Absolute DC Part 6: Live Free Or Fight

As dusk descended upon Washington, DC, recently-elected United States of America President Henry Knight was giving a rousing State of the Union address to a gigantic crowd of his constituents, crowded around the Capitol Building. In the end, the President had revealed a small platoon heavily-armored soldiers he called “Ultramarines”, and spoke of a series of new “America First, America Only” policies that the Ultramarines will help enforce. The people cheered and rallied behind this… until a booming voice rang forth from the top of the Capitol Building that overpowered the speaker system. A team of five costumed metahumans were seen at the top as spotlights were trained on them. The man in the middle, cloaked in the red, white, and blue, said “President Knight! I WANT YOU… to end this before we end it for you!” President Knight ordered the Ultramarine leader, Warmaker One, to have the Ultramarines open fire on the team, and the costumed heroes leapt forward to battle them. These costumed metas call themselves… The Freedom Fighters!

24 Hours Earlier... 

US Marine Samuel Knight, son of President Knight, was being tortured in an unknown facility unknown to the public. The hooded figure overseeing this, the leader of the cabal running this facility, ordered his men to inject Samuel with “the formula”. After they did, intense pain coursed through Samuel’s body as the hooded man, speaking in a German accent, gave him a choice to join him or die. When Samuel refused and demanded to know who he is, the figure pulled back his cloak… revealing himself as President Knight, Samuel’s father! Still speaking with a German accent, Knight revealed his true identity to be Per Degaton, the minister of science for Nazi Germany back before and during the Second World War. When the American forces were encroaching upon Berlin the day of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, Degaton escaped to Brazil with an experimental super-soldier formula that he used to make himself immortal. Thus, he and his followers emigrated to the USA under new aliases to form a cabal that eventually infiltrated the US government. Degaton saw the USA’s power and size as the perfect stepping stone to fulfilling Hitler’s ideals, and he, as Henry Knight, did everything in his power to become President. Samuel proclaimed that the metahuman heroes of the world, such as The Justice League, will stop him, but Degaton says he has a dead-man’s switch that will launch a nuclear missile at The Watchtower, the JL’s satellite headquarters, to decimate them all in one fell swoop. He also has begun the process of using the formula to create an army of super-soldiers at his beck and call, to hunt down the remaining heroes when they’re ready. Speaking of the formula, the sample injected into Samuel was taking hold and he began entering a berserk state, complete with superhuman strength, agility, and regenerative ability. Degaton ordered his men to take Samuel, still strapped to a gurney, and wheel him over to the imprisonment pit to “have him cleanse out our other failures”. Samuel was thrown into a pit where four other people, also kidnapped and experimented on, were kept: two white men, an African-American man, and a Pakistani woman, all with ability-supression collars on to keep them from using their abilities given to them by the experimental formula. The woman, Delilah Saqquaf, had her power-suppressor knocked off from an attack by Samuel and she tried to escape by using her intangibility powers, but there was an electromagnetic current being fed through the walls that still injured Delilah and prevented her escape. Realizing that they could soon escape, Degaton had his men seal the pit and have it dropped into the sea, as it turns out the cabal’s base was actually on a freighter far off the coast. Samuel, Delilah, and the others, Stan Silver, Dane Maxwell, and Andy Franklin, managed to escape and they washed ashore. Having now calmed down, but still retaining his powers, Samuel apologized to them for his father’s evil. They accepted, all five agreed that they need to fight against Degaton’s scheme. Stan, Dane, and Andy soon revealed their powers to Samuel and Delilah: Stan can morph into living light to fly, be invulnerable, and fire energy beams; Dane can shrink to the size of an action figure to double his strength and agility; and Andy and produce globules of energy from his body that detonate according to his will. With no time to lose, Samuel and his team need to get back to Washington DC, but they will “need some disguises”. On their travels on foot back to DC, they came across an abandoned Halloween costume store still filled with goods…

Now calling themselves The Freedom Fighters, Samuel Knight, now in the patriotic guise of Uncle Sam, led his teammates into battle against Degaton’s Ultramarines. The civilians safely scattered as Andy, The Human Bomb, and Stan, The Ray, blasted the roads apart to toss the Ultramarines off their footing. Delilah, as Phantom Lady, phased through solid materials and projectiles to fight the Ultramarines that way as Dane, now calling himself Doll Man, snuck through enemies’ fields of vision in his shrunken form to attack them as well. Uncle Sam and Degaton went blow-for-blow and it ended when Uncle Sam plunged his hand into Degaton’s ribs to crush the dead-man’s switch that would have launched the nukes, disabling it. In the end, Per Degaton, still believed to be Henry Knight, was beaten, and he ordered the civilians that had gathered to see the aftermath to attack the Freedom Fighters. They were all, initially, blindly loyal to President Knight, but now, hearing him ”order (them) to fruitlessly throw their lives against superhumans”, they simply walked away. Uncle Sam talked to the weakened Degaton, his father, telling him that “America is still ready to believe in good”, and that “he’ll never stop fighting to preserve the goodness and freedom that America can still be for all people over every race, creed, and gender”. The other Freedom Fighters agreed with Sam, and they walked off as the police and other authorities, including the Justice League themselves, arrived to have Degaton and his cabal and soldiers arrested.

Notes:

* Microhero parts for The Ray and The Human Bomb provided by Darksun28 .

* Doll Man’s design is based on The Atom, but from the “New 52” world called “Earth 2”.

* The cabal’s mutagenic formula is based on the original version of Lazarus, which the Nazis found during the 30’s-40’s.

* Warmaker One and the Ultramarines are from the original comics, but as a government-controlled superhero team instead of a superhuman army.

* Delilah Saqqaf is based on Delilah Tyler, a character from the original comics who is a successor to the the original Phantom Lady: Sandra Knight.