Marvel Superheroes - Heroes of Silverage City UPDATED 5/19

[Dr Midnight]

Herbie was having one of the worst days of a life that was one bad day after another.

“How was the trip?” Herbie didn’t answer. His dad, who tended to not get the hint, asked again. “Herbie? How was the field trip?”

“It was great,” Herbie said, staring out the window. “I went with all my friends and saw amazing things all day. We laughed and had fun.”

“Well that’s good! Sounds like a terrific time.”

Herbie was anxious to just get home and lock himself in his room for the rest of the night. He saw his dad put the left blinker on to turn onto Beecher Street. Herbie sighed. His dad chuckled. “Sounds like someone forgot it’s Wednesday! Time for your allergy shots.”

They walked into the medical complex and met with the doctor. “Hiya, Herbie! Ready?” Dr. Kenning always treated Herbie like he was still eight. Herbie always tried his best to ignore it and project a manly image, but like with everything else, Herbie failed.

Herbie rolled up his sleeve. Dr. Kenning got out a syringe and threw away the box it came from. He filled it with some solution in a small glass vial, and as always Herbie had no idea what was in it.

The doctor stuck it in Herbie’s arm. The was a tiny noise, and Dr. Kenning held up the syringe. “The needle broke! I must have hit your bone. Well, I’ll be! My last syringe, too. Tsk. Lucky you, Herbie, you’re not getting a shot after all.”

Herbie’s dad asked “Is breaking a needle this way uncommon, doctor?”

The doctor shook his head. “Yes, for healthy young men. Herbie, your arms are so thin that there was no meat for the needle to inject into! You need to put some muscle on these things, kid. Eat a hamburger now and then. You’re so scrawny.” He smiled. He meant these things kindly, but this was the last thing Herbie needed to hear today.

Herbie got up and walked out of the room. He reached the sidewalk by the time his dad caught up to him. “Herbie, what’s wrong?” Herbie kept walking, leaving his father standing behind him with a confused, hurt expression on his face.

Herbie walked home by himself, feeling the wind rush by him in the afternoon sunshine. He thought about everything that had happened to him in the course of the last eight hours.

It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he should have let the doctor take the broken piece of needle out of his arm before leaving. He felt around the place on his arm where the needle had gone, and didn’t feel anything. Come to think of it, Herbie hadn’t even felt the needle’s pinching stab. Well, whatever. As long as the needle wasn’t embedded in his arm, he could manage.

He reached an intersection. A car idled at the light. It was full of a group of sophomores from school. They looked at him, grinned and unrolled the window.

“Hey, Herbie! Going for a walk? Careful, you might snap those broomsticks you call legs. Fag!” They laughed and one threw a half-full McDonald’s chocolate shake at him. It fell short, landed on the ground and splattered his shoes and pants. The car peeled away with all the kids inside howling with laughter.

Herbie pushed the button for the WALK signal and waited. After a while, he noticed that the cars were all stopped- the light wasn’t working. He looked up at it and saw the light was dead. That was odd, it was working a minute ago. He looked at the button he’d pushed and now only saw a hole. He leaned forward and looked harder. The metal of the light pole had been punched inward, maybe two inches, and the metal held the shape of a finger. Purple sparks fuzzed and fitzed from the depression.

“Stupid thing was broken and I didn’t even noitice,” Herbie sighed. He crossed the street as cars began honking at each other, waiting for the light to change.

Herbie got home, closed the door to his room and plunged onto his bed. He stayed that way, thinking hard and dark, until the phone rang around seven-thirty. He didn’t go to answer it- there was no point. It was never for him. Nothing was.

A knock on the door. “Herbie?” his mom called, sounding concerned. “Phone call.”

Herbie sat up. A phone call? For him? He picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Hi, Herbie? This is Emerson from school. Listen, is anything happening to you?”

Herbie didn’t’ know what to make of that. “What?”

“Umm… What I mean is- is anything odd happening around you? Weird things? Maybe since the accident in the Transatomic Superconductor room today?”

“Yeah, kinda. Nothing really weird. Why?”

“I’ve… uh… well, I’ve been having a hell of a day, you could say. I called the others and they’re having problems too. We’re getting together at my place within a half an hour to talk about things and see what we can’t figure out.”

“Hmm. Does this mean JJ, Jeremy, Hammer, Mace, Dick and Glenn will be there?”

“JJ, yes. I can’t get a hold of the others.”

“I dunno… I don’t think I want to go.”

Emerson hesitated. “Alright, that’s too bad, I guess… I’ll tell Donovan, JJ, Gustav and Cat that you couldn’t make it.”

Cat? Of course… she was in the room too. Cat, with the pink pigtails. “Wait. What’s the address?” Herbie wrote them down on a piece of scrap paper, then went to his closet to begin picking out an outfit.

Next: Joining

 

[Dr Midnight]

Donovan finally showed up at Emerson’s house. He was the last to show up. He walked into Emerson’s room to find the place a mess- things were lying all over the ground, some kicked into heaps in the corners. The things all seemed to be everyday objects that were broken and bent out of shape.

The others sat around on bean bag chairs and Emerson sat in his lab chair, looking most like the person who’d just been diagnosed with something irreversible. Donovan said “Emerson, this isn’t how I pictured you living. There’s broken stuff all over the ground.”

“It doesn’t go back to normal after it falls off.”

Donovan screwed up his face. “What??”

“Never mind. Listen, now that everyone’s here, I think we all have things to say. Cat, why don’t you start.”

Cat began, telling of the things that had happened to her in the time since school let out earlier in the day. The others followed, and soon it was clear that they were all stricken with bizarre afflictions, none of which they were happy about, save Gustav.

Cat tried her hand at rationalizing what was going on. “Clearly, we all have some kind of problem. Maybe some radiation sickness or something, or some marvelous coincidence of bad luck.”

Emerson said “I’m not sure what could have caused this, though.”

“You fools,” Gustav said, with that same half-grin on his face. “Don’t you see what’s happening? We were in the presence of a giant malfunctioning machine that changes things’ base elements when it was struck by lightning. We were fundamentally changed.”

The lights dimmed momentarily, then went back normal. No one paid attention to the disturbance.

“Someone better take care of this,” JJ said. “I don’t want people thinking I’m some kind of mutie and getting my rep soiled. I am NOT having it.”

“YOU’RE not having it,” Donovan growled. “If not for you and your clique of creeps, we wouldn’t even have had an incident today!”

“Don’t start, sphinx-boy, I had to climb out of a drain today. You ever climb out a drain?”

“That’s probably the second time you crawled out of a drain. The first was your birth.”

“Shut up, freak!”

Donovan picked up one of Emerson’s science beakers and hurled it at JJ. Emerson, without thinking, reached out to stop it. It was an instinctive reaction to having something of his imperiled. The beaker shattered in the air, before it ever reached Emerson’s hand. The shards shot to and around Emerson’s hand, whirling around it and clinging to it. In a moment, the glass pieces began re-forming with each other. The glass formed a perfectly smoothed, segmented glove over Emerson’s hand. He stared at it.

Cat asked “What the hell are your powers, man?”

“I don’t know,” Emerson said. “I seem to attract things. I think I’m a magnet guy or something. I can make the things fall off, but they don’t fix themselves.” The pieces of glass fell off into the wastebin. Emerson looked down at his broken beaker sadly.

Cat shrugged. “How is making things stick to you a power?”

“I don’t know, can YOU do it?” Emerson was in a foul mood, and this was about as close to getting really angry as he ever seemed to get.

Cat leaned down to scratch Emerson’s cat. “All I’m saying,” she offered, “Is that if we’re going with the angle that we now have superpowers, shouldn’t we be looking for great benefits and abilities? Conjuring sphinxes and making things stick to us don’t seem to offer us much of anything.”

Gustav said “Not every super power is beneficial. There’s a large number of mutants who are stricken with crippling deformities as a result of their mutation.” He looked at Cat as he made his point and his poise failed him briefly. “You’ve… uh… you’ve got some…” He gestured to her face.

