Hope you like it!
I play on Guardian, fyi.
Character info:
Name: Emission
Real Name: Daniel Ketzner
Origin: Tech
Archetype: Defender
Primary Power Set: Force Fields
Secondary Power Set: Radiation Blast
And I'm going to be using teleportation as a movement power.
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The Origin of Emission: Past and Present
Although he is the man behind the mask today, Daniel Ketzner is not the first daring soul to don a set of E.M.I.S.S.I.O.N. Armor. For years up until his untimely demise, Daniel's brother Jonathan wore the armor his brainchild in an effort to keep the streets a little safer.
Jonathan Ketzner was one of the brilliant engineers who, alongside the infamous late Dr. Webb, helped to develop the Portal Corp technology which pioneered interdimensional travel. In the wake of Dr. Webb's tragic undoing at the hands of the Reichsman, and the judicial nightmare which followed, Johnathan accepted an offer from longtime friend Leonard Nash to start up a business of their own. By 1990 the pair had accumulated enough startup capital to open the doors to Temptech R&D, additionally procuring funds from investors eager to cash in on what they saw as the massive potential of up-and-coming extranormal research firms.
Under the forceful and ambitious direction of Nash, who adamantly believed that the close relationship between time and space could provide the clues which would allow the adaptation of teleportation technology for time travel, Temptech quickly made a name for itself in the scientific circles of Paragon City and beyond. After a year with promising projects but no substantial progress, however, investors began to flit their cash elsewhere and the firm found itself in dire straights.
In 1992, their salvation and simultaneously their doom arrived. Late one August evening, in a stunning display of both unparalleled ingenuity and scientific naïvety, Jonathan cracked the code: having solved what he had thought to be numerous mathematical impossibilities, Johnathan used Temptech machinery to open a portal to what he believed would be 1935. Instead, what he got was a massive explosion! Luckily, Johnathan was the only technician in the building at the time of the explosion. Surviving only because he had had the foresight to stand behind protective observation walls, Johnathan picked himself up out of the rubble and debris of the Temptech facility and placed a call to Nash. Though their company had been destroyed, the pair were undaunted, and work continued sans expensive machinery in the basement of Leonard Nash's private residence. In the following month they made their startling discovery: Johnathan had not opened a portal into the past, but rather had opened a wormhole directly into the sun!
Teleportation, though commonplace, has its limits. At the time of this discovery, wormhole technology was light years ahead of any teleportation technology on or off the market. As the two discussed the possibilities they were about to unleash on the world, Johnathan came to a second revelation. While he spoke of the wonders of interstellar travel and possibly even first contact with an alien race, Nash seemed focused on the laboratory explosion and the prospect of selling the technology to the military. Imagine an army with the technology to teleport a battalion of troops or worse, an explosion of almost any size anywhere they want! When Johnathan voiced his concern over Nash's thoughtless greed, Nash retaliated fiercely, claiming the technology as his own and citing as proof his own ambition as the impetus behind Temptech. The argument heated up and excited elation became forceful shouting, eventually degenerating into violence.
In the end, Johnathan won out, but the struggle had proven deadly: unable to stop Nash on his own, Johnathan was forced to wield a monkey wrench in a desperate attempt to save his own life, unwittingly killing his friend in the process. Grief stricken and panicked to near terror, Johnathan fled, taking with him his notes on the wormhole procedure and leaving behind more than one shattered life.
After a long and wearisome journey, a broken Johnathan arrived at the Chicago household of his brother Daniel, pleading for help. Daniel, though hardly a model citizen having served a few stints in the county lockup recognized urgency when he saw it and readily took his brother in. After hearing Johnathan's confused tale, Daniel agreed to let him stay there in Chicago and work out of his low-budget apartment. Determined to make some right out of this terrible wrong, Johnathan went to work the very next day at constructing a new wormhole-opening device with what little cash he had left.
In the coming months Johnathan now a wanted man took to working on the roof of Daniel's apartment building (the noise was often enough to send his neighbors complaining). Daniel learned what he could from his brother, though usually that meant slowing down his work progress quite a bit.
