Editing NECESSARY EVIL in Freedom City SPOILER PAGE (section)

==TYRANY LEAGUE of another Dimension==
===the Star Lords===
What the 'Star Knight' of the Tyranny Syndicate's Anti-Earth would look like …

Somewhere in the galaxy, a dozen races worked together to design a super-computer named Mentor. Meant to be a benevolent coordinating system for their newly-forged multi-system interstellar rebublic, it turned malignant and seized control, ruthlessly supressing dissent with it's armored 'Star Lords' (each of which was assigned a different planet to oversee / police in it's name). After centuries of rule, a rebellion arose against Mentor, led ironically by it's armored enforcers (who were sick of ruling in *it's* name, and wanted to rule in their own...). Mentor struck out viciously, killing the current Star Lords via cyberneural viruses from within their armor, but was also horribly damaged in the initial attack, and similarly fell into a vicious feedback loop, repeating only it's last command, to kill the rebels, *all* of them... 

Automated drones continued to be manufactured and sent out, and within a matter of days every planet in the Empire was sterilized of life, while the computer system finally burned out. Mentor 'died' without ever seeing his victory, and a dozen worlds became lifeless burnt-out husks. 

A thousand years later, a motley crew of composed of crooks on the run, occasional space pirates, and other scum of space, landed on the home-world, finding that the planet was a lifeless (and mildy radioactive, and toxic) mess, but held the remains of fantastic technology. The automated drones had long since run out of power, as they functioned on broadcast power from stations that had fallen silent, and the opportunistic explorers soon found the remains of the Star Lord armor-suits, fallen in various areas around the central city, where their wearers had succumbed to he cyber-virus. The armors also functioned on broadcast power, and with the failure of Mentor, only one suit, that 'native' to this planet, still functioned. 
It seemed that each suit had an independent power-source, capable of beaming it power at fantastic ranges (not just anywhere on the planet, but anywhere in the same star system!). But these power-sources were located on the home-worlds of the various Star Lords, and their internal reserves only lasted a single day without this power-source. 

The captain took the 'native' suit for himself, and his favored crew-men took the others, and searched the local systems until they located the power-sources to activate their power. Not wanting to remain 'Lords' of a dead set of systems, they excavated the concealed power-batteries from their armored bunkers, and transported them to the worlds that they wished to conquer... 

The Star Lord of Earth is a third-generation space-vermin, wearing thousand year old armor (that thankfully is self-repairing, since they never figured out how to tinker with it) and having hidden his armors 'power-battery' deep within Earth's moon (having blasted a deep chasm on the dark side to hold it, and then sealed it over with lunar regolith, burying it from sight). 

But the above? Just a prequel. I never cared for one sentence in the Anti-Earth write up, the sentence stating that 'the only real hero on Anti-Earth is Mind-Master.' 

the 'heroes' of Anti-Earth, the League of Order .


===Devil Ray===

Carl Mattus worked in an experimental dome-complex under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, mostly as a grunt for his wife, the complex’s no-nonsense designer (seen the movie, the Abyss? Same deal.). 

His first contact with the Tyranny Syndicate was when the evil Siren decided that the undersea complex was an affront to her sensibilities, an intrusion of filthy man and their cold stinking blasphemous technologies into the serene world of Les Invisibles. Calling up storms, she battered surface ships attempting to supply the station, while tormenting it’s occupants with controlled sea life for over a week as they died one by one, primarily from CO2 build-up and suffocation, with the assorted violent incidents from her attacks on the facility. 

Dr. Mattus was one of the first casualties, caught outside on a repair mission when a school of sharks tore through the workers, with her husband trapped inside forced to watch through the even on external cameras. 

Carl tried to rally the others and get a signal out, but no help came, and he watched the others succumb, while his diver’s lungs allowed him to be the last survivor. As the CO2 levels reached toxic, an item retrieved on the teams last expedition, a strange suit, not crafted of any technology known to man, beeped, and he reached for it and pulled it’s hood over his head, only to discover that the air’s deteriorating quality had triggered the suits automatic O2 scrubber, and that it’s mask now fed him a stream of clean breathable air. Other systems came online, in the until-now dormant suit, and while he could not make heads or tails of the strange instructions that flashed before his eyes, or the weird piping language that sang in his ears, he soon learned to ignore them and figured out the suit’s major functions by the age old method of ‘trying stuff.’ 

He’s never been a leader, and he knew that he didn’t have the first chance in hell of defeating Siren and getting revenge for the loss of his wife and co-workers, but he did know of Radio Freedom, and that there were others who opposed Siren and her Syndicate allies, and after some ‘freelance’ work, he got their attention and joined the Order.


===Dr. Simian=== 

A group of highly-paid (and quite immoral) weapons-system-designers were paid to develop a technique to download the mind and fighting skills of an aging and partially-disabled special ops ‘volunteer’ into the strong young body of a mountain gorilla, hoping to create a covert operative unlike any other. (Their benefactor had many uses for this technology, if successful, including downloading the minds of minions who had failed him into fallow deer and releasing them into his tiger-pens...) 

