As shown in the history of the Convocation, Keenan Lane is not quite what he appears. He is far, far older than he looks, and he prefers to appear as a mature white Human male with dark, short hair and unusually-colored eyes. He clearly enjoys dressing formally, and seems comfortable wearing a suit and tie at almost all times, though he is also at ease in the right company wearing a completely different body (see above). Notably seen in the above are three forms - an avian, a feline, and his 'young' Icarus-suited body. While the feline and avian forms are the same physical body taking a different shape, the younger one is actually a newer cloned body created (along with numerous others 'just in case') on their old world by Melissa and some of her peers. He keeps this body in his own pocket dimension storage, switching to it by swapping his mind and energy into it and teleporting back to Paragon. While using it, his 'older' form is kept in that same storage unit. He cannot use both at once, or it should be said: will not. He is physically and Vortally capable of doing so, but he prefers not to. His heir Paxton does, but it is unknown whether this power was inherited from Keenan or another of his ancestry.

Keenan responds to his name more easily than he used to - given that there have been several 20-30 year periods where no one actually knew his Human name. During those times, as well as among the Convocation, he answers to a variety of other titles such as Mystery, Kallah-vahh, and some more rarely spoken. He seems to prefer being called different names by different people; Melissa for instance almost exclusively calls him 'Kallah-vahh', while Wilson is more apt to refer to him as 'Lane'. He seems to take remarkably little offense at any other less flattering names that his family use ('that dramatic bastard' as Mars usually laughs, and 'old man' from his heir Paxton).

Keenan's chosen Human name quite literally means "ancient pathway", highly analogous to his Vortigese title of Nach'lih Kallah-vahh, loosely translated as 'the spirit's path of shrouded flesh'. When he was given that title by Noah the Vortigaunt some 12 thousand years ago on the Vortigese homeworld, he did not have a body on. He wouldn't adopt one until reaching Earth in a nearby dimension, bearing out the fact that Vortigaunts appear to be able to note aspects of both past and future when they bestow a name upon something or someone. The 'Vahh' namesake has been picked up by his descendants eagerly; given by the Vorts originally to show the connections to the man in question, they have changed the negative connotations of that word (which can mean anything from 'confusion' to 'mystery', 'obfuscation' to 'lies') into something more positive (Melissa's use of it, Bahh'chackt gallum vahh, means 'bearer of mysteries and gifts' or 'mother of surprises'). He seems to bear his title with a fierce pride, something his kind disdain.

Other members of the Convocation (his 'race', not his supergroup) do not have either names that they take themselves, or titles bestowed by Vortikind, and merely refer to each other by way of 'knowing their energy signature', akin to flashing lights or a specific frequency of energy. In Keenan's case his lih, his energy signature, is seen by Human eyes as a specific shade of teal mixed with white, turquoise in its mottled stone. His aura shows this same color and can generally only be detected by those with 'Vortal' senses - psionic, magic, psychic or even technological means. [Though as a Kheldian unfortunately cannot be recolored, the violet color is dominant.] Occasionally this aura can be seen by normal individuals but this is rare, as it coincides with Keenan's emotional stability. Only when he is remarkably angry or otherwise empassioned, does he really allow his full aura to bleed into the 'visible' spectrum.

His mental contact 'feels' and 'sounds' effectively the same as it would if he were standing just behind and to the side of your ear. While he can edit his mental speech to 'only' be heard, using the auditory sensors in the recipient's brain rather than anything else, he usually can be felt (a faint static electrical charge, as if from a huge storm front), heard (with the same odd inflection but without the occasional breathy sounds), and 'seen' (the contact leaves the mind with an afterglow of turquoise, the same shade as his aura). To those who don't expect his mind, it can be a jarring experience, but most of his family seem apt to enjoy the contact. He can also transfer information, such as the location of a building or a password, incredibly quickly in this manner, mentally imprinting it as needed.

Though it would seem by his appearance that he's rather uptight and by-the-books, any amount of closeness to him as a person will reveal quite the opposite. Though he tends not to show outward emotion at all times, he's more than capable of expressing with the lift of an eyebrow or the tiniest smirk whether he's amused or interested in something. Once you get to know him or he decides he is comfortable 'showing off', Keenan demonstrates a very wide range of emotions and expressions. When he is focused on a task it's unwise to try and distract him, but not all that hard to do. Keenan sometimes resorts to rather raunchy humor or suggestive behavior when he's nervous, but equally when he's feeling frisky. Be aware that he is still very Human ("for the duration"), and while he's not necessarily always "just like" other Humans mentally or emotionally, everything that physically affects any normal man would certainly affect him. He is quite apt to show his admiration or annoyance when he believes such action will result in amusement for others nearby.

