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
  Though both bookish and street intelligence, and sheer journalistic 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 consciousness was encased within the form of a stone golem he piloted to crack 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 to spark controversy and throw himself into trouble through his work 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 for the show 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.

Cliff had heard of an isolated tribe deep within the Amazon rainforest that happened to be located at the centre of