So, Art, are you going to do a sum-up of the entries, firm the team canon up?
Will we be going somewhere with this?
not sure where to fit, perhaps a villian
Legion - Can do everything exactly as well as the best “normal person” can. He can run as fast as the fastest sprinter, fight like the best streetfighter, and play a mean game of pool. This power extends to physical and mental apptitude but not knowledge, including the knowledge of how to best utilise his ability, ie he is smarter than the smartest chess player and better suited mentally to all aspects of the game, but he would probably still lose to Kasparov. You can technically weaken him by killing off the people he draws his powers off (blowing up the Earth would pretty much do him in even if he wasn’t there at the time).
He envisages himself as champion of the little people and dislikes other meta-humans, seeing them as a danger to the regular people of the world, if he is a villain he might try and kill them all off and then possibly commit suicide (he is after all superpowered). He spends a lot of time studying the guiness book of records to figure out exactly what he can do (he now knows he can spit melon seeds an awfully long way for example)
Has the Rebel been covered yet?
Here’s my input for such:
Hellion
Born in the mid 70’s, he is a product of the 1980’s. He is an admixture of paradoxes: keenly capitalistic, and yet against large corporations; fashion impaired, and yet swarthily hip in his dress; able to appropriately quote sitcoms and comedians in any situation, and yet disgusted with pop-culture.
Throughout his youth he was always in trouble. He suffered from average to below average grades in school despite his obvious intelligence, and was continually earning detention, suspensions, and even expulsions for his behavioral problems and boredom (misinterpreted as disinterest). As a teenager he had several brushes with the law for minor crimes like vandalism, truancy, and petty theft, and even did a short stretch of time in a juvenile prison for a joyride in a stolen vehicle turned high-speed police chase.
Shortly after reaching puberty, his powers began to manifest themselves at bizarre times, which coincided with his rebellious nature and helped lead him down the path of the criminal.
Lost in society with no ambition or cause, Hellion drifted around North America, getting by on what he could steal or con people out of, until a fateful meeting with Jellybean altered his life forever and finally gave him some sort of direction. Falling head over heels in love with her, and identifying with her seeming randomness and chaotic nature, as well as her lacking any true identity (a mystery that intrigues him), he hesitatingly accepts her offer to join with her and Mentor to put their talents to use fighting crime.
Lacking any real set of true morals has led him into conflict with other team members, such as when after stopping a bank robbery, he pocketed some of the cash; or when he uses unnecessary lethal force to apprehend a criminal.
Hellion is able to become invisible or visible at will. He has a minor form of telekineses that enables him to manipulate small, lightweight objects from a distance with just a thought. But his most dangerous ability is the ability to affect probability around him. When he is near, the improbable becomes the probable, and vice versa. He has very little control over this ability and has to concentrate to suppress it at all (which is why he isn’t allowed within 50’ of the Walford estate).
Ultimately, Hellion is a rebel without a cause (unless you count a near slavish loyalty to Jellybean a cause) and a severe lack of social grace. He does what he wants, when he wants to, and doesn’t care much for lip service saying otherwise. He is confrontational and sneaky, and has a tendency to hold grudges long after he’s forgotten what the original conflict was about. He is at odds with most every other member of the team, but recognizes that he’s got a good thing going here (and just might one day score with Jellybean) and so he maintains his status as an active member of the group.
He is, however, also acutely insecure, and though he hides that behind his gruff exterior, it is a weakness that a more subtle villain may one day take advantage of.
New villain:
Mindset
Mindset is actually many villains in one. She has multiple personality disorder, but not in the standard sense. As a young child, her disorder became clearly evident to her parents and pediatrician, but it wasn’t until her power manifested itself that they really began to worry. Mindset (nee: Allison Walker) is not one body with many personalities, she is actually many bodies, each with different personalities and talents, cohabiting one body.
When as one person, Mindset is Allison Walker (a psychotic young woman with horrendous mood swings and a penchant for violence), but at any time she is able to spawn off one of her personalities into an exact physical clone of herself. The clone is able to function and think completely independently.
The limits of her power is unknown, though she has been observed to have up to six different clones simultaneously operating independently.
