Camia/Characters

B

The Three Bobs

In my early writing I had three characters named Bob. One of them appeared only early on and was simply an annoying pest for the kids, but the other two hung around for a longer period of time.

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 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.

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, but in this particular battle one of Dr. Zāme's subordinates 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.

Bob (2)

Bob

Bob was an Earthling who was well known for his skill in boxing and his aggressively masculine personality. 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: once when the children were being attacked by giant spiders, with his boxing gloves on Bob took down the spiders one by one. Bob was thus the kids' strongest adult ally, and indeed was one of the few adults who wasn't constantly attacking them.

However, the TCT kids disagreed with Bob's freewheeling manners. Late in their history, as they were 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.

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 three Bobs, and the chronologically earliest of the three (Bob(3)) differs greatly from the middle one (Bob1)), but in many ways resembles the chronologically latest one (Bob2)).

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.

Bob (3)

Bob

Honestly, I think I just found a third "Bob" character. This Bob was an Earthling, like Bob(2), and I may have originally intended them to be the same character. But whereas Bob(2) respected the TCT kids and took great risks to help them out, Bob(3) was a parasite who used the kids for favors and gave nothing back. When Bob(3) heard that two TCT boys were about to start a new space mission, he located their ship 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 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.

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, knowing that Bob had a large appetite and wasn't very friendly when he was hungry.

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.

The other Bob wouldn't have intruded on the kids both because he was never aggressive towards the TCT kids and because he was rich enough that he could simply use one of his own spaceships.

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.

BTD

BTD

BTD

BTD (no acronym) was a superhero league found in Lewiston that allied itself with TCT and the other leagues. Unlike the other leagues, the BTD 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. 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 on missions to defeat their enemies seemed odd even to the Camians. Thus the BTD'ers were often frustrated and refused assistance even by their allies.

Battle strategy

On missions, the BTD children mostly focused on fighting Dr. Zāme and his mutants. Although they were overall very powerful, the BTD 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 BTD tracked Dr. Zāme down to a hideout in Wamia, the BTD kids disappeared halfway through the mission. Perhaps they needed a nap.

Naming

BTD was named for its three original members, and thus is not an acronym. However, by the time they rose to prominence, their primary members were named Julie (who signed her name Rainbow), Jimbo, Donald, John, and Hayden. They chose not to rename themselves to JJDJH or any similar name because they wanted the league to expand both by retaining the original members as they grew older and by enrolling new members once they were old enough to walk.

External history

I know that I patterned BTD 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 BTD 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.

C

Calvin

Calvin was a character borrowed directly from Calvin & Hobbes who appeared in several early comics in his Spaceman Spiff form. He always had dark hair, but I think this is just a relic of my early drawing style. He was six years old, and therefore smaller than most of the other kids, and he had no superpowers, so he was weak, but he still carried his gun, thus giving him a power none of the other kids had. Calvin used this gun against Dr. Zāme in the very first battle the children fought against Zāme, but it was a boy named Lumyt who defeated Dr. Zāme by hitting him with a bomb.

Cleanup Corps

Cleanup Corps

Cleanup Corps

The Cleanup Corps (CTC) was a group of eight elementary school students living 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. One day, Nancy called up eight of the TCT kids and assigned them the task of destroying planet Earth. She had grown tired of Earth interfering in her plans and decided the best thing to do was just to get rid of it once and for all. The TCT 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 TCT kids met up with the Cleanup Corps kids. Perhaps the Cleanup Corps were trying to pick up some uranium bomb shells that the TCT 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 TCT itself. But when the TCT 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 TCT and brought them back to Teppala.

Cleanup Corps expands

Later, some of the TCT kids became powerful enough to achieve effective independence from their teacher, but the Cleanup Corps kids were too young to do this, so Nancy changed the name of the combined league to Cleanup Corps and began referring to one of the independent ones (Teddy and Zach's league) as the true TCT.

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 an additional group of older children from TCT.

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" M. was a 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 superpowers, but they were not as potent as some of the other kids' powers. 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.

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.

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 their 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 very young 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.

E

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.

F

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.

However, Gary did have his shining moments. One day 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.

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.

H

Hayden

Hayden

Hayden

Hayden was a small girl with wavy blonde hair who joined #BTD near the height of the war, at the age of three. She was less than three feet tall, 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, Kelsey, was a renowned composer of music despite herself being also only three years old. However, Kelsey had some help from Hayden's (not Kelsey's) father. The two three-year-olds and the man formed a band that was very popular and received subsidies from Camia's government. However, they were often unsuccessful at meeting their record label's targets because Hayden was often forced to leave a recording session unexpectedly to go save the planet.

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 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.

J

Jen

Jen

Jen 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.

Nevertheless, she continued to help the others because she was still a member of STW, and STW cooperated with TCT. Despite her skills, she gained a reputation for foolishness and in one case needed to be rescued by another girl, Tanya. 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.

Jim

Jim

Jim

Jim was a BTD 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 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.

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.

John (2)

John

John

John was a three-year-old boy who joined #BTD in order to help fight enemies. He had the longest endurance of the many young children in BTD, 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 BTD 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 #BTD superhero league, and was four years old at the time of the peak of the war. She was the only one of the BTD 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.

