Biographical Information:<br/>Code Name: Pax<br/>Real Name: Judah Somerset<br/>Other Aliases: None<br/>Secret Identity: Judah Somerset was well known as being Pax, when he was active under that id.<br/>Occupation: Owner of Aegis Industries, a company known primarily for defence contracting.<br/>Legal Status: Citizen of the United States of America with No Criminal Record<br/>Place of Birth: Unknown<br/>Martial Status: Single<br/>Known Relatives: Elizabeth and William Somerset (parents, deceased)<br/>Current Base of Operations: Splits time between New York City, London and Washington DC primarily.<br/>Extent of Education: The equivalent of multiple degrees across several fields<br/>Religion: Agnostic<br/>Group Affiliation: none<br/><br/><strong>Known Abilities/Skills</strong>:<br/><br/><strong>Crucible of Human Development</strong>: It was said that Pax's capacity was outright preternatural, but as he used to be fond of correcting, it was very much the opposite that was true. Almost everything Judah could do, human beings have done. It is simply that he is a walking repository of those accomplishments, from the athletic to the bizarre. Men have caught arrows between their hands, slapped those hands around the flats of blades. Men have stood on coals and ignored the pain entirely, lain or perched on beds of needles and remained in balance, punched through bricks, punched through ice. Men have remained still and silent and wakeful for days, and willed themselves in and out of trance states, from monomaniacal hunting frenzies, slowed down their heartbeats and mimicked death, leapt and ran great distances after days of privation.  From Shaolin to Vodoun to Yogi to Carnival sideshows, if there was a person or group that was pushing the edge of human capacity, Judah traveled out to meet them and learn at their feet, to make their skills his own.  If there was a study that would point to the heightening of some senses when others were deprived, Judah would spend whole stretches of time without them to develop a similar acuity in himself. It is not a process he ever abandoned, his military contracting having allowed him the occasional perusing of abandoned MK ULTRA files, taking from them efforts to desensitize himself as best he could to drugs, hypnosis, to undergo torture in order to understand it and understand where his own breaking points were, and then push them further.<br/><br/>Most of whatever he can do, someone, somewhere has the knowing of it. It is simply that he himself can do all of these things himself. He is a walking repository of olympic records and esoteric capabilities.<br/><br/><strong>That too fine mind</strong>: Judah has been a student of human history, of humanity itself, of how cultures form, behave, grow and die. Of the psychological behaviour behind it all. Of the sociological principles that can be observed and theorized upon, the economics weaving through human interaction and the rise and fall of civilizations. From books, from teachers and from watching and living first hand has Judah refined his knowledge, and wherever he could, as viscerally as possible. He has whirled with dervishes and hunted with tribesmen across plain and jungle, with spear and blowgun. He has sat down with shamans, gurus, cult leaders and CEOs. All of it in a hope to understand the core of the human spirit, and how to improve upon it, to guide it to somewhere better. If instead he turns it now to more twisted manipulations, he would say that perhaps that is a reflection on just what he saw in the heart of man, and what he has to turn on it to excise that darkness.<br/><br/>Much of his advanced intellect and always swiftly flickering thoughts he turned to medicine, the science of his parents, carrying around the knowledge thus of several doctorates, medical and otherwise. His understanding of the human body, of disease, of health as it strengthens or decays is second to none, and supplement with anything he could grab from the wider world, from herbalism to acupuncture.<br/><br/>His strength of will lets him balance out the many compartments of his thoughts, and keeps his knowledge from overwhelming him. It is a resolve beyond pain, and so information overload is a small thing to keep at bay by comparison.<br/><br/><strong>Holistics</strong>: It is Judah's ability to combine the training of body and mind into a greater whole that is one of the more dangerous things about him. At the most basic, his martial prowess, and his understanding of the human body lead to a regular use of pressure points and nerve strikes in his fights as Pax, of knowing where nerves cluster, where blood and muscle and organs place to strike off whole chain reactions, of just the right moment to strike at someone's temples when their adrenalin starts to rush.