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I'll probably post an app later tonight

E P I S O D E O N E
S M A R T E R
C H A P T E R O N E


Legion Clubhouse, Earth
The Thirtieth Century: 2999


“Lightning Lad, it’s fantastic to see you! Has your first week’s stay in the Legion Clubhouse lived up to your expectations?”

“Yeah. It’s great. Really ritzy,” he said, kicking one of his heels into the other.

“That skyblue shock in your eyes has returned. Is everything to your liking? Please don’t feel pressured to say that it’s perfect. I know it’s not. My research team employed a trio of focus groups over the course of several weeks to try and make it feel as homey as possible but, as an entrepreneur, I know as well as anyone that getting that many opinions on anything tends to have a blanding, sterilizing effect.”

“Oh, in that case. Yeah. It, uh, doesn’t really feel like home. It doesn’t feel real. It feels more like a dream. I wake up and everything’s spotless. The menu looks just like it did in the old neighborhood on Winath, like, it tastes like you literally hired their staff.

“I’m glad to hear that you hate it,” Brande chortled magnificently, “I was afraid you’d try to spare my feelings. I thank you sincerely. It feels too presentable. I’ll amend that at once. Don’t worry: next time you see the place, it’ll be scummier than your belly button!”

Garth looked at him with a pair of evershifting eyes, perplexed. He couldn’t tell if he felt grateful or insulted. Maybe something else, not that he knew what that would even be. He was speechless. Absolutely speechless until the second when he wasn’t: “Wait. Did you say next time I see it?”

“I told them you were a bright one. Yessir, pack your bags for an all-expense paid trip to the planet Colu! We’ll be leaving in four hours. If you’d be so kind, please go rouse Imra, Rokk and Chuck. Tell them that you’ll be undertaking your first case as the Legion of Superheroes before night’s end!”


The Mark 494 Legion Cruiser “Forneus”
Outside Colu’s Atmosphere


“Pop Quiz!” Brande spouted as he stood in front of the teenagers.

That’s the worst kind there is, Garth thought to himself.

“Within the United Planets, one planetnation produces an amount of data exponentially larger than every other member of the Union combined. What is that planet?”

Garth’s fist shot up like a bolt of lightning, standing on his tiptoes like a toddler peeking over a fence before being upstaged by Imra’s unceremonious utterance, “Colu.”

“Ah, see! I knew you were a smart cookie. Say,” Brande began, “how’d you know?”

“I read your mind. Also, Garth told us we were going to Colu before brining us down here. So… I dunno, a bunch of reasons really,” she shrugged, politely grinning out of courtesy.

“Okay, I’ll have to bear that in mind from here on out,” Brande said, pausing his breathing for a moment in an attempt to think only clean thoughts. “How much do the rest of you know about the line of Coluan succession, though?”

Imra stayed silent, waiting for the others, who were even silenter exempting the staccato shrugging sound of softly slumping shoulders.

Brande grinned. This was what he was waiting for. “The Coluans would have conquered the universe several times over if not for the simple fact that, by and large, they want nothing to do with it. They’re generally too preoccupied with their internal bickering, espionage and mind-games. In spite of the formidable processing power of their minds, they sabotage each other’s research in their casual cat-and-mouse counterintelligence games so thoroughly that their ability to progress as a society is hindered to merely being good or occasionally earth-shaking as opposed to fundamentally redefining the pace of intergalactic society on a daily basis.

This should come as little surprise given that their roots lie with the age-old beings known as The Computer Tyrants, a collective of sociopathic bean counting androids who crafted the entity known as Brainiac as a living encyclopedia to slither through the stars, sampling and stealing away data at any cost. Though he had been operating as a tenth level intelligence, he was assisted by a lowly engineer who unshackled his mind and enabled him to ascend to the twelfth level, every bit as psychically robust as his creators and with a bevy of life experience behind him. He slew them like dogs before seizing the seat of Colu as his own and creating a race of people in his own image, tasking them with the exact same manner of scientific fieldwork that he had been designed to perform with one significant difference.

Their every thought was monitored and censored by his own mind. Unfortunately for him, this put such a strain on his ability to perform other functions once they anomalously began sprouting individuals also of the twelfth level. Ever since, he has been at rest in the heart of Colu, kept latent by his own laborers enlightenment. Naturally, there are loyalists who would like to see Colu returned to the control of the monarch Brainiac, but twelfth level intelligences, the first level at which a meaningful contribution can be made to processing the massive load of data, are only born every two or three hundred years on average. None of them have been interested in shouldering the burden.”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Chuck demanded. “Didn’t you say that you were talking about succession or something? This can’t all seriously be relevant! Can it?”

