The Physicist
It’s a painful thing to renounce your name, and all the more so when it’s a proud one. Saichin’s family were Zamindars, a lineage of authority dating back to the reign of the Mughal emperors. But when the Zamindar divisions were abolished in 1950—the year Saichin was born—his family satisfied themselves with merely being wealthy, storied and cultured.
The wealth was the next thing to go, when their home in East Pakistan was devastated by the great 1970 Bhola cyclone. At the time, Saichin was overseas, studying physics at Harvard. When he heard of the deaths in his family and the destruction of their estate, Saichin hurried home and found that it was worse than he’d feared. Everything they had was gone and, moreover, the country itself seemed to be dissolving into madness.
Worried about old grudges (real or imagined) getting settled, Saichin gathered what remained of the family fortune and moved his two surviving sisters from their native Chittagong to the capital Dhaka, changing their names to the generic “Rahim” and trying to forge new lives from the sodden remainder of the old.
Then, in 1971 came Operation Searchlight, Pakistan’s crushingly violent response to the Bengali independence movement. After dragging their feet over Bhola, the butchery was seen as a brutal insult on top of a callous injury. But there was a factor that Pakistan had underestimated: Dark energy.
They knew an expatriate Bangladeshi had teleported supplies in from the US after the cyclone, but they didn’t know he’d stuck around to agitate for his homeland’s independence. In the process of teleporting people to safety in the face of Operation Searchlight (an activity that got him killed) he spawned a sub-set of Bengal metahumans. One of them used his powers of persuasion on Saichin, and when the soldiers tried to gun down the noisy firebrand, they found their bullets ricocheting around the interior of an impenetrable barrier—a field that let them breathe, but which blocked all matter from entering or exiting.
Unfortunately, it didn’t block radio waves, and the soldiers were able to radio a sniper who picked off Saichin’s power-giver. Had they only known how events would turn, those soldiers would have moved heaven and earth to kill Saichin Rahim instead.
Lineage: Amanda Sykes - Abraham Sykes - Deionne Bright - Jonas Dreyer - Salim Taieb - Ram Guhathakurta
Power Level: Tier Seven
Offspring: Unknown
Personality: Thoughtful, grave and obstinate. While his courtesy and finicky manners might make him seem sycophantic to some in the casual West, they are actually the trappings of a fiercely proud upper class metahuman who sees no controversy arising from his opinion that he’s better than 99% of humanity.
Values: His Family, His Country, Order
Known Powers
- Saichin has just one power, the ability to create Selective Force Fields which block out only certain things.