I try it on, gingerly. The costume is a one-off, cut to work around and complement my cybernetic elements, even the ports on my right thigh. In fact, it shows off the best of my bodywork. I’ve never been especially slender—even before the changes I was probably no Damsel—but when I try it on it fits me sheer and perfect, the way I’d always imagined. At the window, I take a moment to luxuriate, Manhattan spread out below me. It barely seems real.
This isn’t my usual sweatpants and tank top ensemble; it’s a real superhero costume, like Damsel wears. It’s unnervingly like being naked, but at least no one will mistake me for a robot.
I stop and look at myself in the full-length mirror, a machine-woman hybrid in a leotard. Female cyborgs are supposed to be wasp-waisted pleasure machines, but the fact is, it takes a lot of structural metal to carry a miniature reactor and this much hardware. I’m six four, taller than most men, with long thighs and broad shoulders. Even with my silver hair down, the impression is a bit more fearsome than traditionally beautiful.
The uniform isn’t especially modest, baring more skin than I’m used to around the shoulders and above the knees. But the patterning complements the silver and peach of my skin tone, and the effect is not unpleasant. You could even call it flattering.
I run a hand down my flank, feeling the cool metal and then the real flesh, thinking of how long it’s been. Not since the accident, and how long before that? I don’t even know. I only know I’m not a virgin. That’s all.
I look again, to see Fatale of the Champions. It’s hard not to feel a little proud of myself. I flip the hair back and do a Fatale pose for an imaginary photo shoot.
I hear scattered applause as I come into the kitchen. Someone whistles. There’s a cake with my name on it, and Lily’s as well. She joins in with a bemused expression. Everyone shakes my hand. Blackwolf explains: Apparently, the founding members met without us and put it to a vote, and that was it. I’ve got a new security clearance and an official ID.
“Is the costume all right? Damsel designed it.” Blackwolf plays host, passing out plastic cups of champagne.
“It’s perfect.” It is. And I’m kind of touched, thinking of Damsel spending so much time on her own, thinking of me.
“They say I have a knack for it. Look. You did good back there in the bar. I hope you’ll stay on with us.”
“I’d…yeah, I’d really like that.” Suddenly, I would. I empty my glass. Damsel did a lot for me when she asked me to join. Suddenly, I feel bad for disliking her.
“Look, I know we kind of come from, uh, different worlds.”
“I was raised normal, if you didn’t know. I didn’t get my powers until I was sixteen. Until then, I was the amazing little girl who couldn’t.”
“But…genetically, I thought…”
“I’ll tell you all about it sometime. The costume’s okay?”
“I didn’t realize it would be so tight.”
“You get used to it. I did.”
Everybody’s changed their look over the years, at least a little. Elphin still wears her suspiciously Pre-Raphaelite “traditional” costume; she’s added an armband to signify her Champions affiliation; Blackwolf hasn’t changed, but then he relates to his wolf getup in some way that I’m afraid to ask about. Damsel’s looks like a cross between her father’s and mine.
We’re a team, at least in the clothes department. Officially, it’s a response to the CoreFire situation and Doctor Impossible’s escape. Damsel herself makes the announcement that evening at a press conference, with the six of us standing behind her. Re-forming the team means notifying the city, the State Department, and the UN. The logo that had been dark for almost ten years glows from the Champions Building overlooking the city. We’re an item in late-night talk-show monologues. Calls and congratulations come in from other major superteams.
Tomorrow, we’re all going to Doctor Impossible’s island, ten hours in Blackwolf’s Wolfship, to fight a bona fide major villain. If they’re right, he’ll be there waiting for us, with God knows what wacky inventions at the ready. We don’t even have a scientist with us. Or CoreFire.
When the party breaks up, everyone goes their separate ways, to the rooftops or the gym. My eyes follow Blackwolf out; Lily notices and carefully cocks a silvery eyebrow, which I studiously ignore.
I linger for a while looking out at the city. I could rest up for tomorrow, but there’s something else I’ve been meaning to do.
Upstairs in the computer room, they have a modest library, including films. I meander upstairs, and, a little furtively, slip the DVD of Titan Six from its shelf. It’s still in the shrink wrap; I’m probably making a newbie mistake by even watching it.
The documentary came out the year after the team broke up, five hours of patchwork archival video, found footage, and FOIA-obtained government video. No one on the team agreed to be interviewed, but it purports to tell the true story of the world’s greatest superteam. It’s not quite that, but it’s something.
I don’t know what I’m looking for. To get to know CoreFire, I guess. They’ve all met him, and I’ve just seen a few speeches on TV. I wanted to be a detective, but I’m the only one here without a clue about the missing person.
I put the disk in the player, settle on the couch. A solemn voice-over introduces the three original members, young superheroes at the start of their careers.
