The saying goes that if a person is born into a family of wealth, they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. If that is true, then in my situation, relatively speaking, I was born with a diamond-studded platinum spoon in mine. I am the sole heir to the Williamson Estate. It is valued at more than twice the gross national GDP of the UK. Last I checked, the only person who had more wealth than my family in the US is Edgar Lockhart. A sound piece of advice to anyone with substantial wealth is that a diverse financial portfolio has greater potential to produce greater wealth. While the Williamson Empire was able to do quite well with a narrow focus on energy production and solutions, Lockhart Holdings has made investments in a multitude of billion dollar verticals and markets. It would make sense his monetary wealth eclipses ours. Furthermore, with Edgar’s expansion into alternative sources of energy, combined with his penchant for hostile corporate takeovers, I would not be surprised if my family and I were to be under his employment one day. That, however, is a discussion for another day.

In any case, my life over the last decade has had nothing to do with privilege. If life does come full circle, it can be said I have begun repaying the universe for the lavish life of comfort I was raised and grew up in. I don’t speak just financially though. I also mean in terms of life experiences. Everything has always came easy to me, whether it was athletics, academics, or social status. Life just seemed to lay down for me as I walked by each age marker.

High school was a breeze and I finished it early at the age of 13. I was the valedictorian, captain of the football, basketball and baseball teams, as well as captain of the debate and math club teams. I graduated early in college: Summa Cum Laude from Yale after 3 years, in which, again, I was captain of all the major sports teams. In fact, I led the Yale Bulldogs basketball team to three straight NCAA Final Four appearances, including a national championship victory in my third year.

By the time I was 19, I had graduated from Wharton Business School at the top of my class, while simultaneously obtaining my PhD in Economics from Penn. And to top it all off, during this time I had the pleasure of dating numerous international supermodels, celebrities and entertainers. I say this without attempting to sound arrogant or brash, but women seemed powerless against me. It was as if I had every cheat code to the game of life. That was until I decided to work for the US government as their top soldier for hire.

They told me I was the all-American poster boy. I was the American dream personified. They said my familial wealth and connections combined with my superior athletic prowess, mental acumen and mastery of interpersonal interaction separated me from every other person in the entire world, and it was a blessing from God that I was born an American. I was the opportunity which the Dept. of Defense could not pass up.

It’s interesting… they knew exactly what to say to get me to sign on the dotted line. And once I did, I essentially became property of the US government. However, that is when I discovered a life-long secret my parents had kept from me: I had been the subject of a top secret experiment!

Being 19 and finding out your parents made a deal with the Feds that offered their only child as a guinea pig at the age of 7 for genetic experimentation will certainly blow anyone’s mind. I mean, discovering that for twelve years, virtually everything you ate and drank provided from your family or school was laced with hyper-serums, and that every time you visited home from college you were unknowingly pumped with microwaves triggering the hyper-serums to independently evolve your cellular structure while you slept, is enough to drive one to the nut house.

I, however, found comfort in the revelation. My whole life, I never understood why it was I who was chosen to have life so easy while so many others struggled greatly just to get by. I pondered why on top of my family’s wealth, I was naturally gifted beyond most of my peers. It just didn’t seem fair. But finding out there was a greater purpose behind my success all these years that was beyond my control was surprisingly comforting.

You see, I had lived under the belief that the Almighty had made a mistake in creating an unbalanced world. Yet, discovering the government was behind my exceptionalism and not God, well, oddly made everything right in the world again. It wasn’t unbalanced, yet, fate had provided me with an opportunity to help make things right for everyone, and I now had every resource and ability I would ever need to achieve this.

Therefore, I was more than willing to complete the experiment. They said I would have super strength and speed, the ability to fly, a natural healing factor and nearly indestructible skin. I couldn’t wait! So they laced my body with the last injections of hyper-serums to cap off my treatment, and then had me endure the final round of microwave emissions to fuse all the genetic mutations together. After being baked one last time, I emerged the super hero I am known as today: Captain Noble.

It was a grand affair, too. I was paraded around the country on tour to meet all the most influential people, and to let the evil and villainous in the nation know I would be coming for them. I even got to meet the great Mayor Gemini DeLisi. It was incredible! But, man, I must admit how ironic it was that those days would also signify the beginning of my current exhausted state of mind.

It was not long before the government accelerated me through the most difficult soldier training program in the world. When I completed it, I was unleashed to distribute justice around the country as the DoD, FBI, CIA and White House saw fit. Eventually, I began operating globally, aiding allies of the US with their advanced issues of terrorism and national threats. I was doing amazing work, but even with my enhanced abilities the constant battles were beginning to take their toll. Simply put, I was spread too thin. Furthermore, witnessing the capacity for evil and destruction worldwide from all people of all nations instilled a great sense of discouragement in me.

Slowly but surely, I realized I could not go on doing this alone anymore. It did not matter how super my government engineered me to be, I could not continue to fight the world’s problems and enhance the interests of the US without help, and that fact was painfully drilled into my mind every time I would limp back to the Pentagon for another debriefing, after having single-handedly defeated an entire battalion of mercenaries or fascist regimes.

Ha! You know, thinking of how it took over 7 years for me to arrive at this conclusion makes me feel proud and stupid all at once. I am proud because I braved it alone for 7 long, hard years. I feel stupid, because I should have gone on strike year one, until they gave me a team to work with. Nevertheless, here I am. 11 years into the superhero gig and still chugging along. Things are different now, though. It isn’t just corrupt governments or individual radical groups of soldiers I am facing. The world is stricken with the plague of arch villains with super powers. It is a time of increasing peril. However, the rise of hyper beings and superheroes is also occurring. There is hope, but if I know one thing from my service as the poster child for heroism, it is that I cannot do it alone. Nobody can.

I have to find a way to convince my government to listen to reason. We need to form a team of heroes. I would like to think it wouldn’t be so hard to convince them, with new villains and threats emerging on the nightly news regularly, and with new heroes like the Platinum City Knights, the Legendary Samurai, Musashi and the Sista Clique becoming more and more well-known. There are others out there who share in my desire to rid the world of the wicked; from stopping those who seek to harm or oppress others. Lord willing, my employers will listen to reason and we can begin recruiting some other heroes, because now I hear they want me to target a man by the name of Ramses Hondo. And if this is indeed the man known in certain circles as “The Pharaoh,” then it will be the greatest and most dangerous mission I will have ever embarked on.

‍