Cyclone 00: Prelude
Ace Mathews was born in the dirtiest, most corrupt section of New York City; Hell's Kitchen. His parents, Mrs. Marsha Mathews and Mr. Harold Mathews, both worked in an accounting firm. The Mathews had never planned on having a child, but when they had heard the news of Marsha's pregnancy, they quickly made the decision to keep the child. The two lovebirds decided that no matter the gender of the child, they wanted to name it Ace.
When she had Ace, Marsha was forced to quit her position as a receptionist in order to raise him. She had never had a child before Ace; however, it did not escape her notice when the child would do miraculous things like solve jigsaw puzzles at the age of two. When Ace was six years old, Marsha took Ace to a child research institute just outside of the city and they found that Ace's intelligence was far higher than most adults. Surprised by this bit of good news, Harold decided to look around for specialty schools that would be able to accommodate his child's hyper-intelligence. He had looked into the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters, but soon abandoned that notion when he decided that he did not want Ace's life to be shaped by mutants. After months of searching, Harold found out about the Richard's Foundation; a specialized school that teaches child prodigies anything that they wish to know.
After several meetings with Harold, the Richard's Foundation decided that they would accept Ace into their school; however, there was an age requirement of ten years old and Ace was only six, so they could not officially enroll him until he turned of age. Ace spent the remaining four years cooped up in his father's garage tinkering with various projects of his own design. Ace did not yet have the knowledge to build anything spectacular, but he did learn that he had a knack for upgrading outdated technologies.
Once Ace turned ten, he visited the Richard's Foundation and quickly decided to join their student dorms so that he would not have to make the fourteen mile trip twice a day, every day. His parents reluctantly agreed, figuring that Ace would also learn better if he didn't have the distractions that the notorious Hell's Kitchen would bring.
Ace had spent a good portion of his four years prior to enrollment thinking about what fields of study he wanted to learn while studying at the Richard's Foundation. Ace decided that he wanted to be just like his childhood hero, Iron Man so his first course at the Richard's Foundation was electrical engineering. Ace was incredibly fast at learning and after only seven months, signed up to take the masters test in engineering. Ace passed this test with a near-perfect score, taking for himself the title of the world's youngest engineer. He prided himself on obtaining the same engineering degree faster than his idol, Tony Stark.
He moved on to physics, the second degree that his idol had earned. He finished the physics master's program in only one year before moving on to medicine. He continued this trend of high-speed degrees for biology, chemistry, mathematics, and theoretics. Ace was required by the school to take an elective, so Ace reluctantly took Alien Zoology; the study of alien anatomy. Ace did not enjoy his Alien Zoology courses; however, he did get a degree in it, because Ace figured that if he was going to study it anyways, then he might as well become proficient in it. During his senior year, Ace wrote his thesis paper titled "The Benefits of the Implementation and Miniaturization of Interdimensional Transportation." He created a working interdimensional portal generator which he named the IDPG. He earned a B minus due to the fact that the technology wasn't upgraded; only miniaturized.
Ace graduated from the Richard's Foundation on the day of his twentieth birthday. His parents, who were ever so proud of their boy, had talked one of their clients into hiring Ace on as lead engineer. Ace hated this position, so after only two months of the stifling atmosphere, Ace quit from his position and used the money he had made to purchase a cabin in Quebec that his family had rented many times in his youth. He renovated the interior of the cabin to become the perfect workshop for a man of his talents.
He spent the remainder of the year developing a near-infinite energy battery that he called the Nitro-Gravitational Engine; later shortened to Nitrogravi Engine. The Nitrogravi engine burns Nitrogen molecules in order to spin a mechanized gyro that would in turn generate gravitational forces. The near-infinite potential for this battery would only come if the gravitational energy was used to power a collection mechanism that would filter massive quantities of air, syphoning out the Nitrogen molecules. Unfortunately, the current model of Nitrogravi engine can only run for one hour before needing to cool down for thirty minutes. If this model of the Nitrogravi engine is used for more than an hour, then there is the risk of catastrophic failure in which the gyro spins out of control, generating more and more gravitational forces until eventually a black hole would form. Naturally, Ace doesn't want this to happen, so he programmed in a failsafe that shuts the Nitrogravi engine down automatically if an hour has passed while activated.
After watching Iron Man prevent yet another catastrophe on the news, Ace decided that he wanted to become a better hero than Tony Stark, just like he had become a better engineer than Tony Stark. Ace's first attempt at becoming a hero was to genetically alter his body to become more animalistic and then use that to fight crime. He decided that he would model his body off of his favorite animal, the panther, due to their natural agility and ferociousness. Unfortunately, Ace's calculations were just a bit off. His original goal was to alter his body so that he could shift into an anthropomorphic version of a panther and back again; however, he wound up only being able to change his head into that of a panther, grow the tail of a panther, and have the claws of a panther. The one part of the experiment that Ace actually managed to get correct was the ability to shift between a purely human form and this hybrid form. Ace, with his new form, went into the city of Quebec and attempted to stop a robbery in progress. After receiving massive damage to his body, he did manage to stop the robbery. Ace then dragged himself back to his cabin to heal up and design a suit that he could wear that would stop bullets.
