Shin "Horizon" Akebono's page

Who or what brought you to the present? The first villain he ever fought, a Golden Age Villain called the Silver Saber, trapped him in an experimental time travel chamber and used him as a test subject. He ended up flung far in the future.

When did you first meet your future self? He would learn of his future self from other heroes in Halcyon and the crimes they've committed. His first real meeting would take place in the first team up of his life...

How is your future self the embodiment of a future you never wanted? Turning away from helping people, from being a good person and becoming something that seems to only want to destroy everything that it hates about the world. He'd always hoped to be a bright light, and not a crushing darkness.

What is your favorite part of life in the future? Your least favorite? Everyone has access to countless journals and scientific studies, can watch from their phones satellite images of deep space probes, and watch lectures on demand! But he's very uncomfortable with some of the fashion choices of the youth and young adults, especially young women walking in public in shockingly exposed clothing!

Why are you determined to stay in the present with the team? He doesn't know how to get back to his own time to start, but he's also desperate to learn what went wrong with his future self, to learn how to stop from becoming the whispered shadow in the dark. The knowledge of advanced science is just a bonus in his book.

Shin Akebono was not born in Halycon City, but was an immigrant child brought over with his parents when he was just a baby. It was much easier for him to adjust to a place that he had known all his life than his parents, learning the customs and culture that befuddle even his professor father. They lived in a family style apartment over a corner store, and despite the strange events that happened around the city, they cherish their lives there. Shin was always protective of his little sister and brother as well, so it came as a surprise to him when before entering high school, he suddenly came down with a case of superpowers.
It was really partially his fault. His father had asked him to deliver some materials for his project to the campus, since his mother was fighting a summer cold. He thought that he had the box secured as he made his way there, but he hadn't counted on ending up running into a super fight along the way. He knew he should have waited for the all clear, but time was growing short and he thought he'd be fine skirting around the edges. Whatever energy blast hit him he couldn't say if it came from a villain or an errant hit from a hero, but the box burst open, and surprisingly black crystals inside glowed and evaporated, Shin inhaling the fumes and feeling his whole body start to burn from the inside.

When he came back to consciousness, he knew he felt different. When he started creating a layer of inky blackness around his arm, and then let off a surprising beam of light that seared a brick wall, he knew that his life would be changed forever. He knew that he could be someone important now, someone that could protect his family from bullies, who could help his father with his experiments - after he apologized for losing his precious materials. He just had to get to campus first. He didn't expect to end up running across another villain trying to bully some other scientist to let him use some strange devices in his lab.

It probably would have been better to call for help. But he was riding a high from his new gifts, and charged in without thinking. He had the element of surprise, but the villain was a master duelist with a rapier, keeping the initiative. It was his lack of experience that caused him to be backed into a chamber and locked away, panicking as the gentleman villain proposed to use their 'test subject'. The last thing that Shin saw was pale blue light filling his visions. The last thing he thought was that his father wasn't going to know what happened to him.

The next thing that Shin knew was that he was still stuck in that chamber, but it was dark outside. He struggled with the door for a while, his powers not working for some reason, until he finally managed to break out, landing in a filthy and dusty attic storage.

He was confused and still hurt, nicked in places by that blade, as he wandered out of there and into a university that was similar, but still strange. He felt like everyone was dressed strangely. Even the girls were wearing shockingly tight pants, men had tattoos displayed like sailors or thugs, people rolling on boards with wheels and almost everyone with a small light up mirror in their hands they found intriguing. He didn't know what was going on - his father's old lab was occupied by a biologist's lab now, who didn't know him. Campus security was no help either, and they didn't know his father.

The trip home was perhaps the most bizarre for him, as there were a lot more cars. Sleeker, shinier, all blaring music, the city packed shoulder to shoulder. A trip that would have been easy to take yesterday for Shin seemed to take him hours to navigate. He thought he would find answers when he got home. He found a chain store instead that had taken over the old business, and some sketchy guys in his family's place obviously up to no good the way they had pills and powders out. They wouldn't let Shin go, so he fought. The minute his hands started to turn black though, everyone there panicked and ran away. He didn't understand that at all. Or where his family had gone. But he was starting to believe that this was not the same city he'd lived in.