What little is known about her powers is: when all clones are “absorbed” into Mindset, she has the physical capabilities of ~10 humans, but a mind clouded by complete, irredeemable insanity. Each clone seems to be an average human being, except that it has one area of expertise in which it excels (observed so far: cat burglar, linguist, robotics engineer, h4x0r, biologist…) to almost superhuman abilities. Lastly, all of the clones appear to have a “hivemind”… a telepathic connection to one another that allows for instantaneous transmission of thoughts and ideas and allows them to work together with amazing cohesion.
soulmurk, that’s a cool idea for a villain.
Another idea
Empathy - A young addition to the team, empathy can understand anyone, she can REALLY understand them, she can use her ability to gain an understanding of the villains the team fight, her powers will tell her what motivates them, their dislikes and prejudices, and can gain insight into the circumstances that made them what they are today.
This power comes with a terrible price however, few people see themself as the Villain in their own story and Empathy can’t use her powers without being forced to sympathise with her target, this means that Empathy can have a hard time actively bringing herself to work against someone she has used her powers on, and that the initially cheerful friendly girl has become withdrawn and bitter as she is forced to cope with all the knowledge and misery she has absorbed from those around her.
Her teammates feel terribly guilty about Empathy and try not to rely on her powers unless they need to, however she has been instrumental in solving in some really nasty situations and the prospect of innocent people dying because she hasn’t done anything weighs just as heavy on her conscience.
Another minor good guy:
Officer Mendez
Another one of Valiant City’s Finest, she works at the same precinct as Officer O’Ryan, and the two have partnered up on occasion. The oldest of 6 brothers and sisters, she serves on the Police force in order to help protect her family from all the various villians and no-gooders who have descended apon the city in recent years. Unlike most other officers, such as O’Ryan, Mendez uses a Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol, the service pistol her father used during his 15 years as an officer in the Army, and she is very well practiced with it.
That could be a cool hero, too, if you think about it. Every Olympics he’s rooting for the long-jump record to be broken so that he can jump even farther. He’s absolutely, 100% in love with the Human Race, because the better we get, the better he gets. He loves everybody, even villians, because when we reach our full potential, he reaches his full potential.
This creates a great villian opportunity, too. Like Sleeper & Rat-Bastard, he has an evil reflection. I’m not sure what the villian’s name & powers would be, but his shtick can be trying to kill off humanity’s finest in order to weaker Legion! Yet another leitmotif to hold the story series together.
Okay, this is lame, but let’s call his villianous reflection Phalanx. He gets his powers from the Lowest Common Denominator: when the masses riot, he can channel that rage into super-human strength; when tens of millions vote for a reality-show contestant, he has the ability to make a star be born. Predictably, his powers ebb & flow with the whim of the times; when Sleeper blows up a bus, Phalanx can channel the outrage into the ability to raise a vigilante mob to do his bidding.
(Okay, maybe it’s not super-villian gold, but most my superhero experience comes from Kim Possible and The Tick.)
That’d be funny if Jellybean had a crush on him, too, so that whenever he gets close to her, the odds of hooking up with her go from good to bad! Heh, heh.
To introduce the inevitable family conflict, I give you another rogue: Copycat. The power that runs in Empathy’s family took a darker turn in her cousin Felice. Even the most innocent of humans have moments of rage, private fears, and dark secrets. Years of perceiving the darkest corners of the human heart have left Felice self-centered and pitiless. Unfettered by sympathy for others, she has driven her powers far beyond mere empathy. With a simple touch, she can duplicate the essence of another within herself, gaining access to all of the original’s abilities and knowledge. She can only hold onto one such copy at a time, but that is often enough for her purposes.
She seldom comes into direct conflict with the Professionals, as she is well aware that she’s no match for all of them at once. Instead, she occasionally contrives to come into contact with a single member, in order to “borrow” some powers for her current scheme. Given her tendency to work behind the scenes, most of them aren’t even aware of her existence. Her growing obsession with Empathy may lead her into more involvement if Empathy’s role in the team expands. Though she’d never admit it, Felice is jealous of Empathy’s innocence. Felice thinks she wants to “teach” Empathy, but truly wants to corrupt her.
