Blaze

Cole "Blaze" Lockwood
Ace of Aces character
First appearance	Dark Blue
First date	July 25, 2024
Created by	OracleLykios
Information
Full name	Cole Lockwood
Alias	Blaze, Charcoal One, Mage Two (Former callsign), "The Black Eagle," "Razgriz," "Demon of Los Angeles," "The Phoenix," "Daredevil"
Nickname	Blaze
Species	Lucario
Gender	Male
Orientation	Straight
Main Kinks	None super-specific enough to list
Sexual Position	Switch
Occupation	Fighter Pilot - Dragon Brigade PMC, Test Pilot - Infinity Flight Engineering
Affiliation	United States Navy (former), Dragon Brigade Private Military Company
Family	Zoey Lockwood
Spouse	None
Children	None
Relatives	Richard "Talisman" Lockwood (Father), Scarlett Savannah-Lockwood (Mother), Robin "Trigger" Lockwood (Grandfather), Daniel "Chopper" Lockwood (Uncle, deceased), Z.O.E. "Zoey" Lockwood (Legal sister)
Origin	San Antonio, Texas
Nationality	American

General Information

Born to two high school sweethearts, Blaze was raised as a military brat moving base to base to base wherever his father was stationed at the time. Growing up in the transitional times during the Liberation, Blaze didn't let it phase him, instead simply idolizing his family, multi-generational fighter pilots stretching back to the dawn of combat aviation in World War One. Hearing tales of his legendary Ace family members, from his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father instilled in him a sense of wonder about the sky and flying in general. His childhood was spent playing any flight sim he could find - with a particular love of the Air Combat series - and his room and toys were mostly aviation-themed. He flew his first plane when he was thirteen, a crop-dusting Stearman PT-17 and his fate was set on course. Through his grandfather's connections, he was able to ride along with a member of the Blue Angels and signed up to join the Navy as a pilot on his eighteenth birthday.

Unfortunately, his training went very far from perfect. His natural talent for flying, aided by an unparalleled reaction time, small frame, and his natural Fighting-type constitution, gave him a massive advantage over other cadets, but it led to his ego getting the better of him. He became cocky, arrogant, and a thousand other phrases for "an asshole," and clashed with leadership on more than one occasion. Things came to a head during the last portion of his training, when a training accident led to the loss of two F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter jets and the crippling of one of his wingmen.

Training Accident & Court Martial

During a bombing training mission, Blaze flew lead while his wingman flew second. The objective was to simulate a routine bombing run that ended with a 10G climb to prepare pilots of the possibility of G-induced Loss of Consciousness (G-LOC). Blaze instead baited his wingman into a much steeper climb by calling out "incoming bandits" which resulted in his wingman passing out at a very low altitude. Having pushed him below the hard deck already - the minimum altitude for safety during training situations - Blaze realized his wingman had passed out very low to the ground and began to panic. Trying to lock the plane with a missile tone to force him to wake up and shouting his name, Blaze made a split-second decision and rolled his wing into the other plane's, which sheared his own wing off and sent the other into a flat spin. Fortunately, the crash did indeed wake his wingman and both ejected, but Blaze's wingman ejected too low to the ground and broke his spine upon impact, while both jets crashed.

Blaze was almost immediately arrested for such a stupid stunt and court-martialed, for both the loss of materiel and for nearly killing his wingman, and for the first time in his career Blaze realized that his ego had gone too far. The threat of being grounded for the rest of his life paled to the fact he would likely be spending the rest of his life in prison, a fate which Blaze felt he had earned. Fortunately, a certain dragon both owed Blaze's father several favors and saw the potential of the pilot now that the cocky flyboy part had been forcibly knocked out of him.

The Dragon Brigade

Pulling several favors, Liberation Rights icon and former Air Force General Chartherax "Charcoal" Dracovayne got Blaze's sentence commuted to instead work for him as a pilot. He didn't mince words, telling Blaze his options were either a life sentence in a windowless room or indentured servitude to him, and Blaze, wisely, chose the latter and was released into Charcoal's custody. This custody included a grueling training regimen, even more so than the USAF's, training Blaze to fly any jet with wings he might come across, pre-dawn to post-dusk. As a result, Blaze is certified on jets ranging from third to fifth-generation fighters such as the F-4 Phantom II, MiG-21bis Fishbed, F-14 Tomcat, Rafale M, EF-2000 Typhoon, Su-30SM Flanker-H, MiG-35 Super Fulcrum, F-35 Lightning II, and more.

Blaze recalls very little of the training itself, saying it's mostly a blur, but is grateful, saying it beat the last of his ego down into the dirt. While he's technically one of the best pilots in the world, he refuses to flaunt it any longer, barely even speaking to those outside of his inner circle of his job.

Zone of the Endless & Project Wingman

Late into his training, Blaze took a wrong turn while looking for Charcoal and somehow ended up in a restricted area. How he ended up in the area and why his access wasn't denied are still under investigation - though Blaze is suspected of no wrongdoing - but the events there couldn't be changed. Upon entering a lab devoted to "Project Wingman," Blaze's brain was forcibly fused with an artificial intelligence known by the codename "Zone of the Endless," or Z.O.E. for short.

This AI, having been designed to conform to Charcoal's mental patterns for a top secret project, instead became forcibly linked to what now presented as a Lucario sharing Blaze's appearance. Zoey, as the program/Lucario chose to be called, was a bleeding-edge project designed to mentally link to pilots and act as a copilot. Rather than punish Blaze and scrap the project, Charcoal instead begrudgingly brought Blaze and his family into the fold, arranging documents to legally adopt Zoey into the Lockwood family.

ADFX-06

On his first fully-fledged mission with the Dragon Brigade, Blaze engaged with a prototype drone over the Florida Keys, taking it down but getting shot down in the process. When he awoke, Charcoal informed him that the Dragon Brigade had been fighting a shadow war against these mysterious drones since before Blaze was born. He had been trained to fight these drones, prepared for the eventuality that Blaze would tangle with them, and training Blaze to fight them. Blaze was promoted to the legendary callsign "Charcoal One" and now leads Charcoal Squadron, flying the F-22A Raptor "Black Eagle" in a bid to challenge these mysterious drones and whoever is behind them.

Appearance

Blaze is, unquestionably, incredibly short, standing around 4'6 when including the tips of his ears. While this helped his piloting career, it also was a source of much mockery when he was growing up and he resents it. Blaze's spikes on his chest and paws have been shorn down and blunted, only appearing to be around half the size of a normal Lucario's for safety, as to not puncture his flight suit at 45,000 feet. When on the ground, Blaze wears a bomber jacket and Vietnam veteran baseball cap (both originally belonging to his grandfather), a t-shirt and jeans, having "molded the perfect image of a cocky flyboy pilot" since his teens, according to him. Otherwise, in most respects he is simply a normal Lucario.

{{Characters}}