afahldjfald mARSHALTIMELY TALES OF THE POSTHUMANS #2 - “BAD THINGS HAPPEN”
KITTY BURROUGHS (W) • MARGARET HOUANG (C)
• Corbin Underwood and his son, Marshal, have set the standard for mentor-sidekick dynamics. As a former mercenary himself, Corbin taught Marshal how to think and work like the criminals they hunt. When one of the Rook’s old rivals kidnaps his brother and shatters their family, Marshal uses that knowledge. This is the story of how the Little Bird fell.
• One-Shot/Rated M
• On sale 7/1/13
Maks is such a special snowflake omg I love him
Well baby I’m a put on a show kind of girl
Don’t like the back seat, gotta be first
I’m like the ringleader, I call the shots
I’m like a firecracker, I make it hot
I will be disappointed if this song wasn’t the inspiration for June ;)
The Posterchildren (c) Kitty Burroughs
afternoon run
(The Posterchildren (c) Kitty)
So I finished The Posterchildren yesterday and fff it’s so fabulous. Here’s a really quick sketch of Maks’ and June’s first meeting (not spoilers since this excerpt was released ages ago).
TPC (c) Kitty
WIP sketch of the Ellie/Mal scene in the opening/preview of The Posterchildren (c) Kitty. I plan to make this a finished painting at some point.
Name: Rosario Galán-Grant
Moniker: Level Field
Band Color: Pink
Classification: Beta
Abilities: Power Suppression. Any posthuman abilities are suppressed in a ten-foot radius. She does not negate powers (i.e., she can’t stop a fireball coming at her face), but she suppresses the ability to tap into posthuman gifts. This is not a controlled power, but it makes her very useful when paired with a wildcard. That is why she is Jack’s partner.
Relatives: Sofia Galán-Grant (mother), Roxanne Galán-Grant (mother), Liberty “Libby” Galán-Grant (sister), Roger Grant (uncle), Isaiah Grant (uncle), William Grant (uncle), Monroe Grant (uncle), Roscoe Grant (uncle), Walker Grant (uncle)
Birthplace: Foundation, Oregon
Bio: The way that Roxy tells the story of Rosario’s birth, she never would have come into being if John Wright wasn’t a sloppy drunk.
John had been going through a rough time. When he was in his early twenties, Corbin quit the team. The politics grated on him, and he was just in a terrible place all around. He and John had been inseparable since they were little boys, but how much John was enjoying the public hero limelight and adulation of the masses was making it harder for Corbin to wrestle down his cynical/distrustful side. All three of them had different ideas as to what it means to save people. Amira believed in changing the structure of society, working toward eliminating the factors that drive need-based crime. John believed in saving people from disasters—-physically saving lives, putting himself between innocents and danger, be it a bullet or a burning building. Corbin believed in eliminating threats. Corbin was not popular in most social circles, but since John didn’t go anywhere without him, they begrudgingly accepted him among their ranks, so long as he didn’t keep to the rules of vigilantism.
One day, completely out of the blue, Corbin announced that he was done with The Set. He didn’t want to work with them any longer, and he was so sick of their hypocrisy, he didn’t want to see either of them again. While that wasn’t completely true, John was devastated. He didn’t know how to deal with the idea of him not wanting his best friend in his life anymore. So the trinity dissolved, and John crashed. Hard. And literally. He fell into the Grant family barn, and when he staggered out of the wreckage, Roxy was staring at him.
She cleaned him up, fed him, and helped him get back to being the hero people needed him to be. She just didn’t let him do it alone. Roxy wanted off the farm, and she knew that he was the best and brightest way to make herself into someone new. John objected, of course, but he’s pretty much useless at objecting to anything (bless him). Roxy was an adrogynous teenager—-short hair, all strong arms and lean angles from a life on the farm—-so John assumed she was a boy. She jumped on that, introducing herself as Roy, and begged him to train her. Every one of her brothers had been an Eagle Scout, so she had some of that under her belt to begin with. John knew he couldn’t be Knight any longer, so he needed a new start just as much as “Roy” did. With her brothers’ blessing, he began training her. Roxy became his sidekick and dear friend. She thought that he didn’t realize that she was a girl, but John did figure it out. Having Corbin as such an influential part of his life gave him a unique view on gender, though, so to him, someone was whatever they said they were.
Roxy was John’s Li’l Champ until she was almost twenty. As his Champ, she helped him train kids at the Academy—-something she enjoyed doing, because it was fun to show some of the more egotistical posters that baseline humans could kick a lot of butt. That was where Roxy met Sofia, so if John hadn’t been a sloppy drunk, Roxy would never have met Sofia, and they would never have had Rosario. Roxy and Sofia settled in Foundation, so when Rosario was born, she had no shortage of posterchildren to play with. She was the same age as John’s eldest and Amira’s youngest, so even though she went to a normal public school, she was friends with Ernest and Mal. They regularly met in the woods outside of the Academy in order to play.
