Alothin

Full Name: Alothin
Chronological Age: 41 (41 at reapproval date)
Race: Human Order Focus
Birthplace: Believed to be somewhere in Cardinal, Earth
Status: Active
Faction: Official Teacher Power Wielder, Tier 1 (sub-1,000 PL)
Initial Approval Date: September 20, 2002
Last Reapproval Date: May 26, 2014

Appearance

Alothin, prior to the Second Null, often appeared dressed in the archaic garb of the mage he was. Other times, particularly when on the business of Empirical Industries, he dressed in a perfectly modern business suit. These days, with the cessation of his magical powers, he has discarded the archaic garb and is daily found wearing a suit of the best cut and conservative fashion.

Alothin stands 5'11", an unimposing height in the powered world, where powerful beings can often be of mind-boggling size and musculature. While not a wielder of physical power, Alothin maintains his body quite well. He has been known to work an old-fashioned forge himself, working with hammer and anvil to craft necessary materials, and this also helps to keep him in good form.

Powers and Resources

Once upon a time, Alothin was a mighty mage, and many were in awe of the fantastic powers he could exert by his will. In addition, his psionic potential, hidden from all as a secret arrow in his quiver against a time of need, when someone might manage to negate his magical prowess, was considerable, although it did not hold a candle to his arcane capabilities. Ironically, both were negated in one fell swoop with the Null, and while he maintains the slightest powers of minor magic and psionics, he has no powers worthy of consideration when one is speaking of combat and power wielders. Despite his loss of power, he retains a vast library and knowledge of magic, and would be a worthy mentor to any aspiring mage, despite his lack of brute power.

However, Alothin also possesses, as his personal asset, Empirical Industries and all its subsidiaries and facilities. This gives him enormous financial and industrial capacity, as well as the political clout necessary to make his voice heard to the Directional Council and other important personages. While it is by no means an absolute voice, as Empirical Industries is one of the largest corporations, public or private, in Cardinal history, with a corresponding influence on the public, it is rare for his voice to be entirely ignored.

Moreover, as Empirical Industries has a policy of acting to employ power wielders in useful and productive work, so they are not left to destroy or commit crime to earn their daily bread, what he lacks in personal power, or that lies beyond the reach of the technological prowess of his scientists and engineers, he can often tap his employees to provide.

Biography

The First Earth

Alothin was born to a pair of unnotable, if reasonably wealthy, parents -- parents he never knew well, for they died when he was still quite young, and he became an orphan. With a lack of living relatives, their estate was liquidated and placed into a trust fund for him. His nature as an Order Focus wasn't known, then. The orphanage was run relatively well, and the kids grew up healthy. A goodly number of them were adopted, but Alothin never was. He stood out from the rest of the orphans, in a way. It wasn't that he was aloof purposely, for he was friendly enough. But he acted differently. Some of them thought nothing of stealing from each other or from the orphanage, or from stores, but he never did. Whenever a bully might pick on someone smaller, Alothin could be counted on to stand up for the small one. Sometimes Alothin lost against the bully, but that was rare. He'd discovered that he could do certain things, at a young age. He'd discovered his ability to Imbue objects, when fixing a toy for another orphan. And he'd learnt to charge objects with Order's power, and that they stunned bullies better that way. Children are observant, and had figured out that Alothin was different somehow. At eighteen, Alothin left the orphanage, finished his studies, and started travelling around the continent, wandering... trying to find his place in the world. During his journeys, he discovered references to Order Foci in moldering old tomes in hidden libraries, and discovered both what he was, and the strange power he wielded. It would take him years to fully develop the philosophy of Order he would come to wield, but with its mastery would come a power of magic that few could stand against, and practically none could penetrate -- not that it would save him from the terrors of the Null.

The Second Earth

When the Ultimate Kai recrafted reality after it had been destroyed by the ravages of the Null, Alothin was among the few power wielders still standing. It is a little known fact that the will and minds of the survivors had a significant impact on the reality that was reborn -- and Alothin has a more formidable will than many. With that in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that Empirical Industries rapidly grew to dominate a significant percentage of Cardinal's economy, eclipsing Capsule Corp rapidly, and expanding out into space itself with the construction of their own space station at a local Lagrange point, among other space-based facilities.

However, despite how he benefitted from it, Alothin never forgot the danger of the Null, and how he wasn't able to withstand and counteract it, despite all that he had learned and mastered. He forever kept himself aware, always on the lookout for any scrap of arcane knowledge that might lead him to a defense against the fearsome nihility that the demonic Oujakuma had wielded. Regrettably, his search was to be in vain -- though he did find many curious motes of power and knowledge in the meantime, and one piece, in particular, that was to be his final redoubt.

The Third Earth

With the passage of the Second Null, Alothin has been left a wasteland of power. While retaining his formidable mind and knowledge, everything save a tiny dreg of magical and psionic capability has been stripped from him -- just enough for him to know what he has lost, without being able to truly reach out and touch it. For many, this would drive them to obsession or despairing depression. But Alothin has never been like the many, and in this, he is even further from it. For the Alothin that the world knows now, while the spitting image, and even psionically indistinguishable from the Alothin of the Second Earth, is not the same man -- but not because of the Null's rewriting.

In the last years of the Second Earth, Alothin delved deeper into stranger and stranger arcane secrets. He acquired powers some would consider the sole purview of gods -- he could hear the thoughts of people who meditated mindfully of him, what some would consider prayer. He grew capable of granting his raw power to others, and even of lending his formidable skills and spells to others. And, perhaps most telling of all, he learned to create avatars of himself, so he could be in many places at once -- a necessity, he found, with the speed of the world and the duties he had assumed. Many of these avatars, particularly the ones who did not resemble him at all, lacked the awareness that they even were avatars, lest a psion discover it from their poorly-shielded minds, and damage Alothin's plans. But this avatar, who has become the Alothin of the Third Earth, is fully aware of the circumstances of his creation, in the final days of the Second Earth.

So where, then, is the puissant Alothin of the First and Second Earths? He escaped the Second Null. His final discovery, on his path to mastering all the abilities of a god, was the ability to craft a place outside of time and space, foreign to reality as we know it, to which the souls and spirits of the deceased could be drawn -- to wit, an afterlife. In the last moments of the Null, with reality collapsing about him, he drew his powers about him, and cast himself out of the reach of the Null, full-bodied into the 'afterlife' he'd so carefully crafted. From there, he gazed upon reality as it was recast anew... but when he made to step back into it, to retake his place, he found himself blocked. The afterlife he had created had been cut loose from reality, and had no bond to this new world. It was too strange, and rejected his presence, blocking him from reestablishing the channel that he had hurled his body and self through. So now, the Alothin of the First and Second Earths stands outside the borders of reality, looking on, watching, waiting for any gap in the barrier of reality that prevents his return.