Thus, Jacob accepted their offer enthusiastically, took the title of "Conduit", and began his new life as a fabled superhero, which would slowly turn out to be not quite as enticing as the comics made it out to look.
Conduit, originally Jacob Anichev, started out as an ordinary teen in Cold War Era U.S.S.R. Born in the nuclear town of Pripyat, he was expected to follow in the footsteps of many of his peers and one day become a Nuclear Engineer. However, as a student, he was known to be unserious and somewhat of a prankster. After a dare with his class mates, he ended up sneaking into the local power plant of Chernobyl using a fake uniform, to see how long he could remain there before being caught.
He picked a day when most of the workers would be distracted by a safety exercise, which would also happen to be the day of the infamous disaster. He got caught between a rock and a hard place during the explosion, or rather, between an overcharged transformer and a wave of radiation. The intense energies essentially vaporized him in an instant, but the quirk of the physical forces at play in that coincidental burst of electricity and radiation would leave an "imprint" of his being, which would later reform from his own scattered particles.
Even after reforming, those same strange forces never let go of him, keeping him essentially trapped inside the abandoned facility for decades in isolation, but at the same time sustaining and preventing him from aging in all this time. During his isolation, he discovered he obtain new abilities of his own, and began to learn how to use them, hoping to one day help him escape. That chance came in 2016, when a new Sarcophagus was built over Chernobyl, which seemingly cut the tether the facility had over him, allowing him to escape.
Being free once more, his first instinct was to find the people he knew, only to find his entire home town long abandoned. Searching for explanations left him even more confused than before, realizing how much has passed and how much the world around him has changed. While wandering essentially aimless and dizzied by the new world, he would be picked up as a walking nuclear hazard on sensors from U.N.I.S.O.N., an organization focused on protecting the world from abnormal dangers, which often employs superheroes for such tasks.
Jacob was thus taken into custody by U.N.I.S.O.N. and contained as a threat, only to realize that Jacob, after training for decades in how to use his powers to escape from Chernobyl, was quite difficult to contain. Instead, they switched to a strategy of "employing" him as one of their heroes, under very careful supervision, of course, and given a large supply of American comic books to "subtly" influence him, which for a someone isolated for over 30 years with no other forms of entertainment, worked like a charm.
Thus, Jacob accepted their offer enthusiastically, took the title of "Conduit", and began his new life as a fabled superhero, which would slowly turn out to be not quite as enticing as the comics made it out to look.
Abilities:
Control over radiation and electricity. U.N.I.S.O.N. keeps his training strictly to electric themed powers, as they do not yet trust he is "stable" enough to use radiation attacks in public. He however has learned some radiation based tricks, such as cooking with microwaves and hearing radio waves.
Essentially immune to radiation, as well as disease, as his inner body is so irradiated that it is essentially sterile.
Ages extremely slowly. Still looks like a teen after 30 years.