Rockwell

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. Anything 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 that 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 relating to organised crime. 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. So, 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 lives of strange individuals. It seemed that this transition to television made Cliff loosen up a little. He was given a scary 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 drudgery of the past decade. Cliff took to the show incredibly well, and a steady fanbase began to accumulate due to the openness, empathy, and sheer joy that Cliff demonstrated in whatever environment he was thrust into.

The Cliff Edge only ran for 2 seasons, largely due to Cliff's overactive imagination and stubbornness when it came to episode ideas. 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 extended series based on his globe-trotting gonzo journalistic adventures. He very soon got the funding he wanted and then some. 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, an idea that was inspired by one of the more popular episodes of his axed TV show.

When recording an episode in Rio De Janeiro, Cliff had heard of an isolated tribe 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 at 2AM, 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 tribe 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 a tragic but predictable case of irresponsibility.

Inexplicably, a year and some months later, a new episode popped up. 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 tribe and 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 tribe, 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 disappearance as a colossal stone golem. Some major changes indeed.

Cliff refused to comment on how this transformation came about, but he settled into his new form very quickly. 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 on the internet. The superhero registration was first seen as a publicity stunt, but when an aging footsoldier of the Family was delivered by hand to the Paragon Police Department with bruises all over and little pieces of rock shrapnel embedded within his skin, people realised that Rockwell was legit. The Nitty Gritty was transformed into an excuse for Rockwell to give lengthy, exhilarating after action reports of his crime-fighting alongside sensitive intel that the gangs of Paragon City did not want anybody to know, especially not the public.

Rockwell is an oddity amongst the roster of Paragon City for sure. He patrols wearing expensive sunglasses and a tailored waistcoat, and he documents his deeds and findings diligently on a public platform every week but still hides the origin of his powers or his time in the Amazon rainforest. 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 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.