August 17th, 1972. The great and terrible Dr. Tyrant stood behind a black marble podium in the center of a grand stage which dominated the front of an auditorium in which nearly two hundred subordinates and lackeys sat conversing in hushed voices before he began his prepared Monday morning speech.
Routine, he had once told his minions, could lead to carelessness if one allowed themselves to get too comfortable. The only part of Dr. Tyrant’s operations since the middle of the year before that could be said to be routine was these Monday morning addresses. He didn’t want to go over all of the same information each time, either. The previous week had been a lecture on proper facility safety procedures, with special attention paid to the forklift operators. “I like your hustle, getting all of the equipment where it needs to go when it needs to go there, but we don’t want another Jimmy Russell incident. By the way, did anybody remember to send flowers to the widow Russell?” That had been an awkward question for him, because he usually tended to such matters personally. At the time, however, he’d been distracted.
His main problem was, at the moment, contending with this super-soldier the government had set after him, Captain Righteous. Dr. Tyrant had been on the run now for two months, hopping from base to base, staying just a couple of steps ahead of the scientifically enhanced soldier that the newly-formed Hero Action Committee had created. Tyrant knew precious little about the man; his spies inside of the administration had been able to glean almost nothing about who the man was, his background, or if he’d even been a member of the armed forces prior to the experiments that made him superhuman.
Using combat robots of his own design, Dr. Tyrant had successfully waged a campaign of terror on several coastal cities since June of 1970. If not for the use of an entire half of the United States Marine Corps taking over Atlanta, he might well have conquered the entire city and made it his base of operations. But the cost of not only equipment, but the loss of life among his subordinates had climbed far too rapidly for his tastes. A madman and a scourge to humanity he may have been, but Dr. Tyrant’s methods did not include needless murder.
In the years to come, that policy would fluctuate, dependent upon the extremity of his needs.
The Captain had first arrived six months earlier at an island facility off the coast of Australia, where the Dr. designed and had constructed the majority of his assault robots and vehicles. There had been the usual flares of klaxons and flashing alarm lights throughout the facility, which he’d been expecting any day now. Usually it was small bands of black ops soldiers and elites, quickly dispatched and disposed of by the various automated defense systems in and around the island.
This time had been different, however. Minions keeping watch by the beachhead turrets had reported in panicked shrieks over the radio that a single soldier had somehow shot out all of the sensor cannons. He was wearing some kind of strange uniform, sleek and white and metallic-looking. Soon after, one of the field sergeants reported over the radio that standard bullets were being stopped by the uniform, some kind of flexible armor apparently.
Dr. Tyrant had, after hearing that, activated several camera monitors and watched as the square-jawed, unknown soldier tore through his combat robots with the strength and speed of a minotaur. The man’s agility was also impossible by most human standards, shown in heated hand-to-hand combat with several of Tyrant’s most elite henchmen. Watching one of his base lieutenants fall to the bludgeoning fists of this new threat, Abe decided it was time to escape.
The same thing had happened at two other bases. As he cleared his throat to begin the Monday meeting, the perimeter alarms began sounding. “Son of a bitch,” he said, his words carried through the speakers in the auditorium. “Everybody to battle stations! This is not a drill!” The hushed tones quickly became panicked gasps and screams as commanding henchmen took control of their squads and began heading out into the compound to make ready for Captain Righteous.
Tyrant stormed off of the stage, out through a rear exit door that lead into a sub-station from which he could control most of the facilities defenses. A bank of twelve monitors flickered to life as he flipped on the light switch, and he saw on one of the screens on the left side his hunter.
Tyrant tapped a button on his console, and a keyboard, high-end technology for the day, swiveled up from inside of the paneling. He tapped a few more buttons, and one of the monitors transformed into a series of green lines of text on a black background.
‘Subject: Captain Righteous. Height: 6’6”. Weight: 247 lbs. Race: Caucasian. Right-handed. Result of successful Ultra-X Program, DoD-funded experiment series intended to create super-soldiers. 57th subject of program, first and only success to date. First contact: February 16th, 1972. Attributes: Superhuman strength, superhuman speed, versatility with conventional and energy-based weapons and explosives. Subject has clear knowledge of several forms of unarmed combat. No known weaknesses.’
This last bit of information nagged at Dr. Tyrant more than anything else. He’d dealt with a handful of superheroes thus far in his criminal career, and each one had been possessed of a weakness. For the first one, The Great Copperhead, it had been laser-based weaponry. While a standard laser in his arsenal would scorch the flesh and tear muscle, it didn’t actually blow through the human body on the first strike. A heavy laser could do such damage, but due to the energy requirements to fire those, said weapons were usually held in reserve.
A man with the ability to transform his flesh into flexible copper, The Great Copperhead wore a snake-themed jumpsuit while fighting crime in the city of Detroit. The Army had apparently convinced the hero to go after Dr. Tyrant in his mountain fastness in Colorado, and the moment one of his henchmen had spotted the hero and opened fire with a machine gun, the bullets had flattened and fallen away, useless. Copperhead had torn through the first wave of minions, using brute force to beat the minions senseless.
