Part of the Milestone brand was to have more super-heroes who aren’t wealthy White men. Thus, Blood Syndicate members gained their abilities due to an experimental gas used in the streets of a minorities-majority American city, Dakota. This type of superhuman is colloquially called “Bang Babies”.
Brickhouse is a Bang Baby, a gang member who received superhuman powers in the wake of the Big Bang. The Big Bang was supposed to be a rumble between all of the major gangs of Paris Island to settle their turf wars, once and for all. The Dakota City Police Department learned of the impending showdown and developed a special tear gas that also contained a radioactive marker.
Their plan was to use the gas to break up the Big Bang and then trace the gang members down the next day by tracing the radioactive “tags.” Instead, most of those exposed to the tear gas died. And the handful of surviving gang members that lived had all developed superhuman abilities.
One of the Bang Babies, Rolando Texador, took the name Tech-9 after his favorite type of pistol. Texador gathered his fellow survivors together with a proposal. Tech-9 wanted to form a new gang, the Blood Syndicate, with the aim of achieving substantive positive social change. They took over an abandoned door factory, which they simply dubbed The Factory.
Operating from The Factory, the Blood Syndicate smashed crack houses throughout Paris Island. They tried to rid the neighborhood of the dealers while taking the money captured in these operations to fund their activities. In the course of their work they would acquire new members, and put an end to many threats in Paris Island.
