Construct

Origins
In Spectran culture, the role of Lightbringer is a divine honour. The duties required of those who held the title involved travelling to other planets and using the technological and spiritual superiority of the Spectran people to help these virgin worlds uplift themselves and become greater than they once were.

It was unusual in Spectra society for two Lightbringers to even meet each other as their responsibilities required them to spend most of their lives off-world, but on one day nearly forty years ago destiny intervened and a series of technical faults resulted in two Lightbringers meeting and falling in love.

The result of this strange and fateful union was a young girl named Dualia, born on the day where the planet was equidistant between the two suns it orbited and named in honour of this event. Due to her unusual parentage, Dualia spent very little of her childhood on her home planet, instead travelling with one or the other of her parents and experiencing a great variety of different planets, species and cultures as she grew up. As she continued her education and training, all evidence suggested that she would ultimately become a Lightbringer like her parents, and when she came of age and returned to Spectra for the Pathfinding, a ceremony which would show her the path of her future, most people around her assumed the foregone conclusion.

However, to the shock of her parents and the assembled masses, Dualia was chosen to become a Brightshield instead. The Brightshields were renowned warriors who would travel to burgeoning worlds and use their defensive capabilities to offer protection from outside threats, in contrast to the more educational role the Lightbringers took on.

Despite the general surprise and initial hesitance of her parents, Dualia quickly became a capable warrior, able to project the light that coursed through her veins outside her body to create powerful hard light constructs. This allowed her to form weapons and shields made of pure, glowing energy that she could use to attack and defend in equal measure, and although she was never top of her Brightshield Caste, she was considered a highly effective defender nonetheless.

When the time came for her to be assigned to her first defensive post, she was placed on a small, unassuming planet which had recently suffered a devastating attack at the hands of the Founders and needed outside support. That planet was named Earth.

The Eternity Pursuit
Dualia arrived on the planet at the end of the Earth year 1999, and was surprised by what she found. Far from a defenseless and primitive world, Earth already had its own group of effective defenders with incredible abilities, the most impressive of whom was a woman with matter manipulation abilities who was referred to as Vanquisher.

As Dualia was getting acclimated to her surroundings, a strange artifact spontaneously materialised in the centre of a large Earth desert, one which Dualia was able to identify as the cosmic Eternity Helm, a powerful and feared object which held great power and terrible darkness. As she raced to retrieve it, she was stopped by a man named Victor Geist, who had seen the arrival of the Helm and wished to claim it for himself. Although she attempted to fight him, Geist trapped her and retrieved the Helm for himself, gaining access to vast cosmic energies and incapacitating both Dualia and the assembled heroes before escaping.

As part of the initial attempts to retrieve the Helm, Dualia was questioned by Vanquisher and some of her fellow heroes, and she told them of her history and purpose on the planet. She also told them stories about the worlds that had been ravaged by the bearers of the Eternity Helm, and how Geist's inner darkness could bring about death and destruction on a universal scale if he was not stopped.

This convinced the gathered heroes that Dualia was on their side, and she joined them in their quest to stop Geist. When the villain reemerged at the North Pole and began constructing a huge, strange device, Dualia was able to identify it as a Matter Ascender, an ancient design which would destroy the planet and transform it into an entity of pure consciousness, allowing humanity to ascend to another plane of existence and escape an unspecified but apparently oncoming catastrophe. The heroes, and Dualia in her role as assigned protector, were none too keen on seeing the Earth destroyed, and assembled to stop Geist from completing the device.

Dualia was instrumental in identifying the structural weak points of the machine, allowing other heroes including Steel Saviour to target and destroy the device, while Vanquisher and others managed to subdue Geist and wrest the Helm from him, imprisoning him and passing the Helm to Pantheon, who elected to hide it outside the known universe to prevent anyone else from accessing it.

The Ascendancy
In the aftermath of the Eternity Pursuit, Dualia was invited to join a group of heroes dedicated to defending the planet, that would come to be named The Ascendancy. Although her Spectran heritage called her to move on and find new planets to protect, she also sensed a great many threats hiding in the shadows, ready to move on Earth and elected to stay. She joined the team, adopting the codename Construct, became a key player when it came to alien races and technology and contributed a great deal to the construction of The Nexus, the team's orbital base of operations.

