The Birth of a monster
Rahn, also known as "The Red Menace" for the bloody trail he leaves in his path, exists because the evil of the Black Hand knows no bounds. The creature known as Rahn was once a child, named Vladmir Orlokov, a part of the Black Hand's epsilon division, which specializes in psionics, psychological warfare, and genetic engineering. He was born in Soviet Russia during the 1968 to a well off family. For a time, his life was happy, the boy didn't have any problems in school or socially speaking. His family was kind and loving, immensely dedicated to their children. He was considered bright, affectionate, had plenty of friends and preformed well in class.
He even had psionic talent and a superhumanly enhanced physique, which he used to fight bullies and petty thugs in his neighborhood as well as to entertain his friends and family. He was popular with the neighborhood, people even styled him as Moscow's own child hero. It seemed that no one could touch him, he was on the top of the world, aiding a good cause and bringing happiness to people. It made him happy to see others lives improved, and the others were happy with him. He was used as an example by Soviet schools of what every child should aspire to be, a selfless servant of the people, who combats the threats to it even though he wasn't even old enough to sit on the front seat of a car.
He held the world in a certain childish wonder and awe. There was just so much to see, and so much to do. Everything just seemed so incredible to him at the time that he just had to get out and explore it all for himself while trying to help as many people as he could. He was as much an adventurer as he was a hero, and he saw himself as such, splitting his free time between exploration and heroism. His psionic abilities let him view the world in a way that most couldn't which perhaps only enhanced his insatiable curiosity. He was endearingly precocious in the way he spoke to grown ups, trying to act as if he was on their developmental level but frequently slipping up with his act due to his never ending curiosity.
He was even given medals and accolades by the government, and had some a small following even out of his native Russia, For a time, it seemed even the eastern european nationalists who hated the current Communist regime admired him. His was an almost storybook style life, as good as it could get in the Soviet Union, which was surprisingly quite good despite the Eastern Bloc's reputation. He idolized soviet heroes such as the Emerald Soviet, the Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, Ursa Major, Nuclear Winter, Red October, Red Guardian, Red Star, the famous duo of "People's hammer" and "Union's sickle", The Crimson Torch, and so on so forth.
Real name: Vladimir OrlokovHe often went on adventures with these heroes of the people, frequently going out of the motherland's borders, sometimes even going as far away as the depths of space! He met all sorts of people, and even beings that couldn't even be described as "people", and laid his young eyes on all sorts of things. He even got to live out another common fantasy of boys everywhere, seeing real dinosaurs when he went to places such as Monster Isle, Skull Island, and the Savage Land. About the only downside of those trips is that he was never allowed to bring any of them back home, but so much as getting to see things such as dinosaurs and aliens was incredible enough.
He always kept on trying to improve himself, really wanting to make his parents and his country proud of him. More than anything, he wanted to see the people he loved happy. He devoted nearly all the time he had to trying to make the world as he saw it a better place for those he cared about. It wasn't about the medals, the rewards, being presented on television, or being famous, it was genuinely trying to make other people live better lives. He wasn't quite old enough to fall into the selfish ulterior motives that plague many adult superheroes, and honestly, even if he were, he still wouldn't give into those motives. It just wasn't what he was raised to believe in, or what he honestly wanted for himself.
Those who knew him generally regarded as one of the sweetest, most loyal, and charmingly idealistic people they met. He had a refreshingly bright view of what many saw as an increasingly dark world. He had that sort of never give up attitude so common to children, stubbornly going after a task that he saw as being the right thing to do, even if there were easier or simpler ways to go about it. Though some disparaged him for being as nice a person as he was, most people were happy to see someone who was not only just, but kind to a fault, even to villains or the "capitalist swine" of the west. He just didn't seem to have a capacity for true meanness.
