Rugiel (Protector)
"Muah-hah-hah-hah!" laughed the crazed-looking fellow in a stained lab coat, as he threw levers and jabbed buttons all over the place. Within the impervium-braced glass enclosure, his hands bound in titanium manacles suspended above his head by a crackling stream of energy, a nondescript young man stared at him with fear in his eyes. It would be nice to say that his captor had carefully studied his victim for days, watching him from afar and making sure he wouldn't be missed, but in truth the mad scientist's thugs had simply dogpiled the first unsuspecting young man they came across while driving down his street and hauled him off to this lab.
The mad scientist never asked his name; he simply cackled gleefully, snapped the manacles on his wrists, and suspended him naked in the glass tank, chortling all the while. Another look around revealed nothing more hopeful than the last look. If anything, the ominous glow from the intricate, arcane-looking etching under his bare feet served only to make his heart pound faster.
"Now," the mad scientist cried, loud enough to be heard within the tank, and then he said something else, but the awful screeching that filled the young man's ears drowned out the words. At his feet, the luminous etching underfoot pulsed, flared blindingly bright, and then a ravenous red-stained darkness drowned out the view from inside the tank. The young man struggled desperately, drowning in terror and despair. His whole body hurt, as if he were being burned and frozen and electrocuted at the same time. And his mind was drowning in another mind, full of hunger and evil.
A demon was trying to steal his body.
Unexpectedly, the young man remembered the moment his mutant power had first manifested, a long time ago when he was the quiet one in class and a bully would pick on him. It made him angry, but the older boy had never tried to touch him. Until that day. The older boy grabbed his arm, screamed, and let go an instant later, holding his scorched hand. It was one of the few times when justice was served, since there was no logical way to explain how he could have possibly burned the older boy's hand. It was the first but not the last time he had made himself too hot to touch.
If he had had time to think it through, he might well have died, giving up his physical body to the demon's will to wreak havoc with as it chose. But all he had at that moment was instinct, compelling him to defend himself in a time-tested manner. He made himself as hot as he could, the way he had practiced. A sharp jab of fear from the demon encouraged him to fight back more fiercely, but then he heard a roar and an awful scream, his voice and the demon's welded together. His voice was not all that was being fused, but also his body and psyche. He realized too late that this was a very, very bad idea.
Like waking abruptly from a nightmare, the young man found himself back in the glass tank. Except he was no longer a young man. His distorted reflection showed him a monstrous nine-foot scarlet-skinned demon with flaming eyes and huge leathery wings, crunching the pieces of his shattered manacles under thick black hooves. His mind struggled to make sense of itself. He could barely remember anything, save an interminable agony of heat and fear, and a strange unnerving sensation of being too big. Outside the tank, the mad scientist had stopped cackling. He had stopped doing much of anything at all besides staring at the demon in the tank. It was probably fortunate for him that the ritual had left his victim disoriented, or things might have gone very pear-shaped. As it was, he had time to stutter the demon's name and, when he saw it did not have the intended effect, to flee.
Rugiel — for that was the demon's name — eventually managed to break, or rather melt, his way out of the glass tank, and proceeded to slag the mad scientist's lab in a thorough and methodical manner. While he did that, the part of his mind that had been human subdued the part of his mind that wanted to be demonic, absorbing memories of terrible infernal deeds, but at the cost of memories of his human life. Rugiel's conscience, repulsed at the thought of evil deeds, helped him determine that his future lay in proving himself worthy of trust. Besides, the mad scientist's ill-considered abduction still rankled, and he didn't want to be like that.
So, after taking a few days to set his affairs in order — which was frequently hindered by his radically altered appearance, as he suspected it would, but he was patient and civil and managed to get through it all relatively unscathed, especially after he took to wearing a scarf over the blank place where his mouth and chin should have been — he moved out to Paragon City, whose hero population would no doubt be more an asset than a hindrance.
