Camia/Characters

A

Alley

Alley

Alley

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

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

Andre

Andre

Andre

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

Andrew

Andrew

Andrew

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

B

Bezza

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

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 (possibly channel 14) as if it were a wrestling match. The kids repeatedly asked Bob to actually help them out instead of just standing there with his TV cameras rolling, but he never even answered them. He called his cache of video of the kids' fighting Quest of Courage and made money selling it as a TV reality series (though he did not call it that).

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

Private wrestling arena

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

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

Role in TCT

When the #TCT kids branched out onto planet Namma and broke free from their teacher and advisor, they ran a recruitment drive for new members, hoping to reach a total of exactly 20. Bob applied and was accepted into TCT as a regular member, the only adult amongst 18 young boys and one small girl. (Nanuko had left TCT by this time but still remained an ally.)

Bob (2)

Bob

Bob was an Earthling who was well known for his skill in boxing and his aggressively masculine personality. He owned a spaceship called Earth Experiment I. He swore allegiance to TCT and used his money and power on Earth to help TCT get things done on Earth. Unlike the TCT kids, he answered to no higher authority, and he asked for no protection on his many missions. He was both intelligent and physically strong: 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 and had in many cases simply stood by holding his microphone as he watched the kids get beat up by their enemies.

However, #Teddy admired Bob the boxer, and tried to enroll him in TCT against the wishes of the other TCTers. At this time, he was still required to obey #Nancy, and Nancy overruled him saying that no Earthlings should be let in. (She did not object to enrolling the Cleanup Corps kids because the Cleanup Corps were moving to Tebbala by so doing.)

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 10-year-old 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 pleaded with him and explained that they were on a mission critical to the well-being of their nation, and didn't have time to stop off on another planet before meeting up with their enemies. But Bob merely stood in place and didn't let the boys get by. Even with their superpowers, they had no way of removing someone as large and solidly built as Bob when he didn't want to move.

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.

Bob(2) and Bob(3) could theoretically be united, so long as I make him a dynamic character who started out as a manipulative and ungrateful intruder who disrupted the children's attempts to defend their home planet solely so he could get a free ride to a different planet, but quickly changed into their strongest ally within less than two years.

BTD

BTD

BTD

BTD (not an 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 out to get shot at by masterminds who were too tough for the mainstream Camian army seemed absurd even to the Camians. Thus the BTD'ers were often frustrated and refused assistance even by their allies.

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

Battle strategy

The BTD children mostly went on missions against 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. When this happened, the older kids accepted that the BTD children had given all they could and did not try to track them down to pull them back into the battle.

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

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

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

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, particularly since I did carry it over to the older kids who were not even part of TCT.

C

Calvin

Calvin

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.

Carla

Carla

Carla

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

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

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

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

Boyfriend

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

Cleanup Corps

Cleanup Corps

Cleanup Corps

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

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

One day, #Nancy called up eight of her students (they were actually Hikik's league, STS) and 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 eight students she assigned this mission to were #Hikik, #Lumyt, #Barry, #Jason, #John, #Tim, and #Satykhuci.

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

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

Cleanup Corps expands

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

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

The Soothsayers

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

Coldwater

Coldwater

Coldwater

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

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

D

Dana

Dana M.

Dana

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

Relationship with Dr. Zāme

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

Dana moves up

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

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

Personality and identity

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

Dana R.

Dana

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

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

Donald

Donald

Donald

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

E

Echinix

Echinix

Echinix

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

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

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

Eddy

Eddy

Eddy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Super Eddy

Super Eddy

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

Eye

Eye

Eye

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

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

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

Ezra

Ezra

Ezra

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

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, possibly with the help of #Bob (2).

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 and weighed only about 30 pounds, making her the smallest of the major combatants in the war. She had poor vision and needed to rely on others to tell her where to go. Additionally, she had very poor motor coordination, to the point of having difficulty even remaining standing up. Nevertheless, her magic powers brought her into the league, and she looked forward to a day when she would be taller and more physically capable of supporting herself.

Hayden was interested in music but did not have a lot of free time. Her best friend, 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

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. Thus, at 13 years old, her career as a TCT superhero was already over.

