Soooo what if Hypno was actually like... a villain? And not just super salty? :3

A while after the incident at the lab, it only seemed as if the Red Leader had disappeared. The Professor believed that the experiment failed entirely, and the Leader had died. Little did he know that the Red Leader had been teleported away, and took on a new identity...

After the fight with Shadow, and all of the other Leaders are accepting Sabre again, things seem to be normal for a while. Everyone is living in a sort of peace, Sabre and Time spending their days recovering from the fight in the village.

However, a few weeks after everything went back to normal... Time started to notice things start happening to Sabre. Strange things.

At first, it was only once or twice a day where Time would find Sabre just staring off into nothing, as if he was seeing something else entirely. All it took was Time either saying his name or tapping his shoulder, and Sabre would snap out of it, with no idea what happened. Then, for a few nights, Time would be checking on Sabre before he went to bed and head to Sabre's room. However, when he got there, he would see Sabre either aimlessly walking around the room or just sitting in his bed... staring.

The few times he was able to see Sabre's face, Sabre looked as if he was half-asleep, maybe even completely on worse nights. Time would snap Sabre out of it like before, and again, Sabre would have no idea what happened. Except after these instances, he would seem tired, almost... drained a bit.

They escalated. These incidents would happen more frequently. Time's worry increased along with the strange activity, but still Sabre would have no idea it was happening.

It all came to a head the night Sabre disappeared.

Time went to check on Sabre that morning, only to see bits of a strange red-and-magenta liquid dotted around the room in small pools, and Sabre nowhere in sight. When he goes to alert anyone else in the village, it's soon realized that a small population of the entire Realm has suddenly disappeared. In every kingdom and village, from 2-3 to a small handful of people have disappeared from their homes, all that's left behind the same strange liquid.

This, of course, is the work of who was previously the Red Leader; Hypno Steve.

Driven almost to insanity by what he saw once he transformed, he decided to take his rage and suffering out on the world... especially on who he believed was at fault for it, despite the timeline showing differently.

Hypno used his powers to develop a special kind of mind control. First, he slowly began to use hypnosis on the affected, showing them small visions of dreamlike versions of positive memories. Then, he'd connect the hypnosis to the energy of the victim, making it so the illusions he'd show would drain them without the victim knowing. This would make it so it'd be much harder for the affected to try and break out of their hypnotized states... however, that wouldn't happen unless the victim knew they were under hypnosis.

Hypno had used his access to the victim's memories to see their desires and such, eventually turning their specific illusion into a false vision of those desires. In Sabre's case, all he had wanted was to be in peace, so his hypnotism had become a vision of nothing but calm environments and tranquil atmosphere. Sabre has no idea what's going on outside of this illusion, and will likely never know as he falls deeper into the hypnotic state he's trapped in. After all, why control with fear when someone can be puppeteered from inside a dream, without wanting to wake up?

Outside of the illusions, Hypno uses the almost husk-like bodies of the people he's hypnotized as his own personal army to fight those who try to stop him. The red-and-magenta liquid mentioned earlier is a kind of residue that leaks from an affected person's eyes, signifying their controlled states.

With this, the group that goes to stop the crazed mutant is forced to fight the people they're trying to save. As the story progresses, they have to figure out a way to both stop Hypno and get the hypnotized people that he's taken to snap out of their false visions.

How will this story turn out? Well, now it's not up to me to decide :)