Dominic Zhao

The 2000’s were the birth of several new advancements of human societies. Openly gay couples raising children, real babies being born out of artificial wombs, organs grown in labs...It’s only natural that these would culminate in The United States Department of Defense creating a living bioweapon to topple opposing governments and keep revolutions under control and out of the picture. Dominic Zhao, or experiment 0\_0079, existed briefly on the microscopic level as a virus. Thanks to the hard work of Emma Bailey-Robinson and Nien Zhao, the seventy-eighth experiment succeeded as the virus took a fertilized egg of their combined DNA into itself and new life was born. His genome had been programmed for that of a ten year old’s body, so the advancement from virus, to embryo, to child in only a few months was one of oddity and bewilderment for Dominic. Training started only a few days after human life did, where he was trained to become a government toppling, spy-assassin-bioweapon-human-virus smoothie.  Of course, there were downsides to having a human and a weapon occupying the same space, and Dominic’s brain was just as adhered to childhood as any other ten year old, however with no target for that enthusiasm or curiosity. While the rest of the military slept, Dominic was kept awake with (edited down) movies, tv shows, and cartoons from the 70s onwards. He slept occasionally, maybe four hours a day, but Dominic found true enamor with pop culture and would rather be exhausted than ignorant of the world outside the small cell he was kept in. While Dominic excelled in every branch of his training, he encountered several ideological differences with his parents, as he viewed them as such, and they viewed him as nothing more than a creation synthesized in a lab, the product of two chemicals, definitely not human and most certainly not their child. However, with nothing more than television and movies to base life off of, Dominic persistently believed they were his parents, and simply bad ones. This was quick to bring him to empathize with modern day urban fiction heroes,  whose backstories all included terrible parents. But that empathy was shadowed compared to the adoration he felt for the superhero genre. It was through that that Dominic felt as if he was, perhaps, not the good guy after only his third mission in actual practice. Seeing the men below him spasm as they suffered from a disease he inflicted, and looking across from him and seeing the politician he was supposed to kill, only made Dominic feel like a hero was supposed to come crashing through the door at any moment and stop him. So, he decided to stop himself. Sort of. After his friend Mason picked up on his misery after his first and last failed mission, he was thrown out of their jet on the way home, and Dominic never looked back. Traveling from Southern Estonia to the Middle East, he met Zalfaqar Quraishi, his first crush and resident terrorist of the region. The two worked together on taking down imperialist figures, including some from the US embassy, before their work climaxed with Dominic killing one of the ruling country’s leaders. After that, he was forced to bid Zalfaqar a goodbye and flee before the US Department of Defense caught up to him and captured him. He’s been on the run ever since.  Whatever they planned to do to him, he didn’t know, but he’s not looking to find out…

 Appearance

Dominic Zhao is a handsome looking, young, half-white half-Chinese male. Dominic has sharp green eyes and dark black hair. His skin is a golden brown color dusted with the occasional mole or beauty mark. He is relatively short at 5'7 and is lean built. Due to his fast metabolism, he has low body fat and is mostly built of muscle, however his muscle structure can vary throughout the day depending on his caloric intake. He can be seen frequently wearing different costumes, although when he feels nothing exciting will happen, wears a signature red Vietnamese war uniform that he found years ago. Often, he can be seen with blood stained bandages that he wraps around his forehead.

## Skills

Dominic is trained in several military fields of assassination, espionage, and combat. Because of this, he’s well versed in a few martial arts, several weapons, and is quite adept at sneaking into and sneaking around locations. Additionally, medical training was included in this package, so he is able to treat bullet wounds, lacerations, and fractures alike. Dominic is good at not being seen or caught and can disable electronics decently (in person, not remotely through other technology) and can hotwire cars and make car bombs thanks to Zalfaqar. His real abilities find themselves in his viral components. Dominic can infect anyone or anything he touches as long as it is organic with several viruses, ranging from influenza, ebola, MERS, etc... His viruses are ridiculously adaptive and take effect much quicker than a normal strain of the virus would, and also claim their victims much more quickly as well. He can store the energy taken from each infection, due to his consciousness spread apart from each of his cells, and cause kinetic energy bursts through cellular exocytosis of energy, in a move he refers to as ‘ergokinesis’. Dominic can also control his body and its functions on a microcellular level, doing things such as degrading and rebuilding organs and bones, moving around his skin, and rapid regeneration. This skill has its limits, and he cannot manipulate his DNA to program for things it is not made to do. Therefore, shapeshifting is off limits. Dominic is also incredibly fast, being able to cause adrenaline bursts through his body and heal his breaking bones and muscles quick enough such that he can run up to 60 miles per hour. Dominic can sense living organisms nearby him like a sixth sense, but only within close proximity to himself. He does, however, have the ability to expend his cells into organisms and track them through that. This is a skill he developed, and thus it can sometimes become symbiotic and lead his prey back to him. He is incredibly difficult to kill, as even when his body is destroyed, he can exist as a single-celled organism, soul intact, however he will avoid this as much as possible. Melting or crushing his body are the only postulated vaccines for such a pest like him.