Capeworld Comics

“If there’s a moral to my little life, it’s this–learn to direct momentum. When i first joined the Limitless, I was pretty useless. I knew how to not get hurt. I didn’t know to prevent other people from getting hurt, nor did I know how to put the hurt on badguys. But little by little, I learned to use momentum. It was like judo. I’d apply force at a certain part of my body while yielding at another. The result was that when bad guys put their fist through me, I wasn’t just a cloud of vapor. I flipped them, like a plane flying through some serious turbulence. Vapor Riser, get it? But I used momentum in other ways. I used the momentum of my anger at my condition and put it towards positive ends. Anger, disgust, shame, these are powerfully destructive feelings, but they can be put towards constructive ends. Just look at Dr. Bell, bossing around a thought-form of fear like her genie! Bad feelings can help you do great good. I got an education. I joined a superteam. And now I’m a teacher. And a mother. And I think I’m doing alright, don’t you?”

 

Carolyn the Little Raincloud

 

Carolyn Bosharova is a history teacher at Martin’s’ school, ex-member of a superteam called the Limitless, the wife of fellow teammate Road Hog, and adopted mother of Martin’s student Allan Bosharova, supername Halcyon.

 

Born in 1982, Carolyn’s story is similar to that of many quasimorphs. She was a basic, born without hyperstatic powers or abilities, and lived an ordinary and happy. When she was ten years old, she found herself targeted by the telekinetic serial killer Killshot. Killshot evaporated Carolyn with a blast of telekinesis, but she did not die. She became vapor, and vapor she remains.

 

Quasimorphs are notorious for their emotional instability. A mind that is used to the stability of the human body is mapped onto a shifting mass that can only approximate the human form. Thoughts cause the body to change shape, and when a Quasimorph’s body changes shape, their thoughts change. This can lead them to form feedback loops. They feel sad, and that makes their form shift, which makes them feel sad. Obsessive compulsive disorder and manic depression are common among Quasimorphs. 

 

Caroyln had both.

 

Carolyn was her parent’s little raincloud. Often sad, rarely happy, she thought of herself as a ghost. She seemed like one. Things passed through her. She couldn’t hold anything. No matter how hard she tried, she could only slow the descent of a ball as it passed through her pale hands.

 

From the perspective of a ten year old, why wouldn’t she be a ghost?

 

Caroyln was obsessed with the idea that she was dead. She would seep into the ground because “that was where she belonged” and float around churches and graveyards because “that’s what ghosts did.”

 

Her parents had manesologists talk to her, but no one could convince her that she wasn’t a ghost. Carolyn didn’t understand what the manesologists meant by odic force and ectoplasm and the near Astral. Were they really experts on ghosts? She didn’t think so. Ghosts were lonely, sad people who couldn’t touch things. That was what she was. She was a ghost.

 

Her parents feared she was developing a variation of quasimorphic Cotard’s syndrome, a syndrome where quasimorphs believe themselves to be lifeless matter and act on that impulse. Quasimorphs made of rock make themselves still and unresponsive. Quasimorphs made of air float on the breeze and blow away. In a way, they die, and enter into a state of unresponsive suspended animation.

Her parents feared their daughter’s wellbeing, and Carolyn picked up on their fear and mirrored it as all children do. She figured she could make them happy and herself happy if she went away, and so she did.

 

A few months after her transformation, Carolyn ran away from home, or to be more exact, she floated away. She learned about a place called New Orleans. 

 

In New Orleans, there was this place called the Ghost Quarter. The Ghost Quarter had stood for more than a hundred years and had become home to the world’s largest population of ghosts. Ghosts from around the planet flooded into the quarter attracted by two houses that called to them like lighthouses across storm-tossed seas, two houses built around experimental gaeite spires Carnacki Foundation manesologits assembled from instructions found in their dreams, two houses alike in purpose but dissimilar in temperament–the somber House of Spirits and the boisterous Palace of Ghosts.

