Disclaimer: As there are no OC's in this, I own nothing.
TTT
Mammoth ran for his life through the long prairie grass. Behind him, the hunters charged forward, hooting and hollering, waving flint-tipped javelins and crude axes. Some of them had torches that filled the moonless night with harsh, flickering light and greasy smoke. Mammoth's huge feet pounded faster and faster as his massive body plowed through the tall grass...then stopped in abrupt desperation.
They'd driven him to the edge of a cliff.
The beast from which he'd taken his name would have fled the weapons and fire in mindless terror, only to fall into the trap, plunging over the edge to die in the fall...or worse, lie there broken and helpless as the butchers closed in with axes held high.
Snarling, he turned to fight.
The hunters advanced to within a hundred feet, then stopped as the men with javelins padded forward. Those men reared back, arching the weapons high, then cast, and a deadly rain of wood and stone whistled through the night. A javelin bit into Mammoth's side, and he screamed as his blood gushed black in the light of stars and torches.
He hunkered down and charged, roaring. The javelin-throwers skipped to one side in an obviously-drilled maneuver and hurled another volley. Another javelin bit into his gut, and a third buried itself in his shoulder. He staggered, but kept barrelling forward.
The axemen ran to meet him.
The first one died almost instantly, as a massive hand lashed out, grabbed him by the head, and squeezed with enough force to crush his skull. Mammoth tossed the corpse into another man, knocking him over. Howling in fury, the massive metahuman snagged a third hunter by one arm and whipped him around as a crude flail, battering him against two others until the man's arm came off.
But size and strength only avail so much against overwhelming numbers. The javelin-men charged into the fight, wielding their short spears. A long flint tip punched into one kidney. As Mammoth whirled to tear the man's head from his shoulders, an axe bit into his right tricep, crippling his dominant arm. He smashed that axeman across the face with a vicious left hook, breaking the hunter's neck. And that gave two more men their chances. Their axes tore into Mammoth's hamstrings in a coordinated assault, and the metahuman staggered, wobbled...fell. It was all over very quickly after that.
Or at least it should have been.
Horribly, though axes hacked his limbs from his body and javelins pierced all his vital organs half a dozen times, Mammoth did not die. His blood-choked screams rang over the prairie as the butchery continued.
The scene slowed, stopped. Mammoth lay slumped on the ground, limbless and bleeding. An axe hung frozen in the air above his torso. His eyes still moved, still held awareness, and they focused on a pair of blue boots that padded into view. The suffering man looked up to see a skeleton dressed in a bright blue robe, leering down at him.
"I am Destiny. Doctor Destiny. Master of dreams. You agree to serve me as my bodyguard and general assistant, and I'll relax my powers and release you from this charming nightmare of yours. Or you can say no...and I'll tighten my grip, which means you live this hell for the rest of your days...which won't be long."
He couldn't speak through the bubbling froth of blood in his dream-self's lungs, but Mammoth managed to frantically nod his head 'Yes.'
TTT
Soft footsteps woke Killer Moth from a sound slumber. He cocked one enhanced ear, then stiffened. The footsteps were too heavy to be his daughter Kitten's. Slowly and silently, the mad geneticist pulled his metal mask from the bedside table and slid it on, then grabbed his laser whip from its place next to the mask. He slipped out from under the covers and moved ghost-like down the hall to his daughter's room. Moth crept into Kitten's room to see a man standing next her bed, looking down at the girl. The man was tall, but had a perfectly average face, and perfectly average brown hair. You could walk right past him on the street and never notice.
Moth's laser whip hissed into crackling life as he pressed the power button in the handle.
The intruder calmly responded to the unspoken threat. "Good evening, Mr. Moth."
Killer Moth hissed, "Who the hell are you?!" His eyes snapped to Kitten. She appeared to be unharmed, just curled up in the fetal position, sleeping like a log.
"The name's Destiny. Doctor Destiny. Master of dreams. And you will serve me."
"I am no man's puppet! Get out of my house and away from my daughter!"
"That last will be easy enough -- not hard to avoid a corpse."
"WHAT?!" The harsh snarl in Moth's metallic voice should have woken anything within a hundred feet. Kitten just whimpered and curled up a little tighter. "What did you do to her?!'
Destiny smiled slowly. "Say instead, 'what will I do to her?' I'm surprised it took you this long to realize that all the shouting isn't waking her. Master of dreams, remember? That's other people's dreams. If you don't accept my offer, I'll put your precious daughter's tiny dreaming mind through her own personal hell -- being scarred, disfigured, and finally skinned alive by her 'Robbie-Poo.' She'll be insane within a day, and dead by the next."
Killer Moth's fists clenched, and he started to raise his laser whip.
"Don't even think about it. By the time you strike, I'll have already started the dream -- and I don't need to constantly maintain it. And if you kill me, there'll be nobody capable of reversing it. The same goes if you betray me...after all, even if you tell her what's waiting for her, she has to sleep sometime."
"God damn you..." The whip hissed as he shut off its power. "What do you want from me?"
"You're a geneticist. I want you to develop something -- a hormone, extra tissue, I don't care what, exactly-- to increase the size of my brain and enhance my powers. Not too much, or it might become a curse instead of a blessing. I want just enough extra power that I can affect normal people in close proximity, whether they're awake or not, and no matter how strong-willed they are. And I want the power to work fast. I'm not exactly a good fighter, so I need a way to put my enemies under within a minute or so. That wretched Batman brought me down, but with the enhancement I want you to make, I'll take him down, then destroy the rest of the Justice League!"
Moth growled, "I work with insects! The only human test I've done was the one that gave me enhanced hearing, and even that was just an extension of my research!"
"Then I suggest you learn how to operate on human subjects...and quickly."