Origin
In the dark ages, Eternity was considered to be, what his village called at the time, a talented alchemist. Always more curious about the world than his neighbors, his homegrown experiments began with simple formulas to bulwark his community’s crops against harsh winters, and help his fellow commoners recover from minor sickness.
Thought of as being rather odd, but useful, his talents were eventually noticed by a monastic order who invited him to join their brotherhood, where he would have more resources to conduct his own scientific research than the simple son of a farmer could ever dream of.
But when plague ravaged the land, this farmer’s son became terrified at the prospect that death could take anyone from him at any time. Thus, he turned all of his work towards devising a cure for mortality once and for all.
He toiled day and night to find it, and in the end, only achieved his goal thanks to a one-in-a-million lab accident.
But alas! In curing death, he had only created a new disease: the curse of eternal life.
Creation
Zip was created by Mike Scrase and San Espina. In 2010 Scrase read a cracked.com article titled 7 Awesome Superpowers (Ruined by Science) and noticed that superheroes as described by the article reminded him of his own experiences with disability. Having been born visually impaired, Scrase found that it was common for people to either think of disabled people as totally helpless, or to write off their disabilities as trivial.
Eternity was styled after the entry on immortality, with Scrase taking the approach of drawing a barrel between Eternity’s glacial perception of time to mental conditions which affect the elderly, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Scrase’s decision to make Eternity invulnerable was inspired by witnessing his elderly relatives frequently come close to death, and manage to survive despite being seemingly frail.
Major Story Arcs
During the dark ages, in a year not even he remembers, the hero now known as Eternity’s scientific experiments made him immortal.
Admittedly, his success was a total fluke. But that hasn’t stopped countless people from attempting to steal his secret over the years.
The catch is that everlasting life is a dreadful curse. A human mind can only learn so much new information until atrophies, and a mind that never dies simply breaks instead.
As he aged, the amount of memories he retained slowed his perception to a crawl, making years appear like hours, weeks like minutes, and days like seconds.
Eternity has sworn never allow anyone else to endure his pain. But as long as things stay as they are, he’ll never be able to spare himself from it. When the universe itself is destroyed, he will live to suffer through it. Unless someone can find a way to reverse his invulnerability.
Eternity now lives in the care of his descendant by many, many generations: Zip. He has been reduced to a vegetable state, unable to react quickly enough to a world moving around him at a lightning pace to do anything but lie bedridden, staring into space.
Zip knows that the only way she can end his misery is to find a way to kill him. But can it done? And what if his secret for eternal life should fall into the wrong hands.
Powers and Abilities
Eternity’s body is completely impervious to physical harm – but not to pain, and while he may be able to withstand any amount of tangible damage he sustains, he has a normal level of strength for a human being.
What this means is that all it takes is for a piece of falling rubble to trap him. With no way for him to free himself without outside help, he might not be killed by the debris – but he’d be pinned there for as long as the rubble remained holding him down.
Due to the fact that absolutely force can kill or even graze him, if he cannot find a way to make himself mortal, he will outlive the universe itself and be left to float alone in a featureless void of nothing, forever.
After centuries upon centuries of memories building up within his mind, he has had ample time to become extremely skilled in the sciences, but still hasn’t found a way to reverse his immortality.
Not only that, but his brain only has so much space for all of those memories, slowing it down overall as a result. To a man who has lived a thousand years, a single day represents very little of their entire life, and just as a year seems much shorter to someone in their 40s compared to how long it feels to a child, to Eternity, 24 hours passes by in a blink.