This made him something of a favorite guest for others, and he got to meet many incredible heroes and beings even while he wasn't out on adventures or quests. Naturally, he was always deeply interested in virtually every detail he could lay his eyes on, and did his best to be polite to those who hosted him over. Another quality of his that many enjoyed was the fact that he didn't really care about political ideaology or nationality, the fact that the Communist East and Capitalist West were supposed to be enemies didn't really seem to take hold in the soviet child's mind. To him, everyone really should have gotten over themselves and been friends, even if they believed in different things.
But all good things had to come to an end. the Soviets invaded Afghanistan sending much of Russia's young men away, and the Black Hand used the opportunity to sweep through the area on a massive recruitment drive. The rapacious and merciless killer known as Ishmael the death jester was at the head of this impressment drive, which he used as an excuse to brutalize and torment more people to satiate his hate for all things. The Black hand terrorized Russia during this time to punish it for trying to fight against it for so long, giving it's all to make damn sure that the communists lost the cold war so that the western system that allowed the Hand such free reign would emerge triumphant.
Orlokov and his family resisted the Black Hand's impressment gangs and for their efforts, Orlokov's relatives were slaughtered down to their dogs for their trouble by the laughing murderer known as Ishmael the Deathjester, all in front of Vladmir as they decided to take him into their forces anyway. He was brought to their red and black temples where he was brutally tortured to break him until he accepted the Black Hand's dogma. Rapes from both male and female members of the black hand, beatings, giving him something to care about only to brutally slaughter it in front of his eyes, and magically induced nightmares were all part of this indoctrination process.
From Vladmir Orlokov to Rahn the Red Menace.But during one such session he was detected as having Psionic potential and was immediately selected for the Epsilon division, where he went under another series of stern, but not quite torturous regimens to bring him into the Black hand's special psionic division. As anything was better than what he had gone through under the Black Hand proper, he worked to please his new handlers, and once again, things appeared good for the now twelve year old boy. He found that Yuri Omega's Epsilon group was a far kinder taskmaster than Caliborn's infamous Shadow Cult, and did his best to adjust into it, even though he repeatedly expressed homesickness.
But then he was selected by Yuri-Omega, the head of the Epsilon division, to participate in a "hypersoldier" program that would give the Black Hand troops to match even the most powerful of metahumans to an even greater extent than the superelite Reapers and Centurions. He was taken in and underwent a series of scientific and magical alterations that even the most depraved government agencies would find revolting. But the Black Hand had already broken him as a small child, there was no reason for him to be bitter as he was turned into a monster. Even as he was subjected to agony beyond the comprehension of most, he had already sunk to the bottom of the abyss, but of course, that never stopped the Black Hand from digging.
Every ounce of humanity was stripped from him, the Black Hand had no use for such traits, they wanted a monster that would strike fear into the hearts of all who saw it. They wanted beasts that would drown the world in it's own blood. His muscles were augmented to a massive degree, his genome was altered, his skin became a hard, glistening exoskeleton, his fingers lengthened and sharpened into terrible claws, he developed the ability to project ropy tendrils, his mind was broken into tiny pieces and then reassembled into the psyche of the perfect warrior, his cells enhanced, there was literally nothing left of his original body.
When they finished, he had become what they wanted, after weeks of being subjected to the cruel experiment, he was now a walking bio-weapon, more a sapient mass of viruses than anything that fit the standard definition of life. One that could lay waste to entire meta-human teams, one who could go from cooly calculated murder to ferally raging slaughter at the push of the button. Now thirteen, he was given a simple command, slaughter the whole of his extended family and every single childhood friend he ever had to prove his loyalty to Epsilon. If there was anything in him that balked at such a suggestion, it clearly did not express itself.
He did so without a second thought, appearing to his family and friends in the guise of his old body to lure them in with the bait of finding their long lost boy. When they had all gathered around him, he transformed into his true form and painted the snow red with their blood and entrails. They screamed, asking god why something like this would happened, asking him to stop, asking him to remember who he was. He didn't listen, he just kept on killing, until the last person stopped twitching. Then he went on to consume every last scrap of their biomatter, these people becoming the first things that the viral monster would devour as it became once of the most formadible members of the inner circle.
