Like anyone who wants to remain sane after reaching a particular level of success, I took a certain amount of pride in my day job. First and most important is, and always will be, 'Why?'

There are a number of why's to ask about, but we I will stick to the most important, meaning why do I do what I do? Why help the very people, who, if they remembered my existence, would be the first to line up and put me behind bars?

The answer isn't that complicated, however. You see, whether or not I like this world, I NEED it, if for no other reason than it is where I keep all of my stuff. While Supers, capes, 'Lantees', Authorized metahuman policy enforcement personnel, or whatever buzzword they are called this week, are little more than ignorant tools perpetuating the slow demise of human potential, their counterparts are worse. And so they remain our best hope.

I should know, I used to be one after all. A Villain, I mean. With a capital 'V'. But I didn't start out that way, not even with a little 'v'. Well, I like to think that anyway. After all I could have been the biggest villain on the planet if I wanted.

This was of course before the meta detection tech that almost became a hindrance to the freedoms so much of the world takes for granted. I found out I was meta by accident, as most did back then.

Nothing special, just your typical schoolyard fight. I held my own when I shouldn't have been able to. I liked to think I was a bit more observant than some, so it would have been a damn shame if I'd missed the fact that a child twice my size hadn't been able to hold me down. I still got my ass handed to me, mind you, but every time we were on the ground I was able to get the brute off me with relative ease.

Sporadic super strength, maybe, or adrenaline induced combat skills of some sort, I first thought. This was the early days of the Q-drone so, while most people are used to finding power orbs for their powers nowadays, most don't remember that the Q-drone simple picked and chose at random when it first arrived.

Everyone hoped, of course, to be given free power, even those who already had it. I admit I was no different, though, at the time, I didn't know what I would use that power for, or even what power I wanted.

After a bit of experimentation, I found out what the power was I had been given. Many received power like mine around the same time. Some think the Q-Drone was going through an ironic phase, but I like to think it was testing to see how creative we could be.

Blind Rush, The fastest speedster to live, but only when his eyes were closed. Alexandria, and her beloved catchphrase, 'knowledge is power', gain strength, speed, energy and reflexes and all that bibliophile had to do was destroy books, the older the better. Bloodfire, the worlds most miraculous healer, even to this day, that is, if you don't mind being set on fire.

There were many like us, given abilities that required just a bit of imagination to properly utilize. In my case, I gain all the strength and abilities of whoever I was touching, while I was touching them.

Yes, yes, this is all about me and not about them, I know. But we are all the protagonist of our own story. I help them because it benefits me, and it benefits me because I've been on the other side and know what the world would be like without the fools.

Blood is an interesting thing. When it's inside you, you consider it yours. As well you should. Even when it's no longer inside you, most people still consider it to be theirs. That is until it loses its vitality, it's lustre, it becomes dry, flaky and unsightly, then very few still think it belongs to them. Nails are the same problem, longer shelf life, but eventually, it too becomes just a thing that belongs to no one.

But hair! that was the key. No matter how long it's been, everyone considers their hair to be a part of themselves no matter how far from their heads it may happen to be. You may be on the other side of the world and as long as I'm touching a single strand of your hair, we both believe I'm touching you, in a way. It's a tenuous connection, but it's just enough for my power to work. And boy does it work.

I didn't even require all that much at first. In the beginning, I was twice as fast, twice as strong, twice as smart. The strength and speed didn't even matter to me that much, I was more fascinated with the boost to my brain.

School became a breeze, and I did just well enough in the extracurriculars to be known without being the most popular, the most sought after, the most... noticed.

Yes, twice the cunning, twice the not just knowledge, but wisdom. I wasn't quite sure why at first, but attention wasn't something I wanted. Not from my schoolmates and certainly not from the fledgling United Nations Post-Human Enforcement Service Agency. Quite the mouthful, I know. What are they, called now? The UN Meta Authority, much easier to pronounce, if not as easy to get along with. But one can hardly blame them after the number of times rouge Metas have almost destroyed a chunk of the planet.

Anyway, School was enjoyable. With no need to focus on academics, I focused on being a guy you just kind of knew, without realizing that everyone else just kind of knew me too. Made a lot of friends, quietly help a few people simply because I could, and quietly destroyed a few more simply because I could..n't stand them.

I was lucky in a way. I had managed to stay a child, with a happy childhood until my power showed me too much. Sure it was all there before, but people survive adulthood by accepting the fact that they couldn't change the world and that was that.

