Sundog

Jenny Faceless Jenny d'Aventura was the team's casing expert. She would go in days or even weeks before the mission, confirm other intelligence and gather data, like floor layouts, guard patrol schemes, internal security. Occasionally she would also get small items she could smuggle out, like key cards, but that was rare. As a result, she was almost never on scene for the actual robberies. She accomplished these with a powerful capacity to disguise herself and to take on roles with basically zero prep time. Cranham got to her with her one weakness, her cocaine addiction. He replaced her usual dealer, and slowly amped up the purity of the drug she bought - until she was flying high as a kite while trying to do the Frobisher building. She missed the clues that should have sent her running, and for the first time she gave the Council bad data. Jenny was blamed by many on the Council when things went south, particularly when she got a suspended sentence in exchange for checking into drug rehab. Once clean, she disappeared, and hasn't been seen or heard of since.

Red Rain is undoubtedly the most psychotic of the ThinkBank. This is despite his motives probably being the purest - he wants to ensure sane, corporate management of the world to protect the environment and make pollution unprofitable. His methodology is to demonstrate the dangers - graphically. He sprays acid on crowds, poisons water supplies and generally acts as brutally as possible to show people the results of the current regime.

Vector Rainbow VR (yes, she is well aware of the initials) is an astrophysicist by trade. She was involved in an experiment, an attempt to model the inside of a star. She was at the ground zero of a "superpower event" that empowered at least four other people as well. Her real name is Raquel Washington, and she makes no effort to hide it. She has the power to create light constructs in the form of skeletonized structures, vector lines and beams, both solid and laser in nature. Her riff is to start with a line of white light, and then slowly break it down by colour until she has a complete rainbow hanging in the air. Raquel is African-American, and she loves going to inner-city schools and less privileged areas like the one she came from. Her family is very proud of her, though she's gotten a certain pushback from extended family, who aren't sure about the whole "rainbow" thing.

Silver Butterfly Silver Butterfly was born Anna Jane Coleman, and was clearly a mutant from her birth. Her glittering, silver wings didn't give her especially swift flight, but she was stable and very reliable in the air and could maintain her flight all day. Anna's family loved and supported her, but the rest of the community was caught up in the anti-mutant hysteria of the early 1970s. She and her family were hounded out of her home and burned out of the temporary housing the state reluctantly provided. Anna's life was made a living hell any time she tried to go to school. Finally, when she was twelve, a maddened mob tried to lynch her and her family. It was unfortunate for the mob that her solar energy powers manifested under the stress. Over a hundred people burned to death, hundreds more were horribly burned. Anna showed no mercy, setting the entire slum her family had been forced into ablaze and attacking anyone who tried to help, including firefighters and police. Her heat and light effects weren't all that powerful, but were very broad-beam, and thus unavoidable by normal humans. Only when local supers showed up did she finally fly away. Later that day she was contacted by the group. She stayed with them for almost five years, making sure her family was safe by staying well away from them. In the end, they parted ways amicably - Ren the Space Weasel and company found her too bloodthirsty, and she'd found a group that appreciated her for herself and provided the stability she longed for - Viper's Dragon Branch. She's been a stalwart member of the organization ever since.

Platyputz Arnold K. Vossman was one of the founding members of the Battalion, though they have since done pretty much everything possible since to forget that. He was supposed to be "The Platypus", but the newspapers were somewhat more than unkind. His abilities weren't terrible. Arnold's suit gave him sonar, underwater propulsion, enhanced strength and speed and, in a slightly dark aspect for the 1960s, poison injectors (though why exactly he decided to follow the actual Platypus and put them on the backs of his ankles is an ongoing mystery). The problem was, Arnold was not built for crime. He weighed almost 250Kg, and little of it was muscle. He was capable of waddling slowly towards his targets, and he never once managed to bring his "spurs" to bear on an enemy. Twice he was caught because he literally couldn't fit through the escape route. He was only tolerated because he really was pretty smart - he planned well. But in the end, Ren the Space Weasel and She-Wolf stripped him of his suit and left his overweight, naked ass on a street corner and called the FBI - and this time they wouldn't be breaking him out. Arnold's story does not have a happy ending. He was released from prison early in 1978 for medical reasons, and within six months his heart had given out. He was buried in a pauper's grave; nobody came to the burial.