It was through that play that Rosario’s abilities first came to light. Mal wasn’t a clumsy boy, but he was a terrible risk-taker. For whatever reason, he completely lacked anything near a self-preservation instinct. Between Ernest’s hardiness and Mal’s bad ideas, Rosario learned to play rough and to play hard. She’d broken her arm twice by the time she was eight, but that didn’t bother her at all. To her, they weren’t having enough fun if there wasn’t at least a 60% chance of broken bones. Their games changed the day that Mal fell from a tree he’d been climbing and broke his leg in two places. Usually, that type of injury just meant that he was done playing for the day—-but that he’d be back tomorrow, healed and ready to go. Rosario had just accompanied Roxanne to one of her seminars, and she’d learned the basics of emergency first aid care. Mal had a bone jutting out of his thigh, so she was trying to help him.
But by being that close to him, Rosario dampened Mal’s ability to heal himself. For the first time in his life, his regenerative powers wouldn’t kick in. It scared him, and his hysterics just made the other two all the more hysterical. Ernest ran and got the closest adult—-Sofia, Rosario’s other mom. When she had been an active hero, Sofia had gone by the name Luz. As a beta with the ability to solidify light constructs into armor, she was familiar with the concept of having a personal bubble. Most posterchildren take after their parents, and Rosario was no different: her sperm donor had been a pink-band, and the expression of her powers lined up with Sofia’s. She more or less wore an invisible ‘nothing’ armor, protecting her from any other posthuman abilities.
Rosario’s powers are passive—-at first, her parents didn’t think her posthuman abilities had a physical expression at all. Since Roxy had no powers, and Sofia didn’t use hers in their day-to-day home life, Rosario’s abilities had been invisible. She had been raised on stories of her mothers’ exploits, so she’d always wanted to become a hero herself. Her “lack” of powers didn’t daunt her, since Roxanne is a baseline human with no powers whatsoever. Even when she found out that she could turn off even the most overpowered Alpha, it didn’t change Rosario’s approach to life: work hard, train hard, play hard, fight harder. She’s an excellent boxer, and her balls-out attitude has earned her a lot of respect from her peers. Nothing has come easily to her, but she doesn’t complain. Like both of her mothers, she’s a creature of stubborn determination.
Rosario art by minuiko!
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⌈ THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT: ⌋ Jack Willard Name: Jack Willard
Moniker: Riot
Band Color: Purple
Classification: Alpha
Abilities: Empathetic Emotional Manipulation. Jack’s emotions are so explosive, they are capable of altering the minds of others. Generally, it’s an innate and passive ability, only activated by extreme emotions. When his adrenaline starts going, his emotions catch like wildfire. If he’s jazzed, everyone around him will be happy, too. If he’s sad, people will be compelled to cry with him. And when he’s angry, he can start a war. That application of his powers is the most useful, which is why he eventually settled on it for his moniker. He is classified as a purple-band rather than a pink-band because he can control it…just not very well. Not yet, anyway.
Relatives: Mary Willard (mother, deceased), Andrew Willard (father, deceased)
Birthplace: Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania
Bio: Jack Willared was one of the underage infantry soldiers deployed into the Hürtgen Forest in November of 1944. At fifteen (almost sixteen, he always said, though “almost” was six months), he was one of the youngest boys in the division, but not by much. Most were between seventeen and nineteen, either zealous boys that had convinced their parents to sign off, or post-high school kids that’d been drafted. From early on, his division had been problematic. The desertion rate was embarrassingly high, as was the number of self-inflicted wounds. These boys lacked the training necessary to get them through combat in wooded areas, and the Hürtgen was a deathtrap. It had tightly-packed pine trees, many as tall as one hundred feet. The cover was so thick, it blocked out all sunlight. In the Hürtgen, it was always night. Jack had been one of the gung-ho ones, a kid pumped full of patriotism. He went into the military with the strong belief that America had the best fighting forces, the best weapons, and the best supplies available for their men. He believed that America was the most modern country. He believed that there were winners and losers and nothing between—-and he sure as hell wasn’t a loser. That was systematically beaten out of him during that ugly, ugly month. They were untrained, without supplies, and with their commanding officer leading them from the protection of a camp thirty miles away.
Jack didn’t know that he wasn’t baseline human. In fact, nobody really knew that people like him existed as a population. They were few and far between, and those with powers usually went out of their way to remain under the radar. He’d always thought that he was a charismatic kind of guy, someone that people liked to be around—-a man’s man, first to throw a punch and first to start laughing at a joke. Since his powers were largely passive, he had no way of knowing that he was influencing everyone around him. It was a cycle: if he projected an emotion, people projected it back; when he felt connected with a group, he projected more. The highest and lowest spikes had been rare so far in his life, so he’d never experienced it to the level of uncanniness. Had anyone known what he was capable of, they never would have allowed him into combat with baseliners.
