My name is Jay Boaz, and this is my story.

    I was born to Tim and May Boaz in October of 1983. My father was a bush pilot, flying small aircraft to remote northern locations. My mother did not work once I was born, staying home to raise me.

    In 1987 I lost my father. I don’t really have any memories of him, other than his bushy salt and pepper beard. I learned when I was older that his plane had crashed in the mountains of British Columbia.

    My mother did her best to raise me alone, always finding the time to read me bedtime stories after a double shift at the grocery store. She died of a stroke in 1989.

    I ended up in the foster care system at that point, my grandparents too old to take me in and both of my parents having no siblings. I never stayed in one place for very long; I was never more than a meal ticket to most of the families I was placed with. They were more interested in the money that was supposed to be used for caring for my needs than actually looking after me.

    With no stable home I bounced from school to school, rarely making friends. I resented the perfect children with the perfect nuclear families, and found that I was driven to best them at every thing.

    I cared little for sportsmanship during athletics and was more concerned with proving my superiority over the other guy. In the classroom I strove to be the top of my class, proving the worth of the homeless orphan who would only be around for 3 to 5 months. And in the playground I bullied my way to whatever I wanted.

    I wanted to be noticed, regardless of what for.

    Starting in 1994 I began to hear reports from the United States about a powerful man named the Moderator. The Canadian media were of the opinion that he was a legitimate threat to the United States government, and that if military action was not taken against him soon he could very well conquer the country. Best estimates had this occurring within three years.

    The Moderator did it in one.

    Not content with just the United States, the Moderator launched a campaign to take Canada in 1996. With the rest of the world attempting diplomatic discussions with the Moderator (really I think they were just scared of launching a military assault against the United States, no matter who was in charge), we were easy pickings. By 1997, Canada and Mexico had both been folded into the United States of North America.

    It was at this time the rest of the world gave up on the diplomatic course and began military assaults against the continent. The Moderator instituted a draft, with all citizens over the age of 16 conscripted. But he didn’t stop there.

    Those of us in the foster system were rounded up and placed in special military academies. We were given no choice but to train to fight for a country that didn’t want us. There was little public outcry as we were considered a drain on society that had been turned into an asset.

    I was billeted in an academy in northern Saskatchewan. There were 200 cadets in total, and within my first week I discovered two different cliques within the student body; those who were good, innocent kids who had no desire to hurt a fly.

    The rest were like me. Resentful of a foster system that jerked us around, we were already fighters that had just been given something to fight for. We were going to get noticed.

    My instructors didn’t like me, but then again, I don’t think they liked anybody. It was hardly a glorious assignment, putting snot-nosed cadets through pre-basic training.

    One instructor took a shine to me, however, and took me under his wing. I never learned his real name, but we all called him Destructo. Rumour was he used to be a demolitions expert before a pipe bomb in Fort Frances cost him his right arm; no longer fit for field duty, he had been assigned to babysitter duty.

    Destructo worked me harder than any of the other cadets, and I thrived off of it. Here was someone who noticed me for my talents, not just because I had given another kid a shiner.

    He also tutored me in explosives, and I found I had a real aptitude for them. I loved the feeling of power I got from setting a C4 charge and blowing something straight to hell. It was like I could open a door to anything I wanted with a little black powder and a match.

    Because of the remoteness of our facility, we sometimes housed metahuman prisoners in a jailhouse on the western edge of the compound. Destructo had told me that if one ever got loose it would be good practice for us trying to contain the escapee. Or if we couldn’t and died we would have proved our uselessness and he could move on to training worthy candidates for the military.

    In his mind it was win-win either way.

    A group called Just a Bunch of Heroes had been captured during a raid on Kelowna, and as a security precaution had been incarcerated at different facilities across the country. We got some clown by the name of Chronic.

