Create a Villain Theme Team!

[CaptainCoulson]

Mx Pentercosla Vonderfaless (But you can call them [Insert new supervillain name of the week])

 

Born sometime in the future... or possibly on an alien world... or maybe it was a different dimension... Well, they don't rightly know. They do know that the childhood they grew up in was full of way more advanced magic and technology and all sorts of superheroes, compared with what is all around them in this dismal past... backwater planet... crappy universe... Whatever.

 

Anyway, they were in and out of prison back home, whatever back home means, when they got seriously bored of the same old locals and the petty super-squabbles, and decided to steal a whole sack of whatever they could find in the lairs of the last five super-villains they teamed up with, and ran off carrying the lot, paying their mate's cousin's boss a shedload of cash to help them hide out till the heat died down...

 

Walked through that portal, wound up falling from the sky over this crummy backwater, with their sackfull of arcane doohickeys and techno-whatsits and a whole random assortment of mutant genome applicators and cures, meta-human templates and treatments, and every other weird new power they could get. This holiday was gonna be the time of their life!

 

Course, these local heroes are just as much a bunch of stuck in the mud twerps as the last lot... Well, except for their big robot wizard dude. Electron or somethin' like that, right? Electron gets it. There's no harm no foul, right? Ain't like anything matters, anyway.

 

It hasn't yet really dawned on them that there may be truly no way home. Wherever they come from, they almost certainly ain't going back, if there even *is* a place or time to go back to. That is, unless they *have* realised that, and the tragedy of that situation has hit them so hard that they've just retreated even further into clowning around as a new "themed" super-villain every week to keep their mind busy and bury the sorrow of losing everything they've ever known as the result of their own choices on a foolish whim...

[CaptainCoulson]

Oh, right. Need a prompt for the next super-villain team, right?

 

"Sweethearts" - three couples and one polycule (at least three people in the polycule) whose powers and super-villain themes were all derived from, and centred on, the fact that they are dating/having sex/whatever their relationships are. The team formed because these super-villains all found a common ground in the fact that they prized their love (and probably, in some cases, the power it granted them) *far* more than the super-heroes "Justice" and an incredibly powerful team of super-villainous spouses/lovers would be a perfect way to demonstrate how right they are and how wrong the heroes are.

[BoloOfEarth]

Stars and Bars are a couple out of south Alabama.  Bars is a good ol' Southern boy who becomes super-strong and nigh-invulnerable the closer he gets to his gal Stars.  She begins to glow and can project light blasts as she gets closer to Bars.  Their costumes are based on the Confederate flag.  

 

They have a running joke that Bars also becomes stronger and tougher (or at least thinks he does) as he goes into bars, particularly after he's had a drink or seven.  

[steriaca]

Leather and Lace are a lesbian couple. Leather has tough thick skin and has moderate super strength. Lace can shoot webbing out of her wrists and has a mildly poisonous saliva. Both are mutants. Both don't care for their birth names and call each other by their villain names (or Lee and Lae as pet names).

[BoloOfEarth]

Pyre, Ra, and Mid are the polycule of the Sweethearts.  Pyre is a female fire projector (not surprisingly); Ra is a male light projector, and Mid is a shapeshifter.  Nobody (not even Pyre and Ra) knows whether Mid is male or female, and Mid isn't saying.  All are from the Middle East.

[DShomshak]

Oh, hey, I was just revising the character sheets of a villainous couple who'd fit the Sweethearts. Might as well share 'em...

 

David and Marsha Stubbs lived in Hanford, Washington State. David worked at the Hanford nuclear facility, making medical drugs and radioisotopes. TGhe pay was good by most standards, but a person of his genius deserved more. He stole drugs and isotopes to sell on the black market. Only his wife Marsha, who taught science at a local high school, was smart enough to really understand him; and David was the only man Marsha ever met with the brains to appreciate her without being jealous of her intelligence.

 

Then David slipped up. He knew the Feds would come for him soon. He packed his stash of radioactives (quite a lot, his contact hadn't shown up for a few months) while Marsha packed everything else they thought valuable, preparing to go on the lam. In his haste, perhaps David fumbled a vial...

 

BOOM! Marsha ran into the fog of radioactive chemicals to rescue David. He was gravely wounded; she had no choice but to call 911. The Feds came with the EMTs. David was decontaminated, more or less, and taken to the hospital under armed guard. When the Feds tried to arrest Marsha and take her from David, though, she began glowing. Bullets bounced off her aura; she shot back with blasts of nuclear radiation.

