Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Heroes of other worlds?

We've seen a few examples of other heroes from various Legion worlds (and some non-Legion Words, like Xera of Manna-5, or the Heroes of Lallor).

In the vein of Calorie Queen, what would be some neat 'local heroes' from various UP worlds?

Starting with Bismoll, since Taryn was just on my mind;

Omnivore. This young man is somewhat hyperkinetic and overly enthusiastic, and uses a rare Bismollan 'eating disorder' to fight crime. Instead of fully and immediately digesting any matter he consumes, he only partially converts it, taking several minutes to do so, and if he doesn't keep his mouth closed, the massive energy released by this conversion process bursts forth from his indestructible interior as a wave of dangerous energy. The denser the material he consumes, the more energy is released, and the longer it takes to 'digest,' so that if he swallows a few lead pellets, he produces impressive blasts of heat and force when he opens his mouth, for a few minutes. Even gulping in a mouthful of air allows him to break down the molecules and generate a 'burp' of energy sufficient to knock a grown man from his feat, or shatter a window.

Consumption. Similar to Omnivore, this young woman has a birth defect, although in her case, it was far more extreme. The outer surface of her body shares the indestructible and omni-digestive properties of her Bismollan stomach, and, unfortunately, the same appearance, making her grotesque, and prompting her to wear an all-concealing bodysuit, both to hide the appearance of her skin, and also to protect the rest of the world from her uncontrollable digestive touch, which destroys anything she lays her hands upon. Invulnerable to most means of conventional harm, and with a touch as destructive as that of Mano, of the Fatal Five, she operates as a feared local hero, until, years later, experimental genetic surgery alters the appearance of her skin (but not it's properties) to allow her to live a normal life, free of her containment suit. She remains hairless, and still must wear special clothing, charged with an internal force-field, to prevent it from being digested accidentally, but has also trained to allow herself to touch items without digesting them, making it safe to shake her hand, for instance, so long as nothing greatly disrupts her concentration...

Any thoughts on fun local heroes from Colu, Imsk, Durla, Braal, Cargg, Bgtzl, etc. who might not necessarily have the exact same powers (or, as in the two cases above, or in the case of Calorie Queen, have modifications of the racial powerset)?

There's also the possibility of heroes from Talokk VIII, Xanthu or Winath, where the locals don't normally have powers, but might have powers anyway, like Lady Memory, or Atmos.

Since they wouldn't be Legionnaires, their powers could come from devices, as well, such as an Orandan whose powers come from his magic sword and armor.

I like your ideas, Set...it makes sense to me that there would be a plethora of local heroes and villains we just haven't heard/seen anything about yet; for every Justice League there's an Outsiders or a Teen Titans, right?

How about:

Cosmic Girl: from Braal, Rokk Krinn is her hero. Her innate magnetic abilities aren't all that powerful, but she can usurp the magnetic abilities of anybody else in her vicinity. This makes her a great heroine on Braal where everybody has magnokinesis to some degree or another, but her power offworld is quite limited.

Trinity: Originally a brilliant (but physically average) Carggite, she left her homeworld to study at the Time Institute where she was accidentally exposed to bizarre temporal energies which gave her the power to split into a younger version of herself who has postcognition, a baseline version, and an older version who has precognition. The older triplicate foresaw that Cargg would be taken over by the Dark Circle in years to come, so taking the name Trinity she has returned home to try and prepare her world for the hard times to come...she has become an active superhero in the meantime to put herself in training for when she is really needed to defend her world.

Trinity, a one-woman Maiden/Mother/Crone analogue, is a hot, hot, hot idea! Very creative!

I like how Cosmic Girl is hot stuff on her homeworld, and no great shakes off-planet. I was thinking of a similar Talokkian heroine, who had awesome control of Talokkian desert wildlife, which is pretty freaking useless anywhere that doesn't have Talokkian desert wildlife.

Unfortunately, I couldn't think of a suitably awesome Talokkian desert-critter that wasn't a direct rip-off of the Sandworms of Arakkis...

re: Trinity, thanks dude! I originally used her in a roleplaying game as part of an NPC team called Anomaly who were all empowered by the same time machine. It didn't take much to re-imagine her as a Carggite, and having the Time Institute handy makes her origin that much easier as well...

re: giant sandworms, I say go for it! There can never be too many giant destroyer worms IMO...

Camel spiders are pretty scary and can grow up to 8" long even on boring 21st Century Earth, who knows what the Talokkian equivalent would be like?

So, next on the list, in no particular order, someone I've already used in a fanfic.

From Colu; Augment.

