Preston Riggs was a happily divorced, middle-aged man living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and working as a sulfur recovery operator for SulfurWorkx, a wholly owned subsidiary of Volksmacht Technology Solutions (VTS). Two years after their divorce he and his ex-wife, Priscilla Pickles, had settled into a better friendship than they’d ever had as a couple… even if some of their friends rolled their eyes and muttered “codependent much?”
Unfortunately, just as life was looking good again, Preston became the victim of terrible industrial accident that ended his life, at least as he’d known it. On 1 November 2019, during the graveyard shift, a strange reading in one of sulfur processing units he was operating showed an alarming rise in temperature. Sensors indicated a small solid of some kind was in the mix. As he attempted to remove what appeared to be a smallish crystal, the temperature in the unit spiked, suddenly exceeding 450°F – and the molten sulfur exploded!
Preston was engulfed in the burning material, and the last thing he remembered was a sharp pain in his chest as the strange crystal embedded itself in him from the force of the blast, a sense of searing heat, and then… nothing. By the time help arrived Preston Riggs’ body had apparently been vaporized – a fact that some of his co-workers found suspicious, as molten sulfur simply didn’t get hot enough to do that to a human body. But however unlikely, the fact remained that by the time they’d vented the toxic gasses from the building, no trace of a body could be found.
The plant closed for the weekend, the company brought in psychologists to help employees mourn the loss of a friend (or at least a co-worker), and the “Days Without an Accident” sign was reset from 248 back to zero. Then it was back to business as usual.
But Preston Riggs had not truly perished. By some miracle his consciousness survived the destruction of his body, its functions somehow embedded in a cloud of sulfuric gas. Unaware of any of this, what was left of the man floated off into the night air above SulfurWorkx plant. He later calculated that he drift in this state for over a month before the first glimmers of memory and thought began to reemerge. A week after that, and he was fully aware of himself again, if mightily confused about his current physical state. From that point it took him mere days to learn how to will himself back into a physical form.
Unfortunately, that form scarcely resembled the person he’d once been. Instead of a moderately good-looking country boy, with thinning brown hair and a bit of a beer belly, the best he seemed able to manage was something that looked like it belonged in the Burn Unit of a hospital, or maybe a morgue – his skin looked like charred leather, where it wasn’t entirely made of sulfur crystals.
His instinctive reaction was to turn to Priscilla, and before he could fully think out the possible repercussions of that act, he found himself on the doorstep of their old house (he hadn’t minded letting her have it in the divorce) on Christmas Eve. There had been surprisingly little screaming or fainting, all things considered, and none of the neighbors had appeared – hardly surprising in Ramsay, really, with so many immigrants just wanting to keep their heads down and mind their own business.
Eventually Preston was able to make Priscilla understand that it was truly him, and by Christmas night she had invited that he’d have to move back in – it wasn’t like he could go back to his apartment in Briar Hill, now could he? Since there was no chance of rekindling a physical relationship, even if either one had wanted to, he’d agreed. She was right, what else was he going to do? Hang out as a cloud of sulfur vapor over the city, waiting for crime to rear its head?
Crime, because he had decided that he was going to take this second chance at life, crappy as it was in most ways, to do so good in the world – and his choices seemed limited to circus freak or vigilante crime fighter. Priscilla got behind the whole superhero idea with an unnerving enthusiasm, actually, and it was she who first suggested that the strange crystal in the sulfur mix that night might be what had transformed him.
A People magazine article from several years ago about the Liberty Alliance hero Vitruvian had mentioned something about an alien crystal that had imbued him with immortality, and this started her off on a research jag to the local library that lasted a week. By early January she’d amassed a pretty impressive collection of books, articles and even research papers, very few of which she understood at anything beyond the surface level. Not that he understood much more; but together it was enough to convince him that it must have been a so-called Seeker Matrix Crystal (or kundalini stone, as Dr. Sampson of the Phenom Four called them) which had saved him from death that night, and imbued him with his strange new abilities.
He soon began experimenting with those abilities, while simultaneously investigating his former employer and their parent company, the U.S.-based VTS. While Priscilla did the more public researching he couldn’t easily undertake (a trench cost and slouch hat only went so far in disguising his frightening form – and then only in dim light, at a distance), he undertook more clandestine investigations. By May they’d amassed enough damning evidence to get an official investigation of SulfurWorkX started, once they’d fed it all anonymously to the local press. The spectacular public confession of the company director, terrified by what he called a visitation by a “stinking demon form Hell” sealed the deal. The parent company, VTS, naturally distanced themselves and suffered no repercussions at all.
That summer, accepting the name Brimstone which the press had hung on him, he began a vigilante campaign against other corporate environmental offenders in Calgary and other parts of Alberta, putting the fear of God into their leaders. The police began to take an interest in him as much as in the crimes he uncovered, and Preston did his best to keep Priscilla out his “business” after the SulfurWorkX success. But she insisted on being his “gal in the chair,” as she put it, and continued to make as much trouble for him as she managed to help. He began to fear Calgary was getting too hot for them…
In October he came back to the house one night to find his ex-wife packing several bags. Confused at first, he was soon annoyed. Priscilla had, somehow, managed to get a job in the corporate HQ of Volksmacht Technology Solutions, in Astoria, Oregon. In the States. And was leaving the next day to start the effort to bring the bastards down from within – she’d never shared her ex-husband’s unconcern with how they’d managed to slip out from under any responsibility for his “death.”
She’d already sold the house, which she’d only owned outright since the beginning of the year (thanks to the insurance settlement – he’d never taken her name off the various insurance policies, brokerage accounts, nor his will), and had already found a nice little condo in Warrenton, a suburb of Astoria that she thought sounded nice. So Preston could either join her, and help her take down the men whose negligence (or worse – how had that matrix crystal gotten into the sulfur tank anyway?) had ruined their lives, or he could stay in Calgary and play Toxic Avenger to his heart’s content…
They drove to Oregon in her ’87 Tesla ElectraGlyde, and he’d drifted across the Canada/US border as a cloud of sulfur gas. They arrived in Astoria on 14 October 2021, and Priscilla remained adamant about starting her new job at VTS on Monday the 19th. The night of the 15th, Brimstone decided he’d better check out the company’s chemical plant out at Clatsop Spit – the one Gojira had apparently been aiming for before being stopped by the Vanguard and the new Ultra…
Ein ganz hervorragendes stück hintergrundgeschichte