Generally she fought alongside Teddy or one of the Thūta brothers when they went out to face Dr. Zāme's mutants. BTD 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.

Julie had the second longest endurance span of the many preschoolers, second only to John, and she generally fought much more intensely than Jim. 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.

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.

L

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. 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.

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. This would be more than 700 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.

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.

N

Nancy

Nancy 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.

Nanuko

Nanuko was a man who met the TCT kids on their very first mission to planet /Namma and realized from the very beginning that they were trouble. He decided to banish the kids from all of the villages under his jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the kids decided to settle in one of his villages, and he was helpless to stop them. One day later on, 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. He happily agreed to join the team although he was upset when he learned that the cafeteria in their elementary school did not carry his favorite brand of beer.

Although at first Nanuko seemed to be a valuable addition to the team, he eventually proved to be 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. 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.

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

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P

The Little Philosopher

A boy whose byname was The Little Philosopher (because his last name meant "short") overcame his shyness and joined STW with the help of his friend Zachary. However, he suffered an attack that caused brain damage and soon was excused from all missions at STW.

R

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 aliens and 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 that the slave he had tortured and beat up on for such a long time would go so far as to join an army and travel to Namma to track him down, 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.

Because Richie was from Earth, Teddy sometimes used him to communicate with Earth. For example, one day Teddy brought Richie along with him to a conference between Earth, Theta, and Teppala at which representatives of the three planets would decide what the relationship between the three planets would be. Richie was the only Earthling at the conference, so Earth only had one vote. However, as the conference was interested in the possibility of a unanimous vote, Richie's votes on the most important questions at the conference were taken away. The conference ended with Teppala and Theta signing a new treaty and agreeing to a mutual invasion of planet Earth.

S

Sam

Sam

Sam

Samuel I. Thompson was a young boy with autism who belonged to the Cleanup Corps in Seattle.

Despite his small size (less than four feet tall) and lack of superpowers, TCT welcomed Sam as a warrior and awarded him full membership. They promised he could help out in combat missions in whatever ways he felt appropriate, and would be given more power 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.

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.

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.

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 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 three 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 15 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.

Stacy

Stacy

Stacy was a small girl living in Lewiston who had superpowers but did not 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.

STW

STW

STW

Save the World was an organization on planet Teppala open to children of all ages who want 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.

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.

Sučithasi

Sučithasi

Sučithasi

Sučithasi ("the Mountain") 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 Teddy or someone would defeat a large enemy such as a spider and then find himself trapped because the defeated enemy was blocking the door and Teddy couldn't move him. Sučithasi 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.

Sučithasi 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.

T

Tanya

Tanya

Tanya

Tanya Bergen 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. She happened to be very muscular, and was disturbed when she realized the others were using her primarily for physical 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 grown so tall that he assumed she must have been Tanya's older sister.

Tare

Tare

Tare

Tare was a small boy 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.

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 was a league of child superheros who bounced around the universe from planet to planet in order to fight battles that no one else was willing to fight. 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 repulsed the Earthlings they got the help message and sent four children back to Camia to take on the invading Xeman army. When the Xemans saw that the TCT kids had arrived, they stopped attacking the Camian army and ran after the two youngest children. The other two children immersed themselves in the crowd of Xeman soldiers, and kicked and slapped at the Xemans as they ran while the regular Camian army shot at the Xemans from the rear. Within minutes the battle had ended with a clear victory for the Camians and their TCT helpers.

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 call for admitting 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 very disappointing. 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 two more adult members ("Sand" and "Swimming Pool"), both of whom also were disappointing, but not as violent as Lilâl or as incompetent as Nanuko.

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. 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.

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 because they had been expecting a peaceful mission and had not brought any weapons with them. 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 would have to take on more than a billion enemy soldiers apiece. Nancy promised to send another league of eight children down to Earth as reinforcements, and promised that the other league would do most of the fighting since they would have weapons.

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.

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 a flock of firebirds 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 TCT for help, and TCT responded by sending down four 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

Zak

Zak was a young 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 around the age of 10 because the rest of the Earthlings were tired of him cleaning up all their messes.

Dr. Zame

Dr. Zāme

Dr. Zāme

Dr. Zāme 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.

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. Dr. Zāme spent much of his time spying on the kids and was reliably just one step behind them whenever they thought they had finally eluded him.

Dr. Zāme had a lot in common with the adventurers he attacked, and was often better able than others to figure out how they might 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.

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. 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.

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 and revealed that he had abducted their fathers. On another mission, the boys were getting ready to go to sleep when Dr. Zāme blew up 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 while the boys flailed their arms to try to stay above water he hit them with threee more of the same mutant.

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.

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.

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. On other occasions, Dr. Zāme would invade the kids directly, for example when he crashed through the protective wall the children had had built around Fort Calamity, into which they had fled after two of the boys had broken out of a jail in Wamia.

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. He was able to do this safely because by this time, the boys' leaders had removed their spaceships' integrated weapons systems, meaning that enemy ships could hit them with all sorts of projectiles and mechanical lasers but they could not fire anything back. The rationale for this was that the kids had lost so many ships to their enemies' attacks that it was too expensive to keep providing them with weapons. 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.

Zeke

Zeke

Zeke was an "engineer" who attempted to join TCT later on after it had broken up into smaller leagues.