    I had heard of him before, a real goody two shoes. He felt that the public’s acquiescence to the Moderator’s rule was a sign of the chronic decay of society, or some bull crap like that. He carried a magical harp that was rumoured to be a former belonging of an angel in Heaven.

    Anyway, one night some of the still-free JBH members had come to rescue him. The JBH had retrieved his harp from where it was being studied in Memphis, and Chronic used it to blow his whole cellblock to rubble.

    Destructo had been on the scene, and I found him pinned beneath a pile of rubble. As the rest of the camp struggled to stop the JBH, I raced to his side, already trying to formulate a way to blow the debris off of him without harming him.

    Destructo died that night, pinned beneath the rubble, but before he died he let me in on a secret. There was a specific reason he had requested to be stationed at the training base in Nipawin, Saskatchewan, and I was it.

    It turned out Destructo was an Agent of Destruction, an order that strove to strengthen society by forcing it to face adversity. As an Agent, he had been suffused with an element known as Explosionite that granted him special powers.

    With his dying breath, he passed on a portion of the Explosionite to me. I had gained a watered-down version of his explosive powers; where Destructo would cause spontaneous explosions, I had gained the ability to exploit and link already existing openings.

    Filled with fury at the death of my mentor I confronted the JBH forces ravaging the school. I acted on instinct, and sent Chronic screaming to a watery death in a sinking oil tanker in the Pacific Ocean. His accomplices I tore in half, sending their torsos to Tuktoyaktuk and their bottom halves to Baffin Island.

    When my superiors discovered my power I was sent to Parodiopolis, where I met the Moderator himself. He took me on as an apprentice, giving me the name of Doorman. By my 21st birthday I was one of his most trusted lieutenants.

    I had finally found my place in the world. I was a part of the ruling elite.

    Then the Lair Legion, from another Parodyverse, brought everything crashing down. Despite my best efforts they destroyed my reality, which was never supposed to exist in the first place. By a stroke of luck I managed to escape my dying universe, to the Parodyverse that the Lair Legion had come from.

    Once again I learned that I existed to be discarded, that I was never meant to live in the first place. This was bad enough, but then I learned of the ultimate insult.

    There was a version of me who lived in this reality, who went by the name of Hatman. We were physical doubles; even my dead mother couldn’t have told us apart by looks. Here in the Parodyverse he was a hero, the leader of the premiere superteam on the planet.

    Everyone loved him. Everyone noticed him.

    It infuriated me, to learn that once again I was nothing. I didn’t belong here, just like I had never truly belonged anywhere before the Moderator recruited me. I was a foster child of the Parodyverse that didn’t even have the right to exist.

    I could feel the Parodyverse trying to reject me. It already had its perfect Jay Boaz, why would it need an inferior copy? With my powers I was able to resist the Parodyverse’s attempts to expel me, but I knew that one day that would not be enough.

    So I planned. Destructo had assured me I was one of the keenest minds at the academy, that I had natural leadership abilities. I was driven, I was focused, and I knew what I wanted.

    I wanted to exist. And I wanted to drag this perfect copy of me down into the muck to prove myself the superior Jay Boaz along the way.

    I hatched a plan. I would recruit my own superteam, an Abandoned Legion to Hatman’s Lair Legion. I would populate it with villains with an agenda against the Lair Legion, disguised as long-gone members of their fraternity. And when the time came, I would set them up for failure, turning the public against the Abandoned Legion, and thus by association their “parent team”. I even set up a fall guy in Killer Shrike, to take the heat while I enact the next step of my plan.

    This was the first step in my plan to disgrace Hatman. There are many more to come before I destroy him completely, leaving me as the one and only undisputed Jay Boaz of the Parodyverse.

    I will prove that I am not a cancer on this Parodyverse, I will be its master.

    I will matter.

    To be continued…

    [DISCLAIMER: Please note that the parents of Doorman have no resemblance at all to the author’s actual parents; Tim and May Boaz are pure fiction who do not even share the same names as the author’s parents]