Mr. Mud: Halfway Crooks

[Charon]

The answers to Kevin’s other two questions were fairly easy to answer. Yes, regrettably, he had embarked on his first job on his own, and with yet more regret he had to admit that it had almost gone as horribly wrong as Kevin’s. So much so, in fact, that he mentally scalded himself for having condemned Kevin for his lack of a plan; seven years ago as he walked towards that bank door, he hadn’t had much of a plan either.

His mud fist connected with the outside wall of the bank with such force that the very foundations of the building shook as his hand disappeared through the hole he had created in the bricks. He drew his fist back and slammed it into the side of the building again, a little higher this time, creating a hole big enough for him to step into the main bank. Sure, the door was only a few feet away but he loved to make an entrance.

As his boot hit the solid marble floor on the inside of the bank, it suddenly occurred to him how many people were afraid of him. Screams rose from the people who had thrown themselves to the floor; others were scrambling for the revolving door and running across the street, screaming for help. At the time, he was on too much of an adrenaline rush to realise that he was in the middle of Paragon City, a metropolis that was literally swarming with superheroes. It didn’t occur to him that if people were running down the streets screaming for help, help probably wasn’t that far away.

Just as he was morphing his fist back into simple flesh and blood, he was morphing other areas of his body, armouring himself in jagged earth, making himself look bigger, stronger and altogether as if he was to be feared. As areas of his body turned to hardened earth and rock, more screams rose from the crowd; it was as if now the people could see his power, they were even more afraid than they were when a huge fist slammed through the wall of an ordinary bank on an otherwise ordinary day.

It was strange in a way; sad that many of the older customers were already lying on their chests, hands on the back of their heads with their valuables laid out in front of them. Paragon City, and more specifically Kings Row was so crime ridden that these people had mastered the procedure to go through if they didn’t want to get hurt. Stay down, shut up, and hand over your valuables. Luckily for them, Mr. Mud was after the big score, he wasn’t interested in taking their watches or their pocket change.

He yelled for the patrons to shut up; in all this chaos he was trying to consider the next move of his very vague plan. To his surprise, the whole place fell silent, and he realised just how much power his abilities gave him. Remembering he was on a schedule, he walked quickly to the cashiers’ counter, mud dropping from his armour and bouncing off of the marble floor. In a swift movement he lifted his hand over his head, morphing it into crude earth hammerhead as he did so and brought it smashing down, splintering wood and metal, and clearing enough room under the bullet proof glass for him to drag one of the employees from their hiding place.

Of course, they immediately asked him who he was; this was a question he heard for a few years until his face became recognisable enough to link to the name. His answer appeared in all the local newspapers the next day, despite being not particularly intelligent or witty. He supposed they spelled out exactly what kind of criminal he was, though. ‘Mr. Mud. Where’s the vault?’

He soon found that this random cashier he’d pulled from beneath the counter was in fact the manager, and was even more surprised when he pointed out exactly where Mud needed to go. Satisfied, he dropped the manager to the floor and rammed the reinforced door that led to the vault, his shoulder encased in hardened soil. The door came clean away from its hinges, and Mud stumbled into the room beyond. He was now standing only four feet from his prize and with only one thing standing in his way; the vault door.

It took all of his strength, and a fist that was almost as big as he was, but he finally managed to put so much pressure on the door that it bent, leaving an opening at one side. Forming his hands into thin wedges, he slipped them into the gap and broke the door open, using his hands as makeshift crowbars, applying all the pressure he could to bend a big enough gap for him to step through. It took only seconds before he had created a gap big enough, and there it was, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. This was more money than he had ever seen, let alone ever had in his possession.

Hastily, he opened one of the pockets on his utility belt and pulled out a sack. Adrenaline pumping, he began to shovel bundles of notes into it, thousands and thousands of dollars. All he could think about was the new apartment he could move into, the new car he could buy, but most importantly he could wean his mother away from drugs, he could book her into rehab and he could pay for her to have a better life. Just as he was lost in this fantasy world of what could have been, he heard the horrible screech of metal as the vault door was ripped from it’s hinges and a deafening clang as it was thrown to the floor.

He turned around just in time to feel the metal fist connect with his face, busting his nose for the first time in what he assumed would be many. Standing in front of him, of course, was one of the reasons he had to do this in the first place. He had just caught a punch from Back Alley Brawler. He was quite proud of himself for managing to stay conscious.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been caught by the Brawler. Back in 1986, before the Basement Boyz and long before there had been a Mr. Mud, he’d started mugging on the streets to pay rent. It was the day he mugged some old lady that the Brawler had caught him. He had been scared out of his wits, thinking he’d go to jail for sure. Just as the leader of the Regulators was about to launch into some speech on the evils of crime and how to make a better life and yadda yadda yadda, he had heard gunshots a few blocks away. When the hero had returned to check on David, he had disappeared.

And with any luck, he could pull the same disappearing act this time. The Brawler said something about nobody getting away with anything in this neighbourhood, but Mr. Mud barely heard him as he launched his attack, armouring his shoulders in jagged earth and tackling the hero to the floor in desperation. As the Brawler slid across the vault floor, scrambling to regain his footing, Mud armoured himself up, leaving only his head and utility belt uncovered.

The Brawler came in fast, fists flying. Before he could react, Mud had taken several shots to the midsection, and was actually surprised at how much he could feel the blows despite the armouring. Ducking to the side, Mud returned fire by forming his fist into a mud mallet and bringing it crashing down on the back of the Brawler’s head as he attempted a tackle, and then again on his back as he crashed to his knees.

Just as he swung it around his head in time to bring down a final crushing blow on the Brawler’s head in an attempt to knock him out cold, an uppercut hit him in the chin with the force of a truck, sending him flying through the open door and back onto the marble floor of the bank.

