Rafael "Superego" Cardenas

▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Eric
CONTACT: overbringer
OVER 18? 34
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: Brigitte Lindholm

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Rafael "Superego" Cardenas
CANON: Valor Corps (original setting)
CANON POINT: End of Terror Corps arc
AGE: 17
BACKGROUND: Way back in the 1960s, an alien exploration ship from the distant star Carina crashed on Earth. The only survivor was the infant child of a pair of scientists who worked on board, and the child only survived because his parents stuck him into an escape pod before the crash. I think everyone knows how this story plays out: The alien child was raised by simple farmers in Idaho under the name Isaac North, where he learned to control his strange powers and that he should use them to help people. Then he moved to the big city and got a humble job as a reporter to disguise his true role as one of the world's first superheroes: ELEMENTAL. In the original draft of creating this character, I actually made Isaac and Rafael Kryptonians, in case the reference isn't clear.

Elemental, AKA Isaac North, stood as a symbol of goodness and hope, using his superhuman abilities to save the world time and time again. Over the years, he started teaming up with other heroes from across the world. With the help of the invulnerable Hundredlives, the mysterious Blue Phantom, the energetic Captain Cosmos, the mechanical Steel Sentinel, and the brilliant Zephyr, Elemental founded the Valor Corps, a legion of superheroes that could accomplish far more than any one of them could on their own.

By the 1990s, however, friction was building up within the Valor Corps. Zephyr maintained that they couldn't interfere with politics. Humanity needed to control it's own destiny, and they only needed the Corps for outside threats. Elemental said that humanity was proving itself too violent and unstable to be allowed to continue without any kind of supervision. The friction built until in the end, Elemental and Blue Phantom split from the Valor Corps and formed their own team, the Terror Corps.

The Terror Corps were defeated on Christmas Day, 2000, in an event known as "Red December". It had actually been a peace talk to bring the fighting to an end but Zephyr, having decided that non-humans in general and Elemental specifically were the cause of the world's problems, had built himself a bioweapon designed specifically to to kill Carinans, and used it on Elemental. In the ensuing chaos, the Terror Corps was eventually defeated, but Elemental's body was never found, Captain Cosmos and Blue Phantom both went missing, Steel Sentinel was destroyed, and Zephyr's bioweapon had turned out to have side effects on humans after all, causing a rare disease known as "red lung." The only two surviving members were Zephyr and Hundredlives. Zephyr went on to become the new leader of the Valor Corps and spent the next decade rebuilding their shattered reputation.

Ten years later, the Valor Corps finally caught up with a minor member of the Terror Corps who had been on the run ever since their defeat, the master thief known as Midnight. They found with her a ten year old child named Rafael who looked suspiciously like Isaac North, and who was starting to show signs of psychic powers similar to those Elemental had once had. The Corps was almost torn apart again over what to do with who was apparently the child of the disgraced hero. Zephyr wanted to have him killed, or captured and used for research experiments, or imprisoned never to see the light of day again, for fear he would turn out like his father. Hundredlives, on the other hand, argued that Rafael was innocent of the crimes of his father, and that he just needed a chance. Fortunately Zephyr relented and let Hundredlives, AKA Elena Vasquez, raise the boy herself. And she did, on a ranch in New Mexico.

Six years later, Ace City, the site of the dreadful battle of Red December, finally let the Valor Corps open a branch once again. The events of sixteen years previously were hopefully in the past. The NEW team in Ace City was made of younger heroes, who they hoped would be able to break free of the dark associations the city had with the Corps. One of their number, who went by the moniker "Superego", showed powers suspiciously similar to Elemental...

