Species: Human
Age: 29
Gender Identity/Orientation: Cis, He/Him, Straight
Location: Evergreen City
Citizen Identity: Jean-Pierre Lemaitre, Grand Opera Conductor
Villain Identity: Stratos-Fear, Master of Storms and Despair
Danger Rating: B (A real danger to an entire city, but not the entire world)
Appearance:
Stratos-Fear has tan skin and a well-groomed goatee, his black eyes are slightly drooping and deceptively soulful for someone devoid of hope or compassion. He carries himself with a high degree of showmanship, sweeping his arms in grand gestures and moving with deliberate dramatic grace. Having studied the art of distraction and stage magic in his youth, he is excellent at using exaggerated body language to mask acts of sleight of hand and subtlety such as twirling his wrist to summon a minor twister. His long black hair flows in his storm winds dramatically and he wears a billowing black cape and fine suits inspired by the formal wear he once adored, now made from vinyl, pleather, rubber and other artificial waterproof materials. His trademark long boots have rubber treads both for traction in wet weather and because he is not immune to lightning powers, having once been tricked into striking himself with a lightning bolt of his own conjuring rather than his intended target by heroes using illusion powers.
Powers and Abilities:
-Major Powers: Weather Control + Emotion Control add-on
Stratos-Fear can control the weather in a 14-mile radius, causing storms, rain, lightning strikes, changing barometric pressure and decreasing temperature. He must still be able to see a target to strike with his lightning control or storm winds directly- he does not have out of body vision. Likewise, he can make the atmosphere uncomfortably cold and bleak, but not reach freezing temperature or control snow and ice. His emotion control ability is limited to direct touch from his skin or acting as a secondary effect of his primary weather control power. Those caught within one of his storms or struck by his wind or lightning attacks can be made to grapple with feelings of despair or fear, but he cannot simply inflict these feelings on his victims from afar without his weather powers actually striking them first. He also cannot manipulate positive or hopeful feelings- only negative ones. His emotion control power is diluted when spread over a wider area, he can cause multiple city blocks exposed to his storms to feel generically gloomy or anxious, or inflict overwhelming despair and even terror on single targeted opponents, but not both at once.
-Medium Powers: Flight + Levitation add-on
Stratos-Fear has medium-tier flight powers, able to travel through the air on his storm currents at a very high speed and degree of precision. He can also hover midair without concentration. Because he moves on air currents which bend to his willpower rather than by projecting force from his own body he can maneuver, change direction, and alter his speed mid-flight more quickly and with greater precision than many flying heroes, and he uses this advantage to outmaneuver and outrun them when needed, though the intense concentration required causes him to mainly direct his storm powers to attack while floating in a stationary position and stop his attacks while in motion.
-Minor Powers/skills: Persuasion, Sleight of Hand
Once a brilliant composer and opera conductor, Stratos-Fear is used to commanding a theater of spectators and has a powerful persona and captivating voice he uses to command attention and leave people vulnerable to his emotion-manipulating weather phenomena. He has studied sleight of hand and uses dramatic gestures to mask acts of subtlety and manipulation.
-Style:
Stratos-Fear prefers to spend hours alone, brooding on his own hurt feelings, which he then works up to a great passion and uses to summon storms of depression or hopelessness-inducing rain, revealing himself with a grand entrance scored to crashes of thunder and lightning and giving self-gratifying monologues about the "delusion of hope" and "futility of dreams" while presiding over his grand operas of self-aggrandizing pity and woe. He cares little for wealth or control, only causing as much dismay as possible, and publicly humiliating and reducing the heroes of Evergreen City to apathetic weeping at his feet.
Backstory:
Jean-Pierre Lemaitre grew up in the vineyard-dotted hills and valleys of the Farras Countryside and came with his parents to the Unified States as a young teen when they relocated to Evergreen City so his mother could accept a prestigious music teaching job at the famed Evergreen City University. Trading a sprawling ancestral chateau named for his forebears for a small and crumbling manor in the forests outside of a foreign city upset Jean-Pierre greatly at first, but he soon found the humid climate, dark rainy days beneath the trees, and secret rivers and untrod paths of the vast forests surrounding the city suited him. Having grown up with music all his life, Jean-Pierre could play Chopin before he could ride a bike, and sing in the school choir with a crystal-clear and mesmerizing voice even a seasoned performer could only envy. His rich, mesmerizing voice did not diminish, but matured with age like a fine wine rich in velvety notes of dark oak wood. His foreign accent, long dark hair, and mysterious, somewhat condescending attitude made him very popular with the girls in his classes... and much less so with his male peers. Although nobody ever tried to bully him openly, Jean-Pierre knew he was an outsider- and he enjoyed it, occasionally acting out and causing dramatic scenes just to get a reaction and manipulate people's perceptions of him.
