Wildcard - A Comic Book Villain

Preface: So my brain working the way it does, when I'd rather focus on writing things like the Firmament or a supernatural western story (i.e. things I can proper publish and maybe get paid for), it instead wanders off to start world-building something else. In this case, it's a superhero setting, complete with origin events, villains, and hero organizations. A lot of it is relatively short, barely more than a paragraph in most cases. But when I was filling in some stuff on an origin event, I suddenly came up with a villain character that ended up getting more than that. So... here we go.

In this setting, everyone possesses the "meta-gene," though it is not active in the majority of the populace. What activates it varies on a case by case basis, and even with multiple present at an origin event ("meta activation events"), maybe only one actually develops superpowers. And even if a second person develops them, they can be wildly different from the other. Despite millennia of study and research, no one understands how the meta-gene works.

Despite the dangers inherent in trying to activate one's own meta-gene, people still persist in trying to understand the unfathomable. This inevitably leads to origin events like the Bright Spark Flash, which led to several early modern heroes' rise and ultimately the genesis of the Allied Hero Commission, but also to the rise of one of the first modern metahuman terrorists...

WILDCARD

One of the first metahuman terrorists, Gabriel Winters didn't start out a villain. He was a proud serviceman in the Army, serving his country proudly and even becoming a member of the military police. He was later stationed at Proud Valley, California, a classified facility where various technologies and weapons were tested, and where he was soon involved in the meta-activation incident caused by Project Bright Spark in the late 1960s. The exact details of Project Bright Spark-- as well as what happened in what is colloquially called the 'Bright Spark Flash'-- remain classified, but what is known is that it caused wide destruction at Proud Valley, killing dozens of people stationed and working there, and also caused multiple meta-genes to activate among the survivors.

MP Officer Winters was one of those survivors, but his meta-gene's activation was anything but simple. He was experiencing random fluctuations of his vital signs, wildly various symptoms of illness, and alternately seemed to wither away and swell with inflammation as the Army struggled to determine what was happening to him. However, as Winters' condition appeared to stabilize, and other survivors of the Bright Spark Flash began to manifest their own active meta powers, it was determined that Winters' condition was somehow connected to his meta-gene's activation, though it remained unclear what it actually did to him.

Winters was allowed to return home, released from his military service, but the next ten years of his life would be marred by struggles to receive treatment for his persistent fluctuating condition. He nominally received some compensation from the Army because of the Bright Spark Flash, but it wasn't enough, and it affected Winters' family life. He grew resentful of the military and government from what he perceived as their indifference-- especially as some of the early Commission heroes had come from other Bright Spark Flash survivors, who were lauded by the establishment-- and led to his eventual catalysis. Winters finally learned what his meta-gene had done to him, and found out how to harness it.

Winters' meta-gene had given him a literal random selection of powers. Fueled by his emotions, Winters could activate his gene at will, giving him a random meta power set, often influenced by his mental state and his surroundings, which would last for a period around fifteen minutes. When the active period was over, he would enter a similar 'cooldown' period as the powers left him, but this could have bad consequences on his body as well.

Winters took his power, after learning how to control it to a degree, and stormed onto an Army base where one of the Project Bright Spark scientists was present to provide briefings about their studies of the incident at Proud Valley. Winters activated his powers and went on a rampage, using electromagnetic powers to fling vehicles around and electrocute people, which lasted until an Army sergeant, later known as the Commission hero Sergeant Stone, fought him to a standstill and took him down.

Winters-- now dubbed 'Wildcard' because of his powers and mental state-- was incarcerated, but the nature of his powers means that he can break out at any time, as he often has done. Over the years since then, Wildcard has refined his control, able to 'turn a card' at will, and can even maintain the powers as long as he wants, though the powers will deactivate whenever he loses consciousness, and he will enter a 'cooldown' period that lasts as long as his active period had. Wildcard is an older threat now, but something about the Bright Spark Flash has also arrested his aging at the point when he first went on a rampage.

To this day, Wildcard maintains his hatred for the military and the government, as well as the Commission. He has often been aligned with other villains and nefarious organizations, who will use this hatred to recruit him to their side (if not their cause), but they know he has his own motivations and cannot be entirely trusted.