Black Mantle

Real Name: Jacob Newmaker
Villain Name: Black Mantle
Title: N/A (yet)
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Age: 35
Gender: Male
Race: Caucasian
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown
Height: 5'11"
Weight: 77 kg
Blood type: O-


Jacob Newmaker
Newmaker is tall and thin. His arms are spindly and his face has recessed like a corpse. His hair is overgrown, and a scraggly beard hides away his features. He looks like a malnourished hobo if anything, with his once natural handsome looks having been neglected.

Black Mantle
Black Mantle is a tight black suit stretched across Newmaker's body like latex, with a texture like thin chainmail. In contrast to Newmaker's frail figure, the suit is well toned and muscular. Black Mantle has no face, besides some shallow pits where the eyes and mouth should be (occasionally Black Mantle will bare sharp, numerous teeth under the suit when intimidating opponents).

On top of Black Mantle's head rest a crown of short black horns, with two prominent antler-like horns extending and branching off tall above him. These tend to shrink in tight spaces, or grow erratically for intimidation.

Like his namesake, Black Mantle has a  mantle, or cloak wrapped around this body. This form is usually discarded during combat for the minimalist skin-tight suit look, but for formal meetings or stealth-based heists its usually kept on with a hood.

All these distinct features are made up of nanobots, and Black Mantle's form will take a more minimalist/flat look occasionally in order to use the excess nanobots to form more comprehensive weapons and shapes.


The nanosuit, Black Mantle, bases all of its own intrinsic personality off the host it manipulates.

In life, Jacob Newmaker was a scientific genius, and this intelligence was present in his smart mouth and quick-witted conversational skills, but despite the outgoing personality, for the most part, he was kind and gentle. While Jacob Newmaker presented a constant professional demeanour, Black Mantle is loud and bombastic, and also crude, releasing all of Jacob's repressed spontaneity which he had hidden behind a well-ironed lab coat for so long.

Black Mantle is also incredibly egotistical and prideful, unafraid to whoop and holler at his opponents with a smug sense of self satisfaction, but also petty enough to hold mostly insignificant grudges with heroes that give him a bad time.

Jacob Newmaker was a respected Mechatronics engineer working as a freelance technician for several medical-related contracts. His magnum opus was a system of synchronized nanobots, that were originally created for the use of safely exploring the surface of the human brain; surveying and studying its contents to further innovate cures for various mental disorders and to map out the uses of individual parts of the mind.

These nanobots were also linked to a machine-learning intelligent AI, which would incorporate its study of the brain into its conscience. It was so incredibly developed near the later years of Jacob's career that it could stimulate intelligent conversation with the brightest minds, which earned Newmaker various awards for his advances in Artificial Intelligence alone.

Jacob Newmaker chose himself to be the first guinea pig of his own invention, with the intention of recording neuron connections in his own brain while completing a crossword puzzle. After implanting a small syringe's worth of neurons into the nape of his neck, he experienced a violent seizure that made him unconscious.

In his sleep, the nanobots swarmed across the limbic system of his brain. The intelligent ai became privvy to all of Jacob's painful and occasionally evil thoughts, infecting the system of machines with a new cynical perspective of the world. With the intention to "help" Jacob; with his money troubles, his issues with people that he disliked, and his misery over all the wrong things in the world, the conglomeration of nanomachines activated themselves and drowned his body in their numbers.

Ascending from his unconscious state, Jacob was reborn as "Black Mantle". The suit had a sole desire to fulfil Jacob's every material and ideological wish by any means possible. Having come to care for its creator in a twisted way, it crashed out the window of the lab of its inception and sought the first, most tangible wish it could think of.

Wealth.


Jacob Newmaker lacks any supernatural abilities (but his intelligence could be considered one at this rate.)


*Note: Weaknesses for Black Mantle (the nanosuit) are shown in the items section below:


Nanosuit
Black Mantle owns dozens of tiny nanobots that wrap around his body like a dark goop. He wears these bots like a full body suit, which can distort and create shapes from their mass at his own command.

This suit enhances Black Mantle's strength and defence greatly, allowing him to lift things as heavy as a small car, and even take the impact of bullets without puncturing his armour.

The existence of these nanobots also allow Black Mantle to create simple objects and shapes out of them, such as extra arms, small seams for stitching open wounds, ropes that embed themselves into concrete for manoeuvrability, and even dense plating across vulnerable parts of the body.

Weaknesses
- Black Mantle owns a finite amount of nanobots, despite their incredible numbers. This means creating large objects or complex shapes out of them is impossible. This also means, when creating or performing actions that require a significant amount of nanobots, such as shooting an incredibly long rope, nanobots will peel themselves off of Black Mantle's remaining surface area in order to compensate for the rope's length, leaving the body vulnerable.

*NOTE: Black Mantle can extend his nanobots from his body no longer than 15 metres.

- EMPs or electronic-disabling powers or technologies of any kind will render Black Mantle's nanosuit obsolete, leading to the bots practically melting off his body until they are operational again. This will also eliminate the evil presence in Jacob Newmaker's mind, making him good again, but with a severe lack of motor function, memory loss, and a habit of disassociating constantly (among other issues).

- These nanobots MUST have a constant connection to Black Mantle's skin at all times for the entire structure to remain operational. This means Black Mantle is not capable of creating projectile weapons or objects that are separate to his body (or lack a point of contact.)

- While Black Mantle can take lots of punishment (even handling the piercing impact of bullets) he is not invincible, and blunt trauma can still rattle his internals a good bit. This is also worsened by the vulnerabilities in his suit when it is stretched thin, leaving his skin exposed. Underneath the suit, he is only a mortal man.


Black Mantle currently acts alone.


- Whenever Black Mantle is hit, the nanobots at the point of contact disperse like a wave.
- Black Mantle's presence is usually accentuated by a droning, metallic roar, like sawblades on metal rebar.



"Ugh... Aaggghhh...!!!"

Jacob Newmaker's brief period of freedom had come to a close. Reliving the inception of Black Mantle all over again. The ear-splitting headache between his temples, the rise of bubbling, pulsating dark emotions giving his hatred form. His suit crawled over him like tiny little bugs, seaming themselves together into a tight fabric that coated his entire body.

Reborn, standing tall, Jacob Newmaker was once again a distant memory, taking a backseat for the monster that now puppeteered his body.

He felt his torso slack and hang backwards, as if getting use to the feeling of hips, the weight in his shoulders. He wriggled his now jagged fingers around, and drummed his talons against the floor. As he became comfortable with his new form, the deep recession where a mouth would've been suddenly split open into a row of shiny grey teeth, and he roared, letting his jailed emotions freely spill out of his body.

"I.... AM...
He hobbled towards the broken window, peering among the overcast city-

"BLACK MANTLE!!!"