Son of the hero of the Golden Age originally called The Ray, Raymond Terrill inherited his father's light based powers and has taken up the heroic mantel and name of The Ray.
Personality
Ray's been released from a prison of darkness that he spent most of his young life believing would always cage him with the revelation that not only his he not deathly allergic to the sun, but he is in fact a Superhero. He's free and he embraces that freedom, probably more than he should. Ray's more than willing to throw himself into new situations and experiences and to push the the boundaries, not just of his powers, but of his expectations, his prior experiences, and his beliefs in himself and who he is. After all when your entire life has been a lie you're much more prone to reexamine your own truths on a semi-regular basis.
Ray's intelligent and generally outgoing, but sometimes tempered by the fact that he's inexperienced in simply being around other people and out in the world at large. When he's thrust into new situation he'll either embrace the chance to learn and throw himself right into the mix if he's feeling confident in his own knowledge of it or he'll hang back a bit from it, try to figure it out from the sidelines as it were or find someone to ask that he trusts to help him understand.
When it comes to more academic knowledge things he thought he knew and understood based on study might suddenly be completely different in practice than what he thought he knew. He's curious about those differences and willing to learn what he doesn't know or fix those things his own understanding has led him astray on.
When it comes to social norms and interpersonal interactions he's entirely unversed and uncertain in just how most other people relate to each other. This is especially true among various groupings that don't involve a parent/child or teacher/student relationship as most of his world consisted of his 'father'/uncle Thomas and a pair of tutoring nuns. He has some knowledge from books of course, but reading about what having a best friend is like and actually having one or actually being one are entirely different things. He's still figuring it all out.
Due to the sheer amount of lies in his past Ray suffers from an odd mixture of naivety and caution. Thanks to his inexperience in real world situations and interactions, he can be lulled into trusting in things that he shouldn't so long as the reasoning seems fairly sound or the source is someone or something he's inclined to believe in. On the flipside he can sometimes be unduly cautious or outright disbelieving of things that are absolutely true because they just don't seem to make much sense to him, otherwise completely defy his expectations on the subject or it comes from a source he's already disinclined to trust. Thank his Dads for that.
Background
The True Life of Ray Terrill
Ray Terrill grew up believing certain things about his life were true. Ray was born with a deadly allergy to the sun, exposure to any strong light in general would kill him. Ray was raised by his father and educated by a pair of ordinary kindly nuns. Ray had no superpowers. Ray was definitely an only child. Ray's mom was dead. Ray also had a bit of minor celebrity as the "Night Boy" in news media. All of this was a lie. Except the Night Boy part, that was only based on prior lies.
The Real True Life of Ray Terrill
The truth was that Ray was actually the son of the original hero to go by the name of the Ray, Langford "Happy" Terrill. At birth it was discovered he had somehow inherited his father's light-based powers and had absolutely no control over them. For the safety of himself and others from himself and others, the story of his sun allergy was concocted and he was thereafter raised by his father in a house with blacked out windows and was schooled by ordinary kindly nuns until his father died and revealed the truth. Sorta.
The Actual True and Real Life of Ray Terrill
In reality his "father" was actually his uncle Thomas that Ray had been left with by Langford for "reasons." The kindly nuns were helping to prepare Ray for some destined meeting with a being of pure light energy that was responsible for Langford gaining his powers in the first place. Langford showed up, not dead, did some more lying to get Ray to better understand and embrace his powers. More truths were revealed among more lies along the way. Disasters were averted, villains were fought and eventually Ray confronted the light entity and sent it on its way without it destroying the earth.
All Truths Revealed, Ray Terrill's Future Looks Bright
That brings us to the present, where newly emerged hero The Ray has burst onto the scene. His past now an open book and his future bright as the sun, he draws powers from. He's looking to find his place in the world that's now opened up to him since all the lies are finally gone. Oh, wait. Remember that part where everything but the "Night Boy" thing was a lie? Where Ray is definitely an only child and his mom is dead? Don't tell Ray. He doesn't know those are lies yet. Shhh.
SKILLS
BLIND SIGHT: Expert - Growing up Ray was raised in almost total darkness, with only very dim and entirely artificial light allowed anywhere near him and even that was for very limited amounts of time. All this has left him with the knowledge and aptitude to operate in conditions of little to no light without the level of impairment that people who take having light to see by for granted suffer while working in the dark. Finding this exceptionally useful, especially when villains tend to want to neutralize his powers with lots of darkness, he routinely drills himself to keep up on this ability, including such things as making rapid study of new locations to get a sense of their navigational spaces if the lights suddenly go out and in spending time operating entirely without light for extended periods of time.
COMPUTERS: Competent - With the dim light of a computer screen being his one link to the outside world growing up, Ray made it a priority to learn all about these technological marvels that allowed him to be connected to the greater world in ways that his 'allergy to sunlight' wouldn't allow for. He knows quite a bit about operating, maintaining, repairing, upgrading, programming, and even the hacking of computer systems.
EDUCATION: Competent - Ray was home schooled by a pair of tutoring nuns who were quite determined to give him what they considered full and well rounded education. This has given him the equivalent education of someone who is naturally fairly intelligent, had the benefit of personal instruction and tutoring, few distractions from actual study, and who actually fully applied himself to his studies. Essentially had he been attending an actual school Ray would definitely have ranked somewhere in the top of the class.
LANGUAGES: Competent - Ray was educated by a pair of nuns, so naturally they drilled Latin into him as part of his home schooling education. Additionally he is well versed in Braille as it was the one method of reading he could perform regularly whether in total darkness or within the brief allowances of dim artificial light he had while growing up.