Deathstroke is uber because he uses '90% of his brain' for combat? Sad, strange little man. Augment is a Coluan, and she has written neural programs that allow her to use 90% of her Coluan brain for combat applications, and since she's got about a million times more 'brain' than Slade Wilson, well, let's just say, there's a point where the body can't keep up with the brain, no matter what percentage you've got going on.

She's inhumanly accurate and punishing in hand to hand combat, and she's not at all averse to pulling out a blaster. She doesn't miss. If you aren't moving faster than she could react (and she can react pretty darn fast) and you can't see the future, she is going to dance around you like a mongoose picking a fight with a sedated tree sloth. Her ability to analyze weak points, strike nerve clusters, etc. also makes her blows uncannily effective.

Most Coluans turn up their noses at her inventions, and the applications of her abilities. She's proven quite useful at dealing with out of control experiments, etc. but the average Coluan regards this sort of physical application of Coluan brainpower as terribly unimpressive. Were she a member of any other race, she might find this discouraging, but she's Coluan born and bred, as self-assured as any other, and this is pretty much how they treat everybody. Her opinion of her detractors is not much kinder...

I like Augment's single-mindedness . She should have a friend or brother or lover that's similarly fixated on Art/Theater. He could go around arranging performance pieces that are built around Augment's violent activities.

He'd be thinking of holosculpture, situation comedy, Shakespearean tragedy and Sondheim musicals to fit every occurence.

What would a Coluan serial killer be like? Now *that's* a thought to send shivers down the galaxy's spine...

For my Legion Legacies group, I had Brainiac Fives clone, imaginatively named 'Brainiac Six,' choose to devote a section of his studies to behavioral science, psychology, etc. and become the schmooze-artist extraordinaire. Even knowing that he's potentially the most manipulatory manipulator that ever manipulated, he's popular, because he's just so darn *likable.* He always says the right thing. He's the perfect friend. He's got the equivalent of 100 smooth operators on call, in his noggin, 24/7.

Querl would, of course, be crushed that his 'son' is wasting his potential learning how to make friends and influence people, when he should be studying 16th dimensional physics...

Oh, that's hot. Coluans have been portrayed as *loving* to prove their superior intellects, and that's very much a serial killer gag, to arrange 'perfect crimes' or to dare the world to catch them. A Coluan might seek to prove that he/she is smarter than even that freak Brainiac Five, by committing insanely convoluted (or insanely subtle, so that it takes years to even recognize a pattern in the 'random' deaths that have been occuring) crimes, right in Metropolis, under Brainiac Five's virtual nose ('in his backyard,' so to speak).

Chilling indeed! We've seen the chilling Kryptonian villains, and the chilling Daxamite villain, but a Coluan, or a Naltorian, or a Durlan, or a Titanian, or a Bgtzln? Ooh! So many races that would be utterly scary as psycho-killers... A Coluan Riddler? A Titanian Joker?

Another from Braal, to go with razsolo's Cosmic Girl;

Tungsten Torv, an attempt to kickstart his failing biomagnetic field as an infant and give him a normal life instead super-charged him so that all of the metal in the area was torn apart on a molecular level and integrated into his body.

Torv is now a living being of magnetically reinforced metal particles, like an iron sandman, and can fly apart into an electrically-charged magnetically-powered metal ‘sandstorm,' or remain in a humanoid form of magnetically contained metallic 'superfluid.'

Augment is an awesome character idea; and I love the idea of a Coluan serial killer, which I guess is something similar to what they tried with Brainiac's mother in the reboot....that had loads of potential, but kind of fell flat unfortunately.

I really really like the idea of Brainy (or more likely Cham as he grew into the Legion's Batman by the 80's) coming across a pattern of deaths that occurred over several years which only becomes more obvious as it's explored further leading to a final confrontation with someone who only dropped clues for the Legion in the first place because he was tired of his brilliance being un-noticed for so long...

From Bgtzl;

Exile, can 'Zone' other people, turning them into ghosts, unable to touch or affect the material world. He himself is stuck in a 'transition' zone, between Earth-space and Bgtzln-space, rendering him intangible (and transparent) to both, except during moments of intense concentration, or specially force-shielded areas, and when he 'exiles' someone, he can send them into a completely different vibrational plane, remaining intangible to him (and no threat to him) as well. His power to 'exile' someone starts at touch range, but he eventually gains the ability to project a ray from his hand that can exile someone.

