EA Chapter One

Jessica gripped her pack strap tight as the lift came to a stop. The doors opened with a whispering gush of air. She let out a hurried apology and bolted forward onto the concourse. A quick glance at the glowing readout on the shimmering ceiling would have gotten her to curse if she had the time.

Five minutes to make it across the concourse. She was going to be late. She did not care if her bags made the flight - she would wear the same uniform for a week if she had to. Her brother has pitched one of his fits, screaming and crying because he didn;t want to get dressed. It was a big one, too. Award-winning. Better than his Fifth Birthday Tatrum and The Time He Cried in His Mashed Potatoes.

Because of it, their parents got caught in traffic. Because of it, she had to leave before her mom finished her good-bye. Because of it, she was running as fast as she could, brushing past strangers and avoiding obstacles with all the grace she could muster.

Another glance at the clock. Three minutes.

This was her first time to the Moonlink. She had planned to take pictures and upload them for all her friends to see back home. She browsed up some of the restaurants and wanted to catch a meal with some of her fellow cadets. The Moonlink was built five years previous, completed on the fortieth anniversary of Countdown Day.

And here she was, moving through it like a forest with some unknown predator chasing her.

She afforded herself a final glance upward. One minute remaining.

A nauseous feeling gripped her stomach. She was not going to make it. All the running, all the applications, and she was going to arrive at Rademacher Field with black marks on her record. Her father always told her how important it was to make a good first impression. The Captain of the Exodus would never have made these mistakes. She would have to be perfect.

Jessica made it around the final corner. She could see the gate. The words “FINAL BOARDING” flashed above the doorway. She poured on the speed. Her mouth was dry. Sweat soaked her face. She lowered her head and put everything she had into her last view steps.

The door to the gate lowered with an almost sympathetic hiss. Jessica slowed, but her momentum carried her into the thick door. She pounded on it in frustration twice. Not fast enough. Not good enough. Over before it began.

Her gaze rested on the sleek winged craft visible through a nearby window. The ship was all swooping curves and shimmering metal. A smooth script written on the front of the craft declared the ship The Mayflower. Inside were fifty of the Earth’s best and brightest students. They were chosen from hundreds of thousands of applicants. Fifty children Jessica’s age, each hoping to lead humanity into the stars and find a new home for billions.

Technically now forty-nine.

Suddenly, the door hissed open. A balding Spacelink worker looked at Jessica with a concerned look.

“I thought I heard something hit the door” he said. Jessica barely had time to smile as he ushered her into the ship bound for the moon.

Get Behind the Mule

There is no escaping it. I have a new laptop. Time is of the essence but there is never enough time.

I guess this is something of a mission statement. The only way to get published is to have salable product. For writers, this means words. Preferably in some clever order. Rather than let these ideas stew, I am putting them out here where people can see them. You may be friends, family, or some random stranger who wandered in off the street. Welcome to you all.

The deal is this - you get free fiction. I get feedback. You get characters to enjoy. I get the thrill of doing awful things to them in the name of entertainment. This is the raw feed here - if any of this ever gets published, you will have read the first drafts here. Hopefully both of us benefit from this relationship. I have been blessed with talented and insightful friends that have wowed me with great twists and amazing characters in game.

Here are the elevator pitches -

Exodus Academy - Sci-fi teen drama set aboard the colony ship escaping the destruction of Earth.

INDIGO - Psychic kids on the run from the conspiracy that made them.

Rhodes and the Hollow Earth - Pulp adventuring couple Rick and Diana Rhodes race to keep the Nazis from discovering the Hollow Earth.

The Moontown Palooka - A hardboiled detective story set in mid-Depression Chicago where magic has returned and is controlled by the mob.

Let me know which one(s) you want to see first - otherwise I will just randomly pick one and run.

Hughes High: The Mask and the Mantle

Most of the students that graced the halls of Hughes High were the offspring of previous generations of heroes and villains. While many magazines wrote cover articles about Savior-Flare, daughter of Nimbus and Dr. Janus, few remember her younger sister, Frostbite.

Offspring, here, means in a broader sense as well. Nick Nelson shed the image of Spooky and turned into the much more serious Silverwing thanks to experiences at the school. On the other side of the coin, if Sure Shot had not gone through the experiences he had as Shaft, there might be more masks alive today.