“What?” Cat at him with whiskers sprouting from her upper lip.

Donovan said “Holy crap. We’re through the looking glass here, people… hip-deep in fricking Wonderland.”

“What!” Cat said again, getting paranoid. “What’s wrong??” By now two triangular, feline ears had grown from the top of her head. Her own ears seemed to have withdrawn, and smooth skin covered where they had been.

“You’re turning into a Cat,” Herbie said meekly.

Cat ran to Emerson’s mirror, stared into it for a second, and touched the cat ears on her head. She looked like she was about to scream… then that look melted away and she said “Cool.”

Gustav said “Clearly, you’re adapting the physiology of animals you encounter. Very interesting power, there.”

Emerson looked away from her and gasped. Behind Donovan, Emerson’s room faded away into a woodlands path. “What is THAT??”

Everyone turned and looked. Something was appearing above the path. It was a big, toothy grin. Two green eyes opened, one winked, and the whole vision faded away.

Donovan said “Whaaaat?”

Gustav cleared his throat and said “Wonderland. That was Wonderland. You just made a reference to it a moment ago, and it appeared behind you. Perhaps you subconsciously create illusions?”

“Great,” JJ said. “The foreign kid is figuring out everyone’s powers. What’s mine, dork?”

Gustav’s answer to this was shocking- he sprang from his position with startling speed and slammed into JJ with both hands. JJ flew back against the wall and fell to his butt. “Aghhh! What’d you do that for, dick??”

Gustav furrowed his brow. “You’d mentioned being unable to get knocked down. I tried it, and it seems that isn’t the case.“

JJ got up, brushing himself off. “Make a run at me like that again and I’ll murdalize ya. Looks like your ability to guess everyone’s power is a bust… I could do better. Watch, here I go.” He put his hands to his heads and closed his eyes. “I’m getting that Herbie’s power is to be a mega gaywad and the biggest loser in Silverage.”

“I’m not a loser,” Herbie replied quietly.

“Oh please! Look at that outfit. You look like you actually dressed up for this. What, were you trying to impress Cat the super-dyke with your JC Penney pressed slacks?”

“Shut up. I mean it.”

“Do you think she could ever even LOOK at a monumental turd like you?”

Herbie’s face turned red and he screamed “Shut UP!” He reached up and brought a fist down on Emerson’s desk. KA-BRAKK!!! The desk shattered as if it were made of graham crackers. Tiny splinters and dust fell around Herbie, who glared at JJ with a furious grimace. “Shut. Your. Mouth.”

The lights overhead flickered, went out, and came back on again after a moment.

Gustav was first to break the silence. “Well. Herbie’s power is clear. You’re the strong guy. Congratulations.”

Emerson said “Okay. All right. We all need to calm down. Breaking my things isn’t going to help anyone, and right now we need to keep our heads clear.”

Another fizzling noise and a purple flare of sparks, and the lights went out entirely.

Donovan looked out of Emerson’s window. “Looks like it’s all over town.

Everything in the room was pitch-black… to everyone except Cat. With her feline eyes she saw everyone around looking about blindly. She giggled, reached out and plucked JJ’s Buscema Broncos cap right off his head. “Hey, what… my hat just disappeared!” She then put the hat on Herbie’s head, and moved back… just as Emerson switched on his flashlight.

JJ saw his hat on Herbie’s head. He reached out and swiped it back. “Bad move, doof! Touch the hat again and you’re wiped.”

“I didn’t take it!” Herbie, still infuriated, reached out and pushed JJ. To his and JJ’s surprise, his hands went straight through JJ’s chest. A vaguely round section of JJ’s upper torso fell to the ground, neatly cut from his body by Herbie’s furious push. JJ then raised his arm to ward off the attack, and Herbie slapped it out of the air. The arm clumped against the wall and fell, where it kept moving.

JJ stood there, with the others, staring down at the piece of his chest and his severed arm. There was blood, but none of it splattered or leaked. It clung to the flesh. There were visible ribs, and a cross-section of his spinal column. JJ said “Huh.”

Gustav said “I didn’t see THAT coming. Based on that and your previous experience with the drain, I’d say you have some incredible measure of body density control. You may well be invulnerable.”

JJ picked up his chest, sliding it back into the hole. “I was invulnerable before.” He picked up his arm and it snapped back into place. He wiggled his fingers. “Everything’s cool. Kinda hurt though.”

Donovan said “You’re Leper Man!”

“At least I don’t see scary monsters.”

“You will.”

The phone rang. Emerson picked it up, hushed everyone, and listened for a minute. “No, we don’t know anything about it either. …What? …Oh, nothing… Hey, is that a police scanner in the background? Let me listen. … … …Wow. Okay. Bye.” He hung up.

“That was Steven Piercey. He wanted to know if we knew anything about the blackout. I heard on his police scanner that hell’s breaking out all over town… the police are rushing about trying to stem the electrical shorts. Apparently crimes are breaking out all over the place as a result of the blackout. The police don’t even have enough manpower to stop the bank robbery that’s going on at Silverage Savings & Loan.”

Everyone let that hang in the air for a moment. Emerson’s eyes were excited. “Want to see if we can do it ourselves?”

Next: Crimefighters

 

[Dr Midnight]

The group took JJ’s Trans Am (black with a gold eagle painted on the hood- a classic) down into the city. They pulled up near the Silverage Savings & Loan with the lights off and got out.

Inside the bank’s darkened windows were the quick flickers of several flashlights being cast over the place. The kids crept up to the windows and peeked in. Aside from the occasional flashlight beam, the place was entirely dark.

Cat’s cat-eyes had faded away over the drive here, and she was now fully human again. She looked around… no cat nearby to help her to change. Night vision would really help right now. Did she even need a cat to be nearby? She didn’t know. She clenched her eyes shut and thought about cats as hard as she could. Tabbies, angoras, calicos, Scottish Folds, manxes, Russian Blues- her eyes snapped open, bright yellow with black vertical slits. The slits widened as she stared into the bank. “Eight men… all in ski masks, all with guns. Working on the safe.”

“It occurs to me that some of us aren’t actually sure of what we can do,” Emerson said. “I’m pretty sure I can move their guns away from their hands. Let me try that.” He held his hand up to the window and willed the guns away from the robbers’ hands. The glass of the window began bowing outward to him. Emerson quickly stopped what he was doing. “Dammit,” he said, stepping away from the window. “If I’m not magnet guy, what the hell am I? Having things stick to you is one hell of a lame power. What am I missing??”

“You’ll figure it out,” Donovan said. “For now, I think I’ll try to scare them into wasting some ammo. It’s time for a radioactive zombie cop!” He concentrated on forming just that by the bank’s door, formed his hands into the classic metal sign… the pointer and pinky extended, with the other two fingers held down by the thumb. His hands glowed a dim orange and a radioactive zombie cop appeared in the doorway to the bank.

It groaned and approached the thieves. They panicked and began unloading bullets into it. It fell after a while, dead from a head shot.

“Good job,” Gustav said. “That seemed to draw some fire, as you suggested. Thirty-eight shots were fired, twenty-four hit their mark. I’d say they have some passing firearms experience.”

Cat gave him a look. “You were able to count the number of gunshots… and how many HIT THE COP??”

“Yes,” Gustav shrugged, nonplussed. “Herbie, they may be about to bolt for the door. How about giving them something to think about?”

Herbie walked around the corner to the main door, reaching out to grab a light pole on the way, to rip from the ground and use as a club. He found very quickly that though his strength had changed, his weight had not and that trying to pull the pole to him had only pulled him to the pole. He frowned and put both hands on the pole, bending it at an axis. He snapped the pole off and walked to the door, holding the pole as a giant baseball bat, ready to swing.

JJ said “They don’t seem to be running quite yet… I’ll give them a nudge. He stretched out with his neck, so that his head went around the corner and through the door… low, as not to be seen. “HEY!” he yelled. “I’m going to call the cops!” His head then shot back around the corner to his shoulders like a tape measure.