Sirens were whirring outside as the Brawler rampaged towards him through the open doorway. David lifted his legs as flesh and bone, but by the time they connected with the Back Alley Brawler’s stomach and sent him stumbling back, they had become earth as hard as concrete.

Scrambling to his feet, Mud shifted his whole body back to it’s human state and dived through the hole he had made during his entrance, only to be met on the outside by a fleet of squad cars and dozens of cops; guns drawn, looks of concentration lay perfectly on their faces.

Looking back through the hole he had created in the bank wall, he saw the Brawler bolting towards him again. Desperate, he went the only way there was to go; Down.

Shifting his fist to be at least three feet wide, he slammed it into the sidewalk creating a shockwave that momentarily threw off both the aim of the police officers and the advance of the Brawler. Another smash of his fist into the city street and he had created a hole big enough for him to jump down into; straight into the city sewer system.

From there, he ran. Fight or flight, and now the latter was the better option. At times, he had thought he’d heard the Brawler behind him, but if the superhero had ascended below the city streets to follow him, he had never caught up. By the time he was sure he had put a few miles between himself, the law and the Brawler, he switched on his flashlight and searched for an exit.

The manhole cover slid to the side, and Mud raised his head above ground to see where he was; a back alley in Skyway City. He listened. There were no sirens that he could hear, no commotion, just the usual movement of people through city streets and cars across elevated highways.

He opened the sack, which he had managed to keep hold of throughout the fight with the Brawler. Bundles of notes had fallen out as he’d been thrown around, but he was sure there was still a significant amount in there. He counted it slowly in the back alley, and found that he had walked away with twenty thousand dollars. Some villains would have called this haul a failure, but for David this was a life-changing amount of cash.

Almost better than the money was the buzz; not only had he gotten away with robbing one of the biggest banks in Kings Row, but he had stood toe to toe with Back Alley Brawler, traded punches and had even escaped to tell the tale. He had made a fool out of the PPD, the adrenaline was still pumping, and yes, he was twenty thousand dollars richer. He had a broken nose and a swolen face to show for it, too.

As a squad car slowly passed by the end of the alleyway, he ducked behind a wall, and after it had finally passed he jumped back through the manhole he had come from. It was about time he found an exit closer to home.

[Charon]

***

“You know, I tried that.” Kevin said. “I got caught because the damn manhole was stuck.”

Honestly, he’d heard plenty of stories like that before. Either the manhole was stuck on the fire escape wouldn’t budge when they pulled it, or the door was locked or something. It was always the fault of some inanimate object as to why the guys he was talking to hadn’t been caught; not that he hadn’t been guilty of using this excuse once or twice, but at least when he said it, it was almost always true.

“Yeah, I hear that a lot.” Mud said, and couldn’t help but laugh. No one ever wanted to admit that it was there own damn fault they ended up in the Zig. Always the cop or some hero who never got off their ass or, god forbid, the manhole that wouldn’t open. Kevin laughed with him, and soon enough they were in fits of laughter. Mud wasn’t even sure what he was laughing at, but just like telling the story of his life, this was keeping his mind off of the destination of his journey.

“Hey. Hey! Shut the hell up in there.” Came the scream, and Mud turned his head just in time to see Officer Francis in the doorway. Every criminal on the street knew Francis; he had once been a hot shot Detective until he was put on the DeMarco case, the one Mr. Mud was determined must have somehow been linked to Charon. Anyway, he’d failed to find out anything about the case, let alone who killed her due to his main witnesses and all his leads being killed in the fire that had consumed the Cloud 9 bar in 1989. Since then he’d been ridiculed, shifted onto lower priority cases and finally demoted to guard duty. Now he spent every night sitting in one of the Ziggursky trucks, yelling at any villains who happened to get out of line. Mr. Mud had never met him back when he was a homicide detective, but now that he was little more than a glorified prison guard he wasn’t the nicest of guys. Mud kept laughing in the hope that Francis would come over, open his cell and try to make something of it. Unfortunately, all he got was a disgusted sneer, and then Francis disappeared to go and check one of the other trucks.

“Man,” Kevin rasped between breaths. “That guy seems like an *******.”

“Yeah, he is. You’ll see a lot worse when we get up to Ziggursky, though.” Mud replied, finally regaining his composure and realising that the whole of his body now ached a lot more than it had done before he burst into fits of laughter. Holding his head, he sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. It was a pretty obvious statement to make in his own head, but he couldn’t help but think about how much he hated being electrocuted.

“You’ve, um,” Kevin stalled for his words, probably thinking about the most tactical way to ask a villain about what were probably the worst times of his life, “ You’ve been up there before?”

The answer was yes. David had been to Ziggurksy Correctional Facility. In fact he had only just gotten out of prison earlier that year in the spring of 1998. In total he’d done two stretches, one back in 1993 and another from 1996 until a couple of months before this latest capture, and the truth was being there wasn’t almost as bad as coming out and trying to pick up what was left of your life. That said, being up there was still a terrible thing in itself. Those were two pretty good reasons as to why he wasn’t exactly looking forward to going back.

“Yeah. Couple of times.” Mud said, without opening his eyes and trying to concentrate on dulling the throbbing that coursed throughout his entire body, starting in his abdomen where he had been shocked, surging up to his head and then back down to his feet. Even with his eyes closed, he could see Kevin grimace. Even a guy who was on his first day as a supervillain knew how bad the Zig was if only by reputation and he could already tell Kevin was feeling sorry for him.

What was still strange though is that the only time Kevin had shown fear or shock was in reaction to what Mud told him. Was he not afraid of being locked up himself? Living in a four foot by four foot cell, getting a few hours of exercise a day and listening to your friends and contacts being kicked around by wardens and other inmates alike? Was he not absolutely terrified of wasting away for the next few years? Mud could still only come to one conclusion; he was in denial, trying not to think about the life that lay ahead of him, trying not to admit to himself that he’d gotten involved in a mug’s game and that truly, crime didn’t pay.

