Hero Prime began his career as Omega Extreme, a hero drawing from Superman, The Eradicator, and Booster Gold for inspiration. Initially, his story had him visiting our time from a distant future utopia, where people had naturally developed powers and abilities that, in the past, had belonged only to heroes. As I played him, I discovered the opportunity to deepen his story, and to broaden it significantly, and he went through a number of changes - though no major retcons or rewrites. Today, he's one of my favorite characters.

[edit] Affiliations

Mike Mars is currently contracted as a technologist for The Zenvious Foundation, though he is also a member of Vanguard. He is a former member of The Guardian Force and maintains several friendships there. More recently, he has made some Rogue Isles aquaintances with the Dread Aces.

[edit] Origin

[edit] The Future Perceived

The actual date of Michael Mars' birth is difficult to determine, but his given age placed him born in CE3449. The memories of his childhood are scant and uncertain, but for the first twenty five years of his life, Mike's surroundings seemed the utopian. There was no war, no conflict, no scandal. Belief systems had been distilled and meshed into a common faith that centered around the ingenuity of mankind and the benevolence of fate. The world had been set on a good and proper course in the late twenty-first century, and had prospered in the following fourteen hundred years. There was no need unfulfilled, no want that could not be attained. Humankind had achieved magnificent scientific leaps, and had even managed to nudge evolution along its path to give normal men and women abilities only "heroes" of the past had wielded.

In this world, Mike Mars was an average young man, a resident of Pinnacle City, formerly known as Denver. He was trained in luminatechnology, working on his Grandmaster's thesis. He enjoyed extreme sports, but with a twist: Michael Mars' ability to absorb and redirect energy made him nearly invulnerable to harm, which meant he could perform tasks more daring and dangerous than many others. Lava surfing and chuteless base-jumping (which meant seeing how close he could come to the ground before bringing himself to a hovering halt) were among his favorite hobbies, other than watching old recordings and reading stories of the bygone Age of Heroes.

Of that Age, one hero stood out in Mike's mind, almost to the point of idolization - a child, sent from another planet, imbued with powers by Earth's yellow sun, who grew to be the most powerful and most noble hero the world had ever seen: Superman. The Man of Steel ignited Mike's imagination, and he wished for the chance to travel back to an age long past and working alongside his hero. The first step toward fulfilling his wish came in CE3474 when Sidney Savant, a brilliantly prodigous young man specializing in quantum gravometrics, offered to open a gateway that would send Mike plummeting back in time to the early twenty-first century, right into the peak of the heroic age.

[edit] The Future: Reality

Michael Mars was born in a timeless subspace dimension known as The Core. A religious sect of the Rikti known as the Iradu had kidnapped his mother from her proper time - the eary twenty-first century - in order to procure the child. His mother was rescued by an unknown hero after the child was born, but the boy was too heavily guarded and had to be left behind. Transported into a twisted branch of Primal Earth's future, Mike was raised in a creche, attached to a biotechnical system that kept him alive in a state of virtual reality, while working his body to negate the potential for atrophy.

By the thirty-fifth century, the Iradu had siezed power on their homeworld and used superior numbers and advanced technology to overcome the metahumans of Earth Prime, decimating its population and enslaving its survivors. Using Earth as a platform for greater conquest, the Rikti spread throughout the galaxy, conquering world after world, seeking out and dominating all sentient life. Their plan for Mike, with his particular abilities, was unique, an experiment by the Iradu built as a weapon of mass destruction. His powers, they reasoned, would allow him to be inserted into a planetary core, absorb tremendous amounts of energy, and output it back into the core in one huge blast, tearing the planet apart from the inside.

Sidney Savant, however, managed to break free of the psionic bonds holding his mind hostage and freed Mike, sending him back to a time and place he was certain the Iradu would not look.

[edit] Humble Beginnings

Completely naive to the truth behind his life, Mike arrived in the twenty-first century on August 27th, 2004, appearing naked and dazed in the Kansas countryside, near the rural community of Elk Falls. He stumbled through fields until he reached a road, waving down the first passing truck. The driver, a seasoned farmer by the name of George Harris, saw a chance to help someone in need, and gave the young man a spare pair of coveralls he kept behind the seat. The farmer and his wife, Tilda, offered Mike a room in their farmhouse and a chance to work the farm for the remainder of the summer and fall, to help him get on his feet.

Mike remained in the Harris home for the next eighteen months, staying out of the limelight and helping George and Tilda with the farm chores, revealing to them only little bits of his past. In early 2006, however, he learned of the problems facing Paragon City and confronted his hosts, showing them what feats he was capable of performing and explaining that he had to leave, to go help the Rhode Island metropolis. With their blessing and a costume handmade by the talented Mrs. Harris, Mike arrived in Paragon City and took on the name Omega Extreme, balancing his time between his newfound work as a hero, his job as a staff reporter for the Paragon Free Press, and an hour or so of free time each day spent at Pocket D.

