Camia/Characters

Below is a list of characters in my Camia world. Note that the redundant headlines are often for alternat spellings.

A

Alley

Alley

Alley

Alley Thompson was the mother of Sam, an autistic boy who belonged to the #Cleanup Corps. She did not participate in the Corps' missions, but often accompanied her son when he needed to travel alone so that he would not be in danger. She survived four assassination attempts while simultaneously protecting her son from even more assassination attempts.

Alley had dark hair and was fond of wearing light-colored sunglasses on top of her head, using them as a headband. She often wore pink clothes, but had a very large assortment of clothes to choose from. At the time of the adoption of the Cleanup Corps into TCT, Alley was 27 years old.

Second character

I had a second character also named Alley, but I believe that this was actually a fork of #Nauri that I created after my characters had grown up to the point that Nauri was no longer "a child". (I traditionally kept all of my characters the same age as me.) I believe I only used her once, and in that story her only role was to make fun of #Teddy after Teddy tried to protect her from a danger that turned out to be imaginary. Later in the story, Teddy believed Alley had rescued the other kids from being kidnapped by aliens, but it turned out that it was actually #Barry who had done so.

Andre

Andre

Andre

Andre was a small boy in #Camian Combat who attempted to join TCT but was rejected. Nancy kept him at #STW and often organized missions for him on planet Namma. His favorite color was red.

Andrew

Andrew Molly was a name used by a boy who later came to call himself #Vamas.

Anitak

Anitak

Anitak

Anitak was a short girl with wavy black hair who lived in #Torushi Village on planet #Namma. She was very rich and lived by the motto "Money means nothing to me." By this she meant:

• Not even the kids in #TCT, who were subsidized by their home nation's government and were thus nominally very rich, could buy her off when she decided not to cooperate with them. However, she had no inborn grudge against TCT or the children such as #Nauri who allied with TCT. Thus, she helped TCT on some missions.

• Similarly, she knew that she had enough money to spend that she could find a breaking point for nearly everyone she knew, at which they would do her bidding in exchange for some of her money.

She often sat down and watched battles instead of fighting, so she often earned no reward for many battles she "participated" in. She was able to do this because she was not part of TCT and therefore #Nancy had no power over her; the other kids encouraged her to help out but realized that she wasn't as good a warrior as most of the other kids. She got a "0" on a scale of 1 to 10 in warrior fitness, but she was so clumsy that one time she hit the machine that she was supposed to hit by accident, and reporters flocked around Anitak to ask her what it was like to be the first one to hit the machine. She liked #Treba, but since Treba was a slave and she was not allowed to remove him from slaveship, she had to sit back even though she hated seeing Treba be tortured. This held true even when she was in power as the queen of the village.

Appearance

Anitak may have been subconsciously influenced by Veronica, as she was one of the very few white people that had jet-black hair, and like Veronica she was extremely rich. Unlike #Callista, though, she had superpowers, and therefore when she was invited to go on missions she actually fought instead of just standing around taking the hits for the other kids. Nevertheless, she never tried out for TCT.

Audrey

Audrey

Audrey

Audrey was a toddler who wrote instrumental music in a local band during the peak of the war. She did not fight in missions, but was the best friend of #Hayden, who did.

B

Barbara

Barb

Barbara

Barbara Fathoms was a small girl who joined the #Cleanup Corps around the age of eight. She was very interested in politics and strongly supported the mission of the group. However, she also often formed her opinions on political issues based on what other people said, and had a difficult time explaining her political views when they were questioned by other people. Adults often said that Barb had a "spacey" personality.

Barbara (2)

Barbara

Barbara was a woman who ran the #Newsletters wing of STW. She never appeared even in a minor role; I just needed a name and felt it sounded like a female position.

Barry

Barry

Barry

Barry was the only character whose name I took directly from a classmate, and I transferred his personality too. I dont have my source material with me right now, so I cant say off the top of my head what his superpowers were or what kind of missions Nancy pushed him into. I do remember that he was a fairly minor character, but that he participated in the battle against "Dr. Snow", a man who destroyed the kids' spaceship with a missile and then followed them down to their crash site.

On an earlier mission, #Teddy and a few other children had run into a crowd of Earthling soldiers, intending to take on the entire army with their bare hands. Barry rescued the other kids by firing lasers from his spaceship, knowing that the other kids were immune to the lasers because they could protect themselves by using "cocoons".

Betty

Betty

Betty

What? Are you kidding me? Apparently I created a character named "Betty" in 1993 and then completely forgot about her. All I know is that when I find/replaced "Betty" in order to give my Archie Comics characters more original names, this Betty also got changed. Then I apparently forgot she had ever existed for the next 20 or so years. I know for sure that she wasn't a continuation of the Archie Comics Betty, but that's all I have to say here.

Bezza

Bežža was a woman who fought her enemies with chemicals. She was a pharmacist by profession, but helped #FILTER and its allies on the side by manufacturing poisonous chemicals. She never dealt with medicine such as pills, however, only powders and liquids that could be sprayed in the face of her enemies.

Bob (1)

Bob

Bob was the owner and referee of a wrestling company. He was well known for his loud voice and his uncanny ability to locate the TCT kids whenever they were attacked so he could film the battle and play it on his TV station (possibly channel 14) as if it were a wrestling match. The kids repeatedly asked Bob to actually help them out instead of just standing there with his TV cameras rolling, but he never even answered them. He called his cache of video of the kids' fighting Quest of Courage and made money selling it as a TV reality series (though he did not call it that).

Bob even followed the kids into a remote corner of Wamia when they were traveling with two preschoolers to help track down Dr. Zāme. Dr. Zāme had promised never to attack Bob, and even let Bob direct his battles by saying things such as "BRING ON THE NEXT EDDY!", but in this particular battle one of the Eddy's dropped a bomb on top of Bob, who up until then had seemingly been helping the kids indirectly by keeping the battle slow enough to make Bob's TV audience more interested. With Bob out of the picture, the boys realized they would have to fight fair. One boy said, "Uh oh ... it's all the Eddys. "

Private wrestling arena

Bob's wrestling arena catered to a wide audience. He enrolled many locals as wrestlers, though some made appearances only once in a great while. For example, there was a girl named Vally Church. "Kiddie" (sic) was another girl's name. Many of the wrestlers used bynames, and some even had more than one stage name, to make the repertoire of Bob's wrestlers seem even larger. For example, Teddy was enrolled as both The Sun and 2-D Man, and his younger sister Sharon appeared with both her real name and (particularly when appearing alongside her brother) The Moon. Even Nancy agreed to take part in the wrestling matches, playing a caricature of herself who spoke with a deranged accent and threw objects at people and pretended to have the ability to hypnotize them.

Bob's wrestling arena soon expanded far beyond #Lewiston. In the town of Danbury, he built a large arena focused around fighting with weapons, and in particular, reenactments of large military battles. In Danbury the fights Bob put on became so far divorced from traditional wrestling that he no longer called it a wrestling arena and simply named the arena Upshot! Since Upshot! was located in Danbury, and Danbury was several thousand miles away from Lewiston and Top City, the customers of Upshot! were not familiar with the TCT superheros, and on those rare occasions when they did appear at Upshot! they were paid very well for doing so — whether they won or lost.

Bob also enrolled animals at the wrestling arena, often consisting of tamed mutants created by the Zāme clan. However, the majority of Bob's wrestlers were nevertheless humans. He considered the TCT children to be adults because they could defeat any adult in a fair fight. Wrestlers advanced in the ranks by earning points for each match they won, with more points awarded for quicker victories, and more points awarded to wrestlers who were considered at first to have been the underdog. With Bob's rules, point totals could reach absurd levels. For example, in one match against a girl named Ursa Major, Teddy won 5,104,284,140,823 points. In another match against a man named The Devil's Advocate, he won 4 points. Officially, the points were actually yēŋa, Camia's currency, one unit of which was worth about 10 cents in 2010 US dollars. Thus, Teddy won $500 billion for a single wrestling match in which he knocked out a girl with a single punch. However, none of the wrestlers were allowed to ask for their points to be turned into cash, and Bob admitted that calling their rewards money was simply intended to make his show more exciting for his audience.

Role in TCT

When the #TCT kids branched out onto planet Namma and broke free from their teacher and advisor, they ran a recruitment drive for new members, hoping to reach a total of exactly 20. Bob applied and was accepted into TCT as a regular member, the only adult amongst 18 young boys and one small girl. (Nanuko had left TCT by this time but still remained an ally.) He did not use his age to push himself into a leadership role; he accepted that #Teddy and #Zachary had invited him, and that they could tell him what to do. Since Bob had previously made a career of seeking out situations where the other TCT children were being violently assaulted and then standing idly by with his TV camera rolling in order to make money from the story, one of the first things the TCT leaders told Bob was that he had to give up on that hobby and actually work with the kids instead of seeing them as money-makers. Bob realized that this meant he could no longer have a truce with #Dr. Zame. However he was allowed to retain his wrestling show, in which the battles were indifferent to outside conflicts, and therefore standing by watching someone get pounded by an enemy was acceptable behavior.

Bob (2)

Bob

Bob was an Earthling who was well known for his skill in boxing and his aggressively masculine personality. He owned a spaceship called Earth Experiment I. He swore allegiance to TCT and used his money and power on Earth to help TCT get things done on Earth. Unlike the TCT kids, he answered to no higher authority, and he asked for no protection on his many missions. He was both intelligent and physically strong; Bob was thus, at his peak, the kids' strongest adult ally, far more helpful to them than their own teacher.

However, early on, he had been more of a pest than a hero. When he heard that on planet Tebbala there existed a league of child superheros entrusted with their nation's most important military missions, he moved to Tebbala and did his best to keep up with any news involving the kids. He learned that they all lived in #Lewiston, in the nation of Camia, so Bob made Lewiston his new home.

First Crystal mission

When Bob heard that two 10-year-old TCT boys were about to embark on a mission to recover Camia's national treasure, the Four Gems of Tebbala, he located their spaceship and then blocked their path as they attempted to board the ship so he could make them give him a free ride to planet Efsajhs (sic). He said that space travel was too expensive for him, particularly to a planet so far away as Efsajhs. The boys pleaded with him and explained that they were on a mission critical to the well-being of their nation, and didn't have time to stop off on another planet before meeting up with their enemies. But Bob merely stood in place and didn't let the desperate young soldiers get by. Even with their superpowers, they had no way of removing someone as large and solidly built as Bob when he was leaning against the door of their ship. The boys could not simply paralyze him because the door opened outward and he would thus still be blocking their path even if they tried to fit through under his armpits.

One of the boys, #Zachary, offered to simply kill Bob, but the leader of the mission, #Teddy, refused to even consider using violence against the man holding up their mission. Zachary obeyed Teddy and backed down.

The boys reluctantly took Bob aboard their spaceship. After a few minutes in space, an alien from planet Theta hit the boys' ship with missiles and kidnapped both the boys and Bob. As he was brought to prison, Bob realized he had made a very bad decision. But the boys eventually escaped and returned to Theta to rescue Bob, who thanked them by eating the food they had brought with them on their spaceship.

Second Crystal mission

Several months later, Bob heard that the Crystals had been stolen again. Realizing his opportunity, he sneaked out to the launchpad and when morning came he stood in front of their ship and blocked their path yet again. But this time he had studied up on interplanetary politics before he went out, and was able to convince the boys he could actually help in the mission instead of just being a parasite. In turn, the kids had prepared for this situation by buying extra food supplies.

The boys reluctantly took Bob aboard their spaceship. After a few minutes in space, an alien from planet Bonæ hit the boys' ship and abducted both the boys and Bob. As he was led into a torture chamber, Bob realized he had made a very bad decision. But the boys eventually escaped the dungeon and rescued Bob, who finally redeemed himself by correctly predicting the location of the Crystals that the boys were attempting to recover.

Later maturation of personality

As Bob spent more time on Tebbala, he began to regret his earlier behavior. He realized that if, instead of taking advantage of the kids and repeatedly making their lives difficult when they were simply obeying their orders, he instead made friends with them and earned their trust, he could get a lot further in his own life by drawing on their power. Bob did not ask for formal authority over the superheros, as he knew that Nancy wouldn't give him even a minor role, but he declared that he was a politician and made sure that all of his public views on issues involving the kids in TCT and the other leagues were the same as those of the kids themselves. (They nearly always agreed with each other because their teacher, #Nancy, told them what their opinions were.) However, he sometimes disagreed with the kids and tried to sway their opinion, even at the risk of losing their trust.

When planet #Theta, populated by giant spiders, attacked the children's homes with ballistic missiles and then invaded their hometown with ground troops, Camia's military called the now-homeless kids and assigned them the task of making peace with the invaders. But Bob showed up in Lewiston and tried to convince the kids to at least fight back.

In this, he succeeded, as one of the children (#Hikik) stood up at the podium after the mayor had been knocked out and announced his declaration of war. In his earlier years, Bob might have reacted to this by smiling and then retreating to the sidelines while the kids fought against the oversized belligerents. But the new, improved Bob declared himself to be part of the fight and physically attacked the spiders that were physically attacking the kids.

Soon, #Teddy wanted to adopt Bob as a full member of #TCT and let him participate in all of their plans. Bob said he wasn't interested, but Teddy kept in touch with him and they cooperated without formally adopting him. As it happened, the kids at this time were still required to obey #Nancy, and Nancy overruled Teddy, saying that no Earthlings should be let in. (She did not object to enrolling the Cleanup Corps kids because the Cleanup Corps were moving to Tebbala by so doing.)

Nancy agreed with the majority of the TCT kids in disapproving of Bob's freewheeling manners, and Bob soon began to drift apart from TCT. Late in their history, as TCT was moving towards independence, they promised they would remain close allies with him but came to an agreement amongst themselves that if Bob were to change his mind one day and try to join TCT as a regular member they would reject him. (They also rejected most girls, children younger than 10, and Earthlings.) By contrast, they were willing to enroll Bob the wrestling promoter even though he had never been an ally of theirs and had in many cases simply stood by holding his microphone as he watched the kids get beat up by their enemies.

In the original DSAS book, I identified Bob(2) as a wrestling promoter, showing that I had already confused him with Bob(1) even at that early date. It's even possible that they were the same character originally, but if so, I must have separated them very early on and then later got them mixed up again, because I have notes that show them as distinct people. Moreover, this theory seems less likely given that there were originally three Bobs, and the chronologically earliest of the three ("parasite" Bob) differs greatly from the middle one (Bob the wrestler), but in many ways resembles the chronologically latest one ("hero" Bob).

In the short scrap I called DSAS3, Bob(2) created an organization called Befriend Our Body and opened its membership to TCT kids and others who wanted to help Bob without renouncing their allegiances to any of the other groups.

External history of Bob

I seem to have confused Bob(1) and Bob(2) quite a lot. I wrote in my red notebook that one of them was an Earthling and the other was a wrestler. I think the fact that they were both into contact sports whereas the rest of the world seemed to be almost entirely without athletes caused me to infiltrate Bob(1)'s personality with ideas that belonged originally to Bob(2), such as believing that he was an Earthling.

"Hero" Bob and "Parasite" Bob were originally separate people, but Ive made him a dynamic character who started out as a manipulative and ungrateful intruder who disrupted the children's attempts to defend their home planet solely so he could get a free ride to a different planet, but quickly changed into their strongest ally within less than two years. The only major barrier to making this decision is that I need to explain how Bob got so much money in so short of a time. Perhaps he wasn't actually poor to begin with, even though I imagined him being stranded on Tebbala rather than moving their purposely.

C

Callista

Callista

Callista

Callista was a minor character I remember creating in my late teens. She never appeared in even a single story, but I might revive her as a replacement for the Veronica character of my earliest writings. However, I've just discovered that Callista originated as a renaming of #Barbara, who is too young to be the "Veronica" character as she would have been roughly six years old at the time that "Veronica" was active. So I will repurpose the name, and the rest of the information here is for the Veronica character rather than Barbara.

Callista's personality

Callista was clumsy and often felt helpless. She often cried, and was thus an exception to the rule that the superheros, even the youngest ones, never cried when they were injured or angry or even when they were sad. However, since Veronica didn't have any superpowers, Callista wouldn't either, and therefore she was not so much a superhero but a shield for the other kids to hide behind when facing off against a difficult enemy. Essentially, Callista would get beat up and try to fool their enemies into thinking she was about to fight back while the other kids launched much more powerful attacks. While this doesn't sound much like Veronica at all, none of the representations of the Archie characters I created resembled their originals in personality.

Callista's alignment

Even though Callista got beat up in nearly every battle, the other kids didn't give her any sympathy, because she was "bad". She may have been of Wamian descent, and thus hated by even the kindest of the Camians she lived among, since Camia was at war with Wamia. They believed in the "zewan rule", which stated that if Callista tried hard enough she could become "good" like the others and start winning battles even if she still did not have superpowers. They thus blamed her for her own frailty, and never shed a tear.

Callista's battle strategy

Callista "fought" battles by taking the hits for the other children, making herself appear to be strong while being the weakest of the seven superheros in their league. During one battle, the kids were fighting a gigantic villain named the Pumpkin. The Pumpkin crushed Simon and #Stacy almost immediately. Callista's reaction to this was to run right into the Pumpkin, who then crushed her as well. Then, the Pumpkin crushed Teddy and as Teddy fell down he hurt Gary as well, meaning that of the six children who had entered the room only Zachary (Jughead) was still standing. ("Reggie" was not in this battle.) Zachary decided to kill the Pumpkin, and then helped revive the other children.

Calvin

Calvin Blaisdell

See #Scott.

Camia

See Camia.

Camian Combat

See #Fort Calamity.

Carla

Carla

Carla

Carla Bread was a girl, 13 years old at the time of the peak of the war. She lived in Oklahoma on the planet Earth and enjoyed astronomy and often thought about life on other planets.

She was lying in bed watching horror movies on her laptop and finding them unconvincing when suddenly four small aliens invaded her bedroom and started to tug at her pajamas. It was the second alien invasion for the Bread family, so she was prepared for a fight but she was still very scared.

Carla pushed her way through the flock of aliens and ran out of her bedroom. One alien hit her with a dart, which paralyzed her and made her fall unconscious. Then they carried her out of the house and headed for their spaceship, which had Carla's name embossed on one side. They were succeeding in their mission of kidnapping Carla and carrying her back to their home planet.

Partly by coincidence, at this very moment two of the TCT boys were in the same neighborhood so they could visit Carla's older brother, Carl. The boys saved Carla from abduction by throwing a force field around the aliens' spaceship, preventing it from leaving Earth. Carla soon realized that while she had been indeed very lucky, her rescue was not as fantastic a coincidence as it had seemed because the kids in TCT and the aliens who had tried to kidnap her had been spying on each other, and that she would not have been attacked in the first place if the TCT boys hadn't chosen to visit her older brother.

Carla also had a younger brother named Toby, but he never appeared independently. I'm pretty sure I took Toby as a stereotypical "little boy" name because I had only heard of that name from a movie starring a child actor.

Boyfriend

Carla had a boyfriend named Bob, but this was not any of the Bobs mentioned elsewhere in my writings. I think I kjust liked the name.

Carolyn

Carolyn

Carolyn

Carolyn was a small girl who joined the #Cleanup Corps around the age of 8 years old. She contributed very little to the Corps, and stated that she wanted to work in the fashion industry instead of slogging around the world cleaning up toxic waste spills with the other children. Nevertheless, she was willing to complete her missions, and never abandoned even the most dangerous missions she was placed on. Many times she was shot at by other Earthlings simply because they did not want her and the other kids fixing environmental problems without asking permission.

When the Cleanup Corps was rescued from their abysmal situation by #STS, Carolyn hoped that her life would get better. On the way to planet Tebbala, a man calling himself Dr. Snow hit the ship she was riding in with a nuclear missile, completely destroying its engine. The children aboard the ship held hands as they plummeted to the ground below, protected partially by a force field that Teddy and Zachary had wrapped around them. Dr. Snow kept on shooting them as they fell, and then landed amidst the crowd of kids when they hit the ground. However, there were too many kids in one place for Dr. Snow to handle, and in the end it was Snow who was captured by the kids rather than the other way around. Carolyn was terrified by the experience, as she had hoped her days of being violently assaulted by assorted supervillains were over, and Nancy agreed to put Carolyn in a very reserved position and not force her onto most of the dangerous missions unless everybody else was already tied up.

Christian

Christian

Christian

Christian was a tall #Camian Combat boy who attempted to join #TCT after they broke away from their teacher. He was younger than the TCT boys, but by the age of 10 could beat up mutants with his bare hands. He had superpowers, but he served mostly as a "muscle" fighter.

Cleanup Corps

Cleanup Corps

Cleanup Corps

The Cleanup Corps (CTC) was a group of eight elementary school students living in Seattle on planet Earth whose purpose was to clean up toxic waste spills and other environmental problems. This for some reason caused some of the other Earthlings to hate them, and since Earth was so overpopulated, the Cleanup Corps kids were under attack everywhere they went. Most attackers used traditional Earth weaponry such as machine guns, but they also suffered more advanced attacks such as torpedos and timebombs.

Unlike other superhero leagues, these kids had no superpowers, nor did they have any advanced technology, and they were thus the most hapless of all of the "child superhero" leagues. Nevertheless, the eight children stuck together, and their teacher, Tammy, defended them to the best of her ability. The children's names were #Vince, #Sheila, #Mitch, #Zak, #Sam, #Barb, #Carolyn, and #Oliver.

One day, #Nancy called up eight of her students (they were actually Hikik's league, STS) and told them that she was bothered by the fact that the universe had an Earth in it, and assigned the STS kids the task of destroying planet Earth. The eight students she assigned this mission to were #Hikik, #Lumyt, #Barry, #Jason, #John, #Tim, and #Satykhuci.

The STS kids obeyed her orders and left their current mission on Xema for Earth. Once on Earth, they immediately began destroying buildings and attempting to trigger natural disasters to kill all of the Earthlings.

While they were at the height of their massacre, however, the STS kids met up with the Cleanup Corps kids. Perhaps the Cleanup Corps were trying to pick up some uranium bomb shells that the STS kids had accidentally dropped so that they could be properly and dutifully recycled into reusable consumer products while simultaneously dodging sniper fire from their enemies on Earth and the mechanical attacks from STS itself. But when the STS kids realized that there were people on Earth who were actually doing good deeds instead of causing massive pollution and overpopulation problems, they decided to cancel their mission and let the remaining Earthlings live in peace for the time being. Then they adopted the Cleanup Corps into STS and brought them back to Tebbala.

Cleanup Corps expands

Although the leadership of STS remained with Hikik, the name of the new expanded league was the Cleanup Corps, as if the younger children had adopted the older ones rather than the other way around. This was partly because whereas STS had simply gone on mission after mission at Nancy's whims, the Cleanup Corps had had a single purpose for its entire existence, and STS agreed to dedicate itself to that purpose as well.

Since the STS adventurers were all boys, the new league had 13 boys and only 3 girls, and those three girls were among the youngest members. Nancy did not see this as a problem, however, and neither did most of the Cleanup Corps' members. Since just a few days earlier, some female adventurers such as #Jen and #Justine had been removed from TCT, Nancy contemplated moving them into the Cleanup Corps, but she was worried that Hikik was now mostly independent from his teacher and would not follow her plans.

The Soothsayers

An early alternative name for the Cleanup Corps was the Soothsayers, and this name was retained to denote the original eight members after the name Cleanup Corps came to be used for an expansion league consisting of the Soothsayers plus Hikik and his comrades in STS.

Coldwater

Coldwater

Coldwater

Coldwater was a girl who became a FILTER member after FILTER absorbed another girls' league. She was the twin sister of Eye, but despite her name, was not related to Ice. Cold-related names were common among the Islanders.

Coldwater was very tall and physically strong, and was very skilled with magic. Enemies tended to try to avoid her in battle and would run away if they got too close. However, she was very shy, unlike her sister, and avoided seeking political power within FILTER.

D

Dana

Dana M.

Dana

Dana "Simon" Mitchell was a tall, dark-haired boy who belonged to TCT and went with them on early missions. He did not like girls in general, and went so far as to rename himself Simon to avoid being associated with a girl also named Dana who was in the same branch of TCT. He had very strong superpowers: he once tested as the 4th strongest person in the world. However, like #Stacy, he spent much of his time working in politics, meeting with world leaders to argue TCT's position on an issue while covertly looking for a way to increase his own power relative to the rest of TCT.

Relationship with Dr. Zāme

#Dr. Zāme soon decided that Dana was his favorite adventurer, and grew so fond of Dana that he created an army of oversized Dana lookalikes who attacked the kids, including Dana, at the most inopportune times.

Dana moves up

When TCT declared itself effectively independent from its teacher and advisor, and stated that they would approve and reject new members based on their own choices rather than those of adults, Dana was worried he would be expelled. But he survived, because the TCT kids were running their membership exams based almost entirely on physical fitness tests and a brief scholastic aptitude test.

However, he was soon ejected from the league, as he soon began losing practice fights to 8 year old girls, and it was rumored that what he really wanted was not a pathway to becoming a hero but a pathway to becoming the next world-class supervillain. Nevertheless, he was allowed to remain in politics, and remained formally an ally of TCT and of STW even as TCT branched away from STW.

Personality and identity

Dana continues the Dilton character from my very early writing when I was writing Archie fanfiction, but I seem to have made this connection only very late, after I was 20 years old, and unlike the Jughead/Zachary connection, Dana/Dilton was a purposeful decision to purge out an Archie Comics holdover rather than a realization of something I had likely been thinking subconsciously all along.

He often kept his hands in his pockets.

Dana R.

Dana

Dana Randolph was a girl who joined TCT early on. She was a competent member, but was eliminated along with most of the other female members when TCT declared independence from its teacher and switched its membership criteria to a battery of tests mostly involving physical endurance and other tests of battle hardiness. Few of the girls were able to keep up with the boys in these tests, even though most of the boys were between 8 and 12 years old and had a body type little different than the girls'.

Unlike many other girls who had been expelled from TCT for being physically weak, Dana lost interest in their missions in general and did not simply switch to an accessory league such as the Cleanup Corps or the Thūta brothers' league.

Donald

Donald

Donald

Donald was a 4-year-old boy with curly blonde hair who was a member of #LSL and helped the other LSL children fight their battles. Of the five preschoolers, he was the least enthusiastic about his missions and often had to be coerced to join a battle. However, he was stronger than average, and was thus a highly valued member of the team.

He was sometimes called a "cloud head" because of his curly hair, and the people of the town had a stereotype that people with curly hair were ditzy and always confused, similar to the blonde stereotypes of bimillenial America.

E

Eartha

Eartha

Eartha

Eartha was a teenage girl with long blonde hair, and one of the most powerful people in the feminist organization called #FILTER. She had a boyfriend, #Power, who obeyed her every command. When they were 13 years old, she was about six inches taller than him and much stronger both physically and magically. His powers, however, complemented hers very well, as she had powers he lacked and he had powers she lacked. Thus, the blonde teenage couple of Power & Eartha appeared near the front lines of nearly every major battle.

Relationship with Power

Power grew taller in his middle teen years, but never reached the height of his girlfriend. Nevertheless, when the couple visited the world outside their sheltered FILTER camps, they found that people often accused Power of abusing his girlfriend. This is because, despite their strong healing abilities, both teens were often wounded in battle and thus appeared in public with easily visible injuries. Eartha generally did not let Power speak unless she spoke to him first, so Power had a difficult time defending himself against such accusations when she was present.

Relationship with other FILTER girls

In FILTER's early days, Eartha was the only member with a boyfriend. This led some of the other girls in FILTER to jealousy. Upset at their own lack of success in romance, FILTER girls such as #Julia and #Eye beat up Power, stole his clothes, and threatened to disfigure him badly enough that Eartha would dump him and therefore wouldn't have a boyfriend anymore. However, whenever he was beaten up, Power realized he was lucky enough to have a girlfriend that had strong healing powers in order to make the pain go away.

Eartha's superpowers

Lifeline

"Through her womb", Eartha was able to heal others' wounds. I imagined this as being essentially a placenta with an umbilical cord that would attach to an ally's body and feed nutrients and therefore heal their wounds. I'm pretty sure that I had the name Lifeline before I got the idea to make it the literal "life line" that an umbilical cord provides to a baby, but not by much. One might have thought I would be bothered by a female fighter assuming a decidedly maternal role for her boyfriend and for others on the battlefield, but I never really thought about women's bodies this way even then. To me, a womb was just a womb.