One of Tyrant’s sergeants had shot the hero then with a laser gun, which had blasted the hero’s leg clean off. Screaming and spraying blood everywhere, the hero had managed to crawl a dozen yards away before that henchman had blasted him in the back, blowing a hole the size of a bowling ball in the man’s midsection.
Each successive hero had, ultimately, been proven fallible. But this Captain Righteous, well, he’d met every challenge Tyrant had thrown at him and kept coming. As Abe looked up from the information screen to the camera monitors, he flinched. Captain Righteous had just put his fist through the head of one of his lieutenants. The horror of the damage the man could inflict gave him the first jolt; the second came when he realized that the monitor he was looking at was a feed from the hallway just outside of this very control room.
The tempered steel door to his left dented inward with an earth-shattering clang and groan, then fell in with a thump that fairly announced the end of Dr. Tyrant’s world. The hero stood there before him, white teeth gleaming in his pristine smile, a simple black domino mask covering his eyes. In person, Tyrant could see that he was enormously muscled, but not to the point of grotesquerie. The white jumpsuit was not, in fact, any kind of cloth. Composed of thousands of diamond-shaped scales, it was a highly flexible armor. A stylized ‘R’ in gold on the chest, the two bars signifying the rank of captain on the left side of his neck, Tyrant noticed.
All of these details he noticed in the fraction of a second, as his right hand started to dart under the control console for the small laser pistol he kept there, a hold-out weapon in the event someone made their way here for him. Before he could even slip one finger on it, however, the hero had his elbow clenched in one enormous hand, the other hand grasping under the arm.
With a wrench and a twist, Aberdeen Tyrannus’s arm was snapped in half. The pain flooded his entire mind and body, until a high-pitched shrieking nearly deafened him. As he was thrown across the room to collide hard with the opposite wall, he realized that the shriek had been issuing from his own throat. Landing in a heap, the great and terrible Dr. Tyrant lost consciousness.
He would not awaken again for nearly a week.
The escape had been arranged quietly, quickly, without anybody being any the wiser. Half of the guards in the secret prison where Dr. Tyrant had been locked up had, in fact, been henchmen of his at some point over the previous three years. All of them agreed that the great Dr. Tyrant could not be so easily put out of commission, that his legacy had to go on. Only two months after his capture, Dr. Tyrant was placed in the back of a Volkswagon bus and driven to a quiet log cabin in eastern Maine.
Tapping into various hidden assets throughout New England, the mad scientist got himself ready for another run at domination. Resting in the cabin that his chief lieutenant, a sad-looking man named Rory Tyson, had arranged for him, Dr. Tyrant reviewed what he knew of his previous operations. His greatest achievement had, undoubtedly, been the near-conquest of Atlanta. He needed to try that again, but this time, he had to be a little less, well, theatrical, about the whole thing.
He needed something to distract the military.
For three months, Dr. Tyrant bent his considerable resources towards creating a new villain, one who stood for everything that HAC would want hunted down and dealt with. The loyal Rory Tyson played his part well, pretending to be a Soviet lunatic by the name of The Iron Bear. Wearing a mechanized suit in the vague shape of a bear, he had been given command of half of Tyrant’s forces and sent to the U.S.S.R. An entire compound had been constructed, decked out in all manner of communist paraphernalia.
Tyrant’s spies started reporting movement within the DoD, special forces units being prepared to strike at The Iron Bear, whose minions had thus far committed various crimes in the United States, targeting and attacking national monuments and historical locations in the name of the great Karl Marx and his modern-day champion, The Iron Bear. Using this distraction, Aberdeen Tyrannus began laying the foundation for an invasion of the city of Atlanta.
But his plans only materialized halfway. Captain Righteous had been sent, along with a team of two-hundred fanatical soldiers, to the command center of The Iron Bear. In the middle of the night, a stealth assault had begun, which culminated in the brutal death of the faux-soviet villain. Captain Righteous had taken a beating at the hands of Rory Tyson, thanks to the engineering genius put into the suit. Unfortunately for Rory, dozens of grenades thrown at his feet while Righteous used his superhuman speed to run clear of the blast radius spelled a short, bright death.
Dr. Tyrant had been forced to increase the pace of production of his war machines then, which meant sacrificing a certain degree of efficiency. So, the drones and assault vehicles had been rolled out, each one with a third less armoring and a quarter less weapons capacity. Haste had also resulted in carelessness on his part; a spy in the ranks of his minions, something he normally would have been able to uncover with little trouble, managed to get word of his planned assault on Atlanta to the military days before the commencement of his scheme.
