#oren koth

So, yeah. Thanagarian gods are real, and they're actually a problem for earth a lot more often than you'd think because Thanagar kind of colonized us way way way back in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt--but don't get me wrong! This isn't an ancient aliens thing where we wouldn't have figured out how to build pyriamids without Thanagar, it's really more like... our planet was a storage unit for screwy holy biproducts of Thanagar's Nth Metal-created gods. In fact, Thanagar wouldn't have shawarma without us, and Thanagarians love shawarma, so you're welcome, Thanagar.

Anyway, thanks to Nth Metal, Thanagar established a massive interplanetary empire, but, shocker! It turns out empires are generally unsustainable, so they had to keep conquering and colonizing and generally being jerks. So let's fast forward to the point where Thanagar finally decides they actually have to invade earth. We were just kind of... 'there' for them for a really long time, but then they're like, "Okay I know we were storing Thanagarian Satan here who we also accidentally invented, but it would be really efficient if we basically turned this planet into a giant corpse-battery to power a massive Nth Metal Mass Effect Relay to slingshot our warships into Gordanian space. But there's also way too many resources on this planet to outright scorch its surface dead, so we need to conquer the local populace."

Long story short: We kick their butts with the power of friendship (and incredible violence) but our ability to repel the Thanagarian invasion basically kicks off a chain reaction in the empire where colonized planet after colonized planet rebels, and in barely a decade of Earth time, the Thanagarian empire is left a fraction of its former self.

The thing about any empire in decline is, they get weird.

You get a lot of grifters and a lot of straight up assholes trying to "make it great again," chasing an image of the past that never really existed. One such asshole was Sh'ri Valkyr, a death cultist who co-opted Rannian technology and, following a bunch of convoluted comic book what-have-you, basically nudged Thanagar too close to its sun, Polaris. Thanagar's atmosphere ignited, and it has since then been uninhabitable.

Which brings me to my boy, Oren. He wasn't on the planet at the time. He was in the "Hol's Feather" program, one of many desperate and highly morally dubious attempts of the Thanagarian empire to reclaim its former glory. Genetically modified to have biological wings, at 5 years old, Oren was basically in a shitty boarding school that was also lowkey a lab when Thanagar's atmosphere ignited.

(I know. I'm going along with the "Thanagarians don't naturally have wings" canon and then giving my OC biological wings, anyway. I know how convoluted this is.)

But at the time, he was on a planet named Naarith, one of Thanagar's older and more remote colonies that basically saw it generally had more to lose than to gain by attempting secession from the Thanagarian empire, and, through its harsh terrain and general lack of resources, was largely used as a training ground for the Thanagarian legions. Naarith was very cold and very dry, pretty much all of its water locked up in permafrost, glaciers, and ice caps. Think steppes, tundras, high deserts, with the planet's 'tropical zone' being largely mediterranean in climate at best. Really what made it valuable as a training planet for Thanagarian forces was its screaming deadly winds, which either immediately killed you when you took to the air, or made you have to learn how to fly, and fly really well, really quickly.

The climate, the teachers and instructing officers, and Oren's peers were all very unforgiving. The food, frankly, was awful. The entire experience was a crucible of an increasingly destabilizing empire that had just had its heart ripped out. Plenty of the kids in the Hol's Feather program were Downsiders, kids whose parents were poor and desperate enough to subject themselves to a still-refining genetic experiment if it meant possibly getting a better life for themselves and their children. This made the children desperate as well--everything to prove, nothing to lose. In the midst of this, Oren cultivated a reputation of quiet competence. Don't get a big enough mouth to draw attention to yourself, be able to kick the shit out of someone if they try to make a name for themselves by punching down on you. The other thing he had going for himself was unusual quality of observance. He watched everything. He took notes on everything. Wind currents, how the position of Naarith's distant twin suns affect the thermals, what pisses off that instructor faster than anything, where to stand in the food line so that you don't end up with just the water on top of the stew or nothing if you're too far back in line, the shifting alliances of his peers, how the different builds of his classmates affect the speed and strength of their martial styles. He recorded everything in notebooks and squirreled them away for years. When the youths of the Hol's feather program were nearing the completion of their training, finally, one of Oren's instructors found one of Oren's notebook caches.

While plenty of the instructors got pissed off at the impertinence of Oren's notes on them, the more seasoned among them saw the potential. When the graduates (survivors...) of the Hol's Feather program were sorted into their respective positions in Thanagar's legions based on their talents, Oren Koth was placed in the Survey Legion, scouts and spies, now more important than ever now that millions of Thanagarians were displaced in the universe and looking for new homes to settle.

He spent a few years in this survey legion, seeing the universe, becoming more and more starkly aware how Thanagar had made the universe hostile to it through its own actions, how Thanagar's past may have doomed its future, but still he and the rest of the Survey legion searched. Perhaps, he hoped, there could be a future. Perhaps there could be redemption.

Then the Metal Wars happened, and you would think Oren and his survey legion squad would be in too remote an area of space to be affected by it, but no. An entity calling itself "The Hawkbat," clawed its way out of the dark multiverse.

This was a version of Batman from a universe where the Thanagarian invasion of earth succeeded, where the Justice League, and indeed, much of humanity were wiped out in the fight for the planet. Batman, broken by betrayal, and bereft of his family once more, swore to turn the Thanagarians' victory turn to ash in their mouths. And he succeeded in that, sabotaging the Nth Metal Stargate/Mass Effect relay to the point where it obliterated Thanagar. He himself was twisted by Nth Metal in the process, growing his own pair of tarnished gold-and-bronze batwings. Now a monstrous shell of his former self, he swore to hunt down all remaining Thanagarians to the ends of the universe--and he went past those ends. Into our universe.

And that was where he slaughtered Oren's team.

To this day, Oren couldn't tell you why, exactly, he survived. Some might theorize that because Batman, regardless of the universe, uses fear as a tool, he needed to leave someone alive to tell the tale, to strike fear through all the Thanagarians of this universe. But Oren fears the truth is something much worse. He remembers a terrible dream as he lay bleeding out on that lonely asteroid. He remembers sinking into darkness, and something in that endless dark claiming him for a greater purpose.

Oren awoke on an unfamiliar ship with bandaged wounds, though was disturbed to notice that his wounds did not seem as dire now as they had when he was attacked by the Hawkbat. He soon found that he had been rescued by the Omega Men, a ragtag group of Space rebels sworn to fight the oppressive reach of the Citadel. Figuring that, as far as the Thanagarian empire knew, he was dead, and also more sickened than ever at the aspect of empire itself, he decided to join in their fight.

Oren's stint with the Omega Men ended up pretty short-lived, though, as he found himself frequently butting heads with the Omega Men's other newest and youngest member (as well as his actual rescuer), Aleea. Aleea was already on thin ice because her parentage basically painted a target on the Omega Men's back, though this was kept a secret from Oren as well for as long as possible.

So when Oren discovered, and in the process accidentally revealed in a crowded spaceport that Aleea was in fact Aleea Strange, the half-human half-Rannian hybrid and the Granddaughter of Rann's chief scientist, Sardath, the Omega Men basically cut their losses and ditched both Oren and Aleea on earth.