Went sifting through Sling Shot's forum posts to find this page. What would you guys think about a Planetary RPG in which you are the character you've created here? That would (obviously) require more people to create characters, but maybe having something to do with them will encourage more people to make one. I know there are some more Planetary lovers here so I expect to see some ideas. And with that, here's mine.
Cable
Years before the victory over the 4, back when there were only 3 members of the Planetary field team, Elijah found out that Randall Dowling and Kim Suskind had conceived a child. It was believed that their genomes were too damaged to breed successfully, but that was apparently not the case. The pair had a child that they sent to a special facility for research and experimentation. The unfortunate child was named Nathan. Elijah was informed of the existence of the facility Nathan and many other children were being kept in, and with Ambrose and Jakita, went to close it down. All the children were set up with families and given normal lives, but 11 year old Nathan didn’t forget about the people who saved him. He was smart and resourceful so he did some digging, got in contact with people and eventually learned about Planetary. He even got access to the Planetary Guides and read every single page he could find. He desperately wanted to be a part of the team but never got the opportunity. As he grew up he started to forget exactly what had happened when he was a child and stopped believing that Planetary really existed. It didn’t help that by the time he was in his twenties Elijah Snow and the rest of Planetary had disappeared without a trace. His desire to serve something bigger than himself never went away though, and he enlisted. He was involved in many wars, small ones, large ones, secret ones, too many to count. War changed him even more and he became a hard, serious man.
He eventually left the wars behind and became just another guy. 35 years had gone by since he was rescued from evil scientists and he had almost blocked his early years out of his mind when Ambrose Chase showed up bleeding on his couch. When Ambrose had disappeared all those years ago, his powers had worked in a new way and shunted him forward into the future to where he lay now. Nathan immediately remembered the black man in white and went to help him. Thinking of the fastest way to get the bleeding man to the hospital, he picked him up carried him out his door only to find himself inside the entrance to an emergency room. While he stood in shock doctors nearby saw Ambrose and the state he was in and rushed him into surgery. They were able to save him and when he had healed completely, Nathan offered to let Ambrose stay with him until he could figure something out, since he couldn’t return to his own time.
His motives weren’t completely selfless however. He had hoped that Ambrose could tell him what had happened when he seemingly teleported into the hospital, but Ambrose had been unconscious and didn’t have any ideas. All he could think of was to put Nathan through the same things he went through as a child of Science City Zero. Over a period of months Nathan uncovered his ability to transcend the physical plane. Ambrose and Nathan discovered that he was able to remove himself from the physical plane and enter other levels of reality. Over time he became skilled at traversing several different realms, but his favorite and most natural to him was the psychic, or astral plane, where he could directly interact with the minds of others. He also learned practical applications for his powers. One, he termed “body sliding”, involved stepping onto a higher plane and coming back to the physical one somewhere else. (After his second time doing so he realized that was how he had gotten Ambrose to the hospital so fast.)
Once he had a good handle on the ins and outs of his powers, he and Ambrose jumped into the work of tracking down and preserving the world’s secret history. In place of Elijah and his missing team, they became the new Planetary. One mystery they always hoped to uncover was the disappearance of the original organization, but along the way they came across something the two of them couldn’t handle, a being who called himself “The Forever Walker”. He claimed to be an immortal, the only survivor of the very first batch of Century babies who had been around since the beginning of sentient life on the planet. When Nathan and Ambrose learned of his plans for the future and the Walker’s role in what he claimed was the “death of Planetary” many years earlier, they knew they had to stop him. They engaged him in battle after battle but his millennia of experience, not to mention formidable powers, left him the victor every time. In one confrontation, after Nathan had exhausted himself fighting the Forever Walker on every level of reality he could think of and still losing, Ambrose paid the ultimate price just so Nathan would have a chance at escaping alive.
Nathan took the opportunity given to him and tried the only thing he hadn’t done yet. Stepping into the realm of time, he walked decades into the past to when Planetary was still up and running. Taking the name Nathan Snow and claiming to be Elijah’s son from the future, he became a member of the team in an effort to prepare them for the threat that was coming.
Powers: Nathan Snow’s powers allow him to access reality on levels other than the physical one we all live in. He sees them as different frequencies or channels and each one is as natural to him as three dimensional space. After honing his powers with Ambrose, Nathan has become most comfortable traversing the psychic, temporal, causal realms, as well as the afterlife and the bleed, but these are just the tip of the iceberg.
Not only can he walk through these realms, but he can affect them. People aren’t aware of all the levels of reality they exist on, but it’s more than just the physical. For example, most sentient beings exist in the psychic realm as well (though some are more aware of it) and he can mimic psychic powers by interacting with a person’s psychic form. (Mind reading for instance would take place by speaking to a person’s psychic manifestation. Another telepath would be aware of the psychic realm and so could refuse to respond, but a normal person wouldn’t be able to stop their psychic self from answering any question Nathan asked.) He could also kill an enemy on the psychic plane leaving them brain dead in the normal world.
Nathan was a natural fighter as he found out when he first joined the army. Though he wages most of his battles on other planes, he can more than take care of himself on the physical one. He is skilled in unarmed combat and has been trained in the use of all kinds of weapons, from Earth and beyond. When in a fight or expecting one he’s most commonly seen carrying one or two excessively large guns and packs of ammo and explosives.
While being upwards of 45 years old, Nathan is in exceptional physical condition; and not just for a man his age, but for one in his prime. He can find no explanation for it other than as either a side affect of his powers to make him tough enough to traverse dimensions unaided or a result of having done so for so long.
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