It's your life, Duane
I was born the highlands of Scotland. I am immortal. I can not be killed unless you take my head.
No, wait. That's not me. It's some character on TV. Well on with my story.
It all begin in Hamburg, Germany in 1936 when my true parents, Hans and Inga Nyenhuis, were recruited into a secret research program under the aspices of Adolf Hitler to develop a genetic mutation for a stonger, longer lived super-race(Project Ubermensch) to take over the world after he had eliminated all of the inferior races. The project was headed by young Dr Josef Mengeles who would later go on to concentration-camp fame (where, unknown to anyone outside of the highest German circles, Mengeles was desperately working on a cure for Hitler's flatulence problem caused by his unusual vegitarian regime).
I was born in April 1937 as a result of Menegeles' perverse experiments on my parents.
[Sidebar: Actually I am 64 not 44 as I usually claim. But 41 is about the upper bound of what people will generally believe when I tell them my age. This gives me the longest practical window for referring to things like old world events or movies & tv shows without giving myself away. Now back to the story...]
The details of how Mengeles more or less succeeded with me are sketchy at best. Unfortunately, Hans and Inga both died from side effects of the process when I was about three. And Dr. Joe didn't realize that he had had a success and therefore what records he kept were not well preserved and mostly lost during the war. By the time I was able to return to Germany in 1948 the records and eyewitnesses were very scarce. (Oh, did I mention that as a result of the experiment I reached my current size and maturity by age nine? Although most of the superhuman and paranormal abilities did not manifest themselves until I was in my early twenties.)
Apparently, about two hundred 'volunteer' couples were experimented on. Mostly, Dr. Mengeles was injecting small quantities of gold, which had been converted from lead using a Philosopher's Stone, into the prospective parents. [Hitler and his cronies were all seriously into astrology, mystism, and all that stuff from the Indiana Jones movies and Mengeles was if nothing else a master at the research funding game.] Mostly, the gold injections had no significant effect good or bad. In my specific case, based on subsequent research I funded, one of those one in a billion coincidences occurred. Namely, my father worked as a mortician and was exposed to many chemicals most people never encounter. Also my mother came down with Polish measles (Germans don't refer to them as German measles!) during the first trimester of her pregnancy.
Anyway, as I said I was born in April 1937. Fortunately for me, Dr. Mengeles knew the whole project was a sham and by October 1938 he had disbanded the project, released all of the volunteers, and moved on to other 'hot' projects of the day. Extremely fortunate, since my unusual growth didn't start until December of 1938.
By spring 1939, when it was obvious to my parents that they would have to move to hide my sudden jump from two year old to seven year old, fortune smiled again. My father's brother, John, who had moved to the United States in the early 20's contacted them. John was an early endocrinologist with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He explained how with the rapid growth of the clinic there was an expanding need for morticians in the immediate area. (Hey, not everyone gets better.) So my parents packed up their belongings and went to America with their visiting 'nephew'.
Kindly, old uncle John took over raising me after both my parents died about six months after our arrival in Minnesota. At this time I was a little over two and half years old but looked about eleven. John was aware of my unusual condition and used the facilities of the clinic for further study. One of the things that most intrigued the Doctors was the time about six months later when I accidently severed two fingers by slamming them in a car door.(Although I am physically superior to normal humans in most ways I still have my 'klutzy' moments like slipping on stairs.) This was in the days before fingers were being surgically reattached, but still in a period of about two weeks I 'grew' replacement fingers. This greatly excited the Doctors as they knew they could save many lives if they could adapt the technique. Alas, they never were able to duplicate the effect.
Well the story will be continued at a later date. I haven't even covered my work in the later stages of the Manhattan Project, my work with the CIA in the fifties, the lost years of the sixties, the secret mission to the hidden pyramids on Mars in 1972, the encounter with the giant killer tomatoes on Sigma Kiu Epsilon in 1974 (and you thought the 'Attack of the Killer Tomatoes' B-movies were pure fiction), or the time travel experiments in the early eighties.
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