after many delays (and much having of a life) Real Small Furry Creatures Press (under special license from Coherent Comics UnIncorporated) proudly presents... _____ / / ______ _______ _______ ________ ___ __ / / / ____/ / _____/ /_ ___/ / ____ / / | / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /| | / / / / / /___ / / / / / / / / / / | |/ / / / / ___/ / / __ / / / / / / / / | / / / / /_____ / /___/ / ___/ /__ / /___/ / / / | / / / /_______/ /_______/ /_______/ /_______/ /_/ |_/ / /______________________________________________________ / of Net.Heroes 2023 / / / /___________________________________________________________/ #0: "Beta Testing 2022" by Austin George Loomis developed by Austin George Loomis created by Dave Van Domelen [Cover: Fromage to ADVENTURE COMICS #247, the first Legion of Super-Heroes story. The figure in Superboy's place has an "N" in his shield. Ranged before him instead of the Legionnaires Three are figures labelled BOOMER (Gadgeteer), AJ (Enhanced Strength and Reflexes) and TAWNY (Telepathy, Invisibility). Boomer, in Cosmic Boy's seat, is saying, "Sorry, Netwalker, but you can't join the Academy of Super-Heroes! Your powers can't do anything in the real world!"] Part 1: The September Invasion (by Dave Van Domelen) [reprinted courtesy of Coherent Comics UnIncorporated] "Try to remember the kind of September when you were a tender and callow fellow..." -- Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt, 1967 [(c) ASCAP or somebody] "Ah, September, when the sysadmins turn color and fall from the trees..." -- Dave Van Domelen, 1994 "Hey, Netwalker, you comin' t' dinner?" asked one of a small knot of 16 year olds. Nate "Net" Walker shrugged. "Maybe later...gotta check the Net, eh?" He ignored the (relatively) good-natured barbs from his friends as he turned and headed for his dorm room. For many at the Academy, hanging around on the Net was entertainment and a way to kill time. For Nate, it was practice. And entertainment and a way to kill time. He grinned. Nate was at the Academy because he had a superpower, just like everyone else studying there. However, his power was not physical like most, nor was it psychic in the strictest sense. His power was to enter the Net, like the old cyberpunk fiction characters could do. He could even bring people with him, if he concentrated really hard. As he entered his room, he booted up his system. It looked pretty much the same as any other slave keyboard produced in the last forty years or so...interface technology really hadn't changed a whole lot. Oh, there'd been a lot of work towards "netrunning" technology, virtual reality interfaces and all that stuff...but the time saved by having the user less hampered by the interface were offset by the amount of system resources the interface itself used. Not to mention to cost. Not to mention having to retrofit the entire Net to whatever system was finally put in use. So far, no system had yet been designed that gave enough solid benefit to merit making it the standard, so all the VR systems out there were pretty much novelties, rich kid toys and military toys. Thus, the keyboard and screen had stayed pretty much the same as in his parents' and grandparents' times. Of course, a few decades of advancement had made an impact on the Net itself, if not on the interfaces. Gone were the tenuous connections and illogical rerouting paths the old Internet and its sister systems needed. Faster and bigger mainframes had allowed for more and better interconnections to be made, making the Net far easier to get around on even before the United World stepped in. Adapting the World Wide Web's hypertext system and merging it more smoothly with other functions like netnews and file transfer protocols had brought the Net tremendous gains in the last decade. And with the United World agreements putting all of the Net under one authority made for the final step in standardizing all the operating systems, so that even with essentially the same hardware as in 2010, the Net of 2022 worked almost as quicky and "magically" as the fictional cybernets of 20th Century cyberpunk writing. Artificial intelligences not dependent on violation principles were starting to appear, and they could perform 'drone' tasks for a user at incredible speeds without as much GIGO worries. The AI could tell if you'd asked it to do something stupid...and could even learn to tell when you really did want to do that stupid thing. Not that Nate needed any AIs. The Net was a wonderful playground, and he was sitting on the swings. He could, as the docs put it, "directly project his spirit into the framework of the computer Net, perhaps even entering an alternate reality which mirrored the events on the Net via symbolic filters." Or to put it more simply, he could netrun, and choose the setting. And the setting determined how he saw things...in a normal urban setting, protected files would look like safes or locked vaults, defense programs