Height:  5’10”

Weight: 172 lbs

Background: Lord Nicodemus Talbot, Baron Strange de Blackmer, was born into the glorious British Empire in 1843.  A brilliant child of prosperity and good breeding, he was quite ingenuitive even in his youth, and as he grew older embraced the teachings and concepts of the great minds of his time – Jules Verne, Lady Ada Byron, and of course Charles Babbage, whose Differential Engine changed the face of England under Queen Victoria’s rule.

 Showing himself to be a deft genius in this new age of intricate clockwork and prodigious steam power, Nicodemus – ‘Nico’ to his cronies – he devoted his life in the pursuit of science.  With the exception of a few necessary activities, such as voting his seat in the House of Lords and the occasional recreational carousing, he spent the lion’s share of his time split between his workshop – where he and his young Serbian assistant Nikola would conduct experiments many would call mad – and in the field, testing whatever new invention had been deemed worthy of leaving the lab.

 The fact that ‘the field’ was usually the streets of London was both a source of amusement to the populace, as well as an occasional cause for panicked flight when things didn’t go exactly as planned….

In his early thirties, Nico had launched his most ambitious project yet.  The various subsystems had been conceived, built, tested, rebuilt, and were operating reliably.  The xenoenvironmental bathysuit had performed admirably in the Temes, the ornithopack problem had been solved with the addition of etheric vanes, his etheric galvanization carbine had been maintaining a steady charge for years now, and the short-range trials of the transconfiguration ether engine had been an unqualified success.

 It was time to go to the Moon.

The day had dawned with great fanfare, not in the least due to the Baron’s appearance while outfitted in his experiment gear.  The xenoenvironmental bathysuit, designed for protection and mobility in the rarified atmosphere of Earth’s little sister, was based on a diving suit design, augmented with protective plating and steam-and-clockwork mobility enhancers.  The ornithopack had been mounted upon this ponderous chassis, retractile clockwork wings capable of lofting even this increased weight into the sky.  And his etheric galvanization carbine, fitted with a second grip and trigger and appearing more as a pistol in the bathysuit’s massive grip, was prepared to deal with…well, anything.

The short-range matter translocation tests utilizing the transconfigurator had produced impressive galvanic arcs through ether discharge.  The vastly increased distances required to transit from the Earth to the Moon, however, caused galvanic discharges the thickness of a horse, arcing through the air and crawling wildly across the ground.  The discharges formed a latticework sphere as a hole was bored in reality…and the armoured Baron vanished.

An unexplored trivial root of the mathematics involved proved to be not quite so trivial, however.  The levels of energy output for the short-range translocations had allowed the experiments to occur as planned – with the vastly increased level of energies for the trip to the Lunar satellite, however, caused an unanticipated cascade chain that had resulted in movement not only over distance…but time.

Finding himself abruptly in the twenty-seventh century, clockwork wings keeping him aloft over a widespread lunar colony, Nico quickly realized that his calculations had, perhaps, lead him a touch awry.  The great energies require to transport him the vast distance had passed some critical threshold, and without appropriate steps taken to restrict them, he had not only been translocated through space, but time as well.

Being the true scientist he was, he took the opportunity to explore this advanced timeline, and was quick to discover that not only was the date far in advance of the one he had left, but history of events of the years he grew up in differed sufficiently enough that he had to conclude that he was not only in some alternate timeline, but some alternate version of reality as well.

Exchanging some of his brand-new centuries-old possessions for modern currency, he blithely proceeded to upgrade his inventions with commonplace futuristic advances, applying processes to increase material durability a thousandfold and substituting vastly more efficient components.  With this great technological upgrade and revised calculations, he confidently re-plotted his return to Earth, and his own time and space, and activated the transconfigurator once more.

This time, his margin of error was less than two centuries, and he reluctantly concluded that until he could resolve the errors in his theories, he was forced to lock away the time-and-dimensional shifting attributes of the transconfigurator – a problem, at least, that he had managed to overcome once he became aware of the situation.

That did, however, still leave him an interesting new timeline to explore while he worked on his mathematics….