Taking energy out of the Earth

Eartha could take energy out of the Earth, and use this energy to heal or harm others. Eartha was fond of hand-to-hand combat, and with this power she could punch and kick with the strength of more than a hundred ordinary men. Thus, she was a good choice for fighting large mutants and other creatures that would normally be immune even to hits from advanced weapons. (A bullet, for example, might be able to pierce the skin of a gigantic frog, but the amount of damage done would still be miniscule. Eartha, by contrast, was able to make her entire body as strong as a bullet and therefore cause much greater damage.)

This power also helped her defensively. Many times, Eartha's enemies hit her with bombs and bullets, but the bullets simply bounced off of her body and the bombs blew up her surroundings but left Eartha herself unscathed. Thus, in some ways, Eartha was a very close match for a typical RPG video game superhero.

Cold weather

Eartha had the ability to conjure up a full-sized glacier in order to both crush her enemies and freeze them to death. It was actually #Julia that taught her this move.

Echinix

Echinix

Echinix

Echinix was a teenage girl who joined #TCT after they broke away from their teacher and started an independent membership drive. She was an unusual choice, as she differed from the others in many ways. At the time she joined, there was only one other girl among the many boys. Also, while not an adult, she was older and more experienced than the other members (except #Bob (1), who was an adult).

Echinix enjoyed fighting and participated often at Bob's wrestling arena, where she usually won. She considered herself a true tomboy and was happy to see that she fit right in with the TCT boys. She became less successful in TCT over time, however, and remained generally one of the lowest priority members for assigning missions. This was not due to her lack of physical or mental ability but to her seemingly intractable personality, always wanting to be in charge and rarely admitting when she had made a bad decision.

Her unusual name referred to one of her battle costumes, where she dressed as a hedgehog ("echinus"). She was taller than the boys and considered herself a match for any of them in a fight, even the ones with the most superpowers.

Eddy

Eddy

Eddy

Eddy was a robot created by #Dr. Zāme to attack the TCT kids, and, in some cases, their weaker allies. It was an oversized replica of #Dana M., Dr. Zāme's favorite adventurer.

Unlike other robots, Eddy had strong superpowers and could not simply be "zapped to pieces" either with weapons or with the TCT kids' superpowers. Among Eddy's powers were:

• Invisibility (Manar) Eddy's could turn invisible, just like some of the TCT kids.

• Force field (Mudubies) Eddy's could shoot force fields, and even had control of the rare ability to make a moving force field, allowing Eddy to drag someone towards him. The only way to stop this was to create another force field on the inside of Eddy's outer one, which would stop the TCT'er from being captured but would also trap him within just a short distance of Eddy.

• Electric shock (Susāmu) Eddy's could also "zap" people, which would cause pain but not be fatal.

Eddy's were fairly strong physically as well, and the TCT children realized that even with all of their powers, they needed to back off and attack from a distance so that they would not get beaten up.

Super Eddy

Super Eddy

Super Eddy was an improved version of Eddy that had stronger attacks and stronger defense powers. In one story, Super Eddy attacks with bombs, but I was not clear if the Eddy's conjured the bombs or if Dr. Zāme supplied them.

Eye

Eye

Eye

Eye was a girl who was a member of FILTER after FILTER expanded by incorporating another girls' league. She was the twin sister of Coldwater. She was very outgoing and easy to make friends with. She was very tall, but not as violent or as skilled in combat as most of the other girls. Thus, she remained at the base much of the time.

Her unusual name led to some confusion, as when the Islanders spoke English, they would occasionally say things like "Wow, I must be really stupid" and Eye would get upset at the perceived insult. She never really learned to get over this because the primary language of the core Islanders was not English and they usually spoke English only in mixed company.

Eye also did not like being confused with her twin sister. One day, she beat up Power and left him bleeding on the floor because he had mistakenly delivered her a meal that had been ordered instead by Coldwater.

Ezra

Ezra

Ezra

Ezra Yurkowski was the founder of #STW, and was still alive at the time of the peak of the war. He had total power, but delegated much of his authority to the chiefs of bases such as #Nancy at STW Base 7. He was a rare example of a male authority figure who was unquestionably positive, but he was also very passive and allowed Nancy to directly control the lives of the STW kids, including those in #TCT.

Some years after the worst of the war was over, Nancy realized her greatest dream: the construction in the Southwest of a new STW base, one with an infinite budget. Nancy installed herself as chief of this base, subject only to a rubber-stamp review from Ezra. Ezra was a close ally of hers now, as he was not as suspicious of her intent as were many other STW leaders. In fact, she encouraged him to come out of his shell and take a more active role in the government of STW. Previously, few people had dared even offer suggestions to the president, as he was considered wise by himself. But Nancy organized open talks with him, trying to create a similar authoritarian image for herself. Ezra reacted to this by appointing Nancy the new president of STW.

F

Fort Calamity

Fort Calamity

Fort Calamity

Fort Calamity was a dome whose area was about 20 square miles located on an island in the permafrost region of the "Moonshine" area of Camia. All twelve months of the year had an average temperature below freezing, making Fort Calamity even colder than the coldest settlements in the Canadian Arctic. However, life for humans and other animals was possible because the churning oceans beneath the ice often broke up icebergs in the area and therefore left areas of open ocean along the shores of the island even in winter.

Fort Calamity had been built by the mainstream Camian military, but when they realized that they had dozens of child superheros living in their nation, they turned control of the fort over to #STW and removed all their adult male soldiers from the fort. The intention was that the fort would be completely unoccupied most of the time, but that STW and its subleagues such as #TCT could use it in the event that they ever needed to flee from their enemies but did not want to take shelter among the mainline Camian army.

Environment

Despite being located in a permanently snowbound habitat, the fort hosted wolves, seals, and various birds which ate sea life. This is because the fort was constructed in such a way that it did not disturb access to the sea even from inside the building. This was in keeping with Camia's general philosophy of environmentalism, specifically the belief that human activity could actually improve nature and therefore enable wildlife to thrive where they previously could not.

Despite the cold climate, the flowing motion of the rivers kept them partially ice free during the summer. It was thus possible to swim into the fort by going underneath the wall, but the Camian military figured that nobody, even with advanced technology, would be able to make such a journey even if they discovered the loophole.

#Dr. Zāme claimed to be able to breathe underwater, and threatened to invade the fort by swimming through the river. In reality, Zāme was merely using conventional scuba equipment and a few submarines.

Note: On the Camia page I have Fort Calamity being on an island of its own at about 43N, which is part of the icecap but, as above, still gets access to the ocean due to the chruning motions of the water beneath the floating ice. Howeever in my red notebook I said it was on Manito Island, which is even colder because it is at 54N.

Population of Fort Calamity

For a long time, the fort was completely unoccupied, as it was intended to be used only a place for soldiers to retreat into in the case of an emergency from which they could not otherwise escape. A small number of mainline Camian soldiers took up residence in the fort so that it would not be invaded by enemies of Camia, but these were not intended to hold the fort by themselves; they were expected to call for help in the event that the fort was attacked. The number was kept small partly because the Camian army was so weak that it was often unable to prevent #Xeman soldiers from infiltrating their soldiers.

But soon, STW, under the direction of #Nancy, began to move some kids there, mostly boys who were a bit younger than the TCT kids, with the average age being around 7 or 8 years old near the beginning of the war and 10 to 11 towards the end. These were known as the "Camian Combat" kids. (They used the acronym CC, but to avoid confusion with the #Cleanup Corps (CTC), it is here represented as CCC.) They were superheros whom Nancy wanted to protect because she felt they were not quite powerful enough to be placed into front-line combat the way the TCT kids were. At the same time, she wanted to exert firm control over them to prevent TCT or one of the other leagues from poaching the kids away from her into their league.

Nancy told Camia's government that an all-female army would be difficult for Xema to infiltrate, as Xema had no known female supervillains. But Camia could not find enough women willing to live in the fort to field an army consisting entirely of females. So Camia sent men, saying that they would have ID badges on so that Xema could not impose on them.

Inside the fort, the Camian army caught fish and cooked food for the children so that the CCC children would have the maximum amount of free time available to practice their superpowers and become stronger. Their parents did not often visit them physically, but they had access to the outside world via computers and could communicate with their loved ones indirectly. This was typical for Nancy's superhero leagues; it was actually only the strongest and most capable of the kids who still lived at home with their parents. Those who were weaker, Nancy felt, were in too much danger if they lived at home in an unprotected house with typical, non-superhero parents and siblings.

#Dr. Zāme had studied the design of Fort Calamity even before Nancy started filling it with children and concluded that it was an easy target for invasion. Dr. Zāme knew about the river access, and had equipment that would reliably protect him from both the cold temperatures of the icy river and the lack of oxygen in the water, but even so, he preferred to simply crash through the fort's protective walls with his spaceship in a hypothetical invasion. By doing so, he figured, he would prevent a counterattack because the kids would not know ahead of time where he was going to break through.

Dr. Zame was not interested in taking on the mainline Camian army and therefore left Fort Calamity alone in its early days even though he knew he could have easily bombed it from afar without putting himself in any danger. But as soon as he realized Nancy had swapped out the Camian soldiers for a population of superhero children, Dr. Zāme knew that he had to invade the fort and kidnap as many of the kids as he could possibly get hold of.

First attacks

One day early on in the war, Dr. Zāme called the fort on its holographic communication system. A small girl answered the phone and connected the call. Dr Zāme promised her that he would never bomb her or her classmates, and said that he did not want to kill them, but to abduct them and add them to his own team, whether they came to him willingly or in tears. Dr. Zāme had hacked open the computer system of the fort before the children were moved there, and was spying on the children through the same cameras that Nancy and #George used to communicate with them.

After the phone call, the girl telephoned Nancy and told her that a man calling himself Dr. Zāme had threatened to invade their fort and attack them. Nancy reassured the children that they would be able to fend off Dr. Zāme's attacks, and that if not, she would send another league of children to help bail them out.

When Dr. Zāme realized that Nancy had refused to protect the children from him even after his threatening phone call, he began to consider that perhaps Nancy was not a very benevolent leader and that he could perhaps take better care of Nancy's adopted children than she did. He considered tabling his attack plan altogether and offering to adopt the children peacefully, showing them pictures of the better parts of Xema so they would get the impression they would be better off on Xema than they were in their icy fort in Camia.

Nevertheless, he decided to go with a conventional attack. He promised a group of Xeman soldiers that if they helped Dr. Zāme invade and capture the kids, they could use the children as slaves until they reached adulthood. He had no intention of honoring this promise, but knew he could not take on the entire league of children by himself. He preceded his invasion of the fort by repeatedly bombing it, planning to blame it on his henchmen so he would not be accused of violating the promise he had made to the little girl he had spoken to on the phone.

As the walls of the fort collapsed around them, the CCC children realized they were under attack. They attempted to get into their spaceships to flee to safety. (Even though the fort and their hometowns were on the same planet, spaceships were the dominant means of travel for trips such as this.) But the bombs also destroyed their spaceships, and they realized they had no means of escape other than the front door of the fort. Then the real attack began when Dr. Zāme and his men crashed through what remained of the walls of the fort and blocked the front door with their spaceships. Then they began a conventional battle against the young chidlren inside the fort.

The children were frightened, but had spent months preparing for a situation just like this. Although Dr. Zāme had completely destroyed the fort's communications systems, the children still had portable telephones of their own so they could still call for help. Nancy panicked when she realized what had happened and sent more unarmed children to the fort as reinforcements. The mainline Camian army also sent in hundreds of men, hoping to overwhelm the Xemans by their sheer numbers even if they were less powerful overall.

Dr. Zāme had expected this, and reminded his soldiers that their job was not to kill the children, nor even to kill the incoming Camian soldiers, but to kidnap the children and return quickly to planet Xema. But this proved surprisingly difficult to accomplish. Even though the CCC kids' superpowers were much less mature than those of the #ZTSD kids (TCT did not exist yet), they had such a large land area to themselves inside the fort that they were able to elude capture while still remaining in touch with each other through their telephones so that they could flock to the rescue of anybody who actually did get kidnapped by the Xemans. Thus the Xemans were forced to search the entire fort for the children, and the mainline Camian army soon arrived. By this time, the Xemans themselves had taken up positions in hiding, using the same strategy to elude the Camians that the CCC kids were using to elude the Xemans. Nevertheless, the Camians had the superiority of numbers and the cooperation of the other two leagues (CCC and STW's makeshift army of children), and they soon captured most of the Xeman soldiers. (Dr. Zāme escaped, as he had superpowers helping him out.)

After the battle ended with a victory for the mainline Camian soldiers and the CCC kids, both groups of Camians realized that the fort was well-designed after all, as the kids had had plenty of hiding places to dive into during the invasion. However, they promised to rebuild the fort and upgrade its security system so that they would not be so easily invaded in the future. Additionally, the mainline Camian army promised to keep its soldiers in the fort at all times unless they were ordered out by Nancy. (This was more a matter of securing food supply than of security.)

Telephone system

Fort Calamity was fitted with a holographic telephone projector in each room, meaning that, in an emergency, Nancy could contact the entire population of children and adults in the fort all at once by projecting herself into each room. Outside calls were automatically blocked because Dr. Zāme had previously found out the telephone number of the fort and made repeated prank calls to the kids in the middle of the night in the hopes that they would soon disconnect the phone lines and therefore cut themselves off from Nancy.

Before the fort was in use by the superheros, Dr Zāme had penetrated the security system and began to use the projectors as spycams. When the children moved to the fort, he was thus able to spy on them in nearly every room through their closed circuit TVs. (These were still called telephones.) In response, the children began to speak in code. Their first code language was a failure, as it happened to simply be another world language that Dr Zame already knew. Later, they developed an unbreakable code. Dr Zame was still able to spy on the kids physically, in the sense that he knew where they were, but he could no longer learn their plans for action ahead of time.

Frog Pond

Frog Pond

Frog Pond

Frog Pond was a metaphorical place known to practitioners of the Ridiam religion living in Lewiston that was seen as a goal all should strive for. George Kennedy did not understand the metaphor, and believed that Frog Pond was an actual place located somewhere within their swampy habitat. By contrast, Nancy understood that it was meant metaphorically.

G

Gary

Gary

Gary Ziegler was the child of Wamian immigrants who settled in Camia at the height of Camia's war against Wamia. In fifth grade, he got beat up by Camian kids about once every two days. Sometimes, though, the Camians took him along on their missions so their enemies could have an easy target to distract them from attacking the Camians. Since he didn't have any superpowers, he generally fought his enemies by screaming for help and running away or, when fighting animals, attempting to get the animals to chase him around so that the other kids could attack the animals. When caught, Gary would try to slap and kick his enemies, hoping that he would be rescued by one of the other kids before his legs were bitten off.

Gary's battle strategy

Gary did not have superpowers, and often played the role of "bait" in battles, particularly battles against mutants. Mutants would attack Gary, expecting him to counterattack, but in reality the counterattack would come from one of the other kids who had been using Gary as a shield in order to have a better shot at the enemies. Thus, Gary was often injured early on in the battle and needed to be healed by one of the other kids.

Gary did sometimes attack, but because of his weak body and lack of superpowers, such attempts to help out usually led him to injure himself almost as badly as he was injured when he was actually being attacked. In one battle, when the kids were facing off against firebirds, he punched one of the birds' beaks but this merely hurt his hand and not did harm the bird at all. In another battle, he was fighting an injured hedgehog given to him by the other kids but was unable to project his kicks and punches through the animal's body and therefore was the only boy that day that did not successfully kill a hedgehog. Instead, Teddy simply tossed a bomb at the hedgehog and blew him up.

However, Gary did have his shining moments. During one battle, #Teddy and another boy (probably #Hikik) were fighting a pack of mutants, most prominently the carnivorous echinus species. They used their superpowers to hover in the air while Gary remained on the ground to draw the mutants towards him. The other two boys had been reliably hitting the animals with their superpowers, but after Hikik threw a "cherry" bomb, Teddy got angry and decided to take time out from fighting the animals to start an argument with his friend about which type of bomb would the best to use to defeat the monsters. Hikik responded by escalating the argument and therefore also pulling out of the battle. After racing around the battlefield desperately trying to survive, Gary screamed "STOP FIGHTING!" and the other two boys apologized to each other and started fighting the animals again.

On another day #Lilal (not Dr. Zāme) sent out some mutants after the kids, and Gary happened to be with them at the time. The kids had a very difficult time and seemed to be unable to injure any of the mutants. Gary pointed out their mistake: they had been reading about pacifism and had decided that they would try to fight the mutants by curling up and trying to protect themselves, but they had forgotten that in order to kill the mutants they would need to use an attack.

Attempts to fight Dr. Zāme

Because he spied on the kids in his free time, Dr. Zāme knew that Gary was weak, and was puzzled that TCT even allowed Gary to enter the field of battle. During the first battle where they met each other, after Dr. Zāme had been tricked into exiting his laboratory, he found himself surrounded by five boys standing about an arm's length away. After shooting two of the boys with his gun, he ran straight for Gary, planning to physically restrain Gary with his arms so that the other boys would be afraid that any attacks they sent at Dr. Zāme would also kill Gary. However, the other kids acted so quickly that Dr. Zāme didn't have time to put this strategy into action, as he was hit with a bomb within a few seconds of exiting his lab.

Career in school

Other students at school rejoiced when Gary enrolled as a student, because they knew that they now had someone they could beat up and not worry about being punished by their parents and teachers. Some of the grownups even joined in on the abuse themselves, such as in one story when a Camian woman pushed Gary into the very polluted Xʷīssirà River, west of #Lewiston, hoping he would die from exposure to the poisonous chemicals. Gary survived, but the woman was never brought to trial simply because no court in Camia considered the attempted murder of a 10-year-old Wamian boy to be a crime.

In fifth grade, Gary moved to a new school so he could avoid the bullies who beat him up. One day, two Camian kids invaded the school and held Gary's classroom hostage (including the man who was teaching the class). They were worried that the Wamian school might be teaching its students to hate Camians and figured they could mend relations by breaking into the school and stopping their lessons. However, they were embarrassed when they discovered that the teacher had actually been promoting peaceful relations and an end to the war that Camia and Wamia were fighting. They decided to let the teacher go, but they grabbed Gary and took him out of the school anyway so that they could claim their mission had succeeded.

Gary's physical appearance

Brownn hair in early comics but later I recast him as a blonde teen. Despite obvious racism against the Wamians by the Camians, they did not seem to be visually distinct from each other. In my very early comics, Gary was smaller than Teddy, but this was just me being jealous because I was smaller than everybody else I went to school with, and projected my inferiority complex onto Gary while projecting the ideal I wished I could be onto Teddy. Later, I seem to have grown out of this (lol), and made the two boys about the same height.

Rule 63

In my early adulthood I changed Gary into a girl named "Pepare". This was a "Xap III" name, a conlang I don't have info about online anywhere, although it occupies the same geographical area as some of the offshoots of Ogili. If I had considered this canonical, all of the stories about Gary being beaten up and others, including teachers, simply laughing at him, would be arguably even more absurd because the many boys who bullied Gary/Pepare would now be beating up on a little girl. I'm sure that the Camians really would laugh if they saw some of their own children beating up a Wamian immigrant girl, but I think that those children would be less likely to do such a thing.

Pepare is the source of my idea that Gary had blonde hair, but I don't consider recasting him as a girl to be canonical. I did similar genderswaps with a few of the other male characters I created, and have reverted those as well because I think the stories make more sense if they are roughly 80% boys, even if they are less exciting that way. I suppose another reason to keep Gary as a boy is that, in my youth, I never identified myself as a girl or as "like a girl" in such a way that swapping one of my self-insert characters' gender would be appropriate.

other info

Had a soda machine in front yard.

George

George

George Kennedy was the mayor of the town the TCT boys lived in (variously called Baeba, Lewiston, and the Northeast Woods) and an advisor to the kids on their missions. Lewiston was a small town, and the people largely did not mind that he spent most of his time guarding and communicating with the TCT children at the expense of the "normal" citizens of the town. Essentially, Kennedy's Lewiston existed to serve TCT first and foremost, and the other citizens were expected to be glad to have the honor of being forced to help out. Kennedy was nevertheless a popular mayor as he was perceived by the non-TCT citizens to be one of the few men capable of handling TCT and directing its members' immense powers towards good deeds.

Like most adults, he got along perfectly well with other adults and never seemed to have a weak moment. However, in the short scrap story I called DSAS3, he had an argument with Nancy fairly early on in the story.

Unlike most adults, George Kennedy admired the children in TCT and occasionally even followed them on missions to ensure that they were doing well. Even Nancy, their teacher, did not do that. Even when he was not on a mission, he often watched the children through cameras that he installed in their spaceships and in other places the children visited. George actually claimed that he had designed the spaceships himself, and the children believed him, until one day on planet Namma the children were mistaken for Earthlings until they got out of their spaceships. The children thus realized that George had not designed their ships, but had taken them from Earthlings, possibly with the help of #Bob (2).

There may be a minor plot problem in that some of the kids did not seem to recognize George in Chapter 1 of DSAS, but yet just a few weeks later he was planning out missions and "designing" spaceships for them to use on those missions as though he had known the kids for years and had been granted their trust. Another possible explanation, though, is that it was George who didn't recognize some of the kids; this would make more sense if George was the mayor of the town they lived in and would presumably be well known by people who were as well attuned to the goings-on of the town as were the kids in TCT.

Other jobs

George was also a professor and had an above average education by Camia's standards. (Whether Camia is above average relative to its rivals is a matter of perspective; all Camians by the age of 13 knew how to survive in the wilderness and deal with animal attacks even if deprived of weapons, but many could not do simple arithmetic.)

In my early writing I sometimes called George a president, but I think I may have just been unfamiliar with political terminology at the time and not trying to re-create my own "President Kennedy". I also wrote that his "place of residence change[d]" frequently, which would seem to be horribly irresponsible behavior for a mayor. But not so much as risking his own life by traveling with the kids to planet Xema on a mission doomed to fail. Rather than being a poor mayor, George Kennedy simply placed his priorities elsewhere, considering his job as an advisor to TCT to come first and his duty to the rest of the town that had elected him mayor second.

H

Hayden

Hayden

Hayden

Hayden was a small girl with wavy blonde hair who joined #LSL near the height of the war, at the age of three. She was less than three feet tall and weighed only about 30 pounds, making her the smallest of the major combatants in the war. She had poor vision and needed to rely on others to tell her where to go. Additionally, she had very poor motor coordination, to the point of having difficulty even remaining standing up. Nevertheless, her magic powers brought her into the league, and she looked forward to a day when she would be taller and more physically capable of supporting herself.

Hayden was interested in music but did not have a lot of free time. Her best friend, #Audrey, was a renowned composer of music despite herself being also only three years old. However, Audreyhad some help from Hayden's (not Audrey's) father. The two three-year-olds and the man formed a band recording instrumental music. They were very popular, even overseas, and received subsidies from Camia's government. However, they were often unsuccessful at meeting their government-run record label's targets because Hayden was often forced to leave a recording session unexpectedly to go save the planet.

Name

At the time I created this character, I did not know (or, more likely, did not remember) that there was a classical music composer named Haydn. Thus, this is an unintentional coincidence.

Hikik

Hikik

Hikik

Hikik was a young boy of the Thūta family who had many talents and served as a well-rounded superhero who did not lead many missions but was always a strong ally. Hikik was the twin brother of Lumyt. Hikik's one weakness was his desire to be in power and the resulting arrogance at feeling constantly superior to the other kids. Originally, Hikik was a captain at STW, considered an equal of Teddy, but his commands were unpopular with the other students, and he eventually abdicated in favor of #Zachary. Nevertheless, he retained both his obnoxious attitude and his talent for putting his strengths to good use.

Hikik was present on nearly every mission against Dr. Zāme. He also traveled to other planets to meet world leaders and help shape the course of interplanetary politics. He even shouted a brave impromptu speech when a political meeting was invaded by aliens from the planet Theta, when his nation's own leaders were too frightened to react.

In the year 4190, George Kennedy split TCT into two separate leagues and immediately assigned the two leagues to two different types of space missions. To his delight, the other kids voted to put Hikik in charge of the league, which they called STS, with his brother sharing the power but having no official role. On the first day of their new independent existence, George Kennedy assigned the STS kids a mission on Xema facing off against the supervillains such as Dr. Zāme that had troubled them for so long. Meanwhile, the other league, which had retained the name TCT because it had retained Teddy & Zachary as leaders, got a much less dangerous mission on Earth. The STS kids of course accepted their mission but were puzzled when Nancy called them up shortly after their arrival on Xema to tell them to abort the mission because she needed them to go destroy planet Earth.

On planet Earth, Hikik took the lead role in massacring the Earthling civilians, but called a halt to the war when his team discovered a group of children called the #Cleanup Corps who were potentially friendly to TCT. They decided to flee Earth and return to Teppala rather than try to explain to the Earthlings why they had destroyed only a fraction of the Earth and then suddenly left. They also decided to take the Cleanup Corps with them.

TCT reforms

Later on, TCT became the clearly dominant league, and its leaders, Teddy & Zachary, declared independence from their teacher Nancy and announced they would be willing to allow the STS kids back into TCT if they could pass TCT's new physical fitness tests. All six of the remaining STS kids agreed to switch over, and thus STS was abolished. (STS had originally had eight members, but two of them were dismissed for having brain damage.) Nancy was dismayed as she realized she had now lost complete control of her entire class to the two students within it that had chosen to break away.

I

Ice

Ice

Ice

Ice was a girl who belonged to the #FILTER club, although she was originally a member of a different superhero league that was absorbed by FILTER early on. Both leagues were strongly feministic and consisted mostly of girls. Despite her name, Ice was not related to #Coldwater.

J

Jen

Jen

Jen

Jennifer Mallard was a blonde member of TCT, STW, and #Newsletters who served as a very good all-around expert and helped TCT on all sorts of missions. However, George Kennedy removed Jen and her friend Justine at a meeting in Lewiston when it became clear that TCT's missions were about to get much more dangerous, and she never reapplied for membership when the TCT kids took over the process of enrolling new members. Thus, at 13 years old, her career as a TCT superhero was already over.

Nevertheless, she continued to help the others because she was still a member of STW, and STW cooperated with TCT. She had good grades and helped the other students with their schoolwork. She was assigned missions, including dangerous ones, but they tended to be missions that Nancy figured would not put her in the path of violence. For example, when two men crashed their spaceship on the uninhabited planet Imama-Hamapaa, whose temperatures ranged from —150F to —70F, Jen volunteered to go find them and then bring them back to Tebbala aboard her spaceship.

However, Jen soon gained a reputation for foolishness. On that very mission to rescue the men who had crashed their spaceship, Jen crashed her own spaceship on a different planet and needed to be rescued by another girl, #Tanya, after a team of small aliens kidnapped her and tried to figure out why humans wore clothes. Earlier she had had a more mundane accident playing with the printing press at Newsletters, causing the entire run of papers for that day to be spoiled.

On the other hand, she also gained a reputation for coming through in a crisis, and in two separate incidents was able to rescue the supposedly much stronger TCT members when they were captured by their enemies.

Appearance

Jen was tall, and usually wore her blonde hair with a ponytail.

Career in STW

Nancy did not think highly of Jen, and was never surprised when one of Jen's missions failed. She kept Jen mostly at home to protect her from danger, as she did with most of the other girls. However, unlike most of the other girls, Jen seemed to have a propensity to mess things up even at home, and Nancy often considered expelling her entirely from STW despite her valuable superpowers.

She was constantly harassed by Nancy in particular as Nancy held an honest conviction that it was people like Jen that were responsible for STW's few failed missions. After years of scorn and abuse from Nancy, Jen began to blame all of the world’s problems on herself and developed an acute inferiority complex. She yearned for power but was constantly tormented as her opportunities were all out of her reach.

Career in entertainment

Jen began making money by selling videotapes of herself acting out comical situations, exploiting her disabilities and general clumsiness for the sake of the jokes, to people outside STW who were willing to pay money to see her humiliate herself. These were aired on local TV from time to time to encourage the citizenry to come to STW to get more of what they had seen on TV. She did her best to exploit her clumsiness for comedy, but doing so only began to make her depressed, and she soon considered the prospect of fleeing Camia and finding refuge on #Namma where people would mostly leave her alone.

Still, her determination kept her up. She tried to act bright and sunny on the outside to fool her superiors, but deep inside she was entering a period of absolute despair.