The year was nineteen eighty one, and the monster known as Rahn was now complete. One of many such hypersoldiers built in the style of Ishmael to provide the hand with a series of enormously powerful murderers that could match anything those who opposed the Black Hand could throw at them. The sweet, kind boy Vladmir was now completely and utterly dead, and now only the bloodthirsty monster known as Rahn stood in his place. Impressed with his work, Yuri Omega elevated him to the Inner Circle as one of the massive Brain's direct lieutenants and has become a political force within the black hand in his own right.
Powers
Superhuman strength: Rahn appears to have Class 100+ strength, his best feat of strength being tossing a 10,000 ton Talon cruiser nearly three dozen miles without seeming to strain himself and can shift his biomass for increased hitting power should he need to do so. Additionally, his strength allows him a surprising deal of speed and the ability to make many mile leaps. Rahn can increase his powers by consuming more biomass, including that in microbial form. Currently, he is strong enough to bash his way through second grade Adamantium without overly much strain.
Durability: Rahn is immensely durable, which is further bolstered by his inhuman anatomy, which allows him to adjust his density to allow attacks to just pass through him or bounce off of him. Additionally, he no longer has any vital points such as organs or bones to strike at, as he is essentially a walking mass of Viral matter, severing limbs or even his head when he decides to take a form that has one isn't of itself dangerous to him other than the fact that his main body will no longer have access to the mass of the severed appendage.
Healing factor: Rahn's healing factor is immense, allowing him to regenerate from say, an adamantium blade swung by a peak human faster than the blade can go through him. He can also regenerate far more quickly by consuming bio-mass, he is capable of absorbing the memories of those he eats as well.
A lost little boy, broken inside.Superspeed: Rahn is incredibly quick, easily capable of breaking hypersonic speeds on foot and has incredibly swift reaction times, capable of catching the bullets of ten miniguns all firing at him at once from different directions for a full minute out of the air with pinching motions without breaking a step with casual ease. Combined with his incredible senses which include pressure sensitivity, he can function with a sort of danger sense as well
Bio-weapons: Rahn can turn his appendages into claws, blades, tendrils, spikes, maces, hammers, or any variety of simple melee weapons to enhance his close in killing ability. Using this ability, he can also develop wings to fly in an atmosphere and is capable of shapeshifting, though he will need to consume someone or at least a complete copy of their genetic code to mimick them perfectly.
Inhuman anatomy: Rahn has no organs or nerve points to attack, rendering him immune to such assaults, this also renders decapitation and disembowelment useless. He is also immune to diseases and poisons for this reason. However, as his body is comprised of viruses in the same way most life forms are made of Eukaryotic cells, special weapons that target Viruses are very debilitating to him, and he's more vulnerable to DNA or protein destabilization than something made out of cells would be. Rahn's split off body parts are capable of fully functioning on their own, though they remain linked to the main body and are proportionately weaker due to their lower mass.
Psionics: Rahn is an extremely potent psion, specializing in biomancy and telekinesis, biomancy is the psionic ability to warp and alter flesh, though this can be resisted. He is capable in other fields, with energomancy and telepathy being his third and fourth most used fields respectively, but the first two are definitely the ones he is most skilled with. His weakest discipline is divinitation, which he hasn't developed since becoming this beast. He typically uses energomancy to charge his attacks with energy sheathes to defeat heavy armour, but occasionally uses it for blasts.
Amphibious: Rahn functions perfectly well in the water, perhaps even better than he does on land!
Absorbed powers: Rahn gains the powers, memories, genetic information, and skills of those living beings that it consumes. The following are the most common absorbed powers of a Rahn body.
