Another Sidekick Story

You can call me Jules, I guess. If you have read this far you have earned that right.

I met The Face on my first day with the World's Greatest Heroes. More like ran into him. That man sees it all. He knows, he actually knows what it is to don a mask and go out there and help the nameless, the faceless. No pun intended. It is a bit weird but you get accustomed to the fact that his mask is his face. That is the last human thing about him. He might look human, talk and feel human. But that man is much more. His Scepter feels like living energy. Power of the Cosmos, he calls it. Never treated me like a sidekick.

Everyone usually looks down upon the science accident kind of hero. Which is me. I was just a cleaner at the Mark Aquarius Laboratories when it happened. A fight between Mercury and Mark Aquarius led to an accident. I got caught in there.

Cliché, cliché. Mercury decided that it would be good for his image to take me on as a sidekick. That was just for the media. I could generate a low-level psychic field that could pass off as a sort of invisibility. I worked solo. Even made the papers, when I, along with officer Mulligan, made that drug bust in the Southern warehouses. Ended up marrying him.

Then of course, Mercury made a big fuss out of me being gay, even though no one really gave a damn. I have to tell you. Mercury is a real jackass. And pretty stupid too. Now, I am no Einstein but even I could tell you what happens when you block an energy outlet. It has to come out from somewhere else. I am of course referring to the infamous Australian Open. I did not coin that term.

Australia, just split down the middle. Turns out Mr. Ink had some sinister plan in place that involved a shrink ray. He wasn’t the first one. (see appendix)

Mercury bumbled his way in. Tried stopping Mr. Ink by smashing the outlet. The energy released by that shrink ray caused the rift. Mr. Ink did his best. He channeled it and split that country right down the middle. That amount of energy could have done a lot of damage. Killed many people. But Mr. Ink saved a lot of them.

Just goes to show, that all bad and good is not black and white. I found it the hard way. The energy split reversed something about my powers. I lost them.

I tried my best to point out Mercury’s fault in the whole thing. But who is going to believe a sidekick? Let alone one with no powers. 

I decided to retire.

But not before one last fling with the cape.

[An excerpt from the instant bestseller, out now, Julius Raymond: A Sidekick Story]