Rigel
Before his nova eruption, Matt Harper was a sophomore student at UCLA. He was a middling student, pursuing astronomy, and a second-string linebacker for the football team. He could have been a great football player or student, yet he was always taking risky gambles on the field (he didn’t follow the playbook very well) or goofing off in class. He supplemented his meager student lifestyle with a small football scholarship and a part-time job at the astrophysics lab on campus, where he acted as a technician and grunt, helping the researchers set up the equipment for experiments. One fateful evening at the lab, he snuck off for what he thought would be a quick nap in a supply closet. Several hours later, he awoke to find the lab closed up and that everyone else had left for the evening. Antsy and bored, he wandered over to the lab’s newest experiment—a chamber designed to simulate the birth of stars by compressing heated gases to mimic stellar fusion. While the chamber had undergone some initial tests, it had not yet been cleared to run a full experiment. Matt fiddled with the controls, starting the chamber’s computer, and pretended he was running the experiment. Then, curious about the chamber itself (in his job, he had never been allowed near it), he entered it. The door shut behind him, locking automatically. In his reckless play with the computers, he had a started the experiment!
The chamber began filling with gas, mostly hydrogen, and heating up, exciting the gases’ molecules which started swirling around Matt and compressing further and further into his body. Matt was sure he was dying as the pressure built up. Huddled in a fetal position on the floor at the center of maelstrom, the chamber walls seemed to recede into the distance in Matt’s vision. But rather than killing him outright, Matt, like the gases around him, grew denser and more compact—he was shrinking, becoming heavier. At the very moment that the scientists hypothesized that stellar fusion would occur, Matt burst into flame. The gases around him exploded furiously, rupturing the containment seals on the chamber and setting the control room on fire. Disoriented, Matt could only watch as the fire spread and an alarm began pealing, magnifying his intense headache. As the pressure left the room, Matt began growing again, becoming less dense. But rather than stopping at his normal size, he continued to expand, becoming less and less dense until he was like a gas himself. Helpless, his gaseous form was sucked out of the room by the air pressure changes caused by the now raging fire, and he mingled with the smoke pouring from the building, and drifted unnoticed past the emergency crews drawn by the alarm. He floated a short distance away and settled to the ground in a small, on-campus park, gradually coalescing back to his normal form. Naked and distraught, he managed to make it his car unseen and back to his apartment.
Back inside his apartment, he first thought he must have been hallucinating or having a nightmare, until he looked into a mirror and saw his eyes. The whites and irises of his eyes had been seemingly replaced with orbs of molten, golden flame, like tiny stars in his head, and his pupils looked like nothing more than sunspots, pulsing at the center. Matt realized that he was a nova.
He did not return to his classes, instead taking a leave from school, and went to a Project Utopia facility. He spent a year there, learning about his newfound powers and training himself to control them. He was stronger than he was before—not inhumanly so, but at the peak of human potential. He discovered, to his delight, that he could fly. He also found that he could become like a gas, spreading his molecules further and further apart, becoming so diffuse that he was intangible and could pass his molecules through solid objects if he wished. He called this form the Nebula. He could also increase his density and become inhumanly strong and heavy (he called this form the Neutron). And like his first manifestation, he could compress himself, dramatically shrinking in size while maintaining his strength and mass (this he called this the White Dwarf). Coupling the White Dwarf form with the Neutron, Matt could become a super-dense, super-heavy, super-strong dynamo (and while like this, he was very hard on the furniture at the Project Utopia facility). And like the stars he loved, Matt could surround his body with flames, an expression of the fusion reactor at his heart that he called his Corona. At normal size, his corona burns mostly yellow, with red shooting throughout. As he shrinks, the flames seem to become more intense, turning greenish, then blue, until finally, at his smallest, he burns with a white-hot intensity. His fellow novas at the facility soon learned that a flying, burning, 4.5 inch, 1000 pound Shooting Star was not to be trifled with. Even less so, once he discovered he could fire bolts of pure flame that he called Nova Blasts. He adopted the name Rigel, after the brightest star in the constellation Orion, and the 6th brightest star in our nighttime sky.
But life at a Project Utopia facility was not quite . . . utopian. The pace his instructors set seemed too slow for Matt, who chafed at their restrictions. He reveled in his powers and wanted to explore and experiment faster than the steady, measured, seemingly riskless regimen he was assigned. And his fellow new novas seemed so serious and docile. He wanted to have fun, and besides, few people there thought his jokes were that funny. Against their protestations that he was too dangerous to leave just yet, Matt thanked them for their help (and the awesome Eufiber suit), put on the deep black wraparound sunglasses he wore to hide his glowing eyes, got into the car he hadn’t driven in a year, and headed back to school.
Back at UCLA he discovered: he had been evicted from his apartment for
non-payment of rent; he had been cut from the football team and his scholarship
rescinded; the lab was still undergoing repairs and not yet open; and
the school declined to readmit him anyway as his grades were poor. And
yet, with little money, no job, and nowhere to live but his beat-up 1994
Honda Civic del Sol, he felt freer than ever, and ready for the adventures
he knew his life would bring him.
System
Aberrant