The forest broke the boys all on its own. It didn’t need Jack accidentally spiking the fear ravaging his allies, but he certainly added fuel to the hellfire. It got progressively worse, spiraling out of control, until they reached their breaking point. The boys broke line and retreated, ignoring the orders—-and threats, and pistols, and carbines—-of the officers. A third of them deserted. Jack wasn’t among them, stubborn as he was beneath his fear, so he wasn’t among the boys rounded up and punished. He was there during the punishment, though. He watched as one of the serial deserters was shot by an officer, a desperate attempt to scare them back into obedience. That brutal presentation had the opposite effect on Jack. It made him start seriously questioning the leadership, and what he was doing there—-what any of them were doing there.
Thanksgiving was horrific. Jack lost it during one of the bombings. Usually, the number one rule of trench combat was not to dig beneath trees. In a setting like that, the trees were the only thing that provided any kind of safety. He watched his division get torn up, barely making it to cover in time to save himself. He hugged the base of one of the pines until the shrapnel stopped raining. One of the boys in the group—-one he’d always labeled as kind of off, but had warmed up to anyway—-was in a bloody heap not far from him. He ran for him as the fire thinned, dragging him to the semi-safety under the pines. The kid didn’t look good—-Jack was no medic, but he didn’t think he was going to make it. He was babbling, incoherent with pain. He tried to give him what medical attention he could, but the kid kept telling him to leave him alone, to stop, to go away. He ignored him—-right up to the point that his bloodshot eyes started to glow and Jack was knocked off his feet. It felt like someone had sunk hooks in his skin and yanked. He briefly blacked out. When he came to, everything had cleared out. The bodies, the carnage, the blood, the enemies—-everything had disappeared. He staggered to his feet, punchdrunk and baffled, and tried to orient himself.
He walked toward the nearest town, not sure what the hell he was supposed to do. Everything was eerily still, devoid of the signs of combat. Jack made it to Spa before he ran into anyone live. It was just three Belgian kids, unexpectedly brave to be playing out with a war on, he thought. They asked him questions in Dutch and German, pointing at him animatedly. Jack’s Dutch was shaky and his German was downright crummy, but he knew a little stilted, broken French. They managed to make sense of some of what he was trying to say—-American, friend, help me—-and directed him to someone who spoke English. She was an apple-cheeked middle-aged woman, the mother of the youngest girl. She hustled Jack inside after taking one look at his uniform and bloodied hands, cautiously fielding his questions.
It was November of 1956. In the blink of an eye, Jack had been thrown forward twelve years. The war had long been over. Thankfully, the woman believed his story—-there was too much physical evidence of who he was and where he had been to dismiss him as nuts—-and told him that she would help him however she could. She was old enough to remember the slaughter that had happened during the war. To say that Jack was shellshocked was an understatement. When she told him to eat, he did; when she told him to bathe, he did; when she told him to sleep, he did; he was detached and mechanical, going through the movements. It didn’t feel real. Even when he woke up the next morning in a bed—-a real bed, with dry, warm covers—-it didn’t sink in that he had inexplicably survived. The woman told him that it would take time, that he had time, so he did as she suggested and tried to rest.
When he woke up on the third day, it was 1964. The mother that had taken him in was older. The gap-toothed little girl that had held his hand and dragged him to her home was almost a teenager. Neither seemed surprised to see him again. This time, he stayed in 1964 for almost three months. The mother’s name was Mathilde, and the daughter’s name was Roosje. They sheltered him, helping him learn Dutch and acclimate to having missed twenty years.
The third time, he was awake when he jumped again. He’d been walking Roosje from school, practicing verb forms with her as she laughed at his fumbling of consonants and vowels. When the hooks dug into him again, he was angry. He knew what was coming—-knew that he was going to be cheated again—-but he couldn’t stop it. March chill turn to June warmth, and 1964 melted into 1970. He walked the rest of the way to the Sehgers’ home alone. Roosje answered the door. She was older than him, now, but she laughed and opened the door wider when she saw him. They’d known that he would come back.
The jumps in time got smaller and smaller. Jack was like a skipping stone on a lake, slowing down from the initial push. He had three months in 1970, two in 1973, a week in 1977, six months in 1980, a day in 1983, six weeks in 1985, a month in 1986, and then one final, painful drop that pushed him as hard as the first one had. He watched Mathilde rapidly age and die. He watched Roosje grow up, get married, have two sons (one named Jack, after him), lose her husband, and gradually grow old. She died shortly after Jack finally “settled”.
By that point, he was only sixteen. As one of the “temporal displaced”, he was tested—-and to their surprise and his, they discovered that he was a purple-band poster. Jack is unsettled, scattered, and emotionally volatile. Though he is slightly older than most of the kids, he was put into the third block at the Academy—-for his sake, as well as the safety of civilians. The Maillardet Foundation is fairly low-tech, so it won’t be as difficult for him to adjust to.
Being around teenagers again is another story entirely.
Jack art by minuiko!
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AHHHHHHHWoooooooooo
I just LOVE that June is sassing the front page, now. She’s sassing the hell out of everyone.