More over, he also has a number of habitual gestures that can, when carefully observed, show a lot more than he would otherwise speak or display. He straightens his tie (when he's wearing the appropriate body/clothing) to show either satisfaction in something he's done, or consternation about what he hasn't or can't control. He often steeples his long fingers and lowers his head - not in prayer by the way his eyes tend to gleam, but to show superiority or that a lesson is needing to be heeded. He is usually impeccably clean, and dusts his shoulders or suit off, examines his nails, checks to see no hair is out of place. At times, his right hand can be seen gripping the air at his hip: this is a holdover from many, many years carrying around a briefcase (which he has since lost) that he often used as a focal point to clear his mind or settle his nerves. These rituals are things that his family and friends have commented on, he knows he does them, and at this point either he doesn't care or is doing them on purpose.

Because he has always had to keep plenty of secrets, both about himself and the companies that he worked with, Keenan is not the easiest man to get close to. To keep people from asking too many questions, he adopted an air of, as Melissa puts it, an 'unapproachable badass'. Obviously this didn't keep everyone away, and he regards the people who were bold enough to get near him with a reasonable amount of respect. While he often appears to 'look down' at people for their flaws, he's also rather free with praise when it's appropriate, and has been known to snipe at those who don't meet with his approval or who openly deride him. Though he prefers to avoid direct confrontation, he can and will put up a verbal defense and is not above using his considerable telepathic power to get his point across. He figures if someone manages to stay mad at him long enough to come to blows, he probably deserves it.

Though by the time they reach Paragon's Earth Keenan is reasonably friendly and approachable, he clearly still has his share of issues, not the least of which is Wilson. But far from the attitude which Wilson had to put up with for years before Ulathoi was destroyed, Keenan's behavior toward his clone is relaxed and at times exceedingly amusing to watch. But both of them will admit to having serious confrontations with each other in the past, something which both also are interested in making sure won't happen again. At times, they appear to act more like brothers, sometimes as father and son, and still others as business partners. Keenan knows the source of his own earlier, bad, behavior: his peers among his 'kind'. All that he had known for a considerable amount of time before becoming Human, was the (original) Convocation's derision and mocking. He unconsciously passed this along to his clone and treated him the only way he knew how. Wilson had to get used to an approach of "that's all he would get" from Keenan, abrupt conversation endings and hardly any actual discussion: the assumption was that Wilson did already know his prime's feelings - what needed to be said hadn't been, for many years.

But as their family grew, and Wilson was forced into the role of an actual father, they both had to find middle ground in order to keep from tearing each other apart. With Paxton's acceptance of his role as the Mystery's Heir, Wilson's role regarding his prime had to be worked out. Keenan's feelings on the matter had actually changed very little, but his expression of those things needed to be voiced. Keenan had always accepted Wilson as a "partner in crime", and would eventually be spoken in the form of Wilson's Vortigese title. As Paxton was the Mystery's heir and the arm that would hold the weapon against Ulathoi, Wilson was his shield, a glove between direct action and the dire consequences if he was caught acting directly himself. Since Ulathoi's downfall, they became much more relaxed and close, finding more commonalities than differences. As he was not 'born' so much as 'created', Keenan and Wilson also share that aspect but it affects them in vastly different ways. Keenan's 'family' know that he loves them dearly - something that if his kinfolk had any say in, would definitely not work that way.

He remains bitter and frustrated at his kin for their behavior toward him, and rightfully so: his attempts to stop Ulathoi were in point of fact for their benefit, not for his own. And he maintains that even as he had to break their rules and regulations in order to facilitate Ulathoi's downfall, the results did justify the means. Ulathoi had been prevented not only from destroying Earth and the Vortigaunt homeworld entirely, but would no longer be let loose to other dimensions or worlds. For forty five thousand years that had been the case, as they grew and evolved, and the Mystery was convinced that they would quite shortly develop the means to devour his kind in addition to the resources that physical matter gave them. Since his kind disdained the realm of matter entirely, they would be blindsided by Ulathoi, and thus had to be stopped. But the Convocation have strict non-interference rules, they must be bidden to aid, and the Mystery's involvement in this was clearly his own doing.