Despite being grossly incompetent in many ways, Jen championed many political causes, but this only served to heighten already existing political bias against many of those causes she stood for. For example, she frequently protested the unfair treatment new members were given in STW, until many of these members themselves signed a petition denouncing Jen and accepting their fate as Nancy's newest victims. Jen then accused Nancy of manipulation and Nancy punished her severely.

By the age of 13, Jen had lapsed into a deep depression and Nancy again began to consider kicking her out of STW. Nancy decided the best way to get rid of Jen would be to send her on more and more difficult missions until she finally gave up and quit of her own will. However, by this time, Nancy was beginning to lose control over her students, and the leaders of #TCT reminded Jen that she could simply refuse Nancy's missions and if necessary seek shelter with TCT. Jen thus decided to drop out of school and pursue a career in politics. She kept in touch with her parents, and often visited #Teddy and especially #Zachary, but never returned to STW or reconnected with Nancy.

Jim

Jim

Jim

Jim Leland, often referred to as Jimbo, was an #LSL fighter who was four years old at the peak of the fighting. His weapon of choice was a sword, but unlike his best friend Julie he could not simply conjure up more swords if he lost his sword, and thus had to rely on her for help in every battle. She thus overshadowed him. Nevertheless, the two kids lived right next door to each other, and played with each other when they weren't out fighting battles that the regular army couldn't handle.

#Teddy was also a close friend of Jim, and being friends with someone almost triple his age made him feel confident in himself and realize that he did have strong powers of his own after all, even if they were weaker than Julie's.

Jim was primarily useful as an athletic fighter, and could jump up on top of enemies and hit them with his sword. Jim was only about three feet tall, and this served as both an advantage and a disadvantage as he fought. He was easily disarmed, but still had magic powers he could rely on if he found himself suddenly swordless. Nevertheless, he tended to attack only wounded enemies that could not easily hit back, since he had no defensive powers of his own and therefore could not simply ignore injuries the way many of the other kids could.

He usually hid behind Teddy during battles so that he would not get hit by any of the enemies, and Teddy often placed a shield around him for extra protection. He would only come out of the shield once every few minutes, when Teddy or another one of the older kids told him that the time was ripe. This was because, unlike Julie and most of the older kids, he could not simply throw his weapon at the enemies and then magically have it back in his hand a few moments later; he needed to attack up close.

Since Jim was both difficult to hit (because he was usually shielded in at least one way) and a weak fighter who caused little damage to his enemies, Dr. Zāme and his subordinates mostly ignored Jim when he showed up for battle. He nevertheless often landed the finishing blow to an enemy such as a mutant after the enemy had been subdued by the other children. This is because the other children did not all carry weapons.

Jim had poor endurance, and tended to last a long time in fights only because he took breaks between each of his attack moves.

Jimmy

Jimmy

Jimmy

Jimmy was a small boy who traveled with the #ZTSD superheros and rescued them when they got into trouble. In my original writings, the ZTSD superheros were actually Archie Comics characters, and were 18 years old, whereas the boy who rescued them was much younger. Now that Ive recast the ZTSD characters as 9- and 10-year-olds in order to make the storyline logical, I may make Jimmy into a five year old.

Jimmy was able to fly and could hover himself a few feet off the ground. This helped him aim his magic spells much better rather than always attacking from below. However, for the most part, Jimmy existed to help the others out rather than to take on their enemies. He rescued two boys from an eagle by using his force field power, and then just a few minutes later rescued the same two boys after they had been kidnapped by #Eddy.

For a brief time, I considered recasting Jimmy as a girl named "Kate" because his name in one language I used in my early adulthood was "Kata", but I've gone back to the original idea of him being a boy even though five of the other seven adventurers he traveled with were also boys. I think it is actually more natural this way even if it is less interesting.

Jimmy's later career

If Jimmy is canonical, that leaves me the question of what he did later on. If he was 5 years old during ZTSD's heyday, he would be seven or eight years old during their careers in TCT. Therefore he could not himself have been part of TCT, as their ages were all within two years of each other, with the average age moving from 10 to 12 throughougt the duration of the war. He could be added to TCT if I make him the same age as the others, but there are no TCT characters that resemble Jimmy either in terms of his personality or in terms of his powers. It might make more sense to add him to the #Lemon Shop League, as they would be closer to his age and therefore have the same needs as him. This would not explain how he seemingly appeared out of nowhere in so many stories, but it could be assumed that he simply was hiding behind a solid object, as the other Lemon Shop kids usually did.

Role in Lemon Shop

If Jimmy is in the Lemon Shop, then there would be two kids in the Shop with the same name. (Jim vs Jimmy would be used to disambiguate.) Jimmy doesn't seem like he would have fit in with the other Lemon Shoppers, but on the other hand, STW could have chosen to place him there simply because he was too young to be anywhere else. This, in turn, could also apply to #Sharon and #Scott, who were both about six years old when they started going on missions.

John (1)

John

John

John Bones, who called himself the Lightning Boy, was a young boy with glasses and blonde hair known for his athletic ability, particularly involving running and jumping. He thus mostly fought mutants, rather than taking to space where his athletic abilities would have little use. He was a poor student, and his favorite subjects in school were those that enabled him to practice his artistic ability, which was an unusual trait among the TCT adventurers.

Nevertheless, John did participate in some important missions. He went on a space mission to learn about Xema and another one to prepare for a war against Earth. He also drove^rode? into Wamia with the kids in order to fight Dr. Zāme, on a mission in which nine adventurers were present.

Like Zach and Teddy, John had the power of fire, meaning that he could shoot fireballs from a distance and therefore not be in danger of immediate counterattack.

John (2)

John

John

John was a three-year-old boy who joined #LSL in order to help fight enemies. He had the longest endurance of the many young children in LSL, and was the only one that could reliably stick out an entire battle from beginning to end without needing a break. However, he was a poor fighter, and was only called up to fight when most of the Lemon Shop League was tied up elsewhere, or occasionally in the very largest battles in which everyone was needed.

Julia

Julia

Julia

Julia was the founder and owner of the FILTER club, an association of feminists founded on planet Earth. She was very mean-tempered, and openly stated that she hated all men and boys and saw males as the main problem facing the world in their time. She allowed boys to join her feminist club, but stated that the female members could kill those boys if they desired and not face a penalty.

Julia was blonde and very tall, and wore a hairstyle that made her seem even taller. At the time of the war, she was about 16 years old, and thus slightly ahead of the average FILTER member. She was much stronger in muscular strength than most of the other FILTER members, including all of the male members, and preferred to use physical combat whenever possible. Nevertheless, her magical powers were also among the most powerful in the world, and she thus went unchallenged whenever she led the girls into battle.

Julie

Julie

Julie

Julie, who preferred to call herself Rainbow, was the most powerful member of the #LSL superhero league, and was four years old at the time of the peak of the war. She was the only one of the LSL preschoolers who could fight alongside the older kids such as Teddy and Zachary, although like the other toddlers, she had a short endurance and often needed to rest after a short time in the battlefield. Like the others, she generally preferred to stand behind the older kids and let them shield her from attacks, and wait for them to signal her for the best time for her to attack. When the environment allowed, she would also hide behind solid objects such as chairs. Thus, her battle plan, like those of the other LSL kids, resembled trench warfare.

However, she was able to attack with renewable powers, unlike her best friend #Jim, which meant that in any given battle she could easily attack an enemy ten times as much as Jim. When she got injured, she was able to heal her own wounds with magic powers, and she was able to heal others' wounds as well. However, she was cautious enough to still spend most of her time hiding behind a shield, and therefore she did not need to use this power very often.

Generally she fought alongside Teddy or one of the Thūta brothers when they went out to face Dr. Zāme's mutants. LSL was never called up to travel in space missions, although they did occasionally ride in spaceships to reach destinations in other areas of planet Teppala. Her main superpower was the ability to conjure weapons, and her second strongest ability was to heal wounds. This combination made her a very efficient fighter, but these powers were of little use on space missions.

Battle strategy

Julie had the second longest endurance span of the many preschoolers, second only to John, and as above, she generally fought much more intensely than Jim or John. Although all of the preschoolers were allowed to leave a battle if they felt they couldn't carry on, Julie was expected to average half of the battle before dropping out. By contrast, Jim usually stayed the entire time, and the others were considered to have succeeded if they managed to last 1/4 as long as the older kids. When Dr. Zāme fought the kids, he mostly ignored the other preschoolers but paid close attention to Julie because he considered her the only one capable of causing much damage to his mutants.

Personality

Julie lived next door to Jim and the two kids enjoyed playing with each other when they weren't out throwing axes at lumbering mutants.

Julie was generally considered the leader of Lemon Shop, although it had no official leader because it relied on other leagues for help. Nevertheless, her behavior reflected on the league as a whole. One day, when Julie was giving a speech on behalf of the Lemon Shop, she began to stumble for words and appear uncomfortable. As she began a new sentence she suddenly threw up on the floor in front of her and then collapsed into her own mess. From that point on, adults and older children unintentionally humiliated her whenever she paused while talking by asking if she needed to throw up. At first she found it unbelievable that she was being treated like a vomit machine, but her embarrassment soon changed to anger and Julie began to cling to the people who belittled her the least whenever possible. In turn, the other Lemon Shop kids followed Julie.

Julie spoke slowly, and was the source of the stereotypical response the Lemon Shop kids had when people asked them how their day had been: "Baaaaaaaad : (".

Justine

Justine

Justine

Justine was a young girl who was a member of TCT for some of their early missions. She was removed by Nancy when Nancy felt that TCT's missions were becoming too dangerous, but her enthusiasm did not diminish.

Justine remained a member of STW and used her dismissal from TCT to devote more time to her ice cream shop, whose profits she mostly turned over to STW in order to send them on to TCT and STW's other projects. While at first the Camians around her doubted that Justine could run an entire ice cream parlor with 25 flavors, she soon proved them wrong. Justine's Ice Cream Parlor was powered by an expensive central heating system that kept the ambient —50F temperatures and —90F windchills at bay in order to keep her ice cream stocks at a more comfortable and easily lickable —20F (although soft serve scoops were served a few degrees warmer than this).

L

Lemon Shop League

LSL

LSL

The Lemon Shop League (LSL) was a superhero league found in #Lewiston that allied itself with TCT and the other leagues. Unlike the other leagues, the Lemon Shop kids were all preschoolers. Four years old was below the legal driving age in Camia, and therefore they were forced to rely on adults and on children in the other leagues, primarily TCT, to reach the departure points of their missions. None of the kids could read. Whereas people in Camia had accepted the idea that their main military power was a league of a few dozen 12-year-old boys and girls, sending toddlers out to get shot at by masterminds who were too tough for the mainstream Camian army seemed absurd even to the Camians. Thus the Lemon Shoppers were often frustrated and refused assistance even by their allies.

Lemon Shop did not have an official leader, although #Julie was by far the most powerful member because of her ability to conjure weapons and to heal wounds, which, combined, put her fully on par with the older kids such as #Teddy and #Zachary. However, not even TCT trusted four-year-olds to get around town and find their missions on their own, so TCT's own internal leaders (usually also Teddy and Zachary) acted as the leaders of Lemon Shop. However, only adults, almost always #Nancy, had the authority to actually call up the toddlers to fight a mission; the TCT kids merely served as a middle layer of management that decided which battle positions the Lemon Shop children would take up.

Battle strategies

The Lemon Shop children mostly went on missions against Dr. Zāme and his mutants. Although they were overall very powerful, the Lemon Shop children were not as enthusiastic as the older kids and sometimes left the battle before it was over because they were too tired to fight any more. For example, during one battle where TCT and LSL tracked Dr. Zāme down to a hideout in Wamia, the Lemon Shop kids disappeared halfway through the mission. When this happened, the older kids accepted that the Lemon Shop children had given all they could and did not try to track them down to pull them back into the battle.

The Lemon Shop kids tended to last longer during fights if they were allowed to insulate themselves from the brunt of the battle. Usually, when they traveled with TCT, at least one of the TCT warriors would have the power of force fields, and could thus wrap a force field (or several force fields) around the Lemon Shop kids in order to protect them from most of their enemies' attacks. However, while in the force field, the Lemon Shop kids also could not attack. Generally, they would step out of the force field once every few minutes in order to launch an attack, waiting for a cue from one of the older kids to be sure that the time was right. Occasionally, however, an hours-long battle would go by without the Lemon Shop kids participating at all: none of their enemies hit them, and they didn't hit their enemies. Their mere presence, however, affected the enemies' strategy, since they had to prepare for those potential attacks even if they never came.

The Lemon Shop kids did not go on missions in outer space because none of them was comfortable flying a spaceship, even as a copilot, and because none of them had the types of superpowers that would be useful if they were kidnapped during a flight in outer space or were fired on by an enemy ship.

Remarkably, the Lemon Shop children were never accompanied by their parents on any missions; they simply were let free in the trust that they would find a safe way to reach their battles. For the most part, the children in the other lewagues were also traveling unaccompanied, but these children were all at least eight years old whereas the Lemon Shop League during the climax of the war had no members beyond the age of four. However, they were always accompanied by at least one TCT member or a child from another STW-allied league; they never even once fought a battle on their own.

Relationship to other leagues

The Lemon Shop kids had difficult lives. As they were dependent on #TCT for nearly everything, and the members of TCT were themselves children who were merely somewhat older, the Lemon Shop kids often had trouble even getting to the scene of each battle. Furthermore, TCT's more immature members enjoyed tormenting the Lemon Shop kids, often by using their superpowers to conjure up objects and then hitting the Lemon Shoppers in the face with them. Because they immediately healed their victims, and knew that the victims could also heal themselves, the TCT kids did not consider their playful abuse to be a form of bullying. Since they were mostly free from adult authorities, and found that those few adults who did have power over them were not good role models, the Lemon Shop kids had no escape.

Personality traits of the Lemon Shop kids

The Lemon Shoppers were not typical toddlers. They were quiet and very shy, and always did as they were told. However, they preferred to obey older children such as #TCT rather than adults. They avoided starting fights, even playful ones, and never showed typical toddler behavior such as pulling each other's hair or playing with their food. All in all, they were remarkably independent for their age, and although they saw all were in close contact with their parents they did not seem to need their parents to attend to their basic needs.

Appearance and dress styles

Of the ones I've drawn colored-in — Julie, Donald, and Hayden — all three have blonde hair. John has blonde hair too, but I've never drawn him in color. That leaves only Jim, whom I patterned after a brown-haired boy in a video game. However, I am trying to get rid of the last vestiges of borrowed material, and moreover, the boy in the game was not a preschooler, he was just "very small". It is possible that even Jim could be blonde, since he had a northern European surname.

In any case, blonde hair became a unifying trait of the Lemon Shop kids, and they associated themselves with the color yellow. They "marched" under a yellow flag and usually wore clothes that had at least some yellow on them.

Members

By the time they rose to prominence, their primary members were named #Julie (who signed her name Rainbow), Jimbo, #Donald, John, and #Hayden.

Naming

Due to the young age of its members, the Lemon Shop League sometimes referred to itself using a translation of their name into Pabappa: Piri Pura Perap, or its acronym, PPP. However, none of the members was actually from Paba, which was a city on the planet #Namma; they merely used the language because of its generally childish sound.

External history

I know that I patterned LSL partly after the Mystic Quest video game characters, though I'm not sure what made me decide to make them preschoolers when everyone else I borrowed from other media was portrayed either as the same age as the TCT superheros or as the age they were in their original medium. It may simply be because Mystic Quest portrays humans as being so much smaller than the animals they fought, such that humans appear to fight primarily by throwing their weapons and magic spells at the animals' feet.

I only borrowed two characters, however. Ben (the player1 character) is #Jim, and Kaeli (the first female the player meets) is #Julie. The other characters in LSL were my original creations. Mystic Quest contributed relatively little to my character design because it was a 1992 video game and the technology of that era did not allow for much in-depth personality in its video game characters. However, I do seem to have retained the characters' favorite weapons: Jim fights with a sword, Julie fights with axes that she can conjure up out of thin air and throw at enemies. At the time, I really did believe Julie/Kaeli was throwing her weapons at the animals, because as above, the animation style the game uses makes it look like the humans would be too small to fight any other way. I'm not sure why I didn't also carry this over to Jim/Ben, however, particularly since I did carry it over to the older kids who were not even part of LSL.

Lewiston

Lewiston

Lewiston

Lewiston was the town most of the TCT kids lived in at the time of the climax of the war. Though a small town, it had a hugely outsized role in the war and events involving Lewiston dominated the politics of the large nearby city known as #Top_City.

Naming

Early on, I called their town the Northeast Woods, which the locals often shortened to "the Woods". (They would use forest to talk about the trees themselves.) Later I changed it to Lewiston, named after Lewiston, Maine, as the general area the kids lived in was similar to Maine.

Much later, in my late teens, I changed the name of the town to Baeba Swamp, but although it's still canonical I prefer to revert to the names I used in my early childhood whenever possible. I have sentimental attachment to swamps for various reasons mostly relating to my childhood, so perhaps even the name Baeba Swamp was already an attempt by my late teenage self to regress back to the days when I was just a little boy.

Climate and geography

Lewiston was a cold place: there was still snow on the ground on June 17 when the spiders began their invasion. But the permafrost they lived on caused the summer meltwater to form into swamps, where abundant wildlife managed to survive. Lewiston was slightly warmer than other nearby areas because it had more sunshine. Originally, I said that Lewiston was 6°F warmer than Top City in winter and 3°F warmer than Top City in summer, with a much greater daily temperature amplitude. Things like this can happen in the Rocky Mountains on Earth, but Top City and Lewiston are both near sea level.

Population structure

Taking my early writings at face value, Lewiston must have had a very unusual population structure. It was a very small town with a gigantic, 4-story school building called Kennedy Middle School near a large field.

This school was just for three grades — sixth through eighth — and yet, did not even enroll all of the middle-school aged children in the town because most of the TCT members instead attended Nancy's school, #STW, in a heavily wooded area on the edge of the town. (Sometimes the TCT kids are referred to as elementary schoolers; this is partly because their superhero careers overlapped the graduation from 5th to 6th grade and partly because those who attended STW school had a different grade structure wherein all new members regardless of age began in the 1st grade.)

And even that wasn't everything, because Lewiston somehow had enough Wamian immigrants to host a segregated^{: (} school on the other side of town for those immigrants, and even this school had multiple floors. Yet, I was so in love with the idea of a small town that I decided early on that Lewiston should have only about 600 people and I never vacillated even slightly.

All three of these schools were essentially just for kids aged 11 to 13, although STW had a small number of younger children enrolled as well. I never gave a name to the elementary school that the TCT'ers had attended before they divided themselves between STW and Kennedy Middle School, but there presumably was at least one such school since I remember drawing swingsets on a playground.

Assuming all of the schools were for citizens of Lewiston, perhaps 200 of the people in Lewiston were adults and the other 400 were children: most of these were ordinary students, but many more were superheros in leagues such as TCT. This is a calculation I did only just now based on how large the local school was; I simply did not think about this at all when I was younger. I ♥loved♥ large buildings when I was younger (and I still do ... ask me what I dream about), but I also loved small towns with more trees than people.

Perhaps, instead of assuming that the town was almost 70% grade-schoolers, I could say that they hosted schools for the surrounding towns, or even for Top City itself, simply because they were more powerful than Top City. But I never mentioned anything like this when I was young and the town quite clearly had a rivalry with its neighbors, and even had four local sports teams just for one sport (shomokan) in its middle school which made quick work of most of the surrounding towns even though they of course didn't cheat by using their superpowers. If I assumed they were hosting the students of the surrounding towns as well, they would have had 36 shomokan teams in just one middle school and be effectively their own divisional championship. Not one of the TCT superheros was on any of these teams, and there were more than 20 kids in TCT, so assuming their nonparticipation was typical of the students around them this would suggest that having 36 teams would require more than 20,000 students and therefore the students would so outnumber the adults that they would not have enough adults to fill their teaching jobs and would need to pull from surrounding towns for this, too.

Either way, it was clear the adults in Lewiston's main purpose was to serve the TCT children on their missions while ensuring that the children didn't get so power-mad that they forgot their purpose. Although from TCT's perspective it seemed like all adults were either their enemies or "allies" who pushed them around and stole their rewards, in reality the entire town was at their feet, simply because the townspeople knew their town was the focus of the war and the TCT kids were the core of their military.

Lilal

Lilâl

Lilâl, also known simply as "Pain" or even "Death", was a supervillain who lived on planet Namma and spent most of his time destroying the local villages with mutants and cooperating with invasions from other planets that also sought to destroy the villages. His name meant literally "human-ACC", but villagers understood it as shorthand for "I hurt people." Lilâl was the only "supervillain" who preferred to live on Namma, but he cooperated with Dr. Roc so that he could learn how to control rocs (firebirds) and how to create mutants and send them after the kids.

Lilâl was familiar with the TCT kids, and in fact, had only himself moved to Namma once he realized that the TCT kids were visiting there. He was particularly interested in Nauri, a young girl who was native to Namma, but had joined TCT and immediately started going on missions to defeat Lilâl.

One day, the TCT kids were vacationing in a tropical resort in New Zealand on planet Earth to take time off from the stresses of being chased around the galaxy by villains sending ballistic missiles and gigantic animals at them. Nauri decided to call up Lilâl and invite him to join them in their resort, hoping they could become friends even though Lilâl had destroyed her house and tried to kill her directly many times. Lilâl accepted Nauri's invitation and shuttled to New Zealand with all of his supplies and personal belongings. He shut down the resort, kidnapped the kids, and flew with them to Namma. Using the kids as labor, he burned Nauri's home again, along with all of the other houses in the village, saying he was going to start the village completely over from the ground up. Soon everyone in the village was homeless and had lost most of their possessions. Then Lilâl sent out another pack of mutants to massacre the villagers, save anyone who agreed to become a slave for Lilâl. Nauri decided that perhaps inviting Lilâl into her tropical resort might have been a bad idea.

Lisa

Lisa was a young #Camian Combat girl who attempted to join TCT late in its history, but failed the intelligence test.

Lumyt

Lumyt

Lumyt

Lumyt "Sunshine" Thūta was a boy, 11 years old at the time of the peak of the war, who was the brother of Hikik and resembled him in many ways. More humble than his brother while still just as talented, Hikik was the more popular but the less powerful of the two. Lumyt was the one who defeated Dr. Zāme during their very first battle. His favorite weapons were bombs and ice spells, which he was able to cast using a wand. The Thūta family was very rich, and by the age of 11 Lumyt himself owned his own yacht. One day, after helping four other kids fend off a gigantic firebird, he took the others for a ride on the yacht to celebrate their victory. It was the first time the yacht had actually left the harbor. After a few minutes at sea, Dr. Zāme torpedoed the boys and as the yacht sank he attacked them with three more of the same mutants.

M

Machim

Machim

Machim was a boy who lived on planet Namma and participated in some of the kids' missions. He was transgendered, but this never played a part in his role in TCT and he was never discriminated against by the other kids.

Mandy

Mandy

Mandy

Mandy was a girl who performed at Bob's Wrestling Arena but did not go on missions with TCT or any other league. She had the power to shoot lightning from her hands, thus incapacitating enemies from far beyond their reach. She also had defensive magics that could stop bullets and other projectiles from harming her.

Although she did not go on missions in space or fight Dr. Zāme's mutants, Mandy was interested in politics. She was a late bloomer, relative to the other kids, in that she did not become a major player in world politics until she was in her early teen years.

External history

I patterned Mandy's personality mostly on a girl named Mandy whom I met on the Internet. I never saw her in person, but I used the appearance I imagined for her (blonde, of course) for the Mandy in my comics.

Manito Bay

Manito Bay was a small town in Camia's arctic north ("Manitoland"), on the east coast in a location similar to Baffin Island. The climate was cold, but winters were not much colder than many locations much further south in Camia, because of a warm offshore current. Manito Bay was warmer than its immediate surroundings, which is why the Camians were able to build a port there. If the map of Teppala is repurposed for Camia, Manito Bay could be identified with the port on the east coast at 54N whose average temperatures are -3 -18 in winter and 38 29 in summer. Cold, but not as cold as one might think when comparing it to Lewiston. However, in my childhood world, Manito Bay was near 70N and yet still somehow just as warm as places much further south.

At one point in the early 2400s, the citizens of Manito Bay wanted to have an STW base of their own. Aside from #Lewiston, small towns generally did not get STW, but some citizens from other areas agreed to move to Manito Bay to set up a new STW base there.

Manitoman

Manitoman

Manitoman

Manitoman was a minor character who appeared in some of my late writings, but never in the comics. I never gave him a proper birth name. He was an adult who was very physically strong and could lift heavy weights with just one hand. He often travelled with the TCT kids, but never officially joined TCT. By the time they met up with him, many of them were 13 years old, so he did not stand out as much as #Nanuko and #Bob (2) had when they had joined the kids.

Appearance

I seem to have pictured Manitoman as resembling Captain Planet. By this I mean that he was tall, broad-chested and very muscular, with a "flat top" head and (when in battle uniform) green skin. (Not blue.) Indeed I was probably thinking of Captain Planet subconsciously when I created Manitoman, as they both were adult males who could be summoned by younger adventurers in distress, and they both were identified primarily by their superpowers without having much of an independent personality.

Superpowers

I did not seem to think much about what Manitoman's superpowers actually were. The only thing I can remember clearly is that he was very physically strong, able to lift objects weighing several hundred pounds with just one hand. This was good because, after the loss of #Nanoŋ, none of the TCT kids had any similar powers and often struggled against physical barriers, and sometimes even aggressive humans, that sometimes trapped the kids inside a room even after they had won their battle. He was good at defense as well, and thus played the role of a "tank" in battle (see wikipedia:wikt:tank).

March

March

March

March was a small boy living on planet Namma under Nanuko's kingdom. When his village was invaded by Lilâl's mutants, he teamed up with a local girl to fight off the mutants. They were an odd match; she had a sword and he didn't. Thus March was severely injured early on in the battle, and never managed to injure any of the mutants.

Mark

Mark

Mark

Mark Thompson was a strong boy who traveled on missions with #TCT. He was very fond of himself and joined every club he heard about. He loved playing tricks on people and was seen as unreliable, but nevertheless he always behaved properly when he was in the hot seat and was overall one of the very best adventurers on space missions.

Mark was more assertive than most of the other kids. During a conference on planet #Theta, after a man beat up one of the other boys, Mark stood up and attempted to argue with the man. The man's response to this was to push Mark into the corner of the room and then kick him in the belly, knocking him to the floor. Mark was physically strong for his age, but his superpowers were weak and he was no match for an adult male in a fight.

On another day, a man temporarily in charge of the kids saw Mark approaching and said, "Hi. #Dr. Zāme made some mutants, so beat them." Mark replied sarcastically "How very logical : /" but the other kids realized that adults did not respect attitudes like that.

Mark was not related to #Sam, and did not even come from the same planet.

Michael

Mike

Michael

Michael was a small boy who participated in the #ZTSD superhero league despite having no superpowers. However, unlike #Callista and #Gary, he seemed to know he was out of place and had a very low participation rate. Of the two ZTSD stories that have survived, Michael participated in neither of them. (Although he was seen approaching the Amama Dome in one story, as he had been told to do, he seemed uninterested in showing up for the actual battle.) Michael continues the "Reggie" character from my early Archie fanfics.

Mitch

Mitch

Mitch

Mitch was a small boy from Seattle who belonged to the #Cleanup Corps and was later adopted into TCT on their second draft pick, having been rejected on the first. He was an easy target for practical jokes.

N

Namma

Nama

Namma

Namma was a large planet visited frequently by the boys in #TCT. Eventually, some of them actually moved there.

In my very earliest work (age 6 or so), Namma was populated by people who as adults stood only about three feet tall. Wild animals, on the other hand, were much larger than their Earthan counterparts, and the people of Namma simply lived with the reality that a lot of them would be eaten by animals such as cats, snakes, and seagulls that would pose no threat to them on any other planet. Human visitors to Namma from Earth and Tebbala could thus easily push around the Namman people and do as they wished while the Namman police were helpless to stop them, but still had to watch out for violent animals.

In later childhood I seem to have abandoned this idea, perhaps because I needed to write a story about the TCT boys befriending a village of Nammans, and I realized subconsciously they would not have been welcome if they were literally eight times the size of the other villagers (2^3 = 8). The TCT boys in their early visits still had the advantage of physical size, however, because they interacted almost exclusively with the young children in their villages, who were much smaller than the TCT boys simply because they were younger. They did have to deal with large, physically powerful adult enemies such as #Nanuko, but had the advantage even here because of their superpowers.

