Longshot
Real Name: Paxton Riggs
Age: 21
Height: 6'
Weight: 163 lbs.
History
Paxton Riggs was born into a wealthy family, but was kidnapped not long after birth. He was raised by Horizon, a fraternity of assassins who trained him to join their ranks. During his training, he was given experimental performance enhancing drugs, and they drastically enhanced his senses, reflexes and agility, just as they had with his peers. He was allowed to take on assignments at a young age, already having been forced to kill several children in his group during training. Over the years, Longshot grew callous. He established a name for himself among his fellow assassins as one of the greatest, despite their objections to his archaic taste in weapons. Even among his victims, he became infamous. Members of the Triad referred to him as "The Red Eye of Death". With every kill, he slipped further into relentless murder, just like every assassin before him. However, he prided himself on being smarter than most, on having control over his baser instincts, and he struggled endlessly to keep at least some tenuous grasp on his humanity.
Paxton began to feel remorse towards the life he had led and when he was assigned to assassinate a little girl, his eyes finally opened and he abandoned Horizon. He had nowhere to go and spent his nights in the cold rain. He had never been taught of the outside world and had no idea where he was. He took refuge in a dumpster with his costume and weapons in a backpack. Unfortunately, the drugs given to him had serious side effects that had been staved off by medication put in his food. Once Paxton left, the side effects began to manifest. His hair fell out and his face became hideously deformed. He saw this as a sign of his penance and a mark of his shame, and considered it a first step on his road to redemption.
With his former friends at Horizon sent to hunt him down, Paxton ran from them and ended up in Boston, where his parents supposedly lived. He found their address, but when he realized that he had long since been declared dead and his parents had a new life without him, he concluded that he should leave them alone and spare them the pain of seeing what their son had become. With the help of his mentor, Akube Mahatu, Paxton turned his assassin codename into a symbol of justice and altruism. He swore to fight corruption and hunt down those who ruined his life, and forced him to end the lives of so many others.
For further detail on Paxton's origins:
Year One
The Night He Came Home
The Lost One, Part I
The Lost One, Part II
The Lost One, Part III
The Lost One, Part IV
The Lost One, Part V
Out There
Abilities
Longshot is a master archer. His equipment includes a series of magnetic attachments to his arrowheads that activate on impact, as well as a fully loaded utility belt. He has mastered Krav Maga, Capoeira, Tae Kwon Do and Jiu Jitsu, and is highly trained in secondary styles, such as Judo, Tai Chi, Soo Bahk Do, and Aikido. Longshot is highly resourceful and is adept at exploiting his opponent's weaknesses. During his days as an assassin, he had dealings all over the world and picked up three languages, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Russian on top of knowing English from youth. He is also a fairly good computer hacker.
His heightened reflexes allow him to hear and feel better then normal humans and his eyesight is impeccably sharp. His agility allows him to perform astonishing acrobatics with ease, jumping heights of up to eight feet.
Equipment
Longshot carries magnetic attachments for his arrows, listed below. He carries them on duel bandoleers across his chest.
Explosive Arrow Attachment: Delivers a nonlethal, but extremely powerful explosion.
Shock Arrow Attachment: Delivers an electric charge more then twice the power of a conventional tazer.
Tracer Arrow Attachment: Sends a GPS signal to a locator in his pocket.
Knockout Gas Arrow Attachment: Releases a cloud of anesthetic gas on impact.
Arm Mounted Cable Gun: A metal gauntlet attached to his forearm that fires a bolt with a tensile strength steel cable on the end.
Eyepeice: A glass scope protruding through his mask that enhances his already stellar eyesight and ensures an accurate shot every time. This eyepiece has several specialized lenses that can be switched out with a simple turn of the rim. These lenses include infra red imaging, night vision, a camera and an X-ray camera.
Belt: Longshot's belt carries objects including a standard re-breather, a first aid kit, a homing device for his tracking arrow attachments, a lock picking kit and basic weapons and gadgets for facing more powerful foes.
Longshot's jacket and mask are also padded and interwoven with kevlar and nomex, making for a lightweight, efficient defense against knives and low caliber bullets as well as fire. Several carbon fiber plates are placed inside the fabric, adding to his costume's durability.
