Memoirs - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Chapter 1 – Broken

Call me Ishmael… no, that’s not it.

Squire Trelawney, Doctor Livesey, and the rest… no, not that either.

In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit… that’s not right.

OK, enough screwing around. I was born… well, let’s just say that I’m a Scorpio and I was born in Atlanta in 1983. That’s enough hints for the people who will no doubt be pouring over this book trying to figure out my secret identity. Who knows, by the end, there may be enough clues that someone will get it.

Anyways, I wasn’t always a supervillain. In fact, growing up I wanted nothing more than to be normal. Not just for the fact that being normal means you don’t have nearly as many problems with other kids, but when you have a couple family members who are a little too proud of their Southern heritage, shall we say, then being what the family defines as normal is a good thing.

Growing up, I wanted nothing more than for all the freaks to get rounded up and tossed in a deep, dark hole that they’d never come out from. OK, that had less to do with my family, and more to do with the fact that one of my friends was ‘collateral damage’ when that bitch Lady Justice was having one of her oh-so-heroic battles and didn’t bother checking what was behind the guy she was trying to blast. He got a hole in his head, and his family didn’t get anything except an “I’m sorry” card from the ‘hero’. And he wasn’t the only one who had shit like that happen to them. There was a reason the heroes kept their identities secret if they weren’t on an official government team, and that was so they didn’t get sued for blasting bystanders.

So you can understand the utter joy I had when I turned out to be one of those freaks, even having my ‘Emergence’ on Emergence Day! (For those of you who are slow on the uptake, that would be sarcasm.)

Since most people don’t care about how someone ‘emerges’ until it happens to them, let me give you a brief rundown. There’s as many different types of Emergence as there are superhero and supervillain origin stories, but they typically fall into one of three categories.

The first would be the inborn emergence. Maybe they were born with elf ears, or maybe they’re a mage from a line of mages and blah blah blah. Point is, there’s something noticeably different about them from birth. It usually starts small, and they grow into their full power by the time they become an adult, but there are some that were given godlike power before they could sit up on their own. No one likes talking about those ‘baby gods’, because they usually end up either dead or drugged up into comas for their entire lives because they can be SCARY powerful. Like ‘end of the world’ powerful.

Next, you have the accidental emergences. Well, I say accidental, but that isn’t always the case. An accidental emergence happens when some event triggers the emergence. Maybe you got struck by lightning. Maybe a radioactive badger bit you. Perhaps a skyscraper fell on you during another super’s battle. Perhaps you were the test subject for a super-soldier serum. Or maybe you found an ancient artifact, alien meteorite, or some other crazy magic, alien, or super-science McGuffin, and it gave you powers. Whatever the case, whether it was an accident or not, that event gave you powers.

Finally, you’ve got your adolescent emergences. These are the ones you typically think of when people talk to you about mutants, in particular, though some with the magic or alien ‘power source’ are in the same boat. Basically, in that wonderful swamp of hormones and body changes that makes teenagers so incredibly stable and paragons of mental health (that is more sarcasm, by the way), a section of their genes decides to turn on, and throw even more shit their way. Some adolescent emergences are gradual, as changes begin happening over time, but most are brutally abrupt. One minute you’re normal, and the next you’re hearing what the girl next to you REALLY thinks about you, or the bed catches on fire when you’re having a hot dream, or whatever. Adolescent emergences are likely to ‘pop’ when someone’s in a high stress situation. That doesn’t just mean ‘running for your life’, but any kind of stress, whether it is talking with a girl or studying for a test or trying your best to make the team.

And no, I didn’t forget the ninja who trained their whole life to do what they do, but don’t have powers. And I didn’t leave out the genius who builds themselves an armored battlesuit so they can fly around and blast stuff. Those types don’t have actual powers of their own, just intellect and gear. Unless the genius actually has a super-science type power, in which case he’d be in one of the three categories above.

Anyways, I was most definitely an adolescent emergence. Like I said, I was normal, and pretty aggressively normal, at that. Of course, trying to be ‘normal’ means you have normal problems to go with it. Honestly, this part of the story is pretty lame, since the biggest problem in my life, other than studying for school was the rather distinct lack of girlfriend in my life. I was fifteen, and didn’t want to stick out, but that meant I didn’t make an impression on any of the ladies, so I was single, and I was a teenage guy, so I was horny, and didn’t have anyone to ‘help’ with that. Normal shit.

