Conduit

Real Name: Aaron Powell
Hero Name: Conduit
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Birthdate: November 8th, 1993
Gender: Male
Race: Human (Metahuman)
Hair: Black
Eyes: Gray
Height: 5’ 11”; 1.80m
Weight: 145 lbs; 645.3 newtons
Blood type: B



Aaron is lean with long proportions, making him seem taller than he is. His face is clean shaven, complemented by a short professional haircut. His choice of attire trends more toward business casual.

In costume as Conduit he wears a full-body hardsuit painted metallic black with bronze accents and a domed helmet made of armored glass, coated in a thin layer of bronze foil.



Despite being fairly social Aaron is an awkward man, often oblivious to intentions left unsaid. In more professional settings he maintains a level of charisma, relying on using his intelligence to impress in spite of his personality.



Aaron and his twin sister Abigail manifested superpowers as teenagers, based on electricity and magnetism, respectively. What had been a family quirk of getting involved in and miraculously surviving high-energy electrical discharges turned out to be indicative of hidden potential in their ancestral genome.

Young, rash, and optimistic, the twins sought to be superheroes. Though their parents were reluctant, the elder Powells eventually relented, allowing the twins to pursue their shared dream. They enjoyed a successful career: primarily street-level heroics, though what proved most lucrative was aiding in the maintenance and upkeep of the state power grid, using their abilities to ensure the safety of line workers.

This was not to last. A supervillain came to their home city of Lowell, Massachusetts, intent on stealing nuclear fuel from the local university’s research reactor. The ensuing fight was not clean, and though the villain's plan was thwarted, Abigail went missing. A weeks-long search ended with little to show, save for a few blood-stained scraps of the girl’s costume. After a year all hope was lost, and Abigail was declared dead in absentia.

The loss of his sister devastated Aaron and his family, leading to his retirement from heroism. Instead he decided to focus on his education, pursuing the natural choice of electrical engineering. He graduated in 2017, having taken the option to work towards a masters degree from the start.

After the destruction of New York City, Aaron realized that despite the fear dwelling in the heart of the common man, and the scars upon his own, heroes would be needed more than ever.


1. Endurance
2. Reaction
3. Strength
4. Agility




1. Potential Perception

Conduit has the ability to sense energy differences, electromagnetic ones being the most pronounced, and kinetic the least. While it manifests across all of his natural senses, sight and self are the strongest. With sight he is able to map probable futures of a given energy potential, each one overlapping the other. As applied to sense of self he possesses the ability to feel energy potentials and circuits, relative to their distance and strength. For distant or weak ones he may only get a sense of their rough input and output. For stronger or nearby ones he can get a detailed sense of how they work internally. He can perceive systems he is part of with almost perfect clarity.
Some otherwise invisible metahuman abilities, especially those which allow the creation or manipulation of natural forces, are also visible to Conduit’s perception due to their potent energies.

2. Circuit Integration

Conduit’s power lets him become part of electrical circuits; he is able to tune resistance, capacitance, and inductance across his body in order to act as a variety of different components or even maintain internal circuits. These simulated components are ideal, behaving exactly as they are rated. Conduit’s internal components interact with the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human body is transparent to.

3. Emulation

The simulated components Conduit creates can be assembled into emulated electronics, ranging from simple analog circuitry to fully functional computers.

4. Energy Resistance

Conduit is immune to electrical shocks and can absorb or ignore them at will. This also confers immunity to non-ionizing radiation outside of the infrared and visible spectrum.

5. Discharge

Electrical energy stored in Conduit’s body or coursing through it can be emitted as either static shocks or sustained arcs. These discharges can be aimed at particular targets, stronger discharges possessing greater range.

6. Circuit Savant

Conduit’s power provides him with a deep understanding of how electromagnetism works, making him capable of designing and building electrical devices that, while not physically impossible, vastly outperform others in their class. In order to build a device he needs access to the right materials and tools suited to the task. Unique projects will be done via item application.