A power-surge instead suffused all of the occupants of the room in a shimmering net of neuroelectrical forces that drained the researchers (and the commando) of their memories and intellectual abilities, and fed them into the restrained simian. The ape that now calls himself Dr. Simian awakened to consciousness to find himself in a room full of lab-coated humans, all scratching themselves, flinging coffee and howling in ape-like confusion. He freed himself (with newly-discovered commando-like escape skills), and using his vast new knowledge and memories of what his captors had been doing, pillaged their bank accounts before vanishing, with his group of six now permanently ape-minded ‘sidekicks.’ 

He keeps these former scientists safely tucked away in a hidden base, as, even knowing what they had planned, and what sorts of people they were in life, he cannot bring himself to kill them, or let them run free and get themselves hurt. 

Combining knowledges from many fields of study, as well as some measure of combat-training from the former special forces assassin, Dr. Simian has constructed a battlesuit that augments his already noticeable gorilla strength, and allows him to fend off the attacks by the research-teams secret financial backer, Dr. Sin, and his grand-daughter, the Raven! It was during a futile attempt to resist an attack by the Tyranny Syndicate (manipulated into doing so by the Raven), that Dr. Simian was rescued by other members of the Order, and joined this underground collection of heroes, working in secret to foil the Syndicate’s schemes.


===Dr. Stratos=== 

Left for dead by his unscrupulous test-pilot, Ray Garder, the man who would become Captain Thunder, Dr. Sebastian Stratos did actually die, for a few moments, before an electrical discharge flared through his ruined machinery and restarted his heart. 

He surged to life coursing with newfound vigor, and found that he could now control the weather directly, without recourse to his demolished machinery! He attempts to use his powers for the good of mankind, but finds himself often having to repel attacks from Captain Thunder, who seeks to steal the rest of his power, despite having turned his own powers only to selfish and destructive pursuits. 

Of the Order, Dr. Stratos is most likely to be found working alone, trying to improve crop yields over the midwest, or tame flooding in coastal regions, but since being lured into a trap by his former employee (with the assistance of his Syndicate teammate Siren), Dr. Stratos has grown quite bitter, as he finds that Gardner's schemes are impeding even his own abilities to use his powers to help others.


===Hiroshima Shadow=== 

On Anti-Earth, the Second World War ended with Japan’s surrender, engineered by the expediment of dropping a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. Surrender came only hours later, but the forces in control of this brutish version of America did not find this sufficient, and so they dropped a second bomb on Hiroshima, not just to further cow the Japanese spirit, but more importantly to prove to the rest of the watching world that the first bomb was not a fluke, that this could happen again, to *anyone.* 

The people of Japan in the modern day are ghosts of the people they once were, most shuffling through their lives, veritable second-class citizens in their own nation (administrated by China, as part of an ‘arrangement’ made between the Allies, who had no interest in directly administering a place so far from their own interests, when they urgently wanted to focus on annexing Europe). 

Growing up in this world, the young man who is know known only as Hiroshima Shadow watched his father snap under a disciplinary review, and, as they say in Asia, ‘ran amok,’ pushing over a Chinese policeman, seizing his weapon and shooting randomly until he was brought down in a hail of gunfire. After months of intense questioning by Chinese authorities, the eight year old boy was finally allowed to go free, only to find that his mother remained imprisoned, and his home had been allotted to new people, who had no room for a stray boy off the streets, who claimed that he had lived there only that spring. 

The boy ended up wandering into the no man’s land of Hiroshima, fenced off haphazardly (but not guarded, since the Chinese knew it only as a place where ‘undesirables’ could go and never be seen again, presumably killed by the toxic levels of radiation and pollution remaining in the never-cleaned area). 

None know what happened next, but years later, the boy returned, as the energy being that calls itself Hiroshima Shadow. Unlike his father, he has not ‘run amok.’ He knows that no amount of random destruction, no amount of flailing about and killing Chinese occupiers will matter in the long run. The source of poison that has broken the spirits of his people is in America, where the weapons came from, and his goal is nothing less than the destruction of the American nuclear arsenal! 

His first attempt at this, a direct approach, barely more sophisticated than his fathers futile last act, led to a stinging defeat at the hands of the Tyranny Syndicate, and he only barely escaped alive, a fact that would surely not have occurred if the Syndicate had realized how hard he was to kill. He was saved and nursed back to health by members of the Order, and now recognizes that allies in this battle are a necessity, that a suicide mission will accomplish nothing for his people.


===The Maestro=== 

Believing that only in a return to the arts, can mankind regain the nobility of lost days, Basil Fatherton creates music to inspire the bold, and bring low the savage beast. 

He attempts to preserve all forms of artistic expression, and even considers spray-painted graffiti tags in the burned-out shell of a building to be a sign of hope for mankind’s future, an expression of art and of defiance in the face of the urban squalor, callous destruction and tyrannical rules imposed by the Syndicate. 

