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Baker is demoralized, however, when firefighters are injured in a laboratory blaze started by activists he was working with.

He is approached by Highwater just as he decides to give up his costumed identity.

While away on a vision quest with Highwater, in which he learns the true nature of his powers and briefly sees the comic's reader, Baker's family is brutally murdered by an assassin sent by the corporate heads seeking to stop his environmental work.

With the help of Mirror Master, who had turned down the hit, Baker tracks down the businessmen and assassin and kills them.

While trying to undo his family's deaths with a time machine, Baker accidentally becomes warped through time and meets the Phantom Stranger, Jason Blood, and the Immortal Man in the 1960s, who help him learn to accept his grief.

Baker is then contacted by the aliens and taken to Arkham, where he stops the Psycho-Pirate and prevents damage to the continuity.

Baker is transported to limbo and encounters several comic book characters not being used in stories.

Ultimately, Baker encounters his own writer ( Grant Morrison himself ), and the two share a conversation on the relationship between the creator and the fictional characters whose lives they write.

After this encounter, Baker is sent back home and his family are restored back to life ; it is left ambiguous as to whether or not Baker remembers the full nature of these events.