The Meldverse

[Clonus]

The Freakish Four: This foursome of strange-looking heroes were blessed and cursed with power thanks to a mysterious anomaly in space. They consist of:

 

Jackie Frost: A beautiful animate ice statue of a woman, Jackie Frost has powers over cold and frozen water. Despite her powers she’s a fun-loving thrill seeker who wants her sister to “lighten up”. She’s always up for a snowball fight but she’s also a brilliant physicist.

 

Shadow Woman: Jackie Frost’s sister, Susan is the mistress of stealth, able to become a two-dimensional living shadow, take shortcuts through the Darkness Dimension, create animate entities of “solid darkness” and boost her strength in shadows.

 

Claymore: Jackie’s actor boyfriend Ben has become the Face of the team since while his clay monster form is quite frightening his shapeshifting power allows him to regain his cinema-idol good-looks for part of each day and pass for normal. He keeps his misery hidden from the public.

 

Dr. Richard Woodrue: Briefly tried to call himself Doctor Floronic but there was universal agreement that name was unbelievably terrible so he stuck with his actual name. He’s half-man, half plant, and all scientist. Unlike his younger colleague Jackie he’s serious-minded and a bit pompous. Even so he managed to become romantically involved with Susan.

 

The Four have foes of course.  For example

 

Clayshaper: An older actor envious of Claymore’s career, he managed to get his hands on a small sample of Claymore’s body and managed to bond with it, giving himself much more limited shapeshifting powers as well the power to create clay statuettes of people that could influence their minds or large statues that could copy a character’s form and powers.

 

Doctor Terrific: A genius associate of Jackie Frost and Dr. Woodrue he used that genius to develop technology to become a superhero in his own right until a combat injury caused facial disfigurement that he blamed Woodrue for since Woodrue was there and he had always regarded the other man as a rival. Since then he has been secretly creating threats to attack the Freakish Four while still acting as a now grimmer hero in a suit of powered armor. Even so, it is only a matter of time before he becomes known as Doctor Terror.

 

Metalsmith: Another genius, he has uploaded his own mind into a robot body and crafted more robots to challenge the Four, a team that consists of Silver Ghost who can turn intangible, Iron Vulture who can fly and is very strong, Red Mercury who fights with with stretchy semi-liquid tentacles that can drain vitality, Golden Dragon who can fly and breath fire and Galena who can alter her mass and create barriers  

Edited July 1, 2023 by Clonus

[Setherak]

Hmmm. Vaguely familiar...

 

A fun homage.

[Clonus]

These are the rules.  Take Marvel hero or villain and fuse them with the DC villain or hero.  But heros must be combined with someone on the other side of the fence (more or less) and vice versa.  Guessing the source characters is left as an exercise for the student.

 

Thunder Woman:  In the 23rd century alien invaders with superhuman strength and durability had conquered the Earth for centuries.  In the society they created women were reduced to the status of property and it was a mark of status to have a large harem.  While the daughters of the invaders also inherited enhanced power they were fitted with power suppression manacles to keep them under control until one day a genius among them figured out how to create a rift into the past, freed several thousand of the concubines and led them into a escape into modern times taking with her, her unborn child, Diana.  That girl grew up and when she learned the time of invasion was nigh she rebelled against her mother's cautious plan to live as a hidden society that would grow in power and one day emerge to start an uprising in the 23rd.  Instead she decided to risk changing the future and left for the outside world to foil the invasion at the start by teaming up with the heroes who had first faced the invader.  

 

Kallark the Superion:  Superion was the ruler of a dying planet who decided to invade and conquer the Earth so his people could move there.  His vast strength, speed and durability made him the most powerful foe the Freakish Four had yet faced and they would have been defeated had Thunder Woman not appeared to team up with them.   

 

 

[Clonus]

Meanwhile in a city with an odd fondness for gargoyles and frequently overcast weather...

 

First boy genius Bruce Osborn was orphaned in his youth and then the CEO of Oztech tried to murder him to keep him from taking control of his inheritance.  The murder attempt failed and Osborn took his revenge by turning himself into a nocturnal boogeyman.  Enhanced by the super serum he was working on that accidentally got into his blood during the murder attempt he developed a dizzying array of Halloween themed weaponry and flew through New Gotham's streets on a jet glider as the Goblin Knight.  