1 hex = 2m. We don't think in inches because everything's metric here, and we almost always use fifth edition anyway.

Movietone Movietone loves the silver screen. Speak of a movie, chances are he's seen it, even if it's obscure - he's claimed to have viewed The Day the Clown Cried. ("Yes, it really is that bad" he says.) His knowledge of film and film history is encyclopaedic, and he's written several review books under other pseudonyms. Pity he's a complete sociopath. His powers would indicate he's some kind of low-level reality warper. He changes his appearance and gear by spinning around - including the weapons he wields. He only uses this to replicate various movie scenes. He suddenly becomes Jimmy Cagney with his classic line "Made it, ma, top of the world!" before emptying a revolver into his victim, or Crocodile Dundee saying "Nah, that ain't a knife. This is a knife." Whereupon he stabs the person with said knife. Think there's enough material here for five.

Genesis James Pashone was one of the founding members of the Righteous Teens. He started out as the kid sidekick of Dynamic, a low level brick/speedster who is now almost completely forgotten - his one time protege having far outshone the older hero. Genesis' abilities to summon semi-autonomous "spirits" to fight or work lead to him being accused of satanic powers or witchcraft, a distressing turn of events for the devout, conservatively religious young man, and he sought to show his true colors by forming a team of righteous and upright young people - a goal that was ultimately fulfilled. Genesis left the team when he turned 19, choosing to concentrate on his studies, and eventually entered a fairly prestigious seminary. Last year, a large number of members and ex-members of the group got together at his home to celebrate his retirement party at the age of 69. NEW GROUP: Five people with one foot in the darkness seek to prove that dark is not evil as Pentacle.

Cerberbull is exactly what his name implies - a three headed Minotaur. Myth Master wasn't entirely happy with it - he doesn't especially like mixing his myths, and it was Theseus who fought the Minotaur of Crete. But, it counts as both the Cretan Bull and Cerberus, and Myth Master was running out of options. Cerberbull's teammates aren't over happy either. The beast is stupid, brutish and likes to eat people. But it's undeniably powerful, and very little tends to remain after one of the creature's "triple charges".

2. Grey Hood.

Tactica hates it here. That's not her real name, of course, but it's about as close as the monkey-boys of this benighted world can manage, and the meaning matches pretty well. She (again, an approximation) is a high ranking member of the military nobility of her homeworld, and is used to the finer things in life. Like slaves, wealth, the finest craftsthings competing for her favour in the making of her weapons and armour, fine foods...yes, she pays for it by subjugating the enemies of the Tetrarchy, but that's hardly difficult most of the time. Can even be enjoyable. Now she's stuck on this miserable mudball. The atmospheric pressure is too high, gravity is too low, it's far too humid - and since she was travelling to a conference, she has to do with the off the shelf weapons and gear their ship had! Worse, this mass produced garbage is wearing out - soon she may have to use some of the pulson-based garbage the hideous locals produce. Oh, well, at least she can get a work out by beating the local "elite warriors" into paste...