 

Carolyn had heard that the House of Spirits and Palace of Ghosts accepted all wayward souls, no questions asked, no judgement passed. They sounded like perfect homes for a ghost like herself…but therein she found a problem. They both sounded as perfect as the other, yet she could only pick one. 

 

The House of Spirits was very calm and a little gloomy. From its walls came the lingering tones of church pianos, the wafting scent of Buddhist incense, and the universal sound of crying.

 

It was a place of quiet contemplation, a place of dignified grief. Ghosts could mourn for what they could remember losing and what they couldn’t remember losing, and when they mourned they would know that they were not alone in their suffering. 

 

There were always flowers. 

 

The halls were always lined with flowers, 

 

Some flowers came from the House’s conservatory, one of the largest in the world, which many ghosts enjoyed walking through like Adams exiled by Eden by a skin that passed through petals lighter than the lightest breeze, the pain of the memory of sensation infinitely better than forgetting. Lingering pain was better than the unknowable numbness of a forgotten memory, for pain was a function shared in common with a living, and all ghosts at the throne of their hearts wish to be alive.

 

Other flowers came from across the planet. They came unmarked, listed for “those that want.” They were for no one, and thus for everyone–orange cempoalxochitl from Mexico, white chrysanthemums from Japan, red halas from Hawaii, black poppies from England…

 

A rainbow of soft colors greeted arrivals to the House, welcomed them, told them that though their bodies may be mist and their memories vapor, they were men, and they were mourned.

 

Carolyn liked the House of Spirits because it appeared as she felt. She felt like the House of Spirits was as inside her as it was outside her. 

 

And yet…she found that she liked the Palace of Ghosts just as strongly.

 

The Palace of Ghosts was the loud morning to the House of Spirits’ quiet night. It was an endless Mardi Gras to an Ash Wednesday kept forever at bay across the street.

 

It was a party that would never die.

 

The rumbling of laughter could be heard from within, and the tinkling of empty glasses toasting expensive wine to fall through transparent throats and stain the velvet carpets, and the tumbling of dice wagering money that meant nothing in games that didn’t keep score, and the reflexive memory-coughing of misty lips closing around lit cigars whose smoke trailed to the ceiling.

 

And jazz. Endless improvisations from masters who had enough time to try it all and more. No lungs meant the trumpet solos never had to stop. A plaque above a certain trumpet used by a certain man had a posthumous quote–”Cold lips blow the hottest sounds.”

 

The House of Spirits may have been how Carolyn felt, but the Palace of Ghosts was how she wanted to feel.

 

Stuck between the two, Carolyn couldn’t decide, and in the end, the decision was made for her. Old Adam, one of the oldest ghosts on Earth (and perhaps even the Biblical Adam), was on one of his routine visits to the Ghost Quarter as a member of the Carnacki Foundation (he joined very early into the Foundations forming and personally knew Thomas Carnacki himself) when he saw Carolyn hiding herself inside a cloud (he always checked the clouds for hesitant visitors) moving her gaze from one building to the other and back again.

 

Old Adam was a leading authority on ghosts. He could tell just with a glance that Carolyn wasn’t a ghost, but he could also tell that in her own way, Carolyn was a wayward soul. He made a deal with Carolyn–he would take her on a guided  tour of the House of Spirits and she would tell him where she came from and how to contact her parents.

 

It wouldn’t be until Carolyn was much older that she saw the inside of the Palace of Ghosts. The Palace can be a little too rowdy for children. It’s an old joke in manesology circles–the first thing to go when you die is your manners. Ghosts can be very, very rude and don’t really care who sees them being rude. Some even go out of their way to be rude in the hopes of forcing people to look at them, or even better, saying something to them.

 

Carolyn loved the ghosts she met on her guided tour. She was disappointed that they all told her that she was alive and not a ghost, but her disappointment was nothing compared to the awe and wonder she felt talking to them.

