FSE

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As always, my story, yaddayadda, coincidental similarities, yaddayadda, please don't steal.

I've also uploaded this story onto danath's FurryWords website if ya'll wanna swing by that place and check it out. So here we go.

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I don't often find myself reminiscing about the past. When you live as long as I have you're going to have a lot of ground to cover and even in a normal lifespan, eventually it becomes an exercise in futility; pining for things that might have been. Things you think should have been but for a single mistake, a single choice.

Even so, it behooves us all to learn from our past because as trite as it may be to say so, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Something I know all too well if my long rivalry with the Steel-Clan Wolves is any indication. To that end, I leave the story of my life to posterity. It begins about six hundred years ago.

I was born in the year 1400 to an innkeeper and his wife, who had thought herself barren. I am told that the midwife took one look at me and remarked "This one is going to do great things." Treasured son of their late lives, I was doted upon and treated like I was fragile; never allowed to play with the other boys, forced to stay indoors where my mother insisted I learn how to read and write and do numbers. I've no idea where she learned it all, she died before those questions really became important.

It was always apparent that I was somewhat different from everyone else. The fact that my fur was solid black while my parents and the other foxes in the village were auburn and rust colored notwithstanding, I showed little interest in following in my father's footsteps as an innkeeper, too occupied with my own little world, fantasies where I was someone important, someone to be respected, not just the scrawny son of the innkeeper. And I was smart. I was intelligent beyond the abilities of my parents, bless them and may they rest in peace, to comprehend. Many people in my village were uncomfortable around me; even as a child I displayed an uncanny ability to see through their lies, the ones they told themselves, the ones they told each-other.

When I was ten, a small group of scholars passed through on their way to Turin. I pestered them with questions about the greater world for as long as my father would let me, though they hardly seemed to mind, applauding my curiosity and suggesting I seek tutoring. They were serious and said these things in kindness, but every time I heard the suggestion, it was like a knife to my heart. I knew I would never be able to afford any proper tutoring, my father could only just support our little family. No way was he going to be able to afford schooling for me.

When the scholars left I made sure that they "accidentally" left behind one of their books. My grasp of words was basic; my mother had done her best to teach me what she knew but this was not much. Still, I picked up on their meaning well enough, and even after I had memorized every word in the book and it was falling to pieces I continued to read it again and again. But it was a foolish dream, or so I thought at the time. More travelers came through as the recently founded University of Turin became more popular, and the differences between them and me became more clear. I knew I was smarter than all of them put together, but I had no way of making it out of the life I was born into. So I resigned myself to my fate as just another innkeeper. But all the while, every night in my dreams, visions of the things I could invent danced in my head. Men of metal and gears marched at my orders, puppets answering to my beck and call. Indestructible, implacable, strike one down and he will reassemble himself. Long before the word "robot" was invented, my metal men were figures of my fondest dreams and I indulged in the occasional whimsy that I would make them real some day.

That day came a bit sooner than I expected. On my twenty-fourth birthday my father presented me with what small savings he had managed to hoard over the years. He knew I was miserable and though he couldn't understand what I was going through, he wanted me to find my own path. It wasn't much, but it was enough. So I left, and I never looked back. Thirty years later I had taken the name Adrian Tomez, brilliant scholar and renowned philosopher. Ten years after that I set to work building the metal men I saw in my dreams. By then I was BlackFox (because I'm a fox with black fur. That kind of thing was on the leading edge of wit back then. Don't judge me.), the world's first "official" super-villain.

My inauspicious career began in 1505, during the Tudor Dynasty under the reign of Henry VII, with a wildly successful assault on London at the head of an army of metal men. I demanded obedience, requiring that the king abdicate the throne in my favor. News of the siege spread through the country like wildfire, even back then when it could take days to get from one side of the island to the next it wasn't long before the world's first supervillain came into conflict with his first hero.

Justin, an apprentice blacksmith with crude, home-made armor that was made from scraps, a pure heart and far too much courage and loyalty for his own good, high-tailed it to London. He was a smart lad, and while the King's knights may have found themselves outmatched by my metal men Justin figured out a way to get around them. He never met them head on, dying with honor in service to the crown, because he was smart enough to know that honor is not paramount. Where the knights attacked head on, Justin used his mind to find weaknesses in their design, exploiting them to destroy my mechanical soldiers, and when he found himself outmatched, he ran instead of foolishly fighting a losing battle.

He deduced my location and attacked me directly, holding me at sword point until I agreed to call off my army. He wouldn't have killed me, even though I had just tried to kill him. His compassion extended even to his enemies; but he definitely had no problems with turning me over to the crown.

It wasn't until the king asked to see his face that Justin removed his helmet and I looked on the face that remains in my memory to this day. Before then I had never considered romance as something to become involved with. I'd seen it make a mockery of better men than I, and I was not about to let it deter my plans. But on seeing Justin's face, I believe I may have fallen in love with him.

For his service to king and country Justin was made a knight. He returned home in honor, bringing new life to the tiny village he was born in, which quickly grew to a vast city.