Kid Pureheart has been a regular on the team for almost four years now. He's actually the third person to have taken up the name and power set - the ability to manipulate "pure light" to flash, blast or even laser villains. Kim Allen Douglas is actually the son of the Kid Pureheart of the 1980s, and nephew of the Kid Pureheart of the 1990s, but this is not widely known, and many outside the team speculate that Kid Pureheart is some kind of immortal, clone or robot. Others note that some of these are ridiculous, since all of the Kids Pureheart have visibly aged while with the team. The source of al of their powers is a piece of alien technology. It bonds to the back of the wearer, and cannot be removed without their permission - but once removed, it cannot be reattached. More importantly, it only works when the wearer is completely and unquestionably sure they are doing the right thing - making Kid Pureheart useless in situations of moral or ethical ambiguity. There does seem to be an override for this - the second Kid Pureheart was able to command operations by sheer willpower, an act the current holder has never been able to replicate. It was only during this period that Kid Pureheart, despite often being called the heart of the team, was allowed to lead it. This has caused more than a small amount of family friction. Kim's father has become an evangelistic preacher, and Kim follows that path, while his uncle Mike is a notably progressive head of a charity group. Of late, Kim has been wondering if the strictures of his belief are what have prevented him from making the breakthrough Mike did. Kim is also almost 18, the age when both his father and uncle bowed out of the role, and his maturing mentality and conscience are making it increasingly difficult to use his powers at all. Plus, in a recent encounter with Ren the Space Weasel Kim found himself swayed by the villain's positions and arguments.. The obvious replacement is Mike's 12 year old daughter, but both Kim and his father question the suitability of a girl Kid Pureheart. Mike is insistant, though, and Laura wants the position. The decision is Kim's to make, and he has not yet decided.

The Hippie Where did the Hippie come from? The '60s, man! If he ever had an identity beyond his supranym, he lost it long ago in his haze of acid and other drugs. By rights he should be well and truly dead - at any one time he has far more then a lethal dose of multiple drugs in his system. But he just keeps on going, year after year - what year is it, anyway? The Hippie's only real power is his regeneration, which may be the most powerful on record. He's literally been flattened by a falling wall, and when the wall was pulled back up, out he popped, good as new. Burning, acid, radiation, cold - they all affect him normally, for about a second. Then he shrugs them off and keeps doing whatever it was he was doing. He's not usually all that much use in a fight, but he can't stand seeing his "little animal comrades, man" threatened or hurt. He'll even get uncool about it and pull out his .44 Magnum revolver. And sometimes he even remembered to load it.

One of the most recent members is Dream. He/She (Dream prefers to be referred to by the gender they currently appear as) was born intersex, and with his powers fully developed - including her limited shapeshift. He can appear (and actually BE) either gender, no gender, or both - though the latter isn't preferred, as it gives her a headache. His mutable biology is also responsible for her powerful capacity to survive in hostile environments. Extreme heat, cold, pressure? Dream has been to the bottom of the Challenger Deep and swum in the Mauna Kea caldera. Vacuum? Been to the moon. (Not again - took two weeks to fly there, two weeks back). Radiation? Has stood in the reactor chamber of a functioning nuclear power plant. With her ability to fly, slightly above human norm strength, and significant skills in the martial arts (which his parents started to teach her more control over his form), Dream is a significant asset to the Righteous Teens, but one that comes with a significant downside. Dream is astonishingly beautiful, in whatever form he currently has, and has had no compunctions about stating that she is pansexual (though, at 13, he is not yet sexually active), and has become something of a celebrity as well as a poster child for the LGBTIQ community. He's not engaged in politics, and her behaviour and attitudes have been entirely within the guidelines for the team, but his mere existence drives a certain conservative sector insane. The team has lost some support since she joined.

I'd go with "The Price of Dreams". Just sounds like a lot of fun.

The Circle of Life Devoted to their cause, these five super-powered activists want to do good, but their values are twisted, seeing animal rights as being far above mere things like human lives.

Warrior Carl Thomas grew up in the streets of Auckland, where he saw the worst of the interactions between Maori and pakeha culture. Drunkenness, drugs and violence were a part of his life, and he grew up with a continuing lack of respect for his own Maori people. He was fortunate enough to have a pair of sensible and sober parents, but so many around him did not. But when he was 16, after a minor scuffle with a gang of local toughs, his parents sent Carl to live with his Aunt and Uncle in a small town on North Island. And there he saw a very different scene. Maori and pakeha lived together, in a shared culture. There were differences, but not terrible ones, and they could be worked out. There were problems, but those problems didn't look as insurmountable as they had back in the city. And something else happened. A car accident occurred, and a woman was trapped in the vehicle. Carl literally ripped the car apart with his bare hands to get her out. Since then, Carl has devoted himself to being a modern man, a modern hero, and a modern Maori. He wears comfortable, stylish clothes, but has had a full set of facial tattoos applied (which was difficult, with his steel-hard skin). He champions the traditions of his people, and also the requirements of the the modern era, and tries to stand as a symbol of what can be - a synthesis of all that is good in tradition and today.

