The Gatekeeper
As a child, Kyle Vance always wanted to travel, to see fantastic and faraway places. He spent hours lost in the pages of fantasy and science-fiction stories and dreamed of traveling the world, leaving behind life in the sleepy rural community in Colorado where he grew up.
As he got older, Kyle became aware he was different from his peers, not only in terms of his imagination and artistic sensibilities, but also in his unusual awareness of things and in his romantic feelings towards other boys.
Attending art school in San Francisco allowed Kyle to stretch his wings as he’d never been able to do back home: he not only developed a dating and social life, but he improved his artistic skills and flirted with the city’s occult subculture. It nearly ended in disaster, when a local cult came after him. Only the intervention of the Door Wardens saved his life. They took Kyle to the Dimension of Doors and revealed he was the new Gatekeeper, guardian of the nexus between worlds.
Since then, Kyle has split his time between his career as a freelance artist, his training with the Door Wardens, and operating as the superhero Gatekeeper in the San Francisco Bay Area (and worlds beyond). Although his true identity remains secret, it’s publicly known Gatekeeper is a member of the city’s gay community, a considerable source of pride for both them and Kyle. Gatekeeper has become San Francisco’s most prominent hero and has helped to minimize the dangers posed by the area’s regular “reality tremors.” At one point considered a candidate for Earth’s Master Mage, Gatekeeper later learned his existing role and title prohibits him from taking on that responsibility.
Gatekeeper is a “living portal” between dimensions, able to step between worlds as easily as most people cross a room. He can visit all of the mystic dimensions of the Cosmic Coil, particularly the Dimension of Doors. By slipping between worlds, he can also teleport virtually anywhere on Earth. He can cause things to disappear into the folds of his cloak and reappear later, as well as pass harmlessly through him.
Most of Gatekeeper’s dimensional effects center on his hooded cloak, lined with a shifting, starry blackness, although the cloak itself is not the source of his powers, as some believe. In addition to his innate dimension-spanning abilities, Gatekeeper is a promising and adept magician, with a natural ability for tapping into extradimensional sources of power for his spells and rituals.
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