He looked at his long boxes and realized, with no small irony, that he defined himself through his comic book collection. His power manifested when he was very young and while he was intelligent enough to realize that the characters in these issues were just that, fictional characters, they nonetheless provided him with a yardstick against which he measured his actions. Unlike these fabricated heroes and villains, however, he had no grand origin story. There was no lab experiment gone wrong, no toxic spill, no good deed turned colossal backfire. He could simply do what he could do and he had been able to do it for as long as he could remember. He was disciplined and he was anonymous and he remained so by following a strict set of rules. Paramount among them were two. First, he never used his power in a way that would draw attention to himself. Second, he would never use his power to take a life. In three days, he would find himself breaking both of these tenets.