Capeworld Comics

Arthur Ezra, School Architect. AKA Candlelight

 

“Architecture is the noblest enterprise of mankind! Physically, we are kin to the apes. But spiritually we have no closer relatives than the ants and bees. And I would have it no other way!”

 

“I walk through walls, I vanish from sight, I move without a sound…oh, my poor ghost is going to hate me! After I shuffle off this mortal coil, he will have nothing to do that I haven’t done already.”

 

Pyroman is not the only person honored with a statue at Martin’s School. Susan Martin has a statue in the 53rd floor’s gardens sitting on a bench next to her husband. The entrance to the reinforced CRS on the 110th floor is flanked by statues of the graceful superheroine Lightstep leaping over a star and the mighty superhero King Titan lifting the Earth. These statues underestimate the abilities of those they represent, but not the beauty of trained bodies in motion. In the 85th floor’s cafeteria, an abstract bronze in the style of Brancusi depicts Starlady, a famous alumni who rescued the Andromeda galaxy from being brushed aside by the Space Strigers. She is posed offering her hand, and it is tradition for students to shake her hand for luck, especially if before a test.

 

But there are statues in Martin’s School that are not meant to be seen.

 

On the 22nd floor, crouched attop a bookshelf, there is a tiny statue of a man in a white suit and cape bringing his gloved fingers to where his lips would be if he had a head.

 

It is one of several such statues that hide in the shadows and corners of Martin’s School.

 

These statues depict Candlelight, superhero alter-ego of Arthur Ezra, the architect that built Martin’s School.

 

He claims that there are 75 Candlelight “gargoyles” hidden throughout Martin’s School.

 

Only 70 have been found, and teachers struggle to this day to keep students from wandering the halls on gargoyle hunts.

 

Arthur Ezra was eccentric even by the standards of superheroes, and many believe his eccentricities explain some of the unusual features of Martin’s School.

 

Such as it being a skyscraper with 111 floors.

 

Arthur Ezra collected ants, bees, wasps, and termites. He kept hives of them in glass enclosures stacked around his palatial estate. He praised insects as “The conquerors of space, beings with a natural inclination to convert chaos into order!!!” complete with the three exclamation marks in his best-seller Architecture: Man’s Endless War Against Chaos. His appreciation for nature influenced his architectural style, which critics have called a revival of art nouveau, and is reflected in several elements of Martin’s School such as its windows, which are honeycomb variations on gothic rose windows, its semi-circular seashell-like rooftop crown, and its undulating stone facade inspired by the Casa Mila in Barcelona, Spain.

 

Arthur Ezra first joined the superhuman community by becoming one himself in the 1930’s to stop the mob from destroying his buildings. His construction company, AEon, won contracts around the country to build large, respectable skyscrapers–the kind whose basements no one would think to check for bodies or robbery loot. The mob told Arthur to play ball or else. Arthur chose or else, and in the summer of 1932 one of his construction sites in Chicago caught fire under “mysterious circumstances.”

 

The 1930’s were a dire time for America. A handful of superhumans ran the mob like a shadow government beneath the United States. Police couldn’t stop them. They did what they pleased. Many feared that the United States would balkanize into a collection of feudal states ran by crime bosses. One of the reasons for the rise of vigilante “mystery men” during the 30’s was that superhumans wished to restore law and order without putting their loved ones at risk. The mob did not play fair, but they did play for keeps.

 

But even if he didn’t have loved ones to protect, Arthur would still have put on a costume. He loved costumes.

 

AEon had been experimenting with photite, colloquially called “hard light,” a kind of luminous quasi-matter made of photoreactive particles. Photite could be programmed during its manufacturing to react to different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. One sample of photite could turn as dense as metal when exposed to ultraviolet light and as thin as air when exposed to infrared light. Another sample could turn as luminous as neon in darkness and as invisible as the wind in light.

 

In the 1930’s, photite was being researched for use in weaponry, communications, and data storage. But architects passed over photite for more reliable, cheaper materials. Why would anyone want to build something that could change depending on how the sun shone on it? But Arthur was a dreamer. He dreamed of buildings that changed their shape with the rising and setting of the sun and enclosed gardens with walls that evaporated like rain when within sunlight. They were, to be kind, avant garde dreams. But to be unkind, they were impractical dreams.

