Soon I Will Be Invincible (12 page)

“We need to take on these unconventional threats in an organized way. In the face of people like Doctor Impossible, we can’t just guess and hope. We need our own operatives in the field.” Allen takes a deep breath.

“Under the circumstances, for purposes of public relations I think it best that Damsel be chosen to lead and operate as team spokesperson.” You can see from Damsel’s face that she doesn’t like the way he’s handling this.

A ripple runs through the crowd, glances exchanged. The vampire huffs a little.

“Shouldn’t we be making decisions like that for ourselves?” The red-and-white woman, who must have been cut pretty early in the process.

Damsel breaks through the noise. You can already hear the voice that would give Damsel’s famous testimony before the Senate.

“I’m not going to order people around. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Yes, but surely you see how it’s going to be interpreted,” says Allen, temporizing, giving the camera a nervous look, as if he already knows he’s playing to history.

“With my military background—” Blackwolf begins.

“Which is, you understand, off the record. You’re just going to be Blackwolf on this team.”

“Wait…what else is he?” Damsel shoots him a look. An odd look, and a familiar one; rewinding, I could swear they’ve known each other from somewhere, longer than the others. There’s another story here.

“You don’t need to know that.”

“What else don’t I need to know? It’s supposed to be my team, damn it.”

“Look. The purpose of this is to have a superteam with institutional legitimacy again. A team people can trust. Not a bunch of costumed weirdos.” The camera cuts from Allen to stock footage of Elphin at a press conference. She’s examining a stapler, fascinated.

“There are going to be changes. You’ve all done most of your work solo up to this point. I’m offering you government sponsorship and all the resources that go with it. Security clearances within reason, transport, and state-of-the-art facilities. Legitimacy. A chance to do a little good, and no more working in the shadows.”

“There are those of us who are more comfortable there, Mr. Allen.” Even on videotape, Mister Mystic’s voice carries its rich resonance. You wouldn’t know it, but two years earlier he’d been sleeping in a dumpster behind a Walgreens. A beat, then everyone starts talking at once.

“Does this mean we’re going to have to disclose our real names? Because I’m not prepared to…”

“Names are power, they say…” Mister Mystic begins some kind of point about wizarding law.

“I swore an oath to Queen Titania. I cannot break it. And technically I’m not an American citizen; I’m a fairy.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license….”

“I don’t have a real name.”

Damsel stands. “Thank you, Deputy Director Allen. Now each of you, if you’ll follow me into the next chamber when I call your code name? This isn’t an audition, more like an informational interview.”

Even then she had good command of a room.

They chose carefully. Galatea’s abilities were impressive, and she gave the group a high-tech edge they’d lacked. Mister Mystic was the Earth’s foremost sorcerer, the master of mysteries that had been lost for generations. And Elphin…God knows where they unearthed her, the world’s only living fairy warrior.

An early press conference shows how easily they captured the public imagination. Blackwolf is absolutely magnetic, while CoreFire’s power is unearthly. Everyone stares as a scantily clad Galatea floats above the crowd, radiating golden energy. Mister Mystic glares with a mesmerist’s dark authority.

Magic and technology, superpowers and athleticism and indomitable will, and a myth brought into the present day. Once Elphin joined the group, they had a genuine fairy paladin! The energy of it was palpable. Here were the people who were going to save the world.

They gave press conferences and made public appearances and trained together as much as their disparate abilities would allow, Elphin sharing Celtic fighting secrets with Blackwolf, Blackwolf acquainting her with the bo stick and three-section staff. At the high end of the power scale, Damsel and CoreFire sparred with earth-shattering force above the Washington Mall.

But it was the big three, that unique mix of personalities and power, who held them together. Damsel’s discipline and readiness at command, her glamour and authority; CoreFire’s blond all-American image, his geniality, confidence, and all-conquering might, balanced by Blackwolf’s unpredictable intellect and dark charisma. They were unstoppable.

From their lavishly equipped headquarters in the center, they sallied forth to fight crimes and right the wrongs of the world. Their uniform was recognized everywhere. After a while, it was almost normal to see them flying back in early dawn after a hard night’s work, almost normal to see Damsel hauling a freighter off a coral reef, or Elphin calming a tornado above Oklahoma City.