Geography and climate

My early conception of Namma was a stereotypical hot jungle planet. On their first mission to Namma, the two TCT boys were amazed at how warm the weather was "even in winter" (in a later plot twist, I decided that it had actually been summer, and the boys simply didn't realize that Namma's seasons were different from Tebbala's.) I was influenced by the Time Machine here, and seemed to decide that despite the planet overflowing with life, "pests" such as insects either didn't exist or didn't bother humans. Thus a small boy had no fear running into the forest that he would come out carrying a disease such as malaria.

I originally conceived of Nama as being entirely without oceans. I believe that, just as Camia was modeled after my bedroom, Namma was modeled at least partly after my backyard, and since my backyard did not have water in it, I seemed to think that Namma wouldn't either. Later, I decided that there was one continent and one ocean, so that the basic idea of an uninterrupted landmass was still intact, but there was no longer a double border between east and west.

I developed an unrealistic climate setup for Namma in my early teen years. The Southern Hemisphere, where the boys first landed, was always warm; the Equatorial area, which I later called #Repilia, was always hot; and the Northern Hemisphere was quite diverse. The western third of the Northern Hemisphere half of the landmass consisted of an icecap where the climate was unnaturally cold for its latitude, because the jet stream on Namma simply remained in roughly the same location at all times and therefore delivered a permanent cold wave to that area of the planet. The next nation over was thus always unnaturally hot. The eastern third was mountainous and probably also unnaturally warm but its temperatures were moderated by the elevation.

Demographics of Namma

I really only thought about the idea of different races and nationalities on Namma in my teenage years, which means that they contradict some of the ideas that I consider to be canonical now.For example, my self-insertcharacter, #Teddy, met his first (and only) girlfriend on planet Namma, and I identified her as #Nauri, who happened to also be the first girl he ever met face to face on Namma. However, since Nauri in the original story was 3 or 4 years younger than Teddy, and I generally moved the age of my self-insert character to match my own as I wrote more stories, that would mean he would be dating a girl 11 or 12 years old when he was 15. I didn't ever consciously realize that I disliked that idea; I seem to have simply forgotten that Nauri was younger than him and made her actually slightly taller and older than Teddy. Later I decided to move Nauri-as-girlfriend to the Northern Hemisphere of Namma, amidst the Moonshine-speaking Sak people, and have Nauri-as-superhero remain in the Southern Hemisphere where people spoke a language similar to Pabappa.

Although I associated the Southern Hemisphere societies with small children, I did not strictly say that the people there were actually smaller even as adults than those of the North. On the other hand, in #Repilia, which was a hot zone around the Equator, women were nearly twice as tall as men, and both North and South found the people of Repilia difficult to relate to. When the people of the generally more powerful North started invading the South to build colonies, they ignored Repilia entirely and preferred to use a pass-through area of the Equator called "Oscar" where the environment was mountainous, the climate was cold, and both males and females were quite tall.

Nancy

Nancy

Nancy

Nancy Himmelman was the teacher of the TCT kids and several other leagues of children that attended her school at #STW. With so many students and no other teachers, Nancy delegated much of her teaching curriculum to the students, and merely checked in to make sure that they were doing the right things.

Appearance

Nancy was of medium height and had bright red hair. She was well known for her distinct manner of speech, often conference-calling the kids on their phones and opening with "Greetings, adventurers!" She preferred to call the kids "adventurers" rather than a more neutral term such as kids to remind them that they were very important.

Attitude

Nancy was very demanding of her students, and remarkably impolite. She never used the word "please" when talking to the kids. When the kids faced difficult or unfair challenges, she offered little sympathy and often refused to help. On one very stressful day, the kids' hometown was invaded by giant spiders from planet #Theta. The kids tried to run away but they were captured one by one and brought into captivity. After they fought their way free, Nancy called the boys on their telephones and told them to fly to planet #Namma and stop the Nammans from joining the war on the side of the spiders. After a few hours on Namma, Nancy called the boys again to tell them they needed to come back to their home planet so they could pick up a man and travel with him to a conference she had set up on Theta, the spider planet that had invaded them earlier that same day. When the boys arrived on planet Theta after a difficult flight, Nancy greeted them with "Hurry up!"

Five minutes after the meeting began, the man whom the boys had been told to bring with them stood up and began to stare at a small blonde boy named #Teddy. Then he walked around the table and stood behind the boy as he wrote on a piece of paper. Then, the man grabbed a sturdy iron pipe he had brought with him to the conference and beat the boy unconscious. He explained that he had done it because Teddy had taken a more moderate position on an issue than the man was comfortable with. The boys were used to being treated like this, but were shocked that the abuse had come from a man they had taken great pains to invite to the conference with them. By this time, Nancy had already left the building to return to her home planet. The spiders decided that the conference would continue without Teddy, but that the man who had beat him up would be allowed to stay on as an observer.

After it was clear that Teddy was out of the picture, #Mark was the only boy who stood up and attempted to argue with the man, and the man responded by hitting Mark several times, eventually leaving him sprawled out on the floor. For the rest of the conference, the boys were quiet.

After Teddy regained consciousness later that day, he tried to contact his home planet, but he was too small to operate the computer's control panel. When the boys tried to sleep later that night, #Dr. Zame shot missiles into their bedrooms, setting the entire building on fire. Frantically, the boys rescued the man who had beat them up earlier and headed for their spaceships.

When Nancy found out what had happened to the boys, she told them to skip sleep for the night so they could hurry back to Tebbala and fend off an attack by a flock of giant carnivorous birds called rocs. When the boys landed, Nancy called them and told them that spears were the ideal weapon for fighting off the rocs. However, since she did not allow the boys to carry weapons on their spaceships, they had no spears to defend themselves with, let alone to kill the birds. So the battle-weary boys were forced to hide from the birds in a cave, wondering what they could possibly do. Their question was answered when a man named Dr. Roc met the boys with a gun and pressed them up against the stone wall of the cave. Then, he kidnapped them. It was their second kidnapping so far that day. In Dr. Roc's captivity, the boys finally got some sleep.

Interaction with others

The mainstream Camian society could not understand why the TCT children allowed Nancy to abuse them so horribly and yet they always obeyed her when she threw more and more dangerous missions at them. Some leaders suggested that perhaps the TCT kids were simply too young to know any better. They claimed that the TCT kids believed that all adults were manipulative, abusive, or both, and that children had to just deal with it and try to side with the manipulators against the abusers. One political cartoonist drew a picture depicting Nancy and #Dr. Zame as two abusive parents, trading custody of their kids, competing with each other to see which parent could abuse the kids the most . The point of the cartoon was to suggest that Nancy and Dr. Zāme were taking turns kicking the TCT kids around, seeing which of them could hurt the children the most.

However, the belief that TCT considered adults to be immoral by nature soon came to be seen as a pro-Nancy argument, as it was clearly not true. Even while still under Nancy's control, the TCT kids made repeated attempts to adopt adults, particularly men, into their league and travel with them on all types of missions. Thus, they had no bias against adults. However, Nancy repeatedly overruled the kids, seeming to believe that other adults were nothing but trouble. Nancy was shocked when she assigned the TCT kids a mission to bring Namman villagers back with them to Tebbala, expecting them to bring home fellow children like themselves, but they came home with #Nanuko, a man well over 6 feet tall. She realized that her students were simply not intimidated by physically strong men and tried to hide the fact that she herself definitely was. Though they didn't directly ask Nancy for permission, she denied the TCT kids the right to add Nanuko to their team. (Nanuko did not speak their language at this point.)

Thus, it was only after TCT finally broke free from Nancy's control that they were able to enroll adult members such as Nanuko, #Manitoman, and #Bob (1).

Nancy defended her authoritarianism as being the only way to keep control over a league of such powerful schoolchildren, and noted that she had always been willing to send other kids out to rescue the TCT kids when they were in danger. She also reminded the non-STW Camians that STW did not appoint outsiders to positions of power, which meant that like all other STW leaders, she had risen through the ranks herself and had endured many years of the same type of abuse. However, Nancy's work had put her in the path of much less violence, as even then STW did not generally expose females to the most dangerous missions, and because the world had been less violent when Nancy was younger anyway.

Nevertheless, the general trend over time was for Nancy's students to want to escape her control, even if it meant giving up control to Teddy and Zachary who had started a league of their own.

Age

When I was younger, I never really dwelt on how old or young Nancy Himmelman was. I seem to remember once writing that she was 24 years old and that 24 was very young for an STW teacher, but I may be confused. I seem to have thought that "24" was a very feminine sounding number for some reason, as I did with "32". I also remember associating the number 24 with me being small, and, in particular, with me being dwarfed by some much taller person (or other object such as a tree) in front of me. It's possible that I subconsciously thus came to associate the number 24 with teachers, even though some of the older kids were taller than Nancy. (The tallest boy I specifically gave a measurement for was 5'3" tall; however, this may be the "teenage bully" who had previously beat up on smaller boys but gave up the fight and was welcomed into TCT. Him and the bully were both named Seth, but I seem to have had 2 Seths. Meanwhile, #Jen and #Tanya are both listed as exactly five feet tall, but this was a measurement for when they were younger, and Tanya especially would probably have been at least 5'6" by age 13.)

Nancy's superpowers

I never really addressed this because I never really addressed the idea that adults other than the few who joined TCT could even have superpowers. It would be illogical for her to rule in the manner she did over the superheros without herself having been a former superhero, however.

Other names and later appearances

In my late teen years, I renamed Nancy Ende, and then later Joja. In my twenties, I split Ende and Joja into two separate people. Joja was dark-skinned because she was 3/4 Laban (Laba was a planet, but its people were mostly similar in appearance to black Africans), but still had red hair. Her being Laban was significant because for much of her career as a military leader she was fighting a war against Laba. There was a white girl named "Heather Hill" who considered herself Joja's primary adversary, but race had nothing to do with their conflict.

I remember Ende as white, and the one picture I have of her depicts her with long blonde hair, playfully tempting a snake to bite her outstretched hand.

Joja was 44 years old at the time of the peak of the war, and had a very cold personality towards the world but was very kind and loving towards her students, unlike the "Nancy" who pushed them around from one battle to the next and then rewarded their job well done by assigning them an even more dangerous job.

On the other hand, I seem to have also toyed with the idea of making Nancy even crueler than I had imagined her in the beginning, telling her students things like "I wish you would never grow up" and "I always get what I wish for". But I abandoned this idea fairly quickly.

Nanoŋ

Nanong

Nanoŋ

Nanoŋ Sučithasi was a boy who joined TCT despite having no superpowers and being incapable of speech. He was very strong, however, and often served as the "muscle" when the other kids faced an enemy that wouldn't fall to their normally useful superpowers such as conjuring bombs and water spells to throw in their face. One recurring theme in TCT's early missions was that a small boy would defeat a large enemy such as a spider and then find himself trapped because the dead or unconscious enemy's body was covering the only available exit path and the hero was physically unable to move him. Nanoŋ helped the others out of situations like that. In this respect, he was similar to the bully-turned-superhero Skate. But the two had little else in common.

Nanoŋ was about 12 years old during the climax of the war, and thus, unlike Skate, was still a strong growing boy. He thus became stronger every day and looked forward to the day when he would be able to out-muscle any human and even many large animals. He was fairly tall, and in one scene was blowing on the hands of another boy who was holding his hands high above his head. I did not include Nanoŋ as a character in my later work, but he certainly would have been over 6 feet tall, perhaps by a lot. Since Nanoŋ's original name was "Fuji Yoshizawa", it may be surprising for him to be among the tallest characters, but at the time of my original writing, I didn't know that the Japanese tended to be shorter than whites.

Nanuko

Nanuko

Nanuko

Nanuko was a tall, strong man who met the TCT kids on their very first mission to planet /Namma and realized from the very beginning that they were trouble. Despite living on Namma, he knew of the existence of the TCT kids because he was in charge of protecting his villages from invasions, and they had had both peaceful and violent contacts before.

Like #Bob (2), Nanuko's first encounter with the TCT kids was hostile, and like Bob, he used his large body size to physically obstruct the kids' path, knowing that even with all of their superpowers, they were too physically weak to push or pull him out of their way in order to sneak on by. Nanuko announced he was going to banish the kids from all of the villages under his jurisdiction. He used his physical strength as a weapon and threatened to crush one of the boys to death if they did not obey.

Nevertheless, Nanuko was unwilling to use violence, and did not try to stop the kids when he saw them run away, circle around, and enter his village again. The kids decided to settle down and sleep the night in another one of Nanuko's villages (called Torushi). Nanuko had given a young boy the task of telling all of the other villages in the area, including Torushi, to keep the TCT kids out, and the TCT kids walked close behind the boy to show that Nanuko's threat meant nothing to them, and that they would proudly walk right into a village they were being banned from just to show that they were invincible.

The other villagers soon began to turn against Nanuko, as it was his job to protect the four villages he ruled from all dangers, and yet he seemed to have no response to the TCT kids' settlement other than to suggest that if the villagers wanted the boys to get out, the villagers as whole must do the fighting rather than just relying on Nanuko. As the boys expanded their settlements and spent more and more time in Torushi Village, even making friends with local children, the other villagers respected Nanuko less and less each day. By now the entire TCT team was visiting Namma, not just the two boys who had visited the first day, and they were using their money to have houses built for them right alongside the houses of the other villagers. Some villagers blamed Nanuko's love of alcohol for the problems of their villages, even though alcohol was a common pleasure amongst the relatively simple villagers he ruled over and he was no different than the average villager in that regard.

One day later on, Nanuko was standing outside worrying about his job when the TCT kids physically surrounded him. He figured he was about to be killed, but to his pleasure and surprise, the kids invited him to join TCT as their first adult member. Nanuko realized that he could at last free himself from accusations that he was not doing enough to prevent the TCT kids from occupying his villages by simply joining the TCT kids himself and becoming part of the winning team. Thus, he quickly and happily agreed to join the TCT kids, although he was upset when he learned that the cafeteria in their elementary school did not carry his favorite brand of beer.

Nanuko's role in TCT

Nanuko was valuable to the TCT kids for several reasons. First, he was trustworthy, as he had shown from even his very first encounter with them that he was unwilling to injure or otherwise physically harm them even if it meant risking the loss of his job. Although he sometimes fought against the kids for political power in his villages, he had always obeyed when he was outvoted or otherwise defeated.

Like other adults, he helped the kids out when they struggled with physical tasks such as lifting heavy weights that even their superpowers couldn't help them with. Nanuko was very tall and muscular, and thus was almost always the strongest member of any team he traveled in. As it happened, many of the adventurers with the strongest superpowers were the youngest members of their league, and therefore physically weak even compared to other kids. #Nauri, for example, who could be said to have had superpowers even stronger than those of #Teddy and #Zachary, entered the war as an 8 year old who stood less than four feet tall. Nanuko's superpowers were weaker, but his physical strength made up much of the difference and he thus scored only slightly lower on tests of military suitability than she did.

Unlike other adults, he didn't mind being bossed around by the young TCT leadership, and when assigned a mission, he was better at sticking to it than most of the other TCT'ers. Lastly, being from Namma, he helped translate between the Jafa language and those of Namma when other Namman speakers were off on other missions.

However, even though at first Nanuko seemed to be a valuable addition to the team, he eventually proved to be largely a disappointment both to Nancy and to the other TCT kids. Although he tried his hardest to work with the TCT'ers, he was largely incompetent and constantly needed to call for help from the kids. Even though he had quickly resigned his job as a security guard in order to live with the TCT kids instead, he was mostly interested in missions on his home planet of Namma and generally uninterested in helping the kids fight off mutant invasions on planet Tebbala or organize political conferences on Earth. Privately, he realized that the primary reason he had agreed to join TCT was because TCT seemed guaranteed to win all of its battles, whereas anyone who fought against TCT seemed doomed to lose or be chased out. He asked to be allowed to remain in power in his villages back home on Namma, and although TCT agreed, they were often tied up elsewhere and therefore left Nanuko to face the angry villagers and the men that they had appointed to replace Nanuko after he had abandoned his duties.

Nanuko in school

By formally joining TCT, Nanuko also was forced to enroll in elementary school, since all TCT members belonged to STW, and all STW members had to attend an STW school beginning with 1st grade even if they had already completed school elsewhere. Many of his classmates were actually three or four years old, as that was the youngest age from which STW was generally willing to enroll students. After being adopted by TCT, Nanuko had found being surrounded by a throng of small children everywhere he went to be alternately amusing and embarrassing in roughly equal amounts.

But when he moved to Lewiston and enrolled in first grade, the embarrassment took over as Nanuko realized he was unable to keep up with his classmates and was in danger of failing his classes. This was because, as the only student in his class that did not speak Jafa, he could not understand even simple instructions such as how to do math problems. Additionally, Nancy outsourced the teaching of the Jafa language to the other children in the classroom, which meant that they were frustrated at having to take time out of their own education in order to educate him. #Nauri, who had also come to TCT without being able to speak Jafa, had surpassed Nanuko and therefore was not one of his classmates. Even the #Lemon Shop kids were ahead of Nanuko, albeit only because Nancy had given them a head start.

Since Nanuko had been enrolled into TCT without Nancy's authorization (the kids were becoming more independent), she used his incompetence to illustrate the need for the kids in TCT to take her advice before doing anything foolish. Nanuko eventually solved the problem by pulling himself out of TCT. He remained an ally of theirs, but resolved to spend most of his time on planet Namma, though occasionally traveling with the kids to other planets in order to defend Namma, and to never again visit the Lewiston STW elementary school.

Nauri

Nauri

Nauri

Nauri was a short girl with blonde hair who lived on planet #Namma in a village called #Torushi. She was about eight years old, and a bit less than four feet tall at the time of the peak of the war. Nauri had superpowers, but they were of a different type than what the TCT kids had. Thus, she made a good teammate, as she was able to cover the TCT boys' weaknesses with her strengths while they covered her weaknesses with their strengths.

Nauri was very confident in her abilities, sometimes to an excess. She preferred to fight without weapons, and during one battle when her village was invaded by Earthlings in tanks she decided to rush into the battle and fight the men barehanded. She expected she would be able to win by jumping on top of the tanks and punching downward, but her hands were unable to make a physical impact against the tanks' hard exterior and she soon lost her balance and was run over by the tanks many times. She was rescued in this battle by the TCT boys, and soon ran away from her home in order to join TCT.

Welcome on Tebbala

On Tebbala, #Nancy wanted to rename her to Julie, but besides the fact that there was already a girl named Julie allied to TCT, Nauri preferred her exotic birth name. Nancy soon realized that Nauri punched well above her weight and did not enjoy being treated like a child. She realized Nauri herself had made the decision to move to Tebbala at the age of 8 years old, rather than having been brought there by TCT. Soon, Nauri became one of the most highly valued members of TCT, which apart from her was entirely boys, and was given many of the most important missions by Nancy, which she happily accepted.

Nevertheless, when #Teddy and #Zachary moved to planet Namma in order to make TCT more independent from Nancy, she went with them, thus returning to the village she had run away from just months earlier. This time, however, she was doing it on her own, and although she remained in contact with her parents they realized that she was now living independently and they no longer had any control over her.

Contacts with Lilal

Shortly after the TCT kids had moved to her village, a man named #Lilal had set up shop in a cave just north of the village and started attacking the villagers. He had burned Nauri's house to the ground early on, along with most of the other houses in her village. He repeated this attack many times, often adding mutants to the mix, which he had learned from #Dr. Zāme. She thus went on many missions, usually accompanied by other children, to stop him or at least chase him away while the other villagers worked on rebuilding their homes after each attack.

A few months after Nauri had joined TCT, the TCT kids decided to build a resort for their own use only in New Zealand on planet Earth. #George approved the project, but he knew that TCT had entirely broken free from his control by this point and that even if he had said no they would have simply gone on ahead with the construction anyway, taking their money from someone else. The new settlement was called Casaverde. All of the TCT kids, including Nauri, decided to move to Casaverde and remain there whenever they were not needed to fight a mission.

A few days after the TCT kids had moved to Casaverde, Nauri called up #Lilal, the man who had burned her house to the ground and sent packs of mutants after her several times. She told him she was living in paradise in New Zealand and would appreciate his company. She had always been drawn to Lilal's strong personality, and felt that she was strong enough to handle the man and that perhaps they could be friends if the two of them could put their violent past behind them.

Lilal appeared in Casaverde almost immediately and thanked Nauri for the invitation. Lilal then decided to take control of the resort for himself and tell the others what he wanted them to do. He created a new program called CRWY to run the resort, and all but one of the kids in Casaverde joined CRWY. That one was #Treba, who was suspicious of Lilal.

Lilal ordered the children he had signed up for CRWY to abandon their resort and fly immediately to Torushi village. They took Treba with them since he would have otherwise had the resort to himself. Once in Torushi, Lilal ordered the children to burn their village to the ground yet again, saying he was going to completely obliterate the village and all its buildings so they could start completely over again.

However, once the buildings had been completely torched and everyone made homeless, Lilal let loose another pack of mutants to attack both the villagers who had just been made homeless and the children whom he had met in the resort and had put their trust in him. Lilal told the children to get out of the way, as the mutant attack was simply part of his plan to destroy the village, but the children wanted to stay so they could protect their friends and families from the mutants.

As the children found themselves dodging sharp-toothed mutants on one side and angry villagers on the other, they came to an agreement amongst themselves that they didn't really want to obey Lilal anymore. Thus, they resigned from CRWY and decided to fight back against Lilal's mutants instead of just letting them chow down on the other villagers. #Teddy beat off the most mutants, and thus became the new ruler of the village, but he soon handed his power to Nauri so he could focus on other issues.

Later career with TCT

When TCT reformed and stopped listening to Nancy, Nauri remained on the rolls. Soon, the rolls were trimmed to just 20 members, and she was the only girl left among 18 boys and one adult man. At nine years old, she was also among the four youngest members. (#Mitch, #Sam, and #Zak, who had come to TCT from the #Cleanup Corps, were the others.) Yet, she retained her unofficial leadership role and always gave her opinions before the group as a whole planned anything.

Nauri was very strong, but she relied primarily on her superpowers rather than physical strength to fight her battles. Thus, the TCTers realized that although she was among the most powerful members of TCT, and arguably the very most powerful, she would not become significantly stronger as she grew taller because her powers were already mature.

Nauri's superpowers

Nauri had very strong superpowers. I seem to have written that, on a scale from 0 to 100, her powers tested at 7662. I don't know what I meant by this. Knowing myself, the oddly specific number probably had a meaning, but I've forgotten it now. I wrote this number after previously crossing out an 80, which was already the highest number of any TCT member, although I only "tested" a small sample of the kids. (I have no idea how I came up with the numbers, but again, knowing myself, even though I didn't have access to advanced computer programs at the time, I'm pretty sure it wasn't just random creation out of thin air, as I can see remnants of worksheets I used to calculate everything.)

Battle strategy

Nauri was one of the strongest TCT fighters, and was considered by many to be the very strongest. She cast spells by chanting magic words, unlike the boys whose magic powers rested in their hands. Thus, even while physically tied up, Nauri could cast a magic spell either to attack her enemies or to heal herself and her allies.

Nauri's healing powers were very strong. At any time during any battle, she could cast a spell to heal all of her wounds, making it as though she had never taken a hit at all. This she shared with the boys, but unlike the boys, she did not need to make physical contact with the ally she was healing in order for the spell to work.

Nauri could cast lightning bolts, which behaved like ordinary lightning and thus could cause fires. However, she mostly aimed the lightning at enemies and used them for their shock value. She could also throw fire directly (listed as "Firebolt").

In one battle against a fire-breathing dragon, she used a "Fury" move, which combined all her magic spells at the same time. The boys could not do anything like this because they were unable to use more than one magic power at a time. However, Nauri's Fury move was physically exhausting for her, so she could not simply win battles by casting the Fury spell over and over.

Like #Teddy, however, Nauri sometimes overestimated her abilities. In the same battle against the dragon, after she had hit the dragon with her Firebolt attack, she stepped closer to the dragon and then punched its front leg with her right hand. (Listed as "Uppercut".) This hurt her hand and she was forced to back off from the fight temporarily. However, she soon cast another Bolt, without even bothering to heal herself.

Role in politics

Despite being from Namma, Nauri joined RMC, a political party in Camia that advocated for the aboriginal population of Camia to remain in Camia instead of trying to seek out a better life on planet Namma, when she was nine years old.

Newsletters

An STW affiliate program. Newsletters was an alternate newspaper run by STW in order to raise money for STW and its subsidiaries such as TCT that needed STW's money.

External history

I may have created this based on just a single Archie Comics story where Betty was working for a newspaper. That would explain why I chose the blonde Jen Mallard to be the person most closely associated with Newsletters. I remember going over the Archie Comics story with whiteout and changing some of the names and other details to be ones from my story.

O

Oliver

Oliver

Oliver

Oliver was a young boy who joined the #Cleanup Corps in Seattle around the age of eight years old. Like the other Cleanup Corps kids, Oliver had no superpowers, and thus contributed very little to STW when STW rescued him from Earth, but #Nancy was determined to get everything she could out of the Corps, and occasionally they were forced to accompany the older kids on missions.

On one mission, in the Camian province of Todrom, #Dr. Zāme kidnapped Oliver and #Carolyn from a spaceship and then announced to the older kids what he had done. He soon handed off Oliver and Carolyn to another group of men, however, because he hoped to pull off even more kidnappings that day.

The men to whom Dr. Zāme had given Oliver called themselves pirates and said that they would not hurt the kids, but would enslave them. However, the kids realized that the pirates were still required to obey Dr. Zāme, and that Dr. Zāme had threatened that he would kill Cleanup Corps children if necessary to force a surrender from the wider #TCT organization or one of the other superhero leagues.

However, the pirates did not cooperate fully with each other, and Oliver was actually able to befriend one of the men by virtue of the fact that they both spoke the same language whereas the other men did not. Thus, the two Cleanup Corps children escaped their abductors with the help of this one man. TCT was still trying to evade Dr. Zāme who kept on firing missiles at them, but the younger kids were eventually rescued by other TCT members.

P

Polly

Polly

Polly

Polly was a red-haired girl who wore green clothes. She was not properly a part of TCT or any of the other leagues because I only created her much later on for a video game in which I needed a child superhero and naturally I thought of my earlier work right away.

Battle strategy

If Polly can be assumed to be canonical, however, she would fit right in. She preferred to fight with a sword in her right hand and had some "thunderclap" magic powers that combined a dispel ability (cancel others' magics that haven't been cast yet) with a weak but significant attack power that she used to slowly wear her enemies down. Thus she combined physical and magical abilities, and despite being fairly weak in both, made up for it with her intelligence and her strong defensive abilities.

Polly was one of the most aggressive fighters in all of Camia. She often fought while surrounded by black cougars which she had tamed. Although the cats did not have any magic powers, they were strong fighters as well and thus Polly became one of the very few examples of humans fighting alongside animals instead of against animals.

However, Polly had a dark side. She lived much further west than the TCT kids, and the people around her were not familiar with child superheros in general except as a hard-to-believe phenomenon that they sometimes heard on the news, so she was able to hide in crowds of other kids and cast magic spells to draw her enemies towards her, but then force the other kids to take the hits and suffer kidnappings while Polly herself ran free. In particular, her hair became less red as she grew older, and reports of a red-haired girl running loose through the woods led her enemies to make unfortunate attacks on many of the wrong people.

Later life

Polly remained a fighter throughout her childhood and into her adulthood; her superpowers did not change during all of this time.

Naming

I seem to have entirely avoided the /p/ sound when naming the characters in my early writing (except for Seth Phillips, but that barely counts). I don't know why that is, but I think in a way it fits that the only person whose name starts with P is a character whom I created more than ten years after I had stopped writing my early comics.

Power

Power

Power

Power was a teenage boy who joined a feminist club called #FILTER because his girlfriend, #Eartha, performed better when he was around. The leader of the club, #Julia, allowed boys to join the club, but stated the female members of the club could kill any male members and not face a penalty. Power's days in FILTER were thus fraught with danger, and he needed his girlfriend for protection.

Like many boys in FILTER, Power was physically small for his age, and needed to jump in order to see over his girlfriend's shoulders. Although he grew taller when he got his teenage growth spurt, he still never reached the same height as Eartha. Despite the boy being literally overshadowed by his girlfriend, however, when the couple traveled they generally referred to themselves as "Power & Eartha", never "Eartha & Power". This was not because they felt Power was more important but simply because they realized a name with two vowels in a row sounded less euphonious.

