Icarus (was Heavy)

[Heridfel]

First Appearance

The super-villain originally known as Heavy first appeared in Freedom City on March 27, 1976. Dressed in a gun-metal grey replica of Daedalus' power armor, Heavy was discovered by Bowman and Arrow as he attacked the Power Corps. The Daring Duo aided him in capturing the Power Corps, but when he tore off their armor and began to beat them, savagely, their gladness at Daedalus' apparent return quickly turned to horror. They tried to restrain him, only to discover that he had enhanced Daedalus' gravitic snare, preventing an entire area from moving. The only thing that saved the Power Corps from Heavy's wrath was the young Arrow's quick reflexes which allowed him to dodge the gravity field. While Heavy seemed more than willing to cripple every member of the Power Corps, he hesitated before attacking Arrow. A lucky shot from Arrow disabled the gravity field, and Heavy fled before the heroes could capture him. They brought the Power Corps in to face justice, but they still had questions about why Daedalus had returned, and what led to his savage attack.

[Heridfel]

Origin

Before the Suit

Sean Parker was an ordinary Freedom City boy, born on July 2, 1951. He grew up in the years of peace following World War II into a headstrong young man who tended to think with his fists before his head. The most noteworthy thing about him was his father, the armored hero Gravitor. Gravitor operated around the Fens and the West End.

Sean didn't get along well with his father, who seemed to care more about his job as an engineer, and then as a superhero, more than he cared about his son. Sean rebelled further, getting poor grades in school and hanging out with the motorcycle gangs. When the Vietnam War began, Sean begged his father for the money to attend college so that he could get a deferment, but his father refused. Sean was drafted into the Army and served two tours of duty in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971.

Sean returned from Vietnam with an undiagnosed case of post-traumatic stress disorder. He did his best to re-integrate into society, getting a job at a local auto repair shop. His father had turned against the War after the release of the Pentagon Papers, and father and son were beginning to develop a relationship that had never been there before. That all changed on January 20, 1972, when Sean's father was killed during a robbery of Haas Jewelers by the Power Corps.

[Heridfel]

Hitting Rock Bottom

When Sean's father died, Sean fell back beyond the lowest point that he had been after coming from Vietnam. He had seen friends die in the jungle, come back to Freedom City, and now his home was no longer safe. If it weren't for his mother needing him to help support her through this time, he probably would have killed himself. He couldn't be strong for himself, but he could be strong for her. He kept working at the auto shop, spending all the hours he could there trying to help make ends meet. Days turned into weeks, then months, then years. It was 1975 when the U.S. government finally returned Gravitor's suit. They had gathered all the secrets that they could from it, and they were incorporating some of his technology into prototype AEGIS weapons. Sean stepped forward and demanded that they pay for all they had taken. His mother had to hold him back when the agents told him that the government could take whatever it pleased, and that Sean should be grateful that they were giving back the remnants of his suit at all.

He took the suit back and patched it up, but he was never a genius like his father. He could iron out the holes, but all of the things that made it more than an oversized set of plate steel welded it together were beyond him. It sat in the garage, staring back at Sean and reminding him of all that his father's heroics had taken away from him and his mother.

He began to drink heavily, and his work at the auto shop began to suffer. Most of the time he drank alone, but sometimes he went to the bars with the guys from work. Invariably, he had to be carried home, drunk and unconscious. The last time, they just left him there. When he woke up, his wallet with that week's pay was gone. He still doesn't remember much of what happened when he found that out, but he somehow managed to smash the entire length of the bar into splinters. It was only when three men with guns came from a backroom that Sean fled.

He couldn't go back there, and he couldn't trust the guys at the auto shop anymore. They let him get robbed - heck, one of them could've done it! Plus, they knew he was there, and the sort of guys who hung out there weren't the sorts that you wanted to mess with. He came home that night and packed his bag, telling his mother that men were after him and he had to leave before they came after her too. He'd send money when he could, but right now, he just needed to get out. He packed the car and gave her a tearful goodbye. As he was about to pull out onto the street, the Gravitor armor stared back at him. Some perverse part of his mind couldn't bear leaving it there, where the men after him would probably try to steal it to sell off to some other idiot. He lifted it up, not even noticing how little effort it seemed to take him to lift it, and then drove away.

