The Plutonian

The Plutonian is an alien superhero who was active from 1959 to 2015. During this time he was widely regarded as the greatest hero and most powerful individual being on the planet. In January 2023, he dramatically returned to the Earth after a significant absence.

## Biography

Crash landing on Earth as an infant, the Plutonian had no clue to his homeworld beyond the wreckage of the rocket he arrived in. He was raised raised as 'Daniel Hartigan' by adoptive parents in the small town of Plains City, Nebraska. The name "Plutonian" is a joke, as his adoptive father didn't know the boy's actual origin but told him he was from "Pluto or therabouts" when the child pestered him with questions.

The Plutonian first began fighting crime in 1959 at the approximate age of 19 and would remain active for over four decades. During that time he faced dozens of world-ending threats, stifled wars, halted natural disasters, and foiled invasions by aliens and alternate dimensions. Further, he was a constant deterrent to crime everywhere, able to patrol the entire world simultaneously to stop crimes great and small. Experts estimate that at the height of his activity fully one in ten felonies were foiled by the personal intervention of the Plutonian.

The Plutonian's crime-fighting career came to a halt when he interceded on behalf of Kid Galactic, interrupting his execution by the Grand Galactic Inquisitor by leaping into the path of the alien's dreaded Cavitation Beam. He somehow survived but was left in a comatose state without his powers, and his wounds defied both scientific and magical healing. Shortly after this point he disappeared, and his location was unknown until 2023, when he was discovered in a catatonic state on the Astral Plane. Inadvertently revived by a rogue member of the Cuckoo House, he has now returned to the Earth for the first time in almost a decade.

## Personality

The Plutonian was a paragon of determination and moral fortitude. His strict code of ethics and refusal to compromise in the face of nonstop corruption and villainy made him a beacon of hope for the entire world. He was the ultimate idealist, and his shining example inspired an entire generation of do-gooders to stand strong against the tide of evil. But the nonstop demands of a society that refused to reform slowly turned the Plutonian's daily life into a ceaseless burden. In the early 1990's he began to withdraw from society and stopped making appearances or giving interviews-- his excuse being that, with a murder happening somewhere in the world every minute, any time spent speaking to the public was wasting lives he might've saved. He stopped communicating with his former teammates and friends over the course of the decade, and by the year 2000 he had withdrawn entirely. From that point on he was never seen except when he appeared to prevent a crime and onlookers often noted an expression of cold contempt on his face. It was widely speculated that the Plutonian was suffering from extreme exhaustion, disassociation, and sleep deprivation due to his unceasing vigil over mankind.

## Powers

During his career the Plutonian displayed a huge variety of esoteric abilities, their only common factor being the titanic scale of power displayed. The Plutonian's greatest assets were his incalculable strength and invulnerability; at his strongest, he pushed a rogue planet out of orbit and has survived nuclear detonations without any apparent harm. He also has superhuman senses that transcend physics, able to see through most materials and hear a child call for help on the opposite side of the planet.

The Plutonian is one of the fastest metahumans on record, though others rival him for that title. He can fly at such incredible speed that he was originally assumed to be using teleportation. He can also exist safely in outer space and has no need to breathe, eat, or sleep (though early in his career he often did all of these things as part of maintaining his secret identity).

Other powers used by the Plutonian in the past include firing beams of incredibly destructive energy from his eyes and breathing clouds of sub-zero air to freeze his foes. Witnesses have credited him with even stranger abilities, such as "reading" a person's thoughts by examining their brain synapses via X-ray vision, or travelling between dimensions by literally shattering dimensional barriers with his fists.

## Weaknesses

Despite his near-total invulnerability to other forces, the Plutonian was noted to be relatively weak to the effects of magic. For example, A bolt of magical fire might cause him extreme pain, even though he could submerge himself in mundane lava with no ill effects. This caused a number of master villains to research magic over the decades as a way to help insure themselves against the Plutonian's interference in their plans.

The Plutonian also had a weakness to the metal Illudium, a strange extraterrestrial ore found very rarely in meteorites. Although useless for most purposes, this metal caused the Plutonian to suffer a debilitating weakness in its presence, leading to a temporary loss of his powers and potentially even death.