He, aided by an empassioned Melissa as well as sternly worded contributions from Eli and others among his group of friends, managed to narrowly avoid extermination at the judgement of the Convocation. To many of them, though, the Mystery is still condemned and a non-entity. Among his kind, only three so far have 'followed his lead' and learned how to form themselves into matter as he does, while the rest of them either abstain from such pursuits, or outright mock them. Keenan's strongest points about this issue include the fact that his kind were originally made of flesh and blood; they had bodies, but they eventually gave them up in favor of pure energetic existence. Some of his kind would strike that history from their collective knowledge, and they are the ones who most openly mock his use of form over energy.

Keenan's focus on matter and life distinguish him from his kind, even though they claim to keep knowledge 'sacred'. He knows better than to think that as purely energy, any of them can 'know' anything at all. They've observed, they've gleaned trends on a galactic and dimensional scale. But they don't know what it's like to take a deep breath of warm, clean air. They have never felt the fear of losing a child before she's even taken her own first breath, the tightening of the throat in worry, or hearing the sound of brilliant laughter. Though his kin believe those things to be irrelevant to the scale of their existence, he knows better. This is why Keenan took the name for the Convocation group in Paragon: he believes that the only way to continue gaining knowledge and experience is to actually look for it. He feels that his kinfolk have lost the spark of desire, the thrill of discovery, that had led them to drop their bodies in favor of pure existence so long ago - they are the ones disrespecting the name (their only name, as such). He knows that he's neither the youngest of their kind by any stretch, and certainly not their eldest (that would be one individual who could count a full star's lifespan twice over, that entity cows even Keenan's will), but he fears that any newcomers will be ignored.

All of that said, Keenan enjoys being Human with gusto. He has stated repeatedly that while he's lived as many different creatures and taken many different forms, Humans seem to have so much going for them. They feel more, though their senses might stop short of being truly Vortal for most of them, he claims that it is easy to allow emotion to flow. He didn't know the words for many of those emotions, until long after he'd begun having them. He has named some of them: Melissa is his conscience, she showed him what guilt looks like. And in his eyes, her daughter with Paxton, Darly - Dar'lih keh-vahh - is his redemption. He finally discovered that in order to truly defeat Ulathoi he couldn't merely use allies and pull strings from afar. He had to have a stake in the outcome - he had to live in order to care. With her birth being so difficult, he can point to it being the moment that he truly became Human.

In some ways, Keenan Lane is a very old fashioned sort of man. Socially, he can easily be seen as a gentleman when in the right company and will go out of his way to make accomodations for women that appear will appreciate the effort. He tends not to dress with 'trends' in mind, more 'comfort' over style - though because Wilson has downloaded an array of fashion and style skills he doesn't mind being made to look more modern or impressive. He loves trains; when he arrived to Earth it was the mid-1940s and thus train travel was still a very strong component of social life. Though he had a car and did drive, there's little need for it in Paragon, and none at all on their original Earth any longer. He knows how to host dinner parties from his arrival era's experiences as well, grooming his contacts in banking and industry. And because, again, Wilson has proven to be extraordinarily adept at cooking, he's more than likely to host more of them in the future, though where is still a question. His handwriting is precise, firm, but not frilly - he learned to write the old-fashioned way and dislikes texting, though is also an adept typist. He is left-handed.

Old-fasioned aspects aside, he also has never cared for issues of race, gender or other such items which in Human society have caused much strife. He purposefully chose a middle-aged white male American appearance for the impact that he could achieve with such a form. But he offered Eli Vance as well as Raven's mother Rhea the respect they deserved, for having achieved greatness in their scientific fields as the odds were against blacks - and women - during the middle part of the 20th century. ("I wanted this to be easy, so that's what I chose. If I'd wanted a challenge I might have been your father, Eli.") His relationship in the mid-50s with Raven's mother - a dark-skinned mulato torch singer and a respectable white businessman?! - would have been quite scandalous if it had taken place on the 'surface world', but deep in the ocean community of Rapture it was hardly worth noticing. Rapture is a sticky point for Keenan - he remains convinced that it would have provided him the weapons he needed to defeat Ulathoi, but for the excesses and drug-abuse that brought the place to an end. While he does drink (and has what appears to be a collection of extremely good liquors in his office) Keenan was never one to let substance or other abuse slide.