Construct grew close to Vanquisher, seeing her as an inspirational figure, and although she was more skeptical of Steel Saviour's pragmatic worldview than most of the other members, she quickly fell into her role as the optimistic and compassionate heart of the team while also using her strength and knowledge to become an asset not only to the Ascendancy, but to humanity as a whole.

She also frequently offers her insight to UNION-S, the outer space division of UNION, in an effort to improve Earth's relations with member of other species on other planets, and has developed a strong working relationship with former hero and fellow alien Beacon, now the head of UNION-S.

Bedlam
In 2009 the Ascendancy were called in to confront a superhuman terrorist calling himself Bedlam, who had already incapacitated dozens of UNION soldiers and even their own government-funded superhero team The Union in the city of Starkweather. Bedlam's actions and attacks had resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, something which greatly angered Construct in her role as a defender, and the team attacked him with their full strength.

However, Bedlam's abilities were powered by chaos, and with a large group of superpowered individuals flying around his power increased exponentially and he was able to subdue the entire team, even Vanquisher. Construct was particularly affected by this defeat as she felt that she had failed in her duty as a protector of the innocent.

Ultimately Bedlam was taken out by a highly trained Cerberus Unit deployed by HADES, a deep-black division of UNION developed to provide defense against superhuman threats, and public opinion of the heroes began to drop.

Spectran Civil War
In the aftermath of the Bedlam situation, Construct struggled to reconcile her role with what she perceived as a crushing defeat at the hands of a madman, and decided that she needed to return to her homeworld in search of guidance. Although the rest of the team assured her that they were all bruised by their encounter with Bedlam, they would overcome it together, Construct insisted, promising that she would be back as soon as she had found the answers she was looking for.

Upon returning to Spectra, Construct found her society in disarray and discovered that a rogue group of warriors calling themselves the Darkshields led by the ruthless Amara had launched a violent coup against the Spectran leaders and the planet was essentially engaged in a civil war. Construct quickly tracked down her parents, who had been attempting to contact her but had their efforts thwarted by the aggressive Darkshields.

Construct confronted the Darkshields and was brutally beaten by the unnaturally strong and violent Amara, thrown from the top of the Spectran Pinnacle, a tall spire in the centre of the capital city, and landed in the slums far below. She was found and cared for by a kindly couple, nursed back to health as she gained more of an understanding of the society she was a part of. Although she had grown up in privilege among the Lightbringers and the Brightshields, she was never fully aware of the lower classes who did not have as much as she did.

She began to understand that these people had been neglected by the power structure of Spectran society and felt unprotected as the Brightshields focused their power on defending other worlds. The Darkshields had risen up in the slums under the declaration that they would prioritise the protection of the Spectrans above that of other worlds, capitalising on people's fears and quickly gaining power and support from the ordinary citizens, allowing them to launch their assault on the capital.

Once her strength had returned, Construct travelled back to the capital to face down the Darkshields once again. However, this time she offered to speak with Amara rather than fighting her, and she told the violent revolutionary that they both wanted the same thing: for the people to be equal, and no longer scared of what was out there. For a time, Construct believed that she was winning Amara over, but just as it seemed that they were about to reach a mutual understanding, Amara stabbed Construct and detonated a bomb in the slums which destroyed several blocks and killed hundreds of people.

Standing over her fallen enemy, Amara told Construct that the Darkshields had just been the beginning, and that equality could only be truly established by destroying society and rebuilding it from the bottom up. Angered, Construct attacked Amara and gained the upper hand, knocking her unconscious and identifying the locations of the other bombs she had planted across the city. She found and defused these, saving thousands of innocent lives but returning to the capital in the knowledge that she had not solved the root cause of the problems people on her homeworld were facing.

In the aftermath, Amara was imprisoned along with many other members of the Darkshields, and Construct was offered a leadership position within Spectran society for her role in ending the civil war. However, she refused, telling the leaders that people in power needed to be chosen by the people, and representative of all classes and groups of society. As a symbolic act, she opened the gates of the capital and allowed people who had previously been relegated to the slums into the city itself, and those within the walls seemed to embrace their neighbours in the warm glow of peace.

