Macaque

PLAYER: @GodOfGibberish
PEN NAME/CODENAME: Rockwell
REAL NAME: Cliff Blum
OCCUPATION: Investigative Journalist/Podcast Host/Vigilante
ORIGIN/ARCHETYPE: Magic Tanker
POWERS/ABLILITIES:

• Toughness/Super Strength
  As a stone golem, Rockwell possesses a tremendous strength and resilience to physical damage without really having to try.
  
• Earth Manipulation
  Rockwell's form hasn't just turned him into a big brute. He can also manipulate the earth around him to some degree. Mostly, he opts to use this ability to encase himself further in stone, but he may also melt the earth around him to form harmful molten puddles, or produce lava from his own body.
  
• Mixed Martial Arts
  Since his transformation, Rockwell has taken great efforts to train his hand-to-hand combat abilities. Whilst he could indeed get away with throwing clumsy strikes due to his freakish strength, Rockwell has instead opted to train real boxing and muay thai techniques and implement them into his arsenal.
  
• Investigation
  Through both bookish and street intelligence, and sheer tenacity, Rockwell can and will get to the bottom of any conspiracy. Granted he often employs brute force in his process, but there's no denying that it gets results.
  

Even before his body was transformed to stone and he was cracking the skulls of criminals all over Paragon City, Cliff Blum was never really known for his journalistic integrity. He had a reputation for selling exaggerated, exploitative stories to whatever rags would take him. Nothing was off-limits. He would sell stories ranging from baseless celebrity gossip to conspiracies and UFOs. Despite his tacky practices, Cliff was clearly a talented writer. Granted it seemed like he worked in fiction more often than not, but he had a style and a decent heaping of charisma to go along with it. Cliff wasn't just some hack who picked up a notepad one day. He had graduated with flying colours from a top journalism college on the West Coast where he had specialised in investigative journalism. He was expected to be a star in the industry, but his enthusiasm and naivety led to tragedy.

Like Icarus to the sun, Cliff flew to Paragon City fresh out of college to investigate The Family. Without a reputation in Paragon City, or really much common sense, Cliff went around asking way too many sensitive questions to way too many people. That ended when he opened his apartment door to the sight of a middle-aged associate of The Family holding a baseball bat. Cliff was beaten up in his own living room. His shin was shattered, his eye had closed up in all shades of blue and purple, and he had shards of glass in his back from when he was smashed through his window and held by his legs over the street below. He was told to never go looking where he shouldn't, and that was that. The encounter left Cliff with a permanent limp and a heap of trauma, all of which he had to sort through on his own in a new city with no friends and barely any money.



For the next decade, Cliff scraped a living as a sleazy tabloid journalist. His tendency throughout his career to spark controversy and throw himself into trouble came from his desire to distance himself from the sheer helplessness and fear he felt the night The Family came knocking. Eventually, whether rightly or not, Cliff was given a TV show called 'The Cliff Edge'. Cliff charmed and bounded his way around the world exploring all manners of extreme subcultures, obscure religions, and the daily lives of strange individuals. It seemed that this transition to television made Cliff loosen up a little. He was given an irresponsible amount of creative freedom, and he loved putting on a show for the cameras. The theatre of it all gave Cliff a chance to heal at least somewhat from the past decade. Cliff took to the show incredibly well, and a steady fanbase began to accumulate around him due to the openness, empathy, and sheer joy that Cliff demonstrated on his show.

The Cliff Edge only ran for 2 seasons, largely due to Cliff's overactive imagination and stubbornness. The producers decided to can the show, but Cliff had built up a decent enough fanbase to continue his escapades independently. He started a podcast called 'The Nitty Gritty' and began a crowdfunding campaign, offering wild promises of an extended series based on his globe-trotting gonzo journalistic adventures. He got the funding he wanted and then some more. So much so that he vowed to make the first series of episodes as exciting and as dangerous as possible, and to write a book once it was all finished. Cliff was going to investigate and hopefully participate in the rituals of superpowered cults all over the world.



Cliff had heard of an isolated cult deep within the Amazon rainforest that happened to be located at the centre of a hotspot for suspicious seismic activity. This information was relayed to him by a drunk old man one night in Rio, but a lead was a lead and Cliff needed to start somewhere. He released his biweekly episode hyping up his journey into the forest and gave some embellished background information on the supposed cult he was going to meet. That was the last episode of The Nitty Gritty for over a year. Cliff went completely dark, and most assumed he had died sticking his nose where it didn't belong. No recovery effort was made and his disappearance was chalked up to be tragic but inevitable.

Inexplicably, a year and some months later, a new episode of The Nitty Gritty appeared. Cliff's voice sounded hardened and raspy. He issued an apology to his fans and went on to say that he had indeed found the cult he was looking for. In fact, he wound up living with them for a year. He stated that the book was no longer going to be written, no episodes would be released about the mysterious cult, and that the series would be discontinued entirely. Cliff promised that The Nitty Gritty would continue, but some major changes would be taking place. This statement was followed up a month later when, even more bizarrely, Cliff made his first public appearance since his year away as a colossal stone golem. Some major changes indeed.



The story, as Cliff tells it, is that this 'cult' was in fact an ancient circle of druids who had kept themselves alive for thousands of years stewarding Earth. Cliff told the story of how he earned their affection, and how after a year of learning from them and living amongst them, his spirit was transferred from his slabby human body with a smoker's cough and a limp leg into a titan made of stone. Once he returned to Paragon City, he adopted the new pen name Rockwell, changed his fashion sense, and registered himself up as a superhero. The whole saga was the subject of bewilderment and fascination. The superhero registration was first seen as a publicity stunt, but when an ageing footsoldier of The Family was delivered by hand to the Paragon Police Department covered in bruises, cuts, and rocky shrapnel, people realised that Rockwell was legitimate. The Nitty Gritty was transformed into a vehicle for Rockwell to give lengthy after action reports of his crime-fighting. He would also brazenly discuss sensitive intel that the gangs of Paragon City definitely did not want the public to know.

Rockwell is an oddity amongst the roster of Paragon City. He patrols wearing expensive sunglasses and a tailored suit made of clay, and he documents his deeds and findings diligently on his podcast. Regardless, Rockwell has become one of the hardest working street-level superheroes in the city. The Hellions, The Skulls, The Family, and even Arachnos have all been the subject of his one-man raids and hit-pieces. The combined price on Rockwell's head is astounding, but he continues to relentlessly destroy and expose the operations of organised criminals throughout Paragon City.