Rodgers

Age sits heavily on Rodgers, a stern old man whose bald scalp keeps only thin grey tufts above the ears and whose face is cut with deep lines. A mechanical piece covers his left eye, its metal fittings marked by a small red circle, and his brows sit thick and sharply angled. He works in a white lab coat worn over a high black collar.

What emerges of Rodgers comes through his conduct in the lab. He is coldly ambitious and quick to defend his results, insisting he is making headway even as his creations fail, yet he bends readily to the will of his superior Steven Erickson, following cruel orders he plainly hesitates over. His willingness to experiment on living subjects marks him as callous beneath the deference.

Rodgers spent his career on classified government projects, chief among them Phase One, a controllable superhuman meant to wield reality-bending power on the state's leash. When a rival scientist, Elias, was assigned to finish the work by having a young woman bear the being, the facility fell to a Lizard League raid, and Elias and Polly fled to a hospital. Rodgers arrived with Steven Erickson and a squad of soldiers, only for Elias to falsely claim the child had died.

Tasked afterward with rebuilding Phase One from scratch, Rodgers could not match Brandyworth's craft, and his attempts came out half-formed, mostly mute and unable to last a day outside their pods, each prototype worse than the last. Erickson threatened to seal him inside a pod himself if results did not improve. When Phase One resurfaced as Atom Eve, Erickson unleashed Phases Two through Five to drag her back; most perished from their own instability, but the weakened hero, now known as Samantha, was recaptured alongside Elias. In the lab the government revealed Polly, Sam's mother, kept alive in horrific condition to breed more siblings. Elias turned on his captors and was killed with Polly in the fight, and the twin losses so enraged Sam that she scoured all memory of the scheme from Erickson and Rodgers, leaving both men bewildered about where they even were.