But I was still stuck on the lessons one learns as a child. my favourite had been the Golden rule, 'Treat others the way you want to be treated'. The police are here to help, our leaders are there to make our country great and to keep us safe. Work hard, be honest, save your money and life itself will get down on its knees to cup the balls and give you a blow job.

Adulthood, I think, is when you realize life has so many people down, no matter how you treat them, some will always be mean-spirited assholes.

Police are so underfunded half their job is robbing civilians to pay their own salaries.

No one who actually wants power should ever, under any circumstance, be allowed to run any part of a country.

And for most no matter how hard you work, no matter how much you save and no matter how much you try to do right by your family, friends, and neighbours, will life ever do anything to your balls but give them two swift kicks and one more just to be sure.

Yes, I left high school, just a bit bitter on the inside, though I made sure no one knew about it.

Luckily I also left with one other thing, A pair of custom, stylish wristbands of my own design with more than 300 different strands of hair. I hadn't become a millionaire, but only because I knew it would be too difficult to hide that from my parent as well as the types of people out there who kept track of that kind of thing.

Yes, I had 300 people worth of potential and ambition, but I had 301 peoples worth of caution. And it was a good thing I did.

South Africa, Texas, Hawaii, Quebec, Mexico, Columbia, Taiwan, Israel, and the big one, Somalia. And those were just the ones that were too big to hide.

Super catastrophes are what the news loved to call them. Incidents where the gifted, which they were no longer seen as became a curse upon the land.

Direct attacks on the people or governments, collateral damage in a battle between supers, or between supers and armies, or between supers and villains or any other combinations you can think of.

Drug lords and prophets took over chunks of countries, and why not, they had the power and in a way, it was no different than what had happened for the last 9,000 years. The base was different but power was power.

Of course, that meant the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Everyone wants to be in charge, no one wants to lead. Those who actually manage to take over any territory, then had to feed and govern that territory, something almost no one seem to consider before their bid for power.

That meant, naturally, rather than starve, the civilian population would begin to migrate, despite not really caring who was in charge. Indubitably Many of these would be kings, dictators, and el presidentes wouldn't like that. So they would use force to preserve their, for lack of a better word, hostages, who would in too many cases become their slaves.

Now, here's the thing, most legitimate governments don't care who is in charge as long as they continue to get their cut, and so long as the threshold for unrest isn't breached, which is about 3% of a population for most countries. Oh and one other thing, open slavery. Western countries especially still have a problem with that.

Now obviously the Metas doing the whole Kang the conqueror bit were either large groups of S-level powers or a few X-levels which you know are able to hold off an entire army by themselves.

But if there is one thing this world doesn't lack, it's armies. We've known war is cost-prohibitive for centuries if not millennia and that hasn't stopped us from killing each other for a single day in the history of the world.

So indeed, even if by chance, the super who took over manage to accidentally better the lives of their people, every single one was eventually killed or captured. The governments of the world are willing to accept a lot of things, but threats to their own power aren't one of them.

The lone EX-Level super incident in Somalia was of course too much for any military to handle, but obviously, that's what Nukes are for. Certainly, if you buy the cover story, it was just an accident. The EX-level super Eebe, who had just successfully taken over the country and actually manage to feed, clothe, and shelter everyone in it, just happen to be in the vicinity of a bomb we would later find out just happened to be stolen from a decommission site at the same time it just happens to go off. Clear as mud, if you ask me.

Still, these were just some of the more high profile incidents. There was still the shield over the Amazon, the disappearance of all three Cayman islands, The time the moon turned pink, and that time they shut down the government because no politician could say anything that wasn't true.

I'm pretty sure it was the last one that really broke the camel.

Rights, what rights? Registration was just a precaution, like how one had to register their gun. Not a single UN country fought against the idea, not even the one you would think would be most concerned about individual rights. But it's not the first time people have given up freedom over fear, and it won't be the last.

Anyway, back to myself, post High school. Not knowing what the future may hold, I elected to study abroad, far away from my parent and any consequences my actions, or lack of action, as far as registration was concerned, may bring.

At first, there wasn't much in the way of trouble to worry about, I took what money I had, and played about in many of the major stock exchanges. Learned a few useful skills and then made myself disappear.

500 fake identities added up to over a trillion dollars, my wristbands had long since become gauntlets and shin guards that contained enough hair to push me to mid-level XX power.

And that was before I started hunting supers in my guise as MR. Nobody. Didn't matter their power levels, I would hunt anyone with an interesting ability, and then just everyone period. Since I had long since gotten into the Meta registration, by way of owning the company that handled the data, finding prey was too easy.

