Niles Wight
Niles Wight
Portrayed By Gaspard Ulliel
Sex Male
Status Registered Evolved
Ability Electromagnetic Replication
Age 31
Date of Birth August 11, 1987
Date of Death June 28, 2009
Occupation Fugitive
Family
Significant Other(s)
First Appearance When Lightning Strikes, Part III
Last Appearance Death Like Cigarettes

Niles Wight is a criminal from 2019 who travels back in time to prevent his fate. Time will only tell whether he succeeded.

Character History:

Niles was born into an unremarkable middle class family. He spent the first ten years of his life in Newcastle, England until his parents divorced and his mother took a job at NYU as a professor of Hellenistic Studies. His mother fell in love with one of her students - a young man only seven years Niles' senior named Eric. This was to begin the bitterness that would come to characterize Niles' teen years. His mother was positively obsessed with her young lover. Between work and his young stepfather, his mother had very little time for him. When the two conceived a baby, the teen Niles got even less attention. His mother told him that he reminded her far too much of his father - a stodgy intellectual who tried to control her. Her young lover on the other hand, was vibrant and obsessed with her. Niles was the lost fragment of her old life.

The teen with scruffled hair and fading British accent wasn't exactly popular at school. He never seemed to excel at any area. So, like many teens, Niles began to act out to get attention. He became a punk, dyed his hair, got several piercings and started to get into brawls. There was a brief period of drug experimentation, but a friend's OD made him back away from hard drugs. He found himself at all the worst parties and got into fights. The fights were violent and all too often he found that he enjoyed the thrill of bringing blood to the faces of his victims. He had enough sense to recoil from that part of himself, but he began to realize there was an something inside of him. Just about the only thing he did that didn't involve getting into trouble was messing around with the school's AV equipment. He and his friends produced small experimental films and dramas, one of which won an inter-school film contest. Although Niles didn't act in it, the story was very much him. It revolved around an angry young artist who put his rage onto canvas. It was a positive enough message for a high school student.

By the time he was twenty, Niles had grown out of the goth/rave subculture, but still hadn't lost his oddball status. As soon as he was old enough, his mother set him up with a tiny bachelor apartment in the basement of one of her fellow faculty members. There was some encouragement for him to go to school, but by this time his mother had a toddler to care for and a career to manage, so she didn't push. Oddly, his stepfather was the one who pushed Niles towards some kind of schooling. Though the young man couldn't help but harbour resentment for the man who would always be more of a peer than a father figure, the two had developed something of a rapport over the years. It took some encouragement, but Niles parlayed an interest in films from school into an application to the Tisch School of Arts.

Niles might have been happy at Tisch were it not for the explosion in Midtown. The explosion greatly damaged the Tisch buildings and forced the temporary closure of the school and the destruction of a project that had been three months in the making. Niles was devastated. Several of his classmates were killed or injured in the explosion. The one thing that had brought stability to his angsty life was taken away.
It was when he was picking over the shattered bits of cameras and video editing equipment that something strange happened. He reached for a camera that looked intact and the silhouette of another hand framed in crackling energy reached ahead of him. Sparks flew, plastic melted and Niles drew back. Whatever it was, it felt fantastic. And it scared him.

It took awhile for Niles to discover what he was. News was filtering out about the Evolved and what exactly that meant. It took some experimentation to figure out exactly what it was he could do. The first time he made a full electromagnetic duplicate of himself, he nearly lost consciousness.
Ever since the explosion, Niles had gone to ground. He didn't know why he had no desire to reconnect with his previous life, or even tell his mother that he was all right. Rather than return to his apartment, he took up residence in the trailer farm. Through a series of coincidences, he managed to meet up with a few other Evolved and began going on runs to loot areas of the city that had been damaged, but not destroyed by the explosion.

With the coaching of a telepath named Aria, Niles gained finer control of his ability and started generating more duplicates. Although he didn't see it, the others around him saw how potentially dangerous the young man could be. They started handling him with kid gloves, and Niles began to realize they were afraid of him. He also realized he could use that fear to his advantage. It wasn't long before he positioned himself as leader of a little posse of Evolved who stole, looted, mugged and fenced in the wilds of New York.
It was by chance that his stepfather spotted him one day in the Canal St Market, about a year after the explosion. Eric was overjoyed to find him and told him how Niles' mother thought he was dead. All Niles could see was the yoke of his old life cinching around his neck. When he tried to walk away, Eric followed him, until in his anger, he released a duplicate who attacked his stepfather. Years of teen frustration and angst pushed the duplicate to sear Eric's flesh and run a current through his heart that stopped its vital pumping long enough to drop the man, sizzling to the ground. At first, Niles felt only shock. Then, after his duplicate re-integrated, he felt a surge of power and inhaled the scent of burnt flesh. He liked it.