Team portraits from the era show a happy young group of friends, a perfect ease. I wonder what happened to it all.

Maybe it was the Somali crisis—the Champions had always had government sponsorship, but some anonymous genius at the State Department decided it would be diplomatic and cost-effective to make them a shadow arm of the U.S. military.

The team smelled a rat. There was a team meeting, of which no record was kept, but which was perhaps the real founding moment of the Champions. There, they planned Blackwolf’s first infiltration of the Pentagon, skulking in full costume through the most secure facility in the world, while Galatea landed on a U.S. satellite and hacked the computer system from orbit. They brought back the full record of Fred Allen’s extended plan for the United States’ foremost superteam.

C-SPAN broadcast the hush and then the rising stir as Damsel walked fully costumed onto the Senate floor with the self-possession of the truly powerful. She deposited the full documentation of the episode onto the Vice President’s lap as the murmur rose to a roar of approval. Her speech and then the celebrated walkout made it official: They were a dedicated team, not a cat’s-paw for the executive branch. The United States quietly withdrew funding, and it was time to find a new patron, and a new paradigm for the superteam.

But that was only half the battle. They had always lived in the shadow of the Super Squadron, and maybe it was inevitable they would clash. There was always the sense that the heroes of this generation were just stand-ins. It’s a charge that dogged Damsel in particular. And it seemed like the Super Squadron would always be there above them. Some of them weren’t even aging.

That changed the day Paragon went bad. In his time, he had been a match for CoreFire, maybe more than a match, but the man who burned with a magical fire had finally lost control. We never found out where the Nightstar Sapphire came from—it was the kind of thing that might have been looted from any museum in Europe—but something in it had gone wrong.

He’d gone into semi-retirement a decade before, but there were disturbing rumors. His powers had changed, fermented within him, curdling in their long disuse. His force field used to be invisible, clean, but now it was visible as a blue flicker. When he struck, there was a blue flash and an ozone smell. He found a new costume, called himself Cerulean for a while, then Gaslight. But the change was ongoing.

He was older than he looked. The evil in the Nightstar was coming back to haunt him, change him. Whatever it was he found was so long ago, he could only barely remember it, a nineteen-year-old corporal called upon by the military to test something neither of them ever understood.

By the time the Champions arrived, it was too late for anything but a demolition job, but the Super Squadron wouldn’t stand for it. CoreFire sided with them and an all-out fight seemed inevitable, Stormcloud against Damsel, CoreFire against Blackwolf, Regina versus Mister Mystic. At the critical moment, Paragon escaped Mystic’s temporary bonds and attacked, leaving them no choice. It was a grim task, but it made the Champions era official—the Super Squadron’s aura of invincibility was gone, and the Champions reigned. But back at Champions HQ, I’m sure no one forgot that moment before Paragon burst in on them. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have come next.

On the screen, it’s the golden age. In a montage of headlines, supervillains fall like wheat before them. People like Slimelord and the Visage were taken off the streets for a long time.

“You worried about tomorrow?” Lily asks, munching popcorn. Mercifully, it goes transparent almost as soon as she bites down on it. Enzymes in her saliva?

“A little. I’m used to drug dealers. All this weird tech—”

“You’re kind of a weird tech person yourself. But I don’t think we’ll see any action.”

“Are you sure? Blackwolf thinks this is the one.”

“Trust me. This stuff looks different from the other side.”

Even Doctor Impossible lost to them, again and again. His face looms on the screen, imperious in his early-eighties high-crested helmet. Now we’re being treated to a montage of Impossible’s captures. The caped villain is throwing up his hands in surrender in a sequence of control rooms, cockpits, and city streets. I gather my nerve and ask what I actually want to know for a change.

“Lily? Were you really in love with him?”

She sighs. “It wasn’t like that. He’s smart, you know? And he made me laugh.”

We move on to the third DVD in the set. The fourth and fifth episodes focus on the mature years, when major crises tended to center around individual members. An interdimensional incursion from a demon overlord Mister Mystic had humbled one too many times. An ancient fairy curse. A crime lord from Blackwolf’s past, maybe connected to his siblings’ disappearance. An alien overlord sought out Damsel, taking revenge against her father for some off-world exploit. And, of course, CoreFire’s endless go-rounds against Doctor Impossible.

