IOTA

Bei Rui-yu was a young Buddhist monk dedicated to a life of self-denial in a secluded monastery in China, when armed men from the Chinese government arrived and took away Bei Rui-yu and five of his fellows -- the most self-disciplined and learned in the monastery -- and brought them to a secret testing facility in which they served as guinea pigs for a top-secret experiment.

The Chinese government had spent many years on two secret and somewhat interlinked programs: The space program, in which their Teikonauts would soon explore outer space, and another program designed to explore innerspace. To that end, a method of shrinking matter by shifting mass partially into the fourth dimension had been perfected and tested upon both inanimate matter and animals with ultimate success. Unfortunately, when this shrinking method was tested on humans, none of them could handle the process -- many simply died, while others became completely and incurably insane. The testing of the disciplined Buddhist monks (seen by the materialistic Communist elite as already somewhat "insane" by their standards) was the last attempt at a failing project. And though two of these Buddhist monks died immediately and three others were put into catatonic states, Bei Rui-yu managed somehow to survive -- a certain unknown factor in his physical and/or mental makeup allowed him to thrive despite the dangers of the shrinking process.

And so Bei Rui-yu became the focus of the innerspace project, though after several months of investigation there was still no sign of the unknown factor which allowed him to survive, and the project was put on hold. When Jack Merlin requested an agent from the Chinese government, they gave Bei Rui-yu over to him and his Strikeforce with little regret. He was seen as useless due to his lack of enthusiasm for the aims of the government and was, besides, no communist. Still, Bei Rui-yu remains loyal to China as a matter of honour. Upon being recruited to the Strikeforce, Bei Rui-yu was given the code-name of Iota, though Bei does not understand the reason for this (he considers it an insult to himself and his ancestors) and refuses to call himself by that name.

Abilities

Bei Rui-yu is unimpressively small even at normal size, but he is nevertheless an expert hand-to-hand combatant with an eerily accurate instinctual battle sense.

Bei Rui-yu has no metahuman powers, but he is uniquely suited to the shrinking process which he uses to change size while in his battle-suit and which would cause madness or death to almost any other human or human-like consciousness.

Iota's battle-suit has a fully self-contained atmosphere and allows him to survive in the most hostile of environments (such as sub-atomic "universes") for long periods of time. A unique property of the battle-suit is its ability to deflect a blow upon any part of it to the whole surface of the suit, making it extremely difficult to puncture or smash.

The battle-suit is fairly heavy, making it impractical to use at normal size -- it works better with some or most of its mass shifted into the 4th dimension during the shrinking process. When shrunken to a relatively small size Iota can shift the weight of the battle-suit from its original 500-pound weight to a weight lighter than air quickly and easily. By maneuvering his weight while in motion, Iota can rocket through the air and smash through almost anything like a bullet. Propulsion "jet-packs" enable Iota to fly and maneuver easily through the air after shrinking to a small size (the "jet-packs" don't work very well at normal size due to the weight and mass of the battle-suit).

(There's probably more that logically fits in with his abilities that I'll make up as I go along.)