Hero High Design Journal #2: Meet the AlterniTeens

“I wish to be Elmo.”

Seven looked up from her history book to find the young girl, Changeling, staring at her with impossibly large, eager blue eyes.

“Excuse me?” Serena asked. She closed her book.

“Elmo?” Changeling chirped. She pointed to another table where Relentless and Dauntless sat with huge grins splashed across their faces. They waved back. “They said you would help me be dark and brooding... Elmo.”

Serena sighed. The AlterniTeens were adjusting well to life at Claremont Academy and the bonds of friendship were forming between the older Next-Gen team and the younger teens. Naturally, that bond was manifesting itself as friendly competition, but it was a promising start.

“I think you mean emo,” Serena said gently. “I’m afraid I’m not very emo.”

“Oh,” Changeling said softly, her innocent face so terribly crest-fallen that Serena shrank at the pangs of guilt

“But I’ll see what I can do,” she added quickly.

“Wonderful!” Changeling replied, her face suddenly full of cheer and light. Even her golden hair seemed to glow with enthusiasm.

Serena stood and faced the shorter girl. “Now the first thing is, pretend like you’ve got no neck muscles.”

Changeling’s head flopped forward, her long hair falling over her face. “Your shoes are very pretty,” she said.

“Thank you,” Serena replied, brushing aside the compliment, “but if you want to be emo, you can’t compliment people. Now secondly, you have to remember that every morning, life is a dark pit where you languish in the obsidian blackness and drape yourself in the shadows of the universe until you are obliterated by its smothering embrace. Then you wake up the next morning and go through that all over again.”

Changeling’s head popped back up, her grin beaming. “Wonderful! I am Elmo!”

“Yes… I can see this is going to work.”

“It is working. I can feel all Elmo inside.”

Serena pinched the bridge of her nose; at the next table, Relentless and Dauntless roared with laughter, Dauntless falling off his chair. “Never say that again… ever,” Serena said slowly. “Look… maybe we can work on the look instead. How about we dye your hair purple? That’s emo, I guess.”

“I love purple!” she said, practically screeching. “It will be wonderful!”

“Okay,” Serena said, taking Changeling by the arm. “Maybe the emo thing isn’t you. How about I teach you to be like Elmo… or Sponge Bob?”

“Yes!” Changeling said, equally enthusiastic about the new prospect. “I greatly enjoy Sponge Bob’s antics.”

“Yes... yes, I thought you would.”

The AlterniTeens formed around the machine known as the Navigatrix, an artificial being designed to navigate across the dimensional gulfs. When twin heroes Relentless and Dauntless found Navigatrix, she aided them in escaping the mutant purge on their Earth. Since then, they’ve found other powered teens and slowly gathered a group of young refugees fleeing their worlds. While the twins were the initial leaders of the group, Elite was eventually given that role thanks to his tactical sense and extensive combat training.

The AlterniTeens were always a loose team with a handful of core members and others drifting in and out of the periphery depending on the worlds they visited. In their travels, they saw many dimensions in peril and much too much misery. Now that they’ve found some semblance of safety in Freedom City, the core members are finally learning to be teens again. They have no plans to leave this dimension, and as a result, they don’t operate as a unit as much anymore. They are content to blend in and be part of the school crowd.

That’s not to say they aren’t heroes or they don’t care for one another… far from it. But it’s looking likelier and likelier that members like Elite may become lone crime-fighters, while others like Relentless and Dauntless don’t want the burden of being in charge of other people’s lives. In fact, given time, some members of the AlterniTeens, like Changeling, may find themselves in the Next-Gen.

