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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]