 

She learned the difference between herself and ghosts. Ghosts had history, but she was too young to have history herself, so she asked to learn history from the ghosts, first in the hope that learning history would somehow turn her into a ghost, and then because she loved hearing them tell stories.

 

Nowadays, Carolyn considers history to be, at its core, storytelling. History as a dry collection of dates isn’t just boring, it goes against the heart of history itself. She strives to make history as interesting to her students as it was to her when she listened to ghosts describe how they lived, died, and lived again. She loves using Martin’s CRS facilities to “spice up” her history classes. There’s a world of difference talking about the Worlds War and taking students into a simulation of the Battle of Hoshi Island.

 

Carolyn learned from gardenia scented Peg Entwistle about the Hollywood of the 30’s, back when it was called Hollywoodland. Carolyn sat atop a glowing white H alongside Ms. Entwistle and together they looked down on images from long ago–actors, liars, and dreamers. They saw a surreal world where what was pretend and false was held in greater value than what was real and true. Ms. Entwistle told her that people were sometimes willing to die for a lie than live for what was true. She did, after all.

 

Carolyn learned from the Captain Hendrik van der Decken and his men aboard the splintered deck of the Flying Dutchman (haunted houses do not have to obey the spatial laws of matter and can contain quite a lot within their halls, even entire ships) about the sea, which was the same in 17th century as it was in the 21st. She learned about the sea’s moods, how it could go from calm blue joy to black rage in an instant. She learned about places she had never heard before–Borneo, Sumatra, and Malaysia. The crew showed her treasures–rusty coins stamped with the faces of long-dead kings, coral-coated rifles, illegible waterlogged books that smelled of the sea.

 

The most important thing she learned from them was that every event in history has more than two sides, something that in the present Carolyn tries to instill within her students. People said that the crew of the Flying Dutchmen were cursed, that God or the Devil or both had punished them for a great evil committed off the Cape of Good Hope. People said that they appeared to sailors to herald their doom and collect their souls. That wasn’t true. They were simply ghosts. One night, the sea went wild against their predictions, and they sank within a tempest. Down went the bodies, up went the spirits, and they’ve sailed on ever since. Rarely would they dock, but it wasn’t because they couldn’t, as legend suggested. They docked at the House of Spirits, after all. They simply preferred the sea. They lived for the sea, died at sea, and so they preferred to remain at sea. The sea did not change, while every day the land turned further and further from their memories.

 

Carolyn learned from Mary Dwight, the famous Resurrection Mary of Chicago, about the fractious times of the 1930’s. Mary looked beautiful and young in her glowing party dress, but she moved like an old woman. The hit-and-run driver had crushed her bones, and they remained crushed in death. Mary told Carolyn about the troubles of the 1930’s while cooking her things like dandelion salad and mock apple pie. Carolyn couldn’t eat it, but that was alright. Neither could Resurrection Mary.

 

Carolyn learned about superhumans and how they captured the fear and wonder of basic humanity. She learned about Gold Star whose existence promised a world without limits, the masked mystery men who evaded the law even as they fought outlaws, and though she didn’t quite understand superhuman regulation, she understood that it made people very upset.

 

Above all, Carolyn learned about tradition from Resurrection Mary. Mary, like many ghosts, was a creature of habits. She wore the same clothes, traveled the same roads, and cooked the same foods. Carolyn learned that  tradition was how people, especially ghosts, maintained a connection to the past. Ghosts are known for their rituals of remembrance, their material obsessions and patterned behaviors, and these rituals rubbed off on Carolyn. She would go on, after all, to marry a man with an obsessive preoccupation with watches.

 

From all the ghosts, she learned about history, and fell in love with history as she did with the ghosts.