 

Marsha, now the villain Reactor, returned a month later to rescue David. He was a paraplegic, and never recovered from radiation poisoning, but they still loved each other. David found that being crippled concentrated his mind wonderfully, though. For a few years, he built increasingly advanced gadgets (often radiological or chemical) to help his wife. Then he built his flying, plasma-propelled hoverchair and revealed that he also gained super=powers from the accident. He gaine atomic psychokinesis, the power to manipulate matter at the atomic and subatomic scale, from setting things on fire to outright disintegration. The circuits in the chair enabled him to perform multiple feats at once, including generating a powerful force field to make up for his physical fragility. Since then he has used the name Exciton and together they became The Covalent Bond.

 

I'm not sure how these couples (and polycule) met, but Covalent Bond has an arrogant, us-against-the-world sense of grievance that would make them easy recruits.

 

Dean Shomshak

[steriaca]

Leather and Lace met The Covalent Bond when they were after the same score and decided not to clash on who would actually have exactly what take. They actually clicked over radiation and mutations issues. They both met Stars and Bars hiding out in the south. And they stumbled over the alien trio recovering their crashed spaceship for ARGENT. 

 

Or, at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 

@DShomshak Your up.

[DShomshak]

Oh, right. A moment, please, this takes some thought. Has someone kept a list of Villain Theme Teams already done?

 

Dean Shomshak

[BoloOfEarth]

The list I have is years out of date - I think the latest team I have listed was posted in 2015.  (I was hoping to update it during my work break between Christmas and New Years.)  But here it is, in case it helps.

 

If you're looking for suggestions, how about a team based on social media platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.)?  I was thinking a name like Anti-Social Media, though would definitely be open to anything better you might come up with.

 

Villain Theme Teams.pdf

[DShomshak]

Wow, if that list only goes through 2015 it's hard to believe any concept hasn't been done already, but I'll try.

 

Force Majeure is a team of mercenary villains that evil tycoons and corporations hire as criminal fixers and arrangers. Member names all refer to legal terms, though members don't need to have backgrounds as lawyers. (Might be good if the team leader did, though.) Six members sounds about right. All origin types allowed.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Clonus]

De Minimis or just "Minimis" is the team's expert in burglary.  Thanks to his ability to shrink, and to shrinks object he carries and his expertise with security systems, he can penetrate any place's defences to remove or place any desired object without leaving a trace.  

[death tribble]

You can always look up Create hero/villain team link. That is more up to date. Look up create and link and you will find my thread. In the first few posts are the complete hero and villain teams 

[steriaca]

Burakku Kigyō is a mysterious man of Japanese nationality who always wears a black business suit. He also is able to generate and manipulate "elemental black light" (a thing which behaves much like Marvel's Darkforce). He can create objects out of the substance and fly.

 

His name translates roughly to "Black Company". He shouldn't be mistaken for the Japanese supervillain team by the same name. Nor the real black companies, which are just as evil for their workers.

 

Spoiler

Black Company is actually a youma, or "unnatural" Japanese monster. He never had a true name, and has over the years posed as various human business men.

 

There is no connection between him and the supervillain group Black Company. The group doesn't actually like the fact that he muddles up their name, but since they don't know he is a youma, and he doesn't actually care about them...

 

[Sundog]

The Litigant is the face of Force Majeure. As well as being a registered member of the Bar in several US states, he is also a Barrister in Britain and lawyer in Switzerland. He's very good in front of a court or Judge, and while his written submissions are nothing special, he rarely if ever fails to convince face to face.

That's because the Swiss-born Guy de Varoux is the possessor of the Golden Tongue of Peitho, the Greek Grace of persuasion, a direct link to the minor goddess, which grants him the power to persuade others of his own point of view. It's not perfect - he can't talk someone into committing some act they are vehemently opposed to, or self-harming - but it gives Guy a decided edge in any argument, and with his natural charm and charisma, that's usually all he needs.

He's not helpless outside of a courtroom, mind you. He's quite fit and keeps a 9mm pistol (licenced, of course) on his person at all times.

[BoloOfEarth]

2 hours ago, death tribble said:

You can always look up Create hero/villain team link. That is more up to date. Look up create and link and you will find my thread. In the first few posts are the complete hero and villain teams 

 

I'm sorry, I had forgotten about that, or I would have referred Dean there.

