Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Alas, poor Pheebs...

So, we really didn't get to know much at all about Pheebs, before he was ganked off, other than that he was Brande's personal assistant, the executor of his will, and cold-blooded.

As is my wont, I have decided to make stuff up.

His people;

Nahgahni are rarely seen off of their home-world, and while their polar cultures have mastered advanced theories of mathematics, astrology, materials fabrication and architecture, their technology is curiously under-developed in other areas (such as biology and metallurgy), partially as a result of their spiritual beliefs. Physically, nahgahni have a humanoid upper torso, four powerful arms, ending in talons, and a reptilian head, topping a serpentine lower body that stretches to three meters in length, fully extended. Their spine is strong and flexible enough that they can wrap their ‘tail’ around a tree limb or bar and hang for hours (their preferred position while sleeping, with their four arms crossed across their chest), and can stretch out the spaces between vertebrae to allow their tail to reach four meters in length. The nahgahni homeworld has gravity roughly equal to that of earth, but slightly higher air pressure, and nahgahni are slightly stronger than a human, an effect that is exacerbated by their four powerful arms, and constricting tail, and mitigated somewhat by the sedentary lifestyles and pacifist beliefs of most nahgahni who leave their homeworld.

The Nahgahni homeworld is notable for its dazzling polar auroras. The natives believe(d) that these spectral displays are the source of their souls, and are divided into four primary cultures, three primitive and avoidant of technology, that exist as nomads in the plains, cave-dwellers in the desert regions and arboreal villagers in the forests and jungles, and a fourth much more advanced culture that dwell in cities ringing the southern and northern polar regions. The city-dwellers use solar, wind and tidal forces to power their great cities, with tall observatory spires and squat translucent silicon domes, originally harvested from sea-creatures, but later created synthetically. Hot air balloons were used for many generations to rise into the night sky to ‘touch the glow’ of the auroras, as a spiritual experience, and many saved up for years to be able to afford a ride on some spiritually significant evening. From their clear-ceilinged homes and tall towers, nahgahni of all walks of life turned to the skies at night, attempting to interpret and decipher the will of their ancestors, and their clear nictitating membranes allowed them to ‘sleep with eyes open,’ and observe these colorful displays even while sleeping. (Even the cave dwellers of the high desert, using a system of mirrors, would gaze upon the reflected displays, while sleeping.)

Their first rudimentary space-flight, using a combination of a solar powered lighter-than-air lifting body, and then chemical rockets, encountered an SP observer craft, excited to see a new race reaching out for the stars, for the first time, unaware that their presence would change nahgahni culture forever.

The encounter with new species, who had been born *above* and beyond the soul-auroras shook the faith of the nahgahni, some of whom declared the sky strangers to be angels or demons, others naming them raiders of the soul-glow, stealing the souls of the nahgahni ancestors for their own purposes, or even the reincarnations of nahgahni souls (as nahgahni faith insisted that all life began on their world, which meant that all aliens must be reincarnations of nahgahni, who, for some reason, were not reborn as nahgahni, perhaps due to some moral failing…).

Already a people resigned to living in multiple mostly incompatible sub-cultures, the schism was less violent than it would have been on some other worlds, with the most extreme reactions generally being nahgahni abandoning the cities to rejoin their ‘primitive’ relations in the other cultures, or abandoning their faith completely and exploring the stars, and the newfound alien races it contained. To a nahgahni, leaving the home world is the ultimate rejection of their philosophy, as it is believed that if a nahgahni dies off-world, their soul will become lost and unable to find its way back to join the great auroras, and that a nahgahni *born* off-world will never have a soul at all. Since many ‘heretic’ nahgahni no longer believe the auroras to be anything other than displays of solar particles striking the magnetosphere of their homeworld, leaving is considered a sign of abandoning their faith.

Some nahgahni, bitter at the memories of the faith they have lost, will wear only dull colors, eschewing the bright reds, yellows, blues and greens that they would revere in the night sky, others wear dazzling outfits, morbidly joking that if they will never shimmer in the sky, they might as well be resplendent in life.

The man himself;

Pheebs was born off-world, one of the first generation of nahgahni born to 'heretic' parents, and unwelcome on his homeworld, thought to perhaps be soulless or even somehow vampiric in nature, by more superstitious and reactionary elements of his native people. (Still others seek to kidnap those born off-world and bring them home, believing that passing through the auroras will ensoul them and 'save' them. It's a complex situation, and one that Pheebs himself wants no part of.)

Growing up far from nahgahni culture, Pheebs tends to dress according to local styles, with little thought to whether or not the colors he chooses would be considered respectful or disrespectful to true believers 'back home.' He tends to avoid other nahgahni he encounters, not wishing to get drawn into a political or religious discussion about nahgahni affairs, and sometimes feels like 'a human trapped in a nahgahni body,' although he only curls his lip in distaste at the thought of going through expensive genetic resequencing to be 'reborn' as another species entirely (a process he could easily afford, on the salary that Brande pays him), considering it an admission that the extremists have won, if their irrational beliefs vex him so much that he abandons his racial physiology to get away from them.