 

Carolyn’s family saw that being among ghosts made Carolyn act more alive than she had ever been and so decided to move to the Ghost Quarter. Carolyn became a regular at the House of Spirits and when she got older the Palace of Ghosts. When she grew up, she enrolled in Dixon University in Mainline City to get a degree in manesology, but while studying found her tastes drifting towards history. She had always loved the stories her ghost friends told her about distant worlds lost to the past, and a general history degree gave her the chance to learn more stories. She still had a passion for manesology and minored in it, but history became her great love, and history is now what she teaches at Martin’s.

 

The Limitless And Beyond

 

While pursuing her history degree at Dixon University, Carolyn became interested in hyperstatic emergency response, better known as superheroics.

 

“I think it was always at the back of my mind.” Carolyn once said, “It wouldn’t be until 2019 that Killshot finally got shot down, so every once in a while I’d check the news and see that he killed another hundred people somewhere. That’s what he’d do. He’d kill people and then go play monopoly or whatever for a year to cool off. I’d see people pass around images of his stupid mask on the noos and I’d think “Golly geezus, I want to take him out. I want to go tornado mode and drop him into my mouth. I want to frog-in-a-blender him. WHA-BLAMMO!  But the feeling would pass, and it never got me serious about superheroics. I don’t know–they say vengeance is a great motivator for superheroes. Didn’t work for me, like at all.

 

“Besides, personally I thought just living my life was the best vengeance I could possibly take against Killshot. What got me to really consider superheroics was what’s got me to do anything, I guess, history.

 

“I got enrolled in this really primo class taught by, get this, Magno–yeah, the Magno! Four Fighters and Aces Magno! Yeah, teaching history classes was apparently what he did between time on the Aces. Let me tell you, it was a great history class! His class is the model for how I teach my own classes. Magno made history interesting and fun, especially when he talked about being a superhero. He started as a mystery man in the 30’s juking the law and operating in the shadows. Then he fought in the Worlds War, and after the War helped establish the world we now know and love. His story was the same as many superhumans, and he had a gift for making personal anecdotes into universal stories. He made the story of a superhero sound very, very interesting and very, very appealing–a bunch of different people, with different abilities, from different walks of lives, coming together for the common good…it reminded me of my time in New Orleans back when I was but a little wisp, not yet the big cloud you see before you…so anyway, I just had to try superheroing! So I went up to the local Statesmen Center and asked if they had any teams looking for a girl with absolutely no experience and with an ERC of nothing. Believe it or not, there are always teams ready to take on super-green rookies. But trust me, it’s best to get your training in now instead of later! If you think Steel Dolly and I are tough on you, we’re nothing compared to how hard they push you on a superteam!”

 

Carolyn joined the Limitless, a superteam created by Urban Ranger back in the 1950’s. The Limitless have had many incarnations through the decades and are flexible enough to let old members retire and new members join. The Limitless are a good superteam for rookies. Their old members are always willing to put in the work to bring new members up to speed.

 

Carolyn got along well with her teammates, but the nature of her powers led Caroyln to quickly rethink joining Limitless after a little less than a month.

 

“Oh I was discouraged to the max when I first started!” she would tell her ERC students, “I was invincible, no matter what anyone tried to do I just pulled myself back together. There’s not much you can do to hurt a cloud. You can call me names but that’s about it. But by the same token there’s not much I can do to hurt bad guys. Sure, I can blow myself really fast and smash into someone like a tornado…or just as a tornado, no “like” to it…but I mean come on, we figured out how to make storm shelters way, way, way back when. Against anyone with a decent amount of super strength like Steel Dolly I’m kind of useless–but don’t tell her I said that! Tell her I said a great amount of super strength!

 

“I nearly gave up, but then I got some really good training from my teammates. I learned a type of judo that quasimorphs have been using since the Hydroman Navy. It started as a way to optimize your response to impacts so that if you were splattered or scattered or shattered you’d be able to pull yourself together in a snap, but it developed into a quasimorph martial art. It’s called…quasimorph judo.