He had gone twenty miles outside of Freedom City when he realized what he could do. There were heroes, like the ones in the Freedom League - they knew about this stuff. Maybe one of them could fix the parts of the suit that he couldn't (in other words, most of them). He turned around and headed back in to Freedom Plaza.

[Heridfel]

Asking the Heroes for Help

Sean parked at a motel north of Hanover, far away from his usual stomping grounds around the West End, Fens, and Southside. It was late enough that he didn't want to try to ask the Freedom League for a favor right then and there. He carried the suit up to the motel room and waited to fall asleep. Sleep didn't come. It felt like the suit was watching him, and even when he turned it around so that it faced the wall, its presence kept him awake. It was a symbol of all the failures of the Parker line. When dawn finally came, a haggard Sean lifted it up and brought it back down to the car. He started out toward Freedom Plaza before rush hour and made it early. He parked, threw a blanket over the suit, and went inside Freedom Hall.

He didn't know what to expect in there. He had lived in Freedom City for nearly his entire life (and the less said about Vietnam, the better), but guys like him never really had a reason to go try and see superheroes. Inside was a lot more ordinary than what he expected. There was a desk with a secretary behind it, some plants, some chairs - if he didn't know better, he'd think he was just in an ordinary office building. He walked up to the secretary, trying to figure out how to phrase what he wanted.

Somehow, he managed to charm her enough that she put in a call to the Freedom League member on duty. Star Knight came down to the lobby and sat down to speak with Sean. He tried to explain what had happened with his father, and why he wanted the league's help. He left out the part about why he needed the armor fixed now, figuring that the Freedom League wouldn't look too kindly on a guy who was mixed up with the sort of people that he was.

A'lan Koor seemed to sense that Sean wasn't telling him the whole story, but he didn't bother to find out what it was. He told Sean that the only member of the Freedom League who might be able to repair the armor would have been Daedalus, but that he had left to explore outer space months ago. The Freedom League wouldn't be able to help him, and the Star Knight didn't know anyone who could.

Sean took the news calmly on the outside, but inwardly, he was seething. A man dressed in battle armor tries to tell him that he has no way of repairing someone else's? The idea that Star Knight didn't fix his own armor didn't even occur to him. After all, his father had always fixed his own, even if Sean had to do some of the grunt work of it. He was probably lying about Daedalus being gone, too. Sean got up and left Freedom Hall, not saying another word to make sure he didn't do something stupid like attack Star Knight. If the Freedom League wasn't willing to help him, he'd just have to find some other way to get the armor repaired.

[Heridfel]

A Deal With Talos

The heroes of Freedom City weren't willing to help him, and he couldn't afford getting help from the eggheads at ASTRO Labs. They'd just try to steal the suit's technology, the same way that the government and AEGIS did. Now that Sean had started trying to get the suit repaired, he couldn't let it just go. Running was a coward's choice, and one thing that Sean Parker wasn't was a coward. But if the heroes and the scientists couldn't help him, then who could?

It was obvious. There were probably even more villains in Freedom City than heroes, and plenty of them had scientific knowledge. One of them would probably be able to fix the suit. The two problems that Sean had now were how to find them, and how to convince them to fix the suit rather than just steal it. He sat in the car in the parking garage and tried to think about it. His fatigue finally caught up with him, and he fell asleep.

His dreams were troubled. The suit was repaired, but it was chasing him and he couldn't run away fast enough. It spoke in his father's voice, telling him what a worthless son he was and how he should have listened to him before. Sean awoke in a cold sweat, little more rested than when he fell asleep. He started to drive around the city aimlessly. Maybe he'd find something to give him an idea on what he could do.