<br/><br/>At the more extreme, there were stories that Pax could dodge bullets. But while the idea might fascinate him (if not fascinate him enough to actually /try/), he can't. What he actually does, is dodge aim, dodge draws. He is deeply familiar with reaction times, with the twitch of nerves and reflex, of his own, of others, of how people react to stimulus, of velocities and aerodynamics. And his senses are always taking in his surroundings so precisely, the scrape of a foot, the pant of a quickened breath, the movement before him and the muscles shifting to shape that movement. Of the pull of hammers, the flash of scopes, the situational awareness of being watched. What he does, is read bodies, read environments, have a sense of behaviour and cause and effect.  What he does, is understand the moments he has just before an attack launches, and how to move to where it will not be, how to keep so moving. The shaken stories of thugs and muggers notwithstanding, he could explain it in entirely scientific terms. And as a side benefit, body reading is entirely useful in judging someone's emotional state, if they don't know it's being done and have a facility for tight control of themselves (Ozymandias can be frustrating in that sense)<br/><br/><br/><strong>Particularities, Limitations, and Weaknesses</strong>:<br/><br/>Judah's mind can be kept at bay with his will, in that it can be kept from overwhelming him, but he can't quite still his thoughts from staying in motion all the time. And while they usually race forward, sometimes they race back. And it isn't processing new information, constantly formulating new conclusions or theories that does him in, it is old dreams, old failures. He doesn't give into despair in that he still fights, still plans, but it is still a state of mind he visits often. His detailed recollections meaning that he can still feel every nuance of a tragedy, of a loss, remember even the smell of a flower the day his institute shut down, the curl of a lip when a previous sponsor or donor pulled away. The cry, analyzed to the pitch and decibel, of a dying child.<br/><br/>They are bleak times, and while indulging in violence will sometimes help, sometimes it is all he can do to just endure until they wash over and through him, sometimes withdrawing to a fastness well beneath one of his corporate headquarters and staring at his old suit of armour, while polishing off a bottle of wine and playing an old victrola that belonged to his father.<br/><br/><strong>Equipment, Weapons and Paraphernalia</strong>: The Peace Institute had gathered the leading minds of its day, and it meant that when Pax went out to quest or battle, he did so with cutting edge equipment. The height of this was a revolutionary suit of armour he pictured one day being able to have mass produced for law enforcement (it was never cost effective to do so, and ultimately he began to view the police as too corrupt to help, and had turned to other methods anyway). Layered kevlar and nomex weaves for protection from bullets and fire, insulation for electricity. Bright white, half sculpted, half stylized ceramic alloy plating and greaves over the dark blue fabrics further protecting his vitals while giving him mobility. He wore a white helmet sculpted fully and classically as his face (it was for protection, not for concealing his identity, which he wanted on full display), providing tactical readouts, voice amplification, providing filtration for his breath and senses (he made regular use of tear gas and flashbangs after all). He had a souped up motorcyle and an armoured helicopter. His gadgets ran the gamut from hand and ranged tasers, to acids and electronics. He had shock absorbers in his boots that went along with hydraulics for wider leaps. Gliding flaps that could extend between arm and body to help in falls. The ol' grappling gun. He even kept medicines on his person, from adrenalin to antivenom, to give aid that went beyond the end of a fist. He was a marvel.<br/><br/>It all gathers dust now. Relics.<br/><br/>Oh, don't get the man wrong, underneath his fashionable attire? A bodysuit of that protective weave. His long coat, and his black gloves have those plates inserted within besides. He's certainly had his company pursue further miniaturization, flexibility and concealment of everything still useful as far as his old tools (he leads a dangerous life after all, and things can happen). But now it's plastic guns and collapsible swords amidst the toys of a fallen age. If there are antitoxins or such things concealed on his person anymore, they are rigged to inject into him alone with a twitch. The converted dark armours he every so often wears out into the world truck in retractable forearm blades, in grenades, in thermite. He walks a darker path, and he has adjusted accordingly. When he can't resist the impulse for that personal touch, he is tricked out in all the terrible things weapons development can provide. His armour all dark, the helmet featureless, smooth, reflective and unnerving, it doesn't amplify his voice, it distorts it to a nightmare.