Post by redsycorax on Oct 23, 2021 1:16:41 GMT
When they began their careers in Seaboard City, Catman, the Black Siren, Tom Turbine, the Streak and the Green Guardsman had some very distinctive origins from elsewhere in the Multiverse. Here's what happened before the emergence of the Justice Guild of America on Earth-109...
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Green Guardsman's power ring was not a long lost magical artefact or the signature weapon of a far-ranging interstellar police corps. Instead, it was a side-effect of a physics experiment near the Bohr Annex at Seaboard University, in which irradiation had resulted in the creation of a stable, yet anomalous transuranic metal element- namely, element 138. A small particle of it lay on the floor of the Annex nuclear reactor, inert and unresponsive to further synchrotron bombardment with assorted subatomic particles. Eventually, tiring of the particle's apparent uselessness, the laboratory buried it. At that point, fate intervened. Scott Mason had returned from Earth-109's Korean War and one day, hiking in the hills above Seaboard's plain, he came across an inexplicable glowing sliver of metal. To his amazement, as he bent and picked it up, it shaped itself into a ring. Unfortunately, Scott wasn't looking where he was going and fell over a precipice. As he plummeted groundwards, the former soldier wished he wasn't so clumsy and that he'd have a soft landing. To his further, he began to slow, until he was at an absolute halt. Realising that there was something to the artefact he'd discovered, he then commanded it to allow him to fly, which it did. After a while, he also witnessed a group of out of season hunters heading for a wounded maternal lynx and her progeny. Angry at the proposed carnage and law breaking, he swept down, and the ring formed a luminescent green wedge, which knocked the riflemen's weapons out of their grasp. As Scott Mason alighted on the ground, he also realised that if he were to continue doing this, he would have to hide his identity or otherwise, he would risk apprehension, abduction or death. The ring created a uniform and mask for him as he pondered this. He grinned- that was it. He would be a guardsman of justice. A... Green Guardsman!
Catman didn't experience a childhood tragedy like the premature death of his parents, caused by a larcenous criminal assailant. He had a happy, idyllic childhood, cherished by both parents, well-liked at high school and university, graduating with enviable qualifications in the fields of finance and corporate management. Later, however, he experienced the byproduct of such a tragedy, when Luke Foster, his corporate outreach executive for Blake Philanthropy, was gunned down on a Seaboard City street and aghast, he found that the Seaboard City Police Department wouldn't investigate his friend's murder. In stately Blake Manor, high atop the Seaboard City Hills, he thought about what might strike terror into the hearts of superstitious and cowardly criminals, then watched Minion, his black cat, corner and trap a mouse. In a flash, the inspiration came to him. That was it! He would become a Cat-Man. Or a Catman. It didn't take him long to track down the perpetrator of the corruption scandal, ganglord Leonard Lothair. Collecting the evidence of Lothair's criminal enterprise, Catman corrned the bald miscreant atop a tenement building, and used his peak physical condition and combat proficiency to end his friend's assassin's criminal career. Shortly after, he was visited by Tom Turbine and told about the new crime fighters organisation that he was forming.
Donna Vance was a shopkeeper, a grocer. She had inherited her small business after her mother died from breast cancer. She was also a former WRAC officer and early on, she had shown strong competence when it came to contingency self-defence training. She could swim as well, shoot as well, punch as well as any man, although she would denied any intention to replace any man in combat. No, she was there to safeguard female administrative and medical army staff in case they were attacked when the 'real' soldiers were off serving elsewhere, and there was a surprise attack. As it turned out, Sargeant Vance weathered two or three situations like that while on active duty. Demobbed, she returned to her native New York City to care for her ailing mother, reflecting on how fortunate she was- a lot of other women had found themselves discarded from the work force once the men came home. She joined them for a few months, but fell for a violent, alcoholic thug named Lance Lawrence. Their marriage was short-lived and due to her small business background, Donna could still do her old job and picked herself up after she moved to Seaboard City, up the coast. One night, though, she was locking up and preparing to travel home when she saw a light in the store window opposite her own and the silhouette of burglars momentarily appeared. Donning the top of a masquerade outfit that she was planning to wear that weekend, some capri pants and a domino mask, she leapt onto the nearby slanting roof and crept in through the skylight. She then disposed of the burglars, who were too humiliated to be beaten by a 'mere broad'. She was gratified to be described as a 'seductive siren of virtue' in the evening papers next day. Hey, that was it! That's what she would call herself- a Black Siren.
