Marcus Garza, Flying Robert

 

“He’s alright. He was a lot better before he got the hots for me, but he’s still okay. Let me tell you, he loves using his powers. “Hey Tanya, can the team practice in rain today? How about hail, want to try hail? What about a tornado?” He’s such a show-off.”

 

–Tanya Abelman

 

“I’ve thought of having a battle cry, I’ve brainstormed several actually, but you know everything that comes out of my worldtunnel is really loud and I’m always flying so no matter what I say it just gets lost in the storm. I think the best thing would is to focus on my heroic poses. When I go into action, it’s easier to hear me than see me.”

 

–Flying Robert

 

Name: 

 

Marcus Garza

 

Supername:

Flying Robert

 

The name his mother gave him was Marcus, but everyone calls him Robert. He’s like Jigsaw Judy where everyone uses his supername so much they think its his actual name.

 

Robert picked his supername from a story out of the infamous 1985 children’s book Stuwwelpeter which featured cautionary tales of misbehaving children suffering cruel and unusual fates. Flying Robert was a boy who liked to play outside during storms and was thus swept away by the wind. 

 

Marcus identifies with the character. He likes to play out in the rain, specifically the rain that comes out of the worldtunnel he’s mentally bonded to, and his worldtunnel is capable of whisking himself and others away. It’s a cheeky reference, but in some ways also a cautionary reminder to Marcus to be very, very careful with how he uses his power. He can safely navigate through his worldtunnel. Other people can’t, and like the Flying Robert of Stuwwelpeter, will never be seen again if he leaves them unattended for just an instant within his worldtunnel.

 

When Marcus was younger, he called his worldtunnel universe Stormland, but after he read Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven in Dr. Carter’s literature class he took to calling it Stormfield. He not only thought the name sounded better than Stormland, but that it sounded more mature.

 

Average Grade:

 

A+

 

Robert is as competitive with his grades as he is with his flying.

 

Emergency Response Class:

 

3

 

Marcus one of the school’s best flyers, and he wants to use his skill in flying combined with his worldtunnel power to fight supervillains and rescue people. He wants to work hard at ERC, and Thespian works him hard. 

 

Personalized Curriculum:

 

Emergency Response With a Focus On Rescue, Telekinetic Development, Flight Club, Spelunking

 

Not every kid in the superhero track takes Emergency Response with a focus on superhuman combat, just most of them. Marcus is taking Emergency Response with a focus on rescue. Marcus’s strategy is that he gets people out of danger or gets the danger far, far away from them. With his worldtunnel, he’s able to do both very easily. Is a BOL operative trying to kidnap someone? Marcus either stuffs the operative in Stormfield or the victim. Either way, the situation becomes much more manageable. Is Granfalloon about to blow up a building? Marcus either sends the bomb into the Stormfield so that it explodes harmlessly within its endless storms or, if the bomb is about to 

 

ERC with a focus on rescue is to help Marcus figure out the optimal response to any given emergency. When he graduates, he’ll be an excellent “rescue hero.”

 

Telekinetic development has helped Marcus turn what could have been a metapathogen into a gift, a true superpower. He started telekinetic development classes in primary school under TIMS simply to learn how to not accidentally open a portal to a world of endless storms through a stray thought, but he continues to take them to master his power and turn it into a potent tool.

 

Spelunking might take some explaining. That’s probably going to raise some eyebrows. The real reason he’s taking it is because Tanya Abelman is taking it. That really explains it all. But he’s starting to learn to appreciate the class, unconventional as it is, for its own virtues. He’s always liked exploring Stormfield for its solitary beauty, it’s mega-storms and rain cloud continents and debris islands, and subterranea has beauty to match–the endless column of Agartha, said to be the spine of the world, the primal jungles of Pelucidar, lit by its own miniature sun,  the megafauna filled liquid ringwoodite of the Nepots Ocean–faced with all this beauty, he’s slowly developing a reason to be in class besides his hormones.

 

Contact Education:

 

Warp Authority, Fishermen

 

Marcus’s association with the Warp Authority goes all the way back to when he first achieved hyperstasis in primary school. ARGO was the first organization to check him out, but after determining that his powers didn’t make him suited to be a vector (ARGO vectors need to be able to connect to anywhere in the multiverse, not just to one other universe), but after he was let go the Warp Authority took him on under Warpman Cody, the Warpman Marcus still works under. It was with the Warp Authority that Marcus discovered the debris islands within Stormfield–accretions of rock that came to rest within the few calm spots amid the endless turbulence of Stormfield. Radio carbon dating determines some of the islands to be as old as the Earth, but whether they came from Earth is a question that cannot be answered, as is how they came to wind up in Stormfield.

