ID: 25319
Everyone needs an Origin story, right? Fine, here is my beginnings. The ending is up for grabs.I have a Doctorate in Archaeology. My specialty is the western culture and cities that began in the early 1800's of North America and runs through the early 1900's - when civilization and statehood took hold. That is when the Wild West died.
It was a simple enough excavation. An old mining town had been found in the foothills of.. well, never you mind where it is. I don't need y'all snooping out there.
For crying out loud... Did I just use the phrase "Never you mind"? Great, now it is starting to leak into my subconscious.
Sorry, getting ahead of myself.
The mining town was abandoned some time around 1850. Just as the gold rush was just starting to pick up further west, this town was left for dead. And dead is where it should have stayed until I started poking my nose around in it.
It was on the 5th month of going through town records when I found the old chest. I was sure excited for that, as it looked big enough to contain plenty of records, maybe some bills of sale, criminal histories, you name it.
I opened the chest and sure enough, the box was a treasure trove of documents. They probably are all still sitting there, blowing in the wind. It was fateful that sitting atop those documents was an old cowboy hat, well used and well taken care of. It was just out of pure glee and child-like enthusiasm that I plopped the hat upon my head.
And that was what sealed it. Like the Snowman that put on his magic hat, this hat caused a massive change in me. At least on my outward appearance. My clothes changed instantly. A vest on my chest, a gun belt - complete with revolver - hung at my hip. My left hip, by the way. I am right-handed. Or was. Whatever.
While in my head, I could still think and reason like a college-educated 21st century man, my mannerisms on the outside took on something a bit more - rough. I stood tall and straight, not slightly hunched as if I spent my whole life reading books. When I walked to the mirror, I did so with a swagger that would let everyone in the room know I was not a man to be trifled with... had there been anyone else in the room with me, of course.
I wasn't "Possessed" per say, or perhaps I was. I didn't hear another voice in my head talking to me. I just.. Didn't act like me anymore. If I wanted to walk to the door, I could. Nothing stopped me. I just did it with a clinking noise, which turned out to be spurs.
The worst part came when I tried to speak.
"Well golly".
Wait, did I just say Golly? Let's try that again...
"Holy horse tails, what is wrong with my voice?"
Yeah, add a twang to that lovely sentence and you can get the gist of my newfound vocabulary. Everything was said with the general meaning of what I was trying to convey.. but with the accent and vocabulary of a man from another time. He wasn't stupid, for I am not stupid. But the words and manner of speaking were not what one might consider... educated.
Needless to say, I flew back to New Amsterdam like a horse with his tail on fi... Damn it. I made my way back to New Amsterdam and went straight to my university. I contact the professors studying the odd phenomena the Morphon Particles have had across the world lately, and explained, in Western dialect, what was happening to me.
Did I mention taking off the hat changed nothing? Yeah, that was the first thing I tried. I took it off, and immediately whapped it across my knee like I was trying to get the dust off of it from a long trail ride.
So the Docs took a look, ran all sorts of tests, both on me and the hat. Only to find that if the hat HAD some sort of Morphon energy, it didn't now. Me - well, I was another story entirely.
I was chock-full of Morphon goodness. How the hat even had Morphon particles was a mystery. The docs started theorizing that maybe the particles were drawn to objects of high energy, such as residual life forces. You know, ghosts. Maybe the hat had been haunted, the Morphons attached themselves to it, and then when I put it on, it all transferred to me.
Apparently, you can't do much at all regarding Morphons without a government agency called B.A.D.G.E. getting wind of it and showing up on your door. They came out, asked me a bunch of questions, and asked if I would come out to their testing lab (Yeah, that sounds fun).
It turned out the testing facility was to test my abilities, not dissect me. Since I was clearly in western mode, they gave me some shooting skills to try. And Holy horse tails, could I shoot. Like, stupid accurate. I had never fired a gun before in my life before this, and here I was hitting targets that were crazy far away, moving, bouncing, behind cover. I could nail them all.
They gave me knives, and I could send the whistling through the air perfectly. Axes? Centered in the tree.
If it involved any sort of physical weapon, I could use it with deadly accuracy. The high tech crazy gizmos? The stuff involving wind and dirt? The speaking Latin and raising zombies or worse? Yeah, I had zippo ability to get near that. And that was fine with me. Feeling the gun in my hand was just... perfect.
The B.A.D.G.E. people let me leave and go home, which was a huge relief. I thought for sure they were going to lock me away for more testing. But nope! They gave me a communicator and told me if I ever needed them, to give it a buzz. And occasionally, they would call me if the situation needed it.
I was contacted shortly after that by a group of heroes called the MacGregors. Which just happens to be my last name. I guess it turns out it wasn't such a coincidence as they had a device that led them to descendants of Clan MacGregor in Scotland that ALSO had Morphon powers.
Anyway, here I am. Helping out a group of young up-and-coming heroes that are all related in some way or another going back to ancient Scotland. MacGregors.
Darn near the strangest thing to ever happen, I tell you what.
Check out other origin stories on the Fiction Forum tab of the Heroes Rising Blog, These City Streets
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