Thomas Terrell was a scientific genius. He had also become one of the earliest mystery men or women in Seaboard City, devising his power belt as a response to the rising lawlessness in Seaboard City and its environs. He knew that it was due to post-war psychological reasons, from displaced and demobbed soldiers trying to adjust back to civilian life and the loss of the military imperative that had governed their lives for the last six years. Still, he was hesitant about using it. Did he have any right to wear his device, which gave him strength, agility, near-invincible body density, speed and senses beyond those of mere unenhanced human beings? Then the moral dilemma resolved itself for him when he witnessed a skyscraper fire and trapped office workers on the afflicted upper floors. He realised that he could not live with himself if he left those poor souls entrapped above them to die, so he donned a colourful uniform and his powerbelt and braved the arduous conditions of fire and collapsing infrastructure. In the end, he managed to rescue the advertising agency's entire staff from the flames. In gratitude, the Man of Science was provided with his heroic nom de guerre by his newfound friends- Tom Turbine.
Jacob and Irene Allon were living a quiet life in the suburbs until one day when a meteorite of unearthly composition fell in his back garden. That morning, Jake ventured out and tried to chip a fragment off the space rock, only to have the volatile substance combust, flinging him back. Disoriented, Jake jerked back to full awareness when he saw a neighbour's child rush out into the street, in front of an oncoming car. What happened then surprised both the Allons, as Jacob streaked out into the roadway, plucked the startled child from its peril and deposit it on the adjacent pavement. Fortunately, Jake had moved too fast to be identified by the little boy, but Irene had seen everything and suggested her husband wear his chemically treated speedway uniform as the Streak.
Seaboard City was a small place, so inevitably, the paths of these mystery men and mystery woman crossed. When the alien Fortrons launched their ill-fated, solitary 'probe mission' against Earth, the hapless aliens found themselves pitted against an organisation of enhanced humans, and that turned out to be the Justice Guild of America's first case. No-one could foretell the team's ultimate fate from that point in 1957, that they would amass enthusiastic young proteges, fight enemies of comparable organisational strength and combat renegade time travellers before it all ended one unnaturally illuminated night as a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile hit Ryerson AFB and the courageous companions would meet their end, trying to shield their beloved city from the consequences of folly and miscalculation beyond their own immediate scope to halt. But legends live on.
THE END
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Green Guardsman's power ring was not a long lost magical artefact or the signature weapon of a far-ranging interstellar police corps. Instead, it was a side-effect of a physics experiment near the Bohr Annex at Seaboard University, in which irradiation had resulted in the creation of a stable, yet anomalous transuranic metal element- namely, element 138. A small particle of it lay on the floor of the Annex nuclear reactor, inert and unresponsive to further synchrotron bombardment with assorted subatomic particles. Eventually, tiring of the particle's apparent uselessness, the laboratory buried it. At that point, fate intervened. Scott Mason had returned from Earth-109's Korean War and one day, hiking in the hills above Seaboard's plain, he came across an inexplicable glowing sliver of metal. To his amazement, as he bent and picked it up, it shaped itself into a ring. Unfortunately, Scott wasn't looking where he was going and fell over a precipice. As he plummeted groundwards, the former soldier wished he wasn't so clumsy and that he'd have a soft landing. To his further, he began to slow, until he was at an absolute halt. Realising that there was something to the artefact he'd discovered, he then commanded it to allow him to fly, which it did. After a while, he also witnessed a group of out of season hunters heading for a wounded maternal lynx and her progeny. Angry at the proposed carnage and law breaking, he swept down, and the ring formed a luminescent green wedge, which knocked the riflemen's weapons out of their grasp. As Scott Mason alighted on the ground, he also realised that if he were to continue doing this, he would have to hide his identity or otherwise, he would risk apprehension, abduction or death. The ring created a uniform and mask for him as he pondered this. He grinned- that was it. He would be a guardsman of justice. A... Green Guardsman!