 

Marcus started interacting with the Fishermen in his freshman year. The Fishermen are one of the oldest superhero organizations on the planet. They began as a group of fishermen and dockworkers who used the fictitious persona of the “Fisherman” to fight smugglers that threatened their New England homes, but through the decades evolved through circumstances into multiverse security force. A large number of Thule and Thule hybrids make up the Fishermen, and Thule “eyes” are able to open and close worldtunnels. The techniques they use can be applied to other forms of telekinesis, such as what Marcus learned from his telekinetic development classes.

 

As a multiverse security force, the Fishermen often have to rescue people from worldtunnels–fishing them out of universes full of melting clocks and neon fractals. In accompanying and assisting on rescue operations, Marcus learns what it means to be a true rescue hero.

 

Hyperstasis:

 

Worldtunnel connection and control.

 

Marcus is telepathically linked to a worldtunnel he’s named Stormfield, a chaotic and roiling collection of cosmically large storms. Within Stormfield, rain blows up and down and all around. Think an ocean if space was crammed between every drop of water. Calm water makes clouds. Currents make rain. And the only light comes from lightning bolts that exceed the diameter of stars, titanic splinters of light that gouge the darkness.

 

The Boy Who Made It Rain

 

When Robert was five years old, he saw a rainbow in the rain outside his kindergarten window and was inspired by its beauty. Rain, so his teachers told him, was something gloomy that brought down peoples’ spirits. But here before him was proof to the contrary.

 

Teachers. What did they know?

 

Marcus developed hyperstasis from that observation, but it wouldn’t be until the next rainy day that anyone knew he had a superpower. While watching the rain and trying to find another rainbow, Marcus wished for the rain to continue, and continue it did. It rained on, and on, and on. When his parents picked him up from school, they found it odd how it wasn’t raining on their way to the kindergarten but suddenly resumed pouring on their way back…and didn’t let up.

 

By lunchtime, superheroes were called in to investigate the sudden flooding and Astral scans revealed the storm was coming from a worldtunnel situated right above  Marcus’ house.

 

Marcus’ parents showed him pictures of the devastation he inadvertently caused, of flooded streets, broken car windows, and fallen trees. It scared Marcus, but he would remark in later years that it woke him up to the enormous responsibility his power was. “I was a kid.” he would explain, “You remember when you were a kid? You don’t quite get that people can be hurt. I needed to learn that I could hurt people. And I did.”

 

Marcus didn’t want to use his powers. He was frightened of them. He asked for the Statesmen to take his powers away, he didn’t want them anymore. Fortunately, the Statesmen believe in limiting destructive powers in children, not eliminating them. Marcus had kybernetic implants placed in his spine that prevented him from activating his powers except through intense meditation. He had to wish with all his heart to open up his worldtunnel. He had nothing to fear from an errant thought summoning up a tornado.

 

Enrolled in TIMS, Marcus was taught to control his power–and once he could control his power, ARGO took an interest in him. They hoped that he could become one of their vectors, but when they found that he could only travel to Stormfield and then back to wherever in the multiverse he accessed Stormfield and not, for instance, travel from Universe Alpha to Stormfield and then to Willow-Wells, they passed him to the Warp Authority.

 

It was under the Warp Authority that Marcus became comfortable with his power.

 

Exploring Stormfield

 

Through most of his childhood, Marcus treated his power as a potentially dangerous curiosity locked away at the back of his mind. When people asked him to turn it on, he did, but he didn’t do it on his own–never on his own. It was the Warp Authority that taught Marcus to take the initiative with his power. Under Warpman Cody, Marcus explored Stormfield and learned that it wasn’t his burden–it was his domain.

 

At first, Cody traveled within Stormfield only under Warpman supervision. He was afraid of it at first. Imagine a place where the wind never stops howling, where the rain never stops falling, where the only light comes from lightning. Doesn’t sound like a very hospitable place, does it? Now imagine you’re a child and all these adults have to put force fields around you for your safety before you can go inside this place of endless darkness and noise.

 

But Warpman Cody taught Marcus how not to be afraid of Stormfield. He explained everything that went on in Stormfield, showed him maps of the air currents and told him how long each lightning bolt was down to the meter. Stormfield was a frightening place, but also a place of great beauty. A light source brought into Stormfield acted strangely with the endless rain producing prismatic sprays that went on for miles. Cloudbanks rose and fell like unlit nebulae. There were sounds within the endless screaming, beautiful whispers from a universe that never knew of living beings.

 

Strangest of all the marvels of Stormfield were the debris islands. There are pockets of stability within Stormfield, slow-moving currents sandwiched between faster-moving currents. There are calm “eyes of storms” between storm walls the size of worlds, and in these eyes are islands gathered from settled debris. They form like the accretion discs around certain planets.