Emerson sighed. Herbie’s really got super-strength. JJ’s got stretch-powers. Cat can adapt to animal forms, Gustav’s got incredible cognitive ability, and Donovan can cast magic. I can make stuff stick to me. This really stinks. He was so lost in his despair that he almost didn’t hear the creaking and groaning noises behind him. When he did, he turned around and gasped, just once. He didn’t have time to scream.

The crooks, frightened by JJ’s taunts, finally began advancing for the door. As the first one made it out, he was astonished to see a fifteen year-old kid standing there, holding a lamp post.

Herbie swung, again forgetting that his weight was still that of a teenage weakling. The seven hundred pound pole’s inertia held it still against the counterweight of Herbie’s one hundred and thirty pound frame. Herbie managed to shoot himself off to his rear to bash off a building, leaving the pole to hang in the air for a second before it crashed to the ground with a jarring CLANGGGG! Herbie rubbed his head on the other side of the street and vowed to be more careful with things like that in the future.

Cat hurled herself at one of the crooks, hissing like a cat and wielding wickedly sharp claws. She knocked him to the ground and began tearing at him. The thug cried out in surprise and pain.

The other robbers pointed their guns at Cat and were about to fire when an immense thunder of a noise distracted them. They looked off to the left and saw the other kids, apparently as shocked as they were, looking around the corner at something. Something huge. Something walking. Another thunderous footstep, then another.

JJ groaned. “Oh no. Oh NO!!!”

Emerson stepped around the corner, wearing JJ’s car.

Next: Crimefighters part II

 

[Dr Midnight]

Screw it, no one's posting. I'm just going to put the rest up and get this thing out of the way.

 

[Dr Midnight]

The black and gold Trans Am had entirely broken apart and covered the bookish young student, forming a ten foot tall creature that very strongly resembled a Transformer. The head of the thing was a metal mask lit with two red eyes. The arms were black and gold plated, thick, with ball sockets at the joints. The hood of JJ’s car was a breastplate for the thing, the eagle glinting in the streetlights.

Emerson spoke, and his voice came, amplified, through the car’s speakers, which were mounted on his shoulders. “Okay. Powers not sucking so much now.” He picked up two of the robbers and chucked them into a nearby dumpster. The lid banged down over them.

Donovan laughed. “Emerson, you ROCK!” He made the devil-fingers and they lit up bright orange. He created a roaring fire inside the bank, and the crooks that were now hesitant about coming out had no choice. Flames roared inside the building. “Oops. That was only supposed to LOOK like fire,” Donovan mumbled.

The criminals ran out into the street, almost ignoring the heroes in their haste to escape the blaze. JJ reached back with fifty-foot arms, grabbed Herbie from the other side of the street, and whipped him right into the middle of the fray.

Herbie began whaling away on them as soon as he landed amidst them. A lot of rage had been building in Herbie through the day, and he let the floodgates open. He pushed one guy into a wall, knocked the heads of two more together, and kicked upwards into a crook’s groin. The man’s face immediately froze in shock and turned a grayish-blue. He collapsed.

I killed him, Herbie thought. I crossed that line the real heroes never cross. I don’t know my own strength yet, and I kicked him as hard as I could. I could have cut him in half. Herbie shook himself from his funk and grabbed the villain’s body. Herbie was panicked. Maybe no one’s even noticed yet. Maybe if I can just ditch the body, no one WILL notice.

A few of the robbers fired their guns at Cat. For some reason, she seemed the most likely target, mauling one of their own on the street. She arced back, dodging a shot, leaned forward to dodge another, then was struck above her heart. She collapsed to the ground and gasped. The would in her chest made slurping sucking noises as she tried to breathe.

This was Gustav’s moment. He’d been carefully hanging back, weighing the time to act. This was the time. He quickly guessed how to best reach Cat, and leapt over the entire fray. He did two tight somersaults and landed, kneeling, beside her. He scooped her up and ran her away from the fight while he pondered what to do with her.

Emerson grabbed a crook and held him up. The fist clenching the crook shot off of Emerson’s metal-plated arm and rocketed down the street, taking the crook with it. Emerson’s arm began reassembling itself from the metal pieces coating it. “Coool,” he said to himself.

Gustav took Cat into a nearby alley. She was dying… quickly. She’d been struck in the heart. “Cat,” Gustav said. “Can you hear me?”

Cat only managed to suck in great bloody gasps of air. “Kcccchccckckk… kccchhhkccccckkkghh…”

“Cat, listen. There are species of lizard that can regenerate severed limbs, to a certain extent. Your heart isn’t a limb, but can you focus on that power and make it work for you?” She stared up at him, pale, gasping, tears running down her cheeks. “I know it’s a longshot, Cat, but you’re going to die unless you can manipulate your power.”

Cat closed her eyes and grunted, turning her thoughts inward, focusing all her energy on her chest wound Lizards. Geckos. Uh… Monitors. Ow. Iguanas. Her wound spat a line of blood into the air. It landed with a clink… the bullet had spat with it.

“It’s working, Cat. Keep going. Concentrate.”

The wound didn’t’ close entirely, but Cat felt her heartrate slow down from its galloping pace. She could breathe again. “I think… I think I’m alright.”

“Amazing,” Gustav said. “You can use the power of animals in any physical context. You didn’t need the lizard to be able to repair his heart to fix your own. What else can you do, I wonder.”

She wiped some of the tears and blood from her face, mostly just embarrassed now to have been shot at all. “I dunno, but all of me is feeling like a horse’s ass.”

Back at the fight, the group was mopping up. JJ grabbed two downed mooks, reached up over a streetlamp with his elbows, then reeled his arms in. His arms acted as a pulley system, drawing the mooks up, who were then hooked on the streetlamp by their shirts.

Donovan had turned all the crooks’ guns to cobras. The cobras now withered away to blackened, crispy looking ribbons. Donovan kicked them into the sewers, then drew the oxygen from the bank, extinguishing the fire.

Herbie darted around a corner, carrying the body. His face was flushed and sweaty. He dumped the corpse into a trash bin… just as a light flashed overhead.

All the heroes looked up to see someone atop the four-story bank building, beneath the train tracks. Someone with a camera. “Steven Piercey!” Donovan cursed. He pointed and Steven’s camera turned into a bumblebee.

“Owww!” Steven grabbed his face. “Something stung me!” The bee flew away.

“Did he see who we are?” Emerson asked quietly.

“I doubt it,” Gustav replied, helping Cat limp back to the others. “We’re lit from behind, down here. All he’s seeing are vague silhouettes. We’re fortunate to have all this corporate signage on the west side of the street.”

Herbie approached them. “How is she?”

“I’m fine… Herbie, you look like a nervous wreck. Were you that worried about me?”

Herbie stood still, unsure of how to respond.

Gustav cocked his head. “What’s that? Does anyone hear that?”

Cat grew a pair of cat ears again and listened. “Sounds low. Rumbley.”

“Getting louder,” Emerson added.

In three quick instants, Gustav put it all together. His face was grim. “It’s the train. The blackout occurred while it was moving, around its maximum speed of a hundred and forty miles an hour. Two miles north of this point, the track splits above a residential area. The train is usually going much slower by then. The switch is likely set to right, if I recall correctly. The train’s brakes are electrical, thus the train cannot slow down at the moment. At the speed the train is going, it’s going to jump the tracks and land in the projects… likely killing hundreds.”

The bank robbers and Steven Piercey were forgotten. Everyone turned their heads south and saw the train roaring their way, approximately five stories overhead, on an elevated metro-rail track. The Silverage bullet train was speeding out of control.

JJ shook his head with a fevered look in his eyes. “No, Gustav,” he said. “That’s not going to happen.”

Next: Gotta Catch a Train

 

[Dr Midnight]

JJ began to stretch up toward the train tracks. “Herbie, grab my legs, I need an anchor! I’m going to try to slow the train or stop it- someone get to that switch!” Herbie planted his legs into the asphalt and grabbed JJ’s ankles.

