OK I'll bite, what's the story behind your comment about Mirror Master?
While it has taken me some time to adapt to the fact that my "interactions" with the superheroes I've otherwise spent my entire life respecting have only become more common as I become more settled in my job (and the running of this blog), what HASN'T changed is the fact that I have been caught up in a number of honest to god "superhero fights" that are thankfully able to be counted on one hand with multiple fingers left over. But the one that I was caught up in the earliest in life is also the one that left the biggest impression on me.
It gave me a burn scar. A gift to remember a man I've never met again.
(The picture of the Mirror Master I am most familiar with, taken around the same time as the story I am about to tell)
Evan Mcculloch is the man most currently known as the Mirror Master, or at least he was when I was younger. The original holder of the title, Sam Scudder vanished for many years after the first multiversal crisis and has only sporadically reappeared since. Though the actual explanation for that is immaterial to this story.
Mcculloch was originally one of the most infamous criminals in the United Kingdom, known as Scotland's best and most wanted hitman. After the seeming death of the original Mirror Master he was approached by the FBI to take on the identity of the deceased villain, using it as a cover to assassinate high profile targets without it being drawn back to his government handlers. As one can expect, this plan almost instantly went awry. Mcculloch killed his handlers, stole the equipment and used them for their original purpose in a life of high visibility super crime.
The gear was mostly related to the gimmick of mirrors. Lasers, illusions, and traversal into a strange "mirror dimension" that allows him to travel between reflective surfaces even when they are totally unconnected in the three dimensional world. The amount of scientific principles that have been discovered, expanded or upended by Scudder and Mcculloch's technology is not small. But in the way that criminals do, he mostly used it to steal things and failing to kill the Flash.
One such unlucky heisting spree sent him on the run from his adopted Central City, needing burner money to disappear. Brining him to a small, unassuming credit union in the town of Amnesty Bay, Maine. A credit union where my mother had set her twin child carrier upon a desk so that she could make a routine withdrawal.
Keep in mind, with the age I was at the time. The details of this story are being recounted by people who were NOT me (my mother, most especially) and are the story as I have always heard it growing up. Any personally recollections I have of this event will be noted as such
She unbuckled her two three year old children, my brother and I, from the carrier so we could stretch and kick a little. It had been a long morning and we were starting to get antsy (one can probably blame the then-undiagnosed autism spectrum disorders. Or just toddlers being toddlers). Turning her back to us for only a moment or two while still being well within arm's reach.
One of my earliest core memories was looking up at the bank's front window and being amazed that the bank's name and logo appeared backwards from what they had seemed to be walking in. I was three after all. Object permanence was still a new and exciting feeling, the spatial logic to understand that an object behind a wall would be reverse to my perspective would take a few years yet. It stuck in my mind though because I saw a man in the mirror. Not someone outside on the street looking into the bank. And not the back of another patron inside the bank, reflected in the glass. But a man in orange and green who seemed entirely contained within the glass' reflection.
Babbling in wordless wonder I reached myself out of my seat, grabbing at open air to try and touch the ghostly man in the glass. Only to watch him begin to step OUT of the glass like a ghost. It was at that moment that history did a little turn. Startled by the sudden appearance of the man from the glass, I tumbled backwards off my tiny toddler legs. landing on my head and shoulders in the seat of a half forgotten bank chair that was mostly pushed up against the desk's underside. As the Mirror Master announced his presence and drew attention to the laser gun he was holding, no one noticed a toddler vanishing behind a tall chair back.
As is the nature of the Rouges' code, the Mirror Master allowed all patrons and staff (save the manager needed to open the various safes) to exit the building before welding the door shut behind him with a laser blast. My mother noticed the discrepancy in the weight of her child carrier only the second AFTER the doors were sealed behind her (a distance of three or four strides, maximum, before anyone starts judging my mother) And the Mirror Master paid little mind to ONE screaming woman.
It was at that time that Aquaman returned to his "home town" alongside Danish national heroine Little Mermaid, having just wrapped up a case of much more Atlantean proportion. Summoned of course by the rushing police cars and gathering crowd, the two aquatic heroes smashed through the front window and ordered the Mirror Master to stand down. Their appearance was met with the Mirror Master producing a new weapon from his belt.
Shaped like a smooth, grey-glass egg with a single button on top. It was meant to collect ambient light and then detonate the energy to reduce the outer shell to a cloud of shrapnel and rushing plumes of molten glass. The heroes, of course, dodged, deflected or otherwise defended against the onslaught. And, in his own hurry, one of the grenades Mccullugh had thrown hadn't had its activation button fully depressed before being thrown. Leaving it rolling like a dud into the middle of the lobby floor.
Where somehow it caught the attention of a three year old Sid Sweeney who had just figured out how to put his feet on the floor and was trying to toddle away from the loud noises and angry shouting. Especially when I saw my mother through the door. And, of course, I stooped down to try and touch the smooth, shiny object that brushed up against my ankle. At the EXACT same moment that my mother, the crowd, and the three assembled superhumans all noticed my presence.
I remember three things in detail.
The feeling of my hand clicking a button into place.
Being bodily tackled by something heavy, damp and cold.
And a SEARING pain flashing upward from my right hand.
I passed out almost instantly. My pain tolerance isn't very good NOW I can only imagine what I was feeling then.
Thrown off kilter by my appearance, and seemingly less inclined to fight back after what had nearly occurred the Mirror Master was quickly wrapped up by Aquaman.
The Little Mermaid for her part had BEEN the cold impact I had felt, wrapping her arms and tail around me and catching shrapnel and burning glass all the way up her hip and back for her trouble. She returned me to my mother's waiting arms, and followed us to the hospital where she would be laid up with third degree burns and glass splinters for several weeks. Though she was quickly transferred to her native Denmark. I've never actually met the woman.
I was only in the hospital for a couple of days at first. Only my right hand had been fully left out, held between Little Mermaid's arm and her torso. For that SMALL exposure I was left with a bright red burn scar that originates in the webbing between my middle and ring finger, stretching until about an inch past the top of my wrist where where a small bubble of superheated glass impacted my hand and then blew back from the pressure of the explosion.
A larger droplet had deflected off the end of one of Little Mermaid's tail fins and landed on my right knee (below the waist I had only been wearing a diaper and baby boots). The damage wasn't nearly as bad due to the much lesser heat since the droplet had taken a much longer route AND originally impacted Little Mermaid's cold, wet tail. It left an egg shaped mark on my right kneecap that almost entirely faded by the time I hit puberty. *I* can still feel it as a difference in skin texture but that's probably because I inherently know where it is. Everyone from my mother to my boyfriend have told me it's entirely unnoticeable unless you know in minute detail what you're looking for.
It's not disabling, my right hand still works entirely normally and I've been perfectly right handed my entire life. The only REAL downside is that I don't like to wear woolen gloves because the fiber on the inside drags on the scar tissue and its a bad sensory experience. Sometimes my fingers just get too cold though and I suck it up.
Even now, in my current "career" I have not met ANY of the trio of superhumans involved. Although the Little Mermaid remains one of my favorite superheroes, and CERTAINLY my favorite superheroine. For the pretty obvious fact that she's the reason I am currently breathing, more or less.
