Ember Point (Latest Update - Bolt, the Electric Swordsman)

[Commander Titan]

And that, with Bob Dylan Batman, concludes the founding members of the Battalion. Next up, is a bridge between this whole project and the actual city of Ember Point: Bolt, the Electric Swordsman, hero of Ember Point turned Battalion member.

[Davies]

But in a small corner of Chicago, for the last twenty or so years an older man named “Tom Kurz” has run a small butcher’s shop and deli, sometimes playing the guitar at local bars on weekends…

I'm honestly crying. Happy tears, don't worry about me, please.

[Commander Titan]

Bolt, the Electric Swordsman [Joseph "Joe" Zhi]

A Brief Intro to Vondrák Electromatics (VE)

In the late 1800s, the eccentric Czech scientist Aurelia Vondrák made her way to the United States from her homelands in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her numerous adventures need no elaboration here. What is important is to note that her lifelong interest in novel energy systems and solutions brought her to study the strange properties of Mount Alexandra near Ember Point.

It proved unusually well-suited to being a source of geothermal energy, and Vondrák developed a series of taps and facilities to harness this, turning Ember Point into a pioneer in electrical and arguably eco-friendly energy generations ahead of the rest of the world. Vondrák’s financial patrons and family organized her scattered holdings and technologies under the aegis of a single company - Vondrák Electromatics, now officially known as VE.

One of these critical technologies are the proprietary powerlines that transfer the strange energies of Mount Alexandra through to the city and transform it into standard electricity. These were nicknamed “ley lines” and are widely referred to as such by everyone except VE, who consider them a highly classified trade secret.


Early Days

Joseph “Joe” Zhi was born in 1960 in Ember Point, to a Chinese-American family in BGH. They were very young when they had Joe, and to ends meet both parents worked - his mother got a job as a bank teller, while his father worked as a stevedore in Port Roy. With both parents working long hours, Joe was mostly raised by his grandmother, June.

June worked at a library, and Joe spent hours there after school, looked over by her and her fellow librarians, fondly remembered as his various “Aunts.” They would read to him, sometimes from books far above his age level (as Joe proved to be a very bright child indeed). Joe’s favorite books, in part because they were his grandmother’s favorites, were tales of swashbuckling heroes - Zorro, Captain Blood, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and, above all else, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.

He loved the swordfights, the dashing and daring musketeers crossing steel with dastardly villains. He dreamed of being a hero like them. It was a dream, in part, born out of a feeling of abandonment by his parents. June became a maternal substitute, and for all his life, Joe would feel closer to her than his own mother and father.

These feelings were exacerbated as Joe got older. By the time he was a teenager, his mother and father had worked their way up to more steady and lucrative positions as managers at their job sites. Joe’s father moved the family to Crown Airlines corporate housing in Cookchester, Here, Joe’s parents finally had the time to become more involved in his life, but the distance was already vast, and only grew larger.

This increased when Joe’s younger brother Will was born, and received all the attention and doting as a child that Joe had missed out on. Desperate to get out of his parents’ home, Joe took the first college offer he received - the electrical engineering program at Carson Lake University. Over the years, Joe had developed into a talented science student and amateur engineer, adding tinkering with electronics to the ways he spent his time alone.

After CLU, he was headhunted to work for Ember Point’s local power conglomerate, VE, and he was eventually promoted to one of maintenance teams for the so-called “ley lines.” He was excited at the chance to work on such groundbreaking, still poorly-understood technologies.

One evening, in the midst of preventative work on one of the lines ahead of a major storm, a strange glitch seemed to affect the system. Joe was on the scene, trying to prevent an overload that could cause a blackout, when there was a sudden surge. He pushed his fellow workers out of the way, when the line “burst” and he was struck by the full charge.

He was knocked out instantly, his body glowing and pulsing with what the media would one day facetiously call “a hundred million million volts!” While that number was an exaggeration, the electricity and the strange energies of Mount Alexandra now coursed through his body…


Shocking, Positively Shocking

As he recovered, Joe discovered that rather than any lasting damage from what should have been an electrocution, he had developed superpowers!

He’d been, for lack of a better word, “supercharged.” He was faster and stronger than a normal human, and healed faster as well. Importantly, his reflexes and reaction times were truly exceptional (such that he would later be able to deflect bullets). With a bit of focus he could move short distances in the blink of an eye, though this was exhausting and he was not a “marathon” speedster able to maintain velocity for any length of time.