The universe has a sense of irony. As Sean drove through the streets of Freedom City, looking for a villain to fix his father's suit, just such a villain was looking for him. The bar that he had trashed served a greater purpose as a front for Foundry operations. It took Talos a couple of days to hear about it, but when he did, he put the word out to watch for a man who looked like Sean Parker. It flew through the underworld, reaching even the literal Underworld - Hades' dark dominion.

Sean parked his car once again and began walking toward a dive in the northern part of West End, long suspected to be a front for criminal operations. It didn't take long for the men inside to recognize Sean, and five of them managed to overpower him (as he destroyed his second bar in a week). Battered and bloodied, he awoke to find himself bound to a chair with a large man dressed in metal armor staring at him with burning red eyes.

While it was one thing to think about dying rather than running, it was another thing to have something like that staring him in the face. Talos began to run down how Sean had worked against him, and how an example had to be made. Panicked, Sean heaved back against the chair. It snapped like twigs, and he awkwardly stood up. Talos paused in his monologue and drew back his fist to knock him out once again, or worse. Sean quickly asked him to wait, and tried to apologize. He hadn't meant it, and now he was just looking for someone to repair his father's suit. Talos smiled coldly and threw his punch, knocking Sean out again.

Talos retreated to his chamber to decide what to do with Sean. When he arrived, Hades was waiting for him in his scrying mirror. After some pleasantries that were anything but, he brought up the issue of the vandal who had destroyed his bar. Hades recognized the description of the man as Sean Parker.He pointed out to Talos that Sean Parker was the son of Gravitor, which meant that he had access to Gravitor's suit. What could be better than to recruit this man to defame Daedalus' name while Daedalus traveled to far-off lands?

Talos paused, then agreed, seeing the potential it offered. He'd be able to give Sean what he had asked for, and at the same time, strike a blow against his hated foe Daedalus. Furthermore, he had seen Sean, and could tell that the young man had powers of his own - powers which seemed to be newly realized and growing quickly in strength. Without restraining them, he might grow powerful enough to be a real threat. He needed some way to ensure that Sean would wear the suit all the time, unaware that it held back his powers rather than magnifying them.

So Talos lied to Hades, saying that Sean might need something to sweeten the deal. Perhaps Hades could enchant the armor so that Sean never aged while he was wearing it? That way, Sean could be a thorn in Daedalus' side for as long as Daedalus had been a thorn in Hades' side. Hades agreed, though he demanded Talos not make any mention of his involvement. Talos left his chamber to prepare.

When Sean awoke again, he was unrestrained on a soft bed. Talos left Keres in the room with him in a female form, thinking this would relax Sean more than his own intimidating presence. Keres told him that Talos had changed his mind. If Sean brought him the armor, Talos would repair it beyond his wildest dreams, even enchanting it so that he wouldn't age while inside it. As suspicious as Sean was, he knew that Talos could have killed him several times already. Sure, his sudden mood swings didn't make much sense, but maybe that's why they call them mad scientists. He returned to his car and brought back the armor to Talos.

It took one month for the suit to be retrofitted. Keres continued to speak with Sean, learning about what he had gone through and simulating sympathy at the mistreatment he had suffered at the hands of the Freedom League. The android subtly poisoned Sean against the heroes, and by the time that Talos had finished the suit, disguised as a copy of Daedalus' suit, Sean was happy to make Daedalus look like a villain. Talos also revealed to him that he had powers of his own, but lied and claimed that they were weak. He told him that the suit magnified his powers, and that he'd need the suit to have any real strength.

It was March 18, 1976 when Sean Parker left the Foundry. All of his past actions against Talos were forgiven, if not forgotten, and he could speak with his mother again. He told her that he had found work out west, and that he'd visit home once he thought it was safe. As he hung up the phone, he looked out to the city. The Power Corps was still out there, and they had to pay for what they did to his father. He floated into the air and flew off. They wouldn't be able to hide from him.