Rapture also produced his first child, though he didn't know it until long after the place had fallen, directly after Ulathoi was defeated. Because he was unsure that he would in fact survive the Convocation's judgement that was sure to come when they arrived, Keenan carefully opened up the few people that he'd managed to preserve over the years from his private storage dimension. Since he wasn't sure that if he was destroyed, those realms (including his 'office with no doors', and a number of smaller private locations) would continue on their own, bereft of his power to supply them, he had to make the agonizing decision to release those three people. He'd seen fit to preserve them from what he saw as certain death themselves, so opening them up to a world which was effectively destroyed would come as a shock to them - but to Raven's mother the most. Keenan would have preferred to release her into a shining, built and healthy new world, that was not to be. Instead she announced her desire to leave and try to forget everything, and a compromise was reached where he kept the child she carried (all that time - she'd been in storage since 1957) and she went her own way. This loss of what he came to realize had been his 'first love' still stings him, obviously, and for many reasons that may not be clear to observers.

The presence of his offspring deeply worried his kinfolk, but Keenan's words to the effect of "if life is irrelevant, surely my family is beneath your notice and deserve no ire." He is convinced that Humanity - not just in their original dimension, but in Paragon's dimensions as well - will approach the level of power that the Convocation has, at some point possibly in the not-too-distant future. The inclusion of "his" genetics but more importantly his lih can be tempered with the knowledge that at some point in the distant past, if not themselves, creatures like the Convocation must have involved themselves in Human history. Their powers, ideas and concepts seem all too familiar: Keenan Lane was seen as a 'Devil in a blue suit' to Eli Vance, as a 'Guardian Angel' to Melissa. And as Eli pondered (and yes, Keenan was 'listening in' to his private mental dialog) 'angels had been known to smite their enemies' with powers that seemed to emulate those which Keenan had used against Melissa's attacker. Keenan seems more comfortable as a devil than a saint, in that regard.

His offspring are also a source of tremendous pride, and Keenan doesn't seem to either acknowledge or care 'what it looks like' to have had them from no fewer than three women. He'd been known to joke with Eli about it, that he was suprirsed there weren't more, given "the number of inappropriately forward secretaries" he'd had relations with. Of course, if Melissa has her way, there will be plenty more by whoever she can find. Keenan adores young children - something he'd hardly had the chance to discover given his life style and dealings in the past. He also loves being referred to (usually by Dar'lih) as grandpa Vahh contrasting with Uncle Wilson. The fact that Wilson is actually Darly's grandfather amuses him to no end, "we still don't have the pronouns to cover this, I'm afraid."

More current events that have affected Keenan include his mastering of the so-called Kheldian Human-form powers. He has discovered an inordinate delight in siphoning enemies' energy, and then releasing it in a spectacular fashion. Since he's 'doing public duties' almost none of the instances of his occasionally brutal capture or defeats of other life forms will result in his kin-folk even looking sideways at him for it. However, his closeness to a woman named Mary may wind up turning heads. Though he and his group are quite new to Paragon City, he was rather smitten with 'Mother', the Powers That Be leader, and has taken it upon himself to help her and her friends through some rather troubling issues.

***

In their continuing adventures, Keenan was forced to lead a large group of heroes and friends to rescue Mary from her captor, Lady Stone. Since his relationship with Mary has in fact led to her becoming pregnant (and his intention to marry her) they have had some... interesting adventures crop up. During a benefit gala for the Galaxy City orphans fund, he and Mary volunteered his mansion and their time, to help foster several young orphaned powered children. Mary's injuries at the hands of Stone and Recluse will be healed if it's the last thing he does - and it won't be.

On a pleasant afternoon in Atlas Park, surrounded by a few friends, Keenan finally proposed to a very pregnant Mary.

***

On a less pleasant afternoon, all that was swept away when Mary took their child, named him without consulting Keenan or anyone else, and... vanished. He wasn't going to go looking. In fact, Keenan has all but erased those memories from himself, of this once-beautiful relationship. He seems to have shit luck for romance...