“How did you land up in there? You seem like a pretty resourceful guy, I mean, you escaped Charon, Back Alley Brawler even!” Kevin said, as if he was now Mr. Mud’s biggest fan. In a slightly more solemn tone, he asked another question, this one without quite so much excitement or enthusiasm. “What’s it like?”

“It sucks.” This frank and somewhat unintelligent assessment hadn’t come from Mud, and he turned his head to see that Jumpsuit had finally awoken from the apparent coma he’d been lying in for the last forty-five minutes or so.

“Cloud Runner?” was Mud’s immediate question.

“Xanatos.” Jumpsuit replied, rubbing his head and trying to get to his feet.

“Tough break.” Mr. Mud said, remembering the few times he had come into contact with Xanatos. Every time he’d escaped, but it usually took a long time to smash all the ice off, and that was without even mentioning the annoying and far too cheesy boy scoutish chatter he spouted as he tried to ‘bring you to justice.’

“Anyway, I didn’t end up there for a while,” Mud continued, turning back to Kevin, “I guess I just aimed a little high…”

[Charon]

***

For a while, things had been great. David appeared in all the local newspapers the day after his first robbery, and was even featured on page 13 of the Paragon Times with the headline ‘Who is Mr. Mud?’

After that, a string of robberies followed, all over Paragon City. Within months he had made thousands, and by the time early 1992 rolled around, his mother was in rehab and he was looking at apartments in Atlas Park to move her into. It had taken a while to get her to admit that she had a problem but as soon as she had broken down in tears and told him the extent of her addiction, she was ready to try and beat the disease she was stricken with. The first step was admitting her problem, and now she had set about beating it.

David himself had moved into a new apartment down in the Kings Garment District. It was hardly the Ritz, but it was certainly much better than the flee and ****roach ridden apartment he had shared with his mother back in the Basement. Plus, he needed a base of operations that wasn’t too high profile; he could move his mother into a nice apartment in a nice part of town, there was no way they were going to suspect a woman in her fifties of being the supervillain known as Mr. Mud. David himself though, he had to keep his spending down just in case the cops came knocking one day.

Of course, his mother had questions; she became suspicious extremely quickly when he came home after the first robbery with a thousand bucks in his back pocket. That suspicion had only grown when he had moved into his own apartment and started looking for another, for when she left rehab. She knew better than to trust her son off the bat, and had interrogated him quite thoroughly. He’d thought quickly on his feet and told her he’d secured a job on the docks, even going so far as to invent a promotion and claim he’d recently been bumped up to a supervisor’s position. She trusted him. In her mind, the money David was throwing around was perfectly legitimate; she had no reason to suspect her son after that.

Life was good. Not only had Mr. Mud pulled off several successful jobs of his own but also he’d begun to make contacts in the underworld to plan more ambitious robberies with. He had even been noticed by some of Kings Row’s crimelords, who had noted his vast strength and invulnerability. Before he knew it he was acting as bodyguard for Vegas, a Sicilian Mafia boss who had somehow rose from the dead back in the seventies. Mr. Mud thought it pretty weird, but he didn’t ask, he just did what he was paid to do.

His talents as a bodyguard and enforcer spread through Kings Row quickly. Soon he was not only taking jobs from the undead mafia, but from such high profile criminals as The General, a Russian gun runner who was now more machine than he was human, and even ‘Knuckles’ LaRusso, one of the most high profile crime bosses in the Row. Mud’s reputation didn’t span much beyond the Row itself, but in his hometown he was living the high life.

But even with such great career prospects, a criminal life style and cash-in-hand payments every month from bosses all over town, David soon grew bored. Sure, in his life as Mr. Mud he got to protect plenty of notorious criminals, and was involved in numerous fights with vigilantes and superheroes. It was just that after a while he began to miss that buzz, the adrenaline rush he got from his robberies. Many a time he would recall his first job, fighting Back Alley Brawler and barely escaping into the sewers, and with the memory of the events came the memory of the rush, which seemed even better in retrospect. All this dirty work for mob bosses was well and good but he missed the thrill of a real job.

1993 rolled around, and just as David was beginning to have pangs for those first few jobs, a priceless diamond was moved to the one and only museum that Kings Row had ever been able to boast. The arrival of this diamond was all over the newspapers, and the choice to place it in one of the most rundown museums in not only Paragon City but on the entirety of the East Coast was a controversial one amongst collectors and intellectuals.

Just as this diamond was on the lips of every lover of high culture in Paragon City, it was on the lips of every criminal. As Mr. Mud, David had begun to frequent many of the underground bars that littered Kings Row, only because they were good places to find leads on crimelords who were hiring or vulnerable vaults to steal from, but all he ever heard these days was that someone ought to steal this diamond; it was ripe for the picking, just no one had the guts to pull it from the tree.

A couple of guys tried and failed; The Reflector tried to enter the museum through a priceless mirror, only to take one step out of the dimension he had used to travel there and put his foot straight through an invisible laser, triggering the silent alarm.

Bulldozer had already tried doing things the way Mr. Mud usually worked, running straight through the wall of the bank, punching out any rent-a-cops that got in his way and trying to simply walk out the front door, diamond in hand. He had almost succeeded it was baffling to admit. As stupid and ill thought out as his plan was, Bulldozer was very good at living up to his name and simply ploughed everyone that got in his way into unconsciousness. That was, of course, until the Freedom Phalanx had turned up.

Murmurings continued to spread long after Bulldozer was given a three-year sentence; only days after The Reflector had gone down for a similar amount of time. But even seeing these acquaintances of his on the stand, something within Mr. Mud was pulling at him to give this a try. Someone had to steal that diamond, and why couldn’t he be the man to do it?