After meeting some of the theater club students acting in plays at his school, Jean-Pierre became obsessed with the stage and commanding an audience as a leading role- and began to hog the spotlight and cause problems when he was expected to stay in the sidelines. He quit the theater club after a dramatic fight over who deserved to play the leading role in the yearly holiday performance. Jean-Pierre did not abandon the stage, but rather sought a new way to command it- as a daring showman. He spent a year studying stage magic, the art of commanding an audience and at the same time distracting them from his hidden subtle motions and sleight of hand such as moving cards from his sleeves, reproducing "vanished" objects from beneath the table, and making people glance away while he slipped coins and baubles from beneath one overturned cup into another. The combination of attention and deception pleased his ego greatly, and Jean-Pierre truly believed he had found his calling in life. His great debut as the "Marvelous Masque" was arranged on his own 17th birthday- his only requested gifts "the honor of having my dearest family, friends and classmates in the audience, that I might humbly treat them to my greatest of tricks and illusions". Although the jeers and heckles of the football club kids were silenced when the school principal had them evicted from the auditorium, the damage had been done, and Jean-Pierre's shattered nerves made his hands too clumsy to complete his act, and he fled from the stage in shame and rage, never to attempt show magic in public again.
A New Obsession:
It was in his lowest moments after that public humiliation that the kindhearted and gentle Lisa Primrose came to visit Jean-Pierre at his parent's manor. Always attracted to his mysterious and dramatic personality but afraid to approach him and become the victim of one of his unpredictable bouts of rage, Lisa confessed her feelings, and like a ray of light breaking through the clouds made Jean-Pierre see new joy in life once again. Although he was temperamental, demanding, jealous and insensitive, Lisa took Jean-Pierre's outbursts as the personality of a "genius" and stayed by his side throughout his moods and dramas from high school graduation through his six years at music college, where he studied grand opera to become a composer and conductor of the symphonies he grew up surrounded by. His first years as a gifted, dramatic conductor unafraid to "challenge tradition" by changing the established tempo or key of compositions to add energy and flair to them earned him as many fans as critics, and for the first time in his sullen, gloomy life Jean-Pierre was truly happy.
Finally, after a great standing ovation one opening season, Jean-Pierre invited his darling Lisa to join him from the stands on stage for the final bow- where he proposed marriage. Lisa accepted and the crowd cheered anew. To Jean-Pierre it was just another perfect performance in which each instrument, including Lisa, performed as commanded, and another public moment of triumph to stroke and bolster an ego made from iron and glass in equal measure.
In the weeks leading up to the wedding everything was simply perfect... until the explosion.
The Supernova Incident:
In Evergreen City a container of experimental chemicals was damaged in a failed theft and consequently exploded, releasing strange gasses across an entire block of the city in what was later dubbed The Supernova Incident. Many simply became sickened, while others were irrevocably changed by the accident, gaining fantastic superpowers... or terrible mutations. Jean-Pierre, having been among those closest to the blast and most affected, could only stagger home before the rescue crews arrived and pass out on the floor of the small apartment he shared with his Lisa. He awoke to her leaning over him, frantic, her voice pleading and shrill as she wiped his sweating brow with a cold cloth.
It was nothing.
Too much work.
Let it go!
Finally, the outbursts, screaming, and shoving. Lisa had no choice but to flee her beloved's rage and linger and worry nearby as he sweated and moaned through three days of anguish while his DNA was invisibly rewritten by the supernova chemicals.
When Jean-Pierre was well and awoke again, he searched the apartment for Lisa... but she was gone. He remembered dimly that her tender ministrations had grown less frequent, her stress more palpable, but Jean-Pierre reasoned that "women were weak creatures and could only handle so much emotional strain"- he only cared that he felt better again and all would be as it was before. Yet when he called Lisa on the phone her voice was unfamiliar, cracked and anxious, and Jean-Pierre felt perhaps the closest thing to regret his arrogant heart was capable of. Had she really overreacted so much because of a little fever? She knew better than that. Jean-Pierre insisted to Lisa that she come back at once so he could "apologize" for screaming at her and driving her away in his fevered state. A few choice words, a disarming guilty smile, and surely Lisa would regain her sense like every time before. Lisa arrived, finally, but her calm blue eyes were red with tears, her pale skin flushed with anxiety, and her sweet smile a tight grimace of discomfort. Had he really been so hard on her? Never matter. Jeanne-Pierre took Lisa in his arms, touched her cheek... and then the screaming began. A banshee's wail that has haunted his black heart forevermore.