Construct knew that rebuilding would take a lot of work, and resolved to split her time between Earth and Spectra in an effort to protect both and to open up diplomatic channels between the two. She returned to Earth a changed woman, more mature and understanding of the complex nature of society, and found the planet in peril once again.

The Cortex Crisis
Just as she had returned to her homeworld to find it mired in fear and chaos, Construct found the same thing when she returned to Earth. Public faith in superheroes had faded in the aftermath of the Bedlam situation and HADES had gained more power and influence thanks to their role in bringing the villain to justice. Two heroes, Longsight and Scattershot had been sent undercover within HADES to investigate and had disappeared, presumed killed by many of the superhuman community.

In the midst of this crisis a malevolent rogue artificial intelligence named Cortex had exploited the turbulence to attack and incapacitate many heroes. It had even laid a trap within the Nexus for Construct on her return, and she was immediately captured by Cortex and her genetic structure was used to begin construction on a new organic body for the AI.

Vanquisher, who had been captured alongside Construct, managed to escape from her bindings and fight back against Cortex, freeing the rest of the captive heroes and leading the charge against the malevolent machine. Cortex was ultimately defeated, and in the aftermath the assembled heroes confronted UNION about their actions over the past few years.

Owing to her experiences on Spectra, Construct was able to empathise with the people who had brought HADES into their position of power, but also advised UNION Director Marcus Cage to rebuild UNION from the ground up to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again. Cage agreed, and enacted a protocol which shuttered HADES and dissolved all of its past and ongoing projects.

Travelling Hero
Although she was happy to be back on Earth with her friends, Construct also felt a responsibility to her home planet, and since the end of the Spectran Civil War she has dedicated herself to travelling between the two planets in an effort to help rebuild both. Steel Saviour, now simply going by Saviour, provided her with an instant transport between the two worlds from the Nexus, and she has proved instrumental in creating better worlds for both her biological and adopted people.

Personality
As the youngest member of the Ascendancy, Construct is good-natured and trusting to the point of being considered naive by some of her older and more jaded teammates. However, she is also incredibly insightful and intuitive about people and their motives, a personality trait gained during her training as a Brightshield back on Spectra, and although it seems as though she trusts people very quickly, she always does so with the knowledge that they are worthy of it.

She is also optimistic and enthusiastic about discovering new worlds and meeting new people, and although she loves her new adopted homeworld of Earth, she does miss the universal travel that came with her childhood. As a result, she is always the first to volunteer when a deep-space mission comes up within the Ascendancy and her knowledge of alien worlds and technology is always an asset in these situations.

Since the Spectran Civil War Construct has become more pragmatic and serious in her outlook, seeing how her upbringing had caused her to overlook some of the more unfortunate aspects of her home society. The events of the war have also caused her to become more patient and understanding of people from a variety of walks of life, and many people around her would say that her compassion has only grown in the time she was away from Earth.

Superhuman Abilities
As a member of the Spectra race, Construct has a number of genetically-gifted superhuman abilities.
 * Light Manipulation - As the Spectrans are born with light energy running through their veins, they are predisposed to using it in a variety of ways. They can cause their entire bodies to glow, using them to cast light over dark spaces, and even project it outside of their physical bodies to create orbs, flashes or beams of light, and even to generate holographic images in the air in front of them. Using her training as a Brightshield, Construct is an expert in using this ability for offensive and defensive purposes, and she is able to create focused beams of laser light which she uses to attack enemies.
 * Hard Light Constructs - As an extension of both her light manipulation powers and her Brightshield training, Construct is able to form objects out of pure white light, which can then be hardened to take on physical mass. Most frequently, she uses this to create a variety of shields and weapons which he can utilise in combat, with a sword-and-shield combo being one of her favourites. Although she can project these separately from her physical body, allowing her to throw light-javelins or shoot light-arrows, she is unable to share these weapons with others, as they will dissipate if anyone else tries to touch them.

Weapons and Equipment
Construct doesn't need to carry any weapons, as she is able to create them out of pure light.