[Heridfel]

What's in a Name?

It took over a year for the general heroic population of Freedom City to discover that Sean Parker and Daedalus weren't one and the same. Anti-Earth was still decades away from being discovered by Johnny Rocket, and the personality inversion between the selfless hero inventor and the selfish robber was one of the leading questions of the day? Sean made the cover of Time Magazine once, though the magazine claimed, as most thought, that it was Daedalus. Until Sean was unmasked during a fight with the Black Avenger, the heroes all thought that Daedalus had returned from space as a villain. Even though he managed to avoid being photographed, the damage had still been done. From then on, he had to operate under a new name.

The villains, on the other hand, knew much earlier that the man inside the suit wasn't the same hero that had bedeviled them. Sean had learned the value of making connections with other villains within the city, enough to know whose turf he had to stay out of and who owed whom a favor. Once they were certain of his grayer moral fiber, they introduced him to the Raft, an offshore oil rig that villains used as neutral ground. The spells and mental conditioning used to make sure that he wouldn't spill its location, or even its existence, to someone not similarly conditioned burrowed into his psyche and his soul.

His arrival on the Raft occasioned some joy amongst the criminal underworld. He was showing up the Freedom League, which was already straining under the absence of many of its members and the unfriendly climate toward super-powered vigilantes. It was one of those villains that gave him the name he used for nearly 30 years. Doc Druggie, the Pharmaceutical Physician, said "Whoa man. You're, like, heavy, man." Sean knew that he couldn't go by his real name - after all, his old man tried to take down some of these villains, and succeeded with some of them. Heavy would be as good a name as any. After he was unmasked, he let other villains spread the word that Heavy was in town. He had grown used to not speaking while in the field, the better to pass as Daedalus, and the habit persisted. Even today, Icarus doesn't speak while in public if there's a chance that he'd be heard by a hero or civilian.

[Heridfel]

Heavy in the 1970s

Learning the Trade

After Heavy fled from the scene of his first super-villainous appearance, he began to calm down. While he would have been able to kill his father's killers in the heat of battle, he couldn't do the same in cold blood. In a perverse way, he owed Bowman and Arrow a favor for keeping him from falling back into the darkness that nearly overwhelmed him 4 years earlier. For a while, he moved out of Freedom City, making his way through the heartland of America. Although the pickings weren't as good, there was also no Freedom League just blocks away. He learned how to fight superheroes who weren't able to capture him, stealing from banks, museums, and once, a car dealership. Trying to carry a car in one hand while fighting with the other hand is a challenge for any super-strong villain. That the hero managed to unmask him and reveal him to be someone other than Daedalus was no great loss by that point. Heavy was always interested in helping himself more than he was interested in showing up heroes.

Heavy was a member of a breed of villainy that was fading out by the time he first appeared on the Freedom City scene. Despite the brutal way that he defeated the Power Corps, he was not willing to kill to pull off his crimes. This separated him from many of the villains that arose during Freedom's Moore Era. At the same time, legitimate heroes were being kicked out of Freedom City. Sean Parker wasn't especially wise, but he saw what that meant. He was already a criminal; they just managed to remove all of his natural predators. From then on, he made his living in Freedom City. Though some villains saw him as an anachronism, others appreciated a villain who was comparatively stable and willing to work in their schemes (as long as they kept the dirty parts out of his sight).

[Heridfel]

The Backlash: AEGIS and Force Ops

Of course, all good things come to an end. While Heavy had little to fear from the normal police, many of whom were more corrupt than he was, he still had to worry about AEGIS. He still held a grudge against them for having stolen his father's technology, and he made sure to destroy all of their gravity guns whenever he saw them. While he was more than a match for any one agent, packs of them could cause him trouble. He had to use his superior maneuverability to avoid them when they started to gang up, and that cut into his success rate.