Mundane items:
Various types of batteries, both disposable and rechargeable
Motors
Commercial-grade components made from common materials
Simple circuit boards

Items requiring tools and industrial material access:
Printed circuit boards
Integrated circuits
Mil-spec components

Items requiring cutting-edge materials and tool access:
Ideal batteries
Ideal components
Supercapacitors
Room-temperature superconductors



1. Information Bottleneck

Conduit’s potential sense is limited by human physiology: in order to see probable futures of energy potentials he sacrifices normal visual acuity, both becoming more pronounced the more he exerts the power. His sense for systems is likewise limited in complexity; he needs to analyze complex circuits unless they are already intimately familiar to him, exploring them mentally using his power. Highly complicated systems which change rapidly such as computers, while not impossible to decipher, are incredibly difficult to map fully due to the limits of human reaction time, appearing to his senses as a blur of probabilities. Systems Conduit designs are much easier to interact with, though those that operate faster than human reaction time present greater difficulty.

2. Neutral

Conduit cannot generate electrical energy beyond the paltry amount that occurs naturally in the human body, and must rely on external sources or absorbed energy to drive his internal circuits.

3. Grounded

Energy absorbed by Conduit leaks out into the environment at all times; he can mitigate this using internal circuitry and wearing electrical insulators, but eventually his body will fully discharge all energy without an external source replenishing it.

4. Collateral Damage

While Conduit is immune to electrical currents, objects connected to him are not. Entry and exit paths for absorbed or stored energy must be chosen carefully, as the thermal effects on whatever it may pass through can harm him. This also limits his circuit integration, as the external components must be able to withstand the energies in the circuit or they will fail.

5. Skin Deep

Conduit's internal circuitry occupies non-physical volume which maps to the respective real volume his body occupies. If he is wounded, circuitry in the injured volume is damaged relative to the severity of the wound. This volume becomes unusable for circuitry until the wound has healed.

6. Uncertainty

Conduit directs discharged electricity by aligning the most probable futures so that they end at the target. However, this is not a guarantee that the discharge will always strike the target. Furthermore, objects that are naturally more probable targets along the discharge path interfere with his ability to weight outcomes.

7. Assembly

Emulated hardware created from Conduit’s virtual circuitry must be assembled via mental effort at the component level. Simple circuits are easily made or modified in real-time, however complex electronics require hours of thought over multiple days to assemble, even when consulting existing design blueprints. Like any real devices emulated circuits require power, though their ideal nature means they draw less than a physical device would.



Armor

Conduit’s armor suit holds equipment he uses to optimize his powers, primarily an array of batteries and capacitors situated on the back. This array stores up to 12MWh of energy depending on the storage media used. The suit contains special contact pads and external electrodes allowing Conduit to safely emit or absorb electricity through the suit. The suit also provides protection via commercially available ballistic materials built into the torso, thighs, and upper arms.

Virtual Machine

Using his simulated circuits Conduit created a computer inside his head, similar in specification to a high-range desktop PC. This computer is capable of recording and analyzing what he sees or hears, and can be controlled by thought, in addition to being capable
While it is an incredibly convenient tool to have, it can only be used by interacting with his neurological senses. Thus, he must trade between being able to perceive the world around him and whatever he wishes to use the machine for. As an example, if Conduit wanted to watch a recording made by the virtual machine, he would have to sacrifice visual sensation. This ranges from the recording existing somewhere in his visual field, all the way to occupying his vision entirely. Listening to recorded audio is less flexible: the machine’s audio output is heard like any real sound, and thus may be drowned out in loud environments.

Virtual Antenna

This emulated electronic device is a wireless antenna Conduit created so that his emulated hardware could interface with physical devices. It operates in the 2.4GHz spectrum, and is capable of connecting to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth standard devices.
Because the human body is on some level opaque to the frequencies used by these standards, Conduit’s virtual antenna is less sensitive than a real device would be. As a result he generally only uses it to connect with his phone, using the phone’s wireless suite as a stepping stone for further connections.