Nonetheless, Power had some powers of his own and did not merely rely on Eartha to protect him during battles. He could take energy out of the Earth and could tolerate pain better than most other people. One day his girlfriend jumped on top of him and threatened him with a shining knife. Eartha believed she was out to finally finish him off, but Power absorbed energy from the knife just before she pierced his throat. Thus he was protected from all damage. Later, a woman tied him up with a thick quilt, stopping him from using his arms to break free, but he was able to tolerate the pain long enough for another girl to discover what had happened and cut him free.

PPP

See #Lemon Shop League.

R

Reino

Reino

Reino

Reino was a planet of "rebels" (I dont remember what I meant by that) and large lumbering animals. I mentioned it three times in my early unfinished novel even though it had nothing to do with the plot of the novel, simply because the narrator was recalling anecdotes about experiences he'd had there.

Reino to some extent continues the early concept I had made for #Namma when I was six years old: "The people here are tiny, but they mean trouble". That is, Reinoans were physically small and adult males were incapable of holding their own against a 10-year-old Tebbalan boy even without superpowers, but because they only traveled in overwhelming numbers, they were quite safe from invasions after all.

Repilia

Repilia

Repilia

Repilia was a zone of planet Namma that I early on called "French Namma". Its people had a culture which at the time I identified with everything I disliked about girls, which I considered for some reason to be "French". Repilian women ruled over and abused Repilian men to an absurd extreme that alienated all of the other cultures on planet Namma. They were able to do this because the Repilian people, uniquely in the universe, had a sexual size mismatch such that adult men only stood as tall as their women's hips. Thus, Repilian women did not need artificial forces such as feminism to keep their men under control, they literally kicked their men around and never worried about the men trying to fight back.

Female characters were generally shown in a positive light in my works, but Repilia was the exception; not even #Teddy, who was strongly attracted to powerful women, was interested in spending any significant time in Repilia.

Richie (1)

Richie

Richie

Richie was a man from planet Earth who was brought to Camia when Teddy asked his father for a present: a slave to beat up on, which he promised to keep in the basement so that the slave did not disturb his parents or his sister. His dad agreed, and captured and brought the man to his new home all in one night in order to surprise his son the following morning. This was possible because a neighboring town, "Ogden", was heavily involved in the capture of Earthans for use as slaves in Camia and therefore Camians wishing to acquire slaves did not have to trouble themselves with going all the way to Earth to get them.

Teddy generally left Richie chained to the wall in the basement of his home. Since Teddy spent much of his time on the go, fighting against aliens and against invading armies, he quickly forgot about Richie, and Richie went without food. Teddy's parents mostly took over the role of providing Richie with food and water.

One day on planet Namma, Teddy was wandering around in the grasslands north of the village when he ran into an advancing army of about 300 men in tanks who had traveled in spaceships from Earth. One of the men looked like Richie to him. Teddy was angry to learn that a slave he had tortured and beat up on for a mere six months would seek revenge on him, but Teddy realized that he might not be able to singlehandedly defeat an army of 300 men in tanks by himself. Instead, he ran away from the men and let the Earthlings massacre the people around him instead. He promised he would get revenge on Richie, but later found out the man who had attacked him was not Richie at all and that Richie had been simply going hungry while chained to the wall.

Richie (2)

Richard

Richie

Richie was a small boy who belonged to the #Camian Combat league (CCC). He was 7 years old when he first met Dr Zame. One day when he was doing his homework, #Dr. Zāme interruped him and brought him home to his torture chamber. He nailed the boy to the wall and used him as a dartboard. Dr Zame played with him for several hours and then went on Camian TV and showed what he had done. #Nancy was so horrified when she saw the boy being tortured that she sent three more small children on a mission to Dr. Zame to get him back. Dr. Zame welcomed these kids to his dungeon, and stuck them each on hooks hanging from the ceiling.

Ridiam

Ridiam

Ridiam

Ridiam was a religion, or what I called a mental practice, popular on planet Tebbala or at least in the TCT kids' hometown of #Lewiston. I didn't develop any detailed doctrinal beliefs other than that they worshipped^? "the Unknown", which was associated with the color purple, and believed in a mental achievement called #Frog Pond that non-members often mistook for a physical location. At one point, I wrote about #Jen visiting an alien planet "to see if there's any Ridiam there".

I never specifically stated whether or not Ridiam conflicted with Christianity; in my very early writing, Camians were Christians and attended churches, and I know that I rejected some orthodox Christian beliefs while I was writing about Ridiam, but I never intended Ridiam to be an enemy of Christianity.

I abandoned Ridiam shortly after I created it, however, to focus instead on reworking the Camian religion as a synthesis of Christianity and the native #Manni religion which was patterned after a generic Algonquian religion (the name Manni is probably a subconscious loan from Algonquian manito).

Rusintas

Rusintas was a city in SW Camia where the children often stayed during long trips. Rusintas had a very efficient transportation system. Nancy built up the city after convincing the national government of Camia to give her an unlimited budget to build a new STW base there on the eastern slope of the mountain the town was on: Base 44. The name "Rusintas" soon came to refer to just the Base rather than the city it was built in, as STW quickly overwhelmed the rest of the city. Of the many STW kids, #Zachary quickly emerged as the leader of Rusintas, and spent more time there than Teddy or any of the other leading adventurers.

NOTE, THIS NAME IS TECHNICALLY BAD BUT IM GOING TO STICK WITH IT SINCE THIS IS TEPPALA WHERE I SOMETIMES "CANONIZE" MISTAKES. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RUSENTAS.

It could also be scrapped entirely in favor of the Andanese name Kuhakiha, although Rusintas sounds much nicer.

Zachary's rule over Rusintas

Zachary allowed party politics in his city, but stated that no matter which party won the elections, Zachary would remain in power. Thus, although he promised to respect the decisions made by the other people in Rusintas, he would not allow anyone else to share his power to implement those decisions. Zachary quickly extended his rule beyond just the STW base and took over the government of the city itself, including all of the adults who held political office in Rusintas; even the mayor of Rusintas had to ask permission from Zachary to do anything.

Since Zachary was still subject to the rule of #Nancy, it could be said that Nancy held all of the power in Rusintas. However, Nancy gave the kids very flexible powers in their new city, and Zachary took all of this power for himself.

Comparison with AlphaLEAP

Rusintas was in some ways similar to AlphaLEAP (not the same AlphaLeap written about here) or "the Parrot Thruway" (from a dream I had once). AlphaLEAP was a planet (or a country) with an entirely female population, where males were not allowed to live. The women in AlphaLEAP were often assumed to be all lesbians, but some were merely women who found the idea of an all-female society appealing and still planned to eventually marry a husband and move back.

AlphaLEAP had a strong, healthy society nearly free of violent crime and its people realized that males were simply not necessary for a country, or even a planet, to grow. However, despite males being banned from the entire nation, a small number of males were nearly always present illegally in AlphaLEAP. These men survived by attacking the women, stealing their possessions, and then moving on to the next victim. Rape was less common than robbery but not unusual. The police force of AlphaLEAP tried to stop the men, but because they were made for a nonviolent society they had a very difficult time projecting their power, and the men kept coming. The presence of males remained small because even a very successful robber lived a harsh life in AlphaLEAP, but those few men that did come committed almost all of the violent crime in AlphaLEAP.

The comparison to Rusintas is essentially that Rusintas is a society whose population consists entirely of children, and has banned adults from even visiting it. The children in Rusintas are better protected than the women of AlphaLEAP, and essentially are invincible because they always stuck together, but like the people of AlphaLEAP they know that when they see an adult male in their town that he is not friendly and they need to run away.

Attacks by Dr. Zāme

As with every other place the kids visited, Dr Zāme established a network of spies in Rusintas to follow the kids around. Some were locals; others were Xeman imports. However, Rusintas differed from #Lewiston, #Fort Calamity, and other places in that it was a planned city, at least the part of it that Nancy built the STW base in.

The students at Base 44 were entirely self-governing, meaning that no non-STW members were allowed into the ward of the city owned by STW unless an STW member invited them in. Nancy herself rarely visited Rusintas, preferring to speak with the children remotely. Thus, Rusintas had no adults at all unless one of the kids' parents was visiting them. Nancy stated that all men were dogs, and that in Rusintas no adults would be let in unless they were accompanied by a child. Thus Dr. Zāme's spies had nobody to blend in with.

On the other hand, though, Rusintas was an open city rather than a fort, and Nancy expected the children to protect themselves from invaders rather than relying on a physical barrier such as a wall or extended ceiling. (Fort Calamity was a 20 mi^2 dome.) Thus, Dr. Zāme and his spies could simply turn invisible and walk right into Rusintas. Aided by Nancy's continued refusal to allow the kids to wear armor or carry weapons to defend themselves, a wave of kidnappings nearly shut down Rusintas almost as soon as it had been born: hearing that they were free to do as they wished, the children in Rusintas rescued a troop of Xemans who claimed to be defectors who wanted to ally with the children and make them stronger. These Xemans quickly infiltrated the computer security system and stuck tiny recorders in the children's hair and clothing. They triggered an attack on Rusintas and then, as the children tried to respond to the attack, the Xemans they had rescued kidnapped the children and tied them to the wall so that they would die first.

When Nancy realized what had happened, she was very angry and decided to punish the children for being infiltrated by denying them the right to leave Rusintas. She blamed the spying incident on the children's rinability to change their clothes. She also refused their request for military help and told them that they needed to get rid of the Xemans on their own rather than asking for help. Thus the children realized that they would have Xemans living among them for the rest of their time in Rusintas.

Once STW's children realized they were being constantly attacked, and countered by setting traps that they could avoid but which the spies often fell into. The children were able to detect the invisible spies to some extent by listening for the sounds they made as they walked. Lastly, and most subtly, they used the spies' powers to frustrate Dr. Zāme, pretending that the spies were succeeding in their attempt to remain undetectable in order to convince them that they no longer had to obey Dr. Zāme. Thus, some spies abandoned their missions and remained in Rusintas without spying on the children. However, the children paid a price for this strategy as well: since the spies could not survive on their own while remaining invisible, they had to steal food and other personal effects from the STW children.

Also unlike Fort Calamity, Nancy ensured that everything in Rusintas was built with the STW kids in mind. In Fort Calamity, the #Camian Combat kids were constantly frustrated by having to deal with oversized doors and furniture that had been built for traditional adult male soldiers rather than for elementary schoolers. In Rusintas, everything was small enough for a young child to use but not so small that the older children would run into the opposite problem. However, after the kidnappings and a series of sniper attacks inside Rusintas, Nancy soon realized that it made more sense to put only the oldest and most powerful adventurers in Rusintas and leave the younger, weaker children behind, so this idea meant little in the long run.

S

Sam

Sam

Sam

Samuel I. Thompson was a young boy with autism who belonged to the Cleanup Corps in Seattle. He was the only one of the Cleanup Corps kids who was often accompanied by his mother, though only when he would be otherwise traveling alone.

Sam was very tolerant of cold temperatures, and preferred to wear shorts even in winter. Like his mom, he preferred to wear pink, not realizing that it was seen as a feminine color. Since boys' clothes that were pink were difficult to find, his mother had to find them for him. Often, these were actually girls' clothes, since at his age there was little difference in body shape between boys and girls. She did not mind him being made fun of for wearing pink because it took attention away from all of the other things people made fun of him for.

TCT was interested in Sam and encouraged him to leave the Cleanup Corps and move to TCT once TCT broke free from the control of Nancy. Despite his small size (less than four feet tall), obvious mental disability, and lack of superpowers, Sam was able to pass the physical entrance exam and TCT welcomed Sam as a warrior and awarded him full membership. (Two other Cleanup Corps kids also switched: #Vince and #Zak.)

TCT promised he could help out in combat missions in whatever ways he felt appropriate, and would be given more freedom than most of the other kids to refuse a mission he felt uncomfortable with. He was able to hone his skills by engaging in practice battles against the older kids. He sometimes used Zak's computers when Zak wasn't around.

Sam was unusually self-aware and easily embarrassed. When people, especially adults, talked about him in public, he would pretend not to listen. This worked well for him because in some cases he legitimately couldnt understand other people talking even in plain words, due to his autism.

Age and abilities

In one story, I wrote that Sam was five years and four months old at the time of his adoption into TCT, but it would be unusual for even a child-driven organization like TCT to put a 5-year-old in charge of his own space missions. I think it's likely that I had originally intended Sam to be about the same age as the other kids in the Cleanup Corps, in line with my description of them as elementary schoolers. Further, the story in which I wrote that he was five also stated that he was hiding out in Antarctica, that he had active telepathy (he could read minds), as could his mother, and that his mother served for a brief period of time as the dictator of Israel.

Friends and associations

Sam was often accompanied on missions by one of several girls who looked after him to make sure he would not get kidnapped or get lost. At the same time, however, many of his friends were younger than him, as his autism made him more comfortable with younger children than older ones.

Autism

I seem to have portrayed autism fairly accurately despite not knowing that autism existed. For example, I did not give Sam any of the stereotypical "special kid" traits that are sometimes mistakenly associated with autism, such as hearing voices, speaking with a "robotic" voice (as in Rainman, which the producers admitted was done on purpose), or having a perfect photographic memory. He had synesthesia, and once told a girl "this music sounds kind of 20ish". (This was the 32-20 hospital story.)

Evil Bed

On the other hand, I later wrote a few stories in which Sam had some special powers after all, but they were mental instead of physical. I had an idea for a story I never actually wrote, in which Sam dreams a hospital bed is eating the patients who sleep on it. Later, it turns out the bed had been poisoned. "Sam was wrong about how the bed was killing its victims, but right that it was." Thus, he was psychic. The story was called Evil Bed; the lack of a the on the title was deliberate, but I had no good reason for it.

I seem to have subconsciously decided that Sam was the most interesting character in the Cleanup Corps as I stopped writing about the other Cleanup Corps members (or at least the Soothsayers) shortly afterward. I found in small writing on Sam's profile "also, sort of like Teddy", where Teddy was the name of the self-insert character. I'm fairly sure that this was all subconscious and not me just trying to work a second self-insert character into my stories.

Sam's later career

I seem to have identified Sam with a large, aggressive boy who worked in law enforcement and wrestled people in #Danbury after the war was over. I do remember that Sam liked fighting, even at the age of 8 years old when he was living in Seattle. Thus, it could be that Sam was tall and strong for his age but was identified as "a small boy" simply because he was surrounded by older children after he moved to Tebbala. His career in the police force would likely have begun only once he reached his early teen years ... which, by the standards of #TCT and the #Cleanup Corps, is quite old.

Sara

Sara

Sara

Sara I. Hildebrandt was a TCT hopeful and the founder of the United Pacifist League, an organization of superheros and their allies whose desire to stop all wars and ultimately to stop fighting of any kind that causes injuries, even if all of the casualties are on the side of the villains, set them apart from every other league.

Unlike the other kids, who took to combat from a very early age, Sara preferred to specialize in spying and detective work, and promised that although she could not fight well, she could help TCT by spying on their enemies and providing them with the best strategy to fight their battles. Thus, even though she was a pacifist, she was willing to help her allies win battles. She was very social and popular, and the other kids enjoyed her presence among them.

Nevertheless, TCT rejected Sara's request for full membership simply because she was too small and weak to pass their physical fitness tests at the age she was when she applied for membership. Even though she was 12 years old, she actually scored lower on TCT's fitness tests than the Cleanup Corps children, even Sam, who were much younger than Sara.

After being rejected from TCT proper, she spent much of her time in allied leagues such as the Cleanup Corps, which did not require members to pass a physical fitness test, and therefore she was present at least occasionally on TCT's missions and was indeed able to help them win their wars. Nevertheless, she was up-front about her commitment to pacifism from even a very early age.

Blonde hair and outfits

Sara had blonde hair. This was not unusual among her peers, but she accentuated her hair and preferred to identify herself with the color yellow in general.

External history

I seem to remember creating Sara when I was in 7th grade, which is to say, towards the back half of the time when I created most of the other characters. But it must have been earlier than that, because in 6th grade I wrote "Sheila is tougher than Sara." This may be because Sara was a very minor character and I didn't have much information on her until I expanded her personality several years later by creating the United Pacifist League.

I suspect the name Hildebrandt is taken from something I read when I was young, perhaps a cartoonist or an editor of a comic strip such as Archie, but I can't find it now. I kept the name despite removing most other "stolen" names because it ironically means "war sword". Her middle initial has no particular meaning.

Satykhuci

Sātykhūci

Sātykhūci

Sātykhūci Nuphian was a boy who overcame his shyness and joined STW with the help of his friend Zachary. He was the youngest adventurer in TCT for much of his time there, before being surpassed by #Treba and a girl named #Nauri. Sāty was impulsive and several times got himself into trouble and needed to be rescued by the other kids. For example, one time when the kids were tracking down Dr. Zāme, he strayed too far ahead of the other kids despite them warning him to stay back. On another mission, on planet #Reino, he was almost eaten by a zomba worm.

Sāty generally escaped his crises unharmed. However, after about a year, a man beat up Sātykhūci and caused him permanent brain damage. Sāty's superpowers were intact, but Nancy didn't feel comfortable sending him out on his own, and he soon was excused from all missions at STW.

Scott

Scott

Scott

Scott was a small boy, 6 years old at the peak of the war. He was shorter than his 5 year old sister.

Scott continues the #Calvin character who appeared in my early childhood stories when I was less creative. I never wrote much about Scott, and that means that he has no characteristics that could conflict with Calvin's. He had dark brown hair, perhaps even black, but that is also a good thing because for some reason I always drew Calvin with black hair as well. (At first I drew everyone with black hair, but added lighter hair colors to some characters earlier than others.)

He was six years old, and therefore smaller than most of the other kids, and he had no superpowers. He always carried his "blaster" gun, thus giving him a power none of the other kids had, but this was useful only in certain types of battles. For example, like all guns, it could not penetrate force fields, and therefore was not useful against enemies with superpowers. Thus, Scott usually attacked animals and mutants.

Strategy

Scott was not a very effective fighter. He wanted to use his gun against Dr. Zāme in the very first battle the children fought against Zāme, but he foolishly walked right up to Dr. Zāme instead of remaining in the distance. Thus, Dr. Zāme shot him in the head with his more powerful gun and it was a boy named Lumyt who defeated Dr. Zāme by hitting him with a bomb.

"Calvin" appearances

Calvin was a character borrowed directly from Calvin & Hobbes who appeared in several early comics in his Spaceman Spiff form. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was in the third person, like the Spiff character in the original Calvin strips. I seemed not to notice this, and in one story (one of only three that has survived) all of the characters start speaking in the third person after one line that Spiff spoke.

Privately, if I considered Scott to be slightly older than Calvin, I could say that the entirety of the Calvin & Hobbes strip history was canon and that it all merely happened slightly earlier. In this storyline, Calvin would have gotten tired of living with his parents in the USA and decided to move to planet Tebbala in order to make his Spaceman Spiff fantasies a reality.

Membership

It is possible, due to his age, that Scott could have been a member of the #Lemon Shop League.

Senguttuvan

Senguttuvan

Senguttuvan

Senguttuvan Ramanujan was a man from southern India who joined #FILTER and sometimes also traveled with TCT and the other groups of kids. He was tall and thin, and had very dark skin.

Role in FILTER

At the time that Seng joined FILTER, it consisted mostly of teenage girls, with a few teenage boys who did what they were told. All of them were white and more than half of them had blonde hair. Senguttuvan saw these blonde teenagers as a threat to the empire he had built himself in India, and decided to face them head-on in an all-out battle.

However, he soon realized that the blondes were not interested in toppling his empire. Instead, they wanted to adopt him into their league. He thus pulled himself out of the fight and signed a peace treaty with the girls in which he agreed to join #FILTER along with his wife, Tammy.

Senguttuvan's superpowers

Senguttuvan's superpowers were different than all of the other fighters'. He had the unique ability to magnify energy, and also the unique ability to deflect attacks. Thus, when anyone sent a magic attack at him, he could mirror the attack back at the spellcaster, magnified. He was able to do this even with attacks that were aimed at others, so long as he could reach the path of the magic in time to bounce it back. He also used his magnification ability to help other fighters make their own attacks stronger. He could do this even with spells that he himself was not capable of producing, such as Julia's glacier attacks.

Senguttuvan's mirror power never failed, and therefore Senguttuvan was literally invincible to all magic attacks so long as he was fast enough to counter each attack with a mirror. The enemies' solution to this was to focus their attacks on Seng and flood him with many different simultaneous attacks from all sides, knowing that he could block only one attack at a time.

Although Seng was physically strong, he did not have the any strength-enhancing magics, and therefore rarely used physical attacks in battles. He also did not have the power of force fields, which meant that he could not protect himself from the physical attacks of his enemies; he was only strong against magic.

Seng's personality

Senguttuvan was a rare example of a positive adult male role model who was not submissive to powerful females above him. Some FILTER members worried that he would disrupt their all-female power structure, but they soon realized he loved fighting and was not interested in gaining political power in their organization even though he had been accumulating political power when he was independent.

Senguttuvan preferred to fight alongside #Eartha, the girlfriend of a FILTER boy named #Power. Here, again, some people worried that Senguttuvan would try to steal Eartha away from the much smaller and more submissive Power. However, Seng was faithful to his wife Tammy and did not use his battle strategy as an excuse to start flirting with the many blonde beautifuls who surrounded him everywhere he went. Power generally tagged along with Eartha and Senguttuvan in battles, even though he was of little use. Thus ironically two of the three most prominent people in the feminist organization known as FILTER were males.

Personification of heat

In many ways, Seng symbolized heat and summer weather. The white members of FILTER seemed to be constantly eating popsicles and icecream, and many of them had names like Coldwater that showed that they personified cool weather. By contrast, Seng and his wife loved hot spicy foods such as rice curry, and although they did not have weather-related magics, they stood out from the cold kids that surrounded them in many ways.

Sharon

Sharon

Sharon

Sharon was #Teddy's younger sister, six or seven years old at the time of the peak of the violence. She was not an official member of TCT but nevertheless helped them on missions because her superpowers were very acute. She was particularly good at magics related to cold weather. One time, she encased her house in a thick sheet of ice, and when her dad returned home and realized she had effectively destroyed the house he got very angry at her, but she cooled him down with more ice and he forgave her.

She was not limited to just one element, however. Indeed, she defeated two gigantic mutants — a giant slug and an ice cube monster — within a few minutes of each other while the boys were too busy struggling to block the mutants' attacks to even fight back. During the ice cube monster battle, Teddy was on his computer reading about battle strategies while simultaneously tapping away with a cellphone in each hand. But then the monster bumped into his computer, completely destroying it, and he was forced to turn the battle over to his little sister.

NOTE TO SELF

;SHARON MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN LEMON SHOP DUE TO HER AGE. THE LEAGUES NEVER COMPETED WITH EACH OTHER, SO THIS WOULD NOT BE A "PROBLEM"

Sheila

Sheila

Sheila was a small girl who joined the #Cleanup Corps early on and hoped to be able to join TCT proper when TCT split itself off. However, like Sara, Sheila failed the physical fitness test and was thus rejected. As she was only 9 years old, this did not embarrass her as much as did Sara's rejection letter. Moreover, Sheila actually outscored Sara despite being much younger than Sara.

The two girls were similar in many other ways. Both were very social and were among the most popular members of their respective leagues. However, Sheila rejected politics and did not try to put herself in charge of an association of pacifists, nor did she join that league when Sara created it.

Skate

Skate

Skate

Seth "Skate" Phillips was a teenage bully with spiked hair who was notorious for standing on the streets of Lewiston waiting for his victims to walk home from school so he could beat them up. Sometimes he acted alone, and sometimes his friends helped. He was about two years older than the original TCT children, but these were not his primary targets, because they had superpowers. Instead he preferred to beat up on boys who were both small and did not have superpowers. Thus, in between stopping alien invasions and negotiating peace treaties between million-strong spacefaring armies, TCT kids occasionally stopped in their hometown to defend a helpless schoolboy from Skate and his friends' abuse.

By the time of the climax of the war, however, Skate had reached 14 years old, and was more interested in chatting up pretty girls than beating up little boys. Skate's advantage over his victims had actually grown stronger with time, because of puberty, but the pride he took in his many victories turned to shame when he realized he had always only picked unfair fights. He thus gave up bullying and apologized to his earlier victims. Then TCT made a truce with Skate, forgiving him for his past abuses, and enrolled him into TCT. Nancy objected to this, but by this time TCT was effectively independent from its teacher and was enrolling and rejecting members based on physical fitness exams and largely ignoring alliances and prior misdeeds.

Skate had no superpowers, but had the body of a man and thus served, in many ways, as grunt labor for the team as well as helping out in those fights where muscular strength mattered more than superpowers. He was 5'3" when he was young, and reached 6 feet tall in his early teenage years.

Stacy

Stacy

Stacy

Stacy was a girl living in Lewiston who had very strong superpowers (ranked 5th strongest on the entire planet, and #1 among girls over 10 years old) but did not often travel on missions with the other kids. Instead, she mostly worked in politics, lobbying to get the kids more power over their own destinies. She also worked to try to stop the illegal emigration of Camians seeking a better life on planet Namma because she wanted them to stay in Camia and improve the quality of life there instead of making Camia worse by taking themselves out of Camia.

Early career

From the age of 9, Stacy went on many missions to planet #Xema to face off against #Dr. Zame and his array of mutants and robots. She was resistant to poison, and had strong healing abilities. This came in handy because, in many early battles, the children were attacked by snakes and other animals that spat on them, and many of these animals were large enough to completely cover their victims in spit without ever getting close enough to be within range of a counterattack. At other times, the animals simply spat on the ground, hoping to create enough of a mess that the children would find themselves in an obstacle course and would fall into one of the poison puddles. This was possible even in the extremely cold climate of planet Xema.

During one mission, Stacy was traveling with several other children to a meeting on the other side of planet Tebbala. (The place later called "Mevumep".) While they were out over the ocean, one of Dr. Zame's henchmen hit their ship with a ballistic missile, forcing them to make an emergency landing on the nearest landmass. They had landed in an area where people were not familiar with the child superhero leagues, or even the general concept of children making independent decisions. So when the ship crashed and four children scrambled out of the wreckage, the people around them assumed that the kids' parents were still inside the ship. They refused to believe the tiny children desperately telling them that they were in Mevumep on important international business and were in danger of being late for their meeting. Only when Stacy conjured a pulsating ball of fire in her left hand did they finally agree to help the children get to their conference.

Career in politics

By the age of 11, Stacy was already moving away from dangerous missions and towards a career in politics. This was largely due to #Nancy's general preference that girls, even the very strongest ones, should not be sent on dangerous life-threatening missions to places like Xema, but should instead remain on planet Tebbala and help run the league from the relative safety of home.

However, her superpowers still helped her in the sense that she was given far more authority, even at a very young age, than any of the other kids in #TCT, or even in TCT's parent organization #STW, except for three boys whose superpowers were even stronger than Stacy's. She helped create an organization called RMC which attempted to stop the illegal emigration of disaffected Camians, particularly those of "Manitan" descent, to planet #Namma which was perceived as having a far better quality of life.

Kidnappings

Her prominence in politics made her a frequent target for kidnappings. Despite the fact that remaining on Tebbala gave Stacy, like most of the other female superheros, a greater degree of safety than what the boys had to deal with, her unique leadership role in STW and RMC meant that she often traveled entirely unaccompanied and had nobody to call for immediate help if she were attacked. Nancy's prohibition on the kids carrying weapons applied to Stacy as well, and her spaceships were similarly defenseless, so villains such as Dr. Zāme needed only to catch sight of her ship in order to be confident that they had an easy victim. Dr. Zame and his compatriots shot more missiles as Stacy than at any other adventurer, and they rarely missed. Often, Stacy would be sitting in school or a political conference with outside parties when a bomb would hit the building and immediately destroy it; Dr. Zāme knew she was there because her ship was nearby.

However, Stacy's superpowers were so strong that she was never successfully kidnapped, even though she often missed scheduled events because Dr. Zāme wrecked her spaceship en route and she was forced to jump from the ship and immediately turn invisible in order to hide from him. This is similar to the strategy that #Zachary used to evade Dr. Zāme when his own ship was wrecked by one of Zāme's missiles.

Career in science

Stacy was interested in science, and founded a group called "The Brilliant Biologists" to study both humans and wildlife.

