Torchwood [Freeform]

[Aleph Null]

Spoiler: Summary: Altair Zephyrian "Astral" Aerilas

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The gestalt being known by the callsign "Astral" is not originally from this universe. In fact, it is precisely this origin that drives his investment in an organization like Torchwood, dedicated to shielding everyday mundane people from the not-so-mundane things that lurk in their midst.
Altair Centauri Lewis was born in late September 2023 in rural Colorado to Quentin and Diana Lewis. The pair were both prolific astrophysicists, with Diana having put lots of research into a project that eventually became the first nuclear-powered rocket to transit the asteroid belt and Quentin having led the push to discover many far-off stars. They had retired to raise their son, on whom they did not want to impose. But even though they did not tell him of their careers as astronomers, Altair was himself always a stargazer, and he even began to train as a pilot in college in hopes that he could become an astronaut.
While plane crashes tend to deter most people from flying, Altair did not flinch when his parents were killed when Oceanic Airlines flight 564 crashed into the Sydney Opera house on April 2, 2042. His friends gave him sideways glances as he completed his type ratings, first on piston-powered planes and then on small jets. And he faced reporters with a smile as he went to board the Ouranos II rocket that was to carry him and the rest of the crew of Juno III to Callisto, the third of Jupiter's Galilean Moons, in late 2044. By the time he came out of stasis to conduct the landing nearly two years later, Earth was a changed place...though he did not yet know it.
What happened on the Juno III mission was kept from the public, and such secrets were easy to keep in the wake of the events of the year 2045 when the public had far bigger concerns. Altair does not talk much of the event himself, other than the vague memory of his human body feeling an odd lurching sensation and then engaging in conversation with a disembodied voice in an oddly warm and bright place. The star, Aerilas Anax Zephyrian, remembers even less, having only just detected the presence of an incoming body milliseconds before he would have been incinerated.
As it turns out, the supernatural was as real in Altair's world as it is in this one. Stars have souls just as humans do, and this was a kind and compassionate one who would do everything to avoid harming an innocent fleshling -- up to and including the ultimate sacrifice. Of course, it did not end up being necessary -- stars are powerful in their own right, and Aerilas was able to conduct a merger of himself with Altair in order to save the latter and gain himself a new, mobile body in the process. But when he returned to Earth, the newly-formed celestial body found himself in a world that had vastly changed.
The world Altair comes from experienced a cosmic event known as the Tipping in the year AD 2045. That universe had in place for most of its history something known as the Worldly Veil, which hides supernatural beings from the eye of mundanes. A werewolf may appear as a very gruff man; a fairy sprite might seem like a dragonfly or butterfly; leviathans appear as large rocks or sea turtles, and even magic that might normally be impossible to conceal remains hidden to the eyes of mundane mortals so long as the Veil holds. But it can only take so much strain, and it was shattered by the actions of a cabal of supernatural beings who felt restrained by its presence, and the result was the destabilization of the fabric of reality in the wake of so much rapid change. This Tipping is not an apocalypse by itself, but if left unchecked it can lead to an event known as the Sundering, which is far worse for the multiverse.
When the effects of a Tipping world spread too rapidly in its universe, the entire universe's dimensional fabric can unravel, sending its denizens scattered throughout the vast other planes of the multiverse.
This was the eventual fate of Altair's world, and how he ended up in this one. And his determination is now very straightforward -- see that this world does not suffer a similar fate.

Spoiler: Some Notes

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I know I linked this google doc earlier but I'm linking it again to have it in one place. It's a lot more detailed than this summary, for anyone who wants to read more about this character (I have had the concept for a while, as I mentioned previously).
For clarity's sake, the "accident" as it would be for the purpose of Torchwood is the Sundering and Altair's arrival in this world as part of the immediate aftermath of that.
I tried to demarcate the sections well enough that the information on the various important things (the Tipping, the Sundering, and other parts of the backstory like the Flight 564 crash and how it relates to the Worldly Veil and the Tipping) but some of them are not relevant here necessarily other than to provide context for experience Altair already has with working with a supers organization, though it's out in the open and thus a different sort of job.