How someone adapts from their identity as a teen sidekick or a hero tells a lot about what they want to do with their abilities.

The current administration is looking to put someone into the identity of Captain Patriot. I spoke briefly with Prodigal, Captain Patriot's son about the idea.

"I understand what they are trying to do," he told me over the Guardians video interview set-up. "With the way things are going in the country, they need something to boost the country's confidence again. People feel very vulnerable about the world even seven years after the Event. A crappy economy isn't helping any."

When asked if he would campaign for the job, I was met by a long pause.

"No," he said. "I've still got some things I need to do under this mask. I can't imagine ever living up to my father."

Hughes High: Time After Time

No matter what you think of him personally, Matthew Orenthal's newest release, The Forgotten Kings of America, has caused a lot of discussion in the media. It doesn't matter whether you believe him or not. The book is a NYT bestseller #1 for four weeks running. Recently released from Lockdown, he was holed up in a posh Highrock hotel waiting for interviews. I'm not sure what a time traveler is supposed to look like, but he looked very normal to me.

Orenthal claims to be the villain known as Stopwatch, a time traveler from the future trying to put the world back the right way. His book detailed his various capers, from his multiple attempts to assassinate Hitler to running automatic weapons to the Confederates during the Civil War. In his book, he claims that an organization known as the Continuum has thwarted his attempts to remake the time stream into his own image.

"I realized early on that the Continuum was an organization of temporal fascists," he said as I asked him about his nemesis. "They have one very specific timeline in mind and any deviancy from it is crushed quickly and efficiently."

Stopwatch has tussled with the heavyweights like Pendragon and the Guardians, and down to the small fries like Abe 2.0. The Continuum's interference has kept his name out of the limelight.

"I wrote this book as non-fiction, but their interference put it into the fiction section. Either way, these stories had to be told. They can't destroy me, but they can discredit me."

One of Orenthal's most shocking opinions is that the Event was engineered by the Continuum as a major threat to their monopoly on the time stream. He claims to have been there as Stopwatch.

"All of the world's biggest masks in one place at one time? What better place to eliminate your biggest threat than in one fell swoop."

Hughes High: Lay of the Land

First off, a welcome to the new readers of this blog. I never expected it to be a big deal, but apparently being a keynote speaker after Prodigal gives you an unexpected Q bump. I hope you find this blog informative, entertaining, and possibly even a bit nostalgic. The Eighties were a unique time for superheroes, and Hughes High was a unique place for superheroes.

Since this is my first blog with a national audience, I think it's a good time to talk about the city of Muellerburg a bit more. The students at Hughes High patrolled and pummelled in the neighborhoods here, so if I talk about the Bankhearst Commons Mall, I want you to have an idea of where that is. Muellerburg was a different city in the 80's. Since it was not targeted by Omnus during the Event, the city reorganized thanks to the refugees that never returned home once cities like New York and Los Angeles were replace by Empire City and San Angelos.

Bankhearst: The affluent suburb of the 80's. Bankhurst reached its peak as the yuppies moved west and built subdivisions to shelter themselves from the world. The Bankhearst Mall was the hangout destination for Hughes High teens and their shopping.
Downtown: the financial center of the city. Largely empty on the weekends, the center of town was home to the larger corporations that had offices in Muellerburg. Hughes High was technically part of this district, even though it resides on an artificial island in Lake Michigan.
Merton: What once was a rural community was turned into a commercial district with the opening of General Walter Mitchum Airport, later renamed Jack Jupiter Memorial Airport. The main streets were lined with hotels, restaurants, and things to do. But head outside those main drags for a few blocks, and you were back to old farmhouses and rusted tractors.
Rustville: The northwest side of Muellerburg was the heart of its industry, which took a severe blow thanks to the rise of importing products. Rustville soon became a neighborhood where the poor and disenfranchised were swept too. They were often distrustful of outsiders, and groups like the Street Sentinels made ths problem worse.
Southlake: The section of town between Merton and downtown maintained its middle class feel. The story goes that there is a pub on every street corner in Southlake. This section of town was where the Muellerburg Sentinels played their games at Southeast Stadium. Thanks to the bad record the Sentiels had throughout the decade, the area around the stadium suffered as well.
Seville: The buffer between Bankhearst and downtown. Seville evolved into a middle-class neighborhood in the 80's. It struggled with a rise in crime as well as the loss of tax revenue. But it also became the rare place where different classes would meet and drink together.
Weissberg: Many of the rural familes displaced by Bankhearst's expansion moved north of the city. While it wasn't incorporated until the 90's, Wiessberg gave rise to the awful local epithet 'Weiss-trash' to indicate someone was of poor upbringing and education.

