A career convict chosen for a shady experiment.

You are Thomas Baxter, 22 year old career criminal who has spent most of your life in and out of various correctional facilities since you were ten and got thrown in juvie for beating another kid into a coma after he called your mother a whore. It wasn't an inaccurate statement as your mother _was _a whore (somebody had to pay the bills since your deadbeat father ran off before you were born), but you took offense to it and chose to work through those emotions by grabbing a brick in the schoolyard and beating the kid about the head and shoulders with it. You thought it was a fair reaction. The school, the kid's parents and the legal system did not agree.

You ended up in juvenile detention for two years and got out to find that your mother had up and vanished on you. You weren't surprised when that happened, really, and you couldn't blame her. She hadn't asked for the life she'd been given and certainly hadn't wanted to get knocked up when she was nineteen like she had. Yeah, you couldn't blame her...but that didn't stop you from putting a beating on her pimp when he tried to shake you down for money she owed him. Even at twelve years old, you were already growing big and strong and you put that to use by venting your anger on the guy. It helped that you fought dirty, gouging his eyes with your thumb and then proceeding to stomp on his crotch until his balls had ended up pulped.

This, of course, landed you back in juvie and that became the recurring theme of your life. You'd get locked up for something, you'd eventually get out, somebody would piss you off or you had to steal something or do something illegal to get by and, bam, you were locked up again. It was a vicious cycle and some people would have probably said you were a product of a flawed system and that you were a victim, but you weren't the type to whine or make excuses. You did the crime, you did the time. Simple as that.

You got used to being locked up, even when you turned eighteen and ended up in actual prison for the first time. The fact of the matter was that, at 6'2" and 250 lbs of muscle built up from having nothing better to do but work out while locked up, you were an intimidating figure. Plus, the transition wasn't that big. The fighting was more brutal and you had to make somebody your bitch to show your dominance (something you did without much hesitation as you were always one to put survival over anything else), but, otherwise, you were used to life on the inside and, in a way, you thrived in it. Of course, that was only because you were in regular prison instead of one of those ultra-max prisons that held the super-powered types. In there, you would have been a small fish, but, in regular prison, you did all right.

You probably would have lived out the rest of your days locked up like that (with brief excursions into the outside world on parole or when your sentence was up), but something happened one night after lights out.

You were lying on your bunk, your eyes closed and sleep about to claim you, when you heard the sound of metal on metal as the door to your cell slid open. In an instant, you had your eyes open and were sitting up, thinking that maybe somebody had bribed the guards to get at you in your sleep. Instead, you were met by four men in black tactical armor and one in a suit with a lab coat over it that looked jarringly out of place.

"Yes, that one. He'll do.", the one in the lab coat said and, with a nod, one of the SWAT rejects unholstered a heavy black handgun and started to lift it to aim at you.

You tried to get at him before he could aim properly, of course, but the other three grabbed you and held you fast, slamming you down to the ground hard and gripping your short dark hair painfully tight to keep you in place. You struggled hard and you took small solace in the fact that it took the three men a bit of effort to hold you down as their friend aimed his gun at you.

"He's quite spirited. Hmmm. Well, hopefully that can be taken care of with the procedure.", the scientist looking guy remarked casually as the gun was aimed and fired at you, sending not a bullet as you'd thought, but a tranquilizer dart into the back of your neck.

"...Fuck...you...", was the last thing you chose to utter as, the **** in the dart acting remarkably fast, you felt your body lose strength and everything went dark as you lost consciousness.

You didn't know how much time passed while you were out and, when you woke up, your surroundings didn't give you any clue to that as all you could see was another cell in another prison. You were locked up again, it seemed, but somewhere new and unfamiliar. It looked like any other prison except a lot more stark and sterile and with a lot fewer inmates than the norm. In fact, as you looked around, you found that there were only six other inmates in cells like yours in your row. Every other cell was empty, making you think that this prison wasn't originally meant to hold so few people and was being used for something other than keeping criminals like you off the streets.

The fact that the guards were the same armored sort that had taken you in the night and were now armed with automatic weapons instead of tranquilizer guns made only made you all the more aware that something was up here. But what was it and why the hell were you here?