Echo of Mercy

Mercy has decided that her old name no longer matters.

In her old life, under her old name, she worked for the Lizard Moll's gang. Nothing flashy - she wasn't a supervillain herself, or even a soldier. She just monitored some of the start-ups around Mercy Island, keeping tabs on potential rivals. It wasn't glamorous work, but she enjoyed it.

Then the Storm came and world started to crack. Mercy Island was torn apart from beneath and sank into the ocean. Swimming desperately for one of the escaping ships, Mercy was caught in a wave of glowing green sludge from some Arachnos experiment and dragged, choking and burning, into the depths.

She awoke under a pier in Millennium City, a strange shore in an alien world. The city was being attacked by insectoid aliens. Some new form of Rikti? Nobody recognized that word. The humans here, who seemed shorter than humans in her world, called them Qularr. One of the creatures came at her and the flailing arm she threw up to fend it off went right through its carapace. At first, she thought they must be incredibly fragile, but soon she realized that the people weren't small and the bugs weren't weak. She was the one who had changed.

She joined in the fight, helping to drive away the bugs, and someone asked her who she was. She meant to say, "I'm the echo of Mercy Island," but all that came out was, "Mercy."

While she had never had any great respect for the law, Mercy was a survivor. She had been accepted as a hero when she helped fight off the Qularr, and she found that this was a comfortable life. No reason to put all that at risk by robbing banks or trying to rule the world. She found that she had a violent temper now. She suspected that some of this came from the chemicals that had transformed her, but she was also angry and frustrated at the loss of her home, her family, and her friends. Taking that frustration out on criminals, however, was enough. She sometimes wonders what it would be like to go farther, but so far has not seen any reason to try it.

On Halloween, the dead rose, and demons clawed their way through the veil of worlds. Millennium City felt like home for the first time.

In the chaos, Mercy stumbled across a thrilling revelation: she was not alone.

Fighting her way through a horde of zombies, she found herself in a group of other heroes who had done the same. Together, they dove into the portal and confronted the demonic entity beyond. One of the heroes was from Paragon City.

Despite her elation, of course, Mercy had to conceal some of the details of her own origins. Still, after a long chat over pumpkin-spiced cocktails, she found out that she and Aleph-Ka weren't the only survivors. Several other heroes, and possibly other not-so-heroic sorts, had washed up on these shores over the past year.

It was good to make a connection with someone from her home world, but it was even better to realize that she could make a connection, period. Maybe this world, this life, could be more than just bearable, after all.