Professor Dark aka Paragon
Ensconced in the dry heat of his office on the second floor of the Fermi building, Professor Lachlan Dark brooded.
There was no measure of humanity which now applied to him. In every sense he had moved beyond the mortal and was now something for which no appropriate human word existed that was not drowned in myth. Titan, djinn, demon....
If by some magic this has all transpired a few thousand years earlier his immortal coutenance would be stamped onto all the currencies of the world. An eternal god-emperor ruling over the ant-like race of man. But not even Dark had the liberty of chosing the world into which he was born or the circumstances of his assent.
And so he was a professor in an age of nuclear weapons, at the dawning of space exploration, when being handy with a sword simply didn't cut it and solving universal mysteries got you half an hour on Larry King and the lead story in British broadsheet newspapers for one day.
He had always wondered, in the comic book stories he had read as a boy, why it was that so many people were determined to blow up cities. At what point did being a cackling master criminal become a viable career choice for these people? There was simply no logic behind it. Still, Dark had to admire the kind of tenacity that brought these beard-stroking loons back again and again to court destruction and defeat.
But what were his ambitions? He had already advanced as far in his career as was possible. Would he spend the next twenty years teaching until it became too obvious that his face had not aged and then would he vanish... and do what? And in any case it was only a matter of time before he ran into some academic who knew him from MIT; they would immediately see he was changed. Or he would make some discovery and his picture would appear somewhere, an unimaginative reporter would find his high school year book.
Anonymity was not practical. Eventually, unavoidably, his super powers would be known. He could not keep that secret.
So whatever his ambitions were, he would have to pursue them publicly.
He pressed the speakerphone button and dialed the number he found online. After a few rings someone answered.
"Good afternoon," he replied. "My name is Professor Lachlan Dark, I'm Head of Applied Mechanics at The Randoph Insitute of Technology. I am an unregistered mutant and I would like to be interviewed live by a member of your evening news team. I have a lot to say and I have exclusive details about the explosion in Rainport today which are not known by the police... Of course I'll hold, I'll give you 30 seconds before I look for Larry King's number".