//|| //^^\\ || || .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED PRESENTS // || \\ || || --X--------------------------------------------- //====TIME=CAPSULES====== '|` ASH UNIVERSE: TIME CAPSULES #2 // || \\ || || "[UUR 500] [VAI 980]" // || \\__// || || Copyright 1998 by Tony Pi & Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________ [Cover has the series title stamped onto a license plate, and shows Derek "Triton" Radner in chains and prison clothing. A banner proclaims, "DEEP ARMAGEDDON TIE-IN!"] "This can't be a relic of the 2020s, can it, Doctor M'Cormack? It looks more like a late twentieth century artifact," said Kaoru Spinoza, holding up a battered license plate with the word 'TRITON' stamped onto it. "I thought license plates were obsolete by then." Dr. M'Cormack leaned closer to get a better look. "You're half right. Standard license plates were replaced by the current system of computer chips embedded in the vehicle's frame by the 2010s. Took a while to get all the bugs out, such as the issue of eyewitness identification, but the system was in use at the time this capsule was buried." "Then why this antiquated license plate, Doc?" "For style. Old-style license plates became decorative, and vanity plates like this moreso, because a vanity plate labelled a car as uniquely its owner's. Since many of the laws regarding license plates were still on the books, albeit suspended like several articles of the Constitution were, the government decided to raise a little funding by issuing plates for a fee. Even now, we often satisfy our need to be vain." "But why 'TRITON'? Could this have belonged to Derek Radner?" "Well, quite possibly it belonged to the original Triton. Yet we cannot discount the possibility that it was ordered by a rogue voguer. Remember that during that decade entertainment was split between fanaticism for all things superheroic, and a craze for the trappings of supervillainy. Everything from toys to music to soap operas were pervaded by the renewed interest in super-heroes. The renaissance of the superhuman made quite a mark in the popular culture. Still, it could very well belong to Radner. Why don't you check his memoirs? They're a matter of public record, after all...." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Selected Entries from "Triton: Memoirs Of A Super-Villain": * * * * NOVEMBER, 2019 My name was notorious at Leavenworth even before I arrived. I, the great Derek T. Radner, a.k.a. Triton. It was a great travesty that I, the premiere super-villain of the twenty-first century, had been sentenced to twenty years in prison for my crimes against the state. And I had Nose-To-The-Grindstone Tracey to blame for this embarrassment...his cronies too. One day I would see them destroyed, at whatever cost to my soul. But for now, I had only my admirers and the fan mail they sent to console me while I plotted revenge. I was forced to wear at all times a harness that would drain away any electrical power I could generate. Likewise, they kept me away from all sorts of electrical luxuries, like television, radio, and even lightbulbs. They may have effectively neutralized one aspect of my power, but they could not take away my greatest weapons: natural genius and fame. I read my fan mail by candlelight. They were from the Triton fans I had amassed during my all-too-short crime spree, ranging from marriage proposals to religious freaks who wanted me to found a Church of Trytyn. I was touched. One postcard in particular caught my attention. It was peculiar in that the name given was Elzzup Suber, or Rebus Puzzle in reverse. The message was standard fan adoration, but the Hieronymous Bosch-like painting on the back had an eye growing out of a can of soda pop, resting on a medieval helmet on top of a frying pan standing on its handle. A man-shaped hole was cut out of the pan, and in the background was a U-turn sign. How easily the fools who censor my mail overlooked such an obvious puzzle. EYE + CAN + HELM + PAN - MAN + U. "I can help you." Sure you could, you maniac. I crumpled the postcard in annoyance and stared at the cracks in the ceiling, plotting my escape from this limbo. * * * * NOVEMBER, 2020 Over the course of my first year in Leavenworth, a group of my admirers had flocked to me in prison. I called them my Tridents. Not everyone in prison cared for my fame, though, especially 'Riot' Singer, a former paragang member with minor beguiling powers who thought he ran the jailhouse. A few of his lackeys left his Lynch Mob to follow my natural charisma, to his froth-at-the-mouth dismay. I had no doubt my little entourage will grow in time to rival Riot's gang. I narrowly escaped a knifing last month. Of course, I would lose all their respect if they knew I was obsessed with a new soap opera. Not that I liked it, of course. It was the fact that they based "Citadel" on the Academy, and I *had* to know if they were going to ruin my reputation by parodying me. I still had no television privileges, so I had to resort to a dirty tactic: actually befriending B.P. B.P. was short for Blueprint. He was called that because he doodled technical blueprints