The eternal proof that the Black Hand's cruelty knows no bounds.- Electrokinesis: Up to the terrawatt level, he can use this either as blasts of varying sorts, or to enhance his own melee attacks and defense.
- Pyrokinesis: Capable of controlling and generating enough heat to induce nuclear fusion in hydrogen, It can use this to create a fiery aura and set of defenses to help mitigate damage and keep enemies away.
- Umbrakinesis: Capable of forming and controlling dark matter and energy into constructs and energy attacks that can either be used as blasts or to enhance it's own blows and durability.
- Aerokinesis: Capable of creating winds of up to the relativistic level, allowing him to create the deadly, omnidirectional, limitless ranged "Red Miles" attack which involve extremely energy charged winds that are moving around in a tendril shaped current so fast that by sheer friction alone, they enter a plasmafied state, making them intensely lethal to anything that gets in their way, they are not quite the match of John's Blue Knots or the red miles attacks of others.
- Teleportation: Rahn is capable of creating localized warps in space time to teleport itself between universes, though it needs an idea of where it's going less it be subjected to some teleportation misshaps. He has a recharge time between teleportation as well, and he cannot teleport more than himself and what he can physically carry.
Hive Mind: Over the years, Rahn has attained the biomass of several planets over it's many missions across the universe in the Black Hand's name. But to keep him under control, each body of Rahn is required to split off some of it's mass into another Rahn after reaching a certain mass. This means that there is effectively an entire army of Rahns, all linked together by a single hive mind.
Magic resistance: Rahn is incredibly resistant to being directly affected by magic. Magic used against him only has a 10% of affecting him at all, and even then it only affects him with a tenth of it's original strength before one factors in such things as will power, fortitude, and reflexes.
Weaknesses
Cold: Due to the amorphous nature of Rahn's body, being frozen is very debilitating to him, causing intense amounts of pain, killing the viral matter frozen and forcing him to have to consume biomass to replace it rather than just flow back into place, immediately exposing him if he's in a shapeshifted form, and otherwise being incredibly unpleasant. Temperatures below -40 are uncomfortable to him, while Temperatures of -180 and below will cause the harmful effects described above.
Dispersion: Blasting apart Rahn is unlikely to kill him, but if one separates his bits and pieces, he will have to reassemble them should there not be enough biomass to draw into himself to form copies.
Broken: Beneath the seeming totality of the Black Hand's breaking of him at a young age, still lies a boy angry at the world. With the right prodding, he could turn against the Black Hand, indeed he seems to be loyal more to Epsilon specifically than to the Black Hand.
Fears Jesters: Rahn, like many others, has a permanent phobia of the skull mask of Ishmael, convincing replicas of Caliborn's green skull mask, with it's golden fangs and rapidly shifting billiard ball eyes, will cause an immediate and severe PTSD attack. A full body illusion of Caliborn sends Rahn into a catatonic state of shock.
Sometimes, the worst monsters are created from the best people.Viral weaknesses: Rahn is comprised out of a seething mass of unusually complex viruses much in the same way one could say a person is made out of a seething mass of unusually complex protists. While this renders him immune to things such as necrosis as he's not really even alive in a biological sense, he lacks much of the defenses that protect Eukaryotic cells from DNA and Protein destabilization, making him especially vulnerable to such things as Ionizing Radiation or genetic deconstructors.
Telepathic disruption: Attacks that can disrupt Rahn's telepathic bond between his many bodies cause intense pain and discomfort to the creature across all of it's bodies. If one Rahn is cut off, the others all feel the pain of separation. A Rahn separated from the main hive mind becomes confused, agitated, unfocused, and frightened, giving up all other priorities in favour of trying to regain a link to the Rahn mind.
Psionic attack: Ironically, despite being a part of the Black hand's psionic core, Rahn's counter-psionic ability is remarkably poor, and he lacks a special resistance to psionics. He is no more resistant to psionics than a normal albeit very physically tough human is. Obviously, due to his unusual biology, certain uses of psionics are still more effective than others (biomancers who have yet to master control over viral "life forms" still can't affect him for example) but against things such as Telepathy, he is sorely lacking in defenses.
