Backstory

Way back in the 1960s, an alien exploration ship 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, where he learned to control his strange powers. Then he moved to the big city and got a humble job to disguise his true role as one of the world's first superheroes: ELEMENTAL.

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, 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". Despite their defeat, their legacy continues to this day, with lives lost, trusts broken, and families shattered. To this day, the Valor Corps members who fought that day refuse to talk about the specifics of that battle. They only say that it was hard fought, but that the Terror Corps were destroyed and Elemental was killed.

One of Elemental's minions, a master thief who went by Midnight, escaped. She had been in love with Elemental, and they had had a child. When the final battle came, Elemental sent her away to take his son and hide. She did this, staying one step ahead of the Valor Corps for over a decade with a young child in tow.

In 2010, Midnight was finally caught by the Valor Corps, who now had to figure out what to do with Rafael Cardenas, the ten year old son of Elemental and Midnight. Zephyr argued that he was too dangerous to be let free. Hundredlives argued that he was a confused kid who needed help. Eventually, Zephyr reluctantly conceded the argument, and let Hundredlives take the boy in.

In 2016, Ace City (the city that was the site of the disastrous final battle against the Terror Corps) finally agreed to trust the Valor Corps enough to allow them to open a new branch. The new team consisted of a bunch of younger, less experienced heroes. One of their number went by the name Superego, and had powers eerily similar to Elemental, the most hated superhero in history.

The Valor Corps, Ace City branch

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.

Powers

Rafael is half human and half carinan. The carinans are a race of powerful psychics. Being only half carinan, Rafael is still a powerful psychic, but his powers are unstable and developing much slower than a full blooded carinan's would.

Psychic Shell: Their most famous power. Carinans can generate a shell of telekinetic force that covers their entire body. This has three benefits.
Protection - the shell acts as a suit of armor, allowing the person inside to shrug off an absurd amount of damage despite not being any tougher than an ordinary human
Augmentation - The shell is far stronger than the wearer's muscles. While the shell is active, the wearer can perform feats of superhuman strength with little difficulty.
Stretchiness - While the shell defaults to the shape of the person who wears it, they can will it to stretch out into other shapes. They can grow wings, form shields, change their hands into blades, stretch their arms to grab distant objects, and generally do sort of shape-shifter-like feats without actually changing their physical bodies.

Rafael's shell has a distinctly unstable appearance, due to him only being HALF Carinan.

Carinan psychic repository: the Carinans are not a hive mind, but they do have a psychic link to a shared repository of all the knowledge their species has ever accumulated, which they can access through meditation. Rafael's link to this psychic library is very unstable. On top of that, he doesn't even know it exists. He occasionally will just "remember" some random factoid about aliens.

Personality

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".