At the same time, young Arrow, now calling himself Archer, was forming the team that would eventually become Force Ops. Archer had listed several possible recruits, and unknown to Heavy, he was actually on the list for a short time. His obvious greed and criminal record got him cut, though if Archer were honest with himself, the real reason was that Archer wasn't willing to ask a villain who had nearly defeated him to work along with him. When the newly-formed team first came across Heavy, he pinned them to the ground and flew away. He was the first one to report to Freedom's criminal community that a new team of superheroes was acting in the city.

Heavy didn't know much about them, though the big guy was nearly able to shrug off his gravity. Despite that, as he began to notice the villains growing ever more bloodthirsty, he began to wonder what responsibility he had for their actions. The psychos were hurting non-supers, and some of them were even killing them. He couldn't do that, and he made it clear that he would not stand for it if he saw any other villain do it. Only his power, which had continued to grow, despite the restraints that Talos built into his suit, kept him from becoming a victim.

It was a dark and stormy night in 1982 when Heavy met with Archer, one on one. He offered something that Archer wanted - information on the villains who were willing to murder to achieve their ends. All he asked from them is that they look the other way when he went out on his robberies. Though Archer didn't want to accept the deal, there was more crime than they could deal with anyway. Heavy wasn't violent (or at least, wasn't violent against non-supers)... and actually, he was less willing to hurt others than some members of Force Ops. They struck that deal, and from then on, Heavy was an informant against other villains. Not his own kind, he was sure to make clear - the new ones were no friends of his.

[Heridfel]

A Chance For Redemption

In 1993, the Terminus invaded Freedom City. Heavy was one of the first villains to begin fighting against Omega and his drone army, especially as it became clear that Freedom City would be overwhelmed if the Freedom League and heroes had to fight alone. Though he was not much of a leader, he convinced some fellow villains that their plans wouldn't amount to a hill of beans if Omega destroyed the world and everything on it. (One villain going by the name of GTNW said "If anyone's going to destroy the world, it's going to be me!" Thankfully for the world, he was one of the villains killed during the invastion.)

Heavy's actions may or may not have influenced Drs. Stratos and Simian and the rest of the Crime League (except for Hiroshima Shadow) to work alongside their hated foes, the Freedom League. Certainly, they were just as capable as Sean was of seeing the consequences of a victory for Omega. Whatever the case, Heavy defended his hometown with a fervor. He had no compunctions about killing countless Omegadrones with gravitic blasts, and none of them were strong enough to stand when he strengthened gravity as much as possible. This was war, even more than Vietnam, and there was no question that he was on the right side now.

At one point, Heavy was fighting back-to-back with the Centurion himself. He had no trouble standing with Heavy weighing down nearby attackers, proving to Heavy how smart he was in only stealing where the Centurion wasn't. Despite that, he couldn't hold down everyone coming in, and he actually saw Centurion bleed - the first time that he could ever remember seeing that. When they heard that Omega himself had appeared downtown, Centurion flew off, faster than Heavy could keep up with. It was later that he heard of Centurion's sacrifice, and knew that he was one of the last people to see him alive.

For his efforts during the fight, the villain known as Heavy received a full pardon from the governor through the influence of Mayor O'Connor, along with several other villains who chose to defend Freedom City during the invasion. Most of those villains soon fell back into their villainous ways. Heavy was one of them, though unlike most, he limited himself to small robberies. Where before he would rob banks, he limited himself to convenience stores and the like, stealing food as often as money.

Heavy did not have a secret identity like most villains, but that was because he was forced to give it up. The idea of growing old had never appealed to him, but having lived nearly 20 years inside a battlesuit had taken its toll. He had developed an aversion to taking it off, only managing to do so for a few hours each year when he visited his mother. While it kept him alive, it left him pale and bruised. He could not have a normal identity - taking off the suit meant that he'd get older, and leaving it on limited his career opportunities. Petty theft kept him alive, but he was chafing for something more.

