A Brief Introduction...

I’m more of a visual person, really.
Don’t you know what I mean? I mean, it’s easier for me to visualize something than to plan it out some other way. Okay, like this: crook’s in a bank vault, right? He knows the system, so he closes the door and locks it, leaving almost no way in. Some guys would be like “okay, let’s plan this out”, but me? Hell no. I “visualize” myself blasting my way through the fucking door and the punching the guy’s front teeth out of his mouth. I can see them tinkling on the floor like loose change. That’s how I work. Especially if it’s one of the Hyper Police.
By the way, my name’s Alex. At least, it used to be.
Nowadays, I go by “The Tank”. Yeah, I know, it sounds like either a wrestler or a football player. And while I watched wrestling as a kid, I never really was much into football. It actually doesn’t have a relationship to either of those things. It’s a codename.
I joined the military when I was pretty young. My parents cut off my tuition because they said my grades weren’t good enough, and my job was not enough to pay for college, so I joined up. Ended up doing really well, too. That’s until they took over.
I say “they” like it’s some crime syndicate. It’s the government. They got twisted up in themselves, and now they call us a “united nation”, but it’s all bullshit. This isn’t a democracy anymore. But I’m digressing.
Once the government got twisted, the crime bosses tried taking over. That’s when the feds started the “Hyper Police” program. Some kind of genetic testing that turned guys into super-powered police. And ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a “super soldier”, just like Captain America. So I joined their little program.
Turned out I was their first big success. They called me The Tank. I’ve got skin that’ll deflect a M1 Abrams shell, and enough “super strength” to lift up an old B-52. Plus, I’ve got these “bio-blast” things. I always call it my “amazing ability to blow shit up”. That’s what I use them for now.
Needless to say, I’m not in the military any more. Oh yeah, they decommissioned me a looooong time ago. And I bet they’re glad they did. Because soon after that, I found out what they had been doing before they made me. Wandered into the wrong room and found guys that looked like puddles of goo with faces…it was not pretty.
That’s when I blew the place up.
So for a while, I was on my own. A loner, fighting crime whenever I could. I always thought of myself like the Punisher back then. They fucked with me, so I fucked back. And I could fuck pretty hard. That was back when Philly was still “The City Of Brotherly LoveÔ”. They don’t call it that any more. At least I don’t.
But I found a family, thankfully. I call them the U.P.S.T.A.R.T.S. Basically, we’re a ragtag group of people who are fed up with this whole fucking regime. Scorpion calls us a double-edged sword: we fight crime, and we fight the government. Sometimes, there isn’t much of a line between the two. We’re kind of like the renegade Avengers, even though the Avengers never really existed.
When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to have cool powers, and fight massive monsters against incredible odds. I never thought it would actually happen.
Well, it has.