The Bygone Corner

@JR19759Sure has been a long time, dude.

Starting off, here’s a tragic hero: Vigil.

Travis Creed was a troubled teen. Everyone could see it written plain as day in his slouched form, bruised face and unblinking eyes. With a dead mother and a father content to express his frustrations on the nearest animate being, life was not easy; made even harder in college by one Randal Brow, a thickset brute of a boy in odds to the scrawny Travis.

Travis was tired; he figured a nice drop down the college’s roof would do him in properly. This was not to be, however; he would be stopped and befriended by the college janitor, Jimmy. Tall, smiling, bright eyed, Jimmy would take Travis under his wing, teach him skills to defend himself, a remnant of his own misspent youth.

When Travis’ father died, the still too young Travis would drop college and run away from the authorities, preferring to live by himself. Ignoring Jimmy’s advices, he would use money won from streetfights to get himself a less-than-legal apartment arrangement. However in few years, the streetfighting scene was being cracked down on, and Travis was all out of rent. Coming across his still arrogant, former bully Randal, Travis made a decision; the next week he followed Randal to an alleyway, beat him up, and stole his hefty wallet.

This, however had tragic consequences; the next day Randal would walk into school with a gun, and Jimmy would be among the dead in the violence. A horrified Travis would find out over the next few days that the money he’d looted belonged to Randal’s father, just as much an abusive figure as his own had been. One beating too many and an unshakeable belief that it was someone from the college who had done it had pushed Randal over the edge.

Jimmy, always a loner, had left Travis his ramshackle house. After a week spent there in mourning, one night a pair of muggers would find themselves faced by a man in hood. They would mock and ask him what he was doing in a street so dangerous, so late at night; before he left them with cracked bones and several broken ribs, he would say only one sentence: “Holding a vigil.”

A soldier without a country, and a man with nothing left to lose; that was the recipe for the man who would undertake a one man crusade against the USA by himself. A bitter war veteran, the man named Connor Bleake would make it his mission to assassinate key military figures, disrupt police equipment and operations, and in short wage a guerilla war against the whole country. To him, this was revenge for his friends who had died needlessly in the last war. Covering his body in pale blue war paint in the manner of the ancient gallic tribes, he would begin this war in earnest. He would be pitted against not only the country, but also the various vigilante heroes who called it home; but despite the best effort of state and masks, he would never be caught. To the media, he would become known as The Gaul.