If not for his ability to drag other things into the 'transition zone' or 'T-Zone' with himself, he would have starved to death / suffocated when his abilities went out of control, as he must pull food / drink / etc. into the T-Zone for his own use. He later discovers that, in the T-Zone, he doesn't actually *have* to eat, drink, breathe, etc. and is no longer aging, but that the longer he goes without exercising his physical organs and body, the more it atrophies, leaving him faint when he does temporarily materialize. So he continues eating, etc. because he's afraid of withering away and becoming a *real* ghost...

How about a non-powered hero.

I was thinking of having this be an anti-hero a bit. His name is Lupin (yes I got the name from the Japanese cartoon character) He first appeared on the planet Zuun. Whether he is originally from Zuun is unknown. He has committed several spectacular robberies, but at the same time has lead authorities to uncover even greater crimes. At other times he has rescued countless people from danger and has anonymously transfered credits from Leland McCauley's secret accounts to various charities to help the poor and disadvantaged as well as some of those individuals directly.

Lupin displays great acrobatic prowess and employs various devices to accomplish his deeds.

Ooh, a Zuunian Batman! I like it!

I'm not real clear on Zuun. From the cartoon, I got the impression that it's a newer-than-most colony world, with a lot of untamed wilderness and some scary natural wild-life, where an unscrupulous researcher might be able to settle and engage in some scary illegal research and 'get away with it' because the colonists have more important stuff to deal with.

Perhaps some continents of Zuun are more settled than others, and Dr. Londo was based on one of the ones deliberately left pristine, and was, officially anyway, studying the natural ecology and cataloguing the local life-forms and all that, while unofficially turning his son into an assassin by infusing him with savage and predatory traits from various Zuunian beasties he'd captured to 'study.'

Mixing this up with Lupin, perhaps he's not just 'Batman,' but also a little bit Tarzan, and was raised in one of the less civilized area, adopting some wilderness survival skills (and gear) for his city-based shenanigans. He wasn't 'raised by wolves' or anything, but he's more outdoorsy and aware of his surroundings than the average urban resident (and what other people see as vigilante-ism or a disrespect for civil authority he sees as the sort of thing that was pretty much commonplace 'on the fringe').

Three from Durla;

Swarm Swarm is a 'breeder,' capable of generating mobile semi-sentient 'homonculi' out of her own tissue and send them out to spy on others, etc. or 'fall apart' into a swarm of tiny creatures, enveloping a foe from all sides. She has only limited control of her components while dissipated like this, and must give them very specific instructions, almost like computer programs. Fortunately, she's grown quite good at this, and someone unaware of the limitations of her programming might mistake the complicated instructions for signs of sentience on the part of one of her drones.

Mimic Mimic specializes in assuming very precise humanoid forms, down to the genetic level, and can adapt so precisely as to gain access to the abilities of the race mimiced. This process requires assimilation of biological matter from the 'donor,' and Mimic is scrupulous about getting permission first, and never changing the appearance of their distinctive costume, as they do not wish to impersonate the donors, merely access their abilites. Current donors include a Braalian woman (magnokinetic), an Imskian man (shrinking, Micro Lad, actually, who agreed to the procedure while in prison), a Renii woman (winged flight), a Tamaranian male (solar-powered flight), a Karnan male (feline strength and agility) and an Emana Branx female (four armed strongwoman). No Coluan, Titanian or Daxamite has yet proven willing to allow Mimic to 'borrow' their form (and abilities), but Mimic remains hopeful.

Healer Like Swarm, Healer is a breeder, a member of a Durlan caste that has traditionally not been allowed off-world. Whether or not the rules have been relaxed, or Swarm and Healer have chosen to defy them is unclear. In any event, he uses his morphic cellular biology to provide biomass and stabilization to injured sentients of nearly any biological race, sending his own cells into wounded tissue to replace damaged cells, and then causing them to permanantly transform into duplicates of the cells they are replacing, essentially 'growing' new tissue for the wounded subjects. He has also developed his talents to allow himself to interface with damaged nervous tissue, allowing him to temporarily usurp control of another's body, which he generally uses to stabilize bio-functions, ease heartrates, etc. but has used in the past to paralyze uncooperative patients by nerve-blocking them, and could, in theory, use in a fight, if the situation seemed to warrant setting aside his pacifist beliefs.

Like all Durlans, all three are capable of rearranging their forms, to an extent, but none of them come anywhere near Chameleon Boy's proficiency or skill. Swarm is the only one skilled at assuming radically non-humanoid forms, and she tends to assume many smaller forms, not significantly larger ones.

(1) Dreamcatcher of Zwen:

Her mutant psionic abilities allow her to astral-project while asleep. She is able to enter the dreams of others, and co-opt and direct them. She protects children from nightmares.

For a race which spends half the year asleep, she is a great hero. Naturally, no one knows her secret, "waking" identitiy.

