Capeworld Comics

Adam Brigham, The Puppeteer

 

“The trick is to always look beyond the moment. From the perspective of a supporthero, the scene is like a chess game. You have your board and you have your pieces. And just like in chess, you want to think as far into the future as possible. You don’t wait for your teammates to tell you they need you. You anticipate what they need and prepare. You fight the battle well before your teammates even move.”

 

–Al Maxwell, AKA Grandmaster

 

“Okay, his best line? “Let me give you a hand.” Cliché? Sure. But it’s good. It’s short, to the point, and works in a variety of situations. Punching a bad guy? “Let me give you a hand.” Catching a falling victim? “Let me give you a hand.” Lifting a teammate out of danger? “Let me give you a hand.” It works! His worst line though? “I’ll finger out something.” The n is too soft. It just sounds like figure unless he really emphasizes it in which case he sounds like a tool. “I’ll finger out something. No.”

 

–Matthew Roy, AKA The Coat

 

Name:

 

Adam Brigham

 

Supername:

 

The Puppeteer

 

Average Grade:

 

A

 

Adam is a model student–attentive, studious, and disciplined.

 

Emergency Response Class:

 

3

 

Adam wants to become a supporthero, a kind of superhero that works from a distance to organize and optimize a superteam’s emergency response. Naturally, he’d have to take ERC 3.

 

Personalized Curriculum: 

 

Telekinetic Development, Telepathic Development, Emergency Response With a Focus in Support

 

Telekinetic Development is pretty much self-explanatory. Adam is telekinetic. He wants to develop his telekinetic powers. He takes Telekinetic Development.

 

Sometimes, it’s easy to pick classes for these kids.

 

For most kids taking an Emergency Response focus class, the focus is in superhuman combat. It’s the glamorous, exciting focus. You vs a supervillain. You taking a fist to the worst the universe has to offer. But there’s more to Emergency Response than subduing bad guys. Adam is taking a focus in support because he wants to be a supporthero–a kind of superhero that hangs back from the action and uses his powers to help his teammates engage with whatever the situation might be. It’s the unsung job. Supportheros don’t get the pictures with their fists in the faces of cosmic madmen, but if you ask the members of any given superteam who holds them together when the chips are down, they will point to the supporthero.

 

Telepathic Development might need a little explanation. While Adam is primarily telekinetic, he’ll need a degree of telepathic mastery to get the most out of being a supporthero. He’ll be the one his teammates are going to be talking to over the noosphere asking him to do this and do that. He’ll have to manage a lot of mental traffic. If his superteam ever goes up against a wannabe Dream Sultan that can mess with the astral, he’s going to be the one that’ll have to re-establish and manage their noosphere connection.

 

Adam is developing ESP to monitor environments for his teammates. The ESP powers that come with most noosphere connections are good, and in the future they’re going to be even better, but nothing will ever be as efficient and reliable as self-generated ESP. Large noosphere connections used by several people at once, such as what you see with superteams, are prime targets for attack. Bad guys love to jam ESP or trick it. If Adam makes his own ESP all in his head, he won’t have to worry about that happening.

 

Contact Education:

 

Superbuilders, Mentorship

 

The Superbuilders are a group of architects that use superpower gifts and engineering knowledge to make the world a better place building by building. They build whatever is needed–farms, homes, dams, hospitals, anything and everything. In working with the Superbuilders, Adam learns architecture–critical knowledge for a boy that wants to make a living propping up buildings during supervillain attacks. If he knows how buildings stay up, he knows how to keep them from falling down. If he knows how cities work, he knows how to direct the takedown of a supervillain so as to cause the least amount of damage.

 

Adam is very fortunate to have a dedicated mentor–Al Maxwell, AKA Grandmaster. Under Dr. Plaras’ inclusion initiative, dedicated mentors have become rarer and rarer. We’re currently encouraged to recruit contact educators that can be shared by as many students as possible. But I am of the opinion (and Dr. Hwang will back me up on this) that nothing beats one-on-one instruction.

 

Al is an old, prestigious superhero from the Captain Marvel years. He underwent hyperstasis in 1942 while playing chess with himself. Chess was his passion, and he often turned to it to relax from the pressures of those wartorn years. He thought about the war, and about chess, and how the pieces on the chess board were like superhuman units being moved around the different theaters of the Worlds War. Something clicked in his head, and he found that he was telekinetic just like Adam except that his telekinesis manifested as glowing squares that could teleport objects to squares of a different color rather than glowing hands that picked up and moved objects. Al called him Grandmaster both due to the origin of his power and with how he could blanket an area in a chessboard pattern. By using his knowledge of algebraic notation, he could quickly move objects and people throughout his chessboard. He could move innocent civilians out of danger and badguys into danger. He could move them right into Blue Beetle’s haymaker or concentrate and trap a bad guy by teleporting him rapidly between the same two squares. Check and mate.