Cat concentrated. Hawks, eagles, owls, pigeons, seagulls… Her arms elongated and flattened. Her delicate skin grew feathers that lengthened until her arms were wings. She flapped with a wingspan of about twenty feet and began to rise into the air. For a moment, the pressure of the situation melted away and Cat joined the elite .0001% of people worldwide that knew what it felt like to fly on their own.

She lifted up into the air and tried to go faster. The train was coming up very fast, and she wanted to match or beat its speed. Cat the bird-girl was racing a bullet train on her first flight.

JJ yelled “HOLD TIGHT, HERBIE!” as he stretched up all the way to the tracks. The train came at him at a frightening speed and THWACK! With the sound of a wad of bread dough hitting a hot sidewalk from a hundred feet up, the train hit JJ, who flattened against the glass and tried to hold on.

The train kept going, stretching an already very stretched JJ out between a quickly moving train and an anchored, super-strong guy. Before JJ knew it, he’d been stretched out to about four hundred feet long, and his breaking point was found. He snapped at the midsection. His upper half launched out into the air before the train, like a rubber band shot off of a finger. His back half shot back and thwapped Herbie in the face, knocking him out of his holes in the asphalt. His upper torso flew out in front of the train, sailing through the air as JJ flailed helplessly against the air.

Donovan tried to magically restore electricity to the train car. He managed to set the lights in the cars on, very dimly. There wasn’t enough power to manage the brakes, that was clear.

Emerson, down on the street in his robot suit said “The train’s getting away… we’ve got to keep up with it and try to beat it to the switch. Stand back…” He held his arms up. “TRANSFORM!!!” Nothing happened. His giant metal arms lowered. “Crap. That would have been so cool.” He sloughed off his suit. It fell around him in hunks of bent, ruined pieces of what was once the star quarterback’s beloved car.

Gustav asked “Why did you take off the suit?”

“Because we’re taking this car. C’mon!” Emerson ran to a nearby car and opened the locked door by momentarily calling the door to his body, then letting it go before it hit him. The door opened with a chunking noise. “Can you hotwire this, Gustav?”

“Of course,” Gustav said as he slid in the passenger seat. Within two and one third seconds, the car was running. “Go!” The car took off down the street.

That left Donovan standing there with Herbie and JJ’s legs and pelvis. Herbie got an idea and grabbed JJ’s lower torso, which wiggled helplessly in his grasp. He tied both feet to street lights on opposing sides of the street and began to back into the center, stretching it back. He kept pushing back and back until JJ’s legs were twitching with the strain… then Herbie released. He was fired up into the air like a bullet. He sailed right past Cat, right past the train, right past JJ and crashed into the ties on the track.

JJ was still tumbling through the air. Herbie flew past him and he stretched his arms out towards the train. He grabbed it and pulled himself in. He slapped against the front of the train’s windshield for the second time, feeling like so much pulled taffy. “Urrrrgh…” Looking inside, he saw a terrified looking conductor manning the train’s operations booth. The man was so shocked by this odd goo-kid stuck to the train’s front that he almost forgot to keep trying the brake lever.

Donovan called upon whatever forces he controlled and managed to cause a drag chute to sprout from the back of the train. The chute began slowing the train down… somewhat. JJ’s legs, tied to two lamp posts nearby, turned brittle and crumbled into pieces, then reformed. The legs walked over to Donovan, who said “The train’s getting away… how can I catch up?” The legs turned in the direction of the train and braced themselves. The meaning was clear: hop on. Donovan sneered. “I am not riding your ass.” The legs looked ashamed, if ever a pair of legs could look ashamed.

Cat was catching up. She was beating her wings furiously and beginning to advance on the train. She realized that unless the train slowed much more dramatically than it was doing, she wasn’t likely to get much further than it, even with a set of wings like this. She got an idea. She concentrated hard and moved in front of the train as she grew a giant spider’s thorax. Calling on two animal forms was tougher, but she managed it. She began to unreel a line of web from her spinnerets, flying back and forth across the tracks trying to tangle the web around power poles and slow the train by any increment.

Emerson and Gustav were in a ’99 Ford Camry, doing ninety miles up a city street. Luckily thanks to the blackout there weren’t many cars on the road, but still it was all Emerson could do to maneuver as well as he was doing. Years of video games had honed Emerson’s driving skill to a razor-keen edge. “This isn’t going to help us unless we can reach the tracks, somehow,” Gustav mused. “Wait… there!” He pointed. Coming up on the right hand side of the road was one of those trucks that carried several cars on two levels. This one was empty, and its rear ramps were resting almost at ground level. Emerson floored it.

Herbie stood on the tracks, waiting for his moment. The train was flying at him very, very quickly. He hopped at the right moment and JJ caught him, placing him up on the roof. Herbie reached down and ripped a chunk of metal right out of the roof. He yelled down to the conductor. “Is there anyone else on the train?”

“No, it’s just me- we bring the train back to the yard at the end of the night… Oh, god, we’re going to crash!” The conductor panicked. “Oh my god, oh my god, I’m going to die and I’m seeing a giant bird-spider woman outside. Am I already dead?”

Herbie grabbed the guy and handed him off to Cat, who grabbed him with her bird’s legs, then dropped the shrieking man off on top of a nearby building. She flew on as he yelled something about being taken by a harpy.

Herbie flattened the chunk of roof-metal he’d ripped as best he could into a disc and hurled it at the switch, which was now visible maybe a quarter-mile away. The end of the tracks was a half-mile away. The disc flew true and glanced off of the switch, which clanged halfway over. The switch was now in between settings… it would need to be nudged again for the residents of the neighborhood to be safe. The track to the right curved too sharply- only the track to the left would support the train at this speed.

JJ reached out in front of him… he couldn’t stretch far enough to hit the switch in time. Herbie looked around for something else to throw, and there was no chance that Cat would make it in the few seconds they had left. JJ said “I need something between me and the switch! I can make it, if just…”

Then, a car launched up into the air, arcing gracefully from the ramp it had flown up from. Emerson and Gustav landed roughly on the tracks with a flash of sparks. The car wavered for a moment and kept going, three hundred feet out in front of the train.

“Bingo,” JJ shouted. He reached out and grabbed the car’s roof with one hand, then released his grip on the train. He flew out over the car, streamlining his body as best he could. He reached far out in front of him and slapped the switch the rest of the way. KA-CHUNK! The tracks clunked into place, aiming the train’s path to the left.

The train was now slowed to about fifty miles an hour, thanks to Donovan and Cat’s many efforts to reduce its speed. It curved around to the left, chasing the car, which was falling apart from the stress of driving across railroad ties.

JJ’s upper body plummeted five stories down to land atop his lower body, which had run this entire way on long legs, waiting for him to rejoin. He landed perfectly, and with a SPLUP noise he was whole again.

Gustav leapt from the car, which was rapidly deteriorating. He flipped down to some power lines, which he swung around in three perfect loops before flipping down to street level.

Cat picked Emerson up from the car before it was bashed apart by the still-slowing train. She flew him to the ground.

The heroes all regrouped on the street, worn and weary. “Y’know,” Donovan said, “I think we should get some costumes if we’re going to do this type of thing.”

“Are we going to keep doing this?” Cat asked.

They looked about at each other.

Next: Issue 2: Welcome to the Community

 

[Dr Midnight]

Issue 2

The Buscema Broncos were facing their archrivals the Kirby Cougars, and the entire town turned out to watch the game.

The suburbs of Silverage had emptied as parents, siblings, sports fans and bored teenagers showed up to line the bleachers. The cheerleaders were doing their best to whip the loyal Silverage fans into a screaming froth. Meager fireworks went off overhead in the sky, where you couldn’t see the stars through the atmospheric light bounced about by the field’s lighting system and the nearby metropolis.

Five teenagers in particular sat on the bleachers. None of these kids had ever watched a football game before. Herbie Miller and Donovan Maddox played PSP against each other. Claire Tibbits stared around, completely bored. Gustav Stammler watched the interaction of sports fans the way anyone else might watch the activity around an ant hill. Emerson scribbled in his notebook. None of them were interested in the game at all… they had only shown up to watch over one of their own.