Maybe the use of his ability had changed the electric currents in his brain, maybe he had developed a mental disorder - or maybe, maybe the sociopath had always been there, lingering beneath the surface. Whatever it was, it was out now, and Niles had no desire to put it back. He returned home to the trailer farm a changed man. His friends could see it in the way he walked. He had new, violent confidence. Niles asked his friends why they were bothering with looting and stealing when they could run the city. A few recoiled at the idea, but others agreed. They looked with envy to the remaining gleaming towers of the New York skyline - at the people who seemed to be going on with their lives despite all that had happened. They wanted their piece of the pie, and Niles was prepared to lead them to it.

When PARIAH started with more violent actions, Niles lost some of his flock. But the terrorists still fought for equal rights, and to the young man with growing megalomania, that was too short-sighted and small.
The problem with terrorizing and lording power over others is that it gets you noticed. By people like The Company and Homeland Security. And Niles was being careless, leaving charred corpses in his wake. Because he'd had no real brushes with the law, he felt invincible. His power, with Aria's help, was growing all the time. First two, then four, then six duplicates were under his control. He used them to scout, to hit targets, to allow his friends to break in and steal things of value. He was the Don of his own tiny mafia, the king of a small hill. A ripe target.

His little golden age was not to last. After the bridge explosion and the arrest of Phoenix members, Homeland Security had their eyes peeled. One industrious Company agent had been watching Niles and found a way to trap the duplicator using a device meant to ground electrical currents. Once the duplicate was trapped, all the agent had to do was find where his comatose body laid. That lead to a raid on his entire operation and the capture and imprisonment of nearly all the people who had followed him. Niles Wight was caught.
The next thing that he remembered was a tiny cell in Level 5 of the Company. He was tested, interrogated and psychoanalyzed, then deemed too dangerous for release. The angry, violent young man was alone in a cell for nearly five months before the decision was made to transfer him to Moab.

For ten years, while the outside got through the birthing pains of a new world, Niles stewed in Moab, drugged and suppressed, powerless. He learned how to fight inside, how to survive. He lost some of his cockiness, but never lost his anger or desire for power. He became a battered man whose conviction only grew with each day of imprisonment. Though young, the other inmates saw something in him that made them keep their distance. He had lost his power, but he was far from powerless. The investigations of 2011 that freed many Evolved did not save him. It didn't help that he had been a belligerent, uncooperative inmate who got into several altercations. At his hearing, several members of his cell came forward to testify that he was a dangerous man and a murderer who didn't deserve to be released.
And so Niles has remained imprisoned. He wrote a book, an Evolved manifesto of sorts, that he could never find a publisher for. It did make the rounds within Moab and gained him some respect from other hardened Evolved criminals. A copy made it outside as well, and was passed and reproduced throughout the city. It was an inflammatory text, but beneath the rhetoric and passion, it made points that many Evolved could identify with. He has cooperated more over the years, but then again, he's proven his toughness. No one picks fights with him much anymore because he's just too unpredictable.

Personality:

Niles Wight is an angry, passionate, megalomanic sociopath. If that wasn't enough, he's also charismatic, intelligent and articulate. With or without his powers, he's a dangerous man. It wasn't really an inevitable course. If his power had manifested later in life after he had left his teen angst behind him, if he had managed to establish for himself a life and a career, he might have adjusted, might have gotten control of his darker impulses. He might have even channeled his leadership skills towards more productive ends. But that didn't happen. The bright future for everyone else is Niles' dark nightmare. He's a raging bull inside a cage, biding his time, eager for blood.
Niles doesn't like to be challenged or under anyone else's thumb. He believes wholeheartedly in the domination of the Evolved over regular human beings. It's a dark impulse, one fed by his own extraordinary ability. He enjoys being feared and lording power over others. He's proven to be very tenacious. Where others who depended so much on their powers might have been broken by their suppression, Niles saw it as another injustice, another thing to rail against. He is tenacious. Like a rat.

Evolved Human Ability (Electromagnetic Replication):

Niles Wight possesses a remarkably dangerous ability, classified as a Tier 3. With conscious effort, Niles may expel an electromagnetic cloud of energy that outwardly mimics his own appearance at the time of its creation. He can see, hear, and otherwise communicate through this replicant. These electromagnetic clouds are incorporeal forms that generate varying degrees of electrical voltage within their blue-white luminous forms, at their minimal level of electrical charge the replicants appear as faintly visible blue-white static silhouettes and leave a tingling sensation when imposed over a person or in close proximity. At their highest voltage the replicants possess enough voltage to burn flesh and ignite paper and kill.

Niles' replicants are not bound by physical gravity, and can travel at the speed of electrical impulse through solid objects, giving them the appearance of teleportation. However objects that ground electricity or are insulated against electricity can resist or even imprison his duplicates. Niles may generate up to six replicants at a single time, able to perceive and communicate through them all, while sharing a central consciousness. Niles' replicants may not enter water, and are disrupted by the presence of rain and other forms of precipitation, causing discomfort and static mental feedback to Niles.

Prolonged extension of his replicants causes Niles considerable physical discomfort, and if one of his replicants is removed from his body for more than 48 hours, Niles' physical body will enter a coma-like state while replicants will retain their ability to perceive and feel, though in constant pain.

Timeline:

Memorable Quotes:

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Trivia and Notes:

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