Matthew Klein
Human
(Actual Age: 66; Apparent Age, 45; Physiological
Age, 30)
Corporeal Forces: 3 Strength:
6 Agility:
7*
Ethereal Forces: 2 Intelligence:
6* Precision: 4
Celestial Forces: 3 Will:
8* Perception: 6
*Built up
Toughness/2, Charisma +2, Status/6
Skills: Computer Programming/1, Climbing/1,
Chemistry/1, Dodge/6, Driving/3, Emote/3, Engineering/2, Fighting/6, Knowledge
(Finance/2, Literature/1), Move Silently/2, Running/1, Swimming/1, Tactics/2
(Matthew has control over his Essence expenditures.)
Destiny: To stop the Sanguine Skull Squadron from
destroying
Fate: To deliberately murder (instead of bringing in
for justice) the criminal mastermind that slaughtered Team Freedom.
Matthew Klein has spent most of his life trying to
figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s
fairly maddening, because as near as he can tell, there isn’t. He’s reasonably smart, healthy and good
looking, and very unreasonably wealthy; as far as Matthew knows, he doesn’t
grate on others and nobody hates him. He
does useful things with his days (and that includes using his wealth to better
the community) while still taking a reasonable amount of time to enjoy
life. He has a great wife and adorable
children. Anything that he can’t buy,
he’s lucky enough to have on his own.
And still, the nagging feeling that he’s missing
something.
Well, it’s like this. Back in 1925, there was a team of Destinians
that had to make a choice: they could have a world where fascism effectively
crashed and burned somewhere in the mid 1940s, or they could have a world that
had superheroes in it. They went with
getting rid of fascism. All in all, it
was the best choice, but there were... anomalies. Such as, say, Matthew: he was slated to become a costumed adventurer that used his vast
wealth and technological gadgetry to help defend the West against the insidious
plots of the Iron Brotherhood. He would
have been exceptionally good at it, too; he and his fellow Epitomes (that’s
what they would have been called) were scheduled to arrive in those dark days
when it looked like England and the Turkish Republic were doomed to fall under
the Fascist lash, and their example would inspire the Alliance for Liberty to
keep up the struggle until the final victory.
We’re talking jet packs, strange mutant powers, battlesuits, Rocket
Aces, Tesla death rays, the whole nine yards.
But, again, Destiny decided that it was better just
to strangle fascism in its God-Damned cradle.
Even if it meant letting international Communism come to malignant
flower for a while; the Iron Brotherhood was slated to cause roughly a billion
deaths before it was destroyed.
Sometimes you have to choose between bad and worse. Not that this helps Matthew much; he was born
before the Destinians threw a spanner into the works, which puts him (and about
twenty or so other people) in the position of having absolutely implausible
Destinies and Fates. This is of some
concern to the Servitors of Yves and
Kronos who have discovered this; if nothing else, it offends their sense of
order. For the moment, the major
objective of the former is to prevent the latter from tricking Matthew into
becoming Hellsworn; there’s an unstated consensus that if this means a sniper’s
bullet and a pious hope that the next lifetime works out better, so be it. Servitors of Destiny assigned to the Klein
case are not notably happy angels.
But it’s better than the alternative. Yes, Matthew Klein never became Golden Golem,
Monique DeLay was kept from taking on the mantle of Libertie, the Battling
Sullivan Clan’s collective lives were cut short; but Paulo D’Ambrosio died in
his bed with nary a hint that he could have been the Butcher of Copenhagen,
Ivan Gregorovich Lermontov never had the chance to use the entire hierarchy of
the Russian Orthodox Church for his necromantic research, Isawa Hitomi’s name
is not whispered by mothers from Darwin to Tehran in order to frighten their
children, there’s still a Nepal and Egypt and Portugal... the list goes on, in
quite gory detail.
Sometimes you have to choose.