Of course, at this point in his career, Mr. Mud had been young and naïve, and had not yet learned the mantra Mud would live by in later life, ‘Only steal it if you need it.’ At the time, Mr. Mud not only hungered for the money he could sell the diamond for, especially if he went to someone like The Trader or Blackjack, but for the rush he would surely get leaving that museum with the priceless diamond clasped in his hand.

For a few weeks, he planned and schemed and finally came up with a brilliant but extremely simple plan, so simple in fact that it might just be crazy enough to work. He staked out the building and learnt the shifts of the various patrolmen who worked the graveyard hours, and more importantly he plotted the locations of the security cameras. When he was finally prepared on a cold night in the late January of 1993, he put his plan into action.

[Charon]

The trash can hit the camera with such force that it actually came off of the wall. That was something he hadn’t planned; he just wanted to make enough of a commotion outside that the security guard would come outside to investigate, but not enough that he’d call the cops straight off the bat. Luckily, even in destroying the camera completely he achieved his objective.

A couple of minutes later some dopey looking kid cautiously tip toed into the alleyway, adjusting the tie on his uniform out of simple and unhidden fear. Suspiciously, he shone his flashlight in every corner and hiding place he could think of, and when he was finally satisfied that maybe a cat jumped from the roof and landed on the camera or maybe a strong gust of wind had simply pulled it off the wall and sent it crashing to the floor, he turned around to go back to his warm, comfortable office chair behind the security desk, stopping to pick up the broken camera and take it with him.

Of course, he never got there. The man that the security camera over the inside doorway saw walk back into the museum wearing the security guard’s uniform was not Fred, nor was he anyone on the museum’s payroll. The man wearing Fred’s uniform was of course David Dirt, better known as Mr. Mud, and more importantly, he had Fred’s security keycard held firmly in his hand. The real Fred was unconscious; the real Fred was lying in the same trashcan that had only minutes before caused the disturbance he had gone to investigate.

Mud had discerned in the few weeks he had spent staking the place out that the security room was, rather stupidly he felt, completely controlled by a keycard. Each security guard had a copy of this keycard, and only one security guard was on duty between the hours of 2-4am on a Thursday. Every other day, there were two of them; a slight security hole, and a hole that Mud was perfectly willing to exploit.

The main security room was right behind the main reception desk, and consisted of three panels. One controlled the security cameras, another controlled the silent alarms and a third controlled the lockdown system, which was only to be activated if a robbery was in progress. Luckily for Mr. Mud, there was now nobody around to switch on the lockdown, and he’d already secured the measures needed to shut down the silent alarms. The only problem was the cameras, which he had learnt could be remotely viewed by a security firm who handled the museum’s systems. He wasn’t willing to switch the cameras off and have someone at their office call the cops; he was just going to have to hope that if anybody was watching him, the uniform would lure them into thinking he was Fred, at least until it was too late for them to stop him and the diamond was securely in his hand.

The silent alarms, at least, were a completely on-site installation, meaning he could switch them off without any third party ever having known he had done so. He slid the keycard into its position on the panel. He was sweating now, the adrenaline he had longed for finally kicking in. The panel didn’t even ask him for a password, something he hadn’t been sure about; he’d managed to pick up most of the information he knew about the security systems by reading the newspapers and listening to the security guards talk as they had their late night cigarette breaks, but this was one detail they hadn’t mentioned. Luckily it wasn’t a problem and he was immediately prompted to select the alarms he wished to disable.

With the security measures out of the way, all there was left to do was go and take the diamond itself. He was very aware of the fact that he may have been being watched from some security company’s headquarters somewhere in Founders Falls or Steel Canyon, one of those rich places in town, and as such he took care to tread very carefully and look as if he was patrolling for thieves; he was just trying as hard as he could not to act like one himself.

As he neared the main exhibit room, he began to hear noises everywhere. The echoing of his own footsteps on the marble floors prompted him to look around and make sure a cop or a hero or anything else for that matter wasn’t following him. There was nothing though, and soon enough he was standing in the doorway of a room that seemed to positively glow with the light that beamed from the centre of the priceless diamond within. He took a step forward and found it within arms length, encaged in a glass case, just begging to be taken.

Slowly, he lifted the glass, taking a glance behind him to see if the camera was watching him. It was. If anyone was keeping an eye on the monitors all those miles away, the game would be up if he didn’t get out of here soon.

Hastily, he snatched up the diamond and half expected to turn and find Back Alley Brawler’s fist buried in his face again, but there was no one there, no one but the marble floors, the ancient pots and the empty suits of armour. He had thought he’d gotten away with it, until he walked from the exhibit room and saw a superhero blocking his exit back onto the streets of the Row.

He didn’t announce himself, which was extremely strange for the heroes of Paragon City. Usually they liked you to know exactly who was busting you. This guy stood at ease with the silence and patience of a military man, waiting for his prey to arrive. He wore black spandex with blue highlights in places, most prominently over one eye. On his chest was a symbol Mud recognised from one of the days when he’d been bothered to turn up to High School physics class; it was a letter from the Greek alphabet, and from what he could remember, it had something to do with electricity.

For a moment, the hero’s silence threw him. So much so that he couldn’t even make up his mind whether this guy even was a hero; maybe he was another villain trying to take his score? Either way, he wasn’t going to find out. The patrol guard’s uniform ripped and fell to the floor to reveal Mud’s costume as he armoured his body and formed his hand into a club of solid earth, bringing it crashing down where the hero stood.

He had moved in seconds, diving to the right and rolling effortlessly across the stainless floor. Mud turned just in time to see the hero’s hands begin to glow a light hue of blue. A nexus swirled around his fist, lighting up the room. In a flash, an arc of electricity flew from his hand and connected with Mud’s armour, jolting his body backwards before fizzling out.

Angry that he had felt the shock, Mud rampaged forward, both of his hands formed into huge mallets of soil, clumsily trying to squash the hero to the floor; his hands connected with nothing but marble, leaving huge potholes in the pristine design.

