Tag: the bastard sons

G. Brett Williams #27 – Stanford Faraday, The Librarian

| November 29, 2011 | 0 Comments

The Librarian, better known by the name Stanford Faraday, was a professor of English at a fairly well-to-do university.  But in his earlier days, when Stanford Faraday was just a lowly graduate assistant spending the majority of his time fetching coffee and hiding in the library, something quite magnificent happened to him.  While working on site at the library, shelving books and cataloguing titles, Stanford made his way into the deep, dark recesses of the library, into the bowels of the the beast where the university’s most esoteric volumes were stored.  Once down there, he was attracted to faint glow that seemed to be coming from one of the farthest corners of the collection.  When he reached the glow, he found a cloth covering a fairly plain piece of flat stone that glowed rather brightly, despite having no discernible light source.  Upon the stone were etched words in a language so lost to time that Stanford had never before encountered it.  Overwhelmed by a desire to experience the tactile sensation of holding the object, Stanford Faraday placed his fingertips on the cold, flat face of that stone and found his life inexorably changed.  He didn’t remember the next few moments.  All Stanford remembered was finding the stone, then finding himself seated at a desk where he’d previously been working.  It was as if no time had passed.  The stone, an ancient relic of unknown origin, was said to have written upon it all the knowledge of the world, from the beginning, to the end.

Stanford felt different after that day.  His mind was clearer, his thoughts crisper.  He found that he could predict with some accuracy the weather for the day, could sense moments just before they happened, could find the solution to a problem with more speed than before.  Pretty soon, he realized that it was the stone, that something must have happened to him when he touched that stone.  For a bit he used this new found brain power for fun and profit, doing things like making bets at the dog track and the like.  But Stanford Faraday was a good man and good will out.  After the campus was hit with a rash of nighttime assaults on female students, Stanford knew it was time to act.  He studied the patterns, found the pieces of the puzzle the police had missed out on, and soon managed to catch the criminal in the act.  Of course Stanford Faraday was no fighter, so the act of catching said criminal left something to be desired.  He would have to become a better weapon if he were going to continue to do this.

Utilizing the heightened powers of his new intellect, Stanford studied boxing, military tactics, the martial arts, survival skills, amazing himself at how quickly he was able to pick up the intricacies necessary to master these skills.  Before long, he found himself possessed of the necessary tools to fight crime, which he did with great aplomb.  Until one day something went terribly wrong, and Stanford Faraday, the crimefighter known as The Librarian, hung up his mask for good.

The villainous Dr. Night, the Surgeon of the Shadows, had landed in Stanford’s hometown and was painting his bloody scenes across the streets.  Never before had Stanford come up against a villain so cunning as Dr. Night, and the ease of his successes as a crimefighter had lulled him into a fall sense of security.  Stanford was ill-prepared for the Dr.  Dr. Night managed to confound Stanford at every turn.  A total of twelve people were killed by the Surgeon of the Shadows before he tired of his dirty business and moved on to warmer climes.  Stanford never recovered from this failure.  He retired from crimefighting, went back to his studies, and eventually became a professor of English at the university.   It was during this time he met his wife, Margaret.

Margaret and Stanford had a very stoic relationship, as the sadness he felt from his failure to save those people from Dr. Night permeated everything he did.  As their relationship grew longer, and his years as a professor collected, his abilities faded.  The trick to the stone’s power was the pursuit of knowledge.  Without a thirst for knowledge, no knowledge would come.  Sure, as a professor Stanford still sought knowledge, and when he did so he found it easier than most to retain it, but the vast computational power of his brain had waned.  He was a sad, complicated man.  So when a young student showed an increasing interest in him, he allowed himself a moment of weakness.  At 42, he was seventeen years the girl’s elder, but her fire and her passion for life, her zest for knowledge, reignited his own.  Suddenly the powers of the stone were evident again and all felt right with the world.  But with all things of this nature, the truth eventually crept out from the shadows and made itself known.  The girl discovered she was pregnant and Stanford came clean to Margaret, who immediately demanded a divorce.  The young student, heartbroken by the tragedy of the whole incident, left the school.  Before she left she told Stanford where she was going and, despite never again desiring to be with the man, always kept him abreast of her location so that he could money for the children; two twin boys she’d named Jackson and Jonathan.