[DShomshak]

Corpus Delicti, or "C. D." for short, is an actual ghost. The team's support staff tell a story that in life he was the crookedest of crooked Mob lawyers. Heaven wouldn't take him, for obvious reasons, and the Devil was scared to let him into Hell. While C. D.'s's ability to go anywhere invisibly and intangibly has great use, his particular specialty is possessing and animating corpses -- the only way he can affect anything solid. One of his favorite ways of tying up an enemy of a client is to animate someone recently dead (if necessary, other members of Force Majeure kill someone), walk the dead person into the target's home or business, then vacate the body to leave an inconvenient corpse for the target to explain. For extra artistry he might shoot his host body with the target's gun, or leave the nude corpse of a strangled person in the target's bed. Then let police and prosecutors do their work. Even if a murder case won't stick, the target will be kept too busy to oppose Force Majeure's client.

 

If Corpus Delicti needs to pose as a living person (and the team can obtain a fresh enough cadaver for this), he sometimes uses the pseudonymous surname of "Mortmain."

 

Dean Shomshak

[BoloOfEarth]

Jimmy Bonder is known as Bail, the "escape ticket" for Force Majeure in case they run afoul of PRIMUS or superheroes, as well as the "doorway" if they need to get into someplace en masse.   He is a mutant teleporter, able to take along others (up to 4x mass, so De Minimis usually shrinks himself); C.D.'s intangibility means he needs to fend for himself unless he's in an animated corpse.  Bail can also teleport objects, blink-teleport himself (for defensive purposes), teleport "reflect" attacks back at the attacker, and other such teleportation tricks.  

 

His powers do come with a cost - literally.  He has a self-imposed mental block that requires him to get paid before he can teleport others.  (At least, he claims it's a mental block - he may just be doing it to put the bite on other members of Force Majeure.)

 

Outside of Force Majeure, Bonder is a fairly successful skip tracer and bounty hunter.

 

[DShomshak]

But what's a super-team without a brick? Several superheroes have fought super-strong, nigh-invulnerable women of diverse appearance, costumes, and pseudonyms. These battles have caused lots, I mean lots of property damage. Factories and businesses have had to shut down because they didn't have insurance against super-battles. Sometimes the female villain got away, though ususally without whatever she came to steal; sometimes she was captured, but another villain teleported her out of jail. (Thank you Bail, here's your tip.)

 

Heroes have not yet realized that all these super-strong female villains are the same woman, variously disguised; nor that the crimes she committed, or tried to commit, were blinds and often the real goal was the property damage. One way Force Majeure can destroy a client's rival is to stage a super-battle. Even sneakier, the group can benefit  a client by staging a super-battle on property that is insured -- whether to destroy evidence of other misdeeds, or just to collect the insurance money.

 

The woman's real code name within Force Majeure? Indemnity.

 

(PS: Another way to profit from super-battles? Short-selling. The process is a little too involved to go into here, but suffice to say there's a way to turn a profit on a stock whose value drops. Unexpected and massive property damage can send the value of a company's stock tumbling. Somebody who knows it was going to happen can make a killing. Force Majeure uses shell companies to profit in this way from companies it attacks, whether from Indemnity's battles, scandals rigged by Corpus Delicti, thefts by De Minimis, other damage by Burakku Kigyo, or just rumors spread by the Litigant. They make at least as much money this way as they get from their clients, and it may indeed be their true "business model.")

 

Dean Shomshak

Oh, is that six? I don't have another team theme at the moment but I know Bolo does, so I pass in favor of him. Take it away, Bolo!

 

Dean Shomshak

[BoloOfEarth]

Thank you, Dean.

 

The members of Anti-Social Media use their powers, as well as various social media platforms (TikTok, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), to try to "remake society" as they think it should be.  It's too bad that they don't all agree on what that image should be, but they somehow manage to stay together despite their differences.  Who are these seven would-be influencers, and what are their individual goals?

 

[death tribble]

Guy Lancer has one goal and that is to educate the world that there is only one true martial art, Kung Fu. He is quite dedicated and knows his stuff. He posts about meditative routines and combat exercises. He also shows how someone with Kung Fu ability can beat a practitioner of any other martial art. What is annoying about this is that he does not disparage the other art merely illustrates the weaknesses of said art and how Kung Fu can overcome them. He also shows how the strength of the opposing martial art can be turned into a deficit by Kung Fu.

He is not a master of Kung Fu as he point out he is still learning the craft, and he does not go into all the supposed abilities Kung Fu can grant like death blows, increased age etc. He is quick to point out that any blow could kill and could thus be considered a death blow, while aging can be prolonged due to good diet and a healthy lifestyle provided you don't have an underlying health condition or live in a dangerous environment.

