But let’s start from the beginning. Dr. Bates was a successful woman who managed to combine an academic career with a mission of helping others. Not many of her friends were aware that her twin sister had died at the age of 11 of an undiagnosed sickness that struck her neural system. Bethany’s pursuit of knowledge lead her to the best medical universities in America and Europe but she was never satisfied with just the academic routine and so kept working in St. Mary’s Hospital in Pulp City’s Seaport district.
On her 31st birthday, while doing the night shift, a girl named Dolores was checked in. The girl was in unimaginable pain as her whole body was shaking in erratic jolts. Bethany remembered that condition from her childhood and knew that the pain wouldn’t pass and the torment would continue for many months, leading to agonizing decline to death.
Trembling with anxiety, she knew this was the moment to redeem all the years of hard study, all the years of nightmares of her sister’s demise while she stood helpless. For all these years, she had been working on a new auto-therapy method that could treat this rare condition with amplified brain waves of the patient.
The therapy would’ve been long and painful, as the patient’s brain needed to be forced to direct its power against the disease plaguing the neural system. Bethany Bates had built the brain wave amplifier prototype (named The Caduceus) a few years earlier but had never tried it on a living being. With emotions fogging her usually rigid academic mind, she called her superior to ask for permission to proceed with the therapy. Sensing that it might be more of a personal obsession than Dr. Bates would admit, her superior denied the request and filed the case to Bethany’s archrival, Dr. Strapping.
Furious, she drowned her frustration in a sea of alcohol that night and when a bar patron asked her about her plans for the night, sobriety returned as a devilish thought crossed her mind. Instead of an easy date, the poor sod found a painful death strapped to The Caduceus. The settings had not been right, but it was just a matter of time when she’d be ready to help Dolores. Bethany frequented Pulp City bars every night, and after a month, the settings were still not right but much better.
The last “date” was almost right. The patient survived the treatment but went ballistic and Bethany had to use her scalpel to finish the frothing maniac and let him join the previous victims in the basement.
Absolutely convinced that she finally got the settings right, she invited Dr. Strapping to her house under the pretense of preparing for an upcoming conference. She was desperate to prove to him that the Caduceus was an absolute breakthrough in auto-therapy research. Since Strapping was very reluctant to try it out, sedating drugs came handy. But Strapping wasn’t alone, and he was the bait in the trap that police, after long weeks of investigation, had set up. The moment he felt to the floor, the door burst open and police men filled the room. Bethany grabbed The Caduceus, hastily hooked it up to her body and let her brain waves fly against the storming troopers.
The massive ripple fried the protein in the brains of the assault team but it also seriously damaged the brain of Bethany Bates.
From that night on, she, better known to Pulp City as Sister Bedlam, wanted to heal and kill at the same time, to bring mercy and inflict pain, to crush and revive. Some say that under the metal helmet of The Caduceus, she still keeps talking to somebody named Dolores.
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