Barry Black / Slake

At a Glance

Field	Value
Full Name	Barry Black
Alias	Slake
Age	39 at time of exposure (2022)
Origin	Blackwater Harbor, Dockworker — Ironworkers’ Local 44
Current District	Blackwater Harbor fringe — derelict piers, drainage infrastructure, abandoned harbor buildings
Affiliation	None
Role	Monster — villain of the week, potential recurring threat
Power Type	Eclipse biotech waste contamination — consumption-based absorption
Status	Active, uncontained

Capabilities

The compulsion: Barry cannot stop consuming. The Eclipse compound rewired his hunger and thirst signaling past any rational limit and kept going. The need is constant, urgent, and indiscriminate — it does not fully distinguish between food, material, or energy. He consumes because the alternative is a pain that has no ceiling.

The absorption: Whatever he consumes in significant quantity, his body partially incorporates the properties. This is not clean or controlled — it is biological chaos, the compound still working through him, still changing what it touches. The results are unpredictable and cumulative. His current physical state reflects everything he has eaten since 2022.

You are what you eat — confirmed properties to date:

Ship hull steel (consumed over several weeks, 2023) — skin along his forearms and shoulders has hardened to a dull grey density approaching plate metal. Currently stable.
Electrical equipment from a derelict crane (2024) — discharges involuntarily under stress. Arcs of current, uncontrolled. Duration and intensity vary.
Harbor concrete and rebar (ongoing) — mass and density significantly above human baseline. Moves slower for it. Hits proportionally harder.
Unknown Eclipse compound residue in harbor sediment (ongoing, source of original transformation) — the base layer everything else builds on. Still active. Still changing him.

What absorption from exotic or enhanced material would produce is unknown and potentially severe. This is the escalation vector if Slake encounters Eclipse tech, metahuman biology, or anything in Darkstar’s experimental orbit.

Physical profile: Massive. Wrong in proportions a human body shouldn’t achieve. The steel-hardened sections catch light differently from the rest of him. The electrical discharge means close combat carries risk for anyone without insulation. He is not fast. He does not need to be.

Background

Barry Black worked the docks for fourteen years. Local 44, cargo logistics, known by Augie Ferreira as reliable and quiet and the kind of man who showed up early and left late without making it anyone else’s business.

In late 2022, Eclipse biotech waste — improperly disposed of through a Persico-adjacent port operation, drums mislabeled as industrial solvent — went into the harbor near Pier 11. Barry went into the water after a colleague who’d slipped from a loading platform during the spill. He got the colleague out. He stayed in too long.

The compulsion started within days. He tried to manage it. He couldn’t. By the time he understood what was happening to his body, he was already somewhere the body shouldn’t be able to go. He stopped coming home in early 2023. His wife filed a missing persons report. The case is open.

He lives now in the spaces the working harbor doesn’t use — derelict piers, drainage culverts, the sealed lower levels of structures that haven’t been active in decades. He comes out at night. He eats what he finds. What he finds has been changing what he is.

Enough of him remains to feel shame about it. He avoids the active docks specifically. Whether that is recognition of the people there or simple territorial behavior that happens to look like recognition is a question nobody has gotten close enough to answer.

Augie Ferreira has left food — real food, nothing strange — at a specific spot near Pier 11 twice. Both times it was gone by morning. Augie has not told anyone he’s been doing this. He doesn’t know what to do with the fact that it keeps working.

Character Profile

Barry is not a thinking villain. He is not planning anything. He is a man trapped in a body that will not stop demanding things from him, running on compulsion and whatever fragments of who he was are still legible underneath it.

The tragedy is right on the surface. It does not need to be excavated. The team’s first encounter should make it visible immediately — something in the way he moves, the way he avoids certain areas, the way the shame sits on him even when the hunger is loudest.

He is not redeemable in the short term. The compound is still active. The compulsion is not something willpower addresses. But he is not gone, and the question of whether he can be reached — whether treatment exists, whether anyone is looking for it — is one the team can carry if they choose to.

Key Tensions

Tension	Description
Compulsion vs. remaining self	He knows what he’s doing. He cannot stop. These are both true simultaneously.
Augie’s vigil	Augie Ferreira knows something happened to Barry. He hasn’t connected it to the thing in the harbor. When he does, that lands differently than a standard monster encounter.
The escalation vector	If Slake consumes something genuinely exotic — Eclipse tech, enhanced biology, Darkstar material — what he becomes next is not predictable. This is the mechanism for making him a larger threat if the story needs it.
Eclipse’s liability	The waste that made him came from a Persico-adjacent Eclipse disposal operation. Eclipse knows the spill happened. They do not know what it produced. If they find out, they have reasons to either contain him or study him.

Relationships

Person	Relationship
Augie Ferreira	Knew Barry by name for a decade. Has been leaving food at Pier 11. Does not yet know what he’s feeding.
Eclipse	Responsible for what he is. Unaware he exists.
Persico’s network	The disposal operation that spilled the waste was Persico-adjacent. Indirect culpability.
Local 44 records	His employment file, his missing persons report, and his work assignment to Pier 11 in late 2022 are all in the union records — including the boxes on the Hall’s third floor.

Tactical Notes (GM Reference)

Do not engage in the water or in enclosed drainage spaces — his terrain, his advantage, his absorption gives him edges the team hasn’t catalogued yet
The electrical discharge is involuntary under stress — heroes with metal equipment or armor take additional risk in close combat
The steel-hardened sections are the durability nodes — forearms, shoulders. Not the whole body.
He is slow. This is the consistent exploitable fact. He hits hard enough that being hit is a serious problem, but he has to get there first.
Food works. This is not a joke. Real food, left where he can find it without confrontation, produces a behavioral response. Augie figured this out by accident. A team that figures it out intentionally has a non-combat option.

Voice & Dialogue Notes

No sustained speech. Sounds that were once words surface occasionally, wrong rhythm, incomplete.
Responds to his name — not always, not reliably, but enough to suggest it still means something.
The shame is physical. It reads in posture, in the specific areas he avoids, in the way he stops when he encounters something that was once familiar.

Open Questions

Is the compound still evolving him, or has it reached a stable state?
Is there a treatment? Who would even know to look — Dr. Vrell? Eclipse’s own researchers?
What happens if he consumes something from Darkstar’s experimental material?
When does Augie connect the thing at Pier 11 to the man who went missing?
Does his wife ever find out what happened to him?

Last updated: March 2026