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Simultaneously with the moment Young Freedom met Talos... Earth-Prime Detention It all happened shockingly fast. One minute they were all in their cells in this bizarre , soft little freakshow of a world, cooling their heels or raging over their imprisonment, bound by unbreakable snare, nullifying fields, or simply encapsulated in unfamiliar bodies that didn't do exactly what they wanted. A moment later, with a crack of light and noise, the electronic doors on every cell shorted out, and automatically rolled up. Outside the doors, in the corridor that connected them all, stood their fierce, fearless leader of the Young Imperial, a cocky smile on his goateed face, the unconscious body of a young woman face down at his feet, blood leaking from her covered nose and mouth. "GENTLEMEN!" Hex gave a terrible, evil laugh. "It seems that I have...gotten lucky with this one. Bwahahahaha! Come, let us make our escape and return to the land of civilization. Once, that is, we retrieve our other friend. The one who the poor, poor little Lor girl here was keeping sedated."

In the universe next door, On Anti-Earth, Claremont Academy is known simply as "The Academy." (When you say that name in Empire City, everyone knows what you're talking about.) The students there are petty godlings drunk on power, young superhumans taught to believe that they are the natural masters of humanity and that the unfortunate regular people of Empire City and the world are there as their pawns and slaves. (However, the Academy doesn't actually discriminate against well-trained young killers, as seen in their most famous recent graduate Tyranny Syndicate member Black Bowman.) Cruel students are encouraged in their cruelty by their harsh taskmasters, decency and humanity discouraged by positive example and negative punishment. Compassion for the weak is a terrible embarrassment liable to fetch you a beating, or worse, from older 'cadets' or your teachers, most of them minor Syndicate members bitterly jealous of their usually more powerful students. The bold student can retaliate against a particularly brutal teacher, but falling beneath the watchful gaze of the drunken, lecherous Fletcher Beaumont II would be a mistake for even the most powerful student. Disobeying the orders of those higher in the Syndicate is a crime punishable in variously unpleasant ways. The most famous cadet team at the Academy is the Next-Syn, formerly headed by the Black Bowman himself and now commanded by Bolt, the spoiled, vicious son of Captain Thunderbolt himself. Bolt is the son of the head of the Tyranny Syndicate and plans to succeed his father there someday, hopefully after the older Ray Gardner retires. But there are other cadet teams at the Academy, organized by ambitious young students determined that they will be the next generation of masters of the world. The newest of these teams is the Young Imperials, headed by Hex, aka Mark Mason Lucas. A group of murderers, thieves, and outright bastards, the Young Imperials are a team with spectacular ambition and a whole lot to prove. And they don't care who gets in their way. Hex: Mark Lucas is the son of a slave and the grandson of a slave. Oh, that wasn't how they billed themselves. To hear him tell it, Jimmy Lucas had been an early member of the Praetor's gang, a loyal toady and supplicant who'd risen on the coattails of the Golden Age Syndicate into a position of wealth, power, and esteem. A generation later, Rick Lucas had been the Praetor's right-hand man, acting as his eyes and ears all over the world as the Syndicate broke the back of their world's few heroes and assumed near-total behind the scenes control. Rick was no fool, though, and when Captain Thunderbolt assassinated the Praetor and his people took over, Rick unhesitatingly took an oath of allegiance to the new regime. After all, he had a son to take care of: and this one he planned to acknowledge as his own. Mark hated his father. And he hated his grandfather, too, for the spineless, powerless, weak little men they'd been. The more the boy learned about history, growing up and watching his father bow and scrape to Captain Thunderbolt and his goons, the more he grew to hate his family and the weak nothings that they were. His family's power was the power of favored pets and slaves, nothing but a legacy of shame and disgrace. When he started as a student at the Academy, it wasn't as a cadet: he was in training to be a favored servant, a minion and goon like any other non-powered student who hadn't been training in combat his whole life. Fuming in his disgust, Mark worked, a brooding, spiteful boy whose anger finally exploded out onto the scene the day William Polsky's chest caved in. The other cadets had been gathered around and watching as Polsky abused and heckled the janitor-trainee on the steps of the Doom Room, the training yard where prisoners of the Syndicate were put to use as test subjects and targets for various student activities. Polsky wasn't a bad boy, really, but he was determined to win respect from his peers by picking on a much-despised "zip." And so it happened that Mark gathered up all his rage at the ill fortune of the world, focused in on William Polsky, and stopped the boy's heart dead in its tracks. That was something; when Fletcher Beaumont II personally appeared to welcome Mark into the Academy track...well, that was something else. Mark was a "luck vampire" for lack of a better word, a young man able to suck the good fortune from others and use it for his own nefarious purposes. He used his powers to pass a test; a car crashed nearby. He dropped a tank on agents of LIGHT? A school burned down nearby. Still deeply jealous of the spoiled children of power like Bolt who mocked him when he was nothing but a slave, Mark used his charisma and stolen good luck to build a team of his own; a team that would one day let him sit and rule where his father stood and waited, that will one day let him be served where once his grandfather was a servant. He hasn't spoken to his parents since the day his powers manifested. (Hex's costume is identical to Edge's, with the exception that he is red where Edge is yellow and black where Mark is blue.)