 

“Not the most creative name, but hey, if the shoe fits…

 

“The idea is that you anticipate your opponents’ attack and flow your body around it. You yield to their force so that you can redirect it and add it to your own. They say that calm water surrounds a raging stream…don’t ask me who “they” are though, I’m not sure I’m allowed to tell you without you getting permission slips signed first. Think of it as another incentive to join ERC 2. I get to expose you to all kinds of cool, twisted, grody stuff there.

 

“The take-away here is that I learned how to apply currents of force inside my body to send my attackers flying. Vapor Riser, get it? Now when they punched me, they wouldn’t just stick their fist through a fog bank. They got spun by the force of a tornado wall plus their own momentum. It worked like a charm! I once sent Pulverizer on a trip to Jupiter. They had to fish him out of the red spot. I’d call that a rise, wouldn’t you? Don’t ever tell me that you can’t learn how to fight or that your power is no good when it comes to throwing down. I won’t believe you! I won’t believe you because if I could get good, you can get good to!”

 

Carolyn was close to all her teammates on Limitless, but especially to Boston Bocharova, the Road Hog. Road Hog was a robot armor operator who liked his armors old fashioned–heavy, low to the ground, and without any flight systems to take up weapon space. His armor used a rocket, but it wasn’t to get him off the ground. It was to get him across the ground. His armor’s fat, bulky appearance, snout-shaped helmet, and speedy wheels got more modernized robot armor operators to call him Road Hog as a put down, but he decided to own the name.

 

Boston’s love of simplicity and tried-and-true engineering methodology was built on a scaffold of love for the old-fashioned in general. He had a particular love for watches. In our modern world of instant noosphere updates, watches were as primitive as abacuses. They were completely outdated, completely useless, and Boston loved them for it. That they had no practical purpose made their aesthetic value shine all the more.

 

Many people think the dial design on the front of his armor represents a speedometer. It actually stands for a clock face.

 

Boston and Carolyn quickly bonded over their shared love of history. Their first date was to the Turner museum in Joyous Harbor.

 

In 2006, Carolyn and Boston were married. They would adopt a troubled quasimorph youth named Allan Brown who would go on to enroll in Martin’s under the supername Halcyon.

 

Carolyn would retire from superheroics in 2010 to become a history teacher and ERC coach at Martin’s School, but she would briefly return to the team in 2019 to assist in the capture of Killshot.

“It felt great to take him down.” Carolyn told her class. “For me, for everyone, for justice. People had been tracking him for three decades. We had his number. I dispersed myself across three cities and God only knows how many farms. Killshot could see anywhere with that fancy sensor suit of his, but it didn’t matter if everywhere he looked was little old foggy me! Urban Ranger drew his fire and while he was busy I formed behind him and clobbered him. POW! One move, one blow, one busted-up badguy!

 

“I have you guys run his takedown in the CRS not to sing my own praises–though I am pretty awesome putting a serial killer in the trashcan, aren’t I?–but because it is a textbook badguy takedown. Don’t blame me! It’s what the guys that write the textbooks say!”

 

Martin’s Teacher

 

Carolyn teaches history and ERC at Martin’s. She’s known as a fun, perky teacher. Her students love her exuberance, and it doesn’t hurt her popularity at all that she’s a light grader. She often works with Steel Dolly in ERC where the two compliment each other well. Steel Dolly is the tough, no-nonsense teacher pushing students past their limits and Carolyn is the understanding, playful teacher keeping her students calm and confident.

 

Her attitude towards history is based on her personal experiences. As a child, she hung around New Orleans’ Ghost Quarter, and its inhabitants told her stories that were true, false, and somewhere in between. The ghosts taught Carolyn a healthy respect for skepticism, tradition, and storytelling, and Carolynn passes this respect down to her students. Her attitude towards ERC is likewise based on her experience learning how to be a superheroine under the Limitless. She sees ERC as the personal development of abilities and encourages students to learn from one another. Conversely, Steel Dolly sees ERC as learning how to optimally apply one’s abilities to the task at hand and encourages students to drill simulations to build muscle memory. Carolyn believes the ultimate philosophical aim of ERC is to enhance students’ powers, Steel Dolly believes the ultimate philosophical aim is to enhance students’ skills, and together they create students that are both powerful and skillful.