I inevitably escaped before I could be executed, and I rebuilt my army, compensating for the flaws that Justin had found, and I attacked again and again Sir Justin arrived to stop me. This time he was stronger, for he was smart enough to not only understand my work, but had even adapted some of the technology and installed it into his armor to make himself stronger, better able to fight any foe that would wish his king ill. And again I was defeated. I escaped and attacked six more times while Sir Justin was alive and when he died, his son took up his armor. Dubbing himself the Steel-Clan Wolf, he stepped forth to oppose me. And I was defeated again. And when he died, his son took up the mantle. And we fought and I was defeated, and he died and his son took up the fight.

I moved my operations to a small island in the middle of the Atlantic, but by then our combined efforts had produced flight. And he tracked me down and we fought and I destroyed the armor, but he created a superior set and we fought and I was defeated. At one point I captured one of them. This one wasn't as clever as his predecessors, but he made up for it with a more flexible set of morals. He was perfectly willing to exploit his resemblance to his long dead ancestor to get around me. Using a variety of increasingly unsubtle euphemisms, he indicated that he would, as the kids these days say, "Rock my world", if only I could do something about those terribly restricting cuffs that kept his arms behind his back. I am ashamed to admit that the blatant ploy worked and not long after I released him from his restraints, I found myself once more being carted back to society to face my crimes. I am even more ashamed to admit that this tactic worked three more times before I wised up.

And this endless pattern repeated itself for five hundred years and would have continued for another hundred years and another hundred after that had the latest Steel-Clan Wolf had a son instead of a daughter.

At around the time the women's suffrage movement was in full swing in the United Kingdom that daughter took the Steel-Clan Wolf armor and came after me. Do not let it be said that I have no faith in the abilities of the fairer sex. Though I had never met a woman who could possibly come close to my intellect (I'd never met a man who could match me, but a few had come close.) it stood to reason that such a woman could exist. That said, this girl was not such a woman. Deluded on the belief that she could do anything a man could do without the need for training or preparation, she attacked me. It was not a difficult battle. Though fairly clever, she lacked the essential genius necessary to find the way around my strategies and my newly upgraded machines. I defeated her and threw her in a holding cell, and held her for ransom.

A few attempts were made to rescue her by more conventional authorities. The other heroes, whom I had fought on and off many times, tried to rescue her and I repelled them as well. Only the Steel-Can Wolves have ever been able to defeat me, a fact that now leads me to believe I had some sort of blind-spot that hindered my dealings with them, some unshakeable subconscious impulse to protect the descendants of Sir Justin.

Eventually the girl's father arrived. My many nemeses, quite opposed to myself who remained young through the centuries, were prone to growing old and fat with the passing of too many years and this one was no exception. He arrived perhaps a month after I first issued my demands, bringing with him a representative of the British government. In return for having all of my patents handed over to my possession, a promise to waive all crimes committed against the country and the retirement of the Steel-Clan Wolf mantle, I would return the girl and the armor she had stolen, cease all criminal activities, dismantle all of my weapons and similarly retire the BlackFox name.

It was not exactly the goal I had worked towards for so long, but it was tempting. I had long since stopped caring much for the throne of England and had instead begun focusing on the super-villain game as a way to kill time and test my robots out on the heroes. The Steel-Clan Wolves had confiscated many of my inventions over the years and patented them in their own name. The result was a rather substantial amount of money, enough to buy England in whole several times over were I so inclined.

So I agreed and a pact was forged. After that I ironically spent most of my time in England, visiting with my old enemy, reminiscing about our shared past, talking about current events. Whatever subject happened to come up. I rarely saw his daughter, who never did forgive me for humiliating her like that. When my old enemy finally died of old age I realized that I had never learned any of their names. Going as far back as Justin's own son, I had always merely thought of them as the Steel-Clan Wolves.

And suddenly I felt like what I was. A sad, lonely old fox. As always, I turned to my robots to soothe my woes. I pondered working on a new idea that had arisen when I wasn't looking, artificial intelligence, while also resolving to make a contribution to the scientific community. So I hired a promising young grad student to assist me in my research and began working on making my robots smart.

Having made the decision to become involved with the greater world of science outside my labs I came to the amazing, and not entirely unwelcome, realization that I was famous. Every four or so year when I replaced my assistant they old ones were practically able to write their own ticket. Apparently being chosen to work for a man widely believed (not least by himself, but nobody's perfect) to be the smartest in the world was enough evidence of skill that universities were falling all over themselves to hire them, the rumors being spread by those jealous few who hadn't been picked that I had kept my assistants as sex slaves notwithstanding.

The "birth" of number eighty-four in 1947 is probably my fondest moment. Probably the first of my robots to be truly intelligent, he remains by my side even today, though he's had frequent upgrades since.

Thirty years later in 1977 one of my new robots, specifically number one hundred and eight, went rogue. Dubbing himself the Evil Robot (just because they're smart doesn't mean they're clever), he fell back to my old M.O. attacking the nearest city with a robot army. I hastily contacted every hero I could think of, but before any of them could arrive on the scene the Evil Robot was defeated by a pair of heroes called EmKathy and the Duke, though they had lost their lives in doing so.

After that I submitted myself to prison for creating the Evil Robot and that was the official end of the activities of BlackFox. And there I sat for the better part of 50 years.

During my stay things started happening quickly. First the Brawl and then the war happened. The Registration rose to power, the Survivors burst onto the scene and then came the day that Erhaben came calling. But that's a story for a different day.