The AlterniTeens are:

Changeling: The AlterniTeens’ most enthusiastic member is in fact a Grue from an alternate reality wherein the Grue Unity prizes individual development. Each Grue was encouraged to evolve in its own fashion and add back something new to the race. When the Majestry Collective learned from the AlterniTeens what the Grue were like in countless other realities, they were horrified. They asked permission to send an observer with the AlterniTeens. Changeling was chosen because she was young and capable of imprinting easily. She would evolve according to her experiences and eventually bring that knowledge and her evolution back to her people. Changeling’s “default” shape is that of a skinny blond teenaged girl, and only her teammates, Headmaster Summers, the Next-Gen, and Pseudo of the Freedom League are aware of her true origins.

Dauntless and Relentless: The twin brother and sister grew up in a world where mutants were a virtual slave-race. The twins joined the mutant resistance using the code-names Dauntless and Relentless, and participated in the revolt that liberated the camps and turned the war on mutants around. Then the government released the Dever Virus, which targeted the mutant gene and unraveled the genetic code, resulting in a painful and slow death. The mutant population was decimated, but then, so were the humans. The world was on the cusp of an evolutionary shift, and many humans carried recessive mutant genes that escaped the crude screening process, but not the virus. Their world was dying and the blame fell on the “mutant terrorists” rather than the real culprits. Fortunately, that’s when Navigatrix appeared. Its entry flash drew the military’s attention and it was only the timely intervention of Relentless and Dauntless that saved the construct from capture. In gratitude, Navigatrix provided them with safe passage from their reality, thus beginning the AlterniTeens.

Elite: Elite remembers no other name than the codename he won for himself. That was part of the Murder League’s training. He remembers snippets of another life, of a smiling woman… his mother, he thinks. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he’s afraid that he killed her. He thinks that was his final test, before the real indoctrination began.

It was on his last assignment for the League that Elite met his match. He was to assassinate a successful baroness who made her fortunes outmaneuvering her rivals on the Stock Market. Elite discovered her potent mental powers when she turned them on him. She tore through his conditioning, through the obedience training, like wet tissue before he managed to escape. The damage was done, though. Without his conditioning, Elite was torn apart by guilt. Fragmented memories of his past came to him along with awareness of what he’d done and what he had become.

Elite went into hiding, knowing the Murder League would hunt him down. He was on the run, constantly moving, never staying in one place for too long. Fortunately, Elite saw a news report about a group of dimensional travelers arrested and detained by the meta-authorities. He recognized the opportunity and rescued Navigatrix, Relentless, Dauntless from detainment. He accompanied them when Navigatrix had enough power to dimension shift again.

Magni: Magni, son of noble Thor and his Midgard wife Gothilde, was a half-god with his feet on the Earth and his head in shining Asgard. Unfortunately, when Loki broke free of his prison and Heimdall sounded the trumpet to warn of Ragnarok, Thor and Odin were unwilling to let Magni fall with them. The All-Father gave Magni a gift of two hammers, forged by the dwarves from the hearts of the giants Ymir and Surtur. Magni believed he was being readied for the final battle, but before he knew it, his parent and grandparents bade him a fond farewell… and cast him from that reality with their combined powers. When Navigatrix and the others found Magni, he was trying to find his way back to his own world. Navigatrix saved the young god and even tried to return him home, but Ragnarok had closed the dimensional paths to it forever. Magni was truly stranded, but no longer alone.

Whoop Ant: Anthony Andrews was a young mutant with everything to love about his powers. Sure, he grew stronger as he shrank; sure he could fly. But who cared about that when he could sneak into girls’ locker rooms and spy on them in the showers. Dude, it was, like, the greatest deal ever.

Anthony chanced to come across a group of strange looking kids and their hot-looking “robo nanny.” He shrunk down to eavesdrop and flew in close… close enough to get sucked into Navigatrix’s dimensional vortex.

For a month, Anthony had a blast following the AlterniTeens around and helping them out when they weren’t looking. He hit bad guys and threw off their aim and he pushed ambushers out into the open before they could open fire. It was Elite who finally caught him and determined the source of the team’s extraordinary “luck.” After wrestling his story out of him, the AlterniTeens realized they owed Anthony a great deal. They invited him into the team officially.