I would ambush everyone from F to A level and simply overpower them. If things needed to look legit, I would fake a crime in their area of operation. During the ensuing conflict, I would be sure to collect my prize and find a way to either be scared off or escape. I rarely met the same super twice.

Of course, it's impossible to fight literally thousands of Metas and not have someone notice the pattern. But with all the powers I had gained combined, making sure I was never captured was childs play. By the time I was finished with any A-level powers I found interesting I was confident I would scale as an EX level myself if only for the myriad of powers I had acquired. Most mage-class are rarely lower than S-level, to begin with, and that's what my Mr. Nobody persona masqueraded as.

I would show up do some light crime and get chased off. I became known as a pushover in the registered super community. But that was fine, the respect of my peers wasn't really something I was worried about.

In my public civilian life, I made infrequent visits to the parents, remained vague about my job and life and generally came off as someone who wasn't living up to their potential, but still managed to get by.

In my secret civilian life, I funded governments lavishly to pass policies I liked, pushed technology I approved of and overthrow neighbours I deemed unreliable. The proper way to conquer a country is from the inside.

My 500 identities had identities of their own, each more secretive than the last, but not so secretive, that politicians worldwide weren't willing to take the necessary bribes. it was, after all, how business had always been done.

Tackling the S-level powers, turned out not to be as hard as I dreaded. I had long since acquired or built most of the Meta-Prisons on the planet. That made getting hair samples from those inside a cake walk.

As for the Hero types, Throwing a significant chunk of change at both themselves and any charity they chose on the planet was a good way to get them to voluntarily cut their own hair, usually on camera.

As for those who didn't fit into either category, Mr. Nobody took care of it after getting enough S-level locks and curls. By the end, I was confident not even one of the hidden SSS classes had managed to hide from me.

This is where it got tricky. There are no X-level pushovers. Where most Mage-class powers are considered S-level for all the elemental manipulation, most X-level Metas, do things like Break the laws of physics.

True every Meta does so in one way or another, but X-Levels take it to another... level.

Most of the less than 100 known X-levels went in for things like Gravity, space, time, or probability manipulation. They were considered vanilla.

It was suspected that Hermit, The Journeyman, Traveler, and Black Merchant spent most of their time on other worlds.

Both Narrator and Who-do-the-Voodoo weren't people I was going to go anywhere near.

While I did manage to get a few of the more common abilities by bribing enough of other people to take the risk, the real prize came from Wildcard. Admittedly that was only because Her power was so unpredictable she mostly refused to use it. Mr. Nobody was considered to be such a feeble opponent, I was able to get a strand of hair and escape mostly before she knew the battle had started.

Timid experimentation showed that while her power certainly was completely unpredictable, it was never directly harmful to the user. Directly. It had no problem summoning a pack of three-tentacle beings that promptly tried to kill me, though, so maybe it's just kind of a dick.

I decided that while it would be nice to get some of the more exotic powers the X-levels were known for, it would be too difficult to do so without taking undue risk to expose my identity. I'm sure I could do it, but I didn't want my real face plastered on every news channel after.

The 13 EX-levels, by contrast, were actually much easier. They were mostly more mundane classes, with somewhat ridiculous power levels. Elemental manipulators could be countered, strongmen weren't faster, speedsters weren't smarter, tinkers and summoners could be overpowered.

The last few years have seen Mr. Nobody Challenging every up and coming would be hero until they are doing feats they never thought themselves capable of.

It had to be enough. I'm sure it was because if it wasn't there wasn't a whole lot more I could do. You see, nobody goes through the trouble I've gone through for no reason.

With all this power, what need have I for money? With all this money, what need have I for such power? True it started as hobby more or less, but that was before my tech detected incoming from the same trajectory that the Q-Drone arrived on.

By my current estimate, less than 10 years. Most of the villains are lost causes, far too selfish to even wrap their heads around the greater good. But ten years should be just enough time. Time to get developing countries up to snuff, time to make sure this world has the tech it may need in a worse case scenario. Time for real leaders to come to power in so many of these countries. And just enough time I think, to make real heroes out of so many of these Metas.

Besides, if it's the worse case, some sort of invasion, my power would be lost with the death of the people who hair I have collected.

Maybe next time I'll tell you all about the 'Who'. Who i am, who I fought to get here, who stood in my way, Who is coming.

But for now that's the 'Why' of it all.