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 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 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.

Bob (3)

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.

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 (no acronym) was a superhero league found in Baeba 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.

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.

C

Calvin

Calvin was a character borrowed directly from Calvin & Hobbes and 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

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.

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.

G

Gary

Gary 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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 my early writing 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.

Sučithasi was originally named "Fuji Yoshizawa", but I want to remove the original Japanese names, even from the "Camia" conworld, in place of using Thaoa names.

T

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 in the middle of winter 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 season.

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 they had had bad experiences with enrolling adults in their past, such as the time when Nauri invited a man who had tried to kill her seven times before to join her and the other kids on a vacation in New Zealand. The man accepted the invitation and within a few days had burned down the children's homes and sent out a pack of mutants to try to kill them once and for all. But this did not stop them 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.

Z

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.

Zeke

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