Azar VS Hecatomb: Desert Showdown
Hero Backstory
When Tristan was 13 years old, his father, Dr. Morgan Vray moved the entire family to the United Arab Emirates after receiving a generous grant from one of the emirs that allowed him to found his company, Hasameli Hydrocarbon Technologies. His mother, Veronica, wilted under the repressive rules, and it wasn’t long before she began speaking out about the oppressive treatment of women. When she attempted to organize a women’s philosophy group, she attracted the unwanted attention of government officials. Although no punishment was forthcoming, she started to feel as though her every movement was being monitored. The strain took its toll on Tristan’s parents and his mother started talking about leaving his father and returning to the US.
One day, Tristan and his mother visited his father’s office. As usual, the doctor was too tied up in meetings to see his family. They waited for over an hour. Tristan lounged on the leather armchair and played on his DS while his mother sat at his father’s desk writing an article on her laptop. Although they made little noise, a guard/worker kept passing by the open office door and glaring at them. When it became clear that they would need to lunch on their own, Tristan and his mother packed up and made their way to the elevator to exit the building. Tristan thought it was his imagination, but the man who had been staring at them all morning long seemed to be sneering a smile that never reached his eyes. They stepped into the elevator, felt an explosion, and then a long drop into nothingness. When Tristan came to, the pain shot through him so fiercely that his whole body felt like it had been submerged in liquid nitrogen. He could see a lump beside him that was wearing his mother’s clothes, but it couldn’t be her. His mother was beautiful, and vital, and passionate. Her smile could draw butterflies, and her laugh made the sun emerge from the clouds. She was not this. She was not this mass of blood and gore and stillness. Tristan closed his eyes against the cold and the unreason of it all, and some part of him started to pray for light, for warmth. He longed to be the dust and smoke rising up from the elevator shaft into oblivion. And just then, the smoke seemed to thicken and solidify. He was sure it had to be his mind playing tricks on him, but the smoke seemed to be almost human. He opened his mouth to scream, and the smoke entered his body. When Tristan came to again, he was surrounded by white. He was swaddled with bandages, and he had tubes coming from his arms and his penis. There was a steady beeping noise from some machine outside of his range of vision, but there also seemed to be something more. At first he thought it was simply some kind of white noise, a machine sound like the hum of electronics, high-pitched and constant. But, as he listened more carefully, with his eyes closed, he realized that some new sense had been activated, and he could “see” the EEG results. He blinked his eyes and realized that not only could he see the results, he could change its output. He experimented with turning the machines on and off until the cacophony of alarms brought all of the hospital staff running. Tristan’s recovery was slow. Although he hadn’t realized it when he first woke up, he had lost a lot more than his mother in the elevator accident. His left leg had been crushed by falling debris, and by the time his rescuers pulled his unconscious body out of the shaft, his leg could not be salvaged. Once he had been released from the hospital to a rehab facility, he spent his days learning how to walk with a prosthesis. His nights, well, they were a different story. His new ability to talk with machines, because that’s what he had realized it was, kept him up all hours of the night. If it wasn’t for his computer, he was sure he would go insane. His dad had only managed to stick out the drama for a couple of weeks. Once he had been sure that Tristan was going to survive, his dad hightailed it back to the UAE, back to the people who had taken away his leg and his mom. A trust had been set up. Caretakers had been assigned. Tutors came and went. And Tristan, mercifully, was left to his own devices. He had always found people to be unpredictable and hard to connect with, and with his parents gone, he no longer had to make much of an effort. The Kassabis were a quiet older couple and, left him to tinker in peace. Tristan had discovered long ago how to circumvent the surveillance system that his dad had installed to, supposedly, keep him safe. |
By the time he was 18 years old, Tristan had completed high school and, under an assumed name, had patented hundreds of inventions and written dozens of apps that went viral. Taking a page from his father’s book, Tristan became quite adept at juggling his money in off shore accounts. Eventually, faced with the prospect of either being forced to go to college or get a job, he decided to create to create a haven for teen techno geeks who had a passion for programming and a disdain for traditional school. They called themselves the Discovery Corps and lent their services to corporation, individuals and governments who had problems of the secret kind that needed solving.