The interaction of Copycat and Empathy offers an opportunity to explore a “know thyself” leitmotif. Both possess an extraordinary gift for understanding others, but do they understand themselves?
enigmatic, can we get a better name for Empathy? I suggest “Insight”, if it’s not taken.
Nice idea, and what’s more, I have another idea for family conflict. Denise’s older sister has no superpowers. However, after the car crash that orphaned the two of them, she wished to gain revenge on those never came to her parents rescue. Thus, she has become a non-superpowered costumed avenger, know to the world as Malice, but know to her sister as Allison-Margeret. She has secretly spent the time and money Denise raised to send the two of them to college into perfecting her body into that of an Olympic level athlete, and studying all she can about mistakes made by past criminals. Denise is constantly trying to get her sister to give up her evil ways, but Allison always seems to be prepared with a contingency plan to escape her sister’s best wishes, or to neutralize the powers of her allies. (“Darn it, Alice! Finish college already!” “I told you to call me Malice, damn it!”) While most of her schemes involves robberies and stealing, not all of them do, so while most heroes are lured by robberies into (inefficient) deathtraps), she often manage less high profile criminal enterprises. Since the team has no great detective, (Billy Bob isn’t there enough) she is constantly gaining new sources of funding.
P.S. Denise has no vulnerability, save for being beaten by another brick, this time with more expertise in martial arts then her.
Okay, here’s the “sitch” as it stands (in the Awesome Young Professionals #1):
the Young Professionals
Mentor - “Boss” Walford - formerly known as the Challenger
Brains - Bileeoobonojoskinalidro Bahbinoreenikolee (AKA Billy Bob)
Trooper - Denise
Babe - Jellybean
Trickster - Pixel
Rebel - Hellion
Veteran - Rat-Bastard
Rookie - Halloween Girl
Sidekick - Dr. Judith Morgan
The Young Professionals are the pre-eminent team of heroes in Valiant City.
Unlike, say, “the X-Men” (in which the team is composed of heroes brought together by a common condition that bonds them and thus operate as a communal-family group), the YP’s are employees of Boss Walford. He runs the team like a ruthless businessman - the team members must perform to his standards or else they are OUT! The team functions more as co-workers than a family unit.
The Boss’s nasty edge hides a soft-spot that only Dr. Morgan is aware of - Walford frets about the safety of his team every moment they are engaged on a mission. While he knows someone has to protect Valiant City, Walford does not want to see any of his employees suffer his own fate. As far as the team members know, Boss Walford is simply one tough-as-nails CEO, but it’s worth putting up with his b.s. to be on the best team in town. During training sessions, Walford grills them all mercilessly and doesn’t hesitate to chew any of them out, except for veteran Rat-Bastard; as “Challenger”, he was a contemporary hero to Rat-Bastard (the other Pro’s refer to them both as ‘the old timers’). Rat-Bastard is the only Pro that Walford shows complete confidence & trust in, a situation that irks the other team members since they universally view Rat-Bastard as scum.
The team roster as shown above is the core cast of the on-going series. Some of them may quit the team or get fired, to be replaced by other heroes temporarily. But somehow, no dismissal or departure of the above members stays permanent.
The collector’s item issue the Awesome Young Professionals #1 (published by Straight Dope Comix) gets the ball rolling:
Dr. Morgan contacts the retired Wizard. She informs him that a slot has opened up on Walford’s team, and he’s willing to accept a trainee. This leads to Halloween Girl (our POV character) to arrive at reclusive Walford Hall, the secret HQ for the world-renowned Young Professionals. She gets to see the team in action in their mega-high-tech training facility (a sequence that introduces the characters, and their powers & abilities.) Although Halloween Girl is amazed at the demonstration, the Boss chews the team out for their sloppy, amateurish performance.
In his private study, Walford & Dr. Morgan assess Halloween Girl’s prospects for success on the team. Walford’s study is shown to have a massive set of files on every known superhero - they are all potential recruits for the team, in case any one else has to be replaced. (Paper Boy, Slaphappy, Furryman & Kitten, Princess Amazon & Empathy are all on file of course, and will eventually be worked into the series.)
Halloween Girl is supposedly being brought in to replace Hellion, who was officially fired from the team due to his uncooperativeness & ornery behaviour. Despite not being an official member, he will repeatedly show up on missions & become embroiled in their activities due to his (unrequited) love of Jellybean. This will irk Boss Walford to no end, but eventually he will relent and award Hellion the first (& only) ‘part-timer’ slot on the team.
