#23 – Faraday (Thomas Peterson)

Being a celebrity or being a hero are hobbies for Thomas Peterson. However, he prefers his uncomplicated life, running his family’s music store and being a fixture in the small, college town he has lived in all his life. Thomas considers his work as a “hero” and as a “celebrity” to be useful tools at times, and he certainly does not eschew their impact on his life entirely. But he feels a great deal more comfortable away from the paparazzi, away from the commotion, living in a community where he can focus on teaching students the piano skills he was taught by his father, and trying to have real solutions to problems.

Thomas has always been a slightly unusual hero, because he’s never really embraced the job. His profession, to him, was as a teacher and community organizer. While doing the superhero’s work was useful and important to him, he didn’t see it as having a lasting impact, that its legacy, and his, were fleeting. So he teaches, instead.

As befits a family that ran a music store, music and musicians were always part of Thomas’s life early on. His father was a session musician for several different jazz groups, and his mother had been a opera singer. The pair began Peterson music before he was born, and made themselves a major part of the community within a few short years.

To his father’s delight, Thomas showed a aptitude and love for the piano, along with an ear for musical variety. He had been at college, studying at a music conservatory for three years when his powers suddenly manifested. It didn’t take a great deal of knowledge about powers to understand his burgeoning control over electromagnetic fields could be put to use, but, committed to finishing what he started, Thomas graduated from college before taking up the mantle of a hero.

For eight years, Thomas worked as a superhero, traveling the country, fighting villains, and always trying to set things right. But he felt himself getting lost inside the insular, self-absorbed world of heroes. His life began to revolve entirely around other people with powers, their problems, and Thomas began to feel he was being pulled away from the reason he’d taken up the job in the first place.

Thomas has not quit from the world of other heroes, he has simply pulled back from it. He’s still famous, and many people still visit his family’s music shop for a chance to meet the man once known as “Faraday”. He enjoys occasionally soaking in the adulation, and keeps in touch with other friends in “the business” he’s made. Thomas still occasionally goes out out to fight the good fight, but the shop, his parents and his community are his home, his rock. A place where nothing more than knowledge and kindness is expected of him.

Category: 2012, Superhero