like police, normal data flow like street traffic, etc. It was more intuition than logic, which was par for the course on Tesla powers. If his intuition failed to tell him what a particular block of data really was, he'd see it wrong. Kind of "not seeing" the huge cannon a security guard had in his pocket. With training, he could see more and more clearly, but he could still be fooled. Because of that, he was required to always wear electrodes when netting, so that if he got in serious trouble a med team could come and yank him out. One time he'd been "killed" by a security program, and it had sent him into convulsions for an hour. He shuddered at the memory. The electrodes in place, Nate logged in and "plugged in," sending his mind into the local system. The Academy's mainframe was not a Regional Node, but it was one step below that. From here, he could either access the RN for the Academy's United World representation region, or for any of the RNs geographically nearest his, roughly 5 of them in this case. It was easiest to go directly to his own RN, but the others were frequently used when traffic got too high locally or there was a system outage. This kind of "cell system" redundancy helped make sure no signal was lost, that the mails would get through. Nate had read once that in the past, a newsgroup not carried by every system might not be able to connect to all the systems that did carry it, since the signal might not be able to get through. Now, fortunately, all outgoing signals went upstream to RNs no matter whether Local Nodes upstream chose to carry the particular board or group. And then from the RNs and National Nodes it would propagate back down, again regardless of LN choices. Easily one of the biggest benefits of the United World Net, Nate thought...local sysadmins can't decide what other nodes will and won't get. Takes some of the power out of the hands of petty dictators, always bleating about their precious resources being used up by things they don't approve of. Nate didn't give a second thought to the possibility that they might have a valid case...after all, computers today have so much more cheap capacity than in the Dark Ages of the 1980's and 1990's. Nate chose an Art Deco Techno viewpoint, and his LN immediately sprang up around him like a gleaming city of steel and glass, hovercars flitting along elevated ramps from one subsystem to another, helitransports carrying data to the subsidiary nodes under the Academy's aegis (mostly private mainframes used by professors) and to other LNs in the region. Nate called up a file transfer program, which formed around him as a bubble-domed car that zoomed along on maglev propulsion, whisper-quiet. Quickly he merged onto the "superhighway" to the RN, joining other traffic headed upstream. It never ceased to amaze him that processes taking nanoseconds in real life seemed to pass at a leisurely pace when he wanted them too...his mind sped up to computer speeds, far faster than mere electrochemical switching could hope to. Had be been hooked up to this setting with a "real" cyberinterface, things would pass in a blur, he'd be more a passenger than a driver...the brain can only compute so fast, after all. But his mind was freed from the shackles of biochemistry, and he was able to take the time to look at the passing data carriers as he drove down the link. Nothing terribly interesting, though. He cranked up the speed, letting his mind relax for a moment to normal rate, and the journey was over in an eyeblink. He was now in a much bigger city, with cargo dirigibles crowding the sky like wayward clouds. Time to hit the National Node, or maybe straight to Central Node...he felt like some globehopping. Normally, traffic had to be high priority to go directly to the Central Node from a Regional without first going through National, but Nate knew how to make himself look like high priority. His car morphed into a sleek and heavily modified DC-3 and took to the air from the highway. Flashing the appropriate signal to the top tower, he took to the skies over the Node. Nate pulled back his perspective away from his "body" and saw the Net as a whole mapped out below him, with a small arrow representing his location. In the tradition of the motif he'd chosen, the arrow arced across the globe to Australia without stopping, leaving a red line behind it. At Australia, home of the Central Node, a red dot appeared as he changed course, heading out into the hinterlands of Northern Africa. He felt gutsy, he was going to try and get into a Corp system, one of the few dotted across the mostly abandoned continent. He might also hack a Moslem system while he was at it, but they tended to be very hard to get around in, since they hadn't officially joined the Net yet. A small "Here be there monsters" label appeared on the globe over the Sahara, and Nate snickered. Khadamite experiments were rumored to wander the desert. He stopped snickering when he felt a