It was during these frequent visits to DJ Zero's club when Omega Extreme met two people who would influence his life to some degree in the near future. The first - and probably his oldest friend in Paragon City - was Alice Littlefield. Alice took an interest in Mike due to his nature as a "Class Two Dimensional Traveler" who needed to be registered with the governmental agency under whom she worked, the BAIC, but her professional interest quickly developed into something more, and she asked him out on a date. About the same time, he met Angel Sliversky, who discovered Mike had no idea what a "date" was, and became determined to show him. One date (with each) later, and the new hero was faced with a choice: Who would he continue seeing? Weighing his options, he decided to explore a relationship with Angel.

It was during their first month together that Mike received a communique from Sidney Savant. The holographic message passed along information that shattered everything the young man knew about himself, and changed how he would see the future forever.

[edit] Sometimes the Truth Hurts

Savant's revelation was simple: While he didn't know the secret of Mike's birth, he did reveail that Mike had not grown up in a utopian world, but in a biotechnical simulation designed by the Iradu. What was worse, he had been wrong about the Rikti not knowing where to find their experiemnt. The Iradu traced the portal, and followed it back to a parallel time on their own homeworld, inserting themselves into positions of authority and power, and using their influence to sway the Restructurists, urging them to attack Primal Earth. That attack came on March 23rd, 2002, and allowed the Iradu to lay in wait for Michael Mars' eventual arrival as Omega Extreme. Shortly thereafter, Angel - who admitted to Mike that she, too, was a time-traveler - disappeared, and, stonewalled by her family, Mike, emotionally crushed by the perceived abandonment, believed she had returned to her own time.

In October and November of 2006, Mike enjoyed the company of Jennifer Dietrich, but also experienced his first real sense of the price of being a hero. A car carrying diplomats from Theta42 careened off the overpass in Skyway City, crashing through his seventh-story apartment's outer wall. The diplomat was delivering a series of schematics and personal effects to Abaleno Lutrai, the Theta42 Ambassador, and was pursued by Malta Operatives. Mike completed the dying diplomat's delivery, but became the target of Malta attacks. In order to protect Jennifer, he retired the Omega Extreme identity and took up residence on Vigil Station with The Guardian Force, secretly working under the name Mr. Protagonist, an alias he shared only with Ms. Dietrich and his best friend, Bobby Thistle. The relationship with Jennifer was cut short just before Thanksgiving when she disappeared. He spent the next month searching for her, but found no clues as to her disappearance, other than that her belongings had gone with her. The only conclusion he could reach was that she simply left, continuing the search for answers to her own questions elsewhere.

Two months later, after leaving the Guardian Force and signing on full time with The Zenvious Foundation, he renewed his relationship with Angel Silversky, and the two dated for a short time before becoming engaged. Eight months later, they ended the relationship due to irreconcilable differences.

[edit] Fate Comes Full Circle

Hero Prime

In early 2007, Mike received a bit of a shock when a child expected by Jade Bernough and Kai Keller was shown to share over 90% of his genetic markers. There was a mild bit of speculation that he had engaged in an affair with Jade, a notion that was debunked when it was mentioned that a parent usually shares between 25% and 35% of the genetic markers with a child. The connection between Mike and the child, however, was perplexing, especially with Mike from such a far jump into the future. The child, however, exhibitied some rather interesting qualities, especially for being still inside the womb. He absorbed tremendous amounts of energy, and seemed to be aging at an accellerated pace. The growth rate was later discovered to be the result not of natural growth in our life cycle, but the result of long periods of growth during which Jade had been snatched out of the Primal Earth timeline, observed for up to weeks at a time, then returned to the exact second she left, her memories of the kidnapping erased.

The Iradu, through the Rikti, eventually managed to procure the child during their last observation period. During the preparation to being Jade on mutagenic treatments, however, an assault on their facility, led by two unknown heroes, managed to free Ms. Bernough and return her to Primal Earth, but without her child.

More was not discovered until, at the behest of Lady Grey, Mike was fighting the Honoree - formerly Hero 1, the legendary British hero and wielder of Excalibur. During the fight, Hero 1 managed to return, at least in part, to his human sensibilities long enough to tell Mike two things. First was that he was the child kidnapped by the Iradu, the product of the union of archmage Jade Ohm and the ascended Psi Monk. This, in turn, gave him a whole new family, which included a spunky, excitable little sister, Vagary Keller, who calls him her "Big Little Brother". Secondly, the Iradu had come after him - that they had been waiting for him, and would continue to try and reclaim their pet project. They called him "Target Hero: Prime". That night, he dropped all pretense and told everyone who he was: Mike Mars was Mr. Protagonist. The next day, he dropped the name entirely and took up a new name, one inspired by what the Rikti called him: Hero Prime.

[edit] And Now...

Hero Prime continues his fight against the Rikti, aiding others in the Foundation and around the city as he can. He is often seen in the company of Saya Ragehunter, a young elven woman with whom Mike is rather smitten. The pair live together in Founders' Falls, and work together regularly.

[edit] External Links

The Zenvious Foundation