Chapter Text
Recommended Listening: Puppet Master Theme
When a baby glowed at birth, society was overjoyed. This child’s birth would serve as the beginning of a new era. It was an era of human evolution as more of the population began to gain superpowers that would come to be known as Quirks. Throughout generations, Quirks were passed on from parent to child as the population of those with Quirks rose dramatically. In 20XX, 80% of the population would possess Quirks, ranging from powerful, useful, versatile, odd, practical, or even useless. As a superhero comic once said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. It was only fitting that life would become something straight out of a comic book, as heroes emerged to combat the rise in villains, people who used their Quirks illegally for their own gain or performed criminal actions. Society became locked in a struggle between good and evil, chaos and peace, truth and falsehoods.
It is easy to forget that humans always possessed such strange powers. Before the age of Quirks, there were people born with psychic powers. Psychics had abilities ranging from future vision to psychometry (sensing the history and emotions behind an object by touching it) that allowed them to explore the supernatural and that which we cannot see with our eyes. However, psychics did not pass on their powers, unlike Quirk users. The population of psychics was based mostly in America and all but died out during the rise of Quirks. It did not help that most known psychics in the country were murdered in the late 1980s and early 90s by gruesome horrors (though that is a story for another time).
There exists one power that predates psychics and Quirks though. Perhaps it even predates human civilization itself.
That power is the Egyptian secret of life. By uttering the ancient words, a person can place a soul inside of an inanimate object, thus giving the object life and the capacity to think. In short, it is essentially reanimation.
Perhaps what it most chilling is that people can bring themselves back from the dead to gain immortality of sorts. The power of life is a dangerous magic, one that can place the power of God in the hands of man.
In fact, the magic never belonged to humanity. It was never a power for humans to possess. It belonged to a powerful demon god from the underworld, Sutekh. An Egyptian sorcerer stole the secret from a tomb, fearing that Sutek would one day rise from hell and take over the mortal realm. Sutek’s men chased the sorcerer across the globe, until he met a young puppeteer named Andre Toulon. Sutekh’s secrets were passed on to Toulon and Toulon used them to reanimate his puppets by transferring the souls of his deceased friends into his creations. Using the magic, he fought off Sutekh’s followers and fled. He would wind up in Germany where he would once again find himself being pursued, this time by the Nazis who wished to use his secrets and newly developed reanimation formula to revive dead soldiers to use as fodder against the Russian troops in World War II. After losing his wife and a new close friend, he created two new puppets and used them to seek revenge on the soldiers who ruined his life. He fled to America, where he hid out in a small hotel called the Bodega Bay Inn. The Nazis pursued him and Toulon committed suicide in his hotel room, his secrets dying along with him.
But, secrets are never meant to stay buried forever. The puppets were found and revived by a new master, one who used them to kill for his own selfish gain. The puppets were a deadly force to be reckoned with; they were a small seemingly unstoppable army of killers being armed with various tools for murder. The puppets would jump around from master to master, sometimes being used for good and sometimes being used for evil. The good masters were friends of Toulon’s creations and people the puppets would watch over and protect. Whenever they were used for evil, the puppets would always turn on their master.
Regardless of who their master was, it was inevitable that the puppets would lose them. The last time the puppets had been used were in the late 90s and helped their current master Rick Meyers kill Sutekh and prevent his awakening. After the battle, Rick left the puppets behind in the Bodega Bay Inn, where they would slowly starve from a lack of Toulon’s formula (it not only brought them to life, but regular doses of it kept them alive) and eventually cease to move.
It is unknown how the puppets and Toulon’s trunk were discovered in the Bodega Bay Inn or how long they sat there, but those who found the trunk did not know about the puppets. They didn’t care. At this point, it was the age of Quirks. Psychics and the supernatural were largely considered myths or relics of the past. The trunk containing them changed hands as those in possession of them sought to get rid of them whenever possible. Those who were in possession of Toulon’s puppets saw them as hideous creations that they wished to get rid of. Nobody realized the power they held or attempted to uncover their secrets. They may as well have been ordinary puppets, albeit stringless.
Much like secrets, such power is never meant to stay buried under the sands of time. Fate will always find a way to run its course, much like how fate brought together the puppets of Andre Toulon and a young quirkless boy. A fate that would lead him into a showdown against a great evil, something far more powerful and sinister than any villain a hero could ever face. A fate that would lead him to become… The Puppet Master!