 

The debris islands are primarily made of oxygen in the form of silicate and silicon with trace amounts of other elements–the composition of Earth’s crust. Could the islands have come from Earth? Could someone else have, in the distant past, used Marcus’ power? They would have to be from the very distant past as radio carbon dating has placed some debris islands as old as the Earth itself. Or are the debris islands from alien worlds of similar composition to Earth? Or perhaps they aren’t from any Earth. Perhaps they are somehow natural to Stormfield? Stormfield is another universe, and like all universes, is infinite in size. Who knows what’s hiding in its far reaches?

 

The debris islands fired Marcus’ imagination. Maybe this wasn’t his Stormfield. Maybe it belonged to other people. To this day, he dreams of meeting these people.

 

The debris islands made Marcus want to explore Stormfield all the time–not just when the Warp Authority was watching him. Warpman Cody encouraged Marcus and gradually gave the boy more and more control over his powers. He lowered the strength of Marcus’ implants and sent Marcus out with fewer and fewer Warpmen to mind him.

 

When he was 13, he had his implants completely removed and began exploring Stormfield entirely on his own–and without force fields.

 

He learned that he was completely invincible while inside Stormfield, and you can imagine what that did for his young ego.

 

Imagine knowing a place of comforting darkness and quiet that you could travel to anytime you wanted, completely leaving this world behind when you do. Imagine a place where wind and rain an lightning blasts anything that enters down to atoms–anything but you. To you the rain is cool, but never cold, and the lightning warm, but never hot. You can breathe in the storm and it will not harm you. The entire world is a monster, but it is a monster that loves you.

 

Now imagine that you’re 13.

 

We probably owe it to Warpman Cody’s guidance that Marcus doesn’t spend all his time inside his own private world. Warpman Cody taught Cody the joy of exploration–and exploration includes exploring beyond what is comfortable. Exploration is confronting the unknown. Exploration is overcoming fear with courage. Exploration is how Marcus went from cowering before his potential to embracing and mastering it.

 

It explains why he is absolutely fearless in hitting on the most popular girl in school.

 

Flying With The Storm

 

When Marcus decided that he wasn’t just going to use his power but master it, he enrolled in telekinetic development as a freshman and built his skills under the Fishermen, an organization whose Thule members use telekinesis to open and close worldtunnels.

Marcus can open and close his worldtunnel at will, and through a combination of his original power and developed telekinesis can determine precisely how they open and close. He can open it so that it acts as a kinetic buffer for whatever goes through meaning that what’s a raging storm within Stormfield comes through as a light drizzle to water the plants in Martin’s cloud garden. He can also open it as a kinetic amplifier so that the rain comes through with such force that each raindrop hits like a bullet fired from a railgun.

 

Marcus can turn the opening of his worldtunnel into a lightning attractor by telekinetically altering the number of electrons present, thus creating a charge. Within Stormfield there are eternal lightning storms the size of nebulae and lightning bolts measured in astronomical units, and he can drag them and their power out into our world.

 

Marcus can be thought of as one of our “blaster” kids, and as such he’s been taught “large to catch, small to hit.” He starts an engagement by opening his worldtunnel wide and letting in windstorms to slow an opponent down and take their measure, but when he wants to hit something hard, he squeezes the entrance of his worldtunnel down to the size of a dime. The effect can be likened to putting your thumb on the end of a water hose–less area, more force per square inch.

 

Marcus can make the opening of his worldtunnel either repulsive or attractive. 99 percent of the time, the opening is repulsive as a safety precaution. He doesn’t want anything–or anyone–to accidentally fall into his worldtunnel. It’s essentially a one-way trip for anyone without Marcus to guide them and telekinetically pull their body through the storms or an “umbrella” badge to ground them within the roil. But Marcus can make the opening attractive, and while its very dangerous to do so, it’s very useful in the right circumstances–say Marcus has to quickly get rid of a bomb.

 

Through the first law of superpowers, Marcus is unharmed by Stormfield. It doesn’t matter how many times the titanic lightning bolts strike him, he’ll be perfectly fine. This doesn’t apply to other people. Without Marcus to put up telekinetic shielding, the average person will be instantly torn apart by the worldtunnel like a watermelon fed to a woodchipper. What remains, if anything, will wash up on one of the debris islands or on some world somewhere in the multiverse.

 

Interestingly, Marcus’s immunity to the storms inside Stormfrield extends to anything brought into Stormfield. Nothing he brings inside can harm him. He could be fighting, for instance, Martina, and if they’re fighting Stormfield then all the infernal powers of Xibalba can do nothing to him. This makes Marcus an ideal sparring partner for several students. He’s a great invincible punching bag. Even the most powerful students can completely cut loose against Marcus when they’re both inside Stormfield.