The Supernova chemicals had changed Jean-Pierre's DNA, making his sweat into an emotional toxin that causes fear and despair in others on contact. Lisa had been slowly poisoned by it while changing his cold compresses and looking after him during his fever, before the direct touch of his hand once the change was complete pushed her over the edge into an unreasoning hysteria. The doctors ran tests. The labs produced results and then antidotes. An unknown toxin, something about the nervous system. Jean-Pierre only half listened to any of it... He knew. Understood. He was one of them- those cursed in the explosion shown on the TV news again and again on the hospital waiting room TV monitors over and over as he waited for word his beloved bride to be had finally calmed down and could be released. Without a word Jean-Pierre rose and grabbed the first nurse who walked past him by the arm and held her, watching with cold eyes as her indignant squirming turned to thrashing and her outrage gave way to fear and finally incoherent cries of terror.
Stricken, ruined, and broken, Jean-Pierre ran from the building, out into the cold and uncaring rain of the night. He did not go to visit his lost Lisa again- seeing her and being unable to again touch her was more than his fragile and selfish ego could bear. Love to him was another opera, another concerto he conducted, and being unable to conclude the final act was a blow to Jean-Pierre's self image and ambitions that left him with nothing once again. He did not truly mourn his "beloved" Lisa, as he told himself he did, he mourned only another failed success, another dramatic performance ruined by cruel fate before it could be duly applauded. It was the magic show all over again... but with no one to come and give him a new obsession to fixate on.
Isolation:
Jean-Pierre retreated to his parent's home in the forest outside the city, and stopped going out or watching the news. Desperate calls and pleading inquiries from concerned friends and even Lisa herself were ignored until they finally stopped altogether. Even his parents eventually went back to Farras, unable to bear the brooding and sullen attic ghost the depressed and increasingly unsettling man their son had become. Jean-Pierre didn't mind the long empty hours alone with his hurt feelings, or cold and meaningless isolation away from others, as before in his childhood it suited him. His own private drama of spiteful shadows and scorned emptiness. From the windows of the manor attic Jean-Pierre watched the storms come and go... and slowly realized that around his little world they lingered long out of season.
Over the lonely, quiet months Jean-Pierre began to realize that he could feel the storms... and his feelings could in turn be used to command them. Finally, in a fit of passion, he stood upon the roof of the manor at night, mixed wonder and rage causing his hands to shake as he first directed the weather itself like he once did his great concertos. The howl of the wind was his opera, the crash of thunder was his percussion. And he laughed. Laughed like a madman as toxic emotional sweat stained his tormented brow furrowed with lines far beyond his years. His grand opera of the damned was the most exhilarating performance of his life- and the only person who really mattered, he himself, was both audience and critic.
First Villain Appearance:
One year after the Supernova incident a parade was held to celebrate the efforts of the new heroes who had done so much to subdue the surge in new villains and make the city safe once more. News of this event delivered to Jean-Pierre's isolated world via special telegram was the final blow to his damaged ego. How could anyone deserve to be happy about what had happened when it was the ruin of his own hopes and dreams?? Donning a white mask and dark suit and cape inspired by his beloved Phantom of the Opera compositions, Jean-Pierre, now Stratos-Fear, master of storms and despair, stood atop a skyscraper in the hated Evergreen City that had ruined him, looking down on the festivities below. With shaking fists he summoned all of his self-pity and rage into a literal rain of sorrow that drenched the event in feelings of misery and sent parade floats crashing and residents wailing in despair. Cries of panic and wails of sorrow rose like beautiful music to Stratos-Fear's ears as parade attendees wept and dropped the colorful parade flags they were waving moments ago to the gray, wet pavement forgotten. Parade floats crashed, and the new "heroes" had their hands full managing the chaos even as they succumbed to feelings of apathy and depression themselves. If Stratos-Fear's bad attitude and style as a villain could be summed up in a single moment it is that very first act of evil- literally raining on someone else's parade because he refuses to believe anyone can be happy about the event which he blames for his own selfish misery. Stratos-Fear despises joy, love and compassion, and seeks now only to cause as much drama, misery and unhappiness as possible- all while presiding over the center of it like the grand conductor he once was.
Chance of Redemption:
Very unlikely. Stratos-Fear has refused to seek an antidote to his supposedly "insufferable" condition, insisting that he cannot give up his own "curse" while others also affected by the Supernova explosion still "mistakenly glory in their own damnation". An excuse-seeking and selfish man, Stratos-Fear loves nothing but his own false image of himself as a ruined prodigy, scorned lover and innocent victim of cruel fate and destiny far beyond his own control (or responsibility). Having grown emotionally cold and detached, the only thing able to rouse him to genuine anger anymore is being forced to reckon with his own self-delusion and megalomania, even briefly.
Thank you for reading! This is a villain character from the superhero world of Prismaris, which you can read about here. You can also read about amazing characters and events in this world created by my very talented friends- just search the tag "Prismaris" to find many more articles and posts... Or maybe add your own!