This guy was too fast to catch, he was quick and agile; not only could he throw lightning itself from his hands but he had lightning reflexes to boot.

As the hero ducked under another violent swing of the earth hammer, his hands began to crackle with charged static, created a snapping sound that could barely be heard over the sound of Mud’s fist slamming into the lobby wall.

Within seconds, he was battering at Mud’s armour with hands that glowed a brilliant blue, sending shocks through Mud’s very bones; the attacks were dulled by the solid earth that lined his body, but the punches were so highly charged that these jolts were still excruciating.

Just as smoke began to rise from the cracks in his armour from flesh beginning to sear, Mr. Mud finally regained his composure. He scooped the hero up in a huge morphed hand and with a roar from the pain that swelled in his abdomen, slammed him to the floor.

Years later, Mud realised he should have quit while he was ahead; he had temporarily stalled the hero, he still had the diamond in his hand and the door was literally feet away. But no, the pain of the electrical burn on his chest spurned his rage. He shifted his foot into earth as hard as brick, and brought it crashing down towards the hero’s head. A second lesson he would learn later in life, ‘Never stay just to settle a score.’

Two blue and black gloves rose in a flash and grabbed Mud’s foot in mid-air. A surge of electricity began to flow through the hero’s body, through his chest, washing over his shoulders and through his arms, crackling and snapping as it entered Mud’s foot and electrified his armour. The earth dulled the massive shock, but Mud still stumbled backwards, screaming out in pain as the charge surged relentlessly through his central nervous system.

Another arc of electricity hit his body as he struggled to push himself up from one knee and continue fighting. A second flash and clap; this blast had hit him in the shoulder, jolting his body backwards and disorientating him further.

In a flash, he saw the supercharged punch flying for his head, a final shot perfectly designed to knock him unconscious, a blow to end the battle. It took all the energy he had left to lift his armoured hand and grab it. He twisted the closed fist violently to one side, causing the blue and black defender to grimace and yell out in pain as something inside his lower arm snapped. With the only energy he had left, Mud lifted the hero off the ground and threw him to one side; it was time he left.

Stumbling towards the door in a dazed stupor that could only be caused by chain electrocutions, Mud held firmly onto the diamond he had worked so hard to steal. He needed a doctor, but there were plenty of guys back in the Basement who catered specifically to supervillains and could treat electrical burns. He had no worries about his health, as long as he escaped.

Just as he was stretching out his hand to pull open the door that lead into the main lobby, he heard the words that made him abandon all hope. ‘Lockdown initiated.’

He turned his head to see Fred standing in the security room, the keycard firmly placed in the slot in the panel. Of course, he understood now. This hero had been flying past when he saw Fred passed out in a dumpster. Fred had revealed all, and set about calling the cops and initiating lockdown while the hero distracted him. It was a simple plan, almost as simple as his own, which had just failed miserably.

Four feet of solid steel dropped down over the door in front of him, locking him into the museum. Just as he was raising his fist to try and smash his way through the iron shutters, he felt the hand on his lower back. Not on his armour, a realisation Mud came to entirely too late. This hand had managed to find flesh and bone, not only that, but it had managed to find the base of his spinal cord.

A thousand volts shot through his spine, causing his muscles to go into spasms. The mud dropped away from his body, returning him again to flesh, blood and tissue. His eyes rolled back into his head before he made an attempt to grab for something to keep him on his feet. There was nothing; the world span and crashed to black.

[Charon]

He woke up where he had passed out, on the museum floor. Except now it was day, and cops surrounded him, dozens and dozens of cops. On his wrists were the heavy-duty cuffs he would come to know a lot about in his criminal career. Somehow they had a way of disabling most if not all superpowers, making any attempt at escape a futile exercise. He doubted he could have escaped even if the cuffs had been taken off. His whole body ached and throbbed. He really hated being electrocuted.

He hadn’t known who the guy had been that attacked him, and nor would he for a long time after. Years later, around 2001 long after his conversation with Kevin McKenel, Mud would come to know the hero as Ohms, the self proclaimed Defender of the Resistance; he would even make the connection between the guy that had sent him for his first six months behind bars and the 'Ohms' who had busted Kevin in 1998. But for now he would have no idea who had sent him up to the big house; something that made his hatred of those ‘electrical guys’ even more fierce.

Despite his relatively low level of infamy as far as supervillains went in Paragon City, Mr. Mud had still managed to find some friends in high places. The moment he arrived at the Paragon Police Department Headquarters in mid-Kings Row, a lawyer had already arrived there from the office of Frank LaRusso. Before David knew it, Frank himself had pulled some strings and he wasn’t even facing charges for the theft of the diamond anymore; somehow Frank had managed to get the commissioner of police to forget that minor detail as a discrepancy. By the time he stood in the dock in late January, he was only facing charges of assault against Frederick Tyler, who was determined to press charges for the blow he had taken to the back of the head.

David Dirt of course protested his innocence in front of a jury of his peers. He lied to his mother and told her that he was being framed, stitched up; the charge for the diamond theft had been dropped, so surely there couldn’t have been anything in this at all?

David was amazed at Frank’s power within the community. Not only had he managed to ‘convince’ the commissioner to drop the main charge, which could have seen David on the inside of a cell for several years, but all evidence of David being Mr. Mud disappeared from police HQ. This fact was never raised in the trial; David Dirt was instead charged and tried as himself with no superhuman alias.

Frank even managed to pull some strings and keep the papers from reporting the fact that David was in fact the supervillain Mr. Mud, despite the fact that all the major press offices had managed to catch a shot of him in the Mr. Mud costume without his domino mask. It was a small saving grace, as for a while he was able to keep his double life from his mother.

