#265: Doctor Benzod: Psychotic Sleep God

     Sorry for the delay on this one, folks. Photoshop is an unpredictable beast that I am yet to fully tame. Now, time for Characterfest character number three: Doctor Benzod, psychopathic sleep god. Genius can go two ways. It can either a) be used to enlighten others and lift them up, or b) be used to shove others down as hard as possible. You'd think after all these years we humans would've learned to scratch out the ladder option altogether, but alas we've still got a little while to go on that one. However, we're not here today to lement about mankind's incredibly oblong learning curve. No siree, we're here to talk about a shining example of that second option, hailing from the JC-Verse: Doctor Barren Benzod. A brilliant chemist that spent his early years hopping from school to school to find one that could keep up with him, Benzod blew the popsicle stand of high school a year early and got accepted into U.N.D.E.R.O.O. Academy. (That's right, it was only a matter of posts until I mentioned U.N.D.E.R.O.O. again. I could only make it so long.) There he blazed through the first two years of training, aimed for a surefire high-up position in the Weapons Division. Things were looking bright for ol' Barret. That is, until things got significantly darker. Upon entry into his third year, Benzod designed the Hypnos toxin, an airborne poison apple of sorts that can put any person into an indefinite slumber, and its corresponding true love's kiss, a liquid anecdote called the Waker serum. Day and night he spent perfecting it, until one day he decided to make test subjects out of his dormmates. Naturally, it didn't sit well with the professors when they heard through the grapevine that one of their students was putting his peers into controlled comas. After falling from grace, the former star pupil of U.N.D.E.R.O.O. refused to let his experiments be set back. So, in a textbook mad scientist 101 move, he found himself a little isolated island called Karrino, and he pressed onward. Spending years upon years building himself a bona fide fortress of a lab that he named Comatose State (badum tssss), Dr. Benzod continued wittling his Hypnos toxin to perfection, making unsuspecting Sleeping Beauties out of innocent folks that he scammed into vacationing on his island. (Now that I think about it, islands seem to be hotbeds for lunatics nowadays. Might be a good idea for y'all to vacation inland. Just a thought.)