 

While Al loved chess, he never actually became a grandmaster. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of dedication to become a grandmaster, but while Al was good he was never that good. It takes an ELO rank score of at least 2500 to be a Grandmaster and the best Al ever got was a 2250 as an FIDE candidate master. FIDE offered him an honorary grandmaster title, but he turned it down. He didn’t want to diminish the highest honor of his favorite sport by being handed a freebie.

 

Nowadays, Al still likes chess, he’s gradually moved away to go and the Barsoomian game jetan in recent years. It’s hard to keep a single game as your favorite after decades. He’s teaching Adam how to play all three games not only because he thinks everyone should learn how to play them but because in learning those games Adam develops his tactical skills. Al is also teaching Adam simple magic tricks–prestidigitation taught to him by his old teammate Stage Phantom. Al found that learning how to make coins disappear and pick the right card out of deck helped improve his focus on the job and for Adam it should produce even greater gains as his powers are tied to the movements of his hands. So far, results have been great. Adam loves learning what Al teaches him not only because it helps him be a better supporthero but because they’re great for socializing and Adam is a huge extrovert. During lunchtime, he can be found playing chess with the other kids or showing them card tricks.

 

Al played a key role in the evolution of the supporthero, and it is an honor to have as part of our contact program. Before Al, supportheroes were called teleheroes. Teleheroes were simply superheroes that operated over a distance without the idea of tactically and strategically supporting a team that’s built-in with the modern idea of supportheroes. Telehero examples included the Chicago Poltergeist, the Gentle Presence, and Gold Star when he was in one of his depressive moods and didn’t want to be seen.

 

Teleheroes were relatively common in the 1930’s due to FDR’s superhuman legislation enforced by Gold Star. With stiff penalties for operating in public, many superheroes either took to wearing masks and disguises or became teleheroes. Teleheroes vs superheroes became one of the major splits in the early superhero community alongside light superheroics vs dark superheroics. Was it better to have a physical presence during an emergency to humanize the use of supernatural powers and provide instruction to frightened and confused civilians, or was it better to “let powers do the talking,” as the Gentle Presence once said, and keep the bad guys guessing? There were pros and cons to both approaches.

 

When Alf Landon was voted into office in 1936 due to Gold Star’s support, nearly all of FDR’s legislation was thrown out. Now that superhumans could associate in public and combine their powers without fear of violating the National Recovery Administration, superhumans began to experiment with how best to combine their powers. The Statesmen formed in 1939 to optimize the peaceful development of superpowers and part of this optimization involved finding complementary superhumans. Naturally, this soon extended to finding complementary superheroes, especially with the world becoming a far more dangerous place in the years to follow.

 

The concept of the superteam was born from the dangers of the Worlds War. No one superhero could stand against all the power of the Axis. Early superteams included the Monster League, the Intercessors, and the team Al Maxwell would join, the Ready. While working with the Ready, Al found that he was doing far more than using his powers from a greater distance than his teammates. He found that he was coordinating with his teammates to change their environment and their placement within that environment to optimize their response to an emergency. Al’s teammates headed the response to an emergency, and he supported that response.

 

In 1944, Al wrote down everything he learned from his time with the Ready in The Human Chessboard: Strategy and Tactics For Superhuman Emergency Response. He coined the term “supporthero” in the book and as The Human Chessboard caught on in the superhero community the term supporthero gradually replaced telehero. Superheroes rarely worked alone after the Worlds War, and nowadays if you’re a telehero operating from a distance without supporting a superhero, you aren’t doing the most you can be doing.

 

The Human Chessboard remains one of the great texts of superheroics. Everyone in Emergency Response Class 3 has to read it and write a report on it. When Gold Star reformed the Intercessors into its modern form in 1959, it was one of the books he memorized in preparation.

 

Hats off to Dr. Jefferson for getting Al involved in the contact program. Who could be better at teaching supportheroics than the guy that invented it?

 

Hyperstasis: 

 

Born a basic, Adam displayed an aptitude for telekinesis during a standard telekinetic development trial class in middle school and decided to pursue the power as a secondary hyperstasis. After a few years and many classes, Adam’s telekinetic profile developed into somatic telekinesis.

 

Similar to his classmate Lucia Regio, Adam’s telekinesis maps to the motion of his body. He makes a gesture, and a corresponding force is exerted across space.

 

The physical manifestation of telekinesis, properly called the hyle, can take many forms. For Tommy Taylor, the hyle is an invisible, formless wave of motion. For Lucia Regio, it is a burst of color and sound. And for Adam, it is a pair of hands–gigantic, glowing hands of variable coloration, most often bright blue.