He modeled the suit off of his hybrid form and implemented his Nitrogravi engine to power the combat suit. He painted the entire suit black, but added strips of lights to highlight the design of the suit; once activated, the lights would glow a dull red in an attempt to be menacing. He attached the turbine that he used as a syphon for the battery to his right arm and then proceeded into town to try once more to fight crime. The suit stopped bullets perfectly, but became all the more useful to Ace when he accidently set the turbine to too high of a level. The resulting airflow actually wound up tripping up the crooks and granted Ace just enough time to tie up the perpetrators.
Ace redesigned the suit to have additional turbines and made adjustments to the Nitrogravi engine to be able to accommodate these extra turbines. The Cyclone suit, as Ace called it, now had a turbine on each forearm, shin, and one on his chest-plate. The turbines only protruded around one inch off of each arm and shin, while the turbine on Ace's chest had to be specially designed, due to the fact that Ace had to be able to wear the suit. Ace designed the turbine in such a way that the airflow would go into the suit and around Ace's body inside of specialized tubes. Ace went into Quebec for a third time to attempt to fight crime. This time the results were much different. One of the crooks had fired his gun at Ace and the bullet ricocheted off of his suit and went inside of the turbine, damaging the blades. This resulted in catastrophic failure of the turbine, causing it to explode, damaging Ace's arm and shredding the right arm of the suit.
Ace ran from the fight and retreated to his cabin to get back to the drawing board. He patched up his arm and began trying to design some sort of shield that would allow gasses to pass through, but completely stop solids from entering. After implementing the shields, Ace's fourth attempt at stopping crime came quickly in the form of a call for help from the Canadian coast guard. There was a pirate attack in progress occurring off the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He put on his suit, a grueling twenty-minute process, and flew off towards the boat. Ace spotted the remains of the victim's boat sinking into the gulf, survivors nowhere to be seen. Growing angry at the fact that the Cyclone suit took so long to equip, Ace spotted the modern-day pirates and flew off after them; however, the pirates saw him coming and fired their cannons at him. Ace managed to avoid most of them, but one of the shots clipped his left shoulder. The impact knocked Ace out of the air and into the gulf. Unfortunately, the turbines were not designed to process water, so they died almost instantly and the lack of fuel caused the Nitrogravi engine to die as well. In order to survive, Ace had to manually disconnect himself from his armor and he had almost drowned trying to get back to the surface.
Frustrated beyond belief, Ace tried to plan his next Cyclone suit around every possible contingency. He redesigned the turbines to be able to process any gas or liquid. He built in a way of having an emergency air supply in case of unplanned submersions like what had happened earlier that day. He also increased the durability of the armor plating so as to be able to last longer in a fight with a heavy-hitter like a tank. While thinking up possible contingencies, Ace also realized that there might be instances where he would need to be able to travel in a complete vacuum, so he designed thrusters built into the legs of the suit that are powered by the Nitrogravi engine instead of using a liquid or solid fuel. He also deigned a way so that his Cyclone suit shrinks and can be stored within Ace's own body so that his twenty minute equip time was reduced down to a half of a second. He based this aspect off of a similar concept as Pym Particles, but based around an atom's gravitational influence on the other identical atoms around it. In order to protect his secret identity, he made it so that the suit will only work in his hybrid form; in fact, it's virtually impossible to even detect his suit while he is in his human form. He accomplished this by making the controls for the suit genetically linked to his hybrid form's DNA. Also, when the suit shrinks, the atoms of the suit wedge themselves into the empty spaces within Ace's own molecules.
Ace also created a couple different weapons to be used in junction with his Cyclone suit. One of which is a portable, single turbine attached to a pistol grip. This Turbine Gun comes with its own battery and was built to be used if Ace's Cyclone suit is disabled, or if the Nitrogravi engine in the Cyclone suit needs to cool down in the middle of a conflict. The other weapon he designed was a remote controlled missile with a highly powerful turbine attached. The missile's purpose is to stick in the ground or any other surface and the turbine will generate a stationary tornado. Due to the fact that the tornado is generated by his turbine, Ace can have the artificial tornado spin either clockwise or counterclockwise. Ace didn't know why he would need the Tornado Missile, but he created it so that he could brag about having a secret weapon to enemies.
Ace's fifth and sixth crime stopping instances were pulled off without a hitch. He showed up on time, stopped the crimes in progress, and even managed not to get hurt at either instance. With these successes under his belt, Ace decided to move back to New York City on his twenty-second birthday to become a real hero. In preparation for the move, Ace purchased the penthouse of one of the downtown buildings to be used as a laboratory and to act as a home base. Ace booked a flight to New York City and began reading up on the local crime and superheroes.
-To be continued in Cyclone 01: The Wrath of the Rhino-