Daniel Bruce, Scion of Hephistus.
Raised in Florida by a hard assed village blacksmith who took discipline and toughening him up a tad bit too far and an abusive mother, the pain of his childhood made him by some miracle all the more caring for the pain of others, and in particular a lover and protector of women.
He was also known even before awakening for muscles honed at the forge and fists hardened on stone and steel.
At age seventeen, after defeating his father in a rite of passage fight, Daniel went North to apprentice at a Sears and Robards steam car factory. He started working the manufacturing floor 13 hours a day, then followed the beautiful rear end of a magnificent blond into Dr. Ferigno's lab, and wound up participating in a discusion on handling with Dr. Ferigno and his brilliant, beautiful assistant, the busty, blue eyed, barely haired beauty Sandra Cinders. In a paradise of car talk and blond companionship, Daniel passed the night, and found himself with a part time job as Dr. Ferigno's assistant. Over the next 3 seasons he worked 8 hours a day on the factory floor, and then 4 for Dr. Ferigno. On the factory floor, he suffered rage issues stemming from his violent childhood that he tried to turn on steel and brick rather than his co-workers, but ultimately a fool who'd already tried to goad him thrice and been divered by the foreman caught him without external athority and stepped up with an insulting snear on his lips.
Not a single word escaped his lips, before Daniel's fist hit them and a moment later, a pace or so back, he hit the ground. The fool's face would never be so pretty, or so smug, again. Daniel washed the blood of his knuckled and went back to work.
The next day the plant manager called him up for a game of pool, after which he was congratulated on a damned mean right cross, offered a drink, formaly fired, and left with a strong suggestion that he go see doctor Ferigno.
The good doctor was chuckling from under an engine, though his assistant was rather distraught from where she was working on her plans. "Ah, Mr. Daniels, good, good. Took us long enough to get you off of that factory floor. Your contract is on the table. 12 hours a day at aprentice sallary. Even without a university education I'm sure at the rate you've been learning I'll be wiring Mr. Hellstrom about getting you a journeyman salary in a few years. Now get me a ratchet wrench and a 7 ounce chunk of ghostrock."
Daniel froze for a moment, sure his ears, damaged by years at the forge and on the line, where lying to him, then he met Miss Cinder's happy smile in a face pale with recently shed tears, grinded wildly, and replied, "Sure thing, boss," as he tied back his hair.
It was a half year of happily discovering exactly what his back country brain were truly capable of that he discovered the dark side of the factory, the deepest basemet where the shambling corpses worked the foundries, and why the normally cheery and affectionate within the boundries of propriety Miss Cinder would burst into quite, unexpected tears every few months, her brothers corpse enslaved in the foundry.
"It's the stupidest thing, isn't it, Mr. Bruce," she whispered in his arms one evening when Daniel had carried her into a back office and held her through a crying fit. "That bastard Hellstrom tortured my parents to death when they wouldn't work for him, and then held my brother hostage down in his foundry so just to squeeze a bit of work out of me. Two years later i discover he's been dead along, just a dead man walking, and I still can't leave here while he's down there."
Daniel dreamed for the next thirteen days of having the courage to be the one man army that would cut through that nightmare cavern of a foundry to steal a walking corpse and dash away with it and the girl. Every night, he dreamed of the sword he would do it with.
On the fourteenth day, tears poured from Sandra's blue eyes again, and Daniel new what he was going to do. He took her back and held her while she cried, but this time, after he kissed her tears away, he didn't kiss her forehead, he kissed her lips with strength and passion, until the older woman's breath caught in her throat and her heart hammered in her breast. First she froze, then she struggled, but he held her close. She beat his breast, then she stopped, going limp in his arms as her lips responded to his. For a moment, she moaned weakly as her lips responded tenatvly. All at once the blond gasped and squeezed his waist and joined her lips to Bruce's deserpatly.