By February of 1993 Johnathan had completed a miniature wormhole-opening device, which he called E.M.I.S.S.I.O.N. Gateway Egression Manipulating / Ingression Subordinating Solar Input / Output Nanotech Gateway. In a bizarre twist brought on by his earlier accident in the lab, Johnathan designed the device to power itself. The Gateway required a jolt of energy to get it started, but once operational, it automatically opened a pinhead-sized wormhole directly into the sun (anything larger would have proven as deadly as the Temptech explosion), drawing off enough energy to power it and fill reserve tanks so long as the wormhole remained open. Once the reserve tanks were full, the wormhole automatically closed leaving it open would cause the reserve tanks to explode, as there was no way to stem the flow of energy while the portal existed. The Gateway would periodically open the wormhole whenever its power reserves ran low, thereby creating a continuous loop which kept the device powered. The Gateway could handle several wormholes at once. Johnathan ran many experiments with holes of varying size, but found that he could not safely open one much larger than a few yards across without requiring an energy input larger than the pinhead-sized sun wormhole could provide at one time.
Surmising that the risk of opening a larger hole was too great, Johnathan decided to confine his experiments to finding uses for his smaller wormholes which would be beneficial to society. Among other things, he discovered that his wormholes were made up of no mass which meant that more than one hole could exist at the same point at the same time. Manipulating this phenomenon, he discovered that, by opening a single wormhole whose source and destination existed at the same point, he could create a sort of force field which he nicknamed Emission Aegis that repelled incoming objects. He also discovered that the holes did not operate on a constant frequency a hole had to be configured to allow certain types of matter to pass through it. If configured improperly, unmediated mass would pass through the wormhole as if it were not there. This limited the effectiveness of his force fields, but did little to dishearten the resourceful inventor, who went on to experiment with various methods of "bending" the wormholes to different shapes and putting them to additional uses.
It wasn't until late July that Johnathan received the inspiration which would be the driving force behind his career as a costumed crimefighter. Sitting atop the roof one evening, Johnathan noticed a mugger pull a young girl into an alleyway across the street. Shocked and unsure of what to do as a wanted man, he could not call the police Johnathan resolved to help the girl himself. Powering up the Gateway, he quickly opened a portal into the alley and stepped through, taking the device with him. In the alley, a confused mugger saw a man walk out of thin air, right in front of him. The thug stared slack-jacked for a moment before collecting himself and charging the disoriented scientist. Johnathan, reacting on sheer instinct, threw up a force field around himself. The mugger ran headlong into it, knocking himself out cold. Johnathan helped the distressed girl to safety and anonymously delivered the unconscious mugger to the authorities.
After the incident, Johnathan came to an important decision. Still grieving and still wanted for the death of his friend Leonard, he determined that he would use his Gateway and mechanical know-how to produce a set of armor which he could employ to make the world a better place and what better city to do it in than the birthplace of the superhero? Johnathan, who had hitherto been funding his own research by "borrowing" cash from unguarded bank vaults (easily obtained by someone who can go anywhere!), set his sights back on Paragon City. First, however, he would need to settle his "debts." Encasing his Gateway device in a protective metal box and mounting it on a prototype suit of powered armor of his own design, Johnathan created the first E.M.I.S.S.I.O.N. Armor and went to work on the streets of the Windy City.
Calling himself Emission and setting his sights on local drug and smuggling rings, Johnathan soon paid off his ill-gotten debts with confiscated currency, even earning enough outside of his charity contributions to make incremental improvements to his armor. What started as an indemnifying venture quickly became a passion and perhaps even an obsession: Johnathan had the hero bug, and he had it bad. By the end of 1993 Emission had made a name for himself in Chicago and Detroit and the surrounding region. Using an arsenal consisting of his wormhole gateways, force fields (a moving force field could even create a sort of "force bolt" which repelled attackers), and the sun's radiation focused through devices built into his armor, Emission was able to foil many a villainous scheme. But, inevitably, the time came when Johnathan felt that he must make amends with the city he had wronged. In mid-1994 he said a warm goodbye and thank-you to his brother Daniel, and returned to Paragon City.
Emission rose quickly to fame in Paragon City. Operating mainly alone, he earned the respect of the heroic community by targeting the criminals not found in the streets and back alleys of the lower city. Within a few short months Emission had busted up several piracy and smuggling operations, generating a paper trail which led straight up to the top of several high-profile, Paragon City-based global industries. Emission's newly won renown was only partially complete, however: choosing to keep his identity a secret to all but himself and his brother back in Chicago, Johnathan led a lonely life in a broken down apartment, ever fearful that he should be recognized or discovered.
