Difference between revisions of "Seth Olsen"

Revision as of 22:58, 3 April 2013

Zenith is known as a superhero affiliated with UNITY, and he is known to be Skyboy's adopted younger brother.

Background

Origin

The planet Krypton... A Krypton where Jor-El managed to save his planet. Thanks to the influence of his father-in-law Sul-Van, the scientist was able to obtain the proper cooperation from his world's government to investigate and counteract the forces threatening his world. A buildup of subterranean plasma should have destroyed the planet, but Jor-El was able to periodically expel this plasma into the Phantom Zone, a prison realm where the worst of Krypton's criminals were kept. Thus the buildup did not become critical, and Krypton survived. Unfortunately, this breach in the seal allowed a great criminal, one General Ur-Zod, to escape. Zod had been prosecuted by none other than Jor-El himself some years earlier, sealed away in the Phantom Zone for treason, murder, and sedition. Zod was able to sabotage the very generator which had freed him, before escaping back into the zone. So it was that the plasma buildup began anew, some three decades after it was first averted...

Ten solar orbits before this, Sol-Zen was born to loving parents on an island in Krypton's western ocean. He grew up a happy child, though he never knew his father Shin-Zen very well... the man was killed when an experiment in gravity manipulation went wrong. As such Sol grew up without a father, primarily in the care of his mother. Maia Shin-Zen was an artist of wide renown, particularly known for her skill with 'living sculpture,' in which she would carefully combine wood, metal, and stone with plants in an effect similar to a more complex version of Earth's bonsai practice. She was also a painter and a great lover of literature and music, and she made certain that her son had the finest education Krypton could offer. This meant complex mathematics by the time most Earth children are discovering 'chapter books,' and advanced science well before puberty ever set in. The lengthened cycle of years on Krypton relative to Earth, three to one, made this somewhat easier; by the time Sol-Zen was ten years old, he had lived the equivalent of thirty Earth years.

It was shortly after Sol's tenth birthday that his mother had to leave to attend an extended conference, and it was decided he would remain home so as not to interrupt his schooling. Their parting was tearful, as they had never been away from one another for more than a few hours before, but there was something more to it than that. Sol-Zen was terrified to let his mother leave... but she swore to him that she would come back to him safely, and so when they embraced to say goodbye, he felt somewhat reassured. But nightmares plagued his sleep that night, and he awoke to a strangely quiet, gray dawn. He wandered outside, thinking it strange that everything should be so silent... and then the first temblor came. There would be several throughout the day, each growing worse, and Sol-Zen found himself huddled in his school's quake shelter, feeling that his dreams of shadowed terror and fire must be coming true. Perhaps he already knew, in some deep corner of his soul, that he would never see his mother again.

An emergency meeting of the Science Council was called, the central presentation made by a young scientist named Kal-El, son of the man who had saved Krypton. In an eerie echo of events that might have taken place years earlier, the scientist's findings were refused by Brainiac, the planet's central operations computer, and so it was believed that there was nothing to fear. Despite Kal-El and Jor-El's warnings, Krypton trusted its overseer. Brainiac, of course, knew that the world was doomed... but calculated that there was no way its people could be preserved. So he uploaded himself into a satellite and abandoned Krypton, even as the final temblor began to shake the very planet apart. Over the next few hours, before the coming of the dawn, the planet's crust ruptured. Cities were swallowed up, oceans boiled, and the planet's core began to ignite the very air. In one last violent swell, Krypton was torn apart by its own internal explosions. The fragments of the planet were sent hurtling through space, changed by the intense radiation...

None should have survived... and yet, Sol-Zen did. He found himself wandering a white sand beach, like his home and yet different. What he could not realize is that he was one of those rare few Kryptonians gifted with magical abilities, and his latent powers had pulled him from the planet just as it was destroyed. He slipped away into the Hypertimestream, floating along in his little bubble of reality. For him time stood still within that world, though his body grew and matured over the equivalent of the next five Kryptonian years. This was a world where nothing could hurt him, where all was created by his whim and imagination. If he was lonely, he would find a friend. If he was hungry, there would be food. He found safety and security there, and buried his mourning for his mother and Krypton deep within himself. He grew up a bit in his own way, but in certain respects he retained the mind set of a child; he never learned many of the life lessons associated with adolescence. Despite all that had happened, he retained the innocence of childhood.

Eventually he drew near a rift in Hypertime, centered on another reality's planet Earth over the Azores islands. His pocket reality was ruptured, and he was cast out into this new, strange world... alone.