Suicide Risk #12

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 2 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

I had assumed, perhaps erroneously, that the reasons for the number of superpowered villains was a consequence of the stress of burying a superpowered personality under an ordinary one.  As the pieces chipped away, the fracture made them unstable.  But, as Requiem explains to his traumatized (and perhaps murderous) daughter Terza, "There is a sickness in you.  And sometimes it acts without you meaning it" (Suicide Risk #12: 1).  Even in their world, their powers are difficult to control and highly destructive.

Tracey Winters shows her considerable hand, one which comes over her with ease, allowing her to motivate it as herself—protecting her mother from the stranger Requiem's physical assaults and cruel verbal insults—but compelling her to violent actions she is later shaken by and regretful of.  Requiem continues to insist that she is Terza; Tracey repeatedly denies it.  They may, in fact, both be somewhat right.  Unlike the others, whose doppelgängers are each dead ringers for their real identities, Tracey doesn't look much like Terza, though she undoubtedly shares her powers.  She is perhaps even more powerful.  To Requiem, he and his daughter are captives and Leo's family part of the conspiracy to wipe them of their identities and steal their lives.  To Leo, Requiem is a dangerous interloper careless of his family's safety.  They are both men, it seems, fighting for their loved ones, misunderstanding the other.

Enter the clairvoyant Dr. Maybe, a man of trickery and deception, but one—perhaps—with the very answers Requiem needs.  In a great battle which pit Requiem, Guesswork (aka, Just-a-Feeling), Prometheus, and a host of other superpowered (and perhaps righteously insurgent) rebels against a great army with Time Warriors, their world was lost to them.  Because an oath prevented the victors, their captors, from killing them, instead they took their memories from them.  They fashioned new ones, building barriers and fail-safes against their real personalities from ever resurfacing.  Seven walls and a pit trap.

The pit trap.  Designed to wipe out Requiem should he ever again "reassert himself" (21), as Dr. Maybe explains.  But this trap has been turned against Leo, his life and his identity falling away from him as Maybe strides into the white nothing of his mind left behind.  "Ode to Joy," indeed.