ABILITIES
FLIGHT: Supreme-level Power - Ray is capable of flight by expelling his light based energies to provide propulsion. Using just his basic flight abilities Ray's fully capable of achieving a hypersonic speed of around Mach 5. However when he converts himself into pure light energy, Ray becomes able to travel at the very speed of light itself.
FULL SPECTRUM SENSES: Enhanced-level Power - Ray is able to shift his senses along the electromagnetic spectrum, allowing him sense things not normally seen by human eyes. This enables him to see in entirely new ways, giving him access to ultra violet vision, infrared sight, being able to see lines of magnetic force (which he often uses while flying to utilize the Earth's magnetic field as a navigational compass), to detect holograms and illusions by their specific electromagnetic makeup and source. Shifting his senses in this way is not an instinctive act on Ray's part, but rather something he must focus on actively to perform. Additionally the entirety of Ray's body is solar reactive and sensitive. As such, theoretically, he could utilize his entire body as a sensory organ for these energies, though doing so would likely be far more confusing that focusing his efforts on the more human way of seeing via his eyes.
LIGHT CONSTRUCTS: Enhanced-level Power - Ray is able to convert light energy into solid light based matter allowing him to create light constructs similar in nature to the energy constructs created by Green Lanterns using their Power Rings. Although there is an initial expenditure of energy to create such a construct, once formed it requires no further energy on Ray's part to remain a solid piece of matter indefinitely under normal circumstances. However if Ray must work against some other force to maintain its structure, such as keeping a shield of solid light energy intact under a continued attack, then he will have to continue to expend energy on maintaining the construct or risk it being overcome and destroyed. At any point Ray can reconvert the light construct back into energy and reabsorb the power utilized to create it if necessary, though any energy expended to maintaining a construct against outside forces will be lost in the reconversion process. Of special note is the fact that Ray's costume and his clothing in general are almost entirely solid light constructs.
LIGHT FORM CONVERSION: Supreme-level Power - Ray is capable of converting himself into a being of living light energy. While in this state he is virtually impossible to harm by conventional means and it no longer requires the fulfillment of such pesky human needs like food, water or air to survive as he sustains himself solely on absorbed solar energies. Ray is essentially intangible in this state. Fists and bullets will pass harmlessly through him like a hologram, he can move unimpeded through anything light would normally pass through and can flow his body around minor obstacles or through narrow openings. However he cannot simply fly straight through a solid steel wall that's larger than he is and he can be trapped in a room that has no natural egress for light to pass through. In addition to his light form making it difficult to harm him in general, when Ray transforms his body from light energy back into physical form he effectively rebuilds his body from scratch, converting light energy back into the solid matter of his physical form. During this rebuilding he instinctively resets his body to a fully healthy state based on a subconscious mental template of his body in its original default state.
LIGHT MANIPULATION: Enhanced-level Power - Ray can manipulate light to create fully realistic holographic illusions or to bend it around items or individuals to provide a form of invisibility. Though manipulating light in such a way requires a closer proximity, around 50 feet, and greater concentration on Ray's part to perform and maintain the illusion or cloaking effect being produced.
LIGHT PROJECTION: Enhanced-level Power - Ray can radiate various wavelengths, lumens, and intensities of his stored solar energy from any individual parts of his body or all of it at once, allowing him to glow with the shining radiance of pure sunlight, or sweep an area with a projected beam of illumination like a flashlight from his hand. He can also expel more energetic forms of solar power in various mixes of heat to light and energy to matter ratios, allowing him to project beams of laser like intensity, waves of melting heat, or blasts of more kinetic based force by converting part of his expelled energy into matter as it's carried along its path.
SOLAR BATTERY: Supreme-level Power - Ray is a living solar energy battery and conversion plant able to absorb, store, and channel the ambient solar energies to fuel his abilities. Within moments of direct exposure to full sunlight he can fully charge himself and so long as he remains operating in reach of the sun he will remain that way even while continuously exerting his other powers. When denied exposure to sufficient light energy Ray will gradually deplete his stored energy even if he makes no overt use of power as his body also draws upon them to help sustain its physical wellbeing. The exact time he can operate between charging varies greatly depending on how much he uses his powers while not being able to properly charge up, 48 hours at the most with no or extremely minimal use of overt powers, 12 hours with moderate, down to possible minutes depending on the situation. While Ray primarily draws energy directly from the sun, he is capable of pulling from other sources of light energy, however, the less natural or weaker the source is the less efficiently his body can store and convert it.
ADVANTAGES
WEAKNESSES
BLACK DIFFUSION - The color black is better able to diffuse and absorb Ray's light based energies, making anything of that color more resistant to his powers and requiring more focus and energy to have the same effect on those items than those of other colors. This in part explains Ray's tendency towards black clothing when wearing mundane apparel as it's more likely to stand up to his powers for some period of time rather than be consumed rather quickly by them.
KNOWLEDGE GAPS - Despite the well rounded education he received from his tutoring nuns, Ray's knowledge does have the gaps within it that come from his isolated upbringing and things that the nuns deemed unimportant or just didn't think to teach to someone living in near perpetual darkness. When it comes to broad educational topics taught in a classroom he's usually golden. History, Math, Sciences. Things that require more practical application or sight/light for explanations to make sense are where the gaps creep in, driving and automotives in general, for example, are a bit of a mystery to him. Art is among other topics that is another large hole in his education, both in general knowledge and practical application. Strangely enough sex education also seems to be a topic the tutoring nuns skimped on, for some unexplainable reason. Go figure.
SOLAR POWERED - Ray's powers are derived from his ability to absorb and store solar energies and then channel them in a variety of ways. If he is denied access to to sufficient levels of light to charge himself from, he can only rely upon his stored reserves until they become exhausted. Once those reserves are exhausted Ray becomes just another run of the mill superpowerless youth until he can recharge.