“Sorry for the exposition dump, my boy, but I’ll get to succession in just a moment. It just seems severely improbably that anyone would be likely to fill you in on the social context that their society has existed within for the last several hundred years organically. I had some of my best researchers working on compiling and abridging their extremely well documented history, sorting through the intentional misinformation overloads so that you could have this neat little two minute speech. Speaking of which, as I was:

“The Brainiacs are the descendants of Brainiac who possess their own twelfth level intelligences. To date, there have been five of them. Only four. The most recent of which is Querl Dox, a young man, particularly bright even amongst the twelfth level intellects, that has survived a comically intense sequence of assassination attempts. The previous three Brainiacs are all, in some form or fashion, incapacitated and therefore not straining the original’s processors. If he falls, then the original Brainiac, the great tyrant shall return with a vengeance. Otherwise, the amount of terrorist attacks on the planet has skyrocketed. From an average of none to three dozen per year. We theorize that this is an attempt to lighten the load on his processors as well. Your job is to assist young mister Dox in preventing any further attacks and attempts on his life. Understood?”

Imra nodded curtly. Chuck looked like his brain was buffering. Rokk worked his eyelids like an abacus, trying to work out how they would pull it off and Garth snapped his fingers, spelling out Y E S with a trail of electrons buzzing in the air.

“Excellent,” Brande grinned. “We’ll be embarking briefly.”
Nicholas


He felt a riddle rippling into the space between his tiny ribs. Wriggling his nerves like a rainstorm. He thought that it would’ve hurt but he felt no pain. He saw nothing. He felt nothing. Nothing at all. But then, the nothing gave way to hearing something, a concatenation of cacophonous human chirps that meant nothing to him.

“You can’t leave until you hurt him, son.”

He tried to feel what it was, the unsolicited sensation stirring his stasis. He wrenched his wrists but found that his struggles only strained his own steel bound wrists, cutting into them like an anchor into a puddle. He yelped helplessly, hoping that perhaps someone might lend him their aid but he found little more than his own dismay. He blinked his eyes, wincing but felt his eyelids raking over each other as clumsily as autumn leaves in the wind. He couldn’t feel his eyes. They were gone.

Then, his nefarious nerves knew what it was he was feeling. Cold. He was cold and wet and weak and scared and, as hard as he had been struggling seconds before, he couldn’t stop shaking now. He couldn’t stop huffing and hissing and batting his tail against his jittering legs. He felt the mystery again but the magic was gone. He didn’t want to know what it was anymore. He’d rather it just go away.

“Son, I can tell you’re not really giving it your all. Believe me, this doesn’t make me happy. I mean it—but you have to learn how to hurt before you can learn how to help. Do you know what the price of not being prepared is?”

He screamed as he felt something distinct: A searing strike streaking across his chest once and then a second and several subsequent times and as he continued quivering, he felt his skin opening like


Nic sat up in bed.

He’d had the dream again. Where he was the squirrel that his dad made him practice paining on. He peaked over to the clock. There were still several hours before he would have to make his way over to the rendezvous with the others. He and Keaton had spent the last several days making preparations for this.

Several hours until go time.

He could try to get some more shuteye. After all, if he weren’t on his A-game he may as well not even go but, on the other hand, even if he did slip back between his bedsheets, he knew that he wouldn’t be well-rested. He felt the lightning in his limbs, as his body was adrenalized. With all the surveillance of the Spire, he had practically gorged himself on rest.

So, he decided that he’d make the best use of the time he had. First things first, breakfast. As he peeked through his cabinet, he was not sure what he wanted. But he did know that he would be busy that day. For that matter, so would everyone else involved. It occurred to him that, despite his best efforts to map out that facility by eyejacking the faculty, his actual mission parameters weren’t particularly well-defined. There is a decent chance that most of them could go off into that grand old goodnight without even constituting a failure. He wasn’t the type to plan for failure. Apparently, he was just the type that failed to plan.

And the cost for his arrogance. The price for his unpreparation? The price of that particular privilege would be paid in his friends’ lives, and depending on how he counted, he had about ten of those, even if he were extremely lax in the criteria for what constituted a friend.

He owed it to them to do better. All things considered, it was too late to dramatically redefine the mission. He wasn’t nearly competent enough of an organizer to make that work, which he admitted was one of his major failings as a man. So, he’d at least do for them what he could.

He prepared some goodies for the crew. While his products were baking and otherwise readying, he relaxed his mind by doing burpees, dressing up in the coziest clothes he could clasp his clammy little claws onto. By the time he was done, the smells filling his room were mouthwatering and gut-wrenching in equal measure. He decked himself out in black spandex, with a turtleneck under a trenchcoat with his hair slicked back for the first time in his entire life.