His forces had been met by the entire Armored Division of the United States Army stationed in the country. Ground-based drones, which comprised about 70% of the automatons at Tyrant’s disposal, were eradicated miles out from the city of Atlanta. Aerial drones and assault vehicles were blown apart by ground-to-air missiles and targeted sniper fire from the tops of trees and buildings on the outskirts of the city. And Tyrant’s elite henchmen, heavily armed and expert though they were, proved no match for such overwhelmingly superior numbers and equipment.
The assault on Atlanta died before Dr. Tyrant could even get his forces in past the outlying suburbs. There was no superhero involvement, no elite forces required; among members of the supervillain community, it was considered one of the most embarrassing defeats in a long, long time.
Dr. Tyrant had sounded the retreat alarm, and those forces that could escape the engagement did so as swiftly as possible. Tyrant himself wasn’t even the first one back to the command compound in the Rockies; a couple of his lieutenants, injured and wounded squad members trailing in medical transports, arrived a few miles ahead of him. Of the wounded, only a third survived their injuries long enough to receive medical attention in the compound’s self-contained hospital unit.
The utter failure in Atlanta led to a simple, necessary decision; Dr. Tyrant dismissed all but twelve henchmen, a core staff of essential personnel. Restructuring, reorganizing, and a host of new inventions needed to be put together in order to reach the level of efficiency he required to be an effective villain.
It would be almost a year before anyone heard from Dr. Tyrant again.
When Dr. Tyrant sent his new wave of drones and forces to the island of Hawaii ten months after the failure at Atlanta, the naval forces were decimated in less than an hour. Aerial forces sent from the nation’s mainland could not even close to within fifty miles before being shot down. His victory was overwhelming, and the once-tropical-paradise fell under the shadow of his rule.
For three months, however, Dr. Tyrant commanded the island’s peoples not with an iron fist, but with a degree of almost carelessness. He began his reign by informing every citizen by way of a radio and television address that they would no longer be expected to pay federal taxes from the wages. Any taxes collected would be for the State of Hawaii, since, to be honest, he didn’t much care to try and reorganize the entire structure of the state’s government. “Think of me as the newly appointed Governor,” he told the people. “I make all the final decisions and rules, and if I don’t like what your state’s assembly or senate wants to do, they won’t do it. Otherwise, you’re free to go about your lives as you like. If you leave the island, however, you won’t be coming back without a lot of clearances from my personal staff. We don’t need someone leaving and thinking they’re going to play hero when they come back.”
Tapping into the natural resources of the island, Dr. Tyrant discovered that there was a strange, previously undiscovered kind of metal under the island, a mile or so below the surface. He’d sent drills down originally to utilize the thermal currents to generate energy for a new drone production facility; the ore, however, turned out to be a far more interesting and valuable discovery.
Harder than steel, yet moldable, the newly discovered ore had one quality, above anything else, that made Tyrant want to unearth and horde as much of it as he possibly could. Metals were conductors of both electricity and heat. That much was essentially universal knowledge. What this ore could do, however, was generate its own energy and store it for a short period of time. When set out in the sunlight, the ore, in either pure form or shaped form, created and housed within itself a form of electricity. When struck or wielded to strike an object, the stored energy was released into the item or point of contact.
If weaponized, the ore could give him yet another edge over his fellow villains in the world, and certainly one over his enemies.
Unfortunately, before he could get more than half a metric ton of the material to the surface for shaping into weaponry and armor for drones and assault vehicles, Captain Righteous arrived at his off-shore compound. While Dr. Tyrant had been busy enhancing his technology and forces, the Captain had also, apparently, been upgrading his arsenal. Explosives and laser weapons in hand, the Captain ripped through the compound’s defenses with even greater finality than he had before.
He took no prisoners, and left nobody he came across alive. Observing via remote monitors, Aberdeen felt a rising horror steal over him. Captain Righteous’s face was locked in a primal grimace of fierce delight, predatory joy sweeping over his every movement, his every assault. He even took the unnecessary step of taking a squad commander who’d thrown aside his weapon in surrender by the throat, and slamming the man’s head against a wall repeatedly, until the skull caved in, killing him.
Abe managed to escape in a private submarine, but U.S. naval stealth subs stood at the ready. He surrendered himself immediately, and was taken into custody. Later, he discovered that, prior to dispatching him from a nearby aircraft carrier, Captain Righteous had been given an injection of a synthetic adrenaline. The drug, previously tested on military volunteers with tremendous results, had reacted in the Captain’s altered super-soldier body in ways that the military scientists could never have guessed at. The result had been a hyper-aggression that, if left unchecked, could have turned the Captain on his own allies.
Thankfully, the injection had worn off by the time there were only thirty or so henchmen left in the compound. The Navy rounded up those minions on the island of Hawaii with little trouble. Dr. Tyrant had given his people very specific instructions regarding such things; the moment squads made contact with overwhelming military numbers, they were to disarm and throw themselves on the ground. He didn’t want any more of his people to die for no good reason.
And so, once again, Captain Righteous dominated Dr. Tyrant, instead of the villain dominating the free peoples of the world.