Jacob Jones ran out onto the football field to the cheers of hundreds of Silverage fans. He held his hands up and nodded as he joined the rest of the team.

“He really does seem to know how to get the crowd excited,” Cat observed.

Gustav agreed. “He’s got performance skills.”

Donovan snorted his disdain. “Why are we here again, listening to the throngs of apes?”

“We’re watching JJ to make sure he doesn’t use his powers to cheat, and secondly we’re keeping an eye out for his clique- Hammer, Jeremy, Mace, Dick and Glenn. They haven’t shown up at school since the incident, maybe they’ll turn up tonight,” Emerson said without looking up from his notepad.

Donovan stopped playing briefly and glared at Emerson. “I know. That was rhetorical.”

It was Saturday night, nine PM- exactly seventy-two hours ago the group had been fighting bank robbers on a city street, exhibiting amazing powers that they’d won at random in an accident at the Silverage Science Museum. Since then, the group had lain low, going to school and only discussing their experience in private, telling no one else, watching the reaction of the public. The arrival of a super-team in Silverage City had enflamed the town’s spirit. Everyone was discussing the team, what their names might be, what the team might be called. The major papers had decided, as a publicity stunt, to award the naming of the team and heroes (unless the heroes came forward first) to the one person who’d managed to get a halfway decent look at them. That honor would go to-

“Hi guys!” Steven Piercey bounded up the crowded bleachers to them. Cat was polite enough to greet him back. “Enjoying the game?” Before anyone could answer, he was onto his favorite topic. “So how ‘bout that new super-team? I get to name them. I’m writing a story about them in the school paper this week. Can you believe I got a picture of them in action?”

Donovan didn’t look up. “So where’s the picture?”

Steven frowned. “ I dropped my camera when a bee stung me.”

Donovan smirked to himself. “That’s a shame.”

“Yeah. I’ve got a new camera though, so I’ll be ready when they appear again. Hey, so let me run my name ideas past you.” He took out a notepad. “For the team name, I’m thinking either The Astonishers or The Silverage Six or The New Legends.”

No one answered. He looked at them. “C’mon, which do you like? Cat?”

“I dunno.” She looked out over the field, watching the game but not paying attention to much of anything.

“Herbie, you’ve gotta have an opinion.”

“Leave me alone.”

Steven sighed. “I guess I like The New Legends better. I dunno. Okay, what about this girl that can adapt to any animal form? I’m thinking of calling her Ani-Gal.”

That got Cat’s attention. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “That’s terrible!”

“Well, what would YOU name her?”

Cat smiled. She’d thought about this. “The Pixie.”

Steven thought about that and tapped his lips with his pencil eraser. “Hmmm. Y’know, I like that.” He wrote it down. “Then there’s this other guy, he kinda had orange-glow hands and cast illusions or something.”

Donovan said “Oh, like he was hexing things?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

“You should call him Hex, then.”

Steven brightened. “Hey, good one! Okay… got it. Hex. Then there’s this guy that didn’t seem to do much, that I could see- he did a flip and picked up the Pixie, but I couldn’t make out much of what he really did.”

Gustav said “Sounds like a savant.”

“What’s a savant?”

“It’s a word for a hero that only acts when he’s needed.” Of course savant means nothing of the kind, but Gustav had a good idea that Steven didn’t know that.

“That sounds like him. Maybe I’ll name him Savant.”

Gustav smiled. “A fine idea.” Lately giving people ideas and making them think they’d thought them up had come very naturally to him lately, and it pleased him every time.

Steven said “Oh, MAN! My FAVORITE was this big robot-guy. He was like a Transformer, which is the coolest thing ever. All black, shiny, glowing red eyes. I’m going to call him Robotror.”

Emerson looked aghast. “Robotror?!”

“Yeah. I think that name’s cool. Don’t you?”

“Uh. No.”

“What would you call him?”

“Constructor!” Emerson shouted, forgetting himself. He was quite excited about the name he’d come up with for himself.

Steven didn’t look impressed, but he wrote the name down. “I’ll think about it. Whoever he is, he’s out of commission for now- he left his robot suit behind! Some scientists are analyzing it right now. What about the stretchy guy’s name?”

Cat spoke up. She’d actually spoken to JJ earlier in the day, and he’d expressed interest in a name that didn’t actually have anything to do with his powers. How would she make this sound attractive? “Um. I was thinking… uh… Gridiron.”

Steven looked confused. “Gridiron? Why?”

“In days of old, a Gridiron was a… um. It was a thing that stretched really far. People would say ‘wow, that’s as stretchy as a gridiron.’ Yep.” She smiled the smile of someone who’s terribly embarrassed. Everyone was looking at her. Her logic hadn’t really worked. She’d need some help on this one.

“Yeah,” Herbie agreed. “I’ve heard that. Gridirons used to be the stretchiest thing around.” Cat thanked him with her eyes.

Steven looked baffled. “I thought a gridiron was a football thing. I don’t know. I guess it sounds cool.” He wrote it down. While he was looking away, Cat shrugged at the others.

Donovan mouthed Stretchy as a gridiron?? at her. She put her head in her hands and gave up.

Steven said “The last one was a real skinny dude that’s, like, super strong. I mean really skinny.”

Herbie looked up, annoyed. “We get it. He’s skinny.”

“I have no idea as to what to name him. All the good strong-guy names are taken.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Herbie offered.

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

“Super-Fantastic Wonderboy.”

Even Gustav’s eyebrows jumped. Donovan shouted “What??”

“Yeah. Super-Fantastic Wonderboy. What’s so weird about that?”

“That is the worst name ever. Pick another one.”

“No, I like it.”

Donovan stood up and pointed. “You’re NOT picking ‘Super-Fantastic Wonderboy!’”

“Maybe I am, so what?”

Steven looked at them both. “Dudes, it’s cool, I can pick another name…”

“No!” Donovan yelled. “Herbie can come up with a better name, can’t you, Herbie?”

“I like Super-Fantastic Wonderboy!”

“What about Frenzy. Frenzy’s not taken. Go with Frenzy.”

“But…”

“No but! Super-Fantastic Wonderboy sucks ass and would be the laughing stock of the entire city.”

“He’s right, Herbie,” Cat agreed.

Herbie bent back to his video game. “Whatever. Frenzy’s fine.”

Steven thought What in the world was that? to himself, but he wrote Frenzy down in his notebook. “Okay, maybe I’ll use that one. Whoever he is, it looked like he almost killed someone that night.”

Herbie’s eyes went wide. “Almost?? I mean- killed??”

“Yeah, kicked some guy so hard that he almost died. ‘Frenzy’ put him in a dumpster, almost like to get rid of the evidence. I called an ambulance and he pulled through.”

“Oh. Good.” Herbie didn’t meet the eyes of the others, glaring at him.

“Well, gotta go- I’ll think about these names. I like ‘em. See ya!” Steven bounded down the bleachers and walked away.

The crowd screamed its approval. Down on the field, JJ had just scored another touchdown. He spiked the ball and waved to the fans. He hadn’t even used his powers. He turned around, grinning at them all.

He stopped suddenly. Had he just seen- He shielded his eyes against the glare of the overhead lights and squinted. Yep- over by the buses, standing in the shadows was Glenn Bristol.

Glenn was a small, wiry guy that stood about five foot three and always had a wry grin on his face. As cruel a sense of humor as you could ever hope for. He’d been a friend of JJ’s for years now, and JJ hadn’t heard from him since the whole clique had been caught in the accident at the museum. He hadn’t heard from any of them, and none of them had come to school or answered their phones.

“Dude!” JJ called, waving as he ran at Glenn. Glenn seemed to shrink back, but didn’t retreat. He looked much more nervous than he ever had before. “Where you been, gaylord?? You haven’t been to school in days!”

“I dunno. Things are messed up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I guess we just ain’t been feeling so good, y’know?”

JJ spoke carefully. “How do you mean, you haven’t been feeling so good? Like what? Sick?”

