Skyline

Old warrior on guard.

CLEA DATA FILE

Identity:

• Tomasz Nowak (previously known as Maglock)

CLEA Classification:

• Alpha Superior

Special Skills and/or Abilities:

• Alpha ability – Tomasz can absorb EM radiation which boosts his strength and allows him to levitate/fly. Much of that energy is stored in his body like a battery and depleted.

Limitation(s)/Weakness(s):

• Away from built up areas the EM power available is not enough to sustain his Alpha abilities. Consequently he is essentially “normal.”
• Stored energy is depleted at different rates – flying uses it the quickest and he needs to recharge after using that part of his ability.
• Whilst “charging” up his internal “battery” he is vulnerable to attack.

Rap Sheet/Criminal Traits:

• N/A

Notes/History

Tomasz’s parents first met whilst she was stationed in Eastern Europe. She was a US army captain and he was policeman.

By the time she was pregnant she had returned to the states and he had come with her and taken on a job in the Pacifica Police Force.

Their combined experiences through their different careers had exposed them to some of the worst that humanity could hand out so it was only natural for them to put some of what they had learned in Tomasz’s upbringing.

Between them they taught him to stand up for what was right, support those that could not support themselves and never walk from a fight if the fight was just. Unfortunately that often led Tomasz into trouble, namely because as a kid he often saw trouble in his neighborhood and when he was other being bullied he had a tendency to involve himself.

Being bigger that most kids his age, Tomasz rarely lost a fight and that only led to bigger and stronger bullies trying to take him on. Though he was essentially doing what he thought was right, his teachers and the police considered him a trouble maker.

Eventually someone suggested to his parents that perhaps Tomasz’s spirited nature could be channeled another way, sport, rather than acting as the neighborhood’s “junior” vigilante. At his parent’s behest Tomasz took up a variety of sports until he found one that he liked, karate.

This gave him access to an alternative form of discipline where he learnt that sometimes it was not always necessary to fight to win and he could walk away from a fight to achieve victory. What he did not realise at the time was the person that was training him was none other Yu Jianjun the man that would become known as “Oracle” the near immortal Alpha. Though he would not realise it until years later, he often wondered why Master Yu charged so little for training. His master though simply told him that one day “he would have great potential” a cryptic clue to the fact that he “knew” that Tomasz was an Alpha. Of course, Yu did not know if Tomasz would make the transition to Alpha Superior but he did know that if such a transition occurred then he was aware of the nature of the Alpha abilities Tomasz would gain.

Like a lot of his students Yu had an ulterior motive for training Alphas, namely to defend the world from his own children.

By the time he left school the only thing that Tomasz wanted was to become a professional sports person and after numerous failures succeeded as an athlete in full contact cage fighting where he was billed as Tomasz “The Bear” Nowak.

Fame and fortune came his way and by the time he was thirty years old he had amassed a small fortune. As newer younger people starting to come up the ranks, Tomasz retired from the sport feeling it was better to quit whilst ahead rather than fade to nothing.

Away from the public gaze now Tomasz tried a number of different careers but none suited him. In truth with the investments he had made he did not actually need to work any more but being an active person, sitting around doing nothing did not suit him either.

That was when life through a curve ball because he found out he was an Alpha Superior. At a time when it was not well known he had no idea what was happening to him. Having never been ill and suddenly finding his eyes sensitive to light and his body consumed by an itchy rash he was quite troubled by it all. Then it inexplicably stopped and he thought nothing more of it until he was watching the game on TV one night and got over excited and suddenly caused the TV to fly off the wall.

The “excitement” caused the adrenalin burst activating his abilities for the first time but in his time this was not well documented. He would later learn through experimentation he could manipulate magnetic fields and having seen “Alpha Heroes” on the news it was relatively easy for him to deduce he was an Alpha Superior.

This was what would be known as the first era of Alpha Heroes and the costumed adventurers he saw on TV gave him an idea of which path his life should take next. Looking at everything he had learned since childhood it seemed to him that fate had finally caught up and shown him the way forwards.

Joining the other costumed adventurers Tomasz became known to the world as Maglock, a name he had chosen at random. For several years, he chased down criminals and fought alongside other Alpha Heroes pioneering a new era for crimefighting. Then Black Shadow began its purge.

One by one Tomasz’s allies began disappearing. Then came the day when Alpha Strike found him. Though powerful, Tomasz was not powerful enough to deal with the team by himself, and he was defeated and left for dead. The only reason they did not finish the job was because the battle had attracted a lot of attention and Alpha Strike did not want to deal with armed civilians as well as any other Alpha Hero that might have been alerted to the area.

For several weeks Tomasz lay in a coma. In fighting Alpha Strike he had pushed his Alpha abilities to excess which had shut down his body (a condition which would later be referred to a burnout). When he eventually awoke his discovered to his horror that his Alpha abilities had gone. He felt they were somehow still present but could not connect with them.