all the time, even though he was only an aging muscle goon with a bad heart who wouldn't know a transistor from a microchip. Everyone thought he was half-crazy. I ignored the lifer for the most part, but he was the only one among the prisoners who would admit to watching the soaps. So I cashed a few favors and got him assigned to license-plate stamping with me. Working the antiquated 1940s-vintage plate stampers was on the short list of things they would let me do. I was deemed too dangerous to do manual labor outside the prison walls, and they wouldn't let me work phones or computers for census-taking or telemarketing. So I chose the old gas-powered, steam-driven plate stamper. It appealed to me: I had a fondness for nostalgia, like my love of twentieth century villain culture. So, it came as a doubly pleasant surprise to me to discover that B.P. once worked as muscle on the old twentieth century villain enclave called Haven, and that he had eidetic memory. I drooled with envy when I found out that every blueprint B.P. doodled came out of the past, out of the long list of all the plans and schematics he had ever glanced at. If only I could escape from my captivity and work on those blueprints! For the benefit of those who read these memoirs without the benefit of further schooling in history, I should give some background on Haven at this point. Haven was, on the face of it, the single largest enclave of supervillains in all of history, unless you count our current government, but that would sully the name "supervillain." But it was more than that, it was an extension of Khadam's internal and external politics. Back in the 1970s or thereabout, the African nation of Khadam got in trouble with the international community for harboring many of the world's worst villains and mad scientists...in fact, those supervillains were part of the government of Khadam. So the government made a great show of expelling most of the supernormal population. A few years later, an artificial island sprang up in the middle of the Mediterranean, built with robot labor and the help of a number of supernormals. All of the villains who had once lived in Khadam now took up residence on this new island, christened Haven. It was nicknamed Upper Zugnovia, after the ruling family of Khadam, the expatriate Nazi Zugmanns. Everyone knew it was part of Khadam in fact, but legally there wasn't much that could be done. And militarily it wasn't wise to attack Haven, since it had a high concentration of supervillains. During the late 1980s, a dimensional doorway opened from another world where everyone was really evil, and that world's version of the Academy of Super-Heroes, the Conclave of Super-Villains, emerged, having been ousted by forces even more evil than they. They immediately took up residence in Haven and were quickly acknowledged as the ruling council, a worthy goal I sought to emulate once I had my freedom back. Over time, original CSVers left or "left" and were replaced by villains from this dimension, and the CSV ruled the world's supervillains for around a decade, until everything hit the fan in 1998. Haven sank beneath the waves as every paranoid mad scientist's deadman switch triggered and set off various instruments of destruction. Still, Haven was well-built, and I couldn't imagine everything had been destroyed. Especially the Strafe armor. In this world, its cybernetic systems turned a criminal who donned it into one of the most self-sacrificing heroes of the Third Heroic Age. In the evil world, something went wrong and it turned a petty criminal into a genocidal maniac. I wanted it. Oh, I'd fix the cyberinterface problem...no point in messing with my highly trained grey matter...but it was a powerful symbol. But, back to the narrative. I seethed with rage when I found from B.P. that 'Citadel' has a character named Neptuno who was a clear rip-off of Triton! What further enraged me was that he was played as comic relief instead of the noble super-villain I should have been portrayed as. Worst of all, my fans were deserting me in favor of that *clown* Neptuno, and that I could not tolerate. I vowed revenge on Neptuno then and there, but it would be some time before I could find everyone responsible for his creation and deal with them. In the meantime, that mysterious puzzle-enthusiast was one of my most devoted correspondents, whose numbers had dwindled down to seven. I tried to resist his puzzles, which had become increasingly more challenging and even more cleverly hidden from the prison censors, but perhaps I became addicted to them. Rebus, as I came to call him, was not the unsophisticated sod I thought him to be...I could detect a genius that rivaled my own behind his puzzles. Always he offered to help me, concealing his message behind acrostics, anagrams and other ingenious methods. Some were simple, like lemon-juice messages that I could read by holding the letter close enough to a flame. Some had to be deciphered from multiple pieces of mail, putting them side-by-side and reading the last word of each line of one letter with the first word of each line of the second letter. At last, I broke