Anyways, like I said, I Emerged on Emergence Day. Didn’t even realize it at first, either. I got knocked into a puddle, of all things, while doing the ‘Christmas Eve at the mall’ thing. Like battling a horde of orcs, except the orcs probably smelled better. Anyways, pushed into a puddle, but when I got up, the puddle was frozen.

Like I said, I didn’t really get what was happening at first. It was just that little thing. And then the next time I got stressed, there was another little thing. Of course, the real kicker was a couple days later, when my uncle was being an asshole to me about the whole ‘no girlfriend’ thing, even though he was on his fourth marriage. I was still fuming when I was taking a bath that night, and wound up frozen solid in the bath. Yeah, that was every bit as glamorous as it sounds.

But after that, I couldn’t exactly hide from the fact that I had Emerged, even though I really, desperately wanted to. Remember that chat we had earlier about how teenagers are so incredibly stable? Yeah, it gets worse when your whole image is on being ‘normal’, and suddenly you’re insanely ‘not normal’. Oh, sure, it could have been a lot worse. I could have been one of those poor souls like Statuesque, who became living marble, a perfectly proportioned woman who is utterly incapable of feeling anything, because she’s a freaking statue. Or I could be like Badger, who looks like an honest to god werebadger.

No, I was at least lucky enough to have powers that didn’t change my body, except perhaps for the fact that my body temperature went down a little, and I was immune to the cold from then on. On the other hand, my powers were the kind that were actively controlled, but might activate when I was stressed, if I wasn’t in control of my emotions. And we all know that there is nothing so stress-free or emotionally controlled as the life of a teenager.

To be honest, part of me was still trying to deny what I was. I still wanted to be normal, just a normal kid, who didn’t have powers or any of that. I just wanted all of it to go away, and leave me alone. That kind of thinking did not exactly lend itself to keeping my thoughts clear and my emotions calm, which would lead to my power sometimes activating, which would make me freak out more, and then it was going and I couldn’t turn it off until I was a sobbing wreck curled up on the floor of my room, trying to make the whole world go away.

The next couple months were the worst in my life to that point, and they were almost my last. Yeah, sounds pretty dramatic, probably overdramatic. But that’s the truth. I was basically in a downward spiral of manic depression and couldn’t break myself loose. Oh sure, the family tried to help, but the pity stares did absolutely jack to keep the teenaged me from feeling like I was worthless and a freak and all kinds of worse things.

It was… early February, I think, when I just couldn’t take it anymore. The family went out for a movie. They wanted to take me, but I said no. I was still freaking about my new powers and how they wouldn’t just stay off. Freezing a movie theater sounded like a spectacularly bad idea. So I stayed home, with an active schedule of moping and self-recrimination planned. That started bad, and got worse.

The next part is almost like a dream sequence. I know what happened. It isn’t like I forgot, or anything, but the whole event is… detached, like it is someone else’s life. I remember the angst, the self-loathing, but it doesn’t feel real to me. A shrink would probably say that is a good indication that I was having a bit of a psychotic break, and I wouldn’t disagree with them.

I remember getting the gun. My dad had this badass revolver. An actual .357 Magnum. Yeah, he got it after that cop movie came out, and liked to make jokes doing his best impressions. He actually took the family to the range a couple times and let us shoot it. Taught us the four rules of guns. Rules I broke that night.

A single bullet in the six-shot revolver. Spin the drum. Put the barrel to my head. Click. Nothing. Second thoughts? I was on fourth or fifth by this point. But I kept going. Click. My hand was shaking. I don’t think I had ever actually thought about how nerve wracking it is to put a gun to your head. Click. Yeah, fuck that, I can’t take it. We’ll just check the drum and move it right to the bullet. That’ll solve everyth--!

I’d love to say how I came to some epiphany, or was visited by time travelers from the future that made me stop so I could carry out my grand destiny (you laugh, but remember Captain Angel, who was a suicidal wreck before his older self came back to set him on the path he’d take through WW2). That’d be a complete lie, however. It was the car lights in the window that saved my life. The family coming home made me panic, and I dropped the gun.

That’s when everything becomes ‘real’ again for me, and I started to run. I didn’t even have a plan. It was just ‘oh crap, what did I just do’, and ‘I can’t let them see me like this’, and ‘oh fuck that mist thing that happens when I’m upset is going off like a fucking smoke machine’. I didn’t have any kind of plan, I just acted. Ran upstairs, grabbed a coat, a bowie knife I’d had since I was five, and whatever I could fit in my pockets, and I was out my window, and running. Just running.

It would be years before I stopped running, at least from myself.