That's all backstory for Valor Corps, which was a tabletop RPG campaign divided into four main story arcs we called "seasons" (like a TV show), which I'll just quick summary of here:

SEASON 1: The newly formed Ace City Valor Corps makes their debut by capturing Dr. Braun, a mad scientist hellbent on spraying the entire city with malevolent nanotech. In the aftermath, the discovered a sinister corporate conspiracy to develop a bioweapon called "Chimera" that mutated normal people into fearsome monsters. They traced it back to Blackthorne Pharmecueticals, which had deeply corrupted a lot of Ace City's government. The Valor Corps stayed one step ahead of the police until they could capture Elizabeth Blackthorne and bring her to justice, but in the final battle a big dose of the completed Chimera formula mutated a good chunk of the city.

SEASON 2: Not much later, Zephyr sent a second team to Ace City to back up the main team, since they were obviously not up to the task of protecting Ace City in light of the Chimera outbreak. The two teams almost IMMEDIATELY came to blows as the first team worked to try and clear the name of one of their own members from kidnapping the city mayor. As they tried to figure out what was going on they slowly realized that ever member of the new team had been chosen SPECIFICALLY because they had a personal grudge with someone from the first team. Eventually, they figured out that Zephyr himself had created the Red Lung virus in an attempt to kill Elemental, and was now trying to use his connections to wipe out the remaining evidence of his crimes so he could cement his power as the leader of the Valor Corps. Zephyr was defeated, but took Hundredlives down with him, leaving no one to fill in the leadership voice but our heroes themselves. Also, Rafael found out the Midnight had had a second child who was three years older than him, his half sister Lucita.

SEASON 3: Some months later, our heroes investigated a distress call from Mt. Markham, the maximum security prison at the South Pole designed to contain supervillains. It was a trap, and while the Valor Corps contained the situation, they left to find that the Terror Corps had been reborn while they were distracted. What followed was a desperate battle to stay one step ahead of the Terror Corps while collecting three powerful relics necessary to defeat them. They ultimately cornered the leader of the Terror Corps and found out it was a reborn Steel Sentinel, along with a strange being that was the result of Captain Cosmos fusing with Elemental to save his life. Rafael finally got to beat up his dad.

SEASON 4: Two years after that, the Valor Corps got tricked into a machine that warped them to another dimension. There, they teamed up with their own future children to fight off evil versions of themselves, who had been ruling a post-apocalyptic hell hole. There were FAR more dramatic revelations than I can sum up in one paragraph, but Rafael's evil counterpart was from a timeline where he had never found Hundredlives and been raised by Midnight instead. He had nothing but contempt for the species that had killed his father, and had nothing in mind but the total destruction of humanity. In the end, they didn't save the alternate Earth, but were able to save the people living there by letting them escape to Valor Corps Prime Earth.

PERSONALITY: Rafael is sullen, sarcastic, and distrustful. It's almost like he's a teenage boy in the throes of puberty who's had a small army of superheroes watching his every move like a hawk for the first sign of supervillainy for the last six years while he tries to learn how to use psychic powers that don't work right because of his human heritage with no one to teach him who actually knows how they work because his father mysteriously vanished sixteen years ago. It a miracle that he hasn't turned out worse than he has. He DOES want to do good, though.

Partly, it's out of spite. His father has been overshadowing at him from beyond the grave for his whole life. He can't punch the smug jerk in the nose himself, since he's dead, but he CAN do it metaphorically by proving himself to be the better man. On top of that, there's also the Valor Corps (Zephyr, mainly) that is expecting him to stumbled and fuck up. He's proving it to THEM too. But most of all, he's proving it to himself. He doesn't want to just be his father come again. He wants to not only differentiate himself from Elemental, but also to surpass him.

He has mixed feelings about his mother. He took her last name because he didn't want any connections to his father, but she wasn't much better than he was and he knows it. Silvia Cardenas was a criminal, so Rafael's early life was spent on the run from various world authorities, while hearing stories about how the cruel Valor Corps had betrayed his magnificent and powerful father for trying to save the world from itself because they were jealous of his amazingness. It took several years of living with Hundredlives to realize that he had been lied to by a morally bankrupt supervillain looking at the past through rosy-eyed glasses. So yes, he knows that his mother was a supervillain, but she was still mom. A kid should have a parent they can trust, and Rafael never really got that. Hundredlives did her best, and Rafael definitely cares for her too, but it's just not the same.