down and sent a message of my own back in a series of license plate puzzles hidden in a self-portrait of me working the plate stamper. If you read the license plates in the picture from left to right, you would have the following puzzle [Editor's Note: puzzles are solved in the Author's Note below.]: [OKY DUU] [CK2 AYD] [MEI W84] [U2N SIR] Rebus responded shortly after with a plate puzzle of his own. The puzzle was hidden in a letter pleading me to repent from a Mrs. Minorca, a simple reversal of "acronim," which alerted me to look out for acronyms: [URUU FL] [UR FOOR] [RZ2 W84] [NEZ XIT] [L8R TON] [TON TON] * * * * NOVEMBER, 2021 It finally happened. Someone requested a vanity plate with the word TRITON. How dare they! First they mocked me with Neptuno. Now someone claimed my cherished name to decorate their car. It was intolerable. I refused to stamp it at first. But then I figured out a way to smuggle out the blueprints from B.P. that I stashed away to Rebus. I could secretly scratch notes I couldn't commit to memory onto the back of the vanity plate for Rebus to recover, and at the same time have Rebus eliminate the fool who claimed TRITON as their own. * * * * NOVEMBER, 2022 [Editor's note: this scene takes place during the Academy mini-series, when the Burnout Killer's identity had not been discovered yet.] I received a surprise visit from Dan 'Grind' Tracey around this time. "What brings you to my humble prison, Nose?" I taunted him. "You want my autograph?" Tracey would have none of it. "I came across an interesting chain of coincidences. Over the past year, twelve people who have applied for the vanity plate with the word TRITON in several sectors have died in vehicular accidents soon after receiving the plate. Each plate was missing after the accident. Each TRITON plate was stamped by you. A striking coincidence, don't you think?" "Are you claiming that *I* have something to do with these strange happenings? I'm securely locked up, if you haven't noticed. Or do you believe I'm capable of escaping my prison to do as I please? Wouldn't that be a laugh?" "You know something, Radner." "And you're after something else." It was a stab in the dark. "You came here because you've been doing some random digging, and you're checking up on anything remotely strange, because you don't know who to trust. Good to know I had some lasting effect, damaging your trust." I gloated. "What, another of your schoolmates is imitating my lead? Who's a suspect this time, Teller? Essay? Watch your back, Nose. Whoever you're after, it's not me. If I could break out of here, I'd never come back." I could tell I guessed right by his silence as he left. One more TRITON plate later, Rebus told me that Tracey had set a trap for him by applying for the vanity plate himself. He left the details sketchy, but said that Grind did not discover his identity, and that both left the other with stinging memories of each other's skill at unarmed combat. Tracey's old internal-combustion car with the TRITON plate was destroyed in an explosion, but the bastard escaped unscathed. I was slightly impressed, but *only* slightly. I reminded him that Nose was *mine* to destroy. * * * * NOVEMBER, 2023 For the past few months, I'd felt my powers escalate. Not by leaps and bounds, but the harness no longer sapped away all the electricity I was able to generate. I was confident that I could short-out the battery contraption with a single, focused burst, thereby giving me back my power. I was careful not to reveal this secret, of course. There was increasing talk about the completion of something nicknamed The Cavity, a new super-prison to hold the most dangerous of super-powered villains and paragangers. Naturally, I was at the top of the list. If Rebus sat on his ass instead of breaking me out now, I would lose my last chance of escaping. Yet Rebus assured me that all would go well, if I only had patience. Well, the day of the transfer came fast. I knew they were going to hire Anchors to lock us down, so I might never escape on my own. I had to act, and fast. Unfortunately, before I could escape I had to kill B.P. He had exhausted his usefulness, and now all he represented was someone who held too many secrets. I already gleaned tons of technical data from him, including how to locate Haven and penetrate any defenses it still had. I was looking forward to stealing the Strafe armor in particular, the jewel in my crown. With a slight shock, I sent B.P.'s heart into fibrillation. Rest in peace, old fool. They never suspected that it was anything other than natural causes. Rebus was still silent on the day of the transfer. I planned to overload my battery, then make a desperate attempt to escape, but the odds were so bad that I couldn't do it while in prison. I would have to risk it on the road. There were two vans, with Riot among those in the front. I was stuck with some losers in the latter. On the road, after driving two hours in the heavy rain, I made my play and zapped the battery. I electrocuted the other prisoners through the leg chains that we wore, then the startled guards in the back. I then broke the tiny overhead dome