irving bob
Average height, slightly above average muscle mass, dingy clothing, very short hair, a goatee, and a t-shirt with the letters I and B on the front pocket and a larger version of the stylized letters on the back of the guy's jacket. He wears black fingerless gloves and an over sized leather jacket and a really strange cowboy hat. It is blue, green, and covered in eagle feathers. He acts like he doesn't have a care in the world. He wants people to notice him and he doesn't care what he does to do so. There is no rhyme or reason to his action he just does anything he wants because its fun
History
Over the last few years IB has managed to make a name for himself among a small group of practicing heroes across the country. I myself was one of the few people to actually encounter him before his power to gain a new body manifested itself.
I’ve encountered him several times in my life, but one of the biggest things about him is that he’s vindictive and will go to insane lengths to gain his revenge. When I first met him he was using is usual MO, robbing banks. On the surface Irving is your standard villain, but he has this affection with his initials.
Most of his clothing will have them displayed somewhere on his body. All his shirts tend to have IB on them and makes it pretty easy to spot him. I attacked him during a bank robbery and quickly discovered that his strength was simply incredible. He took me down with a single punch, one that sent me flying off my feet.
I could barely stand as he laughed at me, called me a few names, and gathered up his loot before he turned to walk away. By this time I was able to get back to my feet and take him down with a blind side attack. From there I was able to have him tossed in prison.
The jerk swore revenge on me, little did I know that this would let the Genie out of the bottle and there wasn’t any way to put the bastard back in. So you see, my first encounter with Irving Bob was quite weird. But then I found out a few months later that He’d died in prison. I was of course saddened by the news, who wants anyone to die? But I wasn’t too broken up about it either. A few months after that, while patrolling the city as I was want to do, I was passing by a building…this lobster jumped off the side of a building and attacked me.
I was so shocked that I barely managed to dodge, the thing still managed to tag me on the way by me and landed some ways away on the other side of a four lane street. I managed to control my flight before I hit the ground. Hovering above the road, I looked down at the lobster and wondered what the hell was going on.
It’s not everyday that one of them attacked you from the side of a building after all. Then I noticed that it had the initials IB on it’s back as it turned to watch me, lifting it’s claws in the air, and snapping them a couple of times.
Then the F…ing thing actually talked to me. “Yeah it’s me Irving Bob! I’m back to get my revenge on you!!” Then it started to scuttle across the street as angrily as a crab could get. Not five seconds later it’s run over by a car. For a second I thought the attack was over and that he was dead for good this time, then the little bastard wiggles around.
He’s slightly crushed, but otherwise alright and I’m reminded of the jerk’s super strength. Bob starts coming at me again with his claws clicking together.I was flabbergasted, then he’s hit by another car coming the other way and it sends him rolling. By this time he wasn’t looking to good, but he kept coming at me and muttering about revenge under his breath.
I could only hover there in shock and watch as he finally made it across the street, then did something even more amazing. He slammed his claw and feet into the building next to me and started to scale it with his amazing strength. Once he was level with me, it turned it’s stalk like eyes towards me and jumped. Moving out of the way, it sailed on by and fell several stories.
I could hear the crack as it impacted the ground and I winced a little. Amazingly enough, after that fall, he was still alive! He had broken a claw and his shell was cracked in several places, but he was still alive! Then he started to climb the building again, though this time a little slower because of the broken claw.
To this day I’m still not quite sure how he did it to tell you the truth, but it’s a classic example of just how bull headed IB can be. As before, he jumped, this time trying to predict how I would dodge, missed me, and fell several stories to the ground and finally died.
This is how I finally found out about Bob’s ability to reincarnate a few months after his body dies. He has this single minded determination that is just impossible to describe.
…my next encounter with IB was stranger still. Not only could he come back as living things, but as objects as well. I was on patrol as usual when I came across an odd sight. A classic flying saucer hovering over a bank and using some sort of tractor beam to suck all the money out of the building.
This was one of the few times, I realized, that my powers wouldn’t be effective stopping the robbery. Then I saw it, right on the underside of the saucer, were the initials IB. Just a few months before I’d encountered Lobster Bob and still hadn’t quite recovered from that. To stop him I had to call in a couple of my friends, but eventually we managed to stop him. Though I was never sure if the saucer was IB or if he was inside the thing.
After that, I’m not to sure how long it was, we came across IB again, only this time he came back as something even stranger than a Lobster. This encounter was both interesting and rather humiliating. At the time my friends and I were part of a super hero team named Val-cor.
We were cleaning hour base of operations up when my danger sense warned me of something and I dodged on instinct. My teammates were wondering what the hell had gotten into me. To them I dodged for no reason, completely out of the blue. I explained that my danger sense warned me of something and they figured there was an invisible attacker in the room.
So of course we started to try and find him, but after a while they started to question my sanity just as my danger sense went off again, going off so strongly I was certain my teammates would be able to feel my danger sense going off. I tried to dodge, but this time something hit me, hard. I rocked back and they really started to look around some more. Then I got hit again and I started to get frustrated.
Just as things were about to get out of control, one of my teammates spotted a little dot on the back of my neck. He moved in closer and saw that it was a flea. Then he jumped back as the flea suddenly announced that it was IB, with a tiny little IB on its back, and that he wanted revenge. This time it was going to punish all of us for killing him.
It leapt at my teammate who had noticed him, not a very smart move as he could manipulate energy to create doppelgangers of himself made of energy. Flea Bob spent several seconds inside a super powered bug zapper. Instead of dying he fell to the floor and started jumping from person to person like –pardon the expression – a flea on a hot brick.