The Young Professionals are called in to deal with a curious group of female mercenaries who are attempting to steal a possible doomsday weapon from a local lab. Hellion shows up & jumps into the fray despite Jellybean’s warning to “stay out of our business.” A battle ensues and the Pro’s are victorious.
Halloween Girl accompanies the team on her first mission officially as an observer. She is supposed to view the activities from a safe distance, but not become involved. Despite the Boss’s stern order though, she will rescue Officers O’Ryan & Mendez from being used as hostages while the women mercenaries are escaping.
Back at HQ, Boss Walford chews out Halloween Girl for not following orders, but Dr. Morgan & Denise get him to ease up, since she did save two police officers lives after all.
Anyway, Walford has other things on his mind. From the team’s descriptions, he recognizes the female mercenaries as the Harem of Super-Assassins, the ardent devotees of his arch-enemy - the Sultan! Walford retreats to his terrarium to ponder this development alone.
Halloween Girl asks who the Sultan is, and Dr. Morgan relates a mini-bio of Walford’s final mission as “Challenger” to the girl, and the events that led to him initially forming the Young Professionals…
And thus, a new comic book legend was born! Back issues for this truly ground-breaking go for millions of dollars, and pop culture historians mark it’s cover date as the beginning of the, um, megabyte age of comic books!
I’ll let someone else describe the synopsis for issue #2.
I wish I was an artist. When** Art** gives his synopsis of the first issue, I can see many panels in my head, but I have no talent for drawing.
Art, those files Walford has, on all the other superheros, does he also have one on known villains? Kind of like the files Sherlock Holmes kept?
Hellion is the only “part-time” member. What about temps, in the event an essential YP is laid up, for one reason or another? Said incapacity could be an ordinary accident or illness, not necessarily one due to combat against the baddies.
I can’t keep up. I’m printing it out to read over a pint. 
As for “fill-in” heroes, it is traditional for the team to encounter the “guest star” and in a ridiculous misunderstanding assume he’s a bad guy and have a drawn out battle with him. The misunderstanding will be revealed, and the team will assist the guest star in the mission that he was trying to accomplish before he was interupted. They part ways, having made a new friend…except for one member of the team who still harbors some unresolved hurt feelings.
Was going to try my hand at the synopsis for the second issue, but alas, my poor brain couldn’t wrap itself around all of the quirks of each character well enough.
Guess I’m just an ideas guy.
hangs onto his mint condition first editions and plans his retirement…
Random nitpick, due to his long-term absences, Billy Bob would be a part-timer, usually making his apperances in some typically dramatic fashion.
After reading the Issue #1 synopsis, I’d like to suggest two things.
First, because the team is being paid as employees, maybe that’ll create some tension in terms of the Mentor trying to build and maintain loyalty.
Second, and I’m not a superhero buff, so I don’t know if this is interesting, but I was thinking that maybe the AYP aren’t the premier team and are trying to become the best.
Just a couple of thoughts.
Yeah, given the descriptions of powers these aren’t galactic-menace battling heroes but more lower-level fighters against street-crime and evil masterminds. It could be that Challenger used to be in a top tier group (this world’s equivalent to the Justice League or the Avengers), but his new group is definately second-string…for now.
Billy will probably work best as a source of plot hooks, drawing the team into occasional space-based adventures. I don’t think he should even appear directly in the early issues. Instead, we should see occasional instances of his tech around the base–maybe it should be semi-organic, to make it stand out more. If questioned about it, Walford will only say that he has “friends in high places”.
That leaves a gap in the roster, though. Walford himself fills the leadership aspects of the Brain role, but we still need a tech hero to handle the gadgets. Here’s a possibility:
Codename: Mechana
Real Name: Sarah McGregor
Powers: A peculiar blend of telepathy and telekinesis that enables her to communicate with and control machines.
Relationships: She hero-worships Denise a bit, identifying her with heroines in her favorite anime programs. She finds Pixel fascinating, but confusing, and often annoys him by describing him as “kawaii”. She detests Hellion, mostly because his very presence often messes up her beloved machines.
