the being, it was like discovering you’ve had a third arm growing out your back all this time and you just hadn’t noticed it before!
Well, whatever the case, Windy wasn’t in good shape and needed immediate help. Tesslah got some food and ran to the hospital, but Windy had stepped inside to use the bathroom. When Windy came back out, Tesslah had dropped the food to investigate an explosion over on the next block. When Tesslah came back, Windy had gone in search of a water fountain. When Windy got back…. Well, Windy may be a new aspect of the being but one thing had not changed: the curse was still making it impossible for one manifestation to meet up with another!
Windy learned to use her powers quickly in Paragon City. Not only were there ample and highly motivating ‘opportunities’ to
learn, the many heroes of Paragon City were happy to teach her how to use her powers. Back home, superheroes were rare, strange
people that would blow through Kansas City hunting down some even stranger supervillain. Now SHE was becoming a superhero!
She was learning to stop bullets and jump incredibly high. And she had even become part of a strange, alien being! It was time
to get out there and start chasing down those even stranger supervillains!!
Da Sloth
Da Sloth's (currently "S l o t h" in Paragon's registry of heroes) past is still shrouded in mystery. He says that his mother was bitten by a radioactive sloth while on honeymoon in Costa Rica but nobody seriously believes that. He got his name back on the playgrounds of grade school in Chicago by using his kinetic powers to speed up all the kids around him - much to their enjoyment. He didn't yet know how to speed himself up, though, so while the other kids were running around so fast that some of the parents actually insisted on them wearing helmets, he was still going at a normal pace.