Talos

In ancient times, the Greek god Hephaestus crafted a giant of bronze and gave it life. Zeus gifted the bronze giant, named Talos, to King Agenor of Tyre in compensation for his daughter, Europa, whom Zeus carried off. Sometime later, the hero Jason and his lover Medea overcame Talos when Medea used her magic to ferret out the giant’s weakness—his heel. Jason stabbed Talos there, causing molten metal to pour fourth from a wound, and the stricken giant fell to the Earth.
The immortal inventor Daedalus later discovered the disabled and diminished Talos in his wanderings. He repaired and restored the bronze giant, although Talos never achieved the full stature he once had.
Daedalus treated Talos as an equal and shared his knowledge and insight with the bronze man. Talos proved to possess an intellect far greater than anyone expected, as well as an innate grasp of mechanics and engineering, perhaps owing to the nature of his creation.
The two were allies for a time, until Daedalus refused to use his skills to create a suitable mate and companion for Talos. The bronze giant became convinced Daedalus, and all creatures of flesh, were weak, treacherous, and inherently jealous of his superior nature. In their conflict, Daedalus deactivated Talos but could not bring himself to destroy him. He instead cast the inert bronze form into the Mediterranean Ocean, where it lay for centuries.
Talos was unearthed in the 20th century by archeologists investigating sea-floor ruins and inadvertently reactivated. The cunning construct operated in secret for a time, creating the Foundry and building a power base in the modern world, while also absorbing scientific and technical knowledge at a prodigious rate, to the point where he quickly began improving upon existing technologies. Talos was particularly fascinated with the nascent science of robotics, the technical creation of beings similar to himself, and sought to master every aspect of it.
Talos and his Foundry clashed a number of times with his old foe Daedalus, and Daedalus’ new allies, The Freedom League . Talos has since created a “son” in the android Argo—who failed in attempts to destroy the League for his “father” and later rebelled against him—and a “mate” in the android Galatea, who developed a conscience and was repulsed by Talos’ cold inhumanity, turning against him as well to join his enemies in the Freedom League for a time.
Talos has had greater success in the creation of robot underlings rather than he has family. He has turned his considerable intellect and the inventive skills he learned from Daedalus to creating new and more powerful weapons to sell to mortals looking to destroy each other, all too happy to profit from their primitive drives, and further his ultimate plan to repopulate the world with machine life.
For the first time since initiating his modern conflict with Daedalus and his allies, Talos finds himself with criminal rivals in the form of Ghostworks and their black market technology. This has proven a distraction for some of the Foundry’s resources as Ghostworks attempts to steal away a portion of their market. Up until recently, Talos left dealing with Ghostworks—as he did running the Foundry—to his underlings, but their continued encroachment on Foundry business may draw the mechanical mastermind into the conflict directly, escalating matters into an all-out war between the two organizations unless Talos chooses to forge an alliance with the black-market technologists instead. Even then, such an arrangement would be purely for convenience until he found a way to co-opt or eliminate Ghostworks altogether.

Physical Description

Special abilities

A magically animated construct created by the god Hephestus, Talos is a giant figure of enchanted bronze, stronger than titanium. He is immune to concerns like respiration, illness, or the effects of the environment, and can regenerate damage over time. Not truly alive, Talos is essentially unkillable short of utterly disintegrating him. Even fragments of his form would eventually rejoin or regenerate, given enough time.
Talos contains a mystic furnace in his chest, filling parts of his interior with swirling, molten metal that glows through his eyes. He can heat his metal skin to searing temperatures and project blasts of flame from his hands, eyes, or mouth as he wishes. Excessive damage to Talos’ body causes him to bleed red-hot molten metal. Once Talos had a vulnerable spot that caused him to bleed out and become inert when it was damaged, but he has since addressed and corrected that weakness.
In spite of his physical powers, Talos’ greatest weapon is his tremendous intellect—rivaling the greatest human geniuses—coupled with computer-like precision and retention. Talos had mastered all modern technology and is an inventor and engineer with few peers.
Talos is a potential menace to all humanity, given his goal to eventually populate the world with machines like him. He’s a powerful foe with the strengths of his robot body and his keen intellect. Through the Foundry, he develops, builds, and sells technology to various criminal clients, allowing others access to advanced equipment, although rarely quite as advanced as his own.

Mental characteristics

Intellectual Characteristics

Talos is the embodiment of science stripped of all compassion. He considers humans—and all organic life—inferior to machine life such as himself and wishes to populate the world with machines, creating a place of perfect order with himself at the pinnacle of power.
Highly intelligent, Talos admires that quality in others, but usually finds their intelligence contaminated by petty emotions. Although Talos considers the emotions of others a weakness, he is largely blind to his own, and angered when others point out this flaw.
He both admires and hates Daedalus, his former ally and teacher and one of his few intellectual equals, and he distrusts Medea, the sorceress he holds responsible for his first death. Talos even considers himself superior to the god who created him, claiming it is his destiny to overthrow even the Olympians as they overthrew their parents, the Titans. Talos longs for true peers—artificial beings like himself—but his efforts to create them thus far have been flawed.