Michael Ryder, Jr.

Mike was born and raised in Central City, a city in the Northeastern United States. He had a relatively average upbringing, with a stay-home mom and a father who worked at a US branch of Hephaestus Technologies, a Biomedical Engineering corporation based out of South America; he loved both of them very much.

However, his formative years were not without incident. When he was just 7 years old, he was using an elevator by himself in the middle of a big storm, ascending up to the floor that his family's apartment was on after returning from the corner store to buy some candy (the storm had just started when he re-entered the building). After a particularly nasty lightning strike, the power went out, and the elevator ground to a halt between floors. It wasn't dark, for the emergency lights had come on. However, he was stuck in there for almost 13 hours before the fire department managed to rescue him. Since then, Mike has had a near-crippling fear of tight, enclosed spaces.

Not everything was terrible, though. Mike met a boy named Keith Coolidge when he was 9 years old, when they were in the same class in 4th grade. The two were very fast friends, becoming best friends within a month of their first meeting. The two would do most everything together. It wasn't until the two were about 11 or 12 years old that Mike realized that he had a burgeoning crush on Keith, which was about when Mike realized that he was gay.

When Mike was 13, tragedy struck. When his father was walking home from work down a busy street, A brown sedan pulled up to the curb, rolled down the passenger window, and someone with a ski mask over the lower half of his face started firing indiscriminately at passing pedestrians, with Mike's father taking a few rounds: one through the throat, one in the chest, and one in the head. Later that night, he died of his injuries at the hospital.

After this, Mike's mother retreated into herself for several weeks, with Mike left to look after himself all the while. He did the shopping, he cleaned, cooked, anything he could do to help his mother through it. Eventually, maybe 2 or 3 months after the murder, she came out of it, and gave her son the biggest hug she ever gave him; one that was both thankful for helping her, and trying to comfort him over what happened. The crying he did in her arms that night was the hardest he has ever cried in his life.

When Mike was 15 - just starting his sophomore year at Central City High School - Mike asked Keith out for the first time. Fortuitously, Keith had had a crush on him as well. Mike had found that very welcome, and had pulled Keith into a very tight hug. Mike's mother and Keith's uncle - who knew each other well due to Mike and Keith's friendship - had placed gentlemen's bets on when the two would finally start dating each other, which Mike's mother had won.

Now, depending on the story, the two are now 19 and enrolled in the same university - Baxter University (which is in a town called Baxter, about 90 minutes to the northwest of Central City)

Additionally, throughout his life, Mike has had an interesting...companion...of sorts: Something that could be characterized as an internal alarm system. Whenever potential danger is near, or whenever he's around someone or something that could pose a very real danger to him, an alarm or siren goes off in his head. It has detected criminals around him and other potential unsavory outcomes, such as a man who lived a few floors down from him, who lived with a woman he claimed - and everyone thought to be - his wife. Mike was only about 10 at the time, but he could sort of sense bad vibes coming off the man in waves, and a concerning wail had come from his internal alarm.

He had said repeatedly to anyone who would care to listen to a 10-year-old child - which wasn't many - that something was really really wrong with the man. As it turned out, the man in question had kidnapped his alleged wife, and had forced her to proclaim several times over that she was his wife, even if he had...forced himself onto her without permission several times. In truth, Mike had a form of Extrasensory Perception. It gave him both the aforementioned alarm and 'bad vibes detector', and also a stalwart mental fortitude. However, because he always seems to be worried about something, and because his ESP - while immensely helpful - isn't perfect, he has been accused of being paranoid.