[Heridfel]

The Fall and Rise of Sean Parker

Sean Parker spent the majority of the 1990s and the first half of the 21st century in relative seclusion. He had a safehouse in the West End, an apartment where the landlord was ok with a renter who never made trouble and always paid in cash five days before the next month. Those walls became the next closest thing to a prison cell for Heavy, as he avoided going out in public and getting spotted by the reborn Freedom League. His suit's radio receiver doubled as a television with a little exploration, and Sean spent more days on the couch, unmoving, than he would like to think about.

He did still get out some, though mostly to the rig. It kept him more grounded than he otherwise would be, though to him, an eight-track tape was still relatively new technology. The younger villains who were going on about 'the Internet' and 'Blackberries' might as well have saved their breath. Sean managed to pick up a few tricks from a couple of very patient young villains - like checking a news website to see if the police are after him - but has trouble using anything more complicated than Google.

During this time, Hades was growing more and more impatient. Heavy had largely failed to tarnish Daedalus' image back in the 1970s, but because the immortal inventor was in space, there was little that Heavy could do to affect him. Now, Daedalus was back, but Heavy still did nothing to him. Hades had all the patience that a god who had lived for milennia could have, but after 13 years of watching Heavy wallow in his own neuroses, he had had enough. Heavy had a problem because he couldn't leave his suit? Fine. Hades never knew the reason why Talos had wanted to keep Sean Parker in the suit, and so he had no problem with letting him out of it.

Hades sent one of his followers a ritual to perform, disguising him as Talos, and gave him a script to follow. The faux-Talos contacted Sean, ostensibly about a job to be performed. Hades planned for Sean's reaction perfectly, dangling the perfect bait - a chance to be free of his suit without loss of his youth. Sean leapt at the chance, and "Talos" told Heavy about a book being held in the Hunter Museum of Natural History, a grimoire that he could use to transfer the suit's enchantment to himself.

The grimoire was just as much of a lie as Talos was. The secret sponsor of the Hunter Museum was Daedalus, and Daedalus took care to keep anything of actual mystical value far away from the public. The purpose behind sending Heavy to steal the grimoire was to anger Daedalus. Sean prepared to go inside for his largest heist in decades, unaware that he was being used as a cat's-paw.

[Heridfel]

King of the Hill

Heavy realized that he was out of practice. He hadn't been on anything more challenging than a convenience run this decade, and he decided that he could use some backup. The museum was a fairly soft target, but given its proximity to Freedom Hall, he'd have to time it properly, or else he'd bring down the wrath of the Freedom League upon himself.

He went out to the Rig to begin putting out feelers, and from there, he heard reports of a new villain from Japan. Heavy had always fancied himself an elder villain, capable of showing new ones the ropes. He hadn't realized that most other villains considered him a joke (albeit a very powerful one that you didn't want to anger in person), and that several of them assumed that he was his own son. He rarely removed the helm from his suit, after all, and when he did, they were more likely to see a young man and take it at face value.

When the villain, Nanowire, arrived, he was cocky, young, and powerful - just what Sean would need for help. The two met and promised one another that the winner would get "a favor" - nothing too big, and nothing that they couldn't or wouldn't do on their own. Nanowire was also a battlesuited villain, though he seemed to call his suit a mecha. Sean hadn't even heard of anime, but he recognized that it was well-made. After a bit of opening banter, where Sean nearly gave away who made his suit (a rookie mistake that impressed upon him how out of the game he had gotten), they met in battle.

Heavy nearly went down with Nanowire's first blow, which surprised both villains in its power. Despite that, he rallied on and tried to weigh the mecha down with his control over gravity. It didn't dodge, simply ignoring the weight that Heavy brought down upon it. He was impressed despite himself, but didn't have time to dwell on it. Another punch, not as hard as the first, came at Heavy, and he had to move so that Nanowire only hit plating and not something more vital.