She turned up to his trial everyday to support him, to watch this terrible injustice unfold, completely oblivious to the fact that her son was becoming a hardened career criminal and was hoping beyond hope that his murderous gangster employer and his team of lawyers would be able to get him off to steal another day.

Unfortunately, even with help from higher places and a team of crack lawyers, the fact remained that David’s likeness had been caught on the security cameras in the museum, evidence too damning for the jury not to convict him. On a cold February 2nd, he was found guilty and was detained in the cells in Police Headquarters to await being transferred to Ziggursky Correctional Facility to serve a year’s worth of jail time for his attack on Tyler.

His mother met with Frank’s lawyers, and they made plans for an appeal. She told David herself that she was going to get him out of jail, free him of the injustice he had faced at his trial. She was utterly convinced that her son was incapable of the crimes he had been convicted for. He was just a humble dockworker, slogging away every day for the wages he brought home. That was, until the media frenzy started.

It just took one newspaper to break the silence before all of them did the same. On the front of The Court laid the headline ‘Convicted Criminal is Mr. Mud’, with one of the forbidden shots of a maskless Mr. Mud being carried out of the museum by two police officers. His likeness was undeniable. Soon enough it was on the local news; David revealed, telling the reporter to ‘get that damn camera out of my face’. It spread to the other papers and news channels like wildfire.

Soon enough, The Court ran an article on Mr. Mud’s career so far, an article that Ms. Dirt read with absolute horror. Bank robberies, muggings, assault, battery, breaking and entering. She read about his links to crime bosses. The General, Vegas, even Frank LaRusso. She stared hard into the steely gaze of the man being dragged out of the museum, and she knew in that instant that this was her son. This was the man she had raised to become a petty thief, a criminal.

He had not been able to contact his mother in the last few weeks, since the media began to report his double life as Mr. Mud. He wanted to talk to her, to explain that he had done it all for them, to keep them away from the terrible life they had been dragged through. He wanted to tell her that he had done it to keep her away from the drugs and him from becoming just another nobody. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry.

He was told the news by one of his lawyers the day before he was due to be transferred to the Ziggurat. She had died early on a Wednesday morning. The cause of her death was an overdose of superadine, which had been washed down with the best half of a bottle of vodka. She had choked on her own vomit at sometime around three in the morning, and her body was found in their old apartment building back in the Basement, sometime the next day.

He immediately told his lawyers to cancel any appeals or retrials, and that he would no longer have any need of their services. This was the last time he spoke for the next few days. He simply sat in his cell and stared at the wall.

They had allowed him compassionate leave before he was taken to the Ziggurat to attend her funeral, deciding that it was better to detain him in Police Headquarters for a few more days rather than transport him to Brickstown. He was strangely silent as his police escort lead him to the church, and said not a word during the funeral. When he was invited to speak he declined to do so.

He knew, no matter what cause of death his lawyers cited to him, or what technicalities her doctors explained to him; he knew that no matter what the priest said as they committed her body to the ground, she had not died from the lethal doses of superadine she had ingested; she had not died of the alcohol with which she had washed it down; she had not died of the fall she took when she passed out; she had not even died from the vomit that had blocked her airway, starving her brain of oxygen. David knew as her coffin hit the cold hard soil, the cause of her death had been shame.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

[Charon]

David never spoke of the details surrounding his mother’s death again. Even when he was retelling the tale to Kevin McKenel, he kept particulars brief and didn’t mention the cause of death, where her body had been found or why she had died exactly as she had. She was a footnote, a side plot; she was little more than an insignificant detail that had to be mentioned for the sake of completeness. The guilt he had repressed was not even present subconsciously; it was buried so deep that he was able to mention off hand that his mother had died without even the slightest flicker of emotion.

He served six months on the inside of the year he had been imprisoned for. One hundred and eighty four days. Four thousand, four hundred and sixteen hours, and he counted down every single one of them in his head as the time dragged by, waiting for the day when he could walk the streets of his neighbourhood again; eat real food and get exercise that didn’t involve just endlessly running around the same old yard, being eyed by the same old hoods in the same old dark corners. He longed for the day when his time amongst madmen and murderers was up.

He had a couple of cellmates during his time inside, and all of them illustrated the ins and outs of prison life to him in different ways. His first cellmate had been completely insane. By night he had been a supercriminal by the name of the Miner, and specialised in infiltration, but unlike the spies and espionage experts that littered Paragon City, he wasn’t exactly a master of stealth. Instead, he tunnelled into bank vaults and disappeared into his never ending tunnels, or dug his way into government facilities and stole carefully guarded information he could ransom back to them. He was quite the professional criminal in his time.

He had been a nice enough guy, but his eccentricities shined through from the moment David arrived at Ziggursky four days after his mother had been buried. He seemed normal, sane enough and very talkative, but he was extremely vengeful towards a person he called ‘Joe’, who he claimed had been watching him in the days before his arrest. He went so far as to claim that Joe had been the one to sell him out; somehow this mysterious figure had discovered his real name and his real address with his wife and three children and had delivered it to the authorities. This, David was willing to accept. It was when he began to claim that his cell was bugged, and that Joe was listening to their conversations that he grew worried. It got worse when he used to spend whole nights staring from bars on their cell window, babbling about a black van that was parked across the street from the prison. He fully believed that this ‘Joe’ character was watching him through super powerful binoculars, plotting his every movement and word.

About two months after David had arrived at Ziggursky the Miner was dragged away in the middle of the night by wardens, screaming that Joe had found him and that he would probably never come back. Sure enough, David never saw him again.

Just as David received a new cellmate, a career criminal named Ray Litman who had operated under the name ‘Lightmare’ until his capture, a new inmate was moved into the cell next to his. As was customary, the other prisoners on the block had immediately jumped to the doors of their cells to snarl threats and insults at the new blood, screaming that they were going to gut him, and reminding him that his momma couldn’t save him now. David hadn’t joined in because he remembered quite vividly how unpleasant it had been when he arrived. Admittedly, none of the threats that were thrown at him had ever come to pass, but he wasn’t going to make some other schmuck’s life hard just because that’s what the other guys had done to him.

