MITHRAL stands for Mystically Integrated Technology for Human Reconnaisance Assault and Life-support. The heart of MITHRAL's armor and its power source is the sword Excalibur and its magical scabbard which was purported to heal all wounds as long as King Arthur carried the scabbard.
Robert Graille or Ireland was trying to create a suit of armor for use by law enforcement to better protect them in dealing with the supervillains of his world. The only problem was he was having problems engineering a power source that would be light enough and cheap enough to mass produce for the armor in order to make it affordable for law enforcement agencies to purchase in bulk to protect their officers.
Having reached a mental block and with no new ideas after several failed attempts, Robert went on vacation to England and just starting hiking through the country side, trying to clear his mind and think of what he should try next. As he wandered through an old growth forest, he suddenly found himself staring at a vast lake, much larger than the forest should have been able to contain, yet there it was. Robert moved towards the lake thinking he would try to locate its source and possibly follow it out of the forest to see how such a vast lake ended up in what he thought was a smaller forest. When he reached the banks of the lake, a beautiful woman rose up out of the lake. She looked at him, smiled, said, "You'll do for now," and handed him an ancient bastard sword. Robert looked down at the sword and scabbard in his hand and when he looked up, the woman and the lake were gone. Robert would have thought he had had a hallucination if not for the weapon in his hand, but when he looked down again, the sword was gone and in his hands was a silver blue metal disc. Robert was baffled.
When Robert returned to his lab, the strange disc went with him. Robert decided to try to determine what the metal was using his knowledge of metallurgy. What he found was that the metal was not a metal known to man at this time. Even more interesting was the metal seemed to be generating an electromagnetic field powerful enough to actually use as a power source. Robert decided to call the metal mithral after the tales of the fabulous silver in the old Tolkien stories.
He then considered the probable use of the metal in his armor as a power source, all he would have to do is reproduce the metal. All efforts to recreate the metal failed, however, which left Robert at almost the same place he was previously. He had a power source that was small enough to work with the armor, but no way to mass produce it and he was unsure how to actually utilize it in the armor since he couldn't reshape the disc and his armor was not made to work with this shape. Not knowing, what to do, Robert labored all night with the disc and the breastplate of his technological masterpiece of modern day armor. As the hours waned towards dawn and no closer to a solution, Robert faded off to sleep on his workbench with the disc sitting on top of the breastplate in a last desperate attempt where Robert was trying to determine how to make a cavity to fit the disc and then use it as a power source.
When Robert awoke around noon the next day, the disc was gone. He thought it had been stolen at first, until he thoroughly examined the breastplate and ran tests on it and found that somehow the mithral disc had fused with the breastplate in a perfect symmetry. Robert knew there were forces at work he didn't understand. He had often heard of magic, and he knew this was what he was dealing with. Robert took the breastplate to the stand and placed it in place with the rest of the armor. As he adjusted the fittings to hold it into place with the rest of the armor, there was a humming of energy and the breastplate began to glow as the mithral flowed out and over the rest of the armor forming lines of power across the armor and even fusing into the cooling fluid lines that Robert had on this version of the armor from when he was trying to use a power supply that seemed to run too hot. After a few minutes, the glow faded leaving only the lines of power and the cooling lines with a soft silver blue glow to them.
Robert put the armor on and went to his test lab to test it. All of the systems were online as soon as the last components were locked into place. The weapon systems which he thought he would have to calibrate to the new power source were powered and the armor was fully operational. No sooner than he had completed testing, an alien armada launched a full scale assault on several cities across the globe. Many current heroes answered the call to arms to drive back the invaders, and Robert arrived to fight off the attacks across the UK. Dubbing himself MITHRAL for the mystical integration that the disc had enacted upon his armor, Robert now fights against the evils of the world as an armored superhero...unlike so many though, he knows his armor is powered by magic and not technology.
(c) Donovan Hicks, 2011
Well, that's another one of my character's backstories. It's all I really had tonight.
Thanks for reading.
Love it! :D
ReplyDeleteGlad you like it. :)
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