jolt and a sickening lurch. With a speed far faster than thought, he returned to the cockpit of the plane, to see a giant demon tearing his wings off! What the hell? Nate shifted the plane into a rocketship, hoping to at least give the beast less to grab onto. Logically, he knew that how he saw things had nothing to do with how it saw them...it looked vaguely arabian, but that didn't mean a whole lot. Perhaps a nasty security program doing outrider work for one of the Corps? The demon flew after him at incredible speed...no lag on that beasty! Whatever it was, it was damn hostile...no secsystem would be that dogged once the target has already shown it's leaving. Khadamite. Damn, it had to be some kind of AI experiment that the Khadamites have unleashed on the Net to see what it could do. Bad enough they did it in real life, now they had to clutter up his lovely Net? Nate wasn't really prepared for any serious net.combat...he hadn't planned on this level of opposition. He'd have to wing it. Thinking fast, he emitted a great cloud of smoke from the rocket's tail. That would blind the AI with noise long enough for him to split the rocket's image in three, two of which would be decoys. The smoke cleared, and the demon wasn't nearby. But he could feel the sick sensation as one of the decoys was destroyed. Then another. It was toying with him...he had only nanoseconds! Below he saw an old, disused Local, only barely connected to the Net. To his eyes, it looked like a shotgun shack hidden behind a tall stand of trees nestled in a fjord. He ejected from his rocket and sent it on its way to the Central Node...if it could make it there on autopilot, the defenses of the CN might kill the Demon. If not, at least he had a second to hide. He jumped down on his antigrav cape to the shack and dove inside, shutting the door and pulling it in after him. He cut the Node completely off of the Net. He knew from experience that doing this would make him stop breathing in real life, so he only had about a minute realtime. Fortunately, that was almost an eternity on the Net...certainly long enough for either the Demon to give up, or for him to find a defense. He looked around the shack, finding an address plaque in the old style. It read "ftp.dhhalden.no" under a crust of dirt. No one had maintained this node in ages...files were corrupted or missing, the whole place was full of noise. An ftp site...maybe it had something in it he could use. After a few minutes of riffling through files and cupboards, all he'd found was a few fiction directories. He'd have to make any defenses from scratch, then. Maybe he could find something in these files to give him ideas,though. /pub/LNH/Constellation? Nope, all corrupted. He looked around some more. "Electrocutioner's Song? Legion of Net.Heroes?" Hmmm...that gave him an idea.... Some time later, probably about ten seconds realtime, Nate had finished cobbling the program together out of raw data lying around the room. He'd found a few GIFs to use as visual reference, and the rest just sort of felt right. He donned the armor-like program and reopened the connection. Instantly the Demon was upon him, tearing through the walls of the Node. Fortunately, Nate had all he needed from it, stored as folders in the blocky backpack of his armor. The Node was torn apart as he sailed out through the roof to meet the Demon head-to-head. The Demon itself looked different. Less Arabian, more like something that would have looked at home in a story drawn by the one who had inspired the armor he wore. He pointed a gauntlet at the Demon, and a crackling mass of dots and color lanced out at the Demon, sending it reeling. He felt his voice boom out like thunder, "Your hell-spawned might is no match for he who wields the POWER KIRBY!" Another bolt, and the Demon flew apart into noise. Nate grinned behind the helmet. So this was what it was like to be a Net.Hero.... Part 2: We Shout Out "November!" (by Austin George Loomis) GM: You turn a corner and surprise three Clickclicks. PLAYER: Clickclicks, hm? Let's see...they're in Supplement III. Hand it here, please. And where's GREYHAWK? It had a note about them. [Pause. Sound of riffling pages] We shout out "November!" GM [wearily]: That's right, the Clickclicks fall over dead. -- an imaginary D&D session, c. 1975 Some weeks later, Netwalker was sitting around in Boomer's room with AJ, Tawny, and Boomer himself -- just the usual crowd -- when Grind walked in. Dan Tracey, one of the Grads, while technically only a Supernormal, had pushed himself to the limits of that level of Magene ability -- and, in some cases, even beyond. Unfortunately, the time he'd spent on that left him little time for a life, so he had even less social skills than most of the AIs Nate knew. Right now, for instance, he walked in without even knocking, slapped a minidisk down on the table, and said, "Your job is to find out who and/or what the people listed in NAMES.TXT have in common. This