That night, screams rang through the block, but they didn’t come from the inmates trying to scare the new kid. Instead, they came from the new kid trying to scare the inmates. He screamed that they were all scum, criminals and psychopaths. As the night trudged by, he described brutal ways in which he was going to kill them all, and continued to do so until the early hours of the morning. The threats of the inmates thrown back at him had no effect; he continued to rant and rave.

David had asked Ray who this guy was as he tried to sleep, and the only answer he’d gotten was that he was some guy who’d been an informer for a couple of the vigilantes in Kings Row who’d gotten a little obsessed with the crime fighting thing. Ray had heard he’d fallen in with some cult who wanted to run the country like a police state, and had eventually been picked up for strangling a hooker to death. He’d been over on B-Wing until the prisoners there tried to kill him, hence his move to A-Wing.

David thought nothing of it, and even managed to drop off to sleep amidst the threats against his life for being criminal scum. It didn’t even cross his mind until later that day when he walked out onto the exercise yard to do those same old five laps around the concrete, when the guy from last night was dragged onto the yard, kicking and screaming. The wardens dumped him to the floor violently, and laughed at him as he kicked to his feet.

It was then as David tried to recognise his face that the mystery inmate swung a fist at one of the wardens who’d thrown him to the hard floor. David rushed over to the scene, and pulled him away. He had finally realised where he’d heard that voice, and as he got closer he instantly recognised the face. Now there was only one question left as he dragged Eric away from the guard he was attacking like a rabid dog; what the hell was he doing here?

Little Eric, the kid from four floors up just had time to tell David to take his dirty, criminal hands off of him before the warden’s baton crashed across the back of his head, sending him spiralling into unconsciousness. David stood in horror as they dragged his old friend from the Basement back into the main building to spend time in solitary confinement.

It all clicked with David in an instant. This guy was an informer in Kings Row; what was left of the Basement Boyz, Eric included had become informers for Charon after he busted up their HQ back in the summer of 1991. Had Eric really managed to fall in with some vigilante cult and end up in jail for murder within two years? Had life working under Charon corrupted him that much? All David knew was that the Eric he saw before him now was surely not the quiet, polite Eric he had known as a kid, who’d only gotten involved with David’s criminal activities to stop his dad from having to work all day in the Garment district. What the hell had happened to him?

David never got the chance to ask. Eric was kept in solitary confinement for two weeks, and when he came out there was no chance to speak to him between the time it took for him to be returned to his cell and the fateful day when he was stabbed twelve times in the prison laundry room. He was immediately taken to the infirmary and was transferred to a private wing for trouble inmates, where they could be sure he would not attack or be attacked for the foreseeable future. David heard years later that some cult leader named The Evangelist had busted him and a bunch of others out of jail. By the time David saw Eric again he was such a corrupted soul that he didn’t even recognise his old friend from the block.

David spent the rest of his prison life being a model prisoner. He exercised when he was told to exercise, he did his job in the prison kitchen as if he was being paid for it and he didn’t complain at a single order he was given by the wardens. Just as he had requested, there were no appeals and no retrials, not even a flicker from his lawyers. As far as all were concerned David had accepted his guilt for the assault on Fred Tyler and was perfectly willing to do the time for the crime. He was just grateful he hadn’t faced charges on the diamond theft as well.

David only went through one more cellmate after Lightmare got involved in a fight and was moved into solitary confinement until further notice. His next cellmate was a guy named Dominic Yates, another supercriminal who had operated mainly in Brickstown under the name ‘Slime’. He was a scary guy due to his skin, which had turned green after exposure to the same toxic chemical he used in committing his crimes, a compound lovingly named ‘Slime I’, which was perfectly capable of making those exposed to it extremely ill, and could even cause death in large doses.

Due to the reputation that preceded Slime, and the friendship David had managed to strike up with him, he no longer had any trouble with the other inmates in the Zig. Before the arrival of Slime he’d had the odd threat against his life, but now he was doing fine. It was only a few months with Yates as a cellmate until his case was put before the District Attorney, who gave the okay for David James Dirt, alias Mr. Mud to be released early on grounds of good behaviour.

David walked free on a sunny August 2nd, and caught a cab from Brickstown back to his apartment in the Garment district. Just as he was fumbling around in the possessions that had been returned to him by the prison governor, a limo stalled it’s engine, parking extremely badly on the curb outside his tenement building and almost knocking over a parking meter. The window wound down to reveal Bruiser, a guy who had worked for Frank LaRusso way before David was sent to prison.

David briefly considered the offer to go and see Mr. LaRusso, remembering some of the terrible things he had witnessed in his employ. For a moment, he remembered the look on his mother’s face at his trial, when she had truly believed in him.

By the time the limo pulled up in front of Frank’s mansion on the outskirts of the Row, that thought had been expelled from his mind and replaced with thoughts of cash and casinos. Hours later, he walked down the steps outside of Frank’s front door with a smile on his face, having just accepted a job to drive a new vigilante away from LaRusso turf.

Soon enough he would be living the high life again. All he needed was one more big score, one more job to set him up for life. All he had to do was come up with a plan and take a chance, and why not?

After all, he had nothing left to lose.

[Charon]

***

“A criminal ever since, huh?” Kevin enthusiastically exclaimed, positively satisfied with the story he’d been told. Mr. Mud could scarcely believe how much he had enjoyed the story of his spiral into a life of crime. If Kevin liked stories like that, he’d hear plenty more of them up at the Zig. Everybody loved to tell the twists and turns that had led to their tragic incarceration. Mud just hoped Kevin ended up with one of those cellmates who loved to talk. If not, and he ended up with one of the psychopaths or tough guys, he could see Kevin being dead by the morning.