His career with Brande was marked by his gentle but firm negotiating style. Possibly as a result of his personal circumstances, he seems a paradox at the negotiating table, willing to abandon or embrace seemingly contradictory points of view in pursuit of his business agenda, mirroring how his family walked away from generations of faith to embrace a new and existentially terrifying alien existence. At the same time, while he will change apparent stances with bewildering speed and grace, adopting the 'whatever works' philosophy of the born iconoclaust, he never loses his grip on whatever endgame his employer has instructed him to achieve, sometimes 'twisting' with such agility during the course of a business transaction as to leave the other side convinced they turned him around and 'beat' him, only to discover belatedly that he obscured his true agenda, and instead left the bargaining table with exactly what Brande wanted.

As a result, he developed something of a reputation for being both 'slippery,' and 'treacherous,' as, while he never actually broke a contract, he was adept at wording a promise in such a way that the other party was completely convinced he had agreed to something else entirely...

Indeed, he found Interlac a delightfully imprecise language, ideally suited for saying very precise words, and yet leaving his opponents wholly convinced that he *meant* something very different, as they attributed warm-blooded humanoid emotional reactions to his offers and agreements.

Suffice to say, there were those among Brande's business partners who did not mourn the passing of 'that snake' Pheebs...

They would be displeased to learn that his species cold-blooded nature makes them somewhat more resilient to even the sort of brutal physical trauma that led to his apparent death, and while he was indeed quite 'dead' at the end of his encounter with the Durlan assassin, his species ability to hibernate for months at a time also makes them easy to resuscitate even *days* later with no significant brain damage or lingering physical side-effects, something which only a specialist in alien medicine would be likely to know.

Whether or not Pheebs managed to survive the Durlan assassination attempt, he has not resurfaced, but with years of exorbitant salary from the generous Brande (and possible access to hidden accounts...) at his disposal, he could easily afford to change his name and records, and lie low.

Pheebs was, after all, a master at letting people believe one thing, while pursuing something else entirely...

The way you write him, you've got to figure he survived somehow. Would you think he had any personal devotion to Brande or just held the job for the money and power it afforded him? If he felt like a human trapped in a nahgahni body, he had something in common with R.J., a Durlan trapped in a human body.

We haven't had too many stories about worlds encountering visitors from space for the first time and the effect that had on their culture. There have been two or three in Legion history. An interesting topic in itself.

This is an awesome write-up with a lot of thought gone into it for someone who only appeared a couple times...well done, Set!

A lot of my creative process happens in the back of my brain, where I'm not allowed to go (or am scared to go?), so sometimes this stuff writes itself.

Your point about feeling trapped in an alien body, or, in both Brande and (my interpretation of) Pheebs cases, acclimating to an alien culture and defying one's own native race and people and world and customs makes sense, even if I hadn't consciously thought of it.

Perhaps, with so little of Pheebs on the page to work with, I put a little Brande into his backstory and nature, the self-exile, making his mark on the universe regardless of whether his people would understand or approve.

The Legion 'verse' doesn't often deal with religious or political issues, or with very different cultures (perhaps with, gasp!, different languages!) coming from a single planet, so I, again, probably unconsciously, played around with the nahgahni as a formerly deeply spiritual race, whose beliefs were thrown into wild disarray by the discovery that their world was not the center of the universe (as happened in our world, and become the focus of people like Nietzche and Lovecraft, who wrote about what role man's existence plays in a universe that is 'vast, cool and unsympathetic,' where Earth is a tiny speck in a vast cosmos, and the universe was not explicitly created as man's doormat).

True. It tends to be more of a Star Trek / Prime Directive sort of topic, and not one that the Legion (or Star Wars, etc.) address as much.

Hrykraius, IIRC, was one example of how a world's first introduction to starfaring races went badly (being pretty much enslaved / exploited by the Gil'Dishpan).

There's a *ton* of stuff that's never really been developed much about the 30th/31st century United Planets setting.

A long time fan of much more lushly developed properties like Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever, I'm always wondering what lurks off the page of the United Planets-verse, waiting to be developed or explored.

Thanks for the feedback, FC!

Thanks! I'm a big fan of the 'Lower Decks' / NPC sorts of characters, because they leave me so much freedom to work with.

I could try to write stuff about, say, Superboy, but I'd be banging into (often contradictory...) bits of canon left and right, but with someone like Pheebs, or the Academy kids, or whatever, I have a options opened up.

Writing is like dancing. It's more fun when you've got room to move.

(Which, I'm sure, is one of the attractions of writing one's own creations, whether they be LMBP characters or 'New' Mutants or brand-new Titans like Starfire, Raven and Cyborg, back in the day, rather than be limited to building off of a sometimes clunky or limiting framework that was assembled by others.)