This will do for now, as there were other, smaller neighborhoods that grew up and eclipsed these conclaves. I grew up in Seville and even moved to Partridge Street when I first started at the paper. Partridge Street was a section of downtown that was made up of students going to the local state university. It was also a haven for the hippies that had been hiding out since Woodstock. Moonbeam Monroe, an art teacher at Hughes High, even lived in my building for a while.

Hughes High: Fatal Lessons

While Hughes High was started to teach young people how to use their powers responsibly, many of the hardest lessons learned were outside the walls. One of the biggest masks to terrorize the students was the mercenary Sure Shot.

From the beginning, Sure Shot didn't play by the rules other cloaks did. He wasn't big on speeches or grandstanding. He didn't have high-tech robots or minions. He was just an angry young man with a gun. He also had been trained by the Scarlet Shortbow, as prison records released to the public peg him as Gary Connor, the young man known as the sidekick, Shaft. Their relationship was savaged in the press, implicating not only a homosexual love affair, but one between a fourteen yoear old boy and a thirty-three year old man. The Shortbow's career was ruined, and Shaft disappeared until the late 70's, when he began targeting students at Hughes High.

Sure Shot was connected with many deaths and injuries to students, but in the 80's his tactics took an interesting turn. No longer content with attacking students, he began to teach lessons to them. These lessons were hard decisions that their heroes would make. Save the bus or save the parents. While Punchline perfected these moral quandaries in the 90's, Sure Shot was one of the first to challenge students and make them realize what having powers really meant.

Sure Shot's whereabouts are currently unknown. After becoming infected with the Mercy virus, his behavior became more erratic. It is unknown if he was involved in the Event or if he was able to resist the Mercy Wave that summoned everyone that had ever become infected to sacrifice themselves at Ayers Rock.

Hughes High: A Brief History of Time

(Editor's note: With the passing of Signal Editor Emeritus Jack Massey, Ron was unable to contribute a column this week due to close friendship with Jack. This weeks column is a bit of a history refresher, excerpted from Signal Magazine, week ending October 13, 2002)

You can hardly imagine that Masks have nearly been around as long as
the motor car or color motion pictures. For those of you that slept
through history class, here's a brief capsule history of our
relationship with superheroes and super villains.

1920-1934: Rumors and wild stories filter into the public
consciousness of masked mystery men and women stopping petty crimes
and cracking down on bootlegging mobs.

1935: The Gargoyle brings about the end of Boss Carruthers' control
of Hudson City Hall. He deposits the crime lord on the steps of the
Hudson Times newspaper. This is the first and only time the
Gargoyle is seen by the public.

1937: The Rocket, sporting a high-tech jet pack and two sliver .45
pistols, thwarts a Nazi spy ring in Southern California. Soon
afterwards, newspapers around the world are flooded with stories of
people with unusual abilities on both sides of the law.

1939: Knowing the situation in Europe is boiling beyond control,
American scientists begin working on a chemical formula to give to
its allies to combat the Nazis. Both Hitler and Stalin have already
begun research in their own "super-men" programs.

1941: A paranormal population explosion. The Americans field
Captain Patriot, the Rocket, and Junior Jet. Britain stops the
Luftwaffe by the timely first appearance of Pendragon. The Germans
are led by Ironwing, Valkyrie and Victor Von BludBann.

1943: Valkyrie joins the Allies and helps turn the tide in the war.
Rumors persist of romance between her and the young Pendragon.