The loss of her swelled inside him, made him ache.  From this loss, he never recovered.  His world was a dark place, void of true purpose, until the day she came to him, desperate for help.  One of his sons, Jackson, had inherited more than just a thirst for knowledge from his father;  he’d inherited the powers of the stone!

G. Brett Williams #26 – The Bastard Sons: Incendiary

| November 27, 2011 | 0 Comments

The Bastard Sons are a super-powered group comprised of the illegitimate children of prominent superheroes (and one villain).  The group, made up of four members, only learned of their lineage when their powers developed as part of their coming of age.   The group was formed by Incendiary, the illegitimate son of Bertrand Blaze, England’s fire controlling hero better known as The Brazen Blazer.  The Brazen Blazer was something of a celebrity in his home country and took every chance he could to use that celebrity to woo the women of Albion.  Not every woman he slept with ended up carrying a child, but a few did, and of those few, one of them gave birth to his superpowered heir.  Superhero genetics are a tricky business.  The gene present in certain people that grants powers has to be “switched on” by some sort of event.  Sometimes that gene can lay dormant, never finding the specific set of circumstances needed to ignite it.  Other times, as with all newborns, a set of recessive genes can come to the forefront leaving the more dominant genes, like the super gene, dormant.  Of the three illegitimate children Bertrand Blaze fathered, only Franklin Tosh, later known as Incendiary, received powers.

When Franklin was fourteen years old, his mother threw him a birthday party.  One of the party guests was a fourteen year old girl from Franklin’s school by the name of Penny Entwhistle.  Franklin had a rather large crush on Miss Penny, a feeling which she happened to return.  As the party went on, Franklin and Penny escaped to his bedroom for a bit of privacy.  Franklin had her down to just her knickers and Penny had her hand on his bathing suit area when his mother burst into the room and found them.  Penny grabbed her clothes and ran out, sobbing, with Ms. Tosh shouting a great many things about defiling her son and telling her parents and the like after the poor young creature as she darted from the room.  Franklin was so embarrassed and angry at his mother that, as she turned to remonstrate the boy’s behavior, his gene kicked in and suddenly the bed he had previously been making it to second base upon was going up in flames.

The next few years were awkward for young Franklin.  With the emergence of his powers, his mother’s long term suspicions about his parental lineage were confirmed.  Franklin’s mother demanded paternity tests from Bertrand and eventually ended up taking the man to court for child support, damages (part of her house had burnt up after all) and what her lawyers dubbed, “the emotional hardship inherent to raising a superpowered teenager.”  It was widely thought that raising a superpowered teenager was more difficult than raising the regular old garden variety teenager.  Raging hormones is one thing, but raging hormones that cause raging fires, well that’s quite another.  In the end, Bertrand’s PR team thought it best to settle the matter out of court for an undisclosed sum and get on with the business of helping old ladies cross the street and rescuing cats from trees.  Anything that would help him repair his damaged image.  The amount of money was enough for Franklin and his mother to live in comfort.

Franklin went away to university at the age of eighteen, eager to remove himself from the life of flaunting her money and dating younger men that his mother had begun since winning her paternity suit, or, as she referred to it, “the day you finally paid off, boy.”  To tell the truth, in the time since winning that settlement, Franklin’s mother had paid little attention to the young man at all.  So when she was shuffled off this mortal coil in a fatal and logic-defying jet ski accident with one of the aforementioned younger men, Franklin wasn’t terribly shaken up.  I mean sure, it was a bummer to lose his mum, but it’s not like she’d ever been all that loving toward him anyway.  And there was the problem of that time she messed up his one chance to touch Penny Entwhistles breasts.  Penny had been so mortified by the experience that she never spoke to Franklin again.  So he was sad his mother was gone, but not that sad.  The one nice thing his mother had done though was to take out a life insurance policy on herself for Franklin, in case something such as a random act of jet ski tomfoolery were to ever steal away her life.  The life insurance, plus the money he inherited from the settlement, left Franklin with a sizable chunk of change.  He immediately got a financial planner and made some shrewd investments that quickly turned his large amounts of money into obscene amounts of money.  And with that money young Franklin Tosh did exactly what any superpowered son of a superhero would do…

He decided to fight crime.