We had a hell of a time trying to hit such a small target and he managed to get in several pretty good hits with his super strength. We managed to do more damage to our base than to IB. Then one of my teammates recalled that cold will slow down fleas. We activated the bases sprinklers, soaked ourselves, and managed to actually slow Bob down.
Unfortunately he managed to get in one last jump and landed on my neck once more and glared at my teammates as he threatened to rip my head off with his strength. This was a threat that he could really pull off and it scared the living day lights out of me.
Then my teammate that nearly fried Bob earlier suddenly formed an energy doppelganger and had it grab Flea Bob off my neck and squished him into a fine goo. Then I spent several minutes berating my teammates for endangering me like that…
“Every time Bob is defeated or killed people like to think that they’ve heard the last of him. Then they try to forget they ever met the guy. I’ve been on his revenge list for some time. I was the unfortunate hero who beat him the first time and ever since then I’ve been number one on his revenge list. Once you end up on IB’s revenge list there’s no way to get off of it. Damnit!”
…at one time Bob even managed to come back as a woman, a Goddess in fact or so he claimed. We could never figure out if he was being truthful or not. It was, by and far, one of his most unusual forms. We think this might be the first time he switched genders, but with him it's just so hard to tell at times. It was the first recorded time he switched and I think the first time he returned in a humanoid form.
At the time I was still with the team and we got wind of a super powered villain on a rampage, so we went to investigate. It took us several minutes to get there, but when we arrived we found this gorgeous blonde haired woman dressed in a skin tight white dress smashing cars and tossing them about like they weighed nothing at all.
She wasn’t familiar to us and tossed a car at us even as we landed, yelling about getting her revenge. We were confused at first, but then we spotted the initials 'IB' on the breast of her dress. IB is like a virus or something, it always seems to come back and kick you around and make your life a living hell.
This time the jerk was back in a new female body, powerful, and just as ready to kick our asses as usual. Then IB proceeded to claim she was a Goddess, I'm not sure what I thought at the time, but she was stronger than all of us combined. Think of a female version of Thor at full power and only limited by a female body's strength.
Then IB revealed a new power besides strength. I shudder in embarrassment even to this day every time I think of Goddess Bob. Her power was Bonding, forcing two objects to bond together at a molecular level. With a wave of her hand she bonded two members of the team together face to face, lip to lip. Knowing a teammate needs to brush their teeth and experiencing it are two completely different sensations.
Then the bastard, or is that bitch, turned on me and another teammate as she fired a beam of energy at us. I tried to dodge, but then my teammate was hit and we were drawn together, also lip to lip. Luckily a few other members of the team managed to avoid getting hit and managed to take her down with a Mind Drain blast.
After Bob 'died' we were still stuck together and we had to be surgically sliced apart on a molecular level. We lost a lot of our dignity during the recovery time after that…
by far the strangest form IB has ever taken was Tape Worm Bob, yes, a tape worm. At the time I was part of the third incarnation of team Val-cor. By this time I was finally coming into my full power and had enough experience under my belt to be a real challenge to the enemy.
I thought that there wasn't a thing in existence that could hurt me and I was a little reckless at times. IB would soon disabuse me of that notion. The man lives to humiliate me and everyone on his revenge list.
One night I was on monitor duty when the doorbell rang. I scanned the outside and found what appeared to be a stray dog on our front doorstep. Scanning the dog more closely I found out it was a stray and one that was in poor shape. I didn't really think anything of it at the time, but I took the dog back to the monitor station and sat him on my lap as I returned to my monitor duty.
The next think I know I'm waking up, the dog is gone, and I'm trying to figure out why I fell asleep. Then suddenly I feel a stabbing pain in my intestines. The pain is indescribable and nearly knocks me on my ass, even with my powers. I instantly move to the med bay so I can use the medical scanners. It takes a few minutes, but I eventually find out that I've suddenly developed a tape worm.
Next thing I know I’ve a familiar pain in the ass mental voice in my head and I found out that Irving Bob was once more among the living.
Irving Bob tells me telepathically that he wants me to surrender or he will use his super strength to thrash his way out of my body! All I can think about is that I'm just glad he put me to sleep before he entered my body, just the though of how he got there…ugh.
I'm a hero, I won't ever surrender, it's against my code and no one but me was in danger, so I refused. So Bob starts thrashing around and I managed to contact the team while in agony. My teammates managed to get some medicine to kill off tapeworms and I managed to survive the encounter.
Then a little while later I was treated to mental scream of IB as is newest body died. That was one of the most distasteful encounters I have ever had and have no desire to ever go through such a thing again.
Powers and Abilities
Irving bob is a mutant with a number of natural and improvements to his physiology. His primary mutant power is the ability to retain the memories of whom and what he was in his past incarnations, typically referred to as an eluini. However unlike typical eluini’s that can only be reincarnated as human, Irving can reincarnated as anything, animals, bugs, bacteria even energy. His mutation also consists of natural superhuman strength the full extent of which is undetermined. Irving can easily lift vehicles, bend metals and lift heavy objects above his head. He is sufficiently strong to lift far in excess of 100 tons. His strength steams from the fact that his body is a storage cell for the elemental forces that flow into it, creating a force field like effect around the individual cells of his body. This allows his to keep his strength even when he doesn’t have a human body making him an extremely dangerous individual.