is a test." That said, he turned on his heel and walked out again. Netwalker paused a moment to look over his friends -- Alaric Muhammad "AJ" Jackson, with skin the color of cappucinno, balanced on one hand in the corner as part of some abstruse meditation regimen; Tabitha Pierce "Tawny" Adams, slouched in a bean-bag chair, her patrician good looks hiding a _very_ searching mind; and their host, Michael J. "Boomer" Hodgson, turning his face (he had the clean-cut, corn-fed Midwestern good looks of a young President Quayle) up from his latest abstruse invention. "Prophet's beard," observed AJ, flipping to his feet. "That could have been done better." "Well then," said Boomer, picking up the disk, "let's see who we're looking at." Mike slid the disk into his desktop terminal and opened the file. Everyone quickly gathered round the screen. "Let's see now..." He thought it over for a moment and finally concluded, "A whole lotta names. I'll have to run this file through CTR." He started to click on the button for his home-brew AI. "Maybe it'll figure out the connection faster than we can." "Oh, for Tym's sake!" muttered Tawny. "The connection is obvious, guys. Just look at the names. Bill Keyes, Heidi Wessman, Christina Hulbe, Bob Mulroy, Petrea Mitchell, Jamie Plummer, Carlos Rodriguez...we _know_ what those people have in common." Netwalker swallowed hard before finishing the sentence. "Burnout." Tawny nodded grimly. "So that answers that." "But only half of the question asked," AJ pointed out. "Grind also wanted us to find out _who_ they have in common." "For somebody who's supposed to be all muscle," Boomer quipped, "you sure pay attention." "Zen confers certain...advantages on the mind. You should consider it." "When I find the religion that's right for me, Al, I promise you'll be the first to know." _Till then,_ he thought, _I'll stick with Her What Done It All._ "We're getting away from the point here, guys," Nate intervened. "Grind gave us a job to do. He came to me because I can search those files faster. As luck would have it, you guys just happened to be with me...What d'ya say? Wanna come along?" All three of them perked at the notion. They'd all been into the Net with him at various times -- but just for enjoyment, to visit some MURF (Multi-User "Reality" Framework) or another -- never on an authentic, canonically Gibsonian netrun. The decision was unanimous. "All right, then." Nate reached into a pocket and unspooled his electrodes. "Boomer?" he said, taping the 'trodes into place. Mike, getting the hint, plugged the cord into his terminal and set CTR to monitor it. Then they all sat down in a circle and joined hands... * * * It was like falling through a silvery tube at incredible speed, streaks of light zipping past. Almost before they knew they were there, they'd dropped into the Net, which firmed up about them as an abstract world of geometric shapes. Their own forms seemed a bit surreal as well -- stylized, synthetic, covered with circuitry. "Hey!" said Boomer. "I recognize this framework!" Nate grinned. "I should have known the old-movies fan would catch on." He lifted a silvery disc out of a holster on his back and started spinning it on one finger like a juggler spinning a plate, until it disgorged three smaller discs. "This could get hairy, guys. I want you to have these persona programs. Each of you, pick the one that feels right." "What will they do?" Tawny asked, bringing her own disc up to absorb the smaller one. "Fairly generic attack and defense programs, plus a few special items, coded to a superhero motif I found on the Net. -- Which reminds me: the motif I picked to usher us in was just to impress." He concentrated a moment, as AJ and Boomer claimed their personas... ...and Net-reality re-formed around them into a big city out of the early 1990s USA, the four of them now dressed in the "grunge" fashions of 1995. "Welcome to Net.ropolis. Now, the files should be right this way..." * * * "Excuse us," said Nate to the desk sergeant. "We'd like to have a look at some of the files." He and the others, now standing around in three-piece suits, showed off their visitors' badges. The jowly, balding, middle-aged man in shirtsleeves peered at them suspiciously for a moment or five. Boomer could feel the underarms of his shirt becoming soaked. "Which files ya need?" the desk man muttered sourly, after a wait long enough to knit a bathtub. "Well, let's see..." From another pocket, Nate produced a piece of paper which Boomer knew to be the icon for the NAMES.TXT file and showed it to the desk man. * * * Much, much later... "Well, so far," Boomer summed up the situation with mock cheer, "we've got what my Grandma Pehl would call `bupkus'!" "Cheer up, guys!" Nate urged. "Only five more files to go! And we keep getting closer to the beginning! -- Okay, who's next?" "Cassandra Murphy," said Tawny, lifting a manila folder out of the simulated file cabinet. "Precog. Died six years