The loss was devastating to him and the fact he could still “feel” like his abilities were there, just beyond reach, made it had for him to move on. If that was not bad enough watching the news reports became highly depressing for when he learned the fate of others that he knew as friends and allies meet their end courtesy of Alpha Strike and there was nothing he could do to stop the rising darkness. He spent a large amount of his fortune visiting various specialists in the hopes that they could recover what had been lost but each of those ended in failure.

By the time he gave up trying and accept his status as a “normal” person most of his savings were gone and he needed to find work. Though his life as a “hero” was over, Tomasz still felt there was something he could do to help others and so looking back to his past decided he could fight crime in a new way by becoming a policeman like his father.

That at least gave his life purpose and after a difficult period of adjustment he settle in well with the Pacifica Police Department. Over the course of the next two decades he rose up the ranks until he became a senior detective before retiring early due to budgetary cutbacks.

For the second time in his life he had plenty of time on his hands and no idea what to do with it. He contemplated the idea of becoming a Private Eye but that did not pique his interest so decided to travel around America catching up with friends and relatives he had lost touch with over the years.

By this time the second era of Alpha Heroes. Seeing a few generation of heroes on the news gave him a longing for the “good old days” especially when Alpha Strike reappeared seemingly having never aged. By now though he had accepted his “war” was over.

What he did not count on though was irony for his “tour” saw him arrive in Atlantica city the night that ARGO attacked Team Zodiac’s HQ, the White Tower. He was only a couple of blocks away from the building after leaving a night club when Libra unleashed her EM pulse to disable the robotic spiders crawling up the building.

Though nothing close to him was affected directly (but she did knock out the power close to the White Tower), as the energy field expanded as it dissipated Tomasz was struck by it. He suddenly became light headed and collapsed, unsure what was going on. Passers by though he was simply drunk and an ambulance was called.

By the time he got to the hospital he felt fine and the doctors could not find anything wrong with him. Consequently, rather than waste everyone’s time he felt it best to retire to his hotel room.

It was there that he caught the news footage of the devastating attack on the White Tower. Though he tried never to dwell on such things, even after two decades, whenever he saw heroes being attacked it made him feel both helpless and angry. The surge in emotions caused a change in his body. A bolt of electricity arced from a wall socket in his room and struck him only it did not hurt.

The event though caused him to jump and in the process he tore of one of the arms of the seat he was sat in. As he stared at the torn furniture piece in his hand he began to noticed a familiar feeling he had not felt in a very long time, that of power flowing through his veins only this time something had changed.

After a great deal of experimentation over the next few weeks Tomasz would learn that most of his “original” abilities had returned including his ability to levitate only instead of them being “powered” by magnetic fields his Alpha ability now worked on EM energy.

The upshot of all this meant that when he was in built up areas where power lines were almost everywhere he could pretty much do as he had done before simply by channelling the energy through his body.

At first this seemed problematic as it would limit where and when he could use his Alpha ability but over time he discovered that like several other Alpha’s his body had the means to store the EM energy like a battery. Away from energy sources though his reserves rapidly depleted at a rate proportional to the way it was being used. Flying expended the most energy whilst his super human strength varied according to how much force he was wielding in a physical confrontation.

This meant outside of the city in quiet areas such as the countryside where there was very little in the form of EM radiation he it was impractical for him to use his Alpha abilities since he would burn through his reserve energy quickly and effectively become powerless which a clever enemy could use as a tactical advantage.

Inside the confines of a city where there were vast reserves on EM radiation in the form of electricity or radio waves not only did he have no need to tap into any stored energy but could use the stored energy at the same time as channelling external sources effectively super charging his Alpha abilities.

Having discovered his limitations, he was ready to re-join the ranks of costumed adventurers but by the time he made it back to his home in Pacifica he changed his mind, figuring that perhaps his best years were behind him and at his age he should leave the crime fighting to the younger generation.

Fate would however intervene for a third time in his life when the Mechaniac attacked the city. Watching the TV live news, he noticed how the authorities and the Phoenix Alliance were having trouble with the destructive criminal and he could not ignore their plight. Despite the fact that part of him was still thinking that crime fighting was a young person’s game he found himself putting on his old costume which now fitted somewhat tightly.

He entered the battle and cut loose on the Mechaniac’s robot allies. Fighting them felt good and it made him feel young once more, but once the villain was forced to retreat Tomasz chose not to stay and fled the scene before anybody could talk to him. He felt that what he’d done was a one-off situation and now that he’d got it “out of his system” he could get on with his retirement.

Over the course of a few months though he started making sporadic appearances. Since he derived all his power from the city he adopted the name Skyline rather that reuse Maglock. The next major battle he fought alongside other heroes was when a clash occurred between Team Zodiac and Alpha Strike. This was something he had been waiting for, since he had regained his Alpha abilities. The criminal team had taken so much from him he was determined to have his revenge.

From that moment in time if Alpha Strike ever made an appearance in Pacifica he would do everything in his power to wreck their plans. Though technically more powerful than before he had learned from the past so would only go after them if other heroes were involved.

For a while he was considered very much a lone operator but in recent times he decided to partner up with younger Pacifica heroes. As well as teaching them how to be better fighters, he also believes it is his duty to pass on his knowledge and experience in the hopes they do not repeat his mistakes.