Editing Dr. Steel (Dark Champions - New Venice) (section)

=Background=

Joshua Riley was a bright young nerd from the solidly middle-class suburbs of New Venice    His intelligence earned him the respect of his high-school peers in the form of wedges and social ostricization... but later, a scholarship to Stanford University.  He graduated with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering.  

Full of youthful idealism and capital from a patent sale, he began developing a solar-powered washing machine to be used in the more rural regions of China.  A clever invention alone was not enough to successfully navigate the morass of local criminal and government officials in the region, and his first company folded.

He returned to New Venice having taken one lesson from his experience abroad... it's important to be loyal to where you're from.  Corrupt as they were, those people were doing that, after a fashion.  
Buying into a struggling medical equipment company, he began producing locally made high-tech medical aids... a compact blood sugar meter, a miniature autoinjector, a seizure-detection watch.  

In just a few years, he's turned the company around and made a decent amount of money while providing a growing number of local manufacturing jobs.  It IS New Venice though.. as he's become more successful... the requests for “campaign contributions” have become more insistent, and the “industrial accidents” when employees didn't agree to unionize are getting worse.  One plant was shot up and robbed by strangely high-tech mobsters... twice, both times raiding for microprocessors... and leaving several people dead.

Requests for increased police protection were answered with requests for donations to the Policeman's Retirement Fund... and he'd had enough.  He was the boss, this was his responsibility.

New Venice had more than its share of vigilantes, who would notice one more?  And, though he'd hate to admit it, it played to youthful dreams of being the good guy   He worked up a small arsenal of non-lethal weapons and customized a car for urban combat, then put his hacking skills to work to find places to hit the mobs and gangs where it hurts.  Gassing and punching a room full of mid-level mobsters in a strip club is one thing, but his pattern analysis shows that the ogranized crime groups are up to something big and as much as he'd like to hurt them, it's not something he can handle alone...  

'''APPEARANCE''' 

Dr. Steel's costume consists a steel gray knee-length trenchcoat and matching slouch hat.  It is armored and with deep pockets for his gas guns and other gadgets.  His face is covered by a reinforced composite paintball respirator mask, matte black with blue-tinted lenses.   His shock gloves are matte black with black chrome reinforced knuckles and a series of contact points on the palm.    Black slacks and knee-high combat boots complete the outfit.  His chem gun is a modified from a Hämmerli air gun, a thin barrel on top and a larger gas reserve running underneath it.

He is 5' 10" tall with brown hair and green eyes and favors business casual clothes when not "on duty."