ago." "That's before any of us even _came_ to the Academy," said AJ, suitably impressed. "Maybe she found out something," Netwalker theorized. "I'll open it up." On the instant, a raging wailing figure sprang from the folder and leapt for Nate's throat! "What the--?" He struggled with the frenzied form, turning on his persona, but before the armor could finish rezzing up, he was already unconscious on the floor. "Well," said Boomer, "looks like we've got to face this thing without him." He didn't understand why they weren't dropping out of the Net, since it was only Nate's power that was keeping them in, but -- that seemed to be the way it worked. He shrugged mentally as all three invoked the modules Nate had provided them, feeling the programmed personas override their own... * * * Decibel Dude blinked. What was he doing here? Memory filled in (somehow distorted, it seemed). He'd managed to persuade Kid Kirby of his innocence, and the Kid and Sing-Along Lass had contacted Vigilante Guy, persuading him to accompany them into the Net.ropolis PD files (by not telling Rex that Nick was going to be along). They'd agreed to put their differences aside and search the files -- when suddenly, this crazy woman had leaped out of nowhere just as the Kirbian was opening the file on SPOON, Samantha. "Sam?" he gasped. "Is that you?" But even before the words came out of his mouth, he knew it couldn't be. Now that she'd stopped being the blur of motion that had somehow overcome the Power Kirby, he could see that quite clearly. This was no net.villain -- this was a frightened red-haired girl, no more than sixteen, in a plain white linen dress. "Stay back, Nick! I'll handle this!" V-Guy's hand dove into the holster of his Enormous Gun (tm). He was just raising it to fire when the girl...changed. Her body twisted and distorted itself. Her hair ran from red to gray in 1.5 seconds. Her nose and chin stretched until they almost touched. "So, you Net.Heroes think you know what death is?" she snarled in a voice from the twelfth pit of hell. "Then taste the wrath of BANSHEE!" A scream, a loud one, a scream that even Nick was impressed with, shot from the ragged hole that was her mouth. Tightly focused, it knocked Rex Dart against the far wall like a sack of limp potatoes without doing any appreciable damage to either of the others (or any noticeable harm to the Kid). "That should bring the police any minute," Nick sighed. "I don't think so," Sing-Along Lass pointed out. "Look." They didn't, D-Dude discovered when he looked around, seem to be in the station house anymore. (And a good thing, too -- if the cops brought by the crash had been Pico and Alvarado...Nick shuddered quietly.) It was some sort of cave or grotto, with a grassy-carpeted floor and excitingly bumpy rock walls. "You call _that_ a scream?" D-Dude laughed. "Let me show you a _real_ scream!" He started drawing air into his lungs, warming up to bring the house down...wait a minute. Sing-Along Lass seemed to have realized it at the same time he did. "Don't! You might bring down the cave!" Nick sighed. "So what _do_ we do?" Sing-Along Lass did what seemed like the most improbable and ludicrous thing possible. She started singing. Just like that. An old Irish lullaby with words Nick didn't recognize and a tune that lulled him to sleep. And suddenly, as Singy's powers kicked in, the Banshee started to sing along. Not a raucous screech as Nick had expected, but a trilling soprano that matched Singy's rich contralto tones. Almost despite himself, D-Dude joined in, and Rex, and even (even? especially) the recovering Kirbian. And as they sang, the Banshee started to change. The hideous transformation she had undergone was reversed. Her hair went back to red, her face youthened to freckled Hibernian beauty, her body unkinked as if by the hands of an invisible chiropractor. "Are you the ones?" the girl asked with a faint Irish lilt. "I'm Cassandra Murphy." Murphy...he was looking for her for some reason, wasn't she? That's right -- Captain Oblivion had said something about her. A cousin (contrapuntally) of _both_ versions of Seamus O'Blivion, the Looniverse Cassandra might just know what the good Doctor was up to. At any rate, it was the best lead Nick had. "I'm Decibel Dude," he said. But even as he said it, he knew it wasn't exactly the truth. There was somebody else, wasn't there? Somebody _underneath_ Nick Eggbeater. Somebody called... * * * "Mike. Mike Hodgson." He dispelled the Decibel Dude personality program. These things were going to take training to get used to -- he hadn't known his own personality would be so overridden; it was all he could do to suggest to "Decibel Dude" reasons to be interested in the girl. Around him, he could see the others dropping their false fronts and going back to being themselves. "Cassandra" watched, impressed. "You _are_ the ones." She rummaged through her pockets, looking for something, and produced a slip of paper. She read back