Powers: Creative Genius.  Even without understanding the theory behind a new source of technology, Nico can usually determine a way of incorporating its effects in a manner consistent with the level of technology he is familiar with.  Knowing little of atomic theory other than to find the concept intriguing, for example, didn’t deter him from replacing the coal-fed burner for the bathysuit boiler with a compact fusion reactor….
 
Equipment:  Nico has a varied arsenal of equipment, mostly of his own invention.

Xenoenvironmental Bathysuit: Starting its life as a standard diving suit, it has been augmented with an overlay of reinforcing mesh at the joints and articulated brass armour plates, now standing eight feet tall and massing over five hundred pounds.  This additional weight is compensated for and more by a series of clockwork gearing and steam-driven hydraulics that provide a greatly increased strength factor, dependant on the amount of steam pressure available.  This steam pressure was originally supplied by a copper boiler heated by a cunningly baffled coal-burning furnace, but sine his foray into futurespace he has strengthened the boiler to withstand vast internal pressure and heat, and the water itself is now superheated to steam by a compact fusion reactor.  The materials of the bathysuit itself have been strengthened to the point of becoming impervious to conventional means, and highly resistant to unconventional ones.  It contains a cunning scrubber to maintain breathable air for close to twenty four hours, and iron plates upon the feet can become charged by an electromagnetic process.

Mounted upon the bathysuit is the ornithopack, a set of clockwork wings that provide the capability of flight.  Mere mechanics proved impractical to loft a man into the air, the required wingspan too extensive to retract to allow portability.  He solved the problem with the addition of etheric vanes, protrusions from the trailing edge of the wings that extended a galvanic network into the air that acted upon the diffuse ether upon which all matter floats.  This increased the effective size of the wings to a sufficient span without the addition of a prohibitive amount of mass.  A cunningly designed energy booster acquired in the future augments these vanes to a prodigious amount, allowing them to gain purchase even in the exceptionally diffuse ether of interstellar space.

Etheric Galvenization Carbine: His personal sidearm, the EGC is just under two feet in length and composed of wood, brass, and glass, structurally reinforced by 27th century process.  A lenticular bottle mounted at its centre discharges a beam that disrupts the ether along its path, releasing a prodigious quantity of electricity in its wake.  The denser the medium through which the beam travels, the more quickly its energies are depleted along the ether trail.  Therefore, while able to extend up to a light-second in the near-vaccuum of space, it is limited to under two miles while in atmosphere, two hundred yards through a liquid such as water, and can tunnel through a mere ten feet of stone or five of steel.  The lenticular bottle is cleverly recharged for its next shot by siphoning off some of the galvanic discharge, but in the unlikely case of the beam be fired in a total vacuum and failing to contact any matter whatsoever, several lightning strikes would prove sufficient to recharge the system for another discharge.

Possessing two hand grips for easy use as a carbine, the EGC has been rigged to be inverted and a third, larger hand grip to be utilized as a pistol when wearing the Xenoenvironmental Bathysuit.

Dimensional Transconfigurator: The invention that sent Baron Strange on his madcap adventure through time and space.  Allowing for the instantaneous transportation of matter between two points – after a short charging sequence – it is mounted on a heavy leather bracer on his left arm (the bracer that contains his mundane tools, auto-recoil electromagnetic grapple line and the like), the control accessable to his right hand.  The act of tunnelling through the ether emits crawling galvanic discharges, at both points of departure and arrival.  For safety purposes he has not tried anything other than a direct line-of-sight transport, although in theory a set distance in an unobservable direction could be attempted.  Recent expansion of this technology has allowed him to bring along hundreds of pounds of additional matter within the tranconfiguration field, and to fold matter away upon itself until it appears to disappear.  He has applied this feature to his carbine and the bathysuit both, allowing him to summon them out of apparent nothingness in a crackle of lightnings – as long as he has his control bracer with which to control the process.

The range of the transconfigurator operates on a logrithmic scale.  It can make jumps in one metre increments up to one kilometer, one kilometer increments up to a thousand kilometers, one thousand kilometer increments up to one million kilometers, and so forth.  With sufficient boiler pressure the range is, theoretically, unlimited, but the possibility of becoming irretrivably lost in interstellar space increases with the distance travelled.  While still capable of travelling through time and dimensions as well as space, Nico has compensated for those functions and locked them away from use, as being far too unpredictable to use safely at present.