King Brain/Riddle Of The Well

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

With the Rogues War causing untold problems as people tried to recover from the trouble caused, America was on high alert. Rumours of Praetorian raids began to circulate, and an unthinkable war seemed to be edging closer to becoming a reality.

The police responded to what they believed was a Council led hi-jack of a shipment of Vanguard Delta-Wave EMP warheads. With Council forces in control of the ship, it had begun to sail for Striga, but the Paragon authorities responded quickly enough to smuggle the heroic newlyweds Brickbreaker and Aglow on board. They disabled the warheads, but the EMP devices scrambled coms and teleportation while they were at sea. As they rendered the last of the warheads unusable, they discovered that the Council soldiers were impostors. They were really Intelligencia agents, posing as Council.

Meanwhile the Intelligencia had struck back in Paragon, kidnapping the baby son of Brickbreaker, Jax Jones. The devastated couple immediately mobilised all the heroes they could, but the Intelligencia had gone to ground. A Snitch helped them learn that it was the Intelligencia who had baby Jax, and that he was to be involved in a sinister sounding operation called Project: A-Jax. Unfortunately the trail went dead, and no amount of psychic searching or spells could uncover Jax.

A Longbow agent, Agent Callows, contacted them, offering to help find Jax in return for their aid in shutting down King Brain’s operation. They eagerly accepted, but were immediately told that the Agent Callows they had met was an Intelligencia clone. With the help of Agent Callows they subdued the clone, and he proceeded to outline missions for the to help track down Jax.

They came into conflict with the police for trespassing at Crey labs and for stealing secret government information on Praetorian gene tech. They took out a Malta cell and destroyed a temporal stasis pod that Malta had there. In the end they grew suspicious, as Agent Callows dispatched them to one final mission with little explanation. There they discovered the real Agent Callows, the one they had originally met. They had helped replace him with a clone, who had used them to attack King Brain’s rivals. King Brain intended to have them all killed to remove witnesses, while Project A-Jax gathered pace. However, Brickbreaker and Aglow managed to fight their way free and rescue Callows.

The Psyentist contacted them, having begun to track the Intelligencia once more. She was intent on ending the nefarious operations of the Intelligencia, but her first attempts met with little success. Dishearted, Aglow and Brickbreaker recieved a strange offer of help from the villain Paul Ooshun. Ooshun had taunted them via Formspring before, but with the intervention of Ultimogirl, he seemed strangely inclined to help.

They met with him, and he proposed that instead of trying to outwit a supergenius, they rely on dumb luck. He offered a cursed mirror to Aglow, and told her where to find the small-time crook called Misadventure. Brickbreaker and Aglow confronted Misadventure and used the cursed mirror to reflect the probability manipulation powers of Misadventure. The resulting clash of bad luck produced a short burst of intense good luck for Aglow and brickbreaker.

Throwing caution to the wind, they used the Psyentist’s teleporter at random, and stumbled into King Brain’s hidden lab. There they fought the fruit of Project A-Jax: villains who had paid to have Jax’s mutant enhanced strength, durability and speed mapped onto their own genetic code. The process was unstable however, and many of them suffered horrible side effects or mutation. The couple fought their way to a stasis pod, demolished a robotic duplcate of King Brain (the real one had no intention of mixing with his mutated clients until their tempers and super strength were under control) and rescued Jax.

King Brain contacted them, saying that they had ruined Project A-Jax. he had intended to build a super-army to fight the Praetorians with, giving every Primal man, woman and child the benefits of Jax’s mutations. In scorn of their short sighted desire to have Brickbreaker’s son back, King Brain handed over a percentage of the money paid to him by the guinea pigs, making Jax an instant multi-millionaire.

Jax was safe, but King Brain was still on the loose, and while one scheme came crashing to an end, another was already unfolding. The Praetorians had made their first move, disabling Terra Volta briefly in preparation for what would surely be the Alpha Strike in the war against Primal Earth.