 

After his Chicago site was destroyed, Arthur began buying crates of photite from his company shortly after the fire. No one asked him why. He was an eccentric. Maybe he wanted to build a photite hive for his precious insects? 

 

“I very nearly made my superhero identity insect themed.” Arthur Ezra once said at a Statesmen convention. “But nearly every insect under the sun is represented by some superhero or other. Headless ghosts on the other hand are criminally underrepresented in the superhero community. There’s the Headless Horseman up in New England and then there’s me.”

 

Arthur created a suit full of photite generators and controllers that allowed him to defend his buildings effectively and in style. He wore a white suit and cape like a dapper gentleman going out to the opera. But he didn’t want to cover his face with a mask–heaven’s no! He thought the way that so many superheroes covered their faces with masks and sulked about in darkness was just garrish.

 

Light made a far better disguise than shadow.

 

When he wasn’t using photite to bend light around himself so as to appear invisible, a column of light hid his face and functioned like a two-way mirror. He could see out, but his foes couldn’t see in. With his clothes a waxy white, the column of light gave him the appearance of a living candle. For this, the papers called him Candlehead–which Arthur changed through a one-man letter writing crusade under multiple handles into Candlelight.

 

His photite tools allowed Arthur to create holograms, blind foes, and protect himself with a reactive shield that deployed at the speed of light. With these powers, he embarrassed the mob and sent their legbreakers running for the police station. 

 

Most of Arthur’s battles with the mob took place on his property and he was quick to develop a homefield advantage. He revealed his secret identity to his head architects and worked with them to install secret rooms. This proved invaluable when the mob started sending supervillain assassins after him. 

 

Mr. Shatter, a supervillain who could create destructive “shatter bombs” out of energy, was defeated when he correctly guessed that Candlelight suddenly vanishing from sight meant that he had turned invisible and fired a shatter bomb to kill him as he hid, but incorrectly guessed that the sudden appearance of a red smear meant that he had got Candlelight. Candlelight did turn invisible, but he also used a trick door to move out of harm’s way. One canister of stage blood and a sharp knock to the back of the head later, and Mr. Shatter woke up in jail.

 

The Buttonman, who was indeed a buttonman, was defeated when he studied footage of Candlelight’s previous battles and correctly guessed the limit to which Candlelight could project illusions from himself. But when he openly boasted of knowing Candlelight’s limits, Candlelight installed proximity activated photite generators on all the floors of his building. Unable to determine Candlelight’s location, the Buttonman was quickly overwhelmed.

 

Overcoming these supervillains with the power of architecture inspired Arthur to place hidden rooms and caches in all AEon buildings, not just for Candlelight but for all superheroes. Word quickly spread through the superhero community to look for tiny candle engravings on AEon buildings. These marked the locations of saferooms with food, medical supplies, and communication equipment.

 

Many of the superheroes of the 1930’s were known to be as elusive as shadows. They could vanish around corners and appear from nowhere. Some pulled this off through their own powers or skills, but some relied on walking the “candle lit paths” as they soon became known. To this day, urban avengers make use of candle lit paths for shelter and secrecy, though the mark of a candle has been retired for a mark known only to those trusted by the superhero community.

 

After placing so many secrets within his buildings, Arthur developed an obsession with secrets and puzzles that rivalved his insect obsession. He constructed a maze on his estate modeled after the medieval turf mazes traversed by medieval penitents. It’s walls were made of photite and shifted based on the ambient sunlight. Arthur would walk the maze in meditation and delighted in losing himself within its walls just as he lost himself in thought. A similar maze is on the 50th floor of Martin’s School for students to use in contemplation, though many like to use the “laser maze” for simulated battles as if it were a CRS.

 

Arthur collected puzzles. He had a baguenaudier from the 16th century, its rungs orange and rope gossamer-thin from age. He had a 17th century gimmal ring, its inscription illegible and faded. So great was his love of puzzles that he even financed the 1935 Knossos archeological expedition which unearthed the fabled Labyrinth of King Minos and a bull-headed skeleton.