 

These hands follow the movements of his flesh-and-blood hands. He points, they point. He makes a fist, they make a fist. He can control his hands without moving, but his hands move with the greatest amount of speed and power when they shadow his movements. Adam can create an indeterminate number of hands and has no upper limit on the mass of his hands, but his control begins to experience lag at three hands or a hand larger than a baseball stadium and extreme lag at twenty hands or a hand larger than Martin’s school. Adam can create a hand as large as the sun (and has), but there’s about an hour of lag between his command and its response.

 

Adam is most comfortable controlling two hands each about the size of city blocks and exercises the greatest control when the hands have a continuity of motion–in other words, when he summons them and they stay “out.” If Adam wants to sacrifice precise control for mobility, he can make his hands appear wherever he wants them from out of the astral. His hands are telekinetic hyle and are no more limited by space than Tommy’s telekinesis. If Adam encounters a perkunite box, he can summon his hands inside the box.

 

Adam’s education has taught him how to get the most out of his hands. He can increase the luminosity of his hands so that they act as spotlights. He can rapidly alter the coloration of his hands to send signals. He’s developed a technique based on the telekinetic power of his mentor Al Maxwell he calls “checkmate” where he hides his hands beneath a surface like the ground or a wall to surprise opponents. It’s not as destructive a technique as it sounds since Adam can alter the density of his hands so that they pass harmlessly through solid matter.

 

The most important thing Adam has learned is how to project a tactile field through his hands. When his hands touch an object, they can cover the object with a glow. This glow allows Adam to manage the kinetic force acting on objects. Adam can use his tactile field to make objects “stick” to his hands. He can touch a bystander with a finger and jerk them out of the way of danger at speeds that would pulp him or her without his tactile field acting as a buffer. He can move an entire ruined city block from a battlezone by touching a single building and extending his glow over the rest of the block so that it moves in its entirety without breaking so much as a window or jostling a wounded survivor.

 

Adam can use his tactile field to assist a teammate in combat by touching him or her and projecting the field as a shield. Naturally, this also works as a way to imprison opponents. Adam knows how to be stealthy and tricky in catching badguys. The big glowing hands tell the badguys that it’s probably a bad idea to touch them. They look out for the hands but not the tactile field projected by the hands tapping the ground. In simulations, he’s surprised opponents simply by projecting his field through the air. In the heat of battle, it’s easy to overlook that air is just as much a medium as anything else.

 

Behavior:

 

Exemplary

 

Adam works hard and plays hard. When he’s with his teachers, he’s serious and polite. He always answers “yes sir” and “no sir.” But when he’s with his peers, he’s relaxed and playful. He’s like his friend Matthew Roy, but Adam is much better at reigning in his irreverence than Matthew. He’s never caused a fight or made a girl cry like Matthew has. Hopefully, some of Adam’s maturity will rub off on Matthew.

 

Adam likes being the center of attention. He uses his hands to juggle, create shadow puppets, make music, anything to entertain. His table is always packed when it’s lunchtime. The party tricks he’s most proud of are the ones he can do with the hands attached to his arms–simple acts of prestidigitation and misdirection taught to him by his mentor Al Maxwell. Adam sees these tricks as proof of his dexterity and situational awareness which form the foundation of all he does. He’s very proud of his tricks even though his classmates keep asking him to “Do the cool stuff with the energy hands.”

 

Perhaps Adam strives to be noticed because of his choice of profession. Supportheroes work in the background. During emergencies, people might see his hands rescue people alongside his teammates, but they won’t see him. His need for attention might be his way of making up for the surreptitious nature of his job.

 

Appearance: 

 

Adam doesn’t need a flashy costume. As a supporthero in training, he’s not supposed to stand out like superheroes. Ideally, he’s not supposed to even be seen. His giant hands are his presence and his identity during an emergency. Still, he longs for the attention of others and this longing is reflected in his choice of dress. While Adam is far from the flashiest boy on campus, no one would confuse him for anyone but the Puppeteer.

 

Adam developed a love of big, retro-style coats from his friend Matthew Roy and wears them with handprint designs. On the front, he has a left hand on the left side and a right hand on the right side with fingers spread. On the back, he has a single hand doing a gesture–a peace sign or a thumbs up, for instance. Adam has coats with more vulgar symbols, but he’s not allowed to wear them to school. He says such symbols make him look tough. Hopefully, he will grow out of it.

 

Adam alternates between a white coat with dark green hands (what Matthew calls mint-flavored Adam) and a black coat with red hands (what Matthew calls chocolate-flavored Adam). Adam is a sentimental boy and loves holidays. Around Halloween, he wears an orange coat with black hands. When Christmas comes, he wears a red coat with white hands.