Easily dominated: To keep Rahn under control, the Black Hand conditioned him to be easily affected by things such as mind control, post-hypnotic suggestions, fear displayers (he who looks upon this shall see their worst fears types of things), charms (of the "make the victim believe you're their best friend" variety) of a non-magical nature, and psionic commands.
Ionizing radiation: Due to Rahn's nature as a viral mass, Ionizing radiation attacks break down it's DNA and protein much more easily than it would a creature actually made out of cells. This makes radiation based attacks supremely effective against Rahn bodies, breaking down their ability to form a cohesive structure and can actually delete entire powers from the Rahn body. This also means he cannot remain within UV light from the sun for an overly long amount of time before experiencing genetic damage on his outer layers.
Rahn in a more reflective moment.Bad fighter in base form: Rahn, despite all of the knowledge of highly skilled combatants he's absorbed, is actually an objectively poor combatant, relying almost completely on his powers in his "base" form, this is because martial arts rely on a ratio of speed, strength, mass, and agility and most of them are geared for a specific body type. For example, beings like the sillicon based four armed, horizontally parallel to the ground like a predatory dinosaur, two tailed, six legged Kolarks of Ji'a'mar VI having martial arts that a human could not even begin to make much use of in combat, while a Kolark would have similar difficulties with human combat styles. Only when shifted into the right form, with the right amount of mass can he use these skills properly, and given his usual titanic weight and density, this usually means weakening him tremendously. And even then, he still has to try and factor in his other, more esoteric abilities, which means even despite all he's done, he still cannot fight optimally.
Child at heart: Despite what he likes to believe, at Rahn's core still lies Vladimir Orlokov, that youthful, optimistic, energetic Russian boy. While the Rahn personality is dominant, save for a few brief instances where the Russian boy emerges again, often in reflective moments, Vladimir could in theory be brought back more fully through psionic, cosmic, or even mundane therapeutic means. Vladimir's personality is extremely good natured and sweet to a fault, but horribly broken and caught in despair, caught in enormous grief concerning everything he's lost, everything he's done, and what he's become, almost certainly nothing that would continue a fight. And if this is done to a Rahn that is still linked ot the hive mind, all Rahns will revert back to Vladimir's personality until the Rahn mindset is made dominant once again through external means.
Traits
Height: Variable, typically at least twelve feet tall in it's "base" form. Vladimir was about 5'3 before being transformed.
Mass: Variable, extreme density leads to estimations of being dozens of tons in mass for the average Rahn body. Vladimir weighed about 105 pounds before he was transformed.
Eye colour: Currently non-applicable, had grey eyes at birth.
Hair colour: Can be any he wants, had platinum blond hair at birth.
Affiliations: The Black Hand, Epsilon
Nationality: Russian
Age: Currently Forty three, ceased being human at age thirteen.
Sexuality: Pansexual with a noted preference for women, when engaging in intimate or romantic affairs, Rahn always assumes the opposite gender to his "partner" whenever possible. Vladimir was strictly heterosexual.
Alignment: Neutral Evil leaning towards Chaotic evil. Vladimir is Neutral Good leaning towards Lawful Good.
Family: All dead.
Birthplace: Moscow, Russia.
Birthdate: October 19th. 1968.
Religion: Vladimir was raised as a liberal Russian Orthodox, Rahn is a follower of the icon.
Split off
Recently, The Vladimir personality has been forcibly split from Rahn with it's own body and an identical powerset, For all intents and purposes, Vladimir is back and functions as a good Rahn, though Rahn constantly seeks to try and force Vladimir to rejoin him. Vladimir is trying to come to terms with rejoining the human world again, and is looking for a new family to be raised by, to try and help him control his now awesome powers.
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