“Kinda. Jeremy’s real sick, dude. He’s in the hospital.”

That shocked JJ. He’d been expecting his friends to show up again with cool powers like his. “What’s wrong with him?”

“The doctors don’t know. It’s unlike anything they’ve seen. None of us feel great… kinda different. It’s weird.”

“Different how?” Now he and Glenn were both studying each other very closely, looking for signs that the other would know what they mean by different

Finally, Glenn said “I dunno. We might actually leave school for good.”

“Leave school? Really?”

“School’s gay. I gotta go dude. You might want to visit Jeremy, they’re saying he might not make it much longer.”

“Damn. I’ll go tonight. This sucks, man.”

“Yeah. I’ll, uh… I’ll see you later.” Glenn turned to walk away.

JJ walked after him. “No, wait-“ Just then he heard Coach shout his name. The team needed him in a huddle. Glenn disappeared behind some buses and JJ turned back to the field. He felt a knot in his gut. Jeremy might be dying? The guy wasn’t the nicest dude around, but JJ had always gotten along well with him. Had he gotten some odd kind of cancer, not powers at all? Was that possible?

As he joined the huddle, a voice on the field’s loudspeaker announced that Steven Piercey had finally chosen names for the heroes of Silverage City. The entire crowd howled its approval as the names were announced in dramatic fashion. “Your Buscema Broncos welcomes Silverage City’s first super-team! The Pixie! Constructor! Frenzy! Savant! Gridiron! Hex! They are now to be known as… the NEW LEGENDS!!!”

The crowd went wild. They screamed like they’d never screamed for any football game, ever.

Next: Visiting Hours

 

[Dr Midnight]

JJ caught up with the group after the game as they were hanging around the parking lot. “Hey! Was I awesome or what?”

“Good game, JJ,” Cat said. “As much as I hate to admit it, you’re impressive to watch.”

“Thanks. Looking good, Herbie- lost the glasses I see.”

Herbie’s posture changed, as if he were put on guard by this. He certainly wasn’t expecting a compliment to be anything but a set-up for a dig… especially from JJ. “What.”

“What what? Just sayin’.”

Herbie had ditched his glasses and invested in contacts earlier that day. They felt funny in his eyes, but they didn’t hurt. He supposed that that might be the invulnerability helping out. He fell in behind the others as they began walking. He wasn’t sure if Cat had noticed. She hadn’t said anything. He looked at her as he walked and sighed.

Donovan said “So we’re going patrolling, right?”

“That’s the plan,” JJ replied. “I just gotta make a quick stop first.”

They walked by the opposing team- the Kirby Cougars’ bus idled as the players stood outside, discussing their defeat at the hands of the hated Buscema High. They stared at JJ as he walked by with the others. “Mutie,” one whispered in a hateful voice.

“What happened there?” Cat asked.

“Ehh, I caught them right after the game ended sneaking off behind school. I followed them and found that they were doing some vandalism.”

“What did you do? You didn’t use your powers without your costume, did you?”

“No, no. Kinda. Well. They surrounded me and beat me up. Thing is, though, that I was as hard as stone at the time. Broke a couple of their hands… funny as hell, I’ll tell ya.”

Gustav said “We must be more careful not to let people know about our abilities.”

“Hey, I don’t know how they do it in Latwervia or wherever, but here we defend our own. What would you have done?”

They piled into JJ’s uncle’s battered pickup. JJ’s car had been left in bent, ruined pieces lying on the streets of Silverage. This old Chevy would have to do for now.

Emerson asked “Where are we going?”

They parked in the visitors’ lot of the Romita Memorial Hospital. The group walked in. It was ten thirty at night, and no one was here except for the occasional orderly, nurse, doctor and janitor. “Excuse me,” JJ said to the desk girl. “I’m here to see Jeremy Mullen.”

“Visiting hours are eleven to seven weekdays, one to eight Saturdays.” She didn’t even look up.

“He’s a friend of mine,” JJ said. “I heard he might die.”

She stopped reading her paperback and looked up with a face that suggested this wasn’t moved. Not yet. “Mullen… let’s see… he’s in intensive care. Are you family?”

“Um. No.”

She paused. “One of you can visit for five minutes. Room 4C.”

“Sounds good. Thanks.” JJ turned to the others. “Wait here… I’ll be back real soon.” He walked up the hall to the elevators as the others took seat on uncomfortable imitation vinyl chairs.

The halls on floor four were almost entirely dark, to further aid people near death in pursuit of a peaceful sleep. From each room was the sound of beeping and respirators. The smell of antiseptic wipes and cloying seafoam-colored plastic was everywhere. JJ shuddered. Hospitals are horrible places.

He came to room 4C and stopped. He slowly turned the knob and stepped into the room.

Jeremy Mullen looked as if he’d been in a very serious car accident. His entire body was bound in a sectional plaster cast. A respirator wheezed and beeped as it fed him air. An IV drip looked like its line was feeding back from Jeremy’s body- a thin wisp of greenish brown fluid floated in the IV solution. The only part of his body that was visible was the thin strip that had been left out of his head cast, showing his eyes. They were going a sickly yellow color in the iris, and even the whites were turning yellowish, like a morphine addict’s. The skin around his eyes was mottled and flushed red. He looked like he was stricken with a horrid rash. The skin had scabbed up in places and looked to be flaking off.

JJ took a breath and steeled himself. “Um. Hey there man. I heard you’re not doing well, thought I’d come in and say hi.” Jeremy’s eyes stared at JJ. Small pink veins pulsed among the sick yellow of his eyes. He seemed to be contorting his face as if in tremendous pain. JJ swallowed and went on. “I don’t know what happened in that room with the Transatomic thingiewhatser, but it looks like it wasn’t good for all of us. I… well I shouldn’t really talk about that, but you know what I mean. I guess you had a bad reaction.”

He paused and heard a faint dripping noise. Bending low, he could see that some kind of liquid was dribbling to the floor. It was soaking through Jeremy’s cast and looked like a thick, clotted gray-orange pus.

“Uhh… “ He straightened and smiled, trying to cheer the situation. “You missed a great game tonight. Brought you the game ball.” He placed the football on the nightstand and smiled wider.

Jeremy’s breathing wheezed and coughed a bit, and his body shuddered. A nearby machine started beeping quickly and loudly. JJ stepped back as the convulsions wracked his friend’s body. Doctors rushed through the door, past JJ. “He’s going into a seizure- hold him down!”

An orderly took JJ’s elbow and pulled him from the room. “C’mon, gotta let the doctors do their work. Visiting hours are over anyway. Just go home, let us do what we can for him.” JJ nodded and walked back down the hall, looking more like a scared child than he had in years.

He rejoined the others in the waiting room. Donovan looked up from a Marie Claire magazine. “How was he?”

JJ tried to look like he wasn’t shaken, but it wasn’t really working. His face was drained and waxy. “He. Uh. He’s not doing well. Looks like he may not live through the night.”

“Interesting,” Gustav said. “I’d like to study him.”

“I’m no philosopher,” Donovan offered, “but what happened seemed to be affected by our personalities and maybe this is just bringing out his.” He shrugged and stood up, yawning. The implication in his body posture was clear: I won’t miss him.

JJ stared hard at Donovan for a moment. Cat and the others felt the uncomfortable tension mounting as it looked like a swing might be taken. Finally, JJ hissed “I don’t need to take this from you nerds right now. He’s my friend and he may be dying.” He turned and stormed out.

“Real smooth, Don,” Cat sighed.

“What? Jeremy’s a jerk and we all know it.”

“Tact. That’s what.”

Donovan rolled his eyes. “I guess. Are we going patrolling or what? Do we all have our costumes?”

Everyone nodded. They’d each brought their homemade costumes in their bookbags, and had been awaiting the opportunity to use them. Only Donovan and Emerson really didn’t need to carry a costume- Emerson’s powers made his costume for him, but he carried a small black domino mask to wear, just in case. Donovan had a different plan.