“Yeah. I pulled some pretty big scores after that, but don’t think we got time.” Mud said, stretching his legs and trying to shake off the last bit of ache that was surging through his body from this latest encounter with electricity, something that was becoming his nemesis more than any of the heroes in Paragon City. “Truck’ll pull into Ziggursky soon enough.”

Kevin smiled. It was a knowing smile, the likes of which David had only ever seen before on the faces of criminals with a plan swirling around in their brain. It had been on Mindswipe’s face right before he revealed his plan for their string of robberies in 94. It had been on Incognito’s face when he convinced Mud to help him with one last score, right before he’d set about making a synthetic mask that would make him look exactly like the mayor. He’d seen it on a hundred different faces, and in usual circumstances it was a good thing. In this one, he didn’t know what to think.

“Okay kid, what the hell you got to smile about?” he finally asked the blunt question which had been circling around in his head the last hour. What the hell had this kid got to smile about? Prison food? Exercise yards? From what Mud could tell he wasn’t going to have anything to smile about for a long time when they pulled up to the clearance gate at Ziggursky.

Just as Kevin opened his mouth to reply, he hesitated. A second later, a smirk formed on the side of his lips, and before Mr. Mud could repeat his question and ask him what the hell he was smiling about, the transport lurched forward violently; Jumpsuit was thrown off his feet, crashing into the side of his cell and grimacing in pain. Mud managed to just put his foot out to balance himself when he heard the explosion, then the yells of the guards as they grabbed weapons and headed out; gunshots, more shouting, then silence.

“I introduced myself as Kevin,” McKenel began, the smirk swapping sides between sentences, “But, well, I think we know each other well enough now.”

There was a loud crash as a body hit the door on the side of their containment truck. There was a small yelp in pain as whoever’s head it was banged violently against the metal of the door. The rattling of keys, and suddenly the door was lurched open.

Standing in the doorway, holding a set of keys that had undoubtedly been stolen from one of the fallen guards was Kevin McKenel.

“You can call us Legion,” the Kevin in the doorway said, prompting the first to begin smirking uncontrollably. “If you hadn’t guessed yet, I’ve got pretty special powers of my own.”

In an instant, Kevin again divided in two. There were now three of them. The one in the doorway passed a set of keys to the others, and they set about unlocking the cages in the transport, freeing villains who were only now rising from their unconsciousness. As Jumpsuit left his cell, he looked from one Kevin, to the other, and then to the third. Mr. Mud was expecting a question; perhaps one of the hundreds he had running around his head right now. Instead, Jumpsuit simply shrugged and ran from the doorway. As Mr. Mud moved over to the hatch that led to the outside world, he not only saw Jumpsuit jump an iron gate and disappear into a back alley, he also saw the carnage outside.

Dozens of guards lay unconscious on the cold road, a light drizzle falling onto their faces in the Brickstown air. One of the trucks near the front of the convoy was on fire, and prisoners were jumping from it and wandering out into the night, eager to escape before the cops, or worse the Freedom Phalanx arrived on the scene. What was most shocking about the scenes he saw was that in addition to the three copies of Kevin McKenel who were busy at work behind him, freeing inmates-to-be, there were literally dozens of others out in the rain, busting open truck doors and freeing criminals, pointing them in the direction of the best escape routes, or telling them where they could find the nearest sewer exit. From what he could see, these clones of Kevin McKenel had created a huge blockade, and had simply outnumbered the cops that had unloaded from the trucks to move them.

“You planned all this since they locked you in this truck?” Mud said, turning back to the three copies of Legion that stood behind him. He asked the question to them all; he wasn’t sure which one had been the Kevin he’d been talking to this whole time, and he knew he didn’t have time to sort out details. This guy’s powers were obvious; he could duplicate himself. But the question still had to be begged, how the hell had he managed to duplicate himself while being trapped in a Zig truck?

“Are you kidding? My copies were already on the outside. I only pulled the robbery so I could land up in here,” Legion said, his smile beaming. “Nothing’s going to make me more infamous in the underworld than letting loose most of Paragon’s criminal element back onto the streets.”

All three Legions dusted their hands off as Nightstick, the last criminal to be freed, fled from the truck and into the night, taking care to retrieve his stick itself from under the guard’s seat behind a cage, which had already been unlocked by one of the Legions.

“Not bad for my first day on the job, huh?” One of the Legions said. He was pretty sure it had been the original Kevin McKenel he’d been talking to in the truck, but he couldn’t tell for sure. “Listen, it’s about time I got out of here,” he said, as Legion after Legion piled into the truck and steadily dissolved back into one person; a strange thing to watch, since Mud had seen the villain Gemini split himself in two before, but never put himself back together again.

“Listen, thanks for giving me something to do while I waited for us to reach my little blockade. Your origin story was great! Here,” Legion passed Mr. Mud a small card which read ‘Legion – Criminal for Hire’ in small black print. “You ever wanna team up? Look me up. But be quick, I’m gonna be rising in reputation pretty quick after this. Wouldn’t want you to miss the boat.”

Legion’s last few clones dissolved into their host body, and Kevin McKenel was once again a singular man. Sirens began to whir in the distance, and Kevin hurried to the door, but stopped in the doorway.

“Hey, I left Spikeman locked in his cage for you. Figure he deserves it,” he turned and flashed that smile one more time. “Thanks again for the entertainment. I’ll see you later, no doubt.” And with that, he ran out onto the cold, wet streets of Brickstown and disappeared.

Mr. Mud took two steps out of the transport and saw the flashing lights of police cars coming over the hill. Just before he followed Jumpsuit, Nightstick and Legion back into the dark underworld of Paragon City, he took a moment to look up to the skies as they turned grey with the smoke that billowed from the lead transport. With a chuckle to himself, he spoke into the wind.

“Yeah. See you around.”