Heavy sent a quick jab at Nanowire's side, doing just as much damage as was done to him (i.e., none). Nanowire took this to be a good sign and unleashed a round of 'hyper-velocity flechettes'. While Heavy didn't understand the explanation, he understood what was happening. A lot of little daggers shot in every direction, tearing up the ground of the Rig. He wasn't hurt by them, and took the momentary distraction to launch himself off the ground and fire a blast of gravitic energy at Nanowire. The blast went off course, and it was Nanowire's turn to retaliate.

Nanowire was growing frustrated at the capable defenses that they shared, and that frustration led him to miss Heavy with his next punch as he flew up to meet him. Heavy took the opportunity to hit Nanowire's jump jets, trying to do some damage and regain the advantage of being able to fly. This was the first blow that seemed to do something to the Japanese mecha, but it didn't do much. Nanowire bluffed that he was damaged, though, and Sean momentarily relented.

Nanowire took the opportunity to change his suit, becoming much faster and flying out of the rig altogether. Heavy could tell that his suit couldn't keep up, and just waited for his opponent to return. Nanowire did return, coming in at hundred of miles an hour, if not thousands. Heavy's radar gave him only a fraction of a second in warning, but some of his old reflexes were still left, and he managed to dodge the blow. He tried to straight-arm Nanowire at the same time, but the mecha managed to evade the blow. Such quick motions took their toll, however, and Heavy's follow-up attack managed to knock Nanowire out cold.

For a frightening moment, Sean thought that he accidentally did more damage than he intended. When Nanowire woke up, he was relieved. Displaying a bit more canniness than he had during the fight, he convinced Nanowire to repay his debt by helping him against the museum's security systems. And with that, he began to make his plans for the heist...

[Heridfel]

The Heist

Heavy had already begun shaking off the ennui that characterized him through the previous decade. One of the more scientifically inclined villains in Freedom City had examined him back in 2002, and found that Heavy was able to manipulate the fundamental force of gravity. Though he had only been using it in a couple of narrow ways (flying, pulling things down, and crushing them), the villain theorized that he was capable of much more.

“You could create black holes and suck everything in, or possibly even wormholes,†the villain said. Heavy vaguely remembered that word from an old episode of Star Trek, which he used to watch back when he was a kid. He didn’t let the villain know it, but that possibility interested him. He looked up the word in his encyclopedia, and found that it was a way to connect two points in space directly, so that one could move between them without crossing the intervening space. He began to practice in secret, and by 2006, he was fairly confident in his ability to go from point-to-point, so long as he wasn’t carrying much besides himself.

One drawback that the method had is that he could only go to places that he knew fairly well. Since he couldn’t go to the museum in his suit, he was forced to doff it in order to scout the museum out. Thus, when he finally met up again with Nanowire, he wasn’t in the most stable of moods. Nanowire’s incredulity at his capabilities didn’t help matters. He brusquely took a hold of Nanowire, warned him to shut his eyes, and bent space.

The two villains made it inside the museum, and so far, no one had seemed to notice. Heavy’s goal was to get in, get the grimoire, and get out. If he didn’t have to deal with any heroes, it would be fine by him. They evaded the guards and made it to the exhibit, but the security was better than Nanowire had expected. Since he couldn’t break it, Nanowire did the next best thing – remotely take control of an automobile and crash into the front of the museum’s façade.

Heavy hadn’t expected that, and he wasn’t too happy with it. Despite that, what was done was done, and he had to get what he came in for. The grimoire’s physical security wasn’t as good as its alarm system, and the two villains quickly began to make their way out of the building.

Heavy suggested to Nanowire that they try to cover their tracks now, stealing other things so that it wasn’t obvious what they had come in for. The two of them barely managed to break out an Inuit spear and an Egyptian staff when two heroes came in and confronted them.

Velocity was a speedster clad in bright yellow, and it seemed like she was every bit as fast as Johnny Rocket. The other heroine, Valkyrie, seemed at first to be a standard strong, flying hero (akin to the Centurion, though not nearly as strong or tough), but soon showed other abilities.

