Editing Mordred (section)

===Background===

The CAMELOT program was a think-tank founded to study and analyze the entity codenamed PALADIN, with the intention of eventually replicating and mass-producing him. They faced a lot of difficulty in this task. The main problem was that PALADIN wasn't the sort to allow himself to be studied that closely. Most of what CAMELOT knew about him came from the data salvaged from various villains, and given that the superhero community was usually quite thorough about covering the tracks of their spokesman when rescuing him, what CAMELOT got was fragments of data and incomplete understanding. Still, they pieced enough together to attempt to make their own PALADINs.

That didn't turn out too well.

The early sample bodies (AGRAVAIN, BEDEVERE and CARADOC) were physically viable but burned themselves out while trying to replicate PALADIN's solar powers, and were terminated for analysis. DAGONET was unable to manifest any powers at all and was swiftly terminated. Overly-ambitious resequencing led to the failure of Numbers 6, 10 and 11 to even get past the accelerated fetal growth stage. Limited successes with power replication were had, but those three were almost impossible to control. ELYAN was destroyed along with the Tunguska facility via hydrogen bomb, while supervillains were brought in to quietly eliminate GAWAIN and HECTOR. LANCELOT was the first promising candidate of the CAMELOT project and its accompanying limbic analysis and control (LAC) teleoperation system, intended to both monitor and influence a subject's mental and emotional state. LANCELOT was deployed as GREEN KNIGHT during various brushfire conflicts and the combat data obtained from him was used to produce the next generation of supersoldier, one which they hoped would finally be able to produce an optimized, effective copy of paladins.

MORDRED was initially thought a failure. He exhibited no superhuman resilience or strength and no ability to manifest solar-type powers. LAC probes of his mind revealed that he had no instinctive concept of those powers, which all of the other clones had. But then, the scientists weren't looking in the right place. MORDRED was not linked to the sun. Quite the opposite; his body was a conduit and gateway for the endless supply of dark matter and energy in the universe, which he could manifest as blasts of chilling darkness and shadowy constructs with what appeared to be a life of their own. He had the ability to teleport, which he used to spectacularly divest himself of the LAC rig fused into his brain and take apart LANCELOT in a depressingly one-sided battle, before he decided to stop and read the project file on CAMELOT. The idea of being grown as an expendable clone (a "glorified science fair project" as one engineer's personal comments put it) filled him with so much anger that he took the time to personally kill every single person on the base before setting off its self-destruct systems.

After that, he took it upon himself to eliminate every single CAMELOT facility on the globe in order to ensure that nobody would ever make anything else like him again. PALADIN intervened - too late to stop MORDRED from putting the finishing touches on the last CAMELOT base, but he was still strong enough to defeat MORDRED, turning him over to the X-Zone Superhuman Maximum Security Penitentiary for incarceration. During his time there, his loss to PALADIN burned brightly in MORDRED's mind, and he realized that only one thing could salve his soul; seeing PALADIN defeated, to expunge the notion that he was just another defective clone.

Then the Great Escape happened, and MORDRED was one of the supervillains released from the X-Zone. He made his formal entrance into the supervillain community then, establishing a reputation not just as one of the rare few villains who actually dared to go one-on-one with PALADIN, but as a thoroughly reliable and professional mercenary with no qualms about taking dirty jobs, although to him, the money was just a means of keeping score; his real objective was to cause enough havoc to lure PALADIN out so he could fight him. He lost every single time he fought the Knight of Light, but he learned from each encounter, and he'd thought of giving PALADIN some time to recover from beating back the V'Sori before he settled things with him once and for all (it wouldn't be a proper challenge to beat him after an entire race of alien invaders softened him up).

But it was not to be; the V'Sori and the K'Therans slaughtered Earth's heroes in a sneak attack, and the first victim of their ambush was PALADIN. MORDRED spent two days raging inside his manor at Glastonbury before K'Theran subjugation troops finally decided to take his lands for their own. After destroying them for their presumption, he had an epiphany.

The alien scum had defeated PALADIN. Now it fell to him to defeat them, and in so doing prove that he was PALADIN's superior for all time...

[[Necessary Evil]]