Catman didn't experience a childhood tragedy like the premature death of his parents, caused by a larcenous criminal assailant. He had a happy, idyllic childhood, cherished by both parents, well-liked at high school and university, graduating with enviable qualifications in the fields of finance and corporate management. Later, however, he experienced the byproduct of such a tragedy, when Luke Foster, his corporate outreach executive for Blake Philanthropy, was gunned down on a Seaboard City street and aghast, he found that the Seaboard City Police Department wouldn't investigate his friend's murder. In stately Blake Manor, high atop the Seaboard City Hills, he thought about what might strike terror into the hearts of superstitious and cowardly criminals, then watched Minion, his black cat, corner and trap a mouse. In a flash, the inspiration came to him. That was it! He would become a Cat-Man. Or a Catman. It didn't take him long to track down the perpetrator of the corruption scandal, ganglord Leonard Lothair. Collecting the evidence of Lothair's criminal enterprise, Catman corrned the bald miscreant atop a tenement building, and used his peak physical condition and combat proficiency to end his friend's assassin's criminal career. Shortly after, he was visited by Tom Turbine and told about the new crime fighters organisation that he was forming.
Donna Vance was a shopkeeper, a grocer. She had inherited her small business after her mother died from breast cancer. She was also a former WRAC officer and early on, she had shown strong competence when it came to contingency self-defence training. She could swim as well, shoot as well, punch as well as any man, although she would denied any intention to replace any man in combat. No, she was there to safeguard female administrative and medical army staff in case they were attacked when the 'real' soldiers were off serving elsewhere, and there was a surprise attack. As it turned out, Sargeant Vance weathered two or three situations like that while on active duty. Demobbed, she returned to her native New York City to care for her ailing mother, reflecting on how fortunate she was- a lot of other women had found themselves discarded from the work force once the men came home. She joined them for a few months, but fell for a violent, alcoholic thug named Lance Lawrence. Their marriage was short-lived and due to her small business background, Donna could still do her old job and picked herself up after she moved to Seaboard City, up the coast. One night, though, she was locking up and preparing to travel home when she saw a light in the store window opposite her own and the silhouette of burglars momentarily appeared. Donning the top of a masquerade outfit that she was planning to wear that weekend, some capri pants and a domino mask, she leapt onto the nearby slanting roof and crept in through the skylight. She then disposed of the burglars, who were too humiliated to be beaten by a 'mere broad'. She was gratified to be described as a 'seductive siren of virtue' in the evening papers next day. Hey, that was it! That's what she would call herself- a Black Siren.
Thomas Terrell was a scientific genius. He had also become one of the earliest mystery men or women in Seaboard City, devising his power belt as a response to the rising lawlessness in Seaboard City and its environs. He knew that it was due to post-war psychological reasons, from displaced and demobbed soldiers trying to adjust back to civilian life and the loss of the military imperative that had governed their lives for the last six years. Still, he was hesitant about using it. Did he have any right to wear his device, which gave him strength, agility, near-invincible body density, speed and senses beyond those of mere unenhanced human beings? Then the moral dilemma resolved itself for him when he witnessed a skyscraper fire and trapped office workers on the afflicted upper floors. He realised that he could not live with himself if he left those poor souls entrapped above them to die, so he donned a colourful uniform and his powerbelt and braved the arduous conditions of fire and collapsing infrastructure. In the end, he managed to rescue the advertising agency's entire staff from the flames. In gratitude, the Man of Science was provided with his heroic nom de guerre by his newfound friends- Tom Turbine.
Jacob and Irene Allon were living a quiet life in the suburbs until one day when a meteorite of unearthly composition fell in his back garden. That morning, Jake ventured out and tried to chip a fragment off the space rock, only to have the volatile substance combust, flinging him back. Disoriented, Jake jerked back to full awareness when he saw a neighbour's child rush out into the street, in front of an oncoming car. What happened then surprised both the Allons, as Jacob streaked out into the roadway, plucked the startled child from its peril and deposit it on the adjacent pavement. Fortunately, Jake had moved too fast to be identified by the little boy, but Irene had seen everything and suggested her husband wear his chemically treated speedway uniform as the Streak.
Seaboard City was a small place, so inevitably, the paths of these mystery men and mystery woman crossed. When the alien Fortrons launched their ill-fated, solitary 'probe mission' against Earth, the hapless aliens found themselves pitted against an organisation of enhanced humans, and that turned out to be the Justice Guild of America's first case. No-one could foretell the team's ultimate fate from that point in 1957, that they would amass enthusiastic young proteges, fight enemies of comparable organisational strength and combat renegade time travellers before it all ended one unnaturally illuminated night as a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile hit Ryerson AFB and the courageous companions would meet their end, trying to shield their beloved city from the consequences of folly and miscalculation beyond their own immediate scope to halt. But legends live on.
THE END