There may be some Neil Gaiman Sandman-ish stuff going on as well.


(2) Invisible Lass of Kathoon:

On a world of eternal night, where everyone can see in the dark, she is able to become invisible. This is a tremendously impressive ability on Kathoon, as people there are just not used to the idea of NOT being able

Oh, that's just super-clever. I love it!

The notion that there might be some psychic predators / dream vampires on Zwen that torment the sleepers, who can't just wake up and end a nightmare, is creepy as well. She's kind of a 'vampire slayer,' if that's the case.

Is she like Night Girl, only able to use her powers in the dark, making them great on Kathoon, but kind of a joke to everyone else?

Also a smart twist using the alien nature of the world and it's people's natural powers to come up with a power that's hot stuff on one's homeworld, and kind of terrible anywhere else.

Kinda like a Titanian who has the mutant power to be immune to telepathy (or set up a false identity in his own head, fooling telepaths into reading fake information). "Uh, yeah, Psychic Static Lad, 99% of the galaxy can't read minds, so your power isn't that hot. Rejected!"

I really like both your ideas Tom...invisibility in darkness is a clever power when everyone on your world can see in the dark normally...and Zwen is one of the worlds I would like to see explored more in the Legion universe because the idea of a society that has to shut down for half the year is fascinating to me. I always wonder how they interact with the rest of the UP, and if they're kind of considered to be one of the backwater worlds because they'd be so far behind everyone else....

Lullabye Lad is a Zwennian hero I came up with for my fanfic. He's like the Jigglypuff of the future, sending people to sleep with a vocal command. Given how hard we've seen it is to wake Stone Boy up in the past, I'd imagine that's something that would come in really handy fighting crime on his homeworld...

Some Imskian heroes;

Doctor Atom Doctor Atom can shrink herself, but, more importantly, can shrink items of medical equipment, emergency supplies and survival gear. She's a trained medic / physician's assistant / xeno-physiologist, and can use her own shrinking abilities to enter the bodies of non-Imskian opponents and cause all sorts of physiological disruptions, preferring to block nerves for a quick resolution. She carries an assortment of shrunken equipment on her person, from medical gears to nonlethal weaponry to an inflatable ten-man emergency survival shelter! She's both a bit of a 'girl scout,' with all sorts of unusual gear stowed away on her person, 'just in case' and has a bit of a problem with holding onto stuff that she probably won't ever find a use for...

Tensor Tensor is able to alter his size with incredible speed, and can expand fast enough that his hand to hand strikes explode with 10,000 PSI as he 'growth-strikes' into a person. His body is not significantly stronger than that of a normal person, so he must be extremely careful to avoid 'grow-striking' a hard surface, or at such an angle that his limb bears the brunt of the force (as he'd snap his own arm in a microsecond!), and so he has developed a loose-limbed and very precise fighting style, using his growth powers more to push people away in a fashion similar to judo, than to deliver damage via a 'harder' martial art style. He learned this lesson the hard way, and is sometimes hesitant to use his abilities in this way, as he shattered the bones in his arm badly, attempting to push away an object while improperly braced. He is fond of using his ability to shrink away from a blow faster than most people can react, to play 'keep away' and 'rope a dope,' allowing a more powerful opponent to wear himself out futilely trying to hit him. He has even managed to 'dodge' an explosion, in this manner, becoming small enough to 'surf' the shockwaves to safety.

Micromass At full size, his destructively unstable shrinking field is at weakest intensity, and yet still annhilates light and air striking his body, so that he appears a hazy black humanoid form, accompanied by a shift in air pressure. As he reduces, the power of this destructive aura increases, collapsing items he touches with intense force, making him like a living black hole, when the size of a coin. Only a special force-field exosuit allows him to co-exist non-destructively with the outside world, although, when at full size, special treatments involving nth metal can temporarily neutralize his powers, allowing him a few hours of normalcy, at the price of remaining human-sized and being unable to interact with shrunken Imskians. Due to the nature of his powers, and the constant containment required, it's been whispered that he's one step away from being the next Mano, doomed to a life of villainy, but those who know him find him to be disarmingly upbeat about his situation, with an enviable youthful resiliency and seemingly inexhaustible sense of optimism. If anything, the sense of anonymity that his powers give him (by concealing his features) makes him a bit fearless, socially, despite a sheltered upbringing and, in his hours of power-negated 'freedom,' plagued by seemingly uncharacteristic attacks of shyness and social awkwardness. He's more comfortable as a shadowy superheroic force of nature, than as a teenaged boy...

