Captain Flux

By quarkstomperquarkstomper

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The Story

Tommy Swain was an aspiring actor who came to Hollywood in the 1950s dreaming of stardom. What he got was something even greater. While working part time as a singing telegram boy, he happened to walk through the wrong door while delivering a birthday greeting at a Top Secret Army base and would up trapped in a Fluxatronic Accellerator where he was bombarded by Fluxatronic Particles. This transformed him from a mild-mannered hoofer into the amazing Man of Magnetism, Captain Flux.

That was the background story my Wacky Brother Steeve came up with for his character in the Justice Buddies campaign. He based the character off an obscure Alan Arkin movie called The Return of Captain Invincible, about a 50s era super-hero with magnetism powers who was forced into retirement during the McCarthy Hearings and then called back into service to defeat Christopher Lee. Oh, and the movie is also a musical. Yes, Christopher Lee sings.

Anyway. Captain Flux had magnetic powers, similar to Captain Invincible's; (or Cosmic Boy's, or Magneto's if you prefer). His costume bore a big letter "F" on the chest, surrounded by lines symbolic of the lines of magnetic flux that surround a bar magnet. The costume was a bright magenta with a cyan and yellow cape; (the three process colors used in printing) and he was known to blind villains just by the garishness of his outfit.

Captain Flux was a true Boy Scout; honest, kind, trustworthy, the works. He was easily the noblest character on the team and completely sincere.

His arch enemy was a criminal mastermind known only as Doctor Nemisis. At least, that's what Captain Flux called him; Steeve decided it would be fun if Doctor Nemisis never showed up in person and that the rest of the players were in doubt as to whether evil doctor actually existed. As it turned out, he did; but he didn't call himself Doctor Nemisis and he hated the name Flux had given him.

Eventually, the GM's for the campaign came up with a delightfully nasty retcon for Flux's origin. He had gained his powers in the 1950s; where had he been since then? How was he capable of some of the outlandish things that had occured in the game, such as Holding Up the Continental Shelf?

The truth was that Flux's powers were not magnetic in nature at all! He actually had the power to warp reality; he merely thought he was manipulating magnetic fields. When the Army realized the scope of his power, they became scared and decided to contain him. They drugged him and put him in a vault underneath a mental facility in eastern Nebraska.

For decades, Flux remained there in a state of coma. But in his dreams, his reality powers began affecting some of the people closest to him: the patients of the mental hospital. The patients began to exhibit super-powers, and thought that they were in fact super-heroes.

Ultimately, the GMs revealed that the entire campaign was the delusion of a sleeping super.

And then, Captain Flux woke up…

War Stories

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