 

Carolyn’s son Halcyon is a freshman at Martin’s, which impacts both his learning experience and her teaching experience. Halcyon arrives early to Martin’s with his mother. He helps her decorate her room for the holidays. He leaves school later than most other students. He usually helps his mother during his lunch break, which is her planning period, by delivering messages around the school. He can’t be taught by his mother, because that would mean being assessed by his mother, and that’s a conflict of interest, so his history classes are all with Mr. Rich (poor guy) and his ERC classes are all with Emmy. 

 

It’s a setup that works, but some wonder if Halcyon being so close to his mother isn’t increasing the alienation he already feels from his peers. Halcyon is a meek, skittish child who longs to be seen as more masculine. Him staying so close to his mother might be getting him the reputation of a  momma’s boy crossed with a teacher’s pet.

 

Rising Vapor

 

As aforementioned, Carolyn is a quasimorph. Her mind is mapped to inanimate matter, in this case vapor, which she can reeshape at will. She can also extend her mind over nearby vapor, placing it under her control and adding it to the mass of her body. She is typically made of nitrogen gas, as that’s the most abundant gas in our atmosphere, but she can absorb and control nearly any kind of gas. She finds it easiest to control noble gases, but can move beyond them with effort. 

 

She floats through the sky by varying her chemical composition. She explains how she does this to her students with a question–if the atmosphere is primarily nitrogen, why are the clouds made of water and not nitrogen? The answer is that water molecules are lighter than nitrogen molecules. Nitrogen gas has a molecular mass of 28 while water vapor has a molecular mass of 18. Thus water rises through nitrogen gas, and as it rises, the pressure around it decreases. The water vapor expands, and as it expands, cools and condenses forming clouds.

 

So when Carolyn wants to move up, she turns into water vapor, and when she wants to descend, she turns into oxygen gas which has a molecular mass of 32.

 

Quasimorphs vary in how little or how much they can control their chemical phase. Sand Queen can, with great concentration, turn her silicate into a liquid. Heart of Gold can easily shift from solid to liquid to gas to plasma and back through the process to solid. Some quasimorphs don’t have chemical phases at all. Halcyon, for instance, is made of photons. Photons are bosons. An arbitrary number of photons can be in the same place and move in the same direction without creating anything like “solid light” (It’s a common freshman mistake to think that photite is made of photons rather than associated with them. There is no such thing as solid light, at least in this universe.).

 

Carolyn can freely vary her chemical phase. Some quasimoprhs become inert when taken outside their standard phase. Sand Queen, for instance, can’t move if her silicate is heated into gas. But Carolyn can comfortably condense her molecules into a liquid or even solid and with concentration expand her molecules into plasma.

 

Quasimorphs exert internal telekinetic force to control their bodies. This allows Carolyn to resist the effects of the environment. She can, as water vapor, rise to the point she should condense into a cloud but will her molecules to stay apart, allowing her to remain as vapor. It also allows her to store chemicals within her body and only have them react when she wishes them to. She holds several microclouds that when allowed to interact with the rest of her body produce different effects. For instance, while her body is made of an atmospheric compound, she can release microclouds of pyrophoric chemicals like silane to turn herself into a human(oid) torch. 

 

Quasimorphs vary in how much force they can exert. Usually (but not always), those whose natural phase requires a greater amount of energy to maintain are stronger, so solid quasimorphs < liquid quasimorphs < gas quasimorphs < plasma quasimorphs. In terms of pure force, Carolyn is a little below-average for a gas quasimorph, but she learned how to compensate with precision. Bringing physical force against Carolyn is a bad idea. She will redirect the force and hurl her enemy around like a tornado with a black belt in judo.