Colony Queen Colony Queen is a mutant, unable to reduce her mass, but able to shrink all the same. When she reduces to half her mass, instead of merely growing shorter, she produces a second self, equally sized, and as she continues to reduce her size, more duplicates of herself appear, all linked to her as they share a single group consciousness. At half-height, there are eight of her. When she reduces to one tenth of her normal size, there are a thousand of her, at that size, each weighing only a few ounces, and while they have only the strength appropriate to their tiny size, they are incredibly well-coordinated, and can perform complicated mechanical tasks (or acts of surveillance) in fluid circumstances that the best programmed mechanical nanobot might prove unable to adapt to. She has learned the hard way that if any of her 'selves' do not return, the loss of mass is reflected in her larger self, as pain and bruising distributed across her body, for a smaller 'manikin,' and more traumatic damage for a more significant loss. While it's hardly the superheroic norm, she has learned that adding a few extra pounds makes it easier to acclimate to such events, as the non-vital fatty tissues seem to disproportionately absorb the trauma of lost manikin. As a result, while other active heroes try to keep themselves in a lean, athletic fighting trim, she's strongly motivated to keep herself at a less toned 'fighting weight,' and tends to carry a bit more weight than some of her heroic peers.

Colony Queen!! I love her! I had a villain in an RPG once called Snow Pea who duplicated by splitting his mass into 5 smaller bodies...but Colony Queen is like a million times better realised version of that idea! Love it!

I also dig Doctor Atom, she has a "Dr Pym Scientific Adventurer" circa the old West Coast Avengers days feel about her...

I am gonna think up some more to kill the last couple of hours at work and post them tonight from home

Looking forward to it!

Giant crystal spiders killed Umbra's mother, the Talokian champion before Umbra.
The British 'Primeval' series had 8 - 10 foot desert type spiders that were supposed to come from Earth's past.
Bugs of any kind are sooo ickkky great.

Some from Winath!

Flora and Fauna, two teenage female twins who are connected to respectively the Green and the Red of their world...so Flora can control and communicate with plant life, and Fauna can do the same with animal life. As they get older they will grow more into their abilities and have wider range and more diverse effects. At the moment though their powers are at a level that are useful for minor crime-fighting, but not much beyond that. They are also connected to their own biosphere, so are powerless outside of Winath (this may or may not change as they get older as well).

Double Trouble: Junio and Marin Wiviarre seemed normal Winathian boys growing up, though they seemed to have a closer bond than would be expected even of identical twins. They both naturally excelled at physical activities, and were both quite extroverted. They became professional wrestlers and minor celebrities on Winath, but they have a secret that only their parents know....there is no Marin Wiviarre.

Junio is a singleton with the mutant ability to split into two identical beings. Nobody really knows where this ability comes from, though the family suspects it may be the result of one of Junio's great-grandparents coming from the planet Janus (Double-Header's homeworld). Junio split for the first time in the womb, and the two bodies only merged again when there were no hospital staff around to see. His parents kept this a secret, and as he grew older they realised that the two boys were extensions of the one individual, but they couldn't face the scandal of having a singleton child. They trained Junio to treat his other self as a brother, but in reality there is only one personality between them.

When his bodies merge, Double Trouble is twice as fast, strong and tough as his already well-developed bodies and while separated the two share the one mind. "They" became a well-known public hero for the adventure, but also because Junio is secretly scared he will turn out evil or insane due to the Winathian prejudice against single births and he needs to prove himself. He is terrified that one day someone will find out his awful secret, and hopes that Junio and Marin's popularity will distract anyone from looking too closely.

We already have Cargg.

Actually, it would be interesting to have a Carggite pretend to be two Winathians....

This won't work because there's absolutely no reason why this character should not step into a Legion meeting (or the Legion Academy) and ask for permission from everyone present so that he has a large library of forms. The characters being heroes, they would have to agree.

Perhaps a pair of twins with a Winathian father and a Carggite mother, who are able to not only produce three dupes each, but also to merge into each other to produce one person with six times the strength, etc. of a single person.

I dunno, I can think of any number of reasons it wouldn't play out like that...I can imagine Shadow Lass and Sensor Girl would have a problem on spiritual grounds with letting someone else take the power that is theirs as their respective planetary protectors....Dawnstar or Chemical Kid are both pretty arrogant, I could see them having a problem with sharing their awesome powers with someone who hasn't earned it...and I think a lot of heroes would quite reasonably be a little apprehensive about that much power being in the hands of one person - especially if that person is going out of their way to gather as much power as they can, it would be only natural to question their motives...and even with the best intentions, there's still the possibility they could go about things the wrong way or that they could be manipulated by someone like Mordru or the Time Trapper...