Ever since he could remember, Barrabas knew that he wasn’t like other kids. Whenever they played games like tag, or smear the queer, Barrabas always won handily, without the other kids even coming close to catching him, and by the time they finished with the latter game, the fear of God had been put into them. When Barrabas reached his teens, he began hanging out with the “wrong” crowd. It started off innocently enough, just cutting a few classes, but quickly progressed petty theft and drug use. By the time he got to high school, he had joined a gang known as The Regulators.

Throughout high school, Barrabas’s behavior worsened alarmingly. He had almost entirely stopped coming to school, and when he did, he was quite stoned, and simply laid back in his chair and smiled. What his Mom and the school officials didn’t know was the Regulators had told Barrabas that he needed to earn his keep, and prove that he was handy with the steel if you know what I mean. Barrabas had begun his life of crime.

Over the course of the next year, Barrabas and the Regulator’s eliminated all of the rival gangs on the eastside of Atlanta, and had taken over the rackets that were once the domain of the mafia. Anything that went down, the Regulators knew about it, and made sure that they got a cut. Occasionally, people would try and sneak little things by them, but the Regulators had eyes everywhere, and this almost always ended up with someone’s brains decorating a wall. Barrabas, with his amazing strength and reflexes proved to be most effective in this regard, as he could out shoot, and out fight anyone that decided to get in the Regulators way. While that’s where his talents lay, he was never comfortable in his role as an enforcer.

Due to the decrease in the crime level, the police turned a blind eye to the occasional bout of violence from the Regulators, so long as they kept the other gangs under control, they were free to do as they pleased. Barrabas and his crew enjoyed unprecedented success in the two years that this lasted, supplying the weed to most of Atlanta, skimming off the top of the lottery, and taking a share of anything that was stolen in their part of town. With success, came everything Barrabas had always wanted. Money, power, and women.

Barrabas and many of the Regulators became close friends, instead of just business associates. They would party together on the weekends, they hung out after their work was finished, and they would smoke each other some when they got a particularly fine bag of weed. The one Barrabas really connected with was Brick Fracksen, the leader of the Regulators. Brick became not only Barrabas’s mentor, showing him how to work it, and how to stay alive on the street, but his best friend.

All of this success however, went to Brick‘s, head. One day, after smoking a particularly killer blunt, he saw some members of a rival gang throwing dice on a corner, parked his car thirty or so feet from them, and walked up, demanding that they give him any shit they had on them. The gang members, seeing he was alone, stood up, surrounded him, then two of them pulled out their pieces, and put them to his head.

They took his rings, they took his Rolex, and just as Barrabas was turning the corner in his rice burner, Brick looked at one of the gang members and said “Damn, what’s next?” Deciding that they’d had enough of this, the gang members glanced at each other, then, getting a nod from his buddy, one of them pulled the trigger, blowing Brick away.

Barrabas slammed on the brakes and came to a sudden stop. He got out of the car, and without hesitation, reached behind him, pulled his gun out of the back of his pants, and checked the clip. It had sixteen bullets, and one in the hole, Barrabas then proceeded to make some bodies turn cold. The gangsters, however, weren’t going to die without a fight, and proceeded to run, duck, dodge and dive, firing at Barrabas all the while. Barrabas himself moved like lightning, avoiding all but one bullet, which struck him squarely between the eyes. Before Barrabas went unconscious, he managed to stumble to Bricks body, kneel, and say his last goodbyes to his best friend and mentor. For the first time since Barrabas could remember, he cried.

When an old man from the Karate Dojo across the street came over to inspect the carnage, he found two bullets in the head of each member of the rival gang, and one extra in that of the man that had shot Brick, the now former leader of the Regulators. When he came to Barrabas, he was shocked to find that he had been hit in the head, but that the bullet hadn’t penetrated. Where there should be a ragged, bloody hole, was only mashed up slug.

This was no ordinary old man from a Karate dojo however, he was a master of the martial arts, who had begun learning how to harness his Ki. Having experience with such things, he immediately recognized Barrabas’s potential. After carrying him into the Dojo, he fetched his smelling salts, and waved them in Barrabas’s face. When Barrabas awoke the old man told him what had happened, and how he had survived. Barrabas didn’t believe him at first, and went as far as to call him a crazy old fuck, and began walking out of the Dojo. However, when Barrabas saw his face in one of the mirrors that lined the walls, and saw the slug still stuck between his eyes, the truth of the old man’s story had been hammered home.

Now intensely distressed, yet, at the same time, curious, he asked the old man more about himself He informed Barrabas that his name was Master Wang, and that he had been practicing the abilities that had saved Barrabas’s life for years, and that he could not replicate that feat of toughness. He also told him that he would be willing to take him under his wing. His interest piqued, Barrabas decided to learn what he could from old Master Wang, several weeks of intermittent training at the dojo, led Barrabas deeper and deeper into the martial arts lifestyle of self perfection.

Barrabas saw what had happened to Brick, and realized that the same could happen to anyone, at anytime. He decided once and for all that he had had enough. It wasn’t enough to do well for yourself, if you tore down your neighborhood and had to watch your friends die to do it. Slowly, he began to not only use his free time to train with Master Wang, but he began using time that formerly belonged to the Regulators as well.

This all came to a head a little more than two months after Bricks death. The Regulators confronted Barrabas, and asked him what was up, they wanted to know what he’d been doing with all the time that he used ot spend with them, thinking of course that he was trying to pass off some action behind their backs. He let them know that it wasn’t anything like that. He was getting out of the game he said. It wasn’t anything with them, he had just found that there was more to life than drugs and money, and that he had enough to last him for a long while anyway. He gave them his cell phone number, and told them that if they really needed him, he’d be there, but for now, to just let him be.

Barrabas’s life is now dedicated to mastering the arts that Master Wang has introduced to him, and he hopes to find others with similar abilities, to test his newfound power.