Flaw: She identifies better with machines than with people, and often misunderstands (or simply fails to notice) human interaction.
Aside from Halloween Girl, Sarah is the youngest of the Professionals and only become a full member of the team a year ago, shortly after graduating from high school. She had already worked for the team in a support capacity for several years while still in school, however, and knows her way around. In addition to maintaining all of the Professional’s gear, she’s often found in the cockpit or driver’s seat. Her powers and her intuitive mastery of machines enable her to coax performance from vehicles that no one else can match. In combat, she uses a suit of powered armor of her own design. No one else can use the suit, as it has no controls–while wearing it, she blends with it and fights as if it were part of her.
Sarah is a serious anime buff, and the more giant robots it has, the better she likes it. Her personal gear, particularly her battlesuit, reflect her obsession. The attachments of the suit change on a regular basis, usually to match something she saw on “Iron Fan Princess”, her favorite show. As a result, the suit may fly in one issue, only to have its rockets ripped out and replaced with a sword in the next.
Machines that she blends with often–like her suit, or the team vehicles–sometimes seem to show lasting effects from her powers. At times, they seem almost aware.
It looks like we need some direction, so let’s elaborate on the background from Issue #1 a bit. We’ve introduced a “possible” doomsday weapon. What is it? What does the Sultan plan to do with it. If, that is, the Sultan has indeed returned from the missing-and-presumed-dead to steal it. Once we define it, we can work out what the villain is up to, and what else he’ll need for his scheme–that will provide a framework for the arc. In between his capers, we’ll fill in with more minor stories that establish the characters. This may be on a bit grander scale than Lemur and js are envisioning, but the team needs to make a splash somehow.
Proposed McGuffin: The Quantum Precipitator
(Panel–space shot of a chain of overlapping Earths): Quantum theory suggests that there are many worlds–that for every possible outcome, there is a universe in which it happened.
(Panel–a boy tossing a coin into the air) For every coin flip, there are two worlds.
(Diagonal Split Panel–coins on the ground, one heads, one tails) One for heads, one for tails.
(Panel–the boy’s hand picking up the “heads” coin) For most of us, this crosses the boundary between science and philosophy.
(Panel–a lecture hall. A scientist stands at the podium, with device covered with a white cloth beside him) Six months ago, Professor Henry Davis turned philosophy back into science.
“Our universe, like a photograph in the middle of a stack of paintings, is the true reflection of reality. Other worlds, other possibilities, exist only as potential.”
(Panel–Davis sweeps the fabric away, revealing an angular device connected to a laptop computer) “That which is potential can be made real. The Quantum Precipitator uses a precisely controlled energy field to alter a small area of our reality to match the potential reality it is attuned to, as if we were transferring paint from one of those portraits onto our photo…”
(Panel–CRASH! as the Sultan’s agents burst into the hall to seize the machine)
Obviously the Precipitator has weapon potential, but it’s not really a doomsday weapon…yet. It’s small, affects a limited area, and can have dangerously unpredictable effects if activated without extensive simulations and delicate adjustments. Davis has only managed to map a small number of potential realities that are noticeably different from our own.
The Sultan’s scheme requires:
- The Precipitator, or enough information to recreate it.
- The resources to create a much larger-scale version.
- A power source to run it.
- A map of useful settings, which he will probably have to develop through trial-and-error.
Build-up issues in the arc will feature high-tech thefts by the Sultan’s minions, possibly as B-plots, or just mentioned, in other issues. The Professionals will foil some of them, but they can’t be everywhere at once. After several such thefts, the team will start facing bizarre situations like carnivorous dinosaurs (smallish ones) loose in the city. The scope of the strange events will spread; maybe next, a blizzard will bury a city park in the middle of summer. Other oddities will crop up in the background–several hundred people all picking the winning lottery number, for instance.
Obviously, the Sultan has managed to duplicate the Precipitator somehow, and is testing it, trying to map out possible realities for his own use. Worse, the repeated use of the device is beginning to have side effects. Things are changing even when the Precipitator isn’t in use, and the effect is spreading.