They walked outside and rejoined a brooding JJ. “Okay, problem,” Cat said. “Do we put our costumes on and THEN patrol, or walk around until we see trouble and change?”

They all thought about it. Herbie offered “Spider-Man patrols in costume, I saw footage on a reality show.”

Gustav shook his head. “Spider-Man can patrol via his weblines, above the roofs of the city. We only have two ‘members’ that can fly; Cat and Emerson. The rest of us, what will we do? Walk around city streets in costume, drawing a crowd? Cat is right, we have a problem.”

JJ pondered that for a moment. “Daredevil just jumps around from rooftop to rooftop, can we do that?”

“Not all of us… Donovan and Herbie aren’t really agile enough to keep up with the rest of us that way. They might fall. We’re a team- we can’t just jump around like Daredevil.”

“So what do teams do?” JJ asked, exasperated. “How do the Fantastic Four get around?”

“They have millions of dollars and a skycar developed and paid for with said dollars. No, I think we need a humbler plan.”

“I’ve got an idea!” Donovan said. He began heading down the street. “C’mon!”

“Where are we going?”

“Where your everyday just-starting-out superhero can get what he needs: Radio Shack.”

Next: Rubbing elbows with the big guys

 

[Dr Midnight]

At Radio Shack, Donovan used his credit card (his dad let him have one with a $5,000 limit, to teach responsibility) to buy the group a few items. He bought six walkie talkie headsets that were voice activated and one high-powered police scanner.

He handed out the devices as they all stood in an alley. “This way, we can all keep in contact and know where there’s trouble. While we listen to the scanner, Pixie and Constructor can patrol the skies for trouble the police don’t know about, and alert us when they see something.”

Pixie snuck behind a dumpster to change. “Nobody look!” When she came out, she had a green outfit with a bared midriff, gloves, thigh-high leggings and pink boots to match her pink hair. Over her face she wore a mask with large yellow goggle lenses.

Savant suited up in a tight black suit that covered everything but his head. His face was covered only by a small domino mask. On his chest in bright yellow, red and green was a curious design that only he knew to be his Latverian family’s coat of arms. A makeshift utility belt ran around his waist and he carried a weapon of his own design, a telescoping staff.

Gridiron was wearing a football uniform with red and yellow colors. It bore the number 3. The only thing that separated it from a real football uniform was the black tinted pane of clear plastic that shielded JJ’s face from identification. He carried a football. He intended to see if he could use it as his weapon- make it his “Captain America shield,” as he put it.

Herbie had given up on trying to design his own costume and offered the job to Cat. She’d gladly taken to the job and created for Frenzy a hand-tailored catsuit of head-to-toe sleek black lycra. The seams were a dark gray and gave the suit some texture. Twin white triangle-shaped lenses gave Herbie’s eyes a fierce look, and there was an opening in the mask for mouth and chin. Sadly, Cat hadn’t taken into account that Herbie didn’t have much chin to offer, and besides, clinging black lycra only accentuated just how thin and lanky the boy was.

Donovan’s costume was entirely magical. With a wave of his hand, he was no longer a heavyset teenager- he was a gangly skeleton wearing an old-style magician’s outfit, complete with white gloves, top hat and red-lined cape. The cape’s high, pointed collar (“for that Doctor Strange feel,” he told the others) completed the look.

Emerson, for now, wore only a small black domino mask. His power was his costume, and he walked to a rusted-out old hulk of a car that had been abandoned in the alley. Within moments Emerson was Constructor, a ten foot-tall monster clad in pieces of well-molded metal. His eyes glowed as thin red slits from his robot’s face. “I guess we’re all set, then,” Constructor said.

Hex turned on the police scanner. -arjacking on 11th street, suspect is a white male driving a red sedan with-

Some car sped by on the road. Frenzy, who’d been staring idly in that direction, suddenly bolted toward the road and after the car.

Hex cursed. “Crap, was that a red sedan? FRENZY! COME BACK!” It was too late- Frenzy was off and running after the carjacker.

A brief chase followed. At the end, the car broke down in the center of the street, having no wheels and a severely damaged body. The carjacker was welded inside the car to await police.

“Well,” huffed Frenzy as he finally arrived on the scene. “That sucked.”

“You took off running, Frenzy!” Pixie let her bird wings fade away, becoming her normal human arms. “We need to be more organized.”

Hex got off the immense white rabbit he’d been riding and let it jump into his tophat. “She’s right, Frenzy. We’re not much of a team if we act as six individuals.”

Frenzy looked away from them. “I saw trouble, I reacted. I’m as new to this as everyone here is.”

A taxi pulled up and Savant stepped out. He frowned to see the action had ended without his help, but he tipped the cabbie very kindly. “You’re the best, Savant!” cried the cabbie as he sped away, waving.

Savant sighed. “I simply must work on a better way to move from place to place.”

“We were just saying that we need to be better organi-“ Hex stopped and listened. Sirens were tearing up the street toward them, maybe a block or two away. “We’ve got a choice to make, and quickly. Do we leave the crook for the cops, or do we stay and greet our public for the first time?”

They stared at each other while the sirens got louder. “Let’s stay,” Pixie said with a grin.

“Yeah,” Constructor said. He sounded excited. The New Legends posed themselves as heroically as they could and awaited the police.

The police tore around the corner and stopped. The cops got out, holding guns in the air. “Hey… hey, Lou, it’s them! The… uh…”

“New Legends!” the other cop said.

“Yeah!” All the policemen looked astounded as they stepped out of their cars. “Is that the carjacker?” asked one.

“Yes it is, officer,” Constructor said in his manliest voice. It sounded deepened and amplified.

“That wreck is the red sedan? That thing ain’t even got wheels!”

People were beginning to gather around. Even though it was eleven at night, the crowd was making quite a stir as the residents of the street came out to meet The New Legends.

“Hey, you’re Gridiron!” one of two thrilled ten year-olds shouted. “Can I have your football?”

“No,” Gridiron replied, “But I can sign an autograph for you….” He took out a paper and pen. “…WAY UP HERE!” His arms stretched up maybe fifty feet, where they signed the autograph. The kids screamed with delight.

Three more kids ran up to Constructor. “Constructorrrrr!” they shouted. “You’re awesome! You’re my favorite robot,” one said.

“Um. Thanks.”

“Can you sign an auto-graph for me?”

“Yes.” Constructor took some scrap paper from the car’s glovebox and began signing.

“Can you pick up a car?”

“Yes.”

“Do it! Pick up that one!”

Constructor handed the autograph to the kid. “I’m not picking up that car,” he said, annoyed.

Frenzy was watching these exchanges and feeling unsure about participating in the media-friendly side of being in a super-team when he was approached by someone behind him. “Frenzy, right?”

He turned and came face to face with a gorgeous girl of maybe nineteen or so. That wasn’t so unusual- what was was that she was looking at Frenzy with interest. Her eyes were wide and she was smiling. No one ever looked at Herbie Miller. He swallowed and tried to speak. “Yeah.”

“You’re the coolest. You’re so mysterious! Who are you?” She twirled a curl of hair with her fingers and Herbie felt his mind twirl with that curl… turning around and around like a spoon in a bowl of oatmeal, and with the same effect.

“Uhhhh,” was what he said seven seconds before he turned around and walked away.

A reporter came up to Hex. “Hex, are you concerned that your skeletal appearance is going to cause a stir with parents’ groups?”

“No, and in fact we’re going after them next.” The reporter looked shocked at that. “I was joking,” Hex said. “I guess you can’t tell because my face is a skull. Not really expressive. He tapped his head with a hollow tap-tap sound.

A few reporters circled Savant. “…and here we have Savant, whom we heard took a cab here tonight. Is this true, Savant, and what is your function within the team?”

Savant took the question in stride with a smile, but inside he cursed the American culture of rudeness. “I’m afraid I don’t discuss team tactics with the press- it gives our enemies that much more of an edge against us.”

“Do you have any enemies yet?”

“Yes… criminals.” This won an appreciative nod from the reporters and it would make a fine piece for the Sunday papers, but Gustav smiled to himself- he hadn’t actually told them a thing.