But his true love is music, and he is constantly setting up ‘Radio Freedom’ substations around the city, until the Syndicate or the so-called Police working for them can home in on them and shut them down. He’s gotten quite skilled at bouncing signals, and making them hard to find, so that even Daedalus now finds it more trouble than it’s worth to try and keep up, and has taken to jamming every frequency not already in use with white noise, and then sending out Johnny Speed to 'search every signal-source' until they find the transmitter, a task which Johnny relishes, since he and the Maestro have tangled multiple times (Johnny trashed several museums, in a playful mood, defacing thousands of priceless artworks in mere moments, and the Maestro has taken a special interest in producing songs that portray him as a bitterly unhappy, and somewhat pitiable, young man full of impotent anger at the world, which, predictably, fills Johnny with anger...). 

While Dr. Simian is undoubtedly the ‘brain’ of the operations, most would agree that the Maestro is it’s soul, and as Medea has pointed out, it’s the Maestro that reminds them to stop and remember what they are fighting *for,* the very soul of what it means to be human, not just mindless opposition of the tyrants of the Syndicate.


===Medea=== 

Medea remembers the old days, and she knows quite well that many of the heroes of legend had their warts and their feet of clay, but still, heroes there were, and she once walked with them (and even stood against them, at times). She weeps for a day that lacks such inspirations, and seeks to change all that by joining an unlikely alliance and find (or make!) a new heroic age. 

She is saddened in particular by the dark turn taken by her old friend Daedalus, whom she remembers falling like an angel from the sky when the wings he made failed him. In these days, she feels that he has fallen even further than ever before, missing the lesson the gods meant for him to learn that fateful day, and insisting instead that man was not meant to fly, even if he must now be the one to smite them from the skies…


===Orion the Hunter=== 

The O'Ryan family was politically powerful, but they ended up on the wrong end of the 'new administration,' and his wealthy family’s assets were seized and properties ‘secured’ by the Syndicate after the Jack's father was ‘found guilty’ of some unspecified acts of treason (which, ‘for matters of national security,’ were never publicly detailed). 

The young man known as Orion is very nearly the least ‘heroic’ of the Order, seeking only to prove that there is room for humans in this world, that ‘mere mortals’ can take back what super-powered thugs like the Syndicate have taken from humanity, not just in cash and lands, but in pride and confidence and self-worth. 

His motivations run from revenge over his own personal losses to a fanatical need to prove that, even as a ‘normal man,’ he can bring these super-powered freaks low. To some degree, he knows that his family will never regain their fortune, that he cannot avenge their losses, but he still runs on a cold fury, and if he can bring down one of the smug bastards who floated above his family home and smashed it into flaming ruin with their powers, he will view his life as complete.


===Wild Card=== 

Jake Wallace always roots for the underdog, and so, as Wild Card, he has chosen the losing side of this war. 

His motivations remain unknown, and he seems to thrive on the conflict and the competition more than anything, not really caring about doing good deeds or beating the bad-guys. Even less trustworthy than the Hunter, Wild Card is always walking a fine line, and even Orion considers him a risk, since he lacks any tangible motivation to work with the rest of the Order. The thought that he could be working for the Tyranny Syndicate is never far from his team-mates thoughts, and Dr. Simian is convinced that if the Order ever does gain the upper hand over the Tyranny Syndicate, Wild Card will turn again, at the least convenient moment... 

But for now, it is agreed that he can be relied upon, in the short term.


===Blackstar=== 

Rojan Lhar was kicked out of the Star Lords when he was found to be shepherding and *training* the inhabitants of his assigned world, instead of ‘lording’ it properly (and more treacherously, advancing their understanding of technology to the point that they may have someday been able to upgrade, or even duplicate, his armor!). 

And so 'Blackstar' was stripped of his armor and forced to watch the culture he’d advanced from bows and arrows to steam and airships reduced in turn to smoldering rubble. 

Left to die on this now lifeless world, he discovered a strange thing indeed, a mystical relic of bygone days concealed even from him in an unassuming temple. These bracers of golden crystal channeled the power of light, and soon he found that he could fly, generate fields of light or fire destructive laser attacks. He recognizes the irony that at any time his ‘serfs’ could have raised up a champion to oppose him with these items, but apparently chose not to. 

He has traveled to the nearest other Star Lord influenced world, Earth, to begin what he hopes to be a long chain of successful defeats of his former allies using these last relics of a destroyed people who once welcomed him as one of their own.



===Mr. Destiny===
an occult being of inexplicable power, Mr. Destiny has long been a denizen of Anti-Earth, freely granting the wishes of anyone who enters his 'shop', so long as their wish brings some measure of joy into other people's lives. but, following the "time of crisis" (when extra-dimensional beings unseated the Syndicate, however breifly), Mr. Destiny has begun to step up his activities, to the point where he has begun to imbue superpowers on those that truly deserve them, such as... 


===the White Knight===
growing up amidst followers of Nazi rhetoric, it would have been easy for Daniel foreman to have become a xenophobic bigot like he did on so many other realities. but something clicked in his mind. He still preaches the values of fascism and less radical concepts of nazism, he never subscribed to the ideology of the master race, having lived under the yoke of the 'overman' (the syndicate) for his entire life. granted powers by Mr. Destiny, he became the white knight, an example to others to live their lives with dignity and strength.




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[[NECESSARY EVIL in FREEDOM CITY]]