The Truth About Split Second

Split Second is perhaps Harborview's greatest hero. Born on an alien world, escaped to Earth from a totalitarian society now dead, he defends his adopted home with the powers of a demi-god and the perseverance of a soldier. Well, maybe not. But he does have an enthusiastic PR crew.
    Split Second was born Jesse Myers, and until his fifteenth birthday he was a perfectly ordinary teenager in the distant suburbs of Harborview. On that day he and several of his friends (Steve Jones, Dylan O'Connor, and Graham O'Connor), witnessed the incredible, and were changed by it. While wandering the woods at the edge of the Myers' property and a State Park, they were at ground zero of the crash of an alien escape pod. The exotic radiation from the pod's warp drive knocked all the boys unconscious and changed them in different ways—ways that would not manifest themselves for months. None of the five had clear recollections of the event, and staggered home without a clue what had happened.
    Several nights later, the sole survivor of the crash followed them, a member of the Sidari race. The Sidari are telepaths from a high-gravity world. The survivor was a police officer, an elite, bonded with the Qax, a jailer transporting Sidari traitors to a colony world for their exile. His charges had rebelled and would have escaped had he not destroyed the space fold drives. As the ship plummeted, he escaped in the emergency pod and discovered the traitors' ringleader in there with him. The Officer won this lethal battle, not knowing that the Ringleader had planted his own mind into the Officer's subconscious.
    The Officer set the pod in permanent spacefold, so that only teleporters could enter it, activated his life support suit, and set out to recapture his prisoners, who were still on the planet. With his weakened telepathy, there was only one suitable mind nearby: Jesse Myers. While Myers slept they linked minds, and the pair—Myers' knowledge & enthusiasm linked with the Officer's experience and drive—searched New England for the escaped Sidari craft. The Officer had taken all the survival suits, so he knew his targets could not stray from their craft for long, and they could not get the craft out of the atmosphere. They had to be somewhere, and somewhere nearby. He, they, would find them.
    While the pair searched, they interrupted members of the criminal element at work repeatedly, for the Officer knew that the Sidari criminals would search for pawns to use on this world. The Officer's huge frame, the painful telepathic probes of his stare, his ominous black survival gear, the lightning discharges from his weaponry, and his sudden appearances led the criminals and the media to label him as the Angel of Death, or just Death. Myers and the Officer didnt care what they were called; still, Myers learned important truths about public relations that he would bring to bear later.
    As they closed in on the elusive Sidari, breaking up their relations with the Giabaldi Mafia Family that dominated the Harborview area, things began to go awry. "Death" became more violent, maniacal, less and less in control. The Ringleader was slowly exerting hiss control over the pair, having taking control during down hours to modify the survival suit, placing specific psychic enhancers into it that would allow him to slowly subvert and overpower the other two. When a battle left five Giabaldi henchmen dead, Myers and the Officer knew that they had to do something.
    What they needed was a way for the Officer to survive outside the suit, where the pair could again bring the Ringleader's influences under control. In a desperate maneuver, the Officer warped space so that his and Myers' bodies merged. The result was a Human-Sidari-Qax hybrid, with a new array of powers and the ability to transform back to Myers' original form. The Officer's memories and personality merged with Myers', but it was a form of death for him, for Myers was now permanently in control, though aspects of the Officer stayed with him.
    Myers called this new form Split Second, and used its power to continue the fight the Sidari criminals. Standing six and a half feet tall, with gold-silver skin and a powerful form, Myers knew he didn't want to be hunted again. Split Second became the defender of humanity, using his vast speed to rush people to the hospital, rescue kittens from trees, and do all the other things that make the people love you. He became the premier member of the new Harborview heroes set, not realizing that many of those new heroes were his friends, also changed by the radiation of the Sidari pod.
    (That Sidari pod was lost to Split Second now, for teleportation was not part of his new repertoire of abilities. Inside the pod, the life support suit, still containing the powers and consciousness of the Ringleader within its altered circuits, was making plans. That suit, Death, would become Split Second's greatest enemy over the course of his career.)
    Eventually, Ground Zero deduced one another's identities, piecing together origins. While all of them had taken different routes for heroism, all agreed on fighting together when required. They formed the loose confederation known as Ground Zero, a personal joke on their origins. Wildcard and Black Flag brought their knowledge of the streets and the gang structure; Rapidfire and Impulse provided connections and funding from the government agency MEDUSA; Split Second brought a lifetime of alien police experience and acted as the groups spokesperson. (Black Dragon worked wit the team on many occasions, but declined membership for personal reasons.)
    During all of this, Myers graduated from high school and moved on with his life, maintaining a dual identity with the help of an alternate form and incredible speed. While Myers attended flight school in Texas, Split Second became a worldwide figure but still prominent in Harborview. He pressed for an international stance for Ground Zero, operating with the team less and less frequently while pursuing his own worldwide activity. He began actively opposing the Brazilian Liberation Front and other variant terrorist organizations. This brought him into contact with the Host on several occasions—they have had a rocky relationship, though he and Apollyon respect each other.
    Myers used his government stipend for the Ground Zero membership to design and maintain the proper public relations image As Sargent Master Stryker was in the generation before, Split Second became THE American Hero. His concocted origin protected his family while maintaining the faade of full disclosure to the press. The physical differences between Split Second and Myers insured his privacy.
    Acting both with members of Ground Zero and on his own, Split Second fought an array of bizarre foes—from the Sidari criminals to members of the World Crime League to international variants like the BLF. He led a contingent of the Earth forces in the final battles of the Plovian Invasion, earning the name hero around the globe. In the middle of the Daemonwar, he fought Death one final time, and both apparently perished. They battled at the edge of a dimensional rift, and Death's psyche fell into it, denied access to another containment suit. Death had injected Split Second with Toxyn's Anti-Variant chemicals, and when they set in, Myers found himself incapable of changing back to Split Second's form.
    Bereft of his powers, Myers still has the years of experience and training of a Sidari officer. He has taken to the skies in an old prop plane, leading a wanderer's existence. Helping people along the way, he is searching, always searching, for a means to restore his powers. He is sure that he will find it, someday. In both his Death and Split Second personas, Myers gained the benefits of Sidari biology, tailored for life on a higher gravity planet. This increased his size, strength and endurance to significant, if not actually variant levels. He also gained resistance to temperature and pressure, sufficient to survive in the vacuum of space for as long as he could hold his breath, once he acclimated himself.
    As Death, Myers had the ability to fold space, providing him with teleportational powers. He had limited telepathic power as well, but the probes were painful to both himself and his subject. He needed to stay within his life support suit, which prevented speech, but allowed him to survive in Earth's atmosphere. Built into the suit were electrical weapons, allowing Death to fire bolts of electricity, short out electrical devices or activate an electrical defensive screen.
    As Split Second, he has a clearly variant endurance. His telepathic powers are quite limited, but allow him to judge peoples' reaction and compensate, making him quite charming and persuasive. His space folding powers have changed to provide him with extremely potent super speed flight—Mach 8 in atmosphere, Warp 1 outside of it—with a corresponding boost in reflexes. The speed and space warping let him to dodge any attack, making him effectively invulnerable.
    As Death, Myers shared his consciousness with the Sidari Officer, and as Split Second he possessed the officer's memories and experience. He is skilled with alien police procedures and the rudiments of Sidari technology. He has a lifetime's experience and instincts, and is a skilled, canny combatant, difficult to surprise.

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