Mentiac

Mentiac aka Richard Burns

About

He is one of the most brilliant minds ever to have lived and, fortunately for humanity, he is on the side of good. While he has never doubted his towering intellect, Mentiac has doubted his own value as a person. His mother’s complete rejection of him when he was a child has seriously scarred him, not that he’ll admit that in public. However, he has found a family with UNITY and is beginning to heal.

Mentiac suffers from horrible headaches at times, and no one is sure why at this point. He is also vulnerable to sensory overload, which can knock him out cold by overprocessing his already superclocked brain.

Background

From the moment he was born, it was clear Richard was a mutant. His freakishly large cranium nearly killed his mother in childbirth. Certainly, his vast intelligence was not an inherited trait, as neither of his parents were brighter than average. And neither could keep up with their infant son. His mother was so horrified by his precociousness, she refused to have anything to do with him after the age of two. His father tried to offer him affection and guidance, but Richard was so much smarter, it became an exercise in futility.

The Canadian press, however, loved him from the start. They dubbed the little boy-genius Mentiac and delighted in showing clips of him discussing the latest developments in physics, literary theory, and cognitive development. By the time he was 12, he was living independently off of all the money he’d made on patents. He regularly worked as a consultant for a variety of different corporations.

It wasn’t until UNTIL, however, that he found his true calling. When he was 18 years old, UNTIL asked him to join their superteam (known as UNITY); they wanted him to be the brains behind the operation. He was delighted. It suited his own, somewhat naïve, sense of idealism as well as validating his self worth.

The team of superheroes became the closest thing Mentiac has ever had to a family, and he is passionately devoted to them and their ideals. The opinions of his fellow teammates, El Picaro, Doctor Black and Doctor White, mean the world to him.