Joe also had a powerful electric charge in his body, enough that he had to be careful not to shock himself or others by accident. He would eventually develop a number of technological grounding devices to protect those around him, but in a pinch could slap or shock someone like a joy buzzer. This same charge could disrupt electronics, and it could also power all manner of little gadgets, which Joe would develop over time, including a handy grappling hook.

The only person Joe confided these new abilities to was grandma June, always his confidante (she was the only member of his family he had come out to as gay at this point as well). He admitted to her that with these powers, he had the foolish notion that he could finally be the hero he’d always dreamed of. June simply responded, “we better get to work then!” With her library expertise, she helped Joe research his new powers and their implications, and limits. This included developing a “grounding rod,” a walking stick-like device to help him safely discharge buildups of the current within him.

One afternoon, as they further worked on equipment, June became ill. A desperate trip to the hospital ensued, and it became clear that Joe’s grandmother had an advanced form of cancer, with only months to live. Joe wanted to stop, but June insisted that she would live to see her grandson achieve his dream.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. June passed away before they were ready. But as a last gift, she had finished a design for his costume – a blue outfit inspired by the Musketeers Joe had so admired in his youth, ably concealing body armor and other gadgets. And his grounding rod cane concealed a “lightning rod” – a sword-like device to harness and cast about his electrical energies.

In 1987, a week after June Zhi was buried, Bolt, the Electric Swordsman, made his public debut, thwarting an attempt to steal restricted technologies from a VE research facility. One of the first of a new generation of heroes, not tarnished by the legacy of Glorioso, the city of Ember Point embraced this smiling new hero, unaware of how bittersweet the moment was inside of him…


The Enemies

Tragic beginning aside, Bolt threw himself into superheroing with gusto. It was dangerous, it was thrilling. The adrenaline rush was worth it. So were the words of gratitude (and, if he was honest, the feeling of being the center of attention for once) from people he saved.

Whatever you think about his own motives, you can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies. And Bolt quickly developed a rogues gallery for himself:

Dr. Holden Scott, professor at CLU, was inspired by the work of life and career of Miss Terrific, and not in the right way. He attempted to replicate her dust cloud powers, and was astonishingly (partially) successful. He could turn his body into sand, but it stayed in a humanoid shape – nonetheless he could pass through barriers and was all but immune to bullets and other attacks (including Bolt’s lightning rod). As Dr. Quicksand, he was obsessed with further enhancing his powers and pursuing all manner of super-technology schemes, he would repeatedly clash with Bolt. Constantly frustrated by the hero’s ability to improvise technical solutions to many of his schemes, Dr. Quicksand would form several iterations of the Triple Threat, three-person team-ups of Bolt’s various enemies, including a final “greatest hits” attempt to finally slay the hero when Dr. Quicksand learned his form was decaying.

Fender Bender was an odd one - Garrett Wembley dressed like a crash test dummy and with an elastic body that could stretch and absorb all manner of bouncing trauma without issue. He tended to have modest ambitions - looking to steal fancy luxury goods for himself, but was entirely apathetic to the excessive property damage and chaos he caused in the process. His crimes slowly evolved to stop having obvious targets, and Bolt would eventually discover, reluctantly with the help of his brother Will (by then a lawyer), that Fender Bender had started to hire himself out to other criminals and even wealthy corporate backers to create distractions while far subtler crimes and wrongdoing happened elsewhere.

Tim Roque survived an industrial accident and became able to manipulate and shape a variety of metals, including granting himself a second skin of steel as powerful armor. For many years he was the Steeler, a brute force villain with simple smash and grab ambitions, taking a direct route to whatever he wanted – through bank vault doors, if necessary. Fortunately he was remarkably unimaginative with his powers, until an off-hand comment by Bolt during a battle inspired a drastic shift in his life and modus operandi…

Nick Neutron, sometimes also known as the Atom-Snatcher, was born Nicholas Newton. A burglar, he managed to steal an experimental compression matrix, granting him the ability to shrink and shift in size, which let him take his larcenous ambitions farther than he’d ever imagine. He prided himself being on a gentleman thief, especially after he’d stolen more money than he’d ever need, and instead began to commit various daring crimes for the thrill of it. He would give the police and Bolt early notice of his intentions, seeing if he could still commit his thefts under their notice. He developed a flirtatious dynamic with the similarly adrenaline-fueled Electric Swordsman over the course of their rooftop escapades, but this would sadly not have a happy ending.