Heavy’s opening gambit was to try to weigh down the two heroines. It was less violent than a blast would be, and he still didn’t like attacking women. Unfortunately for him, Velocity was able to dodge his gravity field, while Valkyrie melted through the floor and re-appeared outside of the field. Then the fight began in earnest. Nanowire and Heavy were barely able to hold off the two heroines, especially since neither of them really wanted to hurt them. Heavy chose to make discretion the better part of valor, grabbing onto Nanowire, throwing away the antique spear as a distraction, and teleporting the two of them away. He went 50 feet into the air at his other destination, the better to inconvenience anyone who tried to follow them. The two villains flew down and went their separate ways, shaken by the fight and how close it was.

[Heridfel]

The Job (Part 1)

Heavy delivered the grimoire to Talos, who needed some time to prepare. Although he had been wanting this for almost as long as he was in the suit, it was almost more than he could bear. He needed something to distract him, and a possible job being talked up by Myron, a local two-bit thug, sounded like it would work. The fact that it offered a fat stack of cash to anyone who succeeded on it didn’t hurt either. He was the first person to show up at the drop site.

Despite all the time he spent waiting, he balked at signing his name on a list of villains who were all potential recruits. Although it seemed like a minor thing, Heavy was wary of weird requirements like that. They tended to have something to do with magic. The only magic that he had was whatever Talos put in his suit, and that had given him almost as many problems as it did benefits. He walked out rather than sign up. One of the other villains there known as Wrecking Ball, a man with cannonballs for fists, managed to insult Heavy’s mother. While Heavy wasn’t about to start a brawl in front of the people who were potentially going to hire him, he remembered what the man said for later.

He wasn’t about to give up that easily, though. He stepped outside and waited on the roof. When Wrecking Ball came out, he jumped him and beat him into the pavement. It was hardly even a fight. As the other villains came out, they all avoided the two brawlers, and Heavy’s plan to demand to know what the target was failed when he knocked the man out and no one else was left.

All wasn’t lost, however. There was one other villain who had hidden himself so well in the briefing room that no one even knew that he was there. Heavy ran into the man, who went by the name Satori, as he deposited Wrecking Ball on the roof of the building that the briefing took place in. Satori and Heavy chose to work together – Satori making use of his stealth, and Heavy acting as the muscle. The money offered was enough that splitting it still left them rich. The two of them set out to find where the target, Adam Kirk, lived, and to go after him.

[Heridfel]

The Job, Part 2

Heavy brought the other villain, Satori, along with him as they went to find exactly where Adam Kirk lived. Heavy knew of a safehouse that villains used when the heat was on. He flew Satori there, then let him search the Internet for Kirk’s exact location. His house was in the North Bay, and Satori was familiar with the area. He directed Heavy there, giving him a flight path that led them into Kirk’s mansion while evading notice.

The two men slowly and quietly began to search the house for Kirk. Heavy began to notice that Satori seemed to be taking the “no injuries to Kirk†to mean “no permanent injuriesâ€Â. Granted, he was stronger than Satori, and so his method of capturing him would be a little more direct, but the way that Satori acted began to set off some warning signals in Heavy’s head.

Satori was the first to run into one of the other competitors. The unnamed villain appeared to possess some means of manipulating luck, enabling him to evade Satori’s attacks. His luck manipulation could also be used offensively, as when he blew up a pipe within the house, shooting its contents at Satori. Heavy arrived too late to do anything but watch as the man walked through the wall to escape them. They split up again, but not for long.

At this point, some normal people had come to see what the commotion was. Satori revealed his lack of scruples and killed one of them when he was unable to give him the exact location of Adam Kirk. Heavy returned to find the carnage, and Satori was forced to detonate the gas line that had been used to attack him to escape. Heavy was unharmed, but the other normal people died. He swore there and then that he’d stop Satori from kidnapping Kirk, and beyond that, from killing.