Nolan's Father

He was a heavyset, powerfully muscled Viltrumite whose face and frame closely foreshadowed his adult son's. Blue eyes sat beneath black hair marked by a lone white streak at the front, and he sported a thick, well-groomed horseshoe mustache. Broad through the shoulders and densely built, he carried the bearing of a battle-tested warrior at his peak. During his early days in the ranks he wore the plain white uniform of the Viltrumite military.

Rigid and imposing as he was, he showed a sliver of mercy uncommon among his people. During Nolan's adulthood duel he halted his mate before she could finish the boy off, granting that the youth had fought capably. The gesture read less as warmth than as exacting expectation; rather than lift his battered son from the ground, he told him to carry himself like the man he had become. Cold, aloof, and commanding, he prized discipline, obedience, and loyalty to Viltrumite tradition above all. Instead of congratulating Nolan for passing, he merely ordered him to report for his first assignment.

Deeply devoted to the empire and its dream of universal conquest, he served as one of its soldiers and idolized the late Emperor Argall. Together with his mate he arranged a test battle to mark Nolan's passage into adulthood, a trial meant to prove the young Viltrumite was ready to take up a place as an officer or agent of the empire. Nolan performed well and earned his father's grudging approval. Like many of his kind, however, he was ultimately caught up in the sweep of the Scourge Virus, a plague engineered from Viltrumite DNA that stripped away his strength and healing until it killed him.

His physiology followed the Viltrumite template: a lifespan stretching across millennia, flight, crushing strength, near-immunity to injury, sharpened senses, and endurance that let him fight on through wounds that would end an ordinary man. Centuries of warfare had also made him a master of hand-to-hand combat, pairing raw power with long experience.