Politically "More Correct" Heroes (Half-Life Man)

Note: This character was inspired by the inventions of Chern Xing and Hong Kuang. If I do make any subsequent characters, they'll be my own unless I state otherwise. This might geek you out.

Name: Half-Life Man

Born: D.K. Konstaan, November 20 1971

Powers: Indefinite longevity, Radioactive manipulation

Weakness: Pencils

Russian born Dominic Karl Konstaan was your average MIT student working towards a Ph.D in Teleporting-freaky-aliens-from-parallel-dimensions Engineering, although he also had a keen interest in Hacking-freaky-aliens-with-a-crowbar Physics. His peers described him as a very boisterous person and a wild party animal despite his reserved demeanour when working.

In 1998, he signed on for a student exchange programme and got posted to the White Masons' University in New Mexico, which is a university for black Jews. A quiet night of introductions turned into a rather wild frat party which some how found its way to the Accident-just-waiting-to-happen Lab, located in the School of Anomalous Materials. During the course of the party, he was bitten by a radioactive head crab, apparently and inexplicably teleported from another dimension.

Konstaan wakes up on the floor in the thrashed lab to three things: a hangover, new found powers and a foreign school full of aliens from a parallel dimension running amok and killing people; apparently we taste better than the casserole they serve at their home planet. Armed with a crowbar, which he stole from a construction worker he knocked out with a beer bottle the other night, and his 12-gauge pump action shotgun, which he brought along "just in case something like this might happen", he set off to fight his way out of the school, whilst slowly getting the hang of his new, slowly manifesting powers along the way.

It is unclear exactly what happened that night, except for the radioactive head crab bit, but somehow Konstaan had lost the ability to speak. Since his new "silent protagonist" image and his new powers were totally unlike the old Dominic Konstaan, he fashioned himself a new (albeit unorthodox, unintruiging and not to mention lame) name: Half-Life Man, in tribute of his powers.

The general term for Half-Life Man's powers is radioative manipulation, and although this encompassed a wide variety of abilities, he was essentially a walking biological hazard to anyone who got in his way. He had the ability to emit alpha, beta and gamma radiation from his hands, enabling him to do things like generate beta particles by rubbing his hands together and producing a steady electric current from them, and irradiating any organic lifeform into a pool of green radioactive goo in seconds. As his powers grew, he learnt to use them in more flamboyant ways, like combining alpha and beta particles to produce jets of helium gas from his hands, thus enabling him to achieve the effect of flying. He had also learnt to control matter at an atomic level, and could quickly generate a cloud of unstable atoms engulfing a room and then later set off an atomic chain reaction. In spite of his manifesting powers and the more technologically advanced aliens he encounters on later in the battle, his weapons of choice were still the shotgun and the crowbar. Something about "going old school".

Although he was a rather radioactive being, he was also blessed with an exceptionally long half-life, which meant that he could not die of natural means, as he will never truly become inactive. It was calculated that by the year 2120 his activity levels would reach background levels, but he would still be technically alive. He found out about his weakness during the fight out of White Masons', when he had a particular head crab zombie cornered, who, in an act of desperation, tried to fend Half-Life Man off with a pencil he grabbed off a nearby desk. The carbon lead in the pencil immediately caused Half-Life Man to temporarily lose his powers, much like the effect that green kryptonite has on Superman, allowing the zombie to escape. Half-Life Man would later find and kill this particular zombie by pumping him full of helium and popping him like a balloon with his crowbar.

Half-Life Man finally managed to free himself from the complex and alerted the authorities. Unfortunately, before the local police could arrive on the scene, the aliens had all managed to flee to Mexico. Realising that the only explanation for all the carnage was now out of US jurisdiction, he fled the scene for fear of being implicated and charged with the destruction of the entire university using his crowbar. He is now rumoured to have been recruited to work in Area 51 as Dominic Konstaan, but fights crime during his free time as the vigilante Half-Life Man.

He is now caught in a huge lawsuit battle against fellow nuclear scientist Bruce Bannor, the comic book publishing company Marvel and big time console game developer Capcom over copyright infringement issues concerning the Hulk's Gamma Wave attack, which Half-Life Man claims to have invented.