Elias Brandyworth

In his working years Brandyworth kept a tidy appearance, his long white-grey hair neatly combed and his frame dressed in a pink shirt, brown slacks, and blue athletic shoes under a lab coat. Once he abandoned the government and fell into homelessness, that polish vanished. He threw a grimy brown coat over his old clothes, let his hair grow shaggy and his beard fill in, and the added wrinkles left him looking worn and far older than his years.

Brandyworth was a gifted, driven researcher devoted to pushing the frontiers of genetic engineering. His bond with Polly softened him, and watching over her through her pregnancy sparked a change of conscience that led him to shield her and her unborn child from becoming lab material. After Polly died and the Pentagon dismissed him, he poured himself into quietly guarding Eve from the shadows, turning fiercely protective and warning her to keep her abilities hidden.

He held a bitter contempt for Steven Erickson and his brutal methods. Discovering that Polly had been kept alive and exploited to birth deformed children, then twisted into a cyborg, broke something in him. In the end he laid down his own life to save Eve, and by triggering the gunfire that struck Polly he unintentionally released her from her suffering, dying in defiance of Erickson's cruelty and setting Eve on the path to her full potential.

An expert in genetics, chemistry, and physics, Brandyworth developed a substance able to rearrange matter at the molecular level. Working under the government agent Steven Erickson, he was ordered to build a living superweapon by exposing an unborn child to it. He recruited Polly, a homeless pregnant woman, promising her a better life in exchange for the experiment. As the pregnancy advanced the two grew close, both came to regret the plan, and he resolved to smuggle her and the baby away from the agency.

When Polly went into labor early, a Lizard League raid on the lab gave Brandyworth the cover he needed to slip out with her. He ignored Erickson's demands to return and rushed her to a hospital, but she died from the strain of the child's emerging powers. He delivered the baby himself and quietly swapped her for the stillborn infant of Betsy and Adam Wilkins, then lied that both mother and child had perished, listening as the Wilkinses named the girl Samantha Eve.

Cast out of the program, Brandyworth spent the next twelve years living rough in Chicago to keep watch over Eve, revealing himself only once her powers surfaced. He explained her gift and the mental blocks he had planted to keep her from altering living tissue, blocks her deteriorating siblings lacked, which doomed them. The two were eventually captured by Erickson, who revealed a barely-living Polly kept as breeding stock. Enraged, Brandyworth attacked him; in the chaos Polly was killed and Brandyworth was shot dead. His death unlocked Eve's suppressed power to reshape organic matter, which she used to erase herself from Erickson and Rodgers' memories. Eve carried his memory for years afterward, cherishing him as the father in the family she never truly had.