So why on earth is he in this group ? He followed a couple of the others and was present when they were attacked at an event. Naturally he leapt to their defence. He joined them to defend their lives and their freedom of speech guaranteed by the constitution. The others are not stupid. He is their martial arts bodyguard and someone who can give them an alibi as he would not do anything wantonly criminal. They very subtly manipulate him so that if they are attacked on their reputations, he'll defend them as obviously opponents of theirs are using money and dirty tricks to destroy them.

Guy does visits to schools to promote his ideas and will fight other practitioners of martial arts but will not agree to any stipulation where he renounces his beliefs or states that another art is better than Kung Fu.

He does not accept sponsorship from alcohol or any other form of stimulant. He actually practices what he preaches. But he does not condemn the others for their backers. 

He openly announces which of his media posts are sponsored and why he has taken money from them. He is photographed with representatives and shared media space with them on TV or radio for example.

His combat gear is plain although for public appearances he can wear one plastered with sponsor logos much like a Formula 1 driver's outfit.

He is known as Master of Shaolin by various people although he goes by his real name and stresses that it does not matter what other people call him as long as it does not disparage Kung Fu.

 

Guy is of mixed Chinese and American heritage.

 

EDIT: He uses all social media but mainly Youtube for videos, Facebook for contacts, Twitter for announcements, Instagram for pictures and TikTok for something punchy

[steriaca]

@death tribblehasn't stated what social media Guy uses. I say YouTube mainly, but that is just me.

[Clonus]

Naked Anarchy is, as the name implies, an anarchist.  She is actually covered by something that looks like a flesh-tone body-stocking that makes her look faceless and anatomically incomplete.  What it actually is, is a symbiotic lifeform which protects her from injury, allows her to see and sonar sense in every direction, boost her agility and strength and rapidly repairs any damage.  It can also disable security systems with a touch and lets her be a master of disguise.  Her crimes are acts of left anarchist protest, that include graffitti and other vandalism, breaking and entering and theft of corporate and government documents and participating in Antifa-related violence.  She doesn't talk in costume, only communicating via twitter and tumbler.   She posts her purloined documents to Wikileaks.  

[steriaca]

Fashionista is the TikTok member of the group. He is a bisexual man who uses weaponized outfits for combat and protection, and doesn't care about the perceived gender of what he wears (making him a crossdresser at times). He is also an expert of the quick change, which is exactly what his TikTok is about...three second shows of him changing clothing rapidly without being indecent. 

[death tribble]

Twin Action

 

These two women are not twins but use Facebook to mobilise and protest against things that are damaging to America. Originally Carole Janner and Anita Krell came from different backgrounds which meant different schools, social interaction etc so what brought them together ? In order to educate people about the environment schools were asked to send classes to an industrial plant which then came under attack from people with superpowers. In the chaos the two women were among some who gained powers from a mixture of odd superpowers being used around them, weird technological appliances in use and chemicals being unleashed. Both saved each other in the terror of the attack and its aftermath which brought them close and then they were able to give clear testimony at the enquiry that followed.

Both joined the debate clubs at their schools and became passionate speakers linking their efforts as Carole is Caucasian and Anita is African American. They set up Twin Action to promote ideas and get support from both their communities.

It was at an event where they were promoting their ethos of everyone working together when they were attacked. Enter Guy Lancer who beat up the redneck neanderthals who were menacing the young women. He had begun following them on the net and although he did not agree with all they were doing he thought that their hearts were in the right place and they could do some real good.

What sealed it for them was that Guy did not expect to date or have a physical relationship with either or both of them. And that he is of oriental extraction allows the women a wider audience.

They direct people with health issues or mental health problems to Guy as well as people being bullied. It has been mutually beneficial.

It took time for Carole and Anita to develop powers and Guy's ideas on meditation allowed them to reach a higher potential. As they were publicly identified in the attack on the industrial plant as victims their developing of superpowers was noticed and monitored. What is not known is that they have powers independent of the other. They act as if they have to be close to one another for their powers to activate which includes light illusions and energy projection. Although their is a slight increase in power if they are together, they don't need to be together for their powers to work.

The two women are savvy and can use flash mobs and protest marches which allows the others to do things with cover. Having witnessed what happened to others they make a point of saying who is sponsoring them. They are known to be opponents of the NRA after being shot at or more than two occasions. They feel it is policy now that someone silences them.

They are both anti-racist and can be drawn into protests concerning police shootings or arrests and general ill treatment of a minority.

They are the public face of the group because they are committed to a cause even if they have to use underhand tactics to get their way. Public scrutiny has made them wary but not ultra cautious or stupid.

 

This counts as one rather than two entries as the two are inseperable.

[steriaca]

If we count Twin Action as two, that leaves two more.