light and stuck my finger in the socket, frying the electrical system in the van. I was ready to fight tooth and nail with the driver and the Anchor when I heard a cracking sound, the sinful sound of a neck breaking. Then a voice: "I've a vanity plate for you, Triton." The van door opened. I recognized the man holding a TRITON vanity plate. "You're one of the goddamn Anchors!" I shouted in surprise. "You took your sweet time, Rebus." "Come. Mr. Strings will arrive shortly with a car." He peeled off his disguise. "He will lose two puppets, but your fiery death and that of my late associate will convince them long enough for us to vanish." And so we did. DECEMBER 2023 The construction of the airship Skyhaven was completed within a month's time. Yet there was something missing, a finishing touch. I snapped my fingers. "The piece de resistance!" I mounted the TRITON plate onto the back of Skyhaven. "We are ready to rock the United World!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Author's Notes: Tony Pi: I wanted to fill in a few blanks about Triton's time in prison, and how he acquired technology far more advanced than he used in STRAFE #0. I also wanted to establish that his acquaintance with Rebus was a long one, and give Dave the chance to flesh out Haven and the Strafe armor's history. This can be seen as a prelude piece to the "Deep Armageddon" arc, but should stand on its own. As promised, here are the solutions to the vanity plate puzzles, including the title: [UUR 500] [VAI 980] "You're so vain(ity)." [OKY DUU] [CK2 AYD] [MEI W84] [U2N SIR] "Okay, why do you seek to aid me? I wait for you to answer." [URUU FL] [UR FOOR] [RZ2 W84] [NEZ XIT] [L8R TON] [TON TON] "You are useful. Your foes are ours too. Wait for an easy exit later, Triton." Dave Van Domelen: As mentioned above, I wrote the section with background on Haven. In addition, I wrote the addendum below, tweaked the title so it'd work with standard [ABC 123]-format license plates and as usual tweaked dialogue and explanations here and there, especially in the M'Cormack/Kaoru scene. If you're wondering if mail censorship is something I introduced for the somewhat less-free North American Combine, I didn't. Prisoners in high security prisons in the real world regularly have their mail opened, read, censored and even subjected to chemical analysis (in case someone soaked a letter in LSD, which does happen). Letters often reach their intended destination full of holes where objectionable bits have been snipped out with scissors. Many don't reach the addressee at all...Triton was probably sent ten times more mail than he actually got. And Rebus probably had to use a new pseudonym and a new mailing location every time to avoid raising suspicion as a possible outside confederate. And now, a special bonus excerpt from Triton's autobiography: ============================================================================= INTRODUCTION My name is Derek Radner, but the world will remember me as Triton, the first true supervillain of my age. Long after the mundanes who sought to hold me down are forgotten, history will remember me, and this book will help ensure history gets the details right. Some have called me evil, but I don't recognize the validity of the term. Others will think me insane for embracing the epithet of supervillain. But they don't understand, and probably cannot understand. It may sound...trite...but most of humanity is comprised of sheep. They may bleat occasionally, but for the most part they're willing to be herded, sheared and even slaughtered. Even criminals, like the paragangers, are simply badly-behaved sheep most of the time, accepting the social order that they violate. The governments of the world are like the shepherds, looking down on their charges and only protecting them as property. Both superheroes and supervillains are wolves, but the heroes are wolves who still think they're sheep. They're domesticated, sheepdogs if you will. They're capable of running with the wolves, but choose not to. Wolves are not evil, they simply don't feel bound by the sheep-rules. When a wolf eats a sheep, it really doesn't matter in terms of the sheep's life, since it'll be slaughtered for mutton soon enough. It disturbs the sheepdog, who feels he's failed in his duty. And it hurts the profit margin of the shepherd, who proclaims the wolf to be evil and sets the dogs on it. So, I am a wolf. If all I did was remain in the wilderness, feeding off the sheep and remaining free, I would be satisfied with my life. But wolves like to run in packs as do supervillains, so anyone I can inspire to join me is welcome. To a point. After all, if all the sheep become wolves, what would I have for lunch Tuesday? If you're a wolf waiting to break out of your domestication, this book is for you. If you're a sheep, you may find it amusing, but remember that you're still lunch. I'm not writing this to inspire the masses of humanity to rise up and seize their destiny in their own hands, because I know the masses don't WANT to seize their own destinies. They want to stay sheep. And that's fine with me, because I'm feeling hungry....