25 years after Houston was destroyed in a brutal supervillain attack, Jay Martin is accepted into the Texan Hero Network. Tasked with this sacred duty, he takes on the alter ego of Quickwit and vows to always protect Neo Houston.
Unfortunately, desp...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
It's kind've a requirement at this point that villains have some kind of mental instability. Whether it's trying to make humans all slaves to cats like Aleycat, attempting to kidnap their favorite sidekick like Stygian, taking over the entire state's power grid like Techtra, villains are never quite "all there," as proven by their harebrained schemes. Jay always considered himself a little...troubled, but it wasn't much of a concern. Even heroes struggled with feeling out of place sometimes. It came with the territory of having a secret identity, after all. Even if Jay always felt like he didn't truly ever have the same dilemmas other heroes did.
But now, things are different.
Jay stares at the metal railing as they descend into the guts of the nightclub. The pounding bass only seems to accentuate his panic. He wanted to believe these voices were a fluke, a freak response to the horrifying trauma of getting his heart torn apart in a freefall. But more and more he suspects this isn't just something he can ignore.
He thinks back to that moment with Influentia—he'd been gloating, reveling in the power he was holding over her. The voices in his mind only seemed to feed the narcissism, literally labeling him the "main character." At the time, it had seemed so stupid, a hilarious mis-firing of his neurons that he could easily ignore. Now? Jay's not so sure. His doppelganger had gone crazy. Not the cute, soft-yandere craziness that compelled Gannet to steal shirts and write four blogs-worth praising his favorite hero for four years straight. The kind of insanity that allows you to justify eliminating a whole state of supers.
Could it also happen here? Would it happen here, if Jay let these voices control him?
"Jay?"
Jay startles. He looks up from the ground. He's in front of two large metal doors, both of which are vibrating with the force of the music blasting behind them.
"I'm okay. Just thinking."
"Okay. Just hang in there. It'll be over soon."
Jay nods. He takes a deep breath, pushing his way into the room. Inside is a spacious basement, filled with jumbled cables, piles of monitors, keyboards, and oddly enough, lots and lots of Apple Idogs. Echo stands at a DJ booth in the middle of the room, head bobbing to the music. Jay takes a step forward, only to freeze as the music stops with a deafening screeeeech! His heart jumps as all the monitors surrounding them flicker until they all bear Echo's blank emoticon face.
"So, the hero has decided to switch sides, has he? Can't say I expected it from Quickwiz of all supes," she scoffs.
"Hello Echo. Glad to see you survived. Me and Quickwit have a proposition for you," says Stygian.
"Sure. You want my help to send the alternate versions of yourselves back, right? Because that idiot Paradoxico fucked up again?"