 

Janet Caldwell's father was a mad scientist who experimented on her, giving her the powers of shrinking and flight with the intent of using her to assassinate those who stood in the way of his grandiose schemes.  But after her father accidentally killed himself, Goblin Knight took her under his wing, creating the duo of Goblin Knight and Pixie.  

[Clonus]

Combining heroes with villains has a tendency to lend a grotesque flavour to Meld's hero population.  While Thunder Woman is conventionally attractive as a combination of Wonder Woman and Thundra apart from being about a foot taller than Wonder Woman the others are turning out a bit grotesque.  For example our next entry:

 

In the 19th century a strange meteorite landed in Europe made out of a glowing green mineral with the additional strange property of turning the flesh of those who touched it a translucent green that left the underlying skeleton visible.  In honour of this property the sculptor in whose hands it fell chose to carve it into a bust depicting the visage of a green skull.  He did various things with the scraps he'd carved away, turning them into stones set into rings and necklaces.  They faded into clarity about a day after being separated from the main mass but would turn green if brought back into contact with it.  A group of people who became known as the Green Flame Society discovered that the gems would temporarily grant them superhuman powers which they used as secretly as possible to become wealthy and influential as they played a crucial role in the formation of Germany.   In the end, however they were devastated by infighting between the pro and anti-Nazi factions in the 1930s, and the Skull and several of the power items fell into the hands of one Alain Schmidt who fled to the United States and made his superhero debut as the Green Skull, endowed with a dizzying array of superpowers that included invisibility, insubstantiality, flight, telepathy, and forcefield generation.  He dedicated himself to defending his new country with all his many powers but after the war a former friend became his arch-enemy, Captain Anarchy. 

 

In the years leading into American entry into World War II, the United States invested resources in a "super-soldier" program with mixed results that include the man who would one day becomes known as Captain Anarchy when developing psychosis as a side effect of the treatment as well as a deathly pale complexion and lips drawn back in a near-permanent rictus that put something that can loosely be described as a smile on his face.  Armed with a circular shield made out of an exotic metal that tore through Green Skull's defenses, he became that hero's most dangerous foe in the post-war era.

 

 

 

[Clonus]

Then there's the challenge of deciding which side of the line a fusion of hero and villain will stand on.  Take for example Barry Dillon, AKA Lightning Flash, a man who, struck by lightning, gained the power to absorb electricity and release it again as lightning bolts, or use it to fuel superspeed.  Should he be a hero or a villain?  

Edited July 7, 2023 by Clonus

[Clonus]

Shayera Neramani was born as one of the royal daughters of the Shinagar Imperium but came out on the losing end of the succession dispute to her maniacal brother Katar.  Defeated she fled to Earth, where, as Death Hawk she proceeded to try to collect a force of Earth's supervillains to return and defeat the Imperial Legion who supported her brother since villains would be more easily motivated by offers of money and power and less restrained by reluctance to use lethal force.  She has the powers of winged flight, superhuman strength, and is armed with a weapon that can shapeshift between mace and spear as needed.  

Edited July 8, 2023 by Clonus

[Clonus]

Peter Kuttler was at his girlfriend's apartment when a criminal came after her to get at her police captain father, and in trying to save her, he was himself shot, rendering him paraplegic.  After that, he became a recluse, virtually living on the web and developing advanced software that made him financially comfortable.  He could have been rich except he sunk so much into upgrading his hardware.  With the best computer setup this side of the NSA, he decided to become a crimefighter in his own way.  With a mixture of hacking and sophisticated prediction algorithms he guided heroes to incipient threats under the alias "Darkweb" and then doubled down by making his own hero.  Female in form (in fact bearing a distinct resemblance to his lost love) Parker's android was also known as Darkweb to help hide the man behind her.  She had super strength, super agility, and could generate synthetic webbing to use for transportation and immobilization and she had Parker's constant behind-the-scenes assistance as a source of guidance and nearly endless information.  