 

In 1935, a light came on in his head and he realized the aesthetic potential for architectural puzzles. AEon buildings began featuring “open” secrets, not only to attract eyes, but to attract eyes away from the candle lit paths. When the treasures of the Knossos expedition made it to the Piper Museum in Joyous Harbor as part of its world tour, Arthur placed the minotaur’s skeleton in a secret room and challenged the public to find it. The turnout was such that it dwarfed all the other museums that hosted the Knossos treasures. When the Knight art gallery in Mainline City opened, more people came to see 12 owl statues hidden around the building than the exhibits. It is from the Knight gallery that Arthur got the idea to place Candlelight statues throughout Martin’s School. Though some have dismissed the statues as a pointless bit of eccentricity at best and a distraction in the learning environment at worst, the statues have shown value. New students are often intimidated by the size of Martin’s School, and being encouraged to find the statues allows them to acclimate to their surroundings. This was especially useful during the early days of Martin’s School when interway travel was still a few years off and many students had no choice but to live on campus.

 

In 1945, Pyroman gave a public address at the Rhode Island Statesmen center calling for the swift construction of a school for superhumans. His impassioned plea, known today as the “Do we fight for the future?” speech, decried the lowering of the draft age from 18 to 15 in 1943 done for the purpose of weaponizing the talents of young superhumans. As it was unlikely that Congress would repeal the lowering until after the war, their school was the only way to save untold numbers of children from the horrors of combat. 

 

Many have blamed Martin’s being an art nouveau tower on the school having to be constructed as quickly as possible. They believe that the only reason Arthur Ezra’s strange design was chosen was because it was submitted first. Nearly everyone has heard the story of how after watching Pyroman’s address on television, he worked feverishly for a day and a night constructing a model for the school. One of his housing staff wrote in his journal that “He glowed like a thunderbolt splintering the dark of night. He worked with the single-minded industry of his beloved insects. Superhumanity had protected his buildings. Now, his buildings would have a chance to return the favor.” 

 

When he had finished, Arthur called in a favor from a super-speedster named Silver Streak to deliver his model to the Rhode Island Statesmen center before the sun had finished rising. Arthur had his model submitted before most architects had started, and people today assume that this was all it took for his model to be accepted. But Pyroman rejected Arthur’s model outright the first time he saw it.

 

When Silver Streak handed Pyroman a package marked TO PYROMAN FROM CANDLELIGHT: LET US BE A LIGHTHOUSE FOR THE YOUTH OF TOMORROW!, Pyroman knew he was in for something interesting. He almost looked forward to it. A little harmless eccentricity was a nice break from the horrors he had seen overseas.

He unwrapped the model and placed it on its side. His blue, fire-filled eyes studied it. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It had something like a fish’s tail on one end, and its sides were sort of like the ribs of a fish…from a certain perspective. There were big, colorful windows of tessellated glass that he thought were meant to be fish eyes…but why were they all up and down the body? Maybe it represented a fish in motion? 

 

It was abstract, whatever it was. It was an abstract something.

 

When he saw Silver Streak snickering, he asked him what was so funny.

 

“It goes the other way.” Silver Streak said.

 

“It’s a tower?”

 

“What’s the French word for tower? That’s probably what he’d call it.”

 

“Oh Mr. Ezra.” Pyroman said. “You poor, crazy man. I wish we lived in the world you do. I bet it’s a nicer one than this.”

When Silver Streak related his comments to Arthur a second later, Arthur was elated. He took what Pyroman said as a compliment. The world he lived in was indeed a much nicer one. He tried to get the world everyone else had to live in more like his with every building.

 

The dismissal of his model did nothing to daunt Arthur’s spirits. He was sure Pyroman would come around.

 

And come around he did.

 

Joyous Harbor taxed by the plot, not the airspace, the undulating stone facade provided grips for students learning to fly, and height kept the noise of CRS classrooms high above the town below.

 

No other model provided these benefits, and it was for these benefits that Arthur’s was chosen.

 

Arthur doesn’t deny that he constructed this model with these benefits in mind. But he doesn’t confirm that he did either. It’s quite possible that in stepping beyond the ordinary he blindly stumbled on useful elements.

 

Artistic types call this inspiration.

 

Arthur remains to this day the head architect of Martin’s School. Any and all proposals to add to or alter the campus must go through him. Though he often talks up “his” school as being his magnum opus, his perfect gift to the world, he is not against changing Martin’s School–provided the changes are weird and interesting enough.