<br/><br/><strong>Full Character Background</strong>:<br/><br/>Judah was a creature of his childhood, more than most tended to be, but then his own was almost singularly off the norm. Born to doctors who traveled the world in a combination of aid and missionary work, they took their only child along with them on their quests to save the world in body and soul. They might have done the sensible thing of leaving him with a wealthy, extended family as they traveled, but there was something about the boy, something bright and shining in his eyes.  There was a sense of the precocious about him, that he had inherited a full measure of their intellect and drive, they could not help but want to show him first hand the better world they hoped for, the existing one they moved in, and the force they acted with to realize their dreams. And though that might have been a poor, selfish, or even deranged choice, they made it all the same.<br/><br/>So it was at a very young age that Judah was exposed to dozens of cultures, languages, ways of life. Showing his quality as a prodigy child, Judah drank that information in, made it his own, made such wonders of the world that he saw, his own. He learned to spell in five different languages.  He saw the rites of initiation of children of a patchwork of nations and tribes, and went through them for his own part.<br/><br/>There was a darker side to this, as when one travels to the corners of the world that need aid work in the first place, one sees those conditions first hand, lives them. Every brutality and privation, every aftermath of man's inhumanity to man, every sickness and famine. That is the kind of thing that can scar a child, should scar a child. Yet for Judah, these hardships both came alongside and were filtered through the lens of his parents experiencing them as well, through his deep connection to them. And every horrible thing they saw only filled them with that much stronger a reserve to do better, to fight harder, to hope to change things. It was a missionary's zeal, but it was infectious, and Judah could not help but feel the same as their son, and in trying so hard to be close to them, to be like them.<br/><br/>Times were sometimes rough, but as a family they were always close, and they had their successes, and shared in the joy of them. Times were good then, too. Judah's knowledge of medicine, of language, of societies would have shocked men three times his age. At 11, he was his parents' assistant besides. But the world they worked in was a steadily darkening thing, and eventually it caught right up to them. They were a too hopeful and even inspiring presence in a country where warring factions used terror and brutality as currency. But really that just made them incredibly useful for the purpose of crushing of spirits, of being a symbol. And the strung up, mutilated, tortured, violated corpses were powerful symbols at that. The boy they left alive, not simply for the sadism of watching, but there was a wealthy family involved after all, and ransoms buy new and shinier guns.<br/><br/>And this could have broken the boy, and this should have broken the boy. But he had grown up with the world's horrors, seen them in his day to day, and seen his parents never fail in resolve in the face of them. Though he saw their dying faces in his all too frequent nightmares in the initial rush of trauma, when it passed, what he saw more clearly through the gore, was that selfsame resolve never flagging. Whether or not that was true, whether or not that was what he told himself he saw as a means to cope, it was the image that stayed with him, beyond anything else. Their resolve had never failed, and so neither would his, could never fail. They lived and they died for a better world, for a world at peace, and he would embrace that. He would love peace so much that he would suffer the paradox and the hypocrisy of being willing to fight for it.<br/><br/>And it might be trite to say that he turned his part of his family's wealth into training, honing himself for such a purpose, turning a life that a prodigy child might have lived to acclaim in any field instead to dedication to a quest he held sacred. Travelling that wide world again for every bit of knowledge or skill he remembered he could make use of. He hunted with the Masai, learned at knifeplay from Gurkhas, at meditation from yogis. And certainly, it was trite but for that resolve in his eyes, fierce, unnerving, burning, that when he spoke of his dreams, it was as if his voice resonated, and a listener could do nothing but believe.