Behind the opening credits, archival film from the early eighties shows Damsel’s first press conference when she was only sixteen and her powers manifested, her father and the rest of the Super Squadron beaming behind her, and then she’s zooming around at her eighteenth birthday party in a white jumpsuit. Then an early shot of her and her mother before she left Earth. The film has a yellow-tinted home-movie quality. There’s a gawky adolescent Blackwolf sweeping the opposition at the U.S. gymnastics finals, not out yet as anything but a precocious Rhodes scholar. And CoreFire in his ROTC uniform, clowning with his dorm mates only a few days before his accident.
After the obligatory origin stories, the talking heads kick in with the much-retold story of their first meeting. All three had, coincidentally, been in pursuit of a particularly nasty drug ring, which had gone to ground in the sewage system, and the heroes followed the same police tip underground on the same night. It must have been a strange encounter in the watery undercity, two men and a woman, all in masks, none over the age of twenty-four. Damsel, crown princess of the superhero world, her force field glowing green with power, casting deep shadows along the waterway. CoreFire had torn aside the gratings of another drain, lazily triggering half a dozen alarms. Blackwolf crouched concealed in a storm drain, night-vision goggles buckled on across the mask.
We’ll never know exactly how the conversation went, or how long it took. I don’t even know if they exchanged secret identities then, or later.
A man named Frederick Allen was deputy director for Metahuman Affairs at the time, and he gave the team sponsorship. He was hoping for a group of attractive, marketable young heroes who would prove both popular and pliable to U.S. policy recommendations. Everyone agrees the name was his idea.
Hence the Champions; when the team roster finalized, their ages ranged from twenty years (Blackwolf ) to over a thousand (if you believe Elphin). They were very young and a little dazzled by the attention. They accepted his offer and became an official government team.
Why? Damsel, perhaps because of her father; Blackwolf because he needed legitimacy, and maybe (although he’d never admitted it) superpowers on his side. CoreFire is harder to pin down. Because he’d wanted to be in the Super Squadron but it fell apart before he was ready? He had everything else, the perfect superhero life—the mighty powers, the fiendish nemesis, everything down to the writer girlfriend who always needed rescuing. He always fulfilled expectations, as if he’d never had to make a decision at all.
It’s nearly ten when Lily drifts in to watch for a while. She hovers a few feet behind me, holding a bag of potato chips. I can see her withou
t turning around—I have attachments for that.
“I brought snacks. Can I watch?”
“Have a seat.” She didn’t get a costume, I notice, so I ask.
“I don’t wear clothes. We worked out some decals, like on a car window.”
“Well, congratulations anyway.”
“Thanks. You, too.” We shake hands awkwardly. On-screen, the heroes are thrashing their first bank robbery together; CoreFire turns over their getaway car, bullets pinging off of him.
“I like your moves.”
“Beating up Psychic Prime isn’t much of a move.”
“Meant against Elphin. It’s hard to land a shot on her. Trust me, I know.”
“It must be weird being on the team. After all that, well, other stuff.”
“All that villainy, you mean? It’s okay. Everyone wants to be the bad girl. Just for a while.”
A superteam needs certain things, the right mix of personalities, an unpredictable battlefield alchemy, a thing no one can predict, or duplicate. Two of them could fly and stop bullets; the third was the best detective and the best athlete in the world. But they needed to shore up the team.
Allen reached out to the superhero world. The most likely candidates lived under secret identities; some were off-world, or in the hospital. It took months to bring them all in.
The recruitment meeting happens in a meeting room in an anonymous office building in Washington, D.C. The filmmakers pulled original tapes and footage of the meeting. Allen has an overhead projector and he ticks through a list of points, crime statistics and potential off-planet threats, making his case. In front of him are eleven young superheroes, top talent, fully costumed and cocky.
The camera does a slow pan, and Lily leans forward to catch all the faces.
“Look at that crowd. They asked Leapfrog, can you believe that? And Anne de Siècle. What a bunch of also-rans! I should have gotten in while I could. God, we both should have.”
“Thanks, but I was six. And I didn’t have any of this stuff yet.”
She takes in the skeletal metal of my calves, upper arms. “That must have been some accident.”
“It was.”
Galatea is there, still an unknown—they don’t even realize she’s a robot. Blackwolf, cocky as ever, riding a wave of celebrity following a spectacular hostage rescue. Captain Kelvin is dripping water on the carpet, his cooling pipes rimed with frost. No Elphin yet, but Mister Mystic, glaring at the psychic Pontifex, later exposed as a fraud. Some of them I don’t know at all: a mustachioed man in chain mail with a sword at his side; a young man with a vampiric look who keeps well away from the windows; a woman in goggles, holding what looks like an Edwardian time machine.
Fred Allen cast his net wide, and the results look like a meeting of the board of directors in Candy Land. CoreFire floats at the back, obviously impatient with the selection process.
“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.
&nb
sp; 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.
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