1945: The end of WWII with the surrender of Ironwing after the
destruction of Onikaze with two atomic bombs. Malice is rewarded by
the Soviets with a dictatorship he calls Roldavia. Jack Massey, the
only suriving member of the Platoon that aided Captain Patriot's
siege on a Nazi atomic rocket, becomes The All-American Kid.

1950-1962: The Salad days of Capedom. First appearance of the
Champions, the Fists of Justice, the Honor Guard...as well as the
Dastardly Dozen, The Red Hand, and VIPER.

1962: Senator Joseph McCarthy launches a second HUAC committee,
this time targeting the superhero community. The first "black
magic" trials single out mystic heroes but soon expand into
other "unsavory" activities. The Scarlet Archer and his sidekick
Shaft are forced to retire after the implication is made their
relationship is not strictly a professional one.

1964: Captain Patriot is thought to be killed in Vietnam, but
resurfaces two years later. In a growing response to more
paranormals battling on its home soil, the US government begins
equipping National Guard posts with high-tech weaponry to both help
subdue supervillains until a superhero arrives and to take them to a
holding facility after the battle. This branch eventually becomes
its own agency, commonly known as "The Guard".

1966: Signal Magazine, a magazine about superheroes, is founded by
the now-retired Jack Massey.

1967: Professor Power makes his first appearance.

1969: Man walks on the moon and discovers a black monolith beacon on
the darkside. Soon, alien races begin to contact the Earth's
denizens. Some are peaceful. Others are not.

1972: With the aid of the best and brightest scientists and
ambassadors from Alpha Centauri, The United Nations begins the
Science Initiative of Supernatural Technology, Education and
Research (SISTER). SISTER researches the origins of supernatural
beings, catalogs powers, and tries to apply breakthroughs to the
common good.

1974: Zinger, the famous speedster and self-proclaimed "Fastest Woman
Out of Mercy High next to Betty Kowalski", appears in Chicago.

1976: The Silhouette makes her precence knwon by stopping an assassination attempt by the Red Hand on Michael Albright, a
candidate for Senate. Albright, the former Professor Power, is
elected to the Senate representing California. He is the first
paranormal is that level of government and makes "Power to the
People" an Election year catchphrase.


1978: Roboto makes his first appearance.

1981: The City of San Fransisco help to pay for Champions manor
after the Champions save the city from a shapeshifting alien race.

1985: Punchline appears to torment heroes across the world. He
offers to sell the secret identities of the worlds greatest heroes
for a million dollars per identity. He then promptly turns the
buyers over to the police, including Alaric Krueger...but disappears
with the money, saying he hasn't learned the identities yet.

1987: While on trial for attempting to destroy Houston with am army
made of the animated dead, the Seventh Sorceror makes a shocking
revelation. Many of the mystic heroes operating in the world came
to him looking for power and he created them. The mystics deny
these allegations but an underlying current of mistrust and
prejudice wells up. Silhouette disappears after the Sorceror
implies "improper" sacrifices were taken by her to achieve her
power over shadow.

1993: Zinger becomes the star of her own network show. While it is
a moderate hit, prouction is rarely stopped for her superheroic
duties. Lady Malice eliminates her father and takes over rule of Roldavia.

1995: Mercy hijacks the Champions Manor and downloads the contents
of the computer into his cerebral matrix. He sets out to hunt all
the heroes in the database.

1999: Omnus arrives over New York City. He decimates the Big Apple
and makes a single offer. Join him or die.

January 1st, 2000: Silhouette returns and chastises both Pendragon
and the Seventh Sorcerer for not working together to stop this
threat that's bigger then both of them. She then is somehow able to
stop Omnus's assault of London. She is not seen again.

January 19, 2000: The entire paranormal community converges on Ayers
Rock in the Austailian Outback to settle the matter. Some have
allied with Pendragon and the Sorceror. Others with Omnus. This
day, known as the Event, was a 48 hour battle that could be heard
around the world. When the dust settled, only Senator Albright
returns from the scene. To this day, he has not told anyone what
happened, only that everything is taken care of.

2001: VIPER resurges and attempts to take control of the White
House. A new breed of heroes rises up to stop them, including
Pinnacle, and Purple Haze.

2002: More and more supernaturals are arising, unbound by tradition
and unguided by those masks that have come before. Will they lead
us into a Silver Age?