Weaknesses
Longshot's heightened senses leave him vulnerable to high frequency noise attacks. His depth perception can be thrown off in a dark room only lit by flashing bright lights. Loud noises and unnatural lighting have been known to disrupt him.
Intelligence
Longshot is highly intelligent and was very well educated in the ways of war. He outsmarted his former teammates like Ox with ease, even at a young age, but he also had beaten such intellectual members as Sting in chess and in the ring. He is a tactical genius, being able to take out an entire hotel full of guards armed with automatic weapons with only his bow and arrow. He has been known to figure out the entire battle before it begins and always have a backup plan. While in a tight spot, his brain sometimes processes things at such a rate that he can formulate a total escape plan as a gun fires, still finding time to evade the bullet.
He is also a skilled detective and has picked up his share of knowledge of science and medicine.
Allies
From his teammates to his circumstantial allies, Longshot has made many friends along his path to redemption.
Ball and Chain: While his vigilante methods can prove lethal, Longshot has done everything he can to keep this crime fighting behemoth under control. He is also aware that the man beneath the hood, Marco Smith, is little more than a host to the lumbering beast that slays criminals in the dark. It is Marco who he's found to be a trustworthy ally, and while he struggles to reform Ball and Chain, he fears he may never succeed.
Bloodstone: Another of Longshot's teammates on the CoD, Bloodstone has proven herself to be cunning, intelligent and very useful in a tight corner. Although Longshot despises guns, he allows her to carry them under the agreement that no one dies because of her.
Eclipse: Although he is not a member of Longshot's team, he and the Crimson Archer have fought alongside one another many times. Once, they were unfortunately pitted against each other in the 5th King of the Vine Tournament. Although they both sustained critical injuries, Longshot emerged victorious. They have not spoken since, but remain friends.
Black Jacket: They first met while hunting the same lead, and believed the other to be a threat. After they came to an understanding, they became fast friends and Black Jacket even joined Longshot's team. After Jacket's enemy cruelly experimented on him and implanted a pair of large, bug-like wings on him, Longshot spent all his spare time researching a way to reverse the effects, but has, so far, found nothing.
Horus: Just before the Nameless, a new Horizon assassin, began planning the downfall of Longshot's team, the archer came across a wounded hawk. The bird's will to live inspired him and he went about nursing it back to health. After the hawk saved his life in the Nameless' final assault on the team, Longshot accepted it as the team mascot and his own personal eye in the sky. He crafted a falconry hood with an eyepiece similar to his own. This means that Longshot can see what Horus sees, and he's even trained the hawk to come down to his location on cue, pinpointed by the eyepiece.
Melissa Hannigan: When they met, she was Special Agent Melissa Hannigan of the CIA. After a long and harrowing ordeal in pursuit of X-Factor, she was assigned to become Director of U.N. Metahuman Affairs. Now, she and her subordinates roam the high seas in the immense vessel that serves as their base of operations. The organization works in metahuman relations, research and defense. Melissa is one of the few powerful influences in the government who advocates metahumans and masked crime fighters. She and Longshot had a short romantic history, but remain close friends and Longshot serves as her unofficial adviser. Although her current title is "Director Hannigan", Longshot still refers to her as "Agent" to remember how they first met, and because it gets on her nerves.
Akube: Akube Mahatu, president and founder of the African nation of Bandari, was Longshot's mentor in his early career, his greatest teacher, who guided him on his path to redemption. Through Akube's teachings, Paxton learned what it was like to be a human being, instead of the instrument of Brixby's will. He learned the ways of peace, diplomacy and compassion. Although he had already abandoned murder, Akube was the one who taught him the true value of human life. Today, Akube is proud of his former pupil's accomplishments and Longshot is happy to call Akube his friend.
The Knights of Dawn
After the events of the Oncoming Storm, Longshot realized that his approach to organized crime fighting was flawed. Therefore, with the secrecy of his team already compromised, he created a new one, the Knights of Dawn. Their new Headquarters were state of the art, and located in the remote, frozen wilderness of Alaska. It was equipped to fight crime on a global scale. The Children of the Damned remained as a decoy for the press. Unfortunately, the Fog, a mysterious villain, commandeered the old team and turned it into a group dedicated to malicious ends.