A few joyful moments later Bruce unlocked her arms and broke the kiss. He spoke huskily, "Never cry again, Miss Cinders, I'm going to take care of you." He left her then and went to work in his shop. For three weeks he worked in his part time, late into the night, 'til everything was ready, everything but the sword.
The sword he'd dreamed off and seen so clearly 'til the moment he kissed Miss Cinder, Bruce could no longer remember but a fuzzy steel blurr with a silver heart. What was its name again?
The swords he tried were failures, in the end he took with his guns and tricks a few knives and a sledgehammer.
Slipping in after hours, he slipped, then fought his way down to the bottom, then fought his way through the the hungry undead. Their guards came out with their gun hands and their axes. At first they could not slow the armored colusus, but when he spotted the zombie he came for at the back of the crowd and tried to fight to it, the undead pulled him down, teeth and claws ripping and tearing through his armor to feed.
Struggling desperately to get up, he heard a voice, familiar and not. "Get up, son. I'm here with you, and I brought your sword, I brought Silver Heart. Since I've been at my forge working it for you since you dreamed the ore."
"What, father, your... Your not... You're..."
"Get up, son!"
Bruce growled, that was not his father's voice, but it was a challange he'd rissen too before, and his blood was on fire with strength and power. Arms thicker than most men's legs flexed and zombies flew in all directions, over and over, and then the newly awakened Scion was on his feet with the awakening ichor still a fire greater than any liquor and many women still burning in his viens.
The great bare of a man with the twisted legs supported by clockwork cyclopes bellowed in glee, "That's my boy," and he tossed to Bruce a great hand and a half bastard sword, which he drew and cleaved into the dead with strength indescribable, 'til he reached the one zombie he'd come here for and hesitated for a crucial moment trying to find how to incipacitate it without defiling it too badly for the funeral. In that moment the zombie of Jeffry Cinder threw itself on his sword, piercin him to the heart while other walking dead closed in all around.
Bruce clicked a stud as he turned away, drawing with one hand a silver gladius from within the blade of the long, broad steel sword. He turned clear around to cleave off his lady love's head. Hephistus left his own battles with the zombies to bag the head, then Bruce reached him and he had a clockwork cyclops release him to carry it. They dashed wildly up and out of the factory to where Bruce had packed a cycle with side car and ghost rock engine. The god handed him a bag. "You'll need these son. We don't have long. You've got to be careful when you use Ghost Rock, it's a pwoerful tool, but that screaming smoke is the souls of the damned being released to spread fear throughout the world. The titan ______ was half released by an indian magician named Raven who thoght that old monster would drive the White Men back over the sea if he got free. But the titans aren't like that, they only want this world to torture and ultimatly destroy, and _____ is all about fear, it's his tool, in the end it will break his chains if you and the rest of the children of the gods don't teach the mortal world some courage while we gods fight our own fight in our own world."
"Um... Okay, I think I've got that, as much as I can hope to... Um... Dad. You're hephistus, right? And i really am your son?"
"Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, by a mortal woman as beautiful as she was intelegent, and that burning in your blood right now is my blood awakening within you, the strength you feel now will never leave you, only grow."
"Then why not her, why the man you left me with and, em..."
Hephistus shook his head. "Sorry, Bruce. I know the woman I left you for a mother was a bitch to make Hera's proud on her worst days and look in a mirror with disgust on her best, it was the foster father I chose them for. I didn't have the time to raise you myself, and I knew you were going to need some skills. More importantly, I knew you needed to be strong in every sense of the word. I have some personal experience with how the right kind of tough old bastard can make the right kind of son strong in all the right ways. I apologise for what you had to go through to become the man you are today, but for what it's worth I'm very proud of the man you are. Now go find the girl you did all this insanity for and make her scream in eccstacy. There's still a few hours 'til sunrise, take your time, if I find out you had any satsifaction before sunrise, or that she hasn't screamed in eccstacy at least a baker's dozen times by sunset, I'll sick Aphrodyte on you, I swear it!"