 

This ones a little tangled since I bent the rules by including a DC hero in with two DC villains and two Marvel heroes.  And one of those villains is very obscure while the other only qualifies as a B-Lister because an upgunned version of them was used a season's Big Bad on the Flash TV series.  

Edited July 12, 2023 by Clonus

[Clonus]

The Doom Foes consisted of:

 

The Director:  A paraplegic scientist who gained the power to attract and repel objects, allowing him to glide around on a hovering wheelchair and engage in combat.

 

Negative X:  A man who looks like a living X-Ray image of himself and can fly and shoot x-ray blasts.  

 

Aqua:  A woman who can liquify and solidify her body, stretching her limbs and growing to giant size

 

FMJ:  A disembodied brain in a cyborg body built for him by Director.  

 

They were an effective team of superheroes until they broke up after the other members discovered that the Director had planned their exposure to the same energies that created the Freakish Four.  

[Clonus]

Loosely speaking, the Vengeance Society is the largest team of supervillains on Meld, but really it's just the team with the most unstable roster as various members join, drop out, are imprisoned or disabled by injury.  It is rife with internecine squabbles that sometimes make it seem that they spend more time fighting each other than the heroes and other targets of various quests for revenge.  Essentially a new Vengeance Society forms every time a few solo villains manage to overcome their differences enough to team up for a common goal.  Numbered among their constantly shifting roster are:

 

Captain Anarchy: Green Skull's previously mentioned arch-enemy and sometimes the leader of the society.  

 

Scarlet Wizard: A sorcerous villain and also sometimes the leader when his shaky sanity isn't acting up.  Brother to Silver Slash

 

Ymir: Empowered by a ancient Norse artifact  Able to turn into a battle-axe swinging giant made out of regenerating ice, and able to control wind, ice and cold.  

 

Solomon Fixit:  Hulking grey skinned revenant mobster with enormous strength and the ability to return from death.  

 

Shadow Panther: Boosted agility and strength, claws plus the ability to generate darkness and see in the dark.  

 

Alexander Stark:  Evil corporate robber baron. Inventive genius that allowed him to create a suit of powered armour.  Sometimes leader of the society.  

 

Mothman:  Able to shrink to the size of a moth or grow into a moth-like kaiju known as Behemoth.  Communicates with and controls lepidoptera.  

 

Silver Slash:  Scarlet Wizard's sister, able to run at superspeed and slash foes with her feline claws.  

 

Binary Star:  Given powers when she acquired a gem from outer space, Carol Danvers-Ferris was turned into a flying zapper with super strength and forcefields in her villainous form. Carol can not remember the misdeeds of her alternate self when in her human form.

 

Immorton:  After accidentally throwing himself into the future, Immorton mastered futuristic technology and returned to the present to join the Society on an undercover mission to avert a catastrophe there, seeking to manipulate the villains of the society to save the mostly depopulated future.  

 

And dozens more!

 

 

 

 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Clonus

[Clonus]

The Confrérie Mutante (X-Men/Brotherhood of Evil) are France's flagship superhero team led by

 

Professeur Cerebrale (Professor X/Brain), a disembodied brain with telepathic powers who gathered together strange and some would say freakish people to create France's equivalent of the Freakish Four.  

 

Other members include
 

Madame Marvelle (Jean Grey/Madame Rouge), a shapeshifter who also has telepathic powers.

 

Bete Noir (Monsieur Mallah/Beast), a large man covered in blue fur and endowed with boosted physical strength and agility.  He is in love with Cerebrale who returns the sentiment although they can only exchange affection on the psychic plane.  

 

General Balor (Cyclops/General Immortus):  More than a thousand years old, Balor has only one eye and can shoot energy beams out of it.  In combat situations, Balor tends to be the leader when he is there.  

 

Gargantua (Colossus/Garguax):  Descended from Russian emigres in the early 20th century Pierre Rasputin has the power to turn into a giant with boosted strength and durability.  

[Steve]

Hmm, I’m coming up with a cross of DC’s Lady Shiva and Marvel’s Black Widow. Tempted to go with Widowmaker for the name. I’m thinking a Chinese operative of some kind, enhanced using Cold War supersoldier technology obtained from USSR after it collapsed.