I woke up feverish and anxious. My throat parched and raspy like sandpaper. I could have so easily waved away what happened last night as a fever dream, born of madness and a lack of proper food, if it were not for that domino mask staring back at me from the floor like the painting of Dorian Grey. I drunkenly walked to the sink, with a rusted faucet that I had to fight with to turn on, and lapped the water from it like a dog before collapsing back onto the floor.
I faded in and out of reality like a buoy bobbing on the ocean. My nightmares were fraught with those three ABB, their faces under a shadow, saying nothing but merely watching for what I would do next.
It was perhaps hours later that I managed to get a grip on myself. "Compartmentalization." I thought to myself.
"I needed to separate my egos." I muttered to myself as I shoveled week old Chinese takeout down my gullet.
I thought of how I would go about it. I knew I could split streams of consciousness and truly multitask down at the 7/11 where I was the manager. Maybe there was something in common with keeping attention on the security monitors and PHO?
I was trapped in that thought and didn't even realize that I was still putting the plastic spoon in my mouth even though the container was empty.
I suddenly threw my takeout into the wastebasket right beside my bed and decided that yes, this would how I would do things.
Taking the concept of an "alter ego" to its stream like that superhero Superman from all of those Earth Aleph comics I managed to get my hands on. Mild mannered Calamus Rut by day, and clinical vigilante Nuremberg by night. The hero neither I or Brockton Bay deserved.
And so I got up, made the bed, and went into a lotus form. Meditation always helped whenever I messed around with my mind. Less outside stimuli meant a surprisingly great deal when your power wasn't all that instinctual or intuitive.
I delved into myself.
The experience could roughly be summarized as jumping off a cliff and falling into yourself. Not a necessarily unpleasant experience, but definitely a weird one. How else would you describe the dual experiences of free fall and collapse.
"There. There. Shift that. Flex this. Mold it here. Bend it that way." I thought to myself as I began splicing off a piece of consciousness but this one was different from my usual one.
It had none of my memories. Yet. A perfec blank slate for me to grow.
I raised it up and gave it it's morals. No compulsion against killing but no desire to see suffering. Clinical, but empathetic. Determination without obsession. Methodical but free form. The basis of any competent serial killer. Hopefully it'll be killing the ones that deserve it.
Then I gave it my memories. It wouldn't do for a hunter-killer to be clueless to social cues, limited as mine were from a life of isolationism. But then I turned it up to 11. Holmesian powers of deduction, but sadly my powers drawbacks remained. I gave it a subjective week to do nothing but analyze yesterday's fight, taking in all of the details. Planning and replanting the most optimal route.
Then the most important part. It's personality. Would it be a chivalrous knight? Already too late for that. A Jack The Ripper rip off, no pun intended? Also too late, there's the Slaughterhouse 9.
Inwardly, I shivered at the mere mention of their name. As far away as I was from them, I still was fearful of them. They were like the very avatars of the apocalypse, more so even than the Endbringers themselves.