Stacy was very pretty, and considered a career as a supermodel during her early and middle teen years.

External history

Stacy continues the "Betty" character from my early stories, who had only positive traits, and no flaws at all. She was strong, intelligent, and always good-hearted. This is one area where Archie Comics actually did influence me, as I would say that the Betty Cooper in Archie Comics has few, if any, negative personality traits and also fits the more concrete qualities I had in mind for her such as being strong (both physically and magically) and intelligent.

STW

STW

STW

Save the World was an organization on planet Teppala open to children of all ages who wanted to help preserve Teppala's society long enough to give the Teppalans enough time to kill all the people living on Earth and then move to Earth themselves.

STW was the parent organization of #TCT, and provided all of the funding for TCT. TCT was the strongest of the many leagues STW controlled, but not the largest. There were 68 STW bases in Camia at the time of the war.

STW raised money by all possible means, be they nice or not so nice. One method of running a fundraiser they often held was to open a store selling a single useful but easily obtainable item, such as Ed's Scissor Hut, and to charge high prices for their product. The people who bought their scissors at the STW store would show off that they had paid the high price and therefore shame other people into going to STW to get the scissors. This worked well because nearly everyone approved of STW but wanted to show their solidarity in a public way rather than simply donating money privately and never letting others know about it.

Although STW primarily acted through its subsidiary organizations such as #TCT, the #Cleanup Corps, #Newsletters, and #LSL, it was not merely a shell organization with no power of its own. There were many children who were members of STW but not of any of its subsidiaries. Many of these, especially in TCT's later days, were girls who had wanted to join TCT but were denied admission because they had failed the physical entrance examination. Others were young children who were similarly unable to join the "big kids" leagues such as TCT, but wanted to help out in any way they could. Some were pacifists who supported STW but did not want to participate in violence.

Base 7

Base 7 was located in a bubble-shaped dome that also resembled the kids' early spaceships. (Later, they got taller, more rocket-like ships.) #Nancy was not physically present in the dome; she communicated with the kids remotely. The kids elected two captains from among themselves to run the school. Those two were #Teddy and #Hikik early on, but #Teddy and #Zachary later. Only one captain was active at a time; they were expected to trade places every 20 minutes, or earlier if their work was done.

T

Tanya

Tanya

Tanya

Tanya J̅̄̅ansen was a tall dark-haired girl who belonged to #STW but was not part of TCT or any of the other major superhero leagues. Later, when the TCT kids broke away from their two adult leaders and began recruiting new members directly, Tanya tried to join TCT, but failed the physical admission test. She was embarrassed.

Tanya was also embarrassed when she underwent her adolescent growth spurt around the age of 12, putting her far above her classmates, including all of the boys. Previously, #Jen and Tanya had both been fairly tall girls, but by the age of 13 Tanya was much taller and more full-figured even than Jen. Tanya also happened to be very muscular, and took pride in being a rough-and-tumble tomboy, but was disturbed when she realized the boys around her were using her primarily for heavy manual labor because she was stronger than almost all of them. One boy, a childhood friend, arranged to meet her one day and when she showed up he said "Where's Tanya?" because she had changed so much that he assumed the tall, busty girl standing in front of him must have been Tanya's older sister.

Tanya was a very good student, and despite being denied admission to TCT twice she remained very loyal to the group and was able to help them in difficult situations using her logical problem-solving skills.

On one mission, Tanya rescued #Zachary after #Dr. Zāme hit him with a ballistic missile and caused his spaceship to crash in the rainforest of Repilia. The original purpose of this mission was to rescue #Jen, another non-TCT STW member, when Jen crashed her spaceship and then was abducted by tiny aliens who had eaten their home planet and were seemingly obsessed with women's clothing. She completed the original mission after rescuing Zach and brought him to the aliens' planet (Zree). When Nancy found out that Zachary had been rescued, she immediately assigned him a dangerous mission on #Xema.

External history

As I implied above, Tanya had big breasts and was full-figured in general, but I don't think adding her into the stories was a transition towards early adolescent fantasies; she was fully a part of the "little kids in elementary school" environment of my early writing and due to her personality would have been out of place in my later writing.

Tare

Tare

Tare

Tare was a small boy of aboriginal descent living in #Lewiston who discovered one day that the white settlers had committed genocide against the native population of Camia when they arrived, and forced the few survivors of the genocide and their children to hide their identities for hundreds of years afterward. Tare realized he was descended from one of those survivors himself, and that Camia's white-led government had been oppressing him and his family for many generations. Nobody in Camia seemed to know about the genocide because all of the victims had been either killed or forced into hiding, and thus there was nobody left to remind them of their history.

Nevertheless, like all other Camians, Tare was proud to live in Camia, and formed a political party advocating for aboriginals to come out of hiding but to remain in Camia and show that they were as much a part of Camia as the white settlers. (Note though that aboriginals also considered themselves white, and did not see this as a contradiction.)

Though not a member of TCT, Tare was able to help TCT indirectly. Like Stacy, he preferred politics and was actually the founding member of the RMC political party which advocated for the aboriginals living in Camia to stay in Camia.

TCT

TCT

TCT

TCT was a league of child superheros who bounced around the universe from planet to planet in order to fight battles that traditional armies couldn't handle. The leader of the league was a schoolteacher named #Nancy.

TCT's battle strategies

Nancy did not allow the children to use weapons or wear protective armor in their battles. The kids believed that this was normal and many believed that they were so strong that they didn't need armor or weapons. Thus, while their superpowers led them to many victories, they sometimes stumbled on surprisingly simple tasks.

The Sunset Battle

For example, when planet Xema invaded Camia with several thousand men, and the Camian army's defenses crumbled, they called TCT for help. At that time, TCT was already busy fighting off an invasion of renegade Earthlings in tanks on planet Namma, but as soon as they had pushed back the Earthlings they got the help message and sent four children back to Camia to take on the invading Xeman army. After they landed, the kids immediately rushed into the battlefield holding hands with each other in order to help the Camian soldiers who had contacted them. However, the general of the Camian army, seemingly unaware of what happened, broke the children's hand chain and told them that they weren't allowed in. The children pled with the man and promised they would be good fighters, and he agreed to let them fight, but said "Don't blame me if [the younger kids] get killed in battle."

When the Xemans saw that the TCT kids had arrived, they stopped attacking the Camian army and ran after the two youngest children, #Treba and #Nauri. These children fought back by kicking and slapping at the Xeman soldiers' legs, expecting to topple them over, but their attacks had no effect. The Xeman soldiers did not simply blow the children apart with their rifles because they had been ordered by Dr. Zāme to kidnap the children and deliver them to Xema in the best possible shape.

Since the kids' hands and feet were useless as weapons, even the now suddenly nonviolent Xemans quickly covered the two children and began carrying them towards one of their spaceships so they could give them to Dr. Zāme. Realizing their imminent doom, the other two kids cooperated to build a force field to trap the soldiers inside. Even though the two smaller kids were also trapped inside the force field with the angry Xeman soldiers (and some of the Camians), the Xemans still held to their promise to deliver the kids to Dr. Zāme intact. However, the crushing weight of the soldiers on top of them had injured the children anyway, and they soon stopped even their futile attempts to fight the soldiers using their hands and feet.

At this point, #Zachary rushed into the battle (he had temporarily shut off the force field) so he could rescue Treba and Nauri. His superpowers prevented the Xemans from stopping him, although they were less worried about physically harming Zach because they knew he could easily heal himself anyway. Nevertheless, Zach managed to rescue Treba and Nauri by creating yet another force field around them, in which a much smaller number of Xeman soldiers were also present, and then hitting those soldiers with a magic spell. The fourth boy, #Teddy, helped the other three exit the layered force fields and restored the conventional battle to what it had been before the children had arrived, except that most of the Xeman army was now trapped in a force field, leaving the Xemans outnumbered by Camian soldiers. On top of this, the boys piled on more magic attacks, which hurt mostly the Xemans. Within minutes, the battle had ended with a clear victory for the Camians and their TCT helpers.

TCT's leadership

Although TCT was a subset of #STW, STW trusted them well enough to let them choose their own leaders, and those leaders were usually Teddy and Zachary. Thus, there was no direct adult leadership, and T&Z sometimes made decisions that went against their teacher's wishes. She tolerated this because nobody else was available to keep the kids in control.

The name "TCT" is used here because although it was originally named the Terrific Ten, the name of the league changed many times as the number of members within it waxed and waned. Nevertheless, the identity of the group itself was maintained, and neither Teddy nor Zachary ever left the group, and the group derived its identity from its leaders, not its other members.

When they weren't out whacking aliens and evil humans, many TCT children spent their time running small businesses. For example, a girl named Justine set up an ice cream stand offering 25 flavors and got lots of customers because all of the people were eager to prove that they were hardy enough to eat her supercooled icecream in the middle of the coldest, windiest blizzard of the summer.

Mostly girls did this, because they were the ones least often called up to go on a dangerous mission. These businesses helped raise money for TCT so that they could afford their spaceships and the fuel that got them from one planet to another. Their customers saw the small businesses the same as they saw other businesses; they were not "fundraisers" or charities and had to deal with direct competition from all of the other businesses in their hometown such as the more luxurious Sandra's Ice Cream Parlor across the street, which offered ice sculptures for the customers to sit on. However, most of the customers of TCT's businesses were members of STW, whose membership mostly overlapped with TCT, which means that little outside money came to TCT from these ventures.

TCT reorganizes

Late in its history, TCT became mostly independent from their teacher (Nancy) and their advisor (George). They decided they no longer needed Nancy to tell them who their members were, and ran a membership drive of their own. At the same time, they also voted out some sitting members, making it clear to them that they were still considered allies but would no longer be a part of TCT. The TCT kids kicked out almost all Earthlings, children under 10 years old, people with brain damage, and girls. There were some exceptions, however: three of the Cleanup Corps children were allowed to remain, and they were all Earthlings under the age of 10. A few girls remained on the rolls, as well.

At the same time, TCT began to admit adult members, even though in the past enrolling adults had never done them any good. They had had only two adult members in the past, both of which (Lilâl and Nanuko) had been disappointments, albeit in two very different ways. Nanuko had been largely incompetent, but was strongly loyal and was beloved by the kids who had adopted him; by contrast, Lilâl accepted his invitation to move in with the children and then three days later he tried to murder them all.

But this did not stop the TCT kids from appealing to adults. They even invited their own teacher to join TCT as a "member" and start taking orders from Teddy & Zachary instead of the other way around. She declined the invitation and also told them to stop poaching kids from other leagues into TCT. In the end, they enrolled only three more adult members (#Bob (1), and h two men whose bynames were "Sand" and "Swimming Pool").

The adult males who joined TCT were much taller and stronger than the kids. For the most part, the adult team members filled in the children's weak spots with their strengths, and the children (whose superpowers were mostly more acute) helped the adults with their more basic human needs. However, outside of battles, the adult usually served the role of grunt labor, moving large heavy objects that the small-bodied kids could not do on their own. Indeed, the adults that enrolled in TCT were all males, and most of them were unusually large and strong even for men in the prime of their life. Of these, #Manitoman was the clear standout. Manitoman was not merely strong; he also had superpowers that made him much stronger. Even when Manitoman had been a young boy, he had already been strong enough to punch through concrete walls with his bare hands (though generally, when he did this, he split the wall into pieces rather than making a hole in the concrete itself).

Teddy

Teddy

Teddy

Teddy Lamb was a short boy with short blonde hair who belonged to #STW, #TCT, and #Newsletters. By most accounts he was the star of STW and TCT, though at times sharing the crown with #Zachary. He had almost every superpower known to TCT, lacking only the ability to turn invisible and remain invisible even when hit by an enemy. (Zachary could do this.) He was 11 years old at the time of the peak of the war.

Family

Being a self-insert character, I gave more details about Teddy's family than I did with most of the other kids. A few TCT boys had brothers who were also in TCT or in STW, but Teddy was the only character who I specifically desscribed as having a little sister (that is, she was not simply a classmate of his), #Sharon. Teddy was the only character on Tebbala whose father played a part in the story, though I only added this in my late teen years. Previously, Teddy's father had not even had a name; I simply saw adults as obstacles and did not feel a need to write about them.

Teddy's family was very wealthy, and in the early days of the war they lived in a house with eleven stories and foldable staircases. However, one day Teddy's younger sister, #Sharon, destroyed that house with an cold weather spell as a prank and her parents realized they did not have ice insurance.

Teddy's personality

Teddy was more friendly to outsiders than most of the people in TCT, and often served as a diplomat. One day, his teacher chose him to invite a man to accompany the kids to a political conference to discuss world issues. The man agreed but stayed close by Teddy's side during the flight to the conference. At the conference, the man quickly became angry, and beat Teddy unconscious with a metal pipe. Later that night, when the building they were sleeping in was wrecked by #Dr. Zame's ballistic missiles, Teddy rescued the man who had beat him up and brought him to safety in the hopes that they could become friends.

Teddy also stood out from his peers on another early mission to recapture the Crystals of Tettom (sometimes called the Crystals of Tebbala). #Bob (2) had heard about the mission, and figured it would be a delightful opportunity to bum a ride from the kids to a planet Bob had wanted to visit for a long time. So when the kids got ready to board their ship, Bob stood in front of the door and didn't let them in. #Zach wanted to simply kill Bob, but Teddy preferred instead to plead desperately for Bob to move so that the kids could open the door. In the end, both boys lost, and Bob was able to board the ship.

When Teddy was afraid, he often lost the ability to speak. Rather than embarrass himself, he would write words on paper or other available objects and communicate using those.

Teddy's superpowers

Conjuring objects

Teddy could conjure up fireballs, iceballs, and burning rocks. The rock power was different from the fireball because the fireball was just fire burning in the air and could not go through most objects whereas the rock could make a projectile impact similar to a slow bullet.

Invisibility

Teddy could turn himself invisible (manar). This included his clothes and any objects he was carrying because the invisibility cloak wrapped around him like a force field rather than being an innate power of his body. Unlike #Zachary, however, Teddy's invisibility shield was instantly destroyed if an enemy grabbed him or if he ran into a strong enough solid object.

Flight and hovering

Teddy could fly by flapping his arms as a bird flaps its wings. He even had the ability to hover nearly silently in the air, unlike birds and insects which mostly must always be in motion.

Hand-to-hand combat

Teddy was able to fight larger opponents without weapons because he could project some of his superpowers through his hands and feet (oboel)

Poison

I just now remembered that I once said that both Teddy and #Zach had the ability to produce venomous saliva and spit it at their enemies, in more or less the same manner that many of their enemies also spit on them. They were immune to their own venom by the same means that made them immune to the venom of their enemies. However, I never illustrated this particular superpower either in my comics or in my written stories; it only existed in my mind. It seems likely that this power would be of little use except in extremely close combat, and only against an enemy that was immune to the boys' many other superpowers.

Tornado and Hurricane

Not all of Teddy's superpowers were militarily useful. He could spin around in circles very rapidly without hurting himself, and used this Tornado (acisuni) power in many battles early on. He would start spinning and then body slam an enemy hoping to knock them over or otherwise hurt them. However, after a few battles, he realized that while his Tornado power was very unique and enemies didn't know how to react to it, it was useless in a battle since his body was not a weapon, and therefore he could not harm his enemies simply by bumping into them, even at great angular velocity. On the other hand, he did win the local figure skating championship several times.

His Hurricane (ībis) power was similar, except that instead of rotating himself he rotated an enemy or another object. This power was not very useful either, but did have the ability to take an enemy out of the battle until they could stop spinning.

Telepathy

Though weaker than #Zachary's power, Teddy had the ability to pull information out of the air (tassarisa). The kids called people who could do this "psychic" and had no other meaning of that term. Teddy could not communicate with others by way of telepathy, however; he was a receiver only.

Combat skills

Teddy was more willing than most of the other kids to put himself in danger in battles involving direct physical combat. He would fearlessly run into a crowd of men that were triple his size, even when they had weapons. Despite being one of the five strongest warriors in the league, he greatly overestimated the extent of his powers and often had to be rescued by the other children. Teddy's bravery often got him into trouble, but he saw misadventures like that as a good thing because every time he was captured he realized he had saved someone else from the same fate.

Teddy often took on seemingly absurd positions in battles. One day on planet Namma, Teddy saw that his spaceship was in the possession of a crowd of several dozen hostile men. With two younger children (#Nauri and #Treba) at his side, he ran into the crowd of men and started kicking and slapping them. He did not use his force field or any other power. The men recognized him, and responded in kind to their tiny challengers. All at once they surrounded Teddy, picked him up, threw him on the ground, kicked him, stomped on him, and tried to crush him to death.

During another mission on planet Namma, Teddy located a crowd of about 12,000 enemy soldiers and landed his ship in the middle of it. Then he opened the door of the ship and charged headlong into a battalion of about 100 of them, planning to take them down in hand to hand combat. But before he could make a move, a dozen of the men pounced on him, and then carried him high over their heads towards a growing fire. They also grabbed three of the other children that had also landed amidst the enemy soldiers. These were rescued by #Barry firing into the crowd from his spaceship (the ships had not been disarmed).

Favorite sodas

Teddy was fond of fruit flavored sodas. I never gave any of them names; they were merely identified by their flavor and color. Teddy would even carry his soda bottles onto the battlefield with him. During a battle against #Dr. Zame, he swung at Dr. Zāme's right hip with an opened soda bottle, expecting to cause a serious wound, but when he realized all he'd done was to get Dr. Zāme's pants wet, he didn't know what to do. It didn't seem to occur to him that a far better idea would have been to use one of his superpowers to hit Zāme with something that could actually hurt him. Dr. Zāme shot Teddy dead with his gun immediately, and then shot a a 6 year old boy who had come with him in the face. However, both boys were quickly revived by the other boys who had stayed behind the front line. Then, a boy named #Lumyt defeated Dr. Zāme in a single hit by conjuring up a bomb. (Dr. Zāme was later revived as well.)

Teddy had attempted to use soda as a weapon before; he poured orange soda into a water pistol and splashed his enemies, causing no harm. But he celebrated because he figured that the soda was "potion" and would therefore work only slowly.

ff

Teddy's force field power was a big help in physical combat because even an entire crowd of soldiers could be temporarily brought down by just a single force field wall. Furthermore, Teddy was one of the few boys who had both the power of flight and the power to turn invisible. Once Teddy further developed his flying ability by learning how to silently hover in the air, he realized he could defeat an enemy of even a very large size by flying up in the air and wrapping a force field around them. This worked because an enemy could not see him, and therefore could not shoot him down. However, force fields only resisted physical pressure for a short time, and an entire army pushing on one of his force fields could have it open again within a matter of seconds. Thus he tended to use force fields against individuals or at most small crowds of people.

Career in TCT

Later, Teddy changed his name to Reptile, because he considered his battle strategy to be similar to that of a generic reptile such as a turtle. He fought very slowly, focusing mostly on defense, and curled up when he was surrounded by stronger enemies in such a way that they could not hurt him and he could not hurt them. (This primarily referred to his cocoon power.) His strategy worked well, especially when paired with a more aggressive partner, who would do most of the fighting for him, but retreat behind his shield when he was counterattacked. A surprisingly effective partner for Teddy in this type of battle was #Julie, a 4-year-old girl.

Theta

Theta

Theta

Theta was a planet whose dominant sapient species was a very large spider-like creature with eight flexible limbs. They were very difficult for humans to injure, even with weapons, because their bodies were very strong against sharp objects. Even the superheros generally could not harm the spiders, as the spiders were strong against attacks such as ice spells as well. However, they could be defeated by blows from a very strong human, much the way a creature such as a crab cannot generally be harmed by a knife but can be crushed to death by a rock.

Since humans generally did not have weapons that made them physically stronger, there was little humans could do to fight back against an attack by spiders other than to attack using chemicals or ballistic missiles from a distance. However, humans on Tebbala were very protective of other humans, and would not use an attack like this if the spiders were invading and attacking humans.

Even though the spiders were warlike animals in general and had no sympathy for their human enemies, on an individual level, they were much more gentle. Spiders saw human soldiers as unnaturally small and delicate, even cute, and therefore not fit to be on a battlefield. Humans captured as POW's by Thetan soldiers were thus treated very kindly, in many cases living a more pampered life in captivity than they had on their home planet as free citizens.

Name

The name of Theta had no meaning to me; it is unrelated to Scientology and I didn't know Scientology even used the word "thetan" until at least 15 years after I had created the planet Theta. (Scientology did not inspire the name "Xema" either, even though Xenu was apparently originally named Xemu.)

It is unrelated to any mathematical meaning as well, although math may be where I first heard the word. (If not, it was from learning Greek.) I do know that I also used the name Theta for Tebbala's sun, before deciding that the Tebbalans probably would not have given their sun a special name. I'm not sure which of my two uses of the name "Theta" is older.

Tom

Tom

Tom

Tom "The Misfit of Manito Bay" was a #Camian Combat boy who lived in Manito Bay but did not seem to have a very good time there. At his birthday he fell backwards into his cake and everybody around him simply laughed at him.

Nevertheless, he applied for membership in #TCT, and was accepted.

Top City

Top City

Top City was a large Camian city a bit southwest of #Lewiston. (This was the reason for Lewiston's originally being named the Northeast Woods.) As the TCT kids stereotypically preferred nature, they did not visit Top City often, and when they did, it was often against their will. But tiny Lewiston outmuscled Top City and quite often it was Top City's politicians who had to travel to Lewiston for meetings rather than the other way around.

Top City was stereotypically associated with the color blue, but this was not unusual, as the entire nation of Camia was also associated with the color blue and Top City was located near the Blue Mountains.

The name of the city meant "mountain city", as "top" in this time had simply become another word for mountain, at least in place names.

Although TCT and the others in Lewiston considered Top City to be an unpleasant place to live or even to visit, due its high crime rate, overcrowding, and pollution problems, all of them realized it was far better to live in Top City than to live in Camia's vastly worse off rival nation of #Wamia. Nevertheless, they showed less enthusiasm in rescuing Top City from Dr. Zāme's many attacks than they did in stopping the lower-level attacks Dr. Zāme sent against Lewiston.

Treba

Treba

Treba

Treba was a small boy living in Torushi Village on planet Namma at the time of the attacks. Unlike many of his friends and neighbors, Treba had no superpowers. He was less than four feet tall, and not very strong, but he was good at running away from dangers. Nevertheless, Treba had no troubles since he lived in a peaceful area of the planet and even wild animals were not a threat to him. His favorite hobbies were hiking in the woods and taking care of his pet birds.

Shortly after the TCT kids discovered Torushi Village, a supervillain named Lilâl moved in to a cave to the north of the village so he could focus on attacking both the children in TCT and the civilians in Torushi and the surrounding villages. Being from Xema, his attacks mostly focused on breeding wild animals and creating mutants, but he liked to clear the field before a mutant attack by setting the village on fire in order to chase the villagers out of the safety of their homes.

When the governments of Earth realized that the children in TCT had been allowed to move in, they decided to invade planet Namma and started their invasion with Torushi Village. Lilâl realized that Earth's conventional army would make a great ally, and timed his attacks to coincide with Earth's, thus leaving the villagers to face men in tanks and sharp-toothed mutants on the same day. This put the village into a state of war, and Treba was chosen to join the army. Due to his small size, the villagers created miniature weapons for him to carry so that he would not be simply shot dead while struggling to lift a battle axe off of the ground.

When Torushi's village elders heard that Earth was about to launch a second invasion, Treba was ordered to defend the village single-handedly while the other villagers worked on repairing their homes. Treba complained and tried to run away, but another villager grabbed him by the arm and dragged him along the ground. Reluctantly, Treba accepted his battle-axe and walked along the road leading out of the village so he could take on the Earthling army.

As Treba began to leave, a small girl named Nauri saw him and realized she would need to protect him during the battle because he wasn't a very good fighter. She didn't have any weapons, but she promised she would focus on protecting Treba while fighting off the Earthlings in the tanks by climbing up trees and landing on top of the tanks. Her strategy failed, however, as the tanks were moving so quickly that she lost her balance and the tanks repeatedly ran over her body while she struggled to get back up. Treba was also run over many times. Fortunately, the two young adventurers were rescued by two TCT kids, who had taken up residence in Torushi and promised to protect it as if it were their home.

When Treba and Nauri returned from the battle, however, Nauri's father banned Treba from the village for cooperating with the TCT kids whom he saw as the root cause of all the recent invasions. He decided not to punish his daughter, however, and promised he would not attempt to harm the TCT kids. Although he realized that the invasions would keep on coming, he was comforted by the knowledge that at least he had eliminated the boy whom the TCT kids had chosen to rescue while protecting the other villagers from the invasion.

However, Nauri considered this solution too cruel, and decided to run away from her parents and take Treba with her. Just then, Nancy called the TCT kids back home. Nauri decided to go with them, and Treba and Nauri thus joined TCT. But when they attempted to follow Nancy's orders to return to planet Tebbala, a mob of about thirty men rushed the children and began kicking and stomping on Treba and Nauri, the two smallest children in the group. Nauri defended herself with her superpowers, but Treba had no superpowers and thus he had to wait for one of the other kids to heal his wounds.

Treba knew that TCT went on dangerous missions, but hoped that at least he would no longer have big people pushing him around and forcing him unprepared into battles against Earthlings in tanks. On Treba's first day in TCT, Nancy and George assigned him the task of traveling to planet Earth with five other children in order to hold back the Earthling army from attempting a predicted invasion of Camia. They did not offer Treba any weapons to defend himself from the Earthling soldiers, but they did provide him with an extra T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

Treba's role in the Cleanup Corps

Once on Earth, the six children received a message from Nancy. Nancy had been learning more about Earth and had decided that the best way to stop Earth from invading other planets would be to simply destroy the Earth.

The children told Nancy they weren't sure they could handle the new mission. Nancy did not allow them to carry weapons, and thus they would have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the Earthlings. But, because there were only six TCT kids on Earth, they were severely outnumbered, and the kids realized that they would have to take on more than a billion enemy soldiers apiece. They figured that if they each killed 10 Earthlings every hour, and worked 10 hours a day, and never got injured by any of the Earthlings they were killing, they would be finished with their war in about 45,000 years.

Although most of the kids had superpowers, Treba did not. TCT figured that Treba's role in the fighting would be to kick and slap at the knees and thighs of the enemy soldiers, and act as bait to draw enemies towards him, while the other TCT kids used more advanced attacks from a safe height.

However, Nancy promised to send another league of eight children down to Earth as reinforcements, and promised that the other league would be well-equipped with weapons in order to destroy all of Earth's buildings.

Return to Namma

One day, Lilâl kidnapped Treba and tied him up inside his cave, which he had turned into a dungeon. Treba managed to escape the torture chamber, but when he returned to his village, Nauri grabbed a whip and started lashing him. He ran away, but she grabbed him and tied him to a post, and called Teddy for help. Then the two of them started whipping Treba from both sides. They kept at this for about an hour and then left him tied to the post. Another villager rescued him and he left the village entirely to go live in the safety of the woods. Lilâl attacked the village again a few days later. Treba had hid out nearby and saw the commotion, so he returned to the village and helped drive Lilâl back out.

Once Lilâl and his army was gone, Nauri grabbed Treba and beat him up again. Later, Treba grabbed his axe and challenged Nauri to a fight, but she beat him again. Then Teddy tied him up and Nauri grabbed her whip. Treba whistled for help from a flock of rocs, but the rocs bit him and tore at his clothing because Nauri hypnotized them. Next, a man who was tired of Nauri abusing the other villagers grabbed her and kicked her down to the ground. Nauri was shocked, but nevertheless managed to beat up the man who had attacked her. Meanwhile, Treba had escaped once again, and he returned to the village in order to convince the other villagers to start a revolt against Nauri.

This boy happened to be a slave, so in the middle of a battle he was often forced to take time out from fighting the enemy soldiers to serve his masters a luxurious meal or take their laundry down from their clotheslines. One day, after helping repulse an invasion of men in tanks (and getting bumped around and repeatedly run over in the process) he returned home to find out he had been banished from the village for cooperating with the other people who had beaten off the invaders. However, he was soon back in Torushi anyway because Teddy and Zach forced their way in and brought Treba with them.

Later, a girl paid Teddy 2 days' wages to beat up Treba, then a different girl, Nauri, sentenced both of them to slavery for violating the prohibition against fighting. Soon, though, Teddy was released from slavery and Treba was transferred from Nauri's property to Teddy's so Teddy could beat up on Treba legally.

