The Valiants

Man, people from New York are wierd.

I've been busy, recently, acting as a liaison for the Pinnacle City PD, thanks to Lt. Alvarez. The New York team The Valiants came out our way, and the PCPD was alerted, because they usually mean lots of property damage, when they come to your town.

Of course, they have a couple of real powerhouses on the team, Maximum Man, Thunderhead and Olympia are tops in the sheer muscle department. And the android, Tronix, with his carbon nanotube bones and metallic whisker muscles is nearly as strong as Max Man, who's just a hair under Apex's strength, they say. All this adds up to broken real estate, so they like to stick a local guy in with the Valiants, when they make an appearance.

I got Lt. Alvarez's call the other evening and went out to meet him. He gave me a packet of dossiers on the team and some credentials from the city. They're temporary, but it's cool, anyway. I got to read up on the team and let me tell you, there is some bizarre stuff there. I won't go into the various twisted alternate time-line confusion, because that's not really relevant. The relevant things have to do with the twisted, bizarre relationships.

First, let's run down the list.

I found this image on theirweb site, so, left to right, etc.
Wildman, Rune Knight, Ladybug, Olympia...
Tronix, Thunderhead, Crossbow, Goshawk...
Fantasya, Maximum Man...
Hoplite V14, Angelfish...
Liberator

This is the current line-up. In the beginning they also had Silver Beetle --Ladybug's former/late husband, whose mind currently resides in the android body of Tronix, who is now "married" to Fantasya--, and they had the purple-skinned behemoth Destroyer, for awhile (before he decided it was more fun to smash things up and hurt people, again).

It gets worse.

So, the late Dr. Heinrich Pohl, a genius in cybernetics and the bio-physics of super-human powers, whose research led him to build his own Silver Beetle armor as well as Ladybug's shrinking suit and Tronix (originally designed to be the Valiants' majordomo), well...he also built the team's greatest adversary.

Pohl is one of those guys who can't imagine a mind greater than his own, and so he designed an apparatus to duplicate his mind in a computer, so that he could brainstorm with himself. This was partly and experiment to see if he could do it, and partly the stated purpose. He ran into hardware troubles, almost immediately. The computer technology of the time, even on the leading edge, was simply too puny to encode, store and operate a human mind. So, he edited the mind down to it's most basic functions of intellect. He removed extraneous emotions and the like and, in so doing, created a monster.

Originally, it was simply Project 314. It became Mechanus. The digitized mind of Heinrich Pohl, stripped of love, compassion, and empathy contrived a means to escape it's computer prison. It was trapped in a stand-alone supercomputer, unable to act, but not prevented from thinking. Machanus, being a machine duplicate of Heinrich Pohl, even an edited version, had insight into the workings of Pohl's mind that would escape even the most gifted psychiatrist. Mechanus used a combination of hypnotic suggestion and flattery to convince Pohl to connect its computer to his laboratory network. That night, Mechanus used the computer-controlled machines of Pohl's lab to construct his first crude body, a wheeled robot, with limited function. It's small segmented arms barely strong enough to do light manual labor, the robot managed to incorporate a new type of ultradense storage media that Mechanus had devised. Still, it could not incorporate all of the mind of Mechanus in such a crude mobile platform. It was enough, however, to be self-motivating and could follow Mechanus's instructions to seek out a superior production facility.

The Mechanus drone found Stiller Industries, a major technology manufacturing firm on the east coast. Malcolm Stiller was the original Hoplite, in case you'd missed the Time Magazine article.

The drone linked with Stiller's design and prototyping plant over a holiday weekend and produced the first true Mechanus robot body. Seven feet tall, nearly six hundred pounds of murderous metal, as they say. The drone copied it's own operating system into the new body and sent it back to Pohl's lab. The body used one of Malcolm Stiller's own neural-net superconducting computers, which made it superior even to the machine Mechanus inhabited in the lab.

A strange thing happened, when Mechanus uploaded its mind into the new body, however. The neural net computer, designed to mimic the human brain in so many ways, contained components for simulating emotional responses. For the first time in its short life, Mechanus felt emotion. "Short" is a relative term, here, however. To Mechanus, living at computer clock speed, it had "lived" quite some time. These emotions caused it considerable trouble, being so new and alien to its experience.

Of course, Pohl was alerted when the machine body broke into the lab and he responded as superheroes often do, with force. Mechanus easily defeated Silver Beetle and injured him severely. However, it could not kill him, for some reason. It was at this point that Mechanus started referring to Pohl as "Father".

From there, it just gets stranger and creepier.

The Valiants went after Mechanus and managed to capture it and, after removing its limbs, stored it in a secure bunker. Eventually, it escaped, the drone freed it more than once and manages to still remain hidden, to this day. Mechanus has improved its body every time it comes back, managing, a few years ago, to acquire enough neutronium to armor its body to near-invulnerability. Fortunately, the internal components aren't so tough.

A few years ago, in an unrelated battle, Pohl was mortally wounded and had his mind transferred into the body of the Valiant's android majordomo, Tronix.

This time around, Mechanus, in its now-Oedipal mania, broke into the home of Janine Royal, the former wife of Heinrich Pohl and abducted her. If Pohl was his "father", somehow Royal was his "mother" and Mechanus has determined to take whatever his "father" loves or loved. Like I said, it's creepy.


This shot from the POV of the floor cleaning bot. Notice it's scanning laser targeting the "obstruction".

So, anyway, we spent a good part of the last week searching through various underground labs and storage facilities, abandoned military bases (it's amazing how many of these things there are), even one old supervillain lair--Serpenthor's I think. Lots of snake motif and very warm.

Finally tracked the 'bot down in an old Atlas missile silo in Wisconsin. Ms. Royal was trussed up in some kind of machine, lots of wires and flashing lights and there was this shimmering, polished stainless-steel fembot wired into the other side of the machine. Haijime Soryama would have loved this thing, I think, a "gynoid" straight out of his art, without the pink bits. :P

This wasn't such a tough battle, since Mechanus had something he/it wanted to protect. With his "bride" in danger, he surrendered pretty quickly, I didn't even get to drain his batteries. The bride woke up while we were freeing Ms. Royal. She was totally naked and not bad for a woman pushing forty from the far side. She was happy to climb into her Ladybug armor, by that point.

We wrapped it all up after only 6 days of searching and minimal property damage. Ho-hum....

---