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

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

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

Appearance

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

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 was easily disarmed, but still had magic powers he could rely on if he found himself suddenly swordless. Nevertheless, he tended to attack only wounded enemies that could not easily hit back, since he had no defensive powers of his own and therefore could not simply ignore injuries the way many of the other kids could.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

John (2)

John

John

John was a three-year-old boy who joined #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. Thus, her battle plan, like those of the other BTD kids, resembled trench warfare.

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

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

Battle strategy

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

Personality

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

Julie was generally considered the leader of BTD, although it had no official leader because it relied on other leagues for help. Nevertheless, her behavior reflected on the league as a whole. One day, when Julie was giving a speech on behalf of BTD, she began to stumble for words and appear uncomfortable. As she began a new paragraph she suddenly threw up on the floor in front of her and then collapsed. From that point on, people were cautious about standing too close to the BTD kids.

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

Justine

Justine

Justine

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

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

L

Lewiston

Lewiston

Lewiston

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

Naming

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

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

Climate and geography

Lewiston was a cold place: there was still snow on the ground on June 17 when the spiders began their invasion. But the permafrost they lived on caused the summer meltwater to form into swamps, where abundant wildlife managed to survive. Lewiston was slightly warmer than other nearby areas.

Population structure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lilal

Lilâl

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

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

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

Lumyt

Lumyt

Lumyt

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

M

Machim

Machim

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

Mandy

Mandy

Mandy

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

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

Manito Bay

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

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

Manitoman

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

March

March

March

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

Mitch

Mitch

Mitch

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

N

Nancy

Nancy

Nancy

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

Appearance

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

Attitude

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

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

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

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

Interaction with others

The mainstream Camian society could not understand why the TCT children allowed Nancy to abuse them so horribly and yet they always obeyed her when she threw more and more dangerous missions at them. Some leaders suggested that perhaps the TCT kids were simply too young to know any better. They claimed that the TCT kids believed that all adults were manipulative, abusive, or both, and that children had to just deal with it and try to get the adults to learn better behavior.

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

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

Nancy defended her authoritarianism as being the only way to keep control over a league of such powerful schoolchildren, and noted that she had always been willing to send other kids out to rescue the TCT kids when they were in danger. Nevertheless, the general trend over time was for Nancy's students to want to escape her control, even if it meant giving up control to Teddy and Zachary who had started a league of their own.

Age

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

Other names

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

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

Joja was 44 years old at the time of the peak of the war, and had a very cold personality towards the world but was very kind and loving towards her students, unlike the "Nancy" who pushed them around from one battle to the next and then woke them up when they tried to sleep at night.

Nanuko

Nanuko

Nanuko

Nanuko was a tall, strong man who met the TCT kids on their very first mission to planet /Namma and realized from the very beginning that they were trouble. He decided to banish the kids from all of the villages under his jurisdiction. He knew that the kids had superpowers, but he used his physical strength as a weapon and threatened to crush one of the boys to death if they did not obey.

Nevertheless, the kids decided to settle in one of Nanuko's villages, called Torushi, and he was helpless to stop them. The other villagers soon began to turn against Nanuko, as it was his job to protect the four villages he ruled from all dangers, and yet he seemed to have no response to the TCT kids' settlement other than to suggest that if the villagers wanted the boys to get out, the villagers as whole must do the fighting rather than just relying on Nanuko. As the boys expanded their settlements and spent more and more time in Torushi Village, even making friends with local children, the other villagers respected Nanuko less and less each day. Some villagers blamed his love of alcohol for the problems of their villages, even though alcohol was a common pleasure amongst the relatively simple villagers he ruled over and he was no different than the average villager in that regard.

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

Although at first Nanuko seemed to be a valuable addition to the team, he eventually proved to be largely a disappointment both to Nancy and to the other TCT kids. Although he tried his hardest to work with the TCT'ers, he was largely incompetent and constantly needed to call for help from the kids. 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 strong positive traits. Unlike other adults, he didn't mind being bossed around by the young TCT leadership, and when assigned a mission, he was better at sticking to it than most of the other TCT'ers. Like other adults, he helped the kids out when they struggled with physical tasks such as lifting heavy weights that even their superpowers couldn't help them with. Nanuko was very tall and muscular, and thus was almost always the strongest member of any team he traveled in. Lastly, being from Namma, he helped translate between the Jafa language and those of Namma when other Namman speakers were off on other missions.

