Blaise Jeannot Andrieux - Life With Tachyon (New York)

Life With Tachyon (New York)

Upon arriving in the United States, Blaise was uncomfortably fitted into Dr. Tachyon's already hectic life. Though he adapted well to new languages (English and Takisian) and excelled in martial arts, Blaise's powers and lack of a moral compass made it unwise to enroll the boy in public schools. So the young human-alien hybrid passed from one outraged tutor to the next, most of them presumably quitting after some brush with Blaise's mind-control. Occupied with running the clinic, Tachyon often left Blaise in the care of his sentient ship, Baby, which was immune to the boy's still developing powers, entertaining him with tales of his Takisian ancestors. An incidental benefit of this was New York's citizens were also kept safe. It was during this time period that Blaise first met Durg, one of a genetically engineered strain of soldiers from Takis known as Morakhs. Bred to be immune to telepathic powers, Durg made a convenient babysitter from time to time. Unfortunately, Durg, who had been raised by a rival Takisian House, had no great love for Tachyon and possibly reinforced Blaise's animosity toward his own grandfather.

Also during this time, Tachyon's deficiences as a parent became more and more evident. Harried for time, alternately inattentive and cloyingly affectionate, inconsistent in his teachings, which range back and forth from Takisian-based to more Earth-oriented beliefs, Tachyon engendered a feeling of aristocratic privilege, an abhorrence for the mundane, and a disgust for the malformed jokers in his already unstable grandson. Dr. Tachyon also unhesitatingly employed corporal punishment with both hands and his belt whenever Blaise misused his powers or, indeed, even suggested he might. All this led to day that became the turning point upon which the path of Blaise's future hinged.

While in Atlanta, amid the chaos of the disastrous Democratic National Convention, Blaise fell into the clutches of a tiny deformed parasitic joker known as Ti Malice. Able to fasten upon its victims by the neck, the joker could control the host's mind and superhuman abilities through direct stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain. Resembling a mutated fetus, Ti Malice used its "mounts" to partake in a wide range of experiences both sadistic and sensual. Surrounded by Ti Malice's followers, all addicted to the pleasure their master could induce in them, Blaise (mounted by Ti Malice) was compelled to use his powers upon a centipede-like joker in an orgy of sex and violence. One by one the joker was made to rip off its own limbs. Pleased by his new mount's excited response to the bloody spectacle, Ti Malice instructed his favorite slave, Ezili, to orally stimulate him. Blaise's first sexual experience involved mind-control and mindless brutality, a combination that would typify his behavior for the rest of his life.

The final catalyst for Blaise's descent into murder and mayhem was in the form of Dr. Cody Havero. The new head of surgery for the Jokertown Clinic, Cody found herself pursued by Dr. Tachyon, whose womanizing was legendary. Despite her resistance, a relationship began to bloom and Tachyon entertained the notion that Blaise might soon have a new family with Cody as surrogate mother and her son, Chris, as a stepbrother. This happy notion would never come to pass. Increasingly infatuated with Cody, Blaise was entertaining his own fantasies, ones in which she played the part of lover, not mother. Failing to purchase her affections with a gift of precious stones (gotten from Jube, but assumed by Cody to be stolen), Blaise followed her to the Jokertown Clinic and flew into a rage. The young man's sociopathic nature was now fully evident. After trying to telepathically coerce Cody into sexual submission, and a failed murder attempt on Tachyon himself, Blaise ran away from home. He was just fifteen at the time. Anti-Wild Card sentiment was on the rise, the Shadow Fists crime syndicate was taking over New York's underworld, Jokertown was a virtual war zone, and the government was helpless to stop the Shadow Fists' newest minions, the jumpers; teenage criminals with the power to exchange bodies with their victims. In this environment Tachyon's grandson would truly come into his own.