<br/><br/>So it went that Judah grew into a young man. A polymath, a true renaissance man, having well expanded on his knowledge of medicine, of social engineering, of a variety of fields, but also on how to fight, on how to kill if need be. For what he envisioned, he would have to persuade men to their better natures. And to be so persuaded, men would need a symbol, which he himself resolved to be.  Superheroes were still a going concern then, and he felt he could stand out amongst them. He took up the name Pax, for peace, and with a knowledge of nerve endings and pressure points, when he fought crime, it was indeed often without the more bonecracking efforts his contemporaries sometimes needed.<br/><br/>At the same time, through force of charisma, and a growing popularity around him, he founded the Peace Institute, a blanket foundation that would gather scientists, social thinkers, mediators, and vast charitable donations turned to the purpose of finding ways to better man's lot in life, to further harmonious and peaceful living. To inspire where needed, protest where needed, to draw attention to global issues and brainstorm solutions. While far more of a doctor than a technologist, the gathered expertise of the Institute was also able to enhance "the more swashbuckling side of my career" as Judah would jokingly put it. The layered armours he would use for defense, gadgets and transportation he would bring to bear.<br/><br/>At the height of his career, of his influence, Judah didn't just fight crime, the dark blue and white armour of Pax could be seen helping with disaster relief, in refugee camps, in consulting with and supporting UN peacekeeping efforts. In a very real sense, he was the opposite of what the Comedian was becoming in service to the American government. It is rumoured the two men actually encountered each other on opposite sides of their international efforts. Neither speaks of it, or the resulting confrontation that must have occured.<br/><br/>Still, for a while, Pax's influence waxed heavily, and times were good, and bright, or at least bright enough to give him the strength to keep fighting. But the Cold War rolled on endlessly, and inevitably with it, the world began to darken all over, and light began to dim, until it seemed to gutter out entirely. With the passing of the Keene act, it was no longer quite so popular to be associated with Judah, and those vast donations stopped rolling in. Peace seemed an impossible joke, and his institute was deserted as people lost their resolve to fight.<br/><br/>Judah despaired, but he did not give into so doing, he would not give up his pledge to fight for a resolve that lingered in dying eyes. With that too fine mind of his, he just examined why he had failed, what had been faulty about his methods. He had loved peace, and now he /would/ love it enough to kill for it. In the popular media, the irony and tragedy of a young man turning his fortunes and faltering charity into a thriving defense contracting company was remarked on endlessly, even through his entirely eloquent speeches about protection and safety being entirely in line with the only way to fight for stability in a dangerous world.<br/><br/>Because after all, he meant it. It wasn't that the company was a front, but like his superheroic identity, it was largely meant to keep him in good will. Happy senators and congressmen being successfully lobbied to and bribed, a Pentagon getting its nice shiny guns were all too happy not to even look at the shadier business a company did. It was simply that for Judah Somerset, his shadier business was turning around and running weapons to every group oppressed in the USA and Russia's death struggle for dominance across the globe. Wherever insurgencies arose from an outraged, occupied, violated people, Aegis industries would supply them weapons and training. Where the victims of genocide regrouped for their vengeance, there was Aegis industries to help them out. He further expanded the illicit sides of his businesses into the "softer" areas of crime. Smuggling especially, spectacularly, sending out medical supplies and even basic day to day goods in the middle of gun running and and otherwise shipping around and selling stolen or counterfeit goods. In the US proper he had even moved into racketeering, profits from extortion letting him organize whole gangs bought and kept by filthy lucre to run out those that would instead deal in drugs, prostitution, or a thousand darker acts from whole neighbourhoods at a time.<br/><br/>He was buying peace now at the edge of a knife, doing so by ensuring it plunged into everyone that had it coming, and no one that didn't. If it made him the closest thing to an actual supervillain that he and his would used to have faced.. well.. go to a neighbourhood where their kids aren't growing up on crack, or to a village where the infant mortality rate has dropped, and speak to him of villainy. He tried to motivate scientists, volunteers, soldiers on the ground with finer things. But that failed. That this is how he now keeps them loyal, now keeps them developing,  keeps them working on behalf of humanity's disadvantaged, it is a small price to pay.