All this has come together to create a young man who has a LOT of anger bubbling within him that he struggles to keep under control. Especially when he gets in fights (which is often, when you're a superhero.). If he's not careful, Rafael's anger can explode into berserk rampages, lashing out violently at everyone around him. He KNOWS this about himself, and can usually recognize it and keep it under control, but he's still a very angry person.

He's also never had anything resembling an ordinary life. He never went to school, but was homeschooled by a supervillain. His early education had about as much to do with learning to read and write as it did with learning how to rob banks and pick locks. Then he moved in with Hundredlives, who was more grounded than Midnight was but was still a goddamn superhero. To Rafael, stories of lone heroes fighting against horrifying foes for peace and justice feel like slice of life stories. He grew up around these kinds of people. Stories about high school students falling in love for the first time feel weird and fantastical by comparison. He spent a little while going to a normal school while he lived in Ace City, but his classmates thought of him as weird and offputting at best.

SPEAKING OF FALLING IN LOVE Rafael is very familiar with Superhero history. He knows that like 80% of the time when a superhero falls in love, their partner is revealed to be secret evil, or to be brainwashed by someone evil, or to be a robot double or clone. Or if they escape that fate they might just die, or their relationship might shatter under the stress of living a double life. The point is, superheroes don't have a good track record with romance. Rafael knows this, and so he generally does his best to avoid romantic entanglements.

His biggest pet peeve: Back in the early 80s, Elemental did an interview with the Ace City newspaper during which he revealed some of what he knew about his species. There was a typo, and so about a quarter of the world's population still calls the species "Carinians" instead of "Carinans".

POWERS/ABILITIES: Rafael is half human and half carinan. The carninans had incredible psychic powers, though human heritage makes them a bit more unstable than normal.
- Psychic Shell. The most well known power of the carnians is a shell of telekinetic energy that Rafael can summon to cover his body. It protects him from harm like a suit of armor (he can shrug off gunfire with minimal effect), it amplifies his strength (He once physically pushed something comparible in size to a SHIELD Helicarrier so it fell into a lake instead of onto a city.), and it can change shape (allowing him to grow wings or turn his hands into big clubs or make barriers or stuff like that.)
- Energy blasts. Rafael can dragon ball this shit, attacking with blasts of psychic energy.
- Flight. He's not very good at it, but Rafael can fly. He stretches his psychic shell into wings to help with steering but most of the lift comes from telekinetic force.
- Collective Psychic Repository. Carnians aren't a hive mind, but they can tap into a shared collection of memories, allowing them to pull up general information on any species or places or objects that the race as a whole has discovered. Rafael was never very good at this, though, and probably couldn't even access it from this dimension unless there are carinans out there in THIS universe too.
- Alcohol resistance. Carinans don't get drunk from alcohol. They have their own drinks that have similar effects, but you can't get them on Earth. Rafael isn't full Carinan, but it still takes a LOT of alcohol to have any effect on him.
- Bilingual. Rafael speaks Spanish and English with equal proficiency.

INVENTORY: - Smartphone: Originally a standard phone, this one has been upgraded by genius inventor Ashlyn Silvermane. It now gets reception ANYWHERE and has a wide variety of defenses against cyber attacks. It's powered by a miniature singularity, assuring the battery will last for ten thousand years. The systems that keep the singularity from getting out of control also protect the phone (and anyone carrying it) from gravity based attacks. If you can get past the safeties you can unleash the singularity and create a miniature black hole, although Rafael fortunately does not know how to do this.
- Earpiece: tiny radio earpiece for staying in contact with teammates while keeping hands free. Basically a fancy bluetooth headset.
- Map of the universe: The carnians were explorers and map makers, and had seen a good chunk of the the universe (and several others). All their starcharts have been downloaded into this handy palm sized hologram projector, allowing the owner to zoom in and zoom out and scroll about the universe with easy, getting simple bits of information on millions of stars. Completely useless here, as it's a map of a different universe.

