Post by Dead Sidekick on Jun 27, 2010 15:15:46 GMT -5
Alpha Flight is a Canadian team of adventurers, most of whom have superhuman powers, which was organized under the auspices of the Canadian government's Department H. In 1997, James MacDonald Hudson, an engineer, resigned for the Am-Can Petro-Chemical Company in Canada when he learned that a special super-powered suit he had built for the company for use in geological exploration was going to be used by the United States military instead. Heather McNeil, the executive secretary to Hudson's immediate superior there, Jerome Jaxon, also resigned from the company. McNeil arranged for herself and Hudson to meet with officials of the Canadian government, who heard their story and settled with Am-Can for any damaged incurred when Hudson stole his prototype psycho-cybernetic helmet when he left the company. Hudson was then invited by the Canadian prime minister to participate in the creation of Department H, a top secret research and development agency within the Canadian Ministry of Defense. Soon afterwards, Hudson married McNeil, and within the next few years, Hudson had recruited the mutant called Wolverine as one of the Department's special agents.
When James Hudson decided to create a super-human response team, he drafted several super-humans into a team he called the Flight. Reading a newspaper account in the year 1999 of how Reed Richards and three of his friends became the Fantastic Four inspired James Hudson to create a team of superhumanly powerful agents to go on missions for the Canadian government. Wolverine aided Hudson in the initial phases of the creation of the team, which would be called the Flight (the Alpha was added when the Canadian government organized the heroes into Alpha, Beta and Gamma Flights following the failure of the team on its first mission). Initially consisting of Wolverine, Stitch, Saint Elmo, Snowbird, Smart Alec, and Sean Bernard who became known as Groundhog after donning an early prototype of Hudson's super-suit. Walter Langkowski and Hudson acted as the support crew.
The Flight's first (and only documented) mission pitted them against Egghead (Elihas Starr) and several of his hired super-human henchmen (Solarr, Porcupine, Rhino, Swordsman (Jacques Duquesne), Power Man).
Egghead was planning on launching a nuclear missile into New York City from a location withing Ontario. The Flight was able to stop him, despite the fact that Logan could barely control himself and that Smart Alec snapped under the pressure. While the rest of the Flight battled Egghead and his supervillain allies, Smart Alec attempted to disarm the missile, but ultimately failed forcing Saint Elmo to sacrifice himself to destroy the missile. In order to save the Flight, Saint Elmo had to sacrifice his life to absorb the explosion. The failure greatly disheartened Groundhog, who left very soon after the mission.
The members of the Flight were:
Wolverine (then Weapon X)
Groundhog (retired)
Saint Elmo (deceased)
Smart Alec (member of Beta Flight)
Snowbird (Alpha Flight)
Stitch (whereabouts unknown)
Due to the failure of his first effort, Hudson revised his plans and created a tiered system for the Flight - Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.
The failure of the original Flight led to a massive reorganizing of procedure for the team. The standard procedure for recruits for Alpha Flight became that they would begin as members of a training team called Gamma Flight. Upon successfully completing their initial training, recruits would move into a transitional team, Beta Flight, to receive more advanced training. Those who proved to be successes in Beta Flight as well would finally join Alpha Flight, the team of agents who would participate in major missions.
Wolverine was tapped to lead the Alpha Flight team, but he declined and later left Department H completely to instead join the X-Men. Hudson finished developing an advanced super powered suit and lead the team as Guardian. Alpha Flight had eventually grew to six members: Hudson (as Guardian), Shaman, Sasquatch, Aurora, Northstar, and Snowbird. One of their first recorded missions, in 2005, was to attempt to recapture the expatriate Wolverine, although they allowed him to continue his membership with the X-Men.
Soon afterward, however, the entire Alpha, Beta. and Gamma Flight programs and Department H itself was disbanded by the Canadian government for financial reasons. However, when Canada was recently invaded by the Great Beast, Tundra, the six members of Alpha Flight banded together in late 2009 with Beta Flight members Puck and Marrina to defeat the Beast. The eight elected to continue acting as a team, although due to lack of a headquarters and central funding and organization, the majority of the members infrequently undertake the same mission as the various members lived in different parts of Canada.
Though Alpha Flight is not currently funded by the Canadian government, they maintain ties to the Canadian Ministry of Defense though their official liason Gary Cody.