Tree

Tree

Tree was a boy who entered foot races but the other kids made fun of him for being so slow that they nicknamed him "Tree". However, he performed better in some situations than others. He enjoyed snowboarding, which was popular because the boys lived on the edge of a glacier.

V

Vamas

Vamas

Vamas

Andrew "Vamas" Molly was a boy, about 13 years old near the peak of the war, who joined the #Cleanup Corps (CTC) and then later on moved to #FILTER. When he joined the Cleanup Corps, the original Cleanup Corps members were mostly eight and nine years old, but they had already absorbed some 11 and 12 year old boys who had been previously part of Thūta's Sunshine League. Vamas was shorter than average, and had a childish personality in general. Therefore, he did not stick out much from the rest of the Cleanup Corps kids.

Vamas was soon moved from CTC to a feminist organization named FILTER, however, partly because they often studied school subjects when they were not out fighting. Vamas was a good fit in FILTER, as FILTER was run entirely by women and girls, and they found Vamas' submissive, timid personality made him easy to control. #Power had always been submissive to his girlfriend #Eartha, and willing to do chores that the other FILTER girls needed to have done, but Vamas was even more submissive than Power. However, Power's powers were much stronger than Vamas', and he was not actually as helpful in the field of battle as most of the other FILTER members.

Vince

Vincent

Vince

Vince was a small boy who belonged to the #Cleanup Corps and was later accepted into #TCT. His favorite hobby was playing video games and his favorite color was olive green. He was a Soothsayer, which meant that he had no superpowers. Nevertheless, #Dr. Zāme attacked the boy several times, hoping to use him as bait to draw the more powerful TCT kids into a battle in Dr. Zāme's home territory, where he would have the advantage.

Once, while playing outside with his aunt watching him, three men surrounded Vince and started talking about their two spaceships. Vince had escaped from kidnappers before, but these men lured him into one of the ships by pretending to be superheros on a mission. Then, they claimed they were being called up to respond to an emergency situation.

Vince was confused, and believed that he was supposed to fly the ship, even though there was only one cockpit and the man who was abducting him was already sitting at it. (He had gotten used to two-pilot setups because that is the way TCT usually flew, and since Vince had no superpowers, he was often chosen to fly the ship while his co-pilot focused on seeking out and avoiding their many enemies in space.)

Vince was soon kicked back out of TCT. A small boy, he had a difficult time passing the initial physical examination, and being repeatedly kidnapped and kicked around had made Vince realize that he preferred to stay at home and play video games. He was soon replaced by #Mitch.

W

Wamia

A country, whe re Gary comes from. Many Camians live here, harassing and beating up the Wamians. To keep the peace, Camia invades Wamia frequently.

Computers

Camia taught its schoolchildren how to hack into Wamia's computers, and held competitions every year to find the most powerful hacker in all of Camia. Each contestant would be given access to a computer in Camia connected to the central government of Wamia, and instructed to cause as much damage to Wamia's computers as possible. The contestant who did the most damage would be declared the winner. This was for boys and girls both. One year, a 16 year old girl named Ginger hacked Wamia so deeply that she briefly took over the Wamian government and raised everyone's taxes. Wamia used an instant withdrawal setup for collecting its taxes, so she was able to bring the money in immediately. She decided to keep most of the money for herself. When the judges realized what she had done, they declared her the winner of the competition and awarded her even more money as a prize.

Video games

When I was around 10 years old and I had just been given an SNES by my parents (or perhaps just before), I decided that Camians played SNES games and Wamians played NES games. See Lilahaa for a better comparison of the two cultures, even though I had created Lilahaa when I was even younger than 10.

Climate of Wamia

See Camia#Climate_of_Wamia.

The Wamian language

From my earliest childhood, I knew that the Camian and Wamian languages were related. I have held to this for 25 years even as I have changed the actual languages radically.

The principle I've always held fast to is that the Camian language is very conservative and efficient, whereas the Wamian language has changed rapidly, in every way for the worse, and has become so decayed that it needs to borrow words from Camian just to express basic concepts, despite the fact that Camian is almost unchanged from the days 2000 years earlier when modern technology didn't exist. Again, I've held to this principle despite going through phases where I've varied the separation time between the two languages from 400 years to 2000 years to over 4000 years.

If planet Tebbala had been settled by the ancient Romans, the Wamians today would be speaking a decayed, "broken" version of a Romance language such as French Creole, whereas the Camians would be speaking perfect Latin, save for a few sound changes just like those that all languages go through. If Tebbala had been settled instead by the ancient Greeks, the Wamians would be speaking Modern Greek and the Camians would be speaking more or less Ancient Greek except, again, for a few sound changes. If it had been settled by the proto-Germanics, the Camians might be speaking Icelandic and the Wamians would be speaking English. (Though as a child, when I was less linguistically knowledgable, I seemed to think of the divide in terms of Old English vs Modern English.)

Hi! I'm Gabby!!

Because #Gary was a Wamian immigrant living in Camia, I occasionally used him to spill occasional snippets of the Wamian language into my comics. An exaggeration of the Wamian language was that it replaced all "l" and "r" sounds not with /w/ like a stereotypical toddler would, but with /b/, because "they can't even pronounce the first letter of their own name" and replaced all "w" with /b/ as well. Furthermore they replaced all voiceless stops with voiced ones, so said "look" as "boog" and so on. It's possible that the isolated "Wamian" name Buga I found in a story I wrote when I was 12 years old or so is a symptom of this, as I don't know where else a name like that could have come from given that at that age I had not even begun work on actually creating a Wamian language separate from just "horribly badly spoken Camian or English".

Poswa vs Pabappa

Another example of this type of split from my own creation is Poswa vs Pabappa. Although I love both languages, Poswa is my clear favorite and embodies all of the Camia-like traits of the Camian language whereas Pabappa shares a lot of characteristics with Wamian. Both languages resemble baby talk, with sentences such as Bamba mumbebap pypembaba (Poswa) and Pom pempomop peminiba (Pabappa) being commonplace. Poswa is far more efficient than Pabappa, with sentences often just half the length of their Pabappa translations, but yet manages to beat Pabappa at its own game by resembling stereotypical baby talk even more than Pabappa does. Poswa has relatively few changes in grammar from its parent language, essentially containing only those changes necessary to keep the language functioning properly after weathering sound changes which are almost but not quite as radical as those of Pabappa. By contrast, Pabappa has radically simplified its grammar even "where it didn't need to", thus wrecking the convenient shortcuts of the parent language and making it less efficient. However, I love Pabappa too much to turn it into a "bad on purpose" language like I would have made Wamian if I had had more time as a young child.

Poswa is spoken mostly in cold climates whereas Pabappa is spoken only in warm climates. This resembles the Camia/Wamia split, where Wamia is confined to coastal warm habitats whereas Camians live mostly in the cold parts of the planet, but do so on purpose, because they actually have even more warm-climate land than the Wamians have. Also, many Poswobs live in Pabap territory, just as many Camians live in Wamian territory, and in both cases they have more power than the locals because of the political power of their homeland.

However, I do not consider the Poswa/Pabappa divide to be politically comparable to the Camia/Wamia divide even if they resemble each other in areas such as language and climate: the Poswobs and the Pabaps love each other and resemble each other too much to go to war. Poswobs living in Paba have power, but are not interested in oppressing the Pabaps they live among. By contrast, the Camians living in Wamia start fights with Wamians every day and usually win because the Wamians are afraid to so much as defend themselves for fear of a "revenge" attack by the ever-vigilant Camian military and the child superheros they hide behind.

The role of Namma

I'm pretty sure that the "Namman" language I created at the age of 11 has the spirit of both Poswa and Pabappa as it was spoken by "children" (the boys only met 2 adults on the planet, and both of them spoke only through Zach, who translated their language to Camian) and resembled stereotypical baby talk in that it had no guttural consonants and very few consonant clusters. Unlike Poswa and Pabappa, most of the words were only two syllables long, so sentences like Levobampobiepi amnebebi "I ate the strawberries" would have seemed out of place, but this could be explained as the two boys misunderstanding what was being said to them.

Werra

A girl with dark hair and a bad temper.

Werra admired #Power, and tried to help him with his many problems. One day, after Power's girlfriend #Eartha had beat him up, she came to him and said "Eartha needs a lot of help."

X

Xema

Xema

Xema

Xema is a planet whose population consists entirely of supervillains originally from Camia and an underclass of people they've managed to abduct. Camians who moved to Xema came to call themselves Xemans even if they spent most of their time on other planets and only returned to Xema to grab weapons or communicate with the other supervillains.

Xema's purpose was to destroy Camia. They primarily targeted the children in TCT and the other superhero leagues, but never passed up a chance to attack the mainstream Camian army or even the wider society of Camian civilians. Despite its small population, Xema's total dedication to its mission of destroying Camia enabled the Xemans to amass weapons of all sorts, including interplanetary ballistic missiles and oversized predatory mutant animals. Xema even had a conventional army consisting mostly of volunteers with some abducted draftees mixed in. This army was not very strong; however, it was strong enough to repeatedly invade Camia and force the Camian army to call on the TCT kids to bail them out.

The role of Dr. Zāme

During the war, Dr. Zāme was the foremost of the evil masterminds and the others often followed his orders. However, one rule on planet Xema was that none of the villains were ever obliged to cooperate with any of the others; when Dr. Roc obeyed Dr. Zāme's orders to unleash his flocks of rocs on Camia, he was doing it of his own free will. Another rule on Xema was that none of the masterminds could attack any of the others. This never caused any problems because all Xemans believed their mission was to destroy Camia, and even though some villains questioned the strategies of the other villains, none of them would have anything to gain by actually attacking any other villain. Nobody ever moved to Xema for any other reason; common criminals lucky enough to get aboard a spaceship after escaping from jail had plenty of more hospitable planets to go to than Xema.

Xemans placed a high priority on missions to kidnap their young challengers. During one battle, Xema invaded Camia with its conventional army and was getting the better of the Camian army while suffering little damage in return. The Camian general called #Nancy for help, and Nancy responded by sending down four TCT children to land in the middle of the battle. When the Xeman army saw the kids, they immediately stopped shooting the Camians and ran after the two youngest children, hoping to be able to grab them and bring them home to Xema, even if it meant losing the battle against Camia. However, Camia made quick work of the suddenly nonviolent Xemans and in the end the Xemans failed both to abduct the kids and to conquer the Camian territory they had invaded.

Climate

Xema's climate was cold even by Camia's absurd standards. Xemans were forced to live in greenhouses so that their planet's sunlight could be trapped and put to use simply to keep the Xemans alive. Although living in greenhouses was a major weakness for the Xemans, as they could simply be blown apart with missiles shot by Camians, Xema's own missile defense system was strong enough to prevent an all-out attack of this type. Thus, the Camians had to use other forms of attack, and when the first Camian soldiers stepped out onto Xema and realized they would be dealing with —170°F temperatures they decided to table the mission and hand it over to the much hardier children in TCT.

Impenetrability

However, Xema was well aware of its weaknesses. They figured that TCT might eventually defeat Xema's climate problems by simply remaining in their spaceships and fighting battles from the safety of their cockpits. Thus every greenhouse was equipped with weapons that could be used to take out ground attacks such as this, similar to their anti-missile shield pointed at the upper atmosphere.

On their first mission to Xema, the TCT children were confident they would prevail. The conventional Camian army had seen very little of Xema and gave TCT a very false picture of the conditions they would face there. But, like the final stage in a video game, Xema combined all of the dangers of every other planet and every other army in a tight space where even the landforms could be repurposed as weapons. Thus TCT did not realize how far out of their depth they really were, and the entire team was kidnapped shortly after they disembarked, including the one adult (George) who had traveled with them in the hopes he could protect them.

Z

Zachary

Zach

Zachary

Zachary Mint was a red-haired boy living in Lewiston who spoke many languages and had many talents. He had the largest variety of superpowers of all of the boys in #TCT, though his powers were not the strongest. He could read minds to some extent, and was able to pull information out of the air even when nobody else was present. For example, on a space mission with Teddy, he correctly predicted the location of Dr. Roc's invasion of the boys' home planet as Hurricane Island while still out in space far away from their planet.

Zach's superpowers and skills

Superpowers

Zachary had many powers. Among his rarer and thus more valuable attributes were:

• Poison tolerance: He could endure poison and thus rescue other adventurers who had been spit on by large venomous animals (some of whom were large enough to spit out "puddles" that would cover the adventurers completely in venom).
• Poison production: Zachary could also produce his own venom, to which he was immune by virtue of the same ability that made him immune to the poison of his enemies. However, unlike the giant snakes that spit on him, Zach could only spit a short distance, essentially the same as an ordinary human, and therefore this power was useless in long-range battles and of little use even in close combat. Moreover, it was only useful against other humans, as the animals that attacked the kids were nearly always far too large to be physically harmed by a human, even one with powers such as this.
• Water: In one mission, Zachary conjured up some hot water out of thin air in order to help heal a fellow boy whose hands had been frostbitten.
• Invisibility: He could turn invisible, and unlike #Teddy, could remain invisible even when captured by an enemy.
• Telepathy: He could read minds, and could pull information out of the air even when no other person was present. The other adventurers referred to this ability as being psychic, as they were unfamiliar with other definitions of the term.
• Cocoons: He could create cocoons, which were similar to force fields but could be put into motion, and were very difficult to pierce. With his cocoon power, Zachary could choose at any time to simply refuse to take part in a battle, as wrapping himself in a cocoon transformed him into an invincible pacifist, both unable to harm his enemies, and immune to any of their attempts to harm him. This came into play several times, being particularly useful when the boys were being bombarded by attacks from all sides, but had reason to believe that those attacks would soon slow down or stop. Unlike a force field, the cocoon superpower would not simply wear off after a few minutes. Zachary could also wrap cocoons around others.
• Force fields: He could rescue others with moving force fields, often more than one at a time. During one battle on planet #Namma, a series of advancing tanks ran over a little boy (#Treba) and girl (#Nauri) many times, but he rescued both kids with two simultaneous moving force fields.

Zachary also shared second-tier superpowers such as the ability to fly unaided, the ability to heal one's own wounds and those of other adventurers, and the ability to cast force fields in order to protect adventurers from harm and paralyze enemies by wrapping a force field around them.

Skills

Zachary was skilled at learning foreign languages, and was the only adventurer from Tebbala who already spoke the language of the villagers on Namma even before the boys had ever visited Namma. He also spoke the spiders' language (the spiders' home planet was roughly Earth-sized, but they spoke a single language), and many languages of Earth such as English. (The boys' native language was not English but Jafa.)

Negative traits

Originally, Zach had many negative personality traits. He was overweight not because he ate too much but because he hated exercise and was the laziest member of STW (and TCT). But he made a strong effort to improve his traits. When fellow TCT member Hikik Thūta complimented him on his image change, Zach said "You should try an image change." Zach gave himself further makeovers, such as dyeing his hair and renaming himself "Zack Black". Later on, he came to call himself the Red Sun.

Running away

When he was 12 years old, Zachary ran away from his abusive parents. Because of his superpowers, nobody worried that anything bad would happen to Zach, and he even continued to show up at school but simply camped out in the woods after school or stayed with friends instead of returning home. Teddy soon also ran away, though mostly because he wanted to spend time with his friend Zach rather than to escape his own (comparatively luxurious) home.

Zachary's parents realized that they could no longer control their sun, and although Zach did move back with his parents after a few weeks, it was only a few months longer before he and Teddy both moved permanently to planet Namma, and the boys rarely saw their parents afterward.

Leadership roles

Once Zachary became more pro-active, he replaced Hikik Thūta as captain of STW Base 7, and became the captain of any TCT mission he was sent on. Because of his many superpowers, his teacher #Nancy wanted him to fight nearly every battle, but he was strong-willed enough to ensure that he would be mostly assigned space missions and thus not have to deal with fighting Dr. Zāme's mutants. However, mutant attacks began appearing on Namma shortly after Zachary settled in there.

Dress style and favorite colors

Zachary preferred to wear tanktops and shorts even when the weather was cold — a trait many Camians had and were proud of. His favorite color as a young boy was a shade of dark green that was also #Nauri's favorite color. The cocoons are near this color. Later, however, he changed his favorite color to black and dyed his hair, making him one of the very few white boys that had black hair.

Space missions

Zachary was the captain of almost every mission he flew, and was one of the few who sometimes flew solo space missions. One day , Zachary was flying in space over Namma when Dr. Zāme hit him with an anti-aircraft missile. He had been tracking Zach's ship with a type of radar that worked even in outer space. Zach crashed near the Equator of Namma, in a place called Repilia. He was only rescued weeks later, when #Tanya received a help message, as the others had simply assumed he was busy. (Dr. Zāme could not find him because he lost contact with the ship when it broke apart into pieces.)

Once Nancy learned that Zach's spaceship had been wrecked, and that he had been forced to live in the wilderness, desperately searching for food while hoping to be rescued, she assigned him a difficult solo mission on planet #Xema seeking out the man who had wrecked his spaceship.

Later missions

Zachary broke away from Nancy early on. When he was rescued by Tanya after a month of living in desperate conditions in the wilderness, he expected Nancy to greet him with joy and give him a time off to rest and recuperate. But instead she slapped him with a mission even more dangerous than the one he had had before. And as always, she refused to allow him to carry weapons to defend himself and told him that cargo shorts and a tank top would be enough to handle the subzero temperatures on planet Xema.

Zach was used to Nancy treating him like trash, as she typically gave her most obedient students the most dangerous missions, but his patience had finally run out. He flatly refused the mission, which involved traveling to Xema to face Dr. Zāme. Nancy's reaction to this was to pass the mission along to a much smaller boy named #Treba.

Teenage career

In stories I wrote as a teen, Zachary blossomed into a world leader and renamed himself The Red Sun (Ussarabosa). At the time, I did not intend the name to be a symbol of his hair color, and it took me many years to even notice the coincidence. This may be because the shade of red I was picturing his emblematic sun to be does not come close to any natural hair color called "red".

Appearance in my early writings

Although it's clear to me now that I had, originally, subconsciously, patterned Zachary after the "Jughead" character I had taken from Archie Comics, I did not realize this at all in my childhood, teenhood^?, or early adulthood, and instead began patterning him after my best friend at the time, who had little in common with either of the two Jugheads except that they were both intellectual without being stereotypical "geeks".

Zachary rarely appeared in missions involving Dr. Zāme, but this is simply a gap in my writing. I dont have my red book with me now, so I cant say if Zach specifically excluded himself from anti-mutant missions or not. However, since I mostly wrote about mutants during a short period in which I didn't tend to write about Zach, it seems that if he did fight mutants, no evidence of it has survived. I do know that Dr. Zāme kidnapped Zachary once, and that I am not confusing Zachary with #Zak, whom Dr. Zāme also kidnapped.

Zak

Zak

Zak

Zak was a small boy who belonged to the #Cleanup Corps. His favorite hobbies were planting trees and digging through municipal landfills looking for recyclable containers. Like the rest of the Cleanup Corps, he was forced out of Earth during the height of the war because the rest of the Earthlings blamed him for the destruction that his enemies in #TCT were spreading all over Earth while claiming to be environmentalists.

Zak was skilled with computers, and was able to use and program in the Lilahaa operating system that Camia's computers relied on with more skill than anyone else even in TCT. Zak was amazed when he was told that he could have the time of his life hacking into the governments of Camia's many enemies, and at the same time be doing more good for the world than he had done in his entire career planting trees for the Cleanup Corps.

Zak was never confused with Zachary, despite the fact that Zachary usually referred to himself as "Zach". This was largely because Zak first entered Nancy's classroom shortly before Zachary forever left it, and the two boys rarely crossed paths afterward. However, Zak applied for and was accepted into #TCT, one of only three Cleanup Corps boys to do so. He had no superpowers and was less than 10 years old, but managed nonetheless to pass TCT's entrance exam and become a full member. Once in TCT, he still worked primarily with computers rather than going on physically demanding missions such as facing off against Dr. Roc and #Dr. Zāme.

Zak's adventures

Although Zak never attacked Dr. Zāme, Dr. Zāme occasionally attacked him. In the middle of the night, Dr. Zāme tracked down the kids while they were preparing to sleep, four to a room, as they usually did. At this time, Zak was busy fixing a broken light switch since he had learned carpentry and electrical repair in his spare time. Dr. Zāme stood behind the boy for a few moments and then quickly grabbed the boy and trapped him with his left arm, hoping to make a quick escape with his little computer expert while the other three children remained fast asleep. But even with Dr. Zame covering him, Zak was still able to scream for help, which alerted the other children in the room to the kidnapping. In a panic, Dr. Zāme threw the boy against the opposite wall, where his hand crashed into a metal file cabinet. However, the other boys quickly healed Zak as Dr. Zāme got away.

The lobster boat kidnappers

Dr. Zāme did not give up. He was still having trouble logging into his mail server, and the price of computer help on Xema was more than he wanted to pay. So Dr. Zāme sent a team of about 20 men down to planet Tebbala to kidnap the boy again. This time, they located Zak in a crowd of children playing in a lobster boat near the East Coast. Because the boat was at sea, the children were mostly cut off from security forces that could protect them. There were some armed guards on the ship, but Dr. Zāme figured they would be no match for his more numerous armed kidnappers. The Xemans traveled to Tebbala in two spaceships and landed on the boat.

The Xemans then rushed the crowd of children, saying they were about to kidnap every one of them at the same time. This overwhelmed the four armed security guards, and distracted the children from trying to protect each other. In reality, most of the twenty men were just there as a distraction so that a small subset of the men could swarm around Zak and carry him off without anyone else, including the security guards, noticing. These men surrounded Zak in such a way that the others couldn't even see him. Quickly the men rushed back to their spaceship and strapped Zak to a chair. Meanwhile, the other men tossed the other children down to the ground and ran off into the other spaceship. The ones who had kidnapped Zak quickly delivered Zak to Dr. Zāme. For this, Dr. Zāme paid them more money than he would have needed to pay even a Xeman computer expert to fix his computer; but he wanted Zak for more than just computer help and figured he could make the money back with ransom anyway.

On Xema, Dr. Zāme tied the boy to a chair and told him that if he refused to fix Dr. Zāme's email problem, he would personally murder Zak in a slow and very painful way: by repeatedly injuring him and then healing him so that he could keep on going. Zak realized that his only hope was to play dumb and pretend he couldn't help, even though Xema's computers were based on Lilahaa, a Camian operating system and programming language which was by now already familiar to Zak. However, as luck would have it, Dr. Zāme's computer problem was genuinely above the knowledge level even of Zak, and Zak did not have to play dumb in order to refuse to help Dr. Zāme. When Dr. Zāme pressed a knife to the boy's throat and the boy still did not have an answer for him, he was satisfied the boy was telling the truth and decided to get rid of him.

But first he called up the national government of Camia and asked how much they would be willing to pay for the safe return of Zak. This was an unusual decision; normally Dr. Zāme preferred to interface with the TCT children rather than the much larger Camian conventional army or the government they worked for. Camia's president realized he was in a delicate situation, and offered Zāme quite a lot of spaceships and weapons, enough to make Xema and Camia military equals at least for the time being. Dr. Zāme agreed to the trade, and Zak thus returned safely home yet again.

Dr. Zame

Dr. Zāme

Dr. Zāme

Dr. Alfred Zāme (/'za:.me/) was the primary supervillain that went after the TCT kids and the most well-rounded villain of them all. Like the other villains, he was a Camian citizen but sometimes hid out on planet Xema when necessary to prepare his next attack. He was the richest, strongest, and by far the most brazen of the many Xeman masterminds. Not a fan of surprise, Dr. Zāme would loudly announce his attacks well ahead of time, confident in the knowledge that even when the TCT kids knew what Dr. Zāme was about to do to them they would still be unable to escape or otherwise foil his plan.

Personality

Dr. Zāme had a lot in common with the adventurers he attacked. In some ways, he was similar to #Dana M. But whereas Dana's favorite hobbies were studying politics and visiting other planets, Dr. Zāme preferred to spend his free time spying on children, embezzling money from his government, and breeding ever-larger species of mutant to attack the Camians and destroy their cities.

Dr. Zāme was intelligent and very confident in his abilities, and whenever the TCT kids split up into smaller teams to attempt simultaneous missions, Dr. Zāme would deliberately target the strongest team instead of the weakest, hoping to tie up as many of their best warriors as possible in order to stop what he perceived was likely their most important mission and simultaneously slow their progress elsewhere. Because of his skills in spying on the kids, and a massive network of radar computers that he alone could control, Dr. Zāme was reliably just one step behind the kids whenever they thought they had finally eluded him.

Dr. Zāme was better able than any other villain to figure out how the kids would react to his battle strategies. He was a jack of all trades; whereas many Xeman villains had only one type of attack they specialized in, Dr. Zāme could hit the kids anywhere with anything. His main strategies were:

Mutants

Dr. Zāme's favorite battle plan was to send out mutants against the kids. Typically, these would be bred in a wilderness area or on planet Xema, and then transported to a Camian city. Since Dr. Zāme knew that the TCT kids were actually very good at defeating mutants, he didn't expect his mutant attacks to succeed, and actually sent the mutants at the wider Camian society most of the time in order to simply cause damage to the society that the Camians would have to clean up. The mutants would destroy large buildings in major cities while the Camian military struggled to keep up. Most of the time, TCT would have to come in to rescue the mainline Camian soldiers.

Dr. Zāme loved annoying the adventurers, and was fond of calling the kids on their phones to let them knew he had just released another pack of mutants to spoil their plans for a warm summer day. Generally, the kids did not say anything to him in reply.

Almost all of the mutants Dr. Zāme created were of enormous size. Typically the mutants would attack humans by crushing them or body-slamming large buildings in order to make them fall down on the humans. He preferred reptiles to mammals because the faster metabolism of a mammal made finding food difficult.

Role in education

When Camia's government realized that Dr. Zāme's mutant attacks were never going to stop, they decided to make it a mandatory study subject in elementary school so that every Camian citizen would know how best to deal with the mutants. Camians thus learned that the best strategy for dealing with large, uncontrollable mutants was to scream for help and run away as fast as possible, unless they happened to be one of the superheros, in which case it was their duty to fight back.

Monkeys

One type of mutant that did not try to crush humans was a species of monkey that Dr. Zāme had created and trained to take over spaceships. He used monkeys, even though they were mammals, because they were less likely to rebel than human slaves were.

Animals

Not all of the animals that made life so difficult for Camians were mutants.

Rocs

There was a species of man-eating bird called the roc that had no genetically modified ancestors but were by themselves large enough and smart enough to hunt humans even if the humans had weapons. They tended to attack in flocks, which made humans' weapons less useful.

Dragons

The kids occasionally fought against fire-breathing dragons. This was not a true mutant, but rather a native species that had been carefully bred for thousands of years by humans on planet Namma, but later became feral enemies of humans. They are very large and difficult to transport by spaceship, so dragon attacks mostly occur on Namma.

One battle fought near Torushi Village involved #Nauri, #Gary, #Teddy, and #Zachary facing off against a fire dragon. The dragon had only two attacks: its fire breath and a "sap" move, which it only used once, against Teddy. However, the dragon also had the ability to heal its wounds using magic, and was impossible for the villagers to defeat. Thus, they called for help from the four kids. Nauri did the bulk of the fighting, knocking the dragon out first with a lightning attack and then, after it had healed itself twice, with her "Fury" (all magic moves at the same time). Teddy and Zachary did some fighting, but were largely occupied with healing the other fighters and each other. Towards the end of the battle, Gary kicked the dragon, but severely hurt his foot on the dragon's hard body and was forced to try to limp away in retreat until he was healed by Teddy.

Missiles and bombs

Dr. Zāme also invested in conventional weaponry and the means to deliver it. On one mission, two boys were responding to an apparent simultaneous mutant attack and alien invasion of their hometown. But after a few minutes in space, Dr. Zāme knocked their spaceship back down to the planet. On another mission, the boys were getting ready to go to sleep when Dr. Zāme demolished their bedrooms with a missile that had come all the way from his home planet of Xema. One day the kids were enjoying a relaxing cruise on a yacht as they celebrated their victory over a mutant attack. After the boys had been on the water for a few minutes, Dr. Zāme torpedoed their yacht, causing it to sink, and then he hit them with three more of the same mutant.