The climax of the arc will be at a power plant. With the full output of the plant to drive it, the improved Precipitator may be able to alter the entire world at once…if the world lasts that long. The random changes are becoming more extreme, and it’s only a matter of time before realities begin to manifest in which the Earth doesn’t even exist.
The denoument will reveal that the Sultan himself is still missing; the entire scheme is the work of the Harem, who plan to use the Precipitator to manifest a reality in which the Sultan survived and succeeded in taking over the world. It’s all going wrong, however. The changes are spinning out of control (montage of alterations–NYC populated by sentient dinosaurs, irregular chunks of land vanishing, and so forth. Time has run out–the only way to save the world is to use the Precipator one last time. As the Professionals battle the Harem, Mechana slips away, leaving her suit on autopilot. She blends with the Precipitator, but finds herself lost in the potential realities. An unlikely savior appears just when all seems lost–Hellion. His power over probability guides Mechana to her target. As the power plant begins to fade around them, they activate the machine…and it vanishes, along with the Harem.
Coda–
(Panel Sequence–Approaching the gates of the Walford estate, Sarah is talking with Halloween Girl)
HG: “So you just made it…unhappen?”
S: “Well, it happened. Everyone remembers it. But in this reality, Davis never built the machine.”
HG: “But everything else is the same?”
(Panel–A two-seater mech is sitting at the gate. A handsome young man is waving from the cockpit. He resembles Sarah’s poster of the hero from “Iron Fan Princess”.)
HYM: “Hey, Sarah! Davis wants us to test-drive the prototype!”
(Panel–Sarah flashes a grin at HG)
S: “Well…almost everything.”
What is it?! Why, it’s a thousand-year-old land survey, but because the Sultan is both a poor speller and slightly stupid, he ends up more embarrassed than someone who’s complained that his gazpacho soup is cold. This bizarrely neurotic madman will hold the team responsible for his epic humiliation and focus all his efforts on destroying them; often, he will set up his villanious schemes to include an attempt to ambush them. Because of this obsession, they’re the team on the scene for an increasingly number of heroic victories, and they become more skilled & experienced as time goes on.
Thus, the team doesn’t start as the top team in the city; rather, part of the story is their rise to the top because, for the Mentor, this is a story of redemption from his near fatal mistake that left him crippled. I wasn’t thinking of them as being less grand, so much as the story of their rise should be part of the theme. IMHO, of course .
Well, if we should beef up the characters a little, I recall a magician who could throw playing cards with enough speed and force to be lethal. It made me think that Jellybean could be a master of games of pure skill, and games of chance, including cards. Because of this, she has a deck of cards special cards—she arrived on the scene with her own deck, but now the Mentor replaces them as needed—that are stiff & flexible & hard & as sharp as an “obsidian razor” (that phrase should be used, IMO). If it’s the type of comic where no one really gets hurt, then she uses them to cut equipment belts, cut off robot limbs, and cut cables, all from 150 yards away, sometimes bending them to get amazing flight patterns and boomerang performance out of them. If it’s the type of comic where people really do get hurt, she can really hurt people w/ them too.
(Believe me, there are a lot of games that no one has ever heard of, so maybe there can be a lot there. For example: the team is manning Mechana’s first giant robot. The Sultan’s enraged efreet is engaged with them, as is the remotely operated killing machine belonging to the Sultan’s villianous enemy d’Lorien, a mad industrialist. Thus the team is in a three-way duel, and Mechana’s robot is on the ropes. Jellybean knows they can shoot first, but they probably won’t hit anything; she knows that the efreet is so magically powerful right now that he won’t miss what he aims for; and she knows that d’Lorien’s killing machine will most likely hit, but it’s not guaranteed. With the Mentor shouting instructions over the radio telling the team to take out the efreet while they at least have a chance, Jellybean takes charge of the robot, fires wild, and makes the robot dive for cover behind the hill. The other two combatants, seeing fire and one enemy quickly diving behind a convenient hill, fire on each other. Of course the efreet wins that match. It’s all over now! But Mechana’s robot has a chance to take aim from behind the hill and fries the efreet! Victory! Later as she’s being scolded for her reckless behavior, she says something like “Lighten up, boss. It was a truel, and we were the low-odds player. Do the math.” It turns out that in a three-way duel, if the odds are right, the worst shooter should just shoot the first shot in the air.)