Huitzilopochtli, taking his name from the Aztec god of war, led the Savage Seven in their brutal attack. He was perhaps the sole member of the team to come by his name and image honestly - Julio Amacaebie actually was of Mexica descent, though whether he was actually Aztec is questionable. Julio was a man consumed by hate. Hate for the entire human race, all their doing and all that they held dear. He saw himself as a cleansing fire that would eradicate the stain of mankind rom the face of the earth, and he would do it with their own perverted "science". A gifted engineer, he snuck onto a Mexican Army base and stole an experimental power suit, being careful to snatch the blueprints and data pack as well. The basic suit was fine, but he then upgraded it with a high-powered flame-thrower, anti-personnel rockets and machine guns, while altering it's bland appearance to be that of the traditional depictions of the Aztec god of war and the sun. Huitzilopochtli opened the attack by confronting Quick-Draw. The pistolero's various types of shot bounced off, but Huitzilopochtli's MGs carved the young man into hamburger. Next he managed to find Sand Rat, and the shrinker's diminutive size gave him no protection against area-effect flamethrowers. He expended the last of his anti-personnel rockets on the weakened Combine before finding the badly injured Lady Sunshine being helped to safety by the also injured Batwing and Silver Spur. Batwing, having one wing crippled by Christi Corpse, could not escape his flamethrowers, and Silver Spur overstrained his ability to deflect bullets trying to protect them from Huitzilopochtli's bursts of MG fire. Out of ammo, Huitzilopochtli broke his neck. Then Huitzilopochtli pulled out an obsidian knife and carved out Lady Sunshine's heart. Still covered in blood from this brutal act, Julio was distracted by the sound of a crowd. He got to the scene just in time to see Wentworth Prescott torn apart by the mob, and Prescott's building go up in flames. Out of ammo, almost out of fuel, Huitzilopochtli realised it was only a matter of time before they would pry him out of his suit. So he enacted his emergency escape system and the suit rocketed into the sky. The g-forces rendered Julio unconscious, but he woke to discover the system had worked, dropping him hundreds of miles away. His suit was out of power, but he had a survival pack on the outside and he was sure he could find his way out of this desert. Yes, his team was dead, but he could make another. It wasn't like he'd ever intended them to survive. But the rear hatch was warped by the escape rockets. It wouldn't open. Julio was locked in a steel coffin in the middle of Death Valley, and the sun was coming up. It took him many hours to die.

The Comanche's real name was never determined, though his membership in any native American tribe has been denied repeatedly by their various authorities. The difficulty lies in his death, which was one of the most brutal of the Savages. The Comanche wore what can only be called a parody of traditional plains tribe garb, and fought with a repeating carbine and a steel hatchet. His sole victim was the Crusader Lamplady, and it was this that roused the ire of his own killers - Lamplady's powers were purely healing and succour based, and she had a reputation for aiding and supporting others. Comanche caught her healing a group of innocent bystanders from the fight, and sadistically beat the young woman to death with his enhanced strength (which was his sole actual super-power). His end came when a couple of road workers, alerted to the situation, arrived on the scene with shotguns. They blew out the man's knees with buckshot, disarmed him, and then used their road repair tools to coat him in boiling pitch - which they then used a blowtorch to ignite. By the time the fires died down, nothing but scorched bone remained. Sean Lerrier and Peter MacGuire were charged with manslaughter for the act, but the Jury refused to convict them.

Yeah, I had one that was based more or less on a combination of Dark Angel and The Fugitive. It worked fairly well but one of the players seemingly didn't get the memo - his character was always trying to "put down roots". Given it was a small group that kind of broke the game.

