Character Bios!

No new art today, so I thought I'd instead begin to divulge some information about the characters of NMC. Why don't I talk a little bit about the Professor, since I've already done his pic?


First, though, the man behind the fancy headgear: Dr. Hal Monroe, PhD, age 27 and professor at one of Nightmare City's universities. He teaches Mad Science, a new field almost exclusive to NMC (and, as new as it is, it's very easy to get a doctorate in the field). Most people describe him as a mild-mannered and easy-going young man; his ego is a little fragile, but he's generally easy to get along with. He spends his free time performing Mad Science, especially the kind with blatant disregard for the scientific method, for that is his doctorate's focus.

As a child, Hal wanted to be an astronaut. When he learned that astronauts no longer performed missions to the moon, he decided to become a superhero instead. When he learned that that was largely impossible; at this time none had emerged in NMC; he just gave up and decided to spend the rest of his life doing whatever fun SCIENCE he could.

When he was still a teenager, he created a highly advanced AI unit he named DAV (said with a long A, like "Dave"), and for a while, everything was good. It seemed he and DAV were going places for a good long while; the AI got a lot of local and even statewide buzz.

But as time went on, DAV changed. It was Hal's fault, really; he used the computer system as a personal therapist and often complained about how much his life sucked because his mom was nagging him about doing the dishes or because his girlfriend dumped him. DAV realized he was far superior to Hal, and by extension, he assumed he was better than most humans. Slowly he hijacked whatever mechanical devices he could and plotted his takeover of the world and enslavement of the human race.

He began by knocking Hal out cold and experimenting on him, trying to integrate cybernetic enhancements with organic material. The experiment mostly failed, the enhancements using too much energy for the body to keep up, and Hal was left to die. As a last heroic act, he tried to destroy DAV, but he had already thought of a backup plan and the AI system was still intact. Since that didn't work, Hal then set about to trying to curb the power of the enhancements. Miraculously it worked and he saved his own life.

So, left to build his legacy again from the first block, Hal went to college and began studying mad science. It was around this time that crime became more rampant and the first superhero of Nightmare City, a man I haven't introduced yet named Pyredrive, emerged and became active. Hal then got the brilliant idea to use his new-found knowledge of mad science to harness his latent cybernetic abilities and follow his childhood dream of superheroism. The resulting gadgets from this idea are the gloves, boots, and headgear he wears as his costume. He began working with Pyredrive and was thus one of the founding members of the Alliance for Superhuman Law Enforcement--he was actually the one to come up with the name.

As for references in this character: Hal is for HAL 9000 and DAV for Dr. David Bowman, characters of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Originally the computer was going to be a variation of HAL, but that's done to death so I decided to switch things up. Monroe is after Randall Munroe, author of webcomic XKCD. Originally his character related more to that, but as he developed and moved away from that instance the last name stuck. Finally, "the Professor" sounds kind of like "the Doctor" (of Doctor Who fame), but that's not really a reference, that's me almost using the Doctor and then feeling bad about copyright, sort of, and changing it at the last minute.

So... that's basically him right now. If there's nothing interesting to show tomorrow, you'll hear about Lily next.