Meanwhile . . . The first few days home from the rehab felt like they were impossible to live through. Tristan couldn’t stop seeing that man’s dead eyes and that horrible smile as he and his mother got on the elevator. His heart ached, and his leg ached. They called it a phantom limb, but he knew it was the ghost of a former life, of tasks left undone that was haunting him. The prosthesis they had given him was worthless. It chafed and bit into his flesh, and the site was prone to infection. He needed something better. He needed a machine leg that would be a part of him. For months during rehab, he had tried to resist the whispers and block out the chatter in the wires, in the walls, in all the machines around him. His handlers, the Kassabis kept doing what could only be called skulking, and he felt like he was at his limit. That’s when he heard the blueprint. It came in deep indigo tones that sounded for all the world like numbers to him. Tristan grabbed a pencil and paper, and hours later, he had the first designs for a prototype limb in front of him. Once he learned the trick of listening for the music and seeing the plans, he couldn’t stop and the inventions came to him one after another. More than that, he had discovered a cyber world tucked away deep beneath the tip of the iceberg that we call the internet. Money could buy you a lot of bitcoin, and he had more than his fair share. He used his influence and spread around some coin until he located the men who killed his mother and ruined his life. After that, it was just a matter of building the right resources and cultivating the right connections. Once again, daddy’s inadvertent lessons came in handy. While the Kassabs were no real threat to him, there were plenty of people who could be, especially if they got their hands on his code and his inventions. He needed a place to be invisible and that meant hiding in plain sight. His plan couldn’t have been more simple. He needed a paper trail, so he contacted his father with a plan to build the Veronica Vray Memorial Garden and Nature Lab. The old man seemed almost grateful to be given a chance to assuage his guilt. He was willing to throw a lot of money at “closure.” It was easy after that to explain the lengthy construction time and cost overages on his emotional trauma while his own team, hired courtesy of the dark web, constructed his underground workshop to his precise specifications. They were easy enough to dispose of, and the world would never miss them. In fact, he made sure of it. It was as though they had never been born. On his eighteenth birthday, he decided to give his ITD (Instant Transportation Device) a spin. He had spent the last few years working on integrating his invisibility technology with his bionic leg. He had created a fully functional super suit which allowed him to temporarily bend matter and light around him. All of this was controlled by an extension of his brain through mind meld technology. He had been tracking Adham of the dead eyes for years and was ready to finally get vengeance for all that he had lost. Tristan looked at his reflection in the shiny metal of his ITD before stepping through, and he barely recognized himself. Gone was the boy he used to be. Tristan was no more. He was Azar and his fury would incinerate his enemies. |
Villain Backstory
When John was a little toddler, he had loved running through the fields where his parents worked from sunup to sundown, harvesting the leaves that would become cocaine for the local Padron. He had always thought the flowers were beautiful as they turned their pure white faces to the sun. None of the workers paid much attention to who was in power or who wanted power. The only thing that mattered was being able to put food in their bellies and clothes on their backs. That all changed the day that the militares came. He should have been there that day, next to his parents. But he had argued with his mother that morning because she believed that he should go to school. “You have a good mind, mijo,” she had pleaded, “El Padron likes you. Let him teach you. Let him send you to school.” He knew that this was just a pipedream. He and his parents barely had enough to eat as it was. Last year, Papa had become so stiff with arthritis that he could barely pick. He knew he couldn’t leave them alone. So, that day, he had run away to the jungle to hunt for food for their table. When his parents hadn’t come home, he had gone out looking for them. There was just enough light left from the setting sun to see the blood from his parents’ bullet riddled body staining all of the innocent flowers. He wasn’t really sure how long he ran or in what direction. When he finally regained his senses, he was deep in the jungle, trying to split the darkness with his hands. He knew he probably wouldn’t last the night without shelter, but he welcomed death. He could feel the hungry eyes of animals watching him, even though he couldn’t see them. He took a blind step forward, and started to fall.
Hours may have passed, days even, John had no way of knowing. Nevertheless, when he regained consciousness, he was in a deep cave lit by fluorescent insects that he had never seen before. How he had entered the cave was hidden from him, so he had no choice but to walk deeper into the bowels of the earth. The floor of the cave was littered with bones and broken clay pots which crunched under his feet as he walked. It looked as though this cave must have been a sacred place in the past. On the walls were smudged drawings of jaguars eating the sun. As he walked, he barely noticed that the insects were growing more and more scarce. It was not just that his eyes were becoming used to the dark, rather, it seemed as though the darkness was embracing him, infusing him with its power. Finally, the cave opened into a large cavern with obsidian walls. Studded in these walls were tiny crystals which glittered in the light that was cast from a golden statue of a jaguar in the center of the room. At the base of the statue were diamond skulls, and the eyes were sapphires so blue that they appeared black. He felt like some force was drawing him to the statue, and when he reached it and looked into its eyes, he felt compelled to kneel. There, between its front paws, was a golden mirror inset with an obsidian lens. The moment he picked it up and gazed into the mirror, he could feel himself changing. He remembered his parents’ bodies, crumpled and small, left like manure in the field. He remembered feeling weak and helpless like it was someone else’s life, not his own. That was when he realized that it was someone else’s life. A life that belonged to his former self. Never again would he succumb to weakness. He was Hecatomb.
Hours may have passed, days even, John had no way of knowing. Nevertheless, when he regained consciousness, he was in a deep cave lit by fluorescent insects that he had never seen before. How he had entered the cave was hidden from him, so he had no choice but to walk deeper into the bowels of the earth. The floor of the cave was littered with bones and broken clay pots which crunched under his feet as he walked. It looked as though this cave must have been a sacred place in the past. On the walls were smudged drawings of jaguars eating the sun. As he walked, he barely noticed that the insects were growing more and more scarce. It was not just that his eyes were becoming used to the dark, rather, it seemed as though the darkness was embracing him, infusing him with its power. Finally, the cave opened into a large cavern with obsidian walls. Studded in these walls were tiny crystals which glittered in the light that was cast from a golden statue of a jaguar in the center of the room. At the base of the statue were diamond skulls, and the eyes were sapphires so blue that they appeared black. He felt like some force was drawing him to the statue, and when he reached it and looked into its eyes, he felt compelled to kneel. There, between its front paws, was a golden mirror inset with an obsidian lens. The moment he picked it up and gazed into the mirror, he could feel himself changing. He remembered his parents’ bodies, crumpled and small, left like manure in the field. He remembered feeling weak and helpless like it was someone else’s life, not his own. That was when he realized that it was someone else’s life. A life that belonged to his former self. Never again would he succumb to weakness. He was Hecatomb.