<br/><br/>Oh, and there was one other thing. He couldn't quite exactly forget the visceral thrill of being Pax, of being the champion of his dreams. And though now in all dark armour, he would yet roam out, at home, abroad, whenever the urge struck him. Bringing peace at the end of his fists, guns, or whatever advanced weapon he might avail himself of. Whether the peace of safety to the beleaguered, or of the grave to the vice ridden.<br/><br/><br/><strong>Physical Information</strong>:<br/>Ethnic Group: English<br/>Gender: Male<br/>Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual<br/>Age: 37<br/>Height: 6"1<br/>Weight:<br/>Hair Colour: Black<br/>Eye Colour: Blue<br/><br/><strong>Distinguishing Characteristics</strong>: A very deep blue to his eyes<br/><br/><strong>Physical Appearance</strong>: As it was in better days, Judah's presence is felt before the sight of him processes fully, from the force of it. But what was warm with the promise of dawn in older days carries with it now more of a chill, a sense of twilight. What is regal about Judah, commanding, has the feel of a king in winter, a sad, regretful smile that never exactly touches the unnerving glint in too blue eyes. He can fake it well enough for the cameras when he needs to, the thunder and passion of old, but when they pass, it is only the black hair he's let grown out thick and just unkempt enough to frame his face that helps to differentiate him from a classical statue, or, when he moves, a shark, all sleek and predatory, a creature of his corporate world.<br/><br/><strong>Costume Description</strong>: Once upon a time, Pax was a dashing figure in blue and white, sculpted ceramics for the plating for his vitals, alloyed boots and gloves, and his helmet that was detailed to the wave of his real hair. The armouring over his chest particular in the symbol of a pure shining star, that he would call a symbol the rising dawn.<br/><br/>Now, when he wears the armour, it is all black, on black, as if part of the shadows and nights he moves through, as if when seen, a piece of that night, reaching out to claim a man, the only contrast being the gleam of blades that might jut forth. The helmet he wears smooth and featureless. The better to keep his identity concealed and his actions of dark legend, rumour and lie.<br/><br/><strong>Normal Attire</strong>: He dresses to match his standing, all long coats and dark power suits, usually with a pair of black gloves.<br/><br/><strong>Public Face</strong>: Judah Somerset is known as having transformed himself from failed international activist and ex superhero, to thriving corporate magnate working defence contracts for the Pentagon, for being able to speak so eloquently about that sort of jarring transition that an audience is left thinking it was perfectly natural. He likes to say that as the poem goes, he grew up and set aside childish things. Still, he had quite the following in his Pax days, and there were those sad and disappointed by the change in him, the popularity of the Keene act notwithstanding. His occasional expert response to medical emergencies that have happened right in front of him in his daily life, and the parts of his fortune he sets to philanthropic donation have kept remnants of a heroic reputation wrapped around him, though he sometimes seems rankled by that. He remains youthful looking and fit, if more in an ageless than actually young seeming sort of way.<br/><br/><strong>Known Facts</strong>: Judah was once one of those types trying so hard to save the world, preaching harmony, unity, peace. With an advanced intellect, diverse masteries, extended support network, and ability to pitch in to everything from peacekeeping to crime fighting, to disaster relief, it was hard not to be convinced that he someday could realize such lofty dreams. A winning smile and a staggering lack of lingering injuries made it hard for even those he fought to carry a grudge (the man even shelled out for rehabilitation and testified at parole hearings). But then his institute collapsed, his superheroics were banned, and it seemed that everything he tried failed and fell apart. He seems to have recovered at least, in a sense, running that company now, talking now instead of stability and security, no longer the young promise of the world.<br/><br/>His more shadowy life goes largely unknown, even having been careful to have the occasional minion take action in his armour in another city or across the world when he was somewhere else, just to facilitate what scant stories float around about those activities doing so in a way that floats well past him.<br/>