Hex decided that the group should leave the public wanting more, and he created an escape route. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried in a showman’s style, “We must depart… we have more work to do this evening.” He waved his hands with a flourish and a giant magicians’ box appeared. It was carved and painted with arcane glyphs. It was twelve feet tall and five feet to a side. He held the doors open for his teammates, and they stepped inside. Everyone seemed to fit, though that didn’t look possible.

“We bid you all a very fond good evening from… the New Legends.” He closed the door and smoke began billowing up around the box. It obscured the box entirely, and when it cleared, the box was gone. The crowd cheered wildly.

Next: The Welcome Wagon

 

[Dr Midnight]

The group appeared on a roof, several blocks away. They stepped out and stretched.

“That took a lot out of me,” Pixie said. “All that smiling and waving. I don’t think I could do that everyday.”

Hex said “We did well, though. JJ, you really impressed those kids.”

Gridiron shrugged. “When you play football, kids look up to you. You learn how to make ‘em happy when they come up to you for an autograph. I like seeing the smiles.”

“I tried. Couldn’t do it as well,” Constructor sighed. “I’m not good with kids.”

“Oooh, y’know what else you do when you play football? Endorsements! Damn, I should have been drinking a Pepsi for the cameras or at least wearing a Nike logo somewhere.” Gridiron looked excited as he imagined the possibilities.

“In the future, we should work more as a team,” Hex said, sitting against the building’s ledge. “Some day this week we shoud discuss strategies, and until then we’ll just take care to consider what everyone else is doing.”

“Agreed,” Savant said. “We should turn on the scanner and listen for more trouble.”

Hex reached into his top hat and removed the police scanner. *zzzAND OH MAN, PIXIE’S GOT SOME LEGS ON HER, I TELL YOUzzz*

*zzzYEAH? SHE’S GOT A PAIR OF STEMS ON HER, EHzzz*

*zzzYOU KNOW IT FREDzzz*

Pixie looked aghast. “I’m FIFTEEN! Those pigs!” She meant “pigs” in two entirely different derogatory ways.

“You don’t look fifteen in that outfit,” Frenzy said. She looked at him and he reddened. “I’m just saying.”

Another voice broke into the police scanner. *zzzCUT THE CHATTER, WE’VE GOT A REPORT OF A 312, METAHUMAN OUT OF CONTROL AT THE OLD LIEFELD JUNKYARDzzz *

*zzzWHAT’S THE I.D.zzz*

*zzzBIG, REALLY STRONG, JUST TEARING UP THE ENTIRE JUNKYARD APPARENTLY. NO I.D. ON A POSSIBLE SUPERVILLAINzzz*

*zzzROGER THAT. POSITION UNITS OUTSIDE THE YARD AT ALL EXITS BUT DO NOT MOVE TO ARREST. WE DON’T NEED ANY OFFICERS TRYING TO GO UP AGAINST THE JUGGERNAUT OR ANYTHING. LET HIM RUN HIS RAGE OUT, MAYBE SOMEONE CAPABLE WILL STEP INzzz*

“Someone capable,” Savant said, standing up. “Sounds like us.”

Constructor shook his head. “Wow. Going up against an actual metahuman. We’ve only fought humans so far.”

“Let’s do it,” Hex said. He conjured a large balloon, tied to a ten foot diameter basket that floated beneath it. “Non-flyers hop in. Constructor can pull us.”

Everyone stared at the balloon. “This,” Savant said cautiously, “Is the most undignified mode of travel I’ve ever heard of.”

Hex stepped into the basket. “I’m sorry, we could all just take a taxi.” The joke hit its mark and Savant climbed in along with everyone else.

Constructor pulled them into the night sky. Pixie flew alongside them with her bird wings. She was growing very skilled at flying, and she seemed to enjoy it so much.

They saw a pillar of dust rising from the ground in front of them, and a great crashing noise was heard from that little blotch of gray-brown earth down there. “That’s the junkyard,” Constructor announced.

Pixie adjusted her eyes to those of a hawk and peered down, trying to see what was causing the mess. “Looks like a big tank of a guy- maybe seven feet tall, completely covered in a navy blue body armor.”

“Crap,” Gridiron said. “IS it Juggernaut?”

“No, too small. Still really strong though. He’s flipping cars all over the place. We’ll have to be careful.”

Savant spoke up. “Care to try that teamwork idea? I have a plan to hit him all at once. Listen…” He laid out his plan while Constructor brought them down low behind a stack of cars.

When they stepped out, they could feel the rumbling of the creature’s thrashing through their bootsoles. It gave them each a nervous fluttering- this was going to be a real fight.

“RARRRRRRGHHH!!!” the monster screamed in a deep, rumbley voice. It lashed out and smashed a semi’s engine block and it flew off into a pile of old refrigerators. “RRRrrrr…huh?” Lights were shining down on it from above. It looked up to see a robot flying down towards him with what looked like headlights beaming. The robot held out its arms and energy blasts bathed the creature, which was now a barely perceptible shadow inside of the bright orange-yellow blast. “DAMMIT!” it shouted. When the light cleared the body armor had melted in crispy black plates against the misshapen body. It almost looked like it had been made of plastic.

It cursed to itself as it looked around for the robot. It was gone, and in the sky now was an enormous hawk-girl who was carrying a wrecked car with gorilla legs. The opposable thumbs released their grips on the car and it smashed down into the monster. “ARRRGH!” it screamed. “Wha-“

A wrecking ball was flying towards it at head level.

DING! It was the sound of a manhole being used to swat a bowling ball out of the air. The blow sent monster flying end over end into an enormous tower of ruined cars, where it smashed. The pile fell around it. Savant leapt out of the crane he’d used to control the wrecking ball with. The New Legends surrounded the pile, ready to hit the creature with everything they had.

A large three-fingered hand rose up out of the pile of cars and waved. The deep voice shouted “Wait! Stop!” The crispy black beast clambered up, holding its hands outward. “Hold on, hold on hold on. Geez, when you guys hit you don’t ask questions first, huh?”

If Hex had eyes, he would have blinked. “What??”

“You take bait like pros, though, I’ll tellya.” It climbed out of the pile of cars and looked at them all with its hands on its hips.

Pixie looked very confused. “Bait? How are you ‘bait’?”

“We want to talk to you. Here, maybe this will help.” It wiped its immense hands over its face. A rough rasping sound came from it, like cinderblocks being rubbed together. The melted black plastic sloughed away to reveal dirty orange-red chunks of stone. It smiled at them, knowing that now they recognized it.

“The Thing?” Gridiron said incredulously. “The friggin’ THING?”

“The ever-lovin’ Thing,” The Thing said. “Mama Grimm’s darlin’ boy in the flesh. We want a word with you if you’re up for it.” He picked some sort of communicator from his pocket and said “Got ‘em, Stretch.”

Frenzy lowered his fists. He seemed as awestruck as the others. “You who? The Fantastic Four?”

“That’s right,” The Thing said as he brushed the rest of the black stuff off of his body.

“Awesome,” Gridiron said. He was the only one of the group who had ever met a real-life celebrity, so he was more prepared to deal with the shock. “I’ve got no problem talking to you guys. What do you want to know?”

“We won’t talk here,” The Thing replied as a high-pitched turbine sound in the sky got closer. “We’ll go to our place. More privacy.” The Fantasticar, the high-profile superteam’s means of conveyance, lowered to the ground. In it was a thin man with graying hair at his temples that everyone recognized.

“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Reed.” He reached out and shook hands with everyone with one elongated arm. “Care to take a trip with us to the Baxter Building? We’d like to get to know you, and offer you our welcome into the superhuman community.”

“I can’t believe this,” Frenzy said to himself as he stepped into the car and took a seat. “I just can’t believe this.”

“Believe it kid,” The Thing said as he leaned back into a specially-made chair that fit his hulking mass. "This is all authentic."

The Fantasticar lifted up into the sky.

Next: Meeting the Neighbors