Nauri

Nauri

Nauri

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

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

Welcome on Tebbala

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

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

Contacts with Lilal

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

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

A few days after the TCT kids had moved to Casaverde, Nauri called up #Lilal, the man who had burned her house to the ground and sent packs of mutants after her several times. She told him she was living in paradise in New Zealand and would appreciate his company. She had always been drawn to Lilal's strong personality, and felt that she was strong enough to handle the man and that perhaps they could be friends if the two of them could get over the fact that he had never stopped trying to kill her.

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

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

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

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

Newsletters

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

P

Polly

Polly

Polly

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

Battle strategy

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

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

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

Later life

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

Naming

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

R

Reino

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

Richie

Richie

Richie

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

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

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

S

Sam

Sam

Sam

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

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

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

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

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

Age and abilities

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

Friends and associations

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

Autism

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

Evil Bed

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

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

Sara

Sara

Sara

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

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

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

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

Blonde hair and outfits

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

Satykhuci

Sātykhūci

Sātykhūci

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stacy

Stacy

Stacy was a small girl living in Lewiston who had very strong superpowers (ranked 5th strongest on the entire planet, and #1 among girls over 10 years old) but did not 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 wanted to help preserve Teppala's society long enough to give the Teppalans enough time to kill all the people living on Earth and then move to Earth themselves.

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

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

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

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 a small boy would defeat a large enemy such as a spider and then find himself trapped because the defeated enemy was blocking the door and the hero was physically unable to 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 Jansen was a tall dark-haired girl who belonged to #STW but was not part of TCT or any of the other major superhero leagues. Later, when the TCT kids broke away from their two adult leaders and began recruiting new members directly, Tanya tried to join TCT, but failed the physical admission test. She was embarrassed.

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

Tanya was a very good student, and despite being denied admission to TCT twice she remained very loyal to the group and was able to help them in difficult situations using her logical problem-solving skills. She also rescued #Jen, another non-TCT STW member, when Jen crashed her spaceship and then was abducted by tiny aliens who had eaten their home planet and were seemingly obsessed with women's clothing.

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. Nobody in Camia seemed to know about the genocide because all of the victims had been either killed or forced into hiding, and thus there was nobody left to remind them of their history.

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

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

TCT

TCT

TCT

TCT was a league of child superheros who bounced around the universe from planet to planet in order to fight battles that 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 three more adult members (#Bob (1), along with two men whose bynames were "Sand" and "Swimming Pool"). Bob contributed little, and the other two were also disappointing, but not as violent as Lilâl or as incompetent as Nanuko.

Teddy

Teddy

Teddy

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

Family

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

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

Personality

Teddy was more friendly to outsiders than most of the people in TCT, and often served as a diplomat. One day, he invited a man to come with him to a political conference to discuss world issues. At the conference, the man quickly became angry, and beat him up. Later that night, when the building they were sleeping in was wrecked by #Dr. Zame's ballistic missiles, Teddy rescued the man and brought him to safety in the hopes that they could become friends.

Superpowers and combat skills

Teddy was more willing than most of the other kids to put himself in danger in battles involving direct physical combat. He would fearlessly run into a crowd of men that were triple his size, even when they had weapons. His force field power was a big help in physical combat because even an entire crowd of soldiers could be temporarily brought down by just a single force field wall. Furthermore, Teddy was one of the few boys who had both the power of flight and the power to turn invisible. Once Teddy further developed his flying ability by learning how to silently hover in the air, he realized he could defeat an enemy of even a very large size by flying up in the air and wrapping a force field around them. This worked because an enemy could not see him, and therefore could not shoot him down. However, force fields only resisted physical pressure for a short time, and an entire army pushing on one of his force fields could have it open again within a matter of seconds. Thus he tended to use force fields against individuals or at most small crowds of people.

Teddy's bravery often got him into trouble, but he saw misadventures like that as a good thing because every time he was captured he realized he had saved someone else from the same fate. During one battle, Teddy took the lead in calling out #Dr. Zame to come fight him, even though he was, as usual, unarmed and he knew Dr. Zāme always carried a gun. Teddy's battle plan was to throw a bottle of potion at Dr. Zāme in an attempt to weaken him, but the potion had no effect and Teddy's strategy had failed. Dr. Zāme considered shooting him, but instead fired on a 6 year old boy who had come with him while a third boy rescued the others by hitting Dr. Zāme from behind with a bomb.