Shin did the only thing that he knew to do at this point - go to the police. It took hours before a detective would sit with him and listen to his story (And surprisingly a woman detective, which seemed weird) before she checked the systems. So it was also as surprisingly to him after she'd been so nice to him, when the whole station suddenly went on lock down, his floor was evacuated and SWAT and a whole mess of heroes he'd never heard of before surrounded him. He also didn't know why people were referring to him as Dusk either. It took a while before people started to calm down, to come and explain to him - that he was already here in the city. And he was one of the most wanted villains in Halcyon.

Dusk, as it was said, was once a hero of great renown. He'd been a proper sidekick first to the hero Radiant Man in the Golden Age. He fought hard to make a name for himself with his power that allowed him to trap light and other radiant particles just above his skin, build it up and then release it as energy. He'd done amazing things, honoring his family. His mother's passing took a toll on him, but he persevered through that. Things were looking up for him as he entered college and worked towards his own doctorate in physics, just like his father.

Who was assaulted one night returning home and left hanging by the neck in a campus tree.

That was only one in a series of racially motivated lynchings that had been quietly happening under the noses of the superheroes. They were vulgar, but mundane and off of the scope of the powered. They hadn't even figured the race angle until Dusk stepped to assist and pointed out the lack of white victims. The police then found several groups full of suspects, all known and suspected members of hate groups. They asked him to help gather evidence to bring them to justice and help take them down.

The next dawn, the police found themselves with a new case, as every one of those groups and their bases were roasted and burned in a way that made it clear who was responsible. Overnight, Dusk went from hero to villain, one whose heart was black with hate. One who didn't seem to care about anything anymore. He worked for anyone as long as the pay was right, as long as they weren't the monsters he would snuff out without a second thought. He'd been incarcerated seven times over the decades, and escaped just as many times, currently at large. He never stays away from Halcyon for very long, and with Shin's arrival now, that may happen sooner than later.

Shin is now a ward of the city, and so has actively made a choice to become a hero himself. He knows that he's under massive scrutiny from the community, and terrified of meeting his older self, but he has to try and do this. He's got nothing left for him here.

Shin takes a bit after his father, Professor Yousuke Akebono, in that he has a curious outlook on things. Being flung into the future, he's got a lot of catching up to do on the latest in science and will take hours out of his day to read through a back stock of old physics journals to catch himself up to today. He is polite enough to his peers and enthusiastic about working with a team, and tries to show off a friendly face that doesn't stink of his alternate counterpart's darkness.
Truthfully, he's melancholy, lonely and severely depressed about his current situation. He's desperate to learn what has happened with his younger siblings, if he has any family left at all. He's isolated from even his peers who are so much more connected with this world's common tech that's hard for him to grasp. He pushes himself to be better because there's already an example of what could happen if he falls here in this world. The pressure on him seems like it could make him snap at a moment's notice, held back only by false smiles and bravado, acting out like a goof to dissuade impressions of him being broken.

(Elemental Control) Shin doesn't have a name for what his powers are, but he's sure that they had something to do with his father's research. His body now appears to have the ability to trap light and other radiant particles around him in a thin shell that appears void black just above his skin. Currently he can only do it with his hands and forearms, but by then 'piercing' the shell, he can let out the energy in blasts of heat and light.
Looking back as Dusk, it seems that there's far greater applications of the power, creating zones of darkness stripped of any light particles, covering the whole body in a protective shell of radiant particles, controlling it like an extension of his body to grasp and manipulate the shell like arms and tendrils. Eventually it appears his body becomes immune to harmful radiation, based on images of Dusk trapping someone inside of his shell with him, killing them with a bombardment of the radiant energy inside.

Shin currently is attempting to at least learn how to use his powers protectively, to gauge how to release energy in ways that stun but don't kill, and ways to blind enemies without microwaving their brains.

Dusk may have once been a Hero of the Golden Age, but these days he's a fanatical mercenary and serial killer that has caused hundreds of deaths by his own hands. His powers make him a deadly combatant at all ranges and his decades of experience have only sharpened his skill. Whatever gave him powers has also apparently slowed his aging process, though his hair has turned white from extensive use of them. Shin knows that he's committed heinous and major crimes, though he doesn't know the depths of Dusk's involvement with the underworld - there had been several moments in prior history where he'd taken back up on the side of heroes against powerful villains, only to switch back after the immediate threats were ended.