GODHOOD
Longshot fought against the invading forces of Dathron and his Pantheon. Struggling to save as many lives as possible, he was helpless as people were slaughtered in the streets, rounded up to be dissected and converted into soldiers, and even flocked to Dathron, begging for him to grant them the power of one of his lesser gods. By the second day of the struggle, Longshot wandered into New York City, under the shadow of Dathron's throne ship, with as many weapons as he could carry. The legion flocked to him, as most of the people had either escaped the city, hidden underground, or perished. The archer took them on, defeating every challenger, but not walking away unscathed. As he stood on a mound of his broken enemies, he called out to Dathron and demanded that he be taken to the throne ship. He was carried aboard and attempted to negotiate with Dathron, an attempt which ended in failure. He was severely beaten by the Master God and carried away to a holding pen, slated for conversion into a legionnaire. He escaped, freeing as many of the other human cattle as he could.
While running through the bowels of the ship, Longshot arrived in the conversion chamber, a massive room where people were subjected to a brutal process, killing them and compressing their resurrected bodies into the featureless form of the legion. He was about to begin freeing people before they could be converted, but he was attacked and forced into a containment pod, put in line for the slaughter. He was able to narrowly escape and fight off the legion, disabling the production line before running off to confront Dathron again, for the final time.
Cornered by the legion, Longshot saw no hope for survival. He called Agent Hannigan, who sheltered as many survivors as she could hold in her ship, and gave her a final goodbye. He fought his way through the hordes of soldiers, formerly members of countless alien races, not to mention Humans, and eventually ambushed Dathron in the well chamber, the room which housed a sampling of the Flame, gathered from the rim of the Eternity Pit. His attacks were worthless against the Master God, who felled the exhausted archer with a flick, sending him across the room and shattering several ribs. With a blast from his eyes, Dathron incinerated half of Longshot's hand. The distraught archer crawled hopelessly across the ground, Dathron destroyed his legs. Still, on the precipice of death, Longshot crawled and arrived at the rim of the well. With the end closing in, Longshot decided he had nothing to lose and reached into the well, absorbing all of the power into himself. The Eternal Flame allowed him to repair his body, and at the same time, repair the broken planet below. For this one, shining moment, Longshot was the most powerful being in all the Universe.
He knew everything, every deep, unfathomable secret of reality. His consciousness was expanded beyond comprehension. The enlightened archer destroyed Dathron's fleet, stripped his lesser gods of their power, and banished them to the last world he destroyed. As the Earth healed, pieced back together by Longshot's will, the only remaining member of the invasion was its leader, Dathron. Now, his power was absolutely trumped by that of the archer. Rather than resisting, he rejoiced in knowing that the Eternal Flame had chosen a greater herald to spread its divinity throughout the cosmos. However, Longshot revealed that he would expel the power as soon as one last loose end was tied up.
Longshot brought Dathron into deep space, rapped in chains forged from Dwarf Star matter in the Eternal Flame itself. He tore open a hole in reality, dropping Dathron into a dark place outside the Universe, to live forever in darkness.
Longshot returned to Earth, patching the hull of Agent Hannigan's ship. She and Umbra met him on the deck and watched him throw away the overwhelming power. Or so he thought. In a burst of blinding light, the Flame returned, and in that moment, Longshot pieced it all together. This was Dathron's contingency plan. If he failed to purge the Universe of heretics, he would allow a single life form to host all of the powers of the Flame. It would burn away the host and become its own entity, a being of thoughtless destruction and uncontrollable power. Before he died, and made Earth the first casualty of the Flame's blind rampage across the Universe, Longshot flew up into the skies, escaping to a dark corner of reality where not a single star shone, a place engulfed entirely in an unending black. It was there that he expelled his power, pouring it out into empty space and creating a new sky. He also thinks that he may have created life somewhere, but his memory of the affair was too blurry to be sure. He opened a hole and fell back to Earth. He awoke several days later in the hospital, and the long recovery from the mental scars of omnipotence began. He has still not entirely recovered.
RPG HISTORY (WORK IN PROGRESS)
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