La Araña La Araña (the spider) hails from El Salvador. She was raised as Esmeralda Anna Mariana Perez, an orphan following the brutalities of the civil war there, managing to attain a good education despite her bereft status by winning a variety of scholarships and prizes, and wound up with doctorates in physics and chemistry, but was careful not to let people know how easy that was for her - her mutant capability is intellect. She could have gotten ten doctorates in the time she took to get two. She settled into a comfortable position with the current government, and was soon running her own research establishment. She kept climbing the ranks...until one day she found that her newly acquired clearances had revealed something about herself. Her parents had not been killed in a guerrilla ambush, as she had been told. Her father had not been a country doctor. He and her mother had been peace activists, seeking to find a peaceful solution to the country's woes. So the government of the time, in colludance with the CIA, had them murdered. She even found her real name. Over the next six months, the men who killed her family died horrible, lingering deaths from untraceable and exotic toxins. Then she did the same to the CIA agents involved - but a couple of top flight FBI investigators managed to trace the chemicals back to her, and she was forced to flee. La Araña (She now uses no other name) took most of the budget for her research establishment with her when she left. A stay in Cuba got her access to old Soviet supertech, which she repurposed into her iconic battlesuit - four arms (the lower two run by AI servitors), capacities to spray a wide variety of entangles and swing lines, and several varieties of sprayable, injectable and contact poisons. Then she went looking for people who hated the USA as much as she did.

Tumour is custom designed to terrify. His "withering touch" actually a combination of gamma radiation, carcinogenic chemicals and particularly nasty nanotech, all designed to shred and wreck DNA, making his victims weak and ill in seconds, and virtually guaranteeing multiple aggressive cancers within months. Even with modern medications and treatments a victim has no better than a fifty percent survival rate. As the embodiment of long-term cellular damage, Tumour is often referred to as the most evil of the team. He certainly looks the part, gaunt and cadaverous, and with a sickening and putrid odour. But the truth is that Tumour isn't evil at all, though his wielders may be. Tumour is a non-sapient robot, built specifically to order. It is entirely incapable of malice or any sort of emotion, and simply does as it is ordered.

Burner embodies the nuclear heat pulse of a deployed device. He can emit waves of searing heat to burn and scorch and melt anything in his way. Burner's power come from advanced cybernetic implants - ironically, the damage he suffered which made him a cyborg in the first place, came from being in the radius of a terrorist nuke.

Scandalous is something of a hanger-on to the group. She's claimed to be the daughter of the Scarlet Temptress a few times, but everybody laughed at that (she's clearly way too young), so she doesn't bring that up any more. On the other hand, she knows where all the secret bases and hideouts are... She is actually useful in a fight, being extremely agile and a better then average martial artist. The problem is, her costume is made up of strings, straps and patches, clearly designed to show as much skin as possible...and often shifting during her acrobatics to show a lot more than can be shown on the six o'clock news. Which has as good a chance of distracting members of the team as it does who they're fighting. Especially with her habit of stopping to pose for the cameras rather then getting on with what they're supposed to be stealing/breaking/getting away with.

Miki James is a small woman, with a happy, smiling demeanour. Most of the time she works in a small tax firm as an agent, a job she enjoys, helping people travel the labyrinthine paths of the tax code. She lives a quiet life, looking after her elderly Japanese grandmother alongside her wife of five years. She doesn't like trouble. Avoids it when she can. But if she decides you're the problem, you get removed. Most of the time, Miki has no superpowers. But when she decides to act, she's unstoppable - and that's fairly literal. If all she's up against is guys with guns, her skin gets as hard as steel, and she gets the strength to break those guns. When superbeings are involved, she simply becomes powerful enough to defeat them. ALL OF THEM. Not that she hurts anyone - she just rounds them up and puts them in jail. They say that the humiliation of being a powerful brick and still getting picked up and carried to a cell by a tiny Asian woman is as much of a counter to recidivism as any program in Stronghold. Miki wears a purple scarf over her face when she acts, but everyone knows who she is.