Emotional Manipulator

Eli Marris grew up in a home painted with silence and shattered glass. His father was a “hero” — polished boots, silver jaw, government-endorsed — but behind closed doors, he was a monster with a badge. His mother? A husk. Trained to smile through bruises. The only light in Eli’s life was the flicker of Saturday night supervillain news — not the propaganda, but the chaos, the passion, the wild unchained freedom in their eyes. Not empty. Not plastic. Alive. As a boy, Eli started to mimic them. He’d collect old news clippings of famous villain heists. Paint his face. Talk in voices. He didn’t want to hurt people… he wanted to feel like them. Something in their rebellion stirred something broken in him — not hatred, not cruelty — but longing. A sick, beautiful yearning to be free the way they were. At 14, after his father “snapped” and killed his mother in a drunken rage, the government hushed it up, pinned it on a local powered kid. Eli spoke out — screamed the truth. No one listened. So they made him disappear. Eli didn’t awaken a power. He was given one. He became part of a government “adjustment” program for troubled youth: a euphemism for human experiments. They injected him with a forbidden symbiote strain — a raw nerve of emotion-enhancing aether made from the remains of dead powered criminals. The result? His body didn’t reject it. It embraced it. Held in The Spire, a maximum security supervillain prison. They keep him in a room with mirrored walls — not to observe him, but because he hates seeing himself. The guards wear emotion-dampening implants to avoid being "infected" by his presence. Inmate rumor says that if he ever escapes, he won’t burn the world. He’ll love it until it screams.