There must have been other moments, ones the cameras didn’t capture. I still feel as if I’m missing something, the real story: the first time they confessed their secret identities to one another; the moment they learned Galatea’s real nature, or CoreFire’s secret vulnerability. I try to watch with a detective’s eye, looking for what’s been buried.

When did Blackwolf and Damsel fall in love? Damsel and CoreFire were the obvious couple, matched in power and fame. Early on you see them together a lot, always soaring above the others, chatting, sparring. It’s hard not to wonder, especially after CoreFire’s girlfriend drops out of the picture. And then…am I wrong to detect a hint of unease between the two of them? Maybe it’s just the Paragon episode, the way the team split.

I stop and contemplate that famous face. Classically handsome, prominent chin, never a hair out of place. He could always say the right things, always knew what to do. For all that muscle, he was smart. He didn’t have Blackwolf’s sense of humor or his sense of mission, quite, but he never wavered, always did what was right. With all that power he could have been the worst villain of the age, but he always chose truth, and justice.

Damsel crosses through the computer room from the roof deck. “Are you really watching that thing? God, look at my eighties hair.” But she doesn’t hang around. I wouldn’t either, knowing what was coming.

I feel like skipping the wedding spectacle, but Lily makes us watch every treacly second of it. It was practically a national holiday at the time, but watching it now feels painful, the way the two of them glare at each other. CoreFire was the best man, Galatea the maid of honor.

At least we get to fast-forward through a compilation of painful
Saturday Night Live
appearances—there was no way to make Galatea funny. The best part was John Belushi in a red leotard and plastic cape, expectorating mashed potatoes all over a gamely smiling CoreFire. I think he was supposed to be Doctor Impossible.

It’s all good fun. But superteams are about personalities, and I can’t help noticing how over time the team starts to withdraw into its own little groups. Blackwolf and Damsel; Elphin and Mister Mystic. CoreFire and Galatea were more and more often alone.

Then the music darkens. They’re getting to the Titan incident, and even the voice-over finally shuts up. Lily may be the only person who didn’t grow up with this, but even so, she gets a little quiet.

Damsel ran the press conference at the UN. “This is real; it’s galactic. We need the full team here.” CoreFire was pulled in from Cabo; Mister Mystic from a shadowy intervention in Khartoum.

The galactic wars we used to hear about from the Super Squadron had come to find Earth. The Pangaeans and the Enderri together ruled about 15 percent of the Milky Way, but they were locked together in a slow, incomprehensible alien war. In the past, heroes from Earth had served on one side or the other, but never with Earth in the balance. Apparently, the Enderri had decided to take us out of the equation.

Damsel showed slides in the situation room, shots from the space probe that had caught a dark mass out by Saturn, where no such mass should be. Magnification and spectrum analysis gave out results too bizarre to believe at first. But confirmation came from off-planet sources, courtesy of old Super Squadron contacts.

By the time the Champions got there the Enderri fleet had been gathering for days, shadowed by the massive planet. They arrived under a diplomatic flag, and there was an audience with the Enderri overlord; the Champions were our planetary ambassadors. Damsel’s legendary self-possession held up well, perhaps one benefit of her off-planetary lineage. But it was Blackwolf who discovered and invoked an obscure section of their martial code, and demanded a trial by combat; he was probably the first to guess what it would mean. The six active Champions set down on Saturn’s largest moon to face the assembled Enderri ground force. They had a force field that ensured atmosphere and warmth as they stood to watch what had to be their final opponents assemble on the frozen plain.

No one can forget that moment as the five Enderri troop carriers disgorged their entire elite occupation force to face them. One of Blackwolf’s remote bugs recorded the event, sending a frame back once every second or two. In the first few images, the heroes can only watch as the alien horror encircles them. The camera pans across a single panoramic frame of Damsel, the powerhouse, squaring up against an army of ten thousand alien warfighters. She stands back-to-back with Blackwolf, who is grimly readying his Special Forces moves to haul the first miscreant out of the crowd. CoreFire’s smug air of invincibility is for once checked, those movie-star cheekbones tinted red in the light of the fleet’s fusion engines. Elphin, the consummate warrior, utterly unfazed, raises her spear against aliens in powered space armor. Mister Mystic is readying himself for the performance of a lifetime. Galatea’s face, unreadable, gives no hint of what is coming next.