Career in TCT

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

Theta

Theta

Theta

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

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

Name

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

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

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. He enjoyed snowboarding, which was popular because the boys lived on the edge of a glacier.

V

Vamas

Vamas

Vamas

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

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

Vince

Vince

Vince

Vince was a small boy who belonged to the #Cleanup Corps and was later accepted into #TCT. His favorite hobby was playing video games and his favorite color was olive green.

However, shortly after being accepted into TCT, Vince was kicked back out of TCT. A small boy, he had a difficult time passing the initial physical examination, and he had no motivation and preferred to play video games instead of flying around the universe fighting armies of men in tanks. He was soon replaced by #Mitch.

X

Xema

Xema

Xema

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

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

The role of Dr. Zāme

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

Xemans placed a high priority on missions to kidnap their young challengers. During one battle, Xema invaded Camia with its conventional army and was getting the better of the Camian army while suffering little damage in return. The Camian general called 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

Zachary

Zachary

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

Superpowers and skills

Superpowers

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

• He could endure poison and thus rescue other adventurers who had been spit on by large venomous animals (some of whom were large enough to spit out "puddles" that would cover the adventurers completely in venom).
• He could turn invisible, and unlike #Teddy, could remain invisible even when captured by an enemy.
• He could read minds, and could pull information out of the air even when no other person was present. The other adventurers referred to this ability as being psychic, as they were unfamiliar with other definitions of the term.
• He could create cocoons, which were similar to force fields but could be put into motion, and were very difficult to pierce. With his cocoon power, Zachary could choose at any time to simply refuse to take part in a battle, as wrapping himself in a cocoon transformed him into an invincible pacifist, both unable to harm his enemies, and immune to any of their attempts to harm him. This came into play several times, being particularly useful when the boys were being bombarded by attacks from all sides, but had reason to believe that those attacks would soon slow down or stop. Unlike a force field, the cocoon superpower would not simply wear off after a few minutes. Zachary could also wrap cocoons around others.

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

Skills

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

Negative traits

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

Running away

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

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

Leadership roles

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

Zachary preferred to wear shorts even when the weather was cold — a trait many Camians had and were proud of.

Space missions

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

Later life

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

Zak

Zak

Zak

Zak was a small boy who belonged to the #Cleanup Corps. His favorite hobbies were planting trees and digging through municipal landfills looking for recyclable containers. Like the rest of the Cleanup Corps, he was forced out of Earth during the height of the war because the rest of the Earthlings were tired of him cleaning up all their messes.

Zak was skilled with computers, and was able to use and program in the Lilahaa operating system that Camia's computers relied on with more skill than anyone else even in TCT.

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

Dr. Zame

Dr. Zāme

Dr. Zāme

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

Personality

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

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

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

Mutants

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

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

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

Role in education

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

Monkeys

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

Animals

Not all of the animals that made life so difficult for Camians were mutants. 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. 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 he hit them with three 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.

Eddy

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

Other humanoid robots

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

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

Direct invasions

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

Kidnappings

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

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

Other hobbies

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

Views on politics

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

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

The government of Camia was horrified when they realized that Dr. Zāme was only interested in fighting children, and seemingly targeted the youngest ones most of all, and that their national army, by far the strongest on the planet, was helpless to stop him. Moreover they realized that the TCT children had grown up simply believing that this was the way of the world and that they existed solely to push back Dr. Zāme whenever he decided to let loose with another one of his attacks. Thus, TCT also considered the Camian army incompetent and irrelevant.

Later battles

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

Force fields

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

Physical appearance

I seem to have varied my opinions on this. I think Dr. Zāme appeared in only one comic strip, because in every other battle, he attacked from a distance and I never drew scenes that the kids couldn't see. He may have had spiky blonde hair, because I don't believe I would have intended it to be white. Later, I wrote that he was a "short, fat man with a robot face" but I'm not considering that to be canonical because I'm pretty sure I was being influenced by Dr. Robotnik. The original strips are gone now but I do believe he was a fairly tall man and had light-colored hair.

Family

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

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

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

Zeke

Zeke

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

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

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