Finally, for many years, perhaps Bolt’s greatest foe, despite Dr. Quicksand’s ambitions, was Zero, the Masked Destroyer. An anti-technology terrorist in a white mask with a black zero upon it (“to return human society to zero” and thus gain a fresh start), he was a pinnacle of human achievement. A skilled martial artist, a fearless acrobat and free runner, and a technical genius, he targeted industry and research sites in and near Ember Point. It took all Bolt’s skill to survive battling Zero, who outclassed him physically, and all his wits to thwart his dangerous schemes. Over time, Bolt began to gather clues that not all was as it seemed with Zero, and after a final confrontation, the villain renounced his violent philosophy and seemingly disappeared, and Bolt never publicly revealed the former villain’s identity, no matter how much he was pressed upon to…


The Allies (or “Tous pour un, un pour tous”)

Of course, even the brilliant Bolt couldn’t take on all these foes alone!

In 1990, three years into his career, Joe made the acquaintance of one Veronika Vondrák, the teenage heir to the family that founded VE. More specifically, he saved her from a kidnapping and ransom attempt. Even more specifically, he broke into the kidnapper’s HQ, only to find that the resourceful Veronika had already freed herself… with the aid of her newly awakened superhuman abilities.

Veronika possessed potent, but unrefined, powers over electromagnetism, including turning herself into a sort of living lightning bolt. Needing a mentor, and desperate to escape her stifling and sheltered life, she convinced Joe to take her on as Sparky, his sidekick (“partner!” - Veronika).

Joe was able to have the sibling-like relationship with Veronika he never had with his younger brother Will. While they came from very different backgrounds, they both had a desire to be heroes. Sparky lent much needed power to back up Bolt, and used her fortune to help build them a proper base of operations, as well as several “Boltmobiles” (not an official name!) to widen their area of operations.

This was critical because in 1991, the pair joined the Battalion. Well, officially Bolt joined, while Sparky was restricted to reserve status for the first year due to the Battalion’s policy disallowing minors as members. Bolt had previously earned the team’s admiration as one of the heroes called in during the Clash of ‘89, where he’d acquitted himself well. A few more years of membership changes, and Bolt’s own star rising, led to the invitation being extended. Ember Point had other heroes at this point, so Bolt and Spark packed up, and moved to Chicago.

The pair were popular in their new home, and with their teammates. Bolt and the Bronze Rider had a number of team-ups outside the full Battalion lineup. “The Cowboy and the Cavalier” took on a number of strange menaces, all too-often starting with street-level threats or mysteries that expanded to bizarre mystic or scientific menaces.

Yet, while Bolt was pleased to see the world with the Battalion, he eventually became homesick. After several years with the team, he resigned and returned to Ember Point. This would also be the end of his partnership with Sparky, for the time being, who chose to stay with the Battalion instead. Joe and Veronika parted amicably, and remained in contact.

For the rest of the 90s and early 2000s, Bolt was perhaps THE greatest hero of Ember Point. His veteran status and time with the Battalion meant that he was widely admired, and emulated. However, he also began to find, as he entered his forties, that the rooftop-hopping lifestyle was taking a toll on him. His powers weren’t the sort to prevent aging, nor the constant wear and tear on his body that came with a life of vigorous activity.

He had lived as Bolt so long, that Joe was worried about what he might be missing in his own personal life – the AIDS crisis and his own shyness out of costume had prevented him from doing much dating, and quitting his job to go to Chicago with the Battalion, a reason he couldn’t fully explain to any prospective employers, meant his career was behind where it could have been. Yet people were still in danger, and the Electric Swordsman still had derring-do to do.

Then in 2005, when Nick Neutron was released from a lengthy prison sentence, and made plans for “a job to end all jobs” to return to his former glory…


Retirement and Present

Over the decades, Ember Point and other major American cities had less and less tolerance for costumed super-antics, villainy especially. Politicians needed to appear “tough on super-crime” to win elections, and thus use of superhuman skills, powers, or technologies became a modifier that could add years to a sentence, even for wholly non-violent offenders such as Nick Neutron.

The Atom-Snatcher came out of prison in 2005, drained by years behind bars, but eager to recapture his reputation as a fantastic super-thief, and perhaps to also recapture the attentions of the dashing Bolt. The police had never discovered his back-up compression matrix, and thus he re-appeared and pulled off a series of heists.

Bolt pursued, and for a moment it was just like it had been a decade ago. Nick Neutron began to shrank, Bolt swung his lightning rod to disrupt the matrix’s activation – and then Nick grasped his chest, and collapsed. Bolt administered CPR until the EMTs arrived, but Nicholas Newton was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Perhaps Joe could have fled, refusing to cooperate. But his guilt and his sense of responsibility demanded that he turned himself in. And so the Electric Swordsman unmasked, surrendering himself to police custody in advance of a possible trial for the killing of Nick Neutron.