That’s when the clarion call to misconduct came clamoring.

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask them, "How much should we give?"
Ooh, they only answer "More! More! More!" Yo!


“Cara!” Nic yowled, “Silence the alarm!” before stuffing the many pockets of his trenchcoat with his semi-edible menagerie. “The time has come!”


His entire life, he’d struggled with the weight of being good at what he was meant for and literally nothing else. Today was different. Today he was defiant. Then he remembered that he belonged to an extremely illegal militia previously. Even his compliance was defiant. Was this any different. Did this small scale paramilitary insurgency he was a key part of really constitute a meaningful change in his behavior? The last one was his family. This one was made up of his friends.

He felt a small pair of beady eyes looking upon him before realizing that this really was different. These people had never forced him to torture his favorite squirrel and would probably never do so, not that any of them would be capable. This was better.
When he arrived at the coffee shop alongside his company of comrades, he smiled victoriously.

When Lynn shouted "Who the fuck wants to live forever," he threw his fist into the air, sharing in the sentiment. Today was the day.
“Alright, everybody. First thing first. We can’t properly survive a session of such a spine-tingling subterfuge without the proper preparations. In this case, I extend my most salient sustenance!” He reached a gloved hand into his breast facing trenchcoat pocket before withdrawing a steaming bag of buttery biscuits stuffed with perfectly prepared bacon, eggs and his own secret blend of cheeses. “Everyone take one, this is non-negotiable. I don’t want to lose any of you to an empty stomach.”

As he opened the bag, a delicious hiss spread through the vicinity, smelling like happiness. “To keep the mindset right and for the sake of morale, I’ve taken the liberty of picking codenames for everyone. You’ll notice a pattern here since I figured it’d be easier to remember this way. Archie,” he pointed to the young man, “you’re The Beast. Lynn, Phoenix. Amelia, Nightcrawler. Eli,” he paused and grinned uncontrollably before recomposing himself. “Eli, you’re Angel. Natalie, Colossus. I’m Cyclops and Keaton is Professor Xavier.” He looked over at Packet. “Packet’s fine as is but if you want in, I think Forge would be a wonderful name for you.”

“Lynn,” Nic said, stepping towards her, retrieving a satchel stuffed with cotton and mason jars, “these are for you. I made some napalm and canned it for you so that you could have an easier time with your powers. Otherwise I have a small retinue of smoke bombs in case I don’t want to see out of anyone’s eyes anymore.”
Alden The Black



How the mighty had fallen. The once beautiful Alden Blackstar had everything in the world to live for. He was wealthy, young, attractive, strong; you name it: he had it. The world was his for the taking and the best part was that his father was in the process of taking it for him. But unfortunately for him, things changed, as they so often do when they are progressing as one wishes. While some suspected, and most of whom wholeheartedly accepted, that Alden had been injured in a hostile takeover engineered by his own kin, Alden knew the truth. He had been stricken by his master, punished for his misdeeds and as penance for his gluttonous embrace hedonism, never again would he feel the warmth of a maiden fluttering her eyelashes his way nor would he be severing heartstrings with his razor sharp jawline any time soon.

Just as a runner would feel a pleasure when he ought to feel agony, hoofing the soil itself into submission, he had made his own flesh subject to the font from which the world had emerged. It was that which brought him where he now stood, to the palace of the Garlands. Jocun was a man who Alden admittedly knew exceptionally little about. In years past, he had little reason to care about the politicking and whatever goings-on there were within the land, his concerns had essentially been limited to his business. But becoming a servant of that which was sacred meant safeguarding that which was more mundane.

Approaching the gates of the palace, he had several testimonials to his identity, letters of recommendation and various other papers to verify his identity should they not be able to spot him on sight. That said, he doubted that he would really need them. After all, he was no longer the boyishly handsome youth Alden Blackstar, he was the saggy-skinned remnant Alden The Black. The title, like a weighted shackle, was not something he'd endorsed but there was little he could do to divorce himself from it at this phase.

As he peeked through the gates towering iron bars, he felt a fresh presence come to stand amongst the gathering crowd. A fresh-faced, unkempt youth, looking a bit peckish, stood hooded with his face obfuscated, though not nearly so thoroughly as Alden's own. Suddenly inquisitive, Alden stepped near him with a small wave and a quiet humor about him as he closed the distance, "Is it true that our very own king is subject to his queen?"
Hey, maybe dead/divorced/shitty parents is a prerequisite for activating your superpowers.


I think that's basically just a superhero trope in general
Hai
Thanks for the posts, gents
I held you like you were a kitchen knife
Now I don't hold you at all
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