FATALITY: WRONG UNIVERSE

Marcus Webb was a perfectly ordinary thirty-one-year-old marketing copywriter from Ohio whose greatest accomplishment was maintaining a comprehensive Mortal Kombat wiki page and whose most dangerous habit was jaywalking. Then a FedEx truck — carrying, ironically, his limited-edition Noob Saibot statue — introduced itself to his ribcage at forty miles per hour, and Marcus died. He woke up in Gotham City. In a ninja costume he can't take off. With glowing white eyes, a voice that sounds like two dead revenants whispering over each other in a frequency that makes grown men weep, and a body that contains the complete fighting knowledge of every single Mortal Kombat character ever created — all operating at full, unrestricted, absolutely unhinged power. There's just one problem. He can't hold back. Every punch is a kill shot. Every kick shatters the laws of physics and whoever's on the receiving end. Every fight — no matter how minor, no matter how much Marcus desperately wants to just incapacitate someone like a normal, well-adjusted vigilante — ends in a Fatality. A full, choreographed, ultraviolent, spine-ripping, skull-crushing, torso-bisecting Mortal Kombat finishing move that his body performs whether he likes it or not. He has tried to stop. He cannot stop. His body treats non-lethal combat the way a fish treats dry land: as a fundamentally incompatible environment that it refuses to operate in. Armed with Scorpion's hellfire, Noob Saibot's shadow magic, Sub-Zero's cryomancy, Raiden's lightning, and approximately nine hundred other abilities that make him a walking apocalypse in a ninja hood, Marcus must now navigate life in the DC Universe — a universe that already has enough problems without adding "guy who involuntarily splits muggers in half" to the roster. He has to deal with Batman, who has very strong opinions about killing and even stronger opinions about unregistered metahumans performing war crimes in his jurisdiction. He has to deal with Gotham's criminal underworld, which keeps sending increasingly dangerous people to kill him, all of whom he keeps fatality-finishing in increasingly spectacular ways that he keeps apologizing for mid-execution. He has to deal with the Justice League, who can't decide if he's a threat, an asset, or a mental health crisis in a mask. And he has to deal with the fact that his personality is now an unholy cocktail of Noob Saibot's cold nihilism, Scorpion's burning rage, and Johnny Cage's insufferable, wisecracking, sunglasses-wearing charm — three psychological profiles that should not coexist in one skull but somehow produce a person who is simultaneously the scariest and the funniest entity in the DC Universe. He doesn't want to be a hero. He doesn't want to be a villain. He just wants to figure out why he's here, how he got here, and whether there's any possible way to turn down the lethality setting on his fists from "FINISH HIM" to "maybe just bruise him a little." There isn't. But he's going to try anyway. FATALITY: WRONG UNIVERSE is a love letter to Mortal Kombat, a parody of DC Comics, and the story of one deeply reluctant overpowered nightmare man trying to do the right thing in a world made of cardboard — where every handshake is a potential homicide, every battle is a highlight reel, and the only thing more dangerous than his abilities is his complete inability to shut up about how ridiculous this whole situation is. Rated M for Mortal Kombat.