Ultimately, the coroner’s investigation revealed that Nick had long suffered from heart issues, worsened by the lack of proper medical care in prison, and that he’d begun to suffer a heart attack before Bolt even struck him. The DA declined to press charges, and Joe was largely exonerated in the press and the court of public opinion.

But in his own eyes, it didn’t matter. The thing that mattered was that Joe and Nick were too old to be playing cops-and-robbers out there any more. And given his own feelings for Nick, Joe just couldn’t bring himself to put on the costume anymore. So, Bolt officially announced his retirement.

He would later give a wide-ranging, extremely thorough interview in the Hour about his life and career, only leaving out details that would have violated the privacy of his friends, family, teammates, and enemies. This included officially coming out. His sexuality had been an open secret amongst his Battalion teammates, but this but made Joe a queer icon, something he’s embraced in recent years, as the battle for equality is one he can fight without a mask and a sword.

Joe declined an invitation to join the new Battalion when they reformed, and every time they’ve asked since, adamant that he is retired and he doesn’t have the stomach for the work any more. That said he’s acted to defend civilians around him during certain major crisis events. He also gave Veronika Vondrák his blessing to take up the mantle of Bolt as Darkbolt, especially because the Infamous Owl’s attack and vampirization of her was the closest he’s come to picking up the lightning rod once again.

Joe has also declined a number of offers to work for a variety of high tech corporate firms, including VE, keeping his gadget designs to himself both to prevent potential abuse and because quite frankly most of his tech is wildly impractical for anyone not able to power it as a living generator.

Instead, Joe earned a degree in library science, and began working in the Ember Point library system, where he specializes in running programs for at-risk, underprivileged, and LGBTQIA+ youth. At present, he has agreed to take up the position of head librarian at the Lowgrove branch, as few were willing after the neighborhood’s transition to “Lowgrave” and a center of the vampire integration movement. This was partly a favor to Veronika to support her and her team’s efforts, but also because Joe is well aware that the right book, in the right time, given to a lonely person in need, can make all the difference.

-

Possible Plot Seeds & Campaign Uses

• While he well and truly never wants to be the Electric Swordsman again, Joe could find himself picking up the lightning rod again, Dark Knight Returns-style, to help protect neighborhood kids at the library - human or vampire. He’s older, out of shape, and out of practice, so he’d be willing to work with and recruit others to his cause, a good mentor for a street-level game in that way.
• Alternatively, since Joe couldn’t bring himself to destroy his Bolt gear, it could be found (or stolen) by a new hero or even a villain. It might require an intrepid gadgeteer develop a new power source, if they don’t have inherent energy abilities like Bolt did, however. Joe, and Veronika/Darkbolt, would be quite interested in figuring out who this new hero was. A good PC concept could be a vampire inspired by Bolt’s legacy working to protect Lowgrave’s human and undead populations. Joe would be a very reluctant mentor in this case - he’d try to convince the PC that being Bolt ultimately leads to heartbreak, but he’s still a hero and he won’t try to stop someone clearly doing good.
• Exposure to accidents (or intentional experiments!) along the VE “ley lines” could cause all sorts of energy and electrical powers as an origin for other heroes and villains. These could be more conventional, Electro-like powers, or something odder. Maybe something more along the lines of volcanic-related powers, if they come from closer to the core of Mount Alexandra. They also make a good target for supervillains - either to plunge the city into a blackout (perhaps to enable some further scheme while everyone is distracted), or to be hijacked as a power source for some grand evil device. Alternatively, an energy villain might try to enter the ley lines and seize control of the city (or the mountain) itself!
• During the height of Bolt's career, he's a great crossover hero. He's skilled, but not too powerful, so less likely to overshadow PCs, and his own bold and brash nature means he might get himself in over his head and need bailing out. And of course, any chance to have a duel with a sword-using PC is a must! Whether it's the typical superhero-misunderstanding-fight, or because someone is mind-controlled, or a public show for charity, Bolt will give it all he's got! His technical knowledge also makes him a good resource if the PCs need an engineer or scientist, especially to help dismantle any strange electronics they may come across.

[EternalPhoenix]

I'm still reading! I don't have anything specific to say, but I'm still here!

[Commander Titan]

Radio silence comes from those long stretches of creative thinking, editing, and of course the depressive attacks where I realize how much mental energy I spend on this stuff and feel like it's nothing but a waste...

State of my mind aside, I'm nailing down the final three members of the original Battalion and then we'll be doing a three or four part outline of their membership over the years.

[Davies]

Looking forward!