 

Through the telekinesis he’s developed at Martin’s, Marcus uses several energy-collecting, forcefield generating badges shaped into umbrellas to go with his Flying Robert theme. These “umbrellas” have several uses. The most important is that they can ground objects and peoplel inside Stormfield. They emit a forcefield that prevents whatever they’re attached to from being blown across the multiverse. Marcus can toss someone into Stormfield, leave, and when he comes back they’ll be exactly where he left them, right as rain. Of course, it’s a bad idea to rely completely on devices, which is why Marcus has been taught to use his own telekinesis to ground people as a redundancy.

 

The umbrellas also allow Marcus to safely control and direct the lightning storms summoned from out of Stormfield. He can make lightning go where he wants it to go, not where the lightning wants to go. This is very useful when Marcus is paired with “lightning rod” partners in ERC, flyers like Edith and Tanya or giants like Dreadnought. They also allow Marcus to concentrate lightning to a point. The umbrellas collect energy and then discharge it all within a single bolt–countless lightning bolts combined in a single blow that would make Thor himself proud. Finally, the umbrellas function as sensors within Stormfield. By charging them with a little lighting, he can detect where they are within his Stormfield. It’s great that his umbrellas can ground people, but they wouldn’t be so useful if he had to hunt for them inside a universe where the only light comes from flashes of lightning.

 

The part Marcus likes most about his superpower is how it allows him to fly.

 

When Marcus was a child, he loved to fly within his worldtunnel and let himself be buffeted around by rainy winds in the darkness. He found it soothing like taking a shower (in fact, he stopped taking showers in bathrooms shortly after he developed his powers). But compared to what he can do with his powers now, Marcus considers those experiences “”swimming” in his worldtunnel, not flying. Flying is what he does now, and he’s very, very good at it.

 

Marcus wasn’t originally able to fly outside of Stormfield. The closest he got to flying was to coast on winds summoned from Stormfield–and given that this was before his telekinetic training and that he’s not invulnerable outside Stormfield, this was a very bad idea that he only did once. When the winds slammed him against a wall and broke his arm, he got the idea.

 

But with the telekinetic powers he has today, he’s able to zip around the sky without even opening up his worldtunnel.

 

Marcus joined Flight Club toward the end of his Freshman year and became an officer in Flight Team. If you ever see any fancy lightning at Flight Team events, that’s Marcus. Marcus developed his own variation of “booming,” a technique taught to all flyers by Coach Barr where momentum is quickly shunted away in a “boom,” where Marcus quickly flies into Stormfield, speeds up by catching a wind current, then flies back into our universe with the added power of a storm propelling him. He calls this move “storming,” and can use it to perform turns on a dime–or less even.

 

Behavior:

 

Good

 

Marcus is your classic jock. He’s competitive, disciplined, confident, outgoing, and gets along very well with other jocks like Martina, Adam, and Matthew. His confident personality and high position on the Flight Team has made him very popular, especially with the girls, but he only has eyes for Tanya Abelman, the captain of Flight Team and #1 flyer in the school. Unfortunately for him, she only has eyes for Donald Swift, and she shoots him down every time he comes for her heart or his title.

 

Marcus is convinced that Tanya will finally take a fancy to him if he takes her spot as captain. He thinks Tanya thinks herself too good to date him. What other reason could there be? All the other girls want to date him. Why should she think she’s so much better than all the other girls? A little humility would do her some good.

 

That he doesn’t give any other girl a chance, though some like Edith obviously have an interest in him, means he’s a bit of a hypocrite. He thinks he’s too good for them.

 

Tanya liked Marcus a lot better when he was just her friendly rival for the position of captain. He pushed her, she pushed him, and they both upped their game and got better. Now that he wants to win her like some kind of prize, he’s far less fun to hang out with.

 

Ah, the complications of teenage romance! I can see why they sell entire comic books devoted to the idea.

 

They still sell romance comics, right?

 

Marcus is a giant ham, which means he gets along with Matthew, Adam, and Amy, but he’s a ham even by their standards. Part of what attracted him to superheroics was the pageantry of it all–the supernames, the costumes, the battle cries, all that stuff. He loves using his powers and being useful, probably because fear of his powers was drilled into his head at a young age. In group exercises, this sometimes causes him to try and steal the spotlight from his peers. He needs to learn that not every problem can be solved by opening his worldtunnel. He’s got a very useful power, but no power is useful in every single situation. It’s why we have superteams.

 

Appearance:

 

Robert dresses like the Robert of Struwwelpeter with an orange coat and blue hat. He even carries the theme into his gadgetools. The forcefield projector badges he uses to ground objects and people within Stormfield so that they don’t go flying off into oblivion are designed to look like red umbrellas.