MOONBLESSING: Iris

▶ SAMPLES

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Rafael is sullen, sarcastic, distrustful...it's almost like he's a teenage boy in the throws of puberty who's had a small army of superhumans watching him like a hawk for the first sign of supervillainy for the last six years while he tries to learn how to use malfunctioning psychic powers with no teacher.

The amazing thing is that he actually DOES want to do good. He feels like his father has been overshadowing him and laughing at him from beyond the grave for his whole life, and the only way he can think of punching the smug jerk in the nose is to prove that he's the better man. He's proving it to Elemental, he's proving it to the Valor Corps, but most importantly he's proving it to himself.

He has mixed feelings about his mother. He took her last name because he didn't want any connections to his father, but he still knows that she wasn't much better than he was. He grew up with her on the run, being told stories of how Elemental was cruelly betrayed and taken down by the jealous, spiteful Valor Corps. After a few years with Hundredlives, he's realized that the truth is not so clean cut, and that the Valor Corps aren't some uniform, faceless evil. He knows in his head that she was wrong, but...She's still his mom. A kid should have a parent they can trust. Hundredlives did her best to be a good foster mom, and he does care for her, but it's just not the same.

All this leads up to a lot of anger issues. Especially when he gets in fights (which is often, when you're a superhero.). There's a lot of bubbling rage inside him that needs to be let free somehow, which leads to berserk and reckless rampages against powerful foes that leave his teammates worried sometimes.

He also has no idea how to be a normal person. He never went to school, instead picking things up from his mother. Thus his early education had about as much about how to read and write as it did about how to rob banks. Then he moved in with Hundredlives, who was more grounded than Midnight was, but still a goddamn Superhero. To him, stories about a lone caped crusader against an army of mutants are slice of life, while stories about high school students falling in love for the first time seem weird and fantastical. He knows more about the world of heroes and villains than he does about the world of regular people.

His biggest pet peeve: Back in the early 80s, Elemental did an interview with the Ace City newspaper during which he revealed some of what he knew about his species. There was a typo, and so about a quarter of the world's population still calls the species "Carinians" instead of "Carinans".

Rafael Cardenas/Superego: Human/Carinan hybrid. Can generate a psychic shell that covers him like armor and reinforces his physical strength. He joined the Valor Corps to prove he won't make the same mistakes his father did.

Izzy/Isotope: Alien shapeshifter. Though she hasn't told the team, Izzy came to Earth to study our people on behalf of her people. Her cover story is that she landed on Earth and fell so in love with our superheroes that she just had to become one herself. Joined the Valor Corps to become a HERO and to SAVE EVERYONE

Ford Freeman/Blue Phantom: The first Blue Phantom vanished on Red December. Many years later, a kid found a magical amulet that contained an ancient spirit of vengeance. Whoever wore it gained the powers of the Blue Phantom, but also had the bloodthirsty spirit Alastor whispering in their ear. He joined the Valor Corps because he wanted to stand up for the little guys that everyone else ignores.

Lori Hamilton/Sonicheart: A cyborg fleeing from her corrupt family, the rulers of a nation so corrupt they called it "Evilvania" and no one complained. She uses music based sound powers to energize her friends or shake her enemies to pieces. She joined the Valor Corps to keep out of reach of her powerful father.

Whisper: A strange, quiet young girl with the ability to generate illusions with her mind. Awfully withdrawn due to her troubled past. No one is quite sure what her deal is or what her actual name is, but they love her anyways. She joined the Valor Corps for her own reasons.

Ashlyn Silvermane: Inventor. Ashlyn's parent's were killed during Red December when she was very young. Now she uses her brilliant inventions to fight crime, though she eschews a superhero name. She joined the Valor Corps because she thinks of herself as the token "normal person" who has to keep an eye on all these superhumans.