Guns

Dr. Zāme always carried a gun when going to battle, even though his enemies were nearly always immune to sharp objects, even rapidly moving projectiles such as bullets. He knew that the leading children such as Teddy and Zachary could protect themselves against all types of bullets and lasers by wrapping themselves in a force field, and that they could easily project this force field onto other children (and adults) who were on their side. But Dr. Zāme also knew that none of the children could launch attacks from inside a force field, and therefore used force fields only when necessary. Thus, Dr. Zāme kept the threat of gunfire up close at all times.

He used his gun more as an instrument of self-defense than as a weapon, often firing just a single bullet every few minutes in between more advanced magical attacks such as creating small but powerful thunderstorms and piles of snow. (Dr. Zāme was Camian, after all, and loved cold weather even more than the children he fought against.) Sometimes the bullets simply bounced off, feeling rather like a pebble as it pushed on but failed to break through the force field. Other times, the kids would place their force field farther away from their bodies so they could have more room to roam around inside their bubble. In all cases, though, the children were trapped by their own shield and therefore could not attack Dr. Zame while the gun was in his hand.

Dr. Zāme did occasionally make contact, nevertheless. During one early battle, a boy named #Teddy hit Dr. Zāme's right hip with a soda bottle. Dr. Zāme realized the soda bottle splash attack proved that Teddy was not currently protected against incoming gunfire, and shot him dead. Then, he looked to his left and shot a much smaller boy, #Scott, in the face. Having eliminated the threat to his hips, he then looked down at the three boys in front of him. However, the other boys had already sprung into action: one healed Scott, another threw a shield around #Gary, who was also unprotected, and the third boy defeated Dr. Zāme with a bomb.

Traps

Dr. Zāme spent much of his time in fortresses located on planet #Xema, but also had some hideouts within the vast and underpopulated territory of Camia itself. Camia's military could have simply blown up his forts with ballistic missiles, but they worried that such an act might lead Dr. Zāme to attack the Camian army in revenge. Thus, the Camian military wisely chose to delegate the task of defeating Dr. Zāme to a league of a few dozen unarmed, underclothed children and toddlers and a man named Bob whose job was to stand around with a TV camera searching for the best camera angle from which to film the action.

Typically, when Dr. Zāme wanted a fight, he would call up one of the kids on the telephone and tell them he was about to launch an attack against their hometown. Sometimes he would interrupt them when they were listening to their teacher give a lesson over their school's private TV network (all children's TV shows in Camia were educational) and announce that he had kidnapped one of their classmates and then tell them where to go to get him back. At other times, he would wait until the local TV station ran a story alerting the population that one of their children was missing and then interrupt the broadcast by showing the hapless young victim stapled to the wall of Dr. Zāme's basement. However, kidnapping was not necessary: the kids knew that they were obligated to defend their hometown whenever Dr. Zāme felt like he was in the mood for a fight.

This type of battle strategy gave Dr. Zāme a valuable advantage over the children he attacked: since he could force the kids to come find him, he could fight the battle on his own territory and make the kids' fight much more difficult by installing booby traps and other devices to strike them down along their way.

During one battle, the kids entered one of Dr. Zāme's many fortresses, and found narrow hallways and low ceilings awaiting them. They soon realized why: Dr. Zāme's henchmen, consisting mostly of #Eddys, were large enough to block off the entire hallway, thus forcing the kids to fight every single Eddy in the fortress instead of playing pacifist and rushing on by while invisible or flying overhead as they sometimes did. Soon, trap doors opened up beneath them, and they ended up in a narrow hallway with many doors but no enemies blocking their path. This narrow hallway soon became even narrower: Dr. Zāme was pushing the walls together in order to crush the children to death.

At other times, the kids would fight Dr. Zāme outdoors. Here, he used his home base advantage to plant land mines all over the terrain, knowing that not all of the children could fly and therefore that there was a good chance that some of them would step on the mines and set them off. He also used chemical warfare, polluting the environment around him with toxins so severe that even breathing the air was painful.

Conventional soldiers

Dr Zāme had a personal army of slaves on Xema, but did not generally send these out against the kids or the other Camians. Nevertheless, he was given access to some of the abducted slave pools of the other Xeman masterminds, and sometimes used these to launch invasions when he figured his typical strategies might be less effective. These men did not have superpowers but were typically heavily armed and physically strong and healthy.

When Dr. Zāme's foot soldiers did go on missions outside Xema, it was often to capture the TCT kids' spaceships, hoping to leave the kids stranded wherever they happened to be at the time, thus opening them up to attack by Dr. Zāme. Typically, when a mission of this type was successful, the men who captured the ship would deliver it immediately to Dr. Zāme (or to whomever was guarding his fortress if he happened to be away) and be given a monetary reward as well as permission to skip out on dangerous missions for a while.

Dr. Zāme told his soldiers to respect the children's powers and not act as though they were invincible. Thus, the men did not simply rush into the kids' ships and hijack them; instead they waited until they spotted a ship that was completely unguarded, typically at night or during a daytime mission if all of the children were tied up doing something else and had nobody left to guard the ship. Thus, physical conforntations between Dr. Zāme's men and the TCT children were rare, and when they did happen, the Xemans usually fled even when they felt they could win the fight. Dr. Zāme accepted this behavior and did not call his soldiers cowards for running away, nor did he punish them when they returned empty-handed after a mission.

Sometimes, the men would kidnap one of the children in addition to stealing their ship. This tended to happen when the men were able to trap one of the weaker, smaller children inside the ship and pin them down to the floor so they could not take over the controls of the ship or call for help. However, Dr. Zāme was not itnerested in kidnapping the smaller children except to use as ransom in order to get concessions from TCT. In every case, Dr. Zāme and his men returned the children to their homes unharmed after the negotiations were over.

On other occasions, it was the children who captured the Xemans instead. Dr. Zāme's foot soldiers were heavily armed, but because they did not have superpowers, and because most of the children were fairly well protected against conventional weaponry such as pistols and throwable bombs, the Xemans needed to overwhelm them with physical force if they wanted to win their battle. Often they would try to physically crush the children, as this was one form of attack they could not protect themselves from. They could cast force fields, but the force field would trap the kids within a bubble and in any case would not last long.

Pacifism

Typically, when the TCT kids abducted a Xeman soldier, they would carry him home to Tebbala and then pamper him in order to show that Dr. Zāme was so cruel that Xemans were better off in the care of their enemies than they were under the protection of Dr. Zāme. However, most of the children found it extremely frustrating to be made to do excruciating chores and express deep sympathy for soldiers who had just beat them all up when they themselves were treated to a much worse life by their teacher, Nancy. Thus, the Camians who made life so enjoyable for the captured Xeman soldiers were typically adults employed by STW but not part of TCT.

When Dr. Zāme's Xeman soldiers realized that TCT would not harm even the worst among them if captured, some of the men decided to defect to TCT so they could have fun pretending to be a prisoner of war. Soon Xema was bleeding soldiers every month, but Dr. Zāme did not see this as a problem. He had never put much value in his foot soldiers to begin with, and their missions had typically just been side quests whose main purpose was to weaken the TCT kids while Dr. Zāme himself fought the real battle with the aid of his mutants and robots. Furthermore, there were soon so many Xeman soldiers at the STW bases that the STW'ers were overwhelmed with the task of keeping them all happy and entertained, since none of the Xemans seemed to be willing to work in order to earn their keep. Lastly, just as the Xeman soldiers had never been reliably loyal to Dr. Zāme, he knew that even after they had defected to TCT they would not be reliably loyal to TCT either, or even to Camia, and Dr. Zāme began to claim that he had successfully invaded Camia with a thousand-strong Xeman army and placed it in the very most important part of their nation.

Robots and computers

Dr. Zāme created an army of robots to attack the Camians. Some were large and intimidating, others looked and behaved like normal humans. Dr. Zāme preferred robots to humans because they were cheaper to feed and far less likely to disobey. Nevertheless, he did put some humans in his slave armies alongside the many robots.

Eddy

The most common of these robots was named #Eddy. This name originally stood for "Evil Duplicate", because it was an oversized replica of one of STW's members, a small boy named #Dana M. Unlike most robots, however, Eddy actually had some superpowers of his own, such as the ability to create force fields.

Other humanoid robots

Dana was not the only boy that Dr. Zāme copied. He actually made lookalikes of all of the TCT adventurers, at least the "Magic Dozen" who were in TCT at a time when it happened to have twelve members (all boys). These were Zach, Tim, Teddy, Satykhuci, Hikik, Lumyt, Mark, John, Jason, #Nanoŋ, and Barry. Dana was not in the league at the time.

Not all robots harmed the adventurers. One large robot actually let the boys free from a cage.

Direct invasions

Most of Dr. Zāme's attacks were launched from a safe distance, meaning that the TCT kids could not actually attack Dr. Zāme himself even after they defeated all of his attacks. On rare occasions, however, Dr. Zāme was unable to flee the scene of battle and the children attacked him up close.

Fort Calamity

On other occasions, Dr. Zāme would invade the kids directly, for example when he met the kids in #Fort Calamity, into which they had fled after two of the boys had broken out of a jail in Wamia. He figured that the kids had made a major tactical mistake by hiding in the fort, as he was able to simply crash through the wall with his armored spaceship, and then park the spaceship in front of the intended entrance, trapping them inside. (They could not easily access the hole he had made in the wall, even with their flying power. Moreover, Dr. Zāme simply burned the kids' original spaceship on sight.) He hopped out of his spaceship and started hunting for the TCT kids. However, it was Dr. Zāme who had made a tactical mistake here, as the entire perimeter of the fort was "booby-trapped" against outside invaders, and Dr. Zāme had deliberately chosen to disembark in that very small area and thus fell into the trap.

Nevertheless, he escaped the trap and regained control of his spaceship. He was angry at the kids for outsmarting him, and vowed to launch an immediate revenge attack, even if it failed, purely to make them suffer for the embarrassment they had given dr. Zame.

After the kids had left Fort Calamity and returned to normal life, he decided to invade Fort Calamity again with Xeman soldiers, and occupy it permanently so that if the kids came back to the fort during some future crisis his men would be there to capture them. Fort Calamity had a cold climate, but it was still livable and there was enough wildlife even inside the fort that the Xeman soldiers could survive.

However, this plan ultimately failed because TCT made the unusual choice of calling for the mainline Camian army to attack the fort, arguing that mainline Camian soldiers should occupy all of TCT's fortresses when no TCT kids were there. Dr. Zāme reacted to this by ordering Xeman soldiers to infiltrate the Camian army, figuring that TCT would trust any adult male who spoke Camian. But #Nancy kept the TCT kids physically separate from the Camian soldiers during this process, and this backup plan of Dr. Zāme's thus also failed.

Use of weapons

Whenever Dr. Zāme fought a battle in close quarters he relied on his weapons to help him out. For example, he always carried a gun, and in one battle against five boys, he shot the smallest boy with his gun while the other four piled on him and defeated him with a bomb. In another battle, he hit the boys' spaceship and as they struggled to stay in control of its motion he spacewalked from his ship to theirs.

Attacks against unarmed children

Dr. Zāme was delighted when he learned that #Nancy and #George had created a new rule stating that the children she commanded would no longer be allowed to carry weapons to defend themselves, nor armor to protect them. Furthermore, she removed the weapons and shields from their spaceships as well, saying that they were hit so often that it was not economically feasible to keep providing them with fully equipped spaceships. This reform helped save money and thus helped the kids get more spaceships for each team, but it left them almost defenseless in space and enabled enemies like Dr. Zāme to make bold moves on the kids such as directly invading their spaceship after shooting it down. Thus, in the battle above, Dr. Zāme was able to enter the boys' spaceship slowly and naturally without any worries about being fired upon as he did so.

Space battles

He also knew that, whenever he found one of the kids out in space, he could hit them with all sorts of projectiles and mechanical lasers but they could not fire anything back. He thus preferred to battle TCT out in space and avoid facing them up close whenever possible. However, the kids were very good at evading their enemies, as the technology of the day was such that even taking a very long and circuitous path through space could lead to arriving at a destination almost as fast as a direct path. Thus, space battles did not happen often, and when they did, they tended to consist of Dr. Zāme and his allies firing at the TCT kids while they tried to dash away as quickly as possible. On the other hand, once word spread beyond Dr. Zāme of Nancy's perverse decision to make the children's dangerous missions even more dangerous by removing their protection, they were chased and harassed by all of their enemies in space, not just Dr. Zāme.

Kidnappings

As above, Dr. Zāme was my far the bravest of the supervillains, and although he wisely preferred to attack from a safe distance, he was the only one bold enough to make direct advances on the kids and other people they allied with. For example, in the space battle up above where Dr. Zāme wrecked the boys' spaceship, he also managed to abduct both of the boys' fathers.

On another day, shortly after the Cleanup Corps had been rescued from Earth, four of the kids were fighting a mission on planet Namma trying to destroy the mutants that were attacking the villagers there. These mutants had been sent by #Lilal, not Dr. Zāme, which meant that Dr. Zāme was free to launch a simultaneous attack. Dr. Zāme figured that with the best anti-mutant fighters tied up, the best possible attack to hit Camia with would be even more mutants. He landed in the battlefield at the center of their hometown and called some of the kids up on the phone inviting them to come meet him in the field. To ensure that they came, he revealed to them that he had already kidnapped #Zachary.

Choice of targets

In part, Dr. Zame's success lay in his steadfast promise that he would only attack children, and therefore leave the mainline Camian military alone. He went on primetime TV and threatened war against the nation's population of infants and toddlers, but stated that he would only attack if all of the adults first evacuated their nurseries. Occasionally, some of his henchmen did accidentally attack adults, such as during one mission when a 9 year old girl named #Stacy was visiting a foreign country for a political conference, and Dr. Zame's warlords took a shortcut by blowing up the entire building instead of just shooting the kids as he'd told them to. Dr. Zāme immediately apologized for the attack and promised to bomb her elementary school when she returned to Camia. (Since STW outsourced the teaching of children to other children, no adults would be harmed by such an attack.) When the kids heard that they were about to be bombed, they asked Nancy for protection, but she told the kids they were worthless if they couldn't face Dr. Zāme on their own. However, the mainline Camian military had also heard about the attack, and decided to stop Dr. Zāme's missiles before they could reach the school.

Contact with the Cleanup Corps

Dr. Zāme avoided specifically targeting the children in the #Cleanup Corps, and advised the other Xeman supervillains to do so as well. This was not out of sympathy for the Cleanup Corps children, but because he knew that they lacked superpowers and would thus be useless to him as soldiers and of little worth even as slaves. However, there were a few missions in which the Cleanup Corps kids were traveling with TCT kids, and Dr. Zāme figured it would be a great idea to follow the kids around on missions like these and look for an opportunity to kidnap one of the Cleanup Corps members. During one mission in the remote Camian province of Todrom, Dr. Zāme was able to kidnap #Oliver and #Carolyn, and held them captive for several days, although he quickly handed the two children over to another group of men from Xema so he could focus on pursuing the more powerful TCT children while threatening to have his men kill the two smaller children if TCT did not meet his demands.

On another mission, Dr. Zāme briefly captured #Zak from his bed while he was fast asleep, but he was immediately spotted by the other kids, as they never slept alone. He threw the hapless little boy across the room to distract the others, and then fled the scene. Zak was quickly healed by the other boys, however.

Attacks against preschoolers

Dr. Zāme's attitude towards the even smaller children in #LSL (the Lemon Shop League) was different. These children were less than five years old at the peak of the war, but had strong superpowers that, in some cases, even TCT couldn't match. He was particularly interested in #Julie, the only one of the preschoolers who shared some TCTers' ability to conjure weapons out of thin air. However, the Lemon Shop children were exposed to much less battle time than the older kids, and almost never traveled in spaceships, so he was never able to pull off a kidnapping of any of the Lemon Shop fighters.

Other hobbies

Sometimes harassing children, bombing hotels, instigating alien invasions of his own planet, destroying his nation's military forts, and trampling its cities to ruins with oversized mutants got old for Dr. Zāme. In his spare time, he embezzled money from the government and citizenry of Camia so that he could have enough money set aside to do all of the other things. Camia didn't make a serious attempt to stop this, as they figured they had more important things to worry about such as how to react to the threat of a simultaneous invasion from planet Theta and planet Namma, which turned out in the end to be a hoax perpetrated by Dr. Zāme.

Views on politics

Dr. Zāme disliked the government of Camia, but considered them utterly impotent and incapable of seriously threatening him. He considered it irrelevant whether Camia's national army was for or against him because he considered himself effectively invincible to even their most advanced attacks. He was constantly on the alert for unexpected catastrophes that might force him to surrender, but he was only interested in surrendering to the children in TCT, not the mainline Camian government that they were being forced to defend or even to #Nancy who pushed them around and claimed their victories as her own. He claimed that even if the mainline Camian government somehow managed to finally track him down and surround him on all sides, he would simply get in his spaceship, plow through the Camian army, and then crash his ship through the wall of the most convenient TCT fortress, broadcasting his surrender message to TCT on the way.

Dr. Zāme realized that he had a lot more in common with the TCTers than he did with other Camians, and made many attempts to kidnap the children, particularly the littlest ones, in order to adopt them into his army and potentially create a league of subservient supervillains that would be just as strong as any of the other supervillains he dealt with on Xema. He was partially relying on the naivety of youth to keep his potential soldiers in line, but claimed that this was no worse than what #Nancy was doing and that he would treat the children kindly when they obeyed him whereas Nancy perversely seemed to reserve the most dangerous missions for her most obedient students. He did not go so far as to say that his kidnapping attempts were actually rescue missions, because he knew that TCT was firmly against him, and that propaganda would have essentially no effect. TCT kids had in fact invited a supervillain to move in with them at one point, and he immediately tried to kill all of the kids. Dr. Zāme realized he had little chance of pulling the same move on them even if he intended to actually protect the children he kidnapped instead of murdering them.

The government of Camia was horrified when they realized that Dr. Zāme was only interested in fighting children, and seemingly targeted the youngest ones most of all, and that their national army, by far the strongest on the planet, was helpless to stop him. Moreover the Camians realized that the TCT children had grown up simply believing that this was the way of the world, and that children existed solely to protect adults from other adults. Thus, TCT also considered the Camian army incompetent and irrelevant.

Later battles

As Dr. Zāme improved his skill with breeding mutants and robots, the TCT kids figured they would see him less and less often, but he actually began to involve himself directly in battles more and more each year. He had been developing battle strategies based on the TCTers' own strategies. For example, when he realized that many of the TCT and LSL fighters wer able to make themselves entirely immune to attacks from Dr. Zāme simply by encasing themselves in cocoons and force fields, Dr. Zāme did something similar. He did not have the power of flight, nor of cocoons, but he eventually came to realize that his force field power was more flexible than that of any of the kids.

Force fields

Dr. Zāme realized he could create a one-man battle front by wrapping a force field around himself and then placing himself between the kids and the mutants or robots that were attacking them. Unlike the kids, he could speed around while still inside the force field. This mattered because he could use his force field to block attacks from any of the superheros, and thus protect his allies from getting hit, while himself remaining entirely invincible to those attacks. Furthermore, like some of the TCT kids, he could turn invisible, meaning that the TCTers wouldn't know which one of them was about to get blocked. All they knew, early on, is that their attack had mysteriously "failed" to reach its target. With difficulty, he managed to perform this trick even with force fields that wrapped around him vertically and were as tall as the mutants, thus preventing even flying attacks from getting through. However, the taller the force field, the slower Dr. Zāme could move, so he did not always use this "wrapped" type of force field.

Like #Eddy, he could also abduct people using this movable force field. An adventurer caught up in Dr. Zāme's force field would typically protect himself, if possible, by wrapping another force field around himself. Doing this would stop the abduction but also leave the adventurer trapped in a bubble near Dr. Zāme, while being unable to attack Dr. Zāme. However, sometimes even this defense was impossible: if Dr. Zāme was quick enough, he would wrap the outer force field around the child tightly enough that the child would be paralyzed and unable to counterattack.

Physical appearance

I seem to have varied my opinions on this. I think Dr. Zāme appeared in only one comic strip, because in every other battle, he attacked from a distance and I never drew scenes that the kids couldn't see. I have just found a black-and-white scan of that strip, one of only three strips that have survived. Even though the scan is in black and white for some reason, I'm pretty sure I was giving him spiky blonde hair, because I don't believe I would have intended it to be white. Later, I wrote that he was a "short, fat man with a robot face" but I'm not considering that to be canonical because I'm pretty sure I was being influenced by Dr. Robotnik. I believe I considered him to be of normal adult size, though he never got close enough to any of the kids to make a precise measurement.

I didn't think about his age, but later on I decided his fixation on the TCT kids may have come from having been a classmate of Nancy's, despite being older than her, and being banished from STW by Nancy or one of her allies shortly after Nancy rose to power. However, I only came up with this explanation long after I'd stopped writing my sci-fi stories, and may have forgotten that I had decided early on that Dr. Zāme had been raised to be bad by his parents when he was still in diapers.

Family

Zāme was his family name, and it was a native Camian name. He was not from a foreign country, let alone a foreign planet; he merely spent time on Xema because he knew that even the weak, gullible Camian army might eventually capture him if he built up all of his projects while living in Camia.

His parents were both criminals, but neither was nearly as ambitious nor as successful as their son; his father was a serial killer who fled with his wife and son to escape Camia's police force for the protection and security of #Xema. His mother was less violent, preferring merely to steal money from other people in any possible way. Their son combined both traits and took them to a far greater extreme.

Dr. Zāme never married and never had any children. He said that instead of having children, he would attempt to build his own in the form of robots such as #Eddy and the later, stronger #Super Eddy. He made many non-Eddy robots, including a child-sized representation of himself, intended to impersonate a TCT member, called Ladzāme (lad in the sense of boy). There were also Zāme 2, a generic improved version of himself which he cooperated with and instructed to take over operations on Xema if Dr. Zāme himself were to die; Zāme 3, a true robot intended to overcome any barriers that Zāme 2 faced, such as the need to find food; Zāme 4, a robot with some human DNA intended to engage in direct physical combat; Zāme 5, a robot that does good deeds and helps people, intended for use by other Xemans; and Zāme 6, a version of Zāme 5 that looked entirely human.

Zeke

Zeke

Zeke was an engineer who attempted to join TCT later on after it had broken up into smaller leagues. Unlike the other kids, Zeke often flew solo missions to #Wamia to help out his nation's army in their fight against their rival. This was unusual both because the kids generally did not participate in the Camia/Wamia war, and because only a few of the kids were confident enough to fly solo missions of any kind.

Whereas most of the TCT'ers saw their struggle with Xema and its many villainous masterminds as a better fit for their talents, Zeke believed he could become a military mastermind and help Camia win its war against Wamia so it could focus on winning its wars against #Theta, Bonae, Namma, Reino, Xema, and Earth.

After TCT broke free from Nancy's control, Zeke was given conditional acceptance into TCT, but when they decided to limit themselves to 20 members, he failed the physical endurance test and never reapplied.

ZTSD

ZTSD

ZTSD

ZTSD, also known as NH5, was a superhero league consisting of five boys and two girls that reached its prime about two years before the peak of the war. #Teddy and #Zachary were both ZTSD members before they became TCT members. ZTSD's members were nine and ten years old at the time of the peak of its missions. There were seemingly no older superheros in Camia at that time.

Unusually, ZTSD considered itself to be divided into two subleagues, a "good" one and a "bad" one. The "good" subleague consisted of #Zachary, #Teddy, #Stacy,^tentative and #Dana M. They had very strong superpowers, and indeed they were the original members for whom the league was named.

The children in the "bad" subleague were #Gary, #Callista, and #Mike. They did not have any superpowers, and were present only because they were friends of the good fighters who tagged along with them in order to tempt their enemies to hit them instead of the other four children.

There was an eighth member who traveled with them on some missions, #Jimmy. He had the power of heat (not necessarily fire) and could blast enemies away that the other superheros couldn't handle. Heat could even travel through force fields.

ZTSD's location

ZTSD fought their battles "in the strange land of Zōma", which I later unified with Xema. Taking this at face value, it would thus seem that early on, the children didn't realize how scary Xema really was since they were voluntarily shuttling themselves off to Xema at the age of 9 and 10 whereas when they were older, stronger, and more numerous, they considered Xema too dangerous for them and tried to dodge out whenever Nancy assigned any of them a mission on Xema. Since these were originally Archie Comics stories, the characters were originally about 18 years old, but for it to make sense in my timeline I have to recast them as the age I was when I wrote the stories, to match all of the other stories I wrote.

I believe that I had not created #Wamia yet when I wrote these stories, which means I was in fourth or fifth grade at the time (thus age 9 or 10). However, at some point in my 20s I reworked the plotline such that the Archie character was recast as #Gary, a Wamian, and it would make sense for Reggie and Veronica to be Wamians as well. Having Gary be present in Camia when he was nine years old contradicts much of what I've said about his parents moving him from Wamia to Camia "at the height of Camia's war against Wamia", but that specific idea was never canonical to begin with.

Only two of the stories I wrote have survived. In one, #Zachary (originally Jughead) defeats their primary enemy, a man called the Pumpkin, singlehandedly after the Pumpkin had physically crushed the other five children (Michael (the Reggie character) was absent on this mission). As above, the characters were originally physically strong teenagers, but the Pumpkin was much larger even than them, and must have been wearing a heavily padded suit of armor. (He actually rolled around on the ground to crush them.)

In the other story, Michael was also absent, and this time Callista ("Veronica") was as well. Thus, the kids only had one "dummy" with them to take the hits in their battles. As it happened, they were facing off against #Eddy, and Eddy managed to paralyze all five children and began carrying them off to prison. Rather than be rescued by an unexpectedly alert Michael and Callista, they were rescued by a surprise visit from #Jimmy, a small boy who could fly around and shoot heat waves at people. He killed Eddy in one hit and then unfroze the other children. (This type of anticlimactic ending was common in my very early writing.)

ZTSD's battle strategy

The ZTSD members, even the "good" ones, were not highly skilled fighters. During one battle, Zachary and Teddy turned invisible as they were fighting a gigantic evil eagle but then immediately taunted the eagle by yelling out where they were hiding. The eagle swooped down and grabbed Zach, who immediately began to scream for help. Then Teddy ran towards the eagle in order to help, but when he got close the eagle grabbed him with the talons on its other foot. (They had been hiding in separate places.) Jimmy rescued the two boys with his force field power.

The "bad" fighters were even worse. On one day, #Gary tripped over his shoelace and landed face-first into a large puddle of poisonous liquid, something common on Xema despite the cold temperatures. #Stacy rescued him by stepping into the puddle herself and then lifting him up. Later, he began running into his enemies, flailing at giant birds with his bare hands, while the birds cut him up with their beaks and claws. Gary was so incompetent that he sometimes hurt his hands on the birds' beaks when he was pummeling away. #Callista, meanwhile, was worse than Gary in that she was simply so terrified of her enemies that she never tried to fight them. Lastly, Michael simply refused to go on most of the missions the other kids did.

The kids were mostly new to the battlefield, and sometimes fell prey to surprise attacks. Once, after they had defeated #Eddy, they were rushed by another of Dr. Zāme's creations. After they had defeated that one, they celebrated their victory. Then they were pounced on by "six evil ghosts" (perhaps men wearing costumes). Nevertheless, the six adventurers that were present defeated the six "ghosts" in just a few minutes.

ZTSD superpowers

I seem to have not paid much attention to this. In one story, the kids fail to even inflict the slightest harm on their enemies, and thus have to be rescued by Jimmy. In the Pumpkin story, the narrator gets physically crushed by a man named the Pumpkin and falls unconscious, along with four of the other five. The one boy left standing defeated the Pumpkin singlehandedly, but I never explained how because the narrator was unconscious. Then, the kids were pounced on by six "evil ghosts", which they beat off with their bare hands. This would make more sense if the ZTSD fighters were teens, but in my current time line they were tiny 10 year olds.

Location of ZTSD battles

Exceptionally, ZTSD traveled to Xema to fight Dr. Zāme rather than waiting for him to dump his attacks on them at home. Since Xema was a very cold place even by Camian standards, most people on Xema lived in gigantic greenhouses, and even Dr. Zāme's mutants needed to stay "indoors" in greenhouses in order to survive. Thus, the battles were fought primarily inside the greenhouses, and both sides of the battle could threaten to break the glass in order to end the battle. For the most part, Dr. Zāme's minions were large enough that they could simply punch through the glass, whereas the children had to use indirect methods. However, since the children could fly and Dr. Zāme's mutants mostly could not, destroying the greenhouse would be a terrible idea for Dr. Zāme and his creations and therefore they rarely even threatened it.