Secret Origins - E-VAC II (aka E1), part 2

It was another botched bank robbery. Jason's fellows who had more brawn than brains had screwed it up again, drawing too much attention to themselves. Naturally, that meant it was his turn. He went in, flinging around phantom pain, crippling injuries that were all in the target's head. He reached the vault area where his fellows were being handcuffed, and shredded into the minds of the police officers with reckless abandon.

But something went wrong. One of the officers crumpled under his assault, cried out... and died. His empathic senses wide open, he felt the man die. Felt his pain and his fear and his... nothing. Felt the officer go from a person to an inanimate object.

Jason tried to blow it off and let it go, but the memory of it was burned into his brain. And then it happened again. And again. He began to doubt what he was doing. What he was being told to do. He opened his senses more and more to the victims of the group's crimes and to people just passing by. And he began to think of them as people.

During this period, his wife became pregnant. Jason was distracted from his introspection by the prospect of becoming a father. Styrm seemed to have a fascination with the process, too, doting on Jason and his wife and seeing to their every need. When the child was born, Styrm and a team of doctors oversaw the birth. Jason was kept outside the delivery room, supposedly to protect him from the onslaught to his empathic senses as well as to keep him from doing anything stupid.

And with the birth, all hell broke loose. Literally. ((Here I chose not to vary from the original story much. The battle between Good and Evil took place very much the way I described in the previous post.))

During the contest, Jason came to discover he very much enjoyed being a father. They called the girl "Jennifer". Jason spoiled his daughter, but was also hyper-protective of her. Understandable seeing as many people wanted her dead.

The death knell of Jason's criminal career began sounding during yet another botched job. He had gone in to bail out his team-mates once again, but his mind wasn't on the job. He was worrying about Jen, left back at the Nights' headquarters with only Styrm to keep an eye on her. He teleported into the wrong room, whirled on the only movement he saw, and shredded into...

...the wrong mind. An elderly woman, trying desperately to get out of the way and hide, suddenly found herself in tremendous pain from non-existent wounds. She cried out in shock and began to have a heart attack. In horror, Jason tried to do something for her, but all he could manage was to hold her up and stare as the light went out of her eyes and feeling went out of her body. He fled, leaving his team-mates to be jailed. He did later retrieve them, but he knew that he was done. He had to find a way out, not just for himself, but for his daughter.

His opportunity came after the final battle of the Contest. The Nights had been mustered in force, every last one of them including Styrm himself. Weakened in the battle, the heroes arrested them to a man. Dr. Jason Pace agreed to turn State's Witness against Styrm and all the Nights in exchange for amnesty and protection for himself and his daughter. The plane he and Jennifer were on was fired on as they left, but they escaped Los Angeles safely, arriving in Paragon City, RI. There, Dr. Pace would serve out a form of community service sentence, taking up a Hero I.D. in order to serve and protect his fellow citizens and fellow heroes.

Originally asked to work in the hospital system, Jason instead asked to serve with the Paragon Police Department. His application, however, was picked up by the budding organization known as Longbow. His first assignment, however, came from M.A.G.I.: act as a liaison and medical expert to the mystical supergroup known as the Dauntless Reverie.

His second assignment also came from M.A.G.I., after a fashion. He was teamed up with a young woman code-named "Fyre Hex", ordered to protect her as she learned to control her powers.