The years passed and Emission continued to gain prestige in the city, even finding himself working alongside the greats of Freedom Phalanx and the Dawn Patrol when the need arose. Escalating quickly from punk-buster to a well-known opponent of catastrophic, city-wide threats, the Armored Aegis (as the press enjoyed calling him) fought his way through the years, locked in recompense for the deeds from his earlier life.
In one particularly impressive encounter in 1998, Emission fought his way through the cybernetically-enhanced Freakshow gang and battled their leader, the psychopathic Dreck, to a standstill. The would-be outcome of that battle will never be known, however, as the timely explosion of a gas tank ruptured by the nemeses' duel allowed Dreck and his cronies to slink off to lick their wounds. The E.M.I.S.S.I.O.N. Armor was badly damaged in this scuffle, leading Johnathan to retire it and design a new, much more advanced suit, which innovated new uses of his force fields and radioactive emissions such as force-propelled flight and nova-style omnidirectional explosions.
Like any hero, Emission had his share of adventures. He even went public with his identity in 2000, leading to his trial and subsequent acquittal for the murder of Leonard Nash. Now fully redeemed in the eyes of the law, anyway Emission led his double life with an alleviated sense of guilt. For him, things seemed to be going no place but up, and he met the future with an accelerated excitement that he had not experienced since that fateful night at Temptech. But time, unfortunately, had something else in store for Emission just as it did for nearly the entirety of Earth's hero population.
Johnathan Ketzner's life ended on May 23, 2002, during the first nightmarish hours of the Rikti Invasion. As scores of well-equipped aliens dropped through endless interdimensional portals in the sky, the heroes of Paragon City Emission included leapt into combat. Their efforts proved necessary but ultimately ineffective, as the tide of invaders swelled, unwaning, replacing their numbers more quickly than could be dealt with. Hero after hero fell to the merciless chaos of the invasion, with no hope of reinforcement or respite from the fray.
Seeking temporary refuge on the roof of a remote building, Johnathan was struck dumb by the scene which he only just now glimpsed for the first time. The city was burning, and the heroes' inability to quell the fires was pulling down everything which had come to make sense in the beleaguered hero's psyche.
Massive explosions cut short Emission's mental breakdown, as an overhead battleship fired down on nearby hospitals and residences. Finally unable to cope with the destruction and genocide, Emission did the only thing left available to him. In order to save the imperiled people below, Johnathan teleported himself directly into the heart of the Rikti battleship and let loose an explosion which all but disintegrated everything within himself included.
The invasion marched on without him. The end finally came in November with the final extrusion of the Rikti supply lines and the ominous withdrawal of their remaining forces into the deeper places of the earth. Most of the world's major cities had been nearly leveled. Many were slain. Of the world's hero population, only a slim few remained to tell the tale. In Paragon City, the Surviving Eight, led by the Statesman, would suffer not a single day's delay for grieving fallen comrades, but instead began to organize reconstruction efforts almost as soon as the aliens fell into their confused retreat.
In Chicago, Daniel Ketzner emerged from a destroyed shelter, dazed by the carnage of recent and past nights. There would be no television broadcast today or anytime soon no newspaper to inform him of his brother's or countless others' deaths. Not for some time.
But that time did come. Months later, upon hearing of Johnathan's demise reported by those few witnesses who hadn't gone insane with terror that night Daniel resolved to carry on in his brother's memory. He soon relocated to Paragon City, where he inherited his brother's first suit of E.M.I.S.S.I.O.N. Armor. He used Johnathan's notes and the technical knowledge he had gained by living with his brother to repair it to a functional level. And though Daniel is no saint, he knows how to do good, and he knows even better the legacy left behind by his older brother.
Today, Emission again travels the streets of Paragon City, fighting crime where he finds it. The man behind the mask may be different, but the spirit of the hero is within him just as it was his brother. Though a greenhorn crimefighter, Daniel steadily gains power as he learns the suit's capabilities and teaches himself to modify them. With effort and determination, he may one day Johnathan's prowess and reputation on the streets of the Tomorrow City. Let evildoers beware: Paragon City falls still under the protection of Emission, the Armored Aegis, and he is eager to prove his worth!
