Sparks

Sparks is a hero in Arcanium.

"While people find him a little too nonchalant about his extremely dangerous tech, there’s no denying that he’s deadly effective when he needs to be."

Description
From the official site: Sparks came from a long line of loggers and dam-builders, and his father expected no different for his kit. But the rapid technological advancement of their home province of Nova rendered loggers and dam-builders obsolete. Sparks’s mother knew this, even if her husband refused to believe it.

And so, mere days after giving birth, Sparks’s mother brought her kit all the way to the great technocratic city of Turbine in order to receive the blessing of Telos, the Spirit of Progress and Industry.

Telos takes the form of electricity, and his visage is too bright for mortal eyes, but that didn’t stop the mother beaver. She covered her son’s eyes and closed her own, and stepped close enough to Telos that both beavers’ fur began to stand on end. Due to her self-imposed blindness, she wandered too close.

A spear of Telos’s electric form zapped her kit, giving her a great shock and leaving her son buzzing but alive. This was not the blessing she was expecting, but it was a blessing all the same. Her son carried a powerful inner electrical charge the rest of his life—along with a natural affinity for all things industrial. Thus he had his given name: Sparks.

Even though Sparks’s father was angry, there was no denying the young beaver’s growing brilliance. Sparks was accepted into the premier Telosian College at half the age of the next youngest student, and graduated before the age most students entered. He could look at a piece of metal or a chunk of wood and picture the invention he would design as readily as a painter envisions a portrait. Even more miraculously, his internal “Sparks” could power his self-made inventions without the need for any external power source other than the occasional arcane power crystal.

Soon Sparks found himself working for Nova’s Council of Steel, designing Mecharmor for the province’s elite warriors. He also built defensive tech such as sentry turrets and mech cannons to defend the Novan borders from minions of the Black Shard. Yet despite his brilliance, he wasn’t infallible.

During a weapons testing procedure, a grenade Sparks believed to be a dud blew up in his hand thanks to an errant jolt of his own electrical charge. Sparks lived, but his arm was destroyed in the blast. The Council of Steel removed him from the defense program, and, just like that, all Sparks’s hard work came to nothing.

That didn’t dampen his spirits, however. Using metallic parts scavenged from junkyards and purchased from Turbine’s mecha market, Sparks built himself a brand new working arm. What’s more, he could focus his electrical current into the conductive arm to power-charge his inventions.

Even though Sparks’s career was over, his industrial mind drove him to keep building. He became a mercenary, selling his expertise and the use of his gadgets so he could afford the parts he needed for whatever mad invention he came up with next.

These days, Sparks spends most of his time tinkering in his workshop, venturing out only when he needs to buy parts or do a job for a paying client. While people find him a little too nonchalant about his extremely dangerous tech, there’s no denying that he’s deadly effective when he needs to be.