the instructions on it. "`And then they'll come to you, and not be themselves. And when they _are_ themselves, give them what they need.'" "Interesting," said Nate. "Who wrote that?" "I did, when I was alive. -- I'm not really Cassandra, just a sort of ghost in the machine." She rummaged through her pockets some more. (When did that dress get pockets?) Mike wondered. "Now where did I put that...? Ah! Here it is!" She handed Nate a folded and taped piece of paper. "This should tell you everything you need to know. It's just a question of reading it aright." * * * "Well," Mike sighed, "I can't make head or tail of this riddle. Can any of you guys?" AJ looked at the text displayed on Mike's terminal. "Well, the `day of the rising gods' obviously refers to the fact that a new Heroic Age is starting now. The `first of the new legends', among whom the Killer is to be found, would probably be the Grads." "Just a dang minute! If one of the Grads is the Killer--" "Do you think that's what happened to JakZak?" Tawny asked in a voice barely above whisper level. "Y'mean, when he was playing fast and loose with space-time, he was trying to see who the Killer was?" Boomer shrugged. "Makes as much sense as any other reason." "That's the one thing I can't quite get my mind around," Nate shuddered. "Burnout is _deliberate_, not random. It's something somebody's _doing_..." "And not just _any_ somebody. `The Vanishing Man, the Porter of Hell...'" "I don't quite get it." "It's a reference to Shakespeare's _Macbeth_." "AAAHHH!" Mike suddenly screamed. "HOT POTATO, DROP HIS DRAWERS, PUCK WILL MAKE AMENDS!" Everybody stared at him as if his ears had just fallen off. "What?" Nate shook his head. "You really are something, Mike. I don't know _what_ exactly, but you're something." "Go on," Tawny said. "AJ, you were about to explain the riddle." "Well, how many `vanishing' types are there at the Academy? -- Not counting you and that mind-clouding stunt." "Well, there's that Ghoster -- what was her name? -- and then there's..." She trailed off, realizing something. "Oh my God." "You figured it out?" "He's one of the Grads. He can appear and disappear." "`An orphan of the storm he made,'" AJ read from the screen. "`A body and a soul betrayed.'" "We know he drains the powers of his victims," Nate said. "What if Mr. St. J--" "Careful!" Tawny interjected. "For all we know, he could be listening right now!" "And besides," Boomer pointed out, "he didn't _earn_ that name, he _stole_ it. Call him what he is. Call him Burnout." "I was going to say, what if he drains memories as well? But it's starting to look like he does." They looked at each other. "So what do we do now?" "What else?" Nate strolled over and started punching buttons. "We send this to Grind, with a cover-letter ahead of it." "Tell him we had to go through five levels of security," Mike suggested. "Five's a nice round number. And given how many levels of secrecy there _were_, not entirely inaccurate." "Fair enough," Nate shrugged and started composing the cover note. "So, what did you guys think of your first real live netrun?" They had to think for a moment. "Nervous," Boomer suggested. "Harrowing," AJ added. "But ultimately uplifting," Tawny concluded. "WHEN DO WE DO IT AGAIN?" all three chorused. "Sometime soon," Nate promised. "When we go back to the beginning..." [Next time: The Legion goes to the place where it all began, and their first continuing story begins!] Kid Kirby created by H. Jameel al Khafiz Sing-Along Lass created by Drizzt, used by permission of Jameel Decibel Dude and Vigilante Guy appear under license from Inspired Weirdness Productions (thanks, Tick) ROSTER: NAME: Netwalker REAL NAME: Nathaniel Walker CREATED BY: Dave Van Domelen STATUS: WC, licensed to Austin George Loomis POWERS: Mental projection into the Net -- can carry up to half-a-dozen "passengers" PERSONAS: Leader types, or the very powerful (e.g. Kid Kirby, Continuity Champ, Ur-Grue, Sig.Lad) NAME: AJ REAL NAME: Alaric Muhammad Jackson CREATED BY: Austin George Loomis POWERS: Enhanced strength and reflexes. PERSONALITY: Alternates between contemplative and combative as needed PERSONAS: Mostly combat types (e.g. Vigilante Guy, Ultimate Ninja, Zagyg Ygraine) NAME: Boomer REAL NAME: Michael James Hodgson CREATED BY: Austin George Loomis POWERS: Enhanced intellect, gadgeteering ability from household objects (sometimes must cannibalize earlier inventions for parts) PERSONALITY: At an acute (but not serious) angle to reality PERSONAS: Cerebral types, who don't start a fight, but don't mind finishing it (e.g. Decibel Dude, Rebel Yell, Hybrid Cockroach) NAME: Tawny REAL NAME: Tabitha Pierce Adams CREATED BY: Austin George Loomis POWERS: Telepathy, psychic invisibility. PERSONALITY: Calm, quiet, smart, sensitive. Occasionally puts forth a bubble-head persona to fool strangers PERSONAS: The ladies, especially those with more power than is obvious (Sing-Along Lass, Lurking Girl, Wyrd, Kopikat)