The current roster of Alpha Flight is:
Vindicator / Guardian (James McDonald Hudson)
Shaman (Michael Twoyoungmen)
Sasquatch (Walter Langkowski)
Snowbird (Narya, "Anne Mackenzie")
Northstar (Jean-Paul Beaubier)
Aurora (Jean-Marie Beaubier)
Puck (Eugene Milton Judd)
Former Member:
Marrina (Marrina Smallwood, recently departed for Atlantis)
=====
Recent Events / Current Mission:
The members of Alpha Flight gathered at an old Canadian military proving ground near the Albany River. Vindicator runs them through a series of combat training exercises in order to hone their skills. Despite a few mishaps, and the inevitable brawl between Puck and Sasquatch, the team enjoys their time together and Mac feels confident that Alpha Flight could one day become as nationally recognized as the Avengers.
Shaman, ever acting the part of Vindicator's conscience, reminds him that while he wears the flag of Canada, perhaps he should also embody the country’s spirit. He compares him to his American counterpart, Captain America.
Suddenly, Puck notices that Marrina is acting strangely. He approaches her out of concern, but Marrina turns feral, lashing out at him with her razor-sharp claws. As Puck falls over, nearly disemboweled, Marrina dives into the river and swims away. Northstar and Aurora attempt to follow her, but she is already too far away.
Vindicator and Shaman rush Puck to the hospital. Shaman uses his Sarcee magic powders to stabilize his condition, but it is his skills as a surgeon that ultimately saves his life.
While Shaman labors to save Puck, Vindicator ruminates over the circumstances that brought Marrina into Alpha Flight's fold.
The rest of Alpha Flight gathers together aboard the Omni-Jet and begins tracking Marrina's path via the signal device located in her locket. She swims to the North Pole where she arrives at a frozen glacier facility. Rising up out of the water, Marrina finds herself in the presence of a costumed man who calls himself the Master.
Snowbird, having received a mystic communiqué from Shaman, flies across the Northern Territories, in search of her friends in Alpha Flight. She finds the crashed remains of the Omnijet, and uses her post-cognitive perception powers to replay the events that led to the ship's landing. In the vision, she sees a red laser beam originating from beyond the plains striking the ship and sending it down into the snow. Her friends survived the crash and left the ship, briskly walking northward. Snowbird begins following Sasquatch's footprints towards their destination.
Meanwhile, the rest of Alpha Flight has found an entranceway into the technologically advanced lair of the Master. In the hopes of expediting their search for the missing Alphan, Marrina, they split up into two teams. Vindicator and Sasquatch head off in one direction, while Northstar and Aurora fly down an alternate tunnel.
The teams get cut off from one another, and Aurora begins to grow scared. Northstar and she lock hands, generating a blinding glow of light, which illuminates the entire tunnel. As they explore further, large metal poles protrude from the walls. One of them strikes Northstar, rendering him unconscious. Aurora grows even more scared and slips into her meek Jeanne-Marie personality. Vindicator and Sasquatch manage to smash through several yards of thick wall in order to find them.
Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed Master of the World has captured Marrina and strapped her to a large torture device. He alludes to the fact that Marrina's heritage is alien in origin and that both of their destinies are intertwined with one another. While Marrina screams in torment, the Master amuses himself by relating his own origin.
The Master was once a member of a tribe of humans known as the Eshu that thrived in the Northern wastelands over 40,000 years ago. The Eshu maintained a strict code against the taking of human life, and discovered that the Master had in fact violated this stringent law.
Exiled from the community, he wandered south until he felt an instinctive need to turn course and head farther north. An unidentifiable summons drew him closer and closer to the North Pole until he discovered the ruins of an enormous space ship. Entering the vessel, the Master found himself at the whims of this seemingly living ship. The ship captured him and used his body for excessive experimentation. It slowly stripped away all of his biological matter for study, and then progressively replaced it with renewed tissue. The sheer pain and torture of the experience ultimately drew him insane, and he remained a prisoner of the ship’s controls for years. Eventually, he regained his sanity, and his consciousness evolved to the point, that he was able to wrest control of the ship and free himself.
The Master concludes his story and tells Marrina that the egg that birthed her originated with this ship, and that she belongs to a race of extra-terrestrials that came to Earth millennia ago. Before he begins his ultimate takeover of the world, the Master is determined to eliminate all traces of the original alien race.
Suddenly, the Sub-Mariner and the Invisible Girl appear in the doorway of the Master's torture chamber. Neither hero is prepared to allow the Master continue with his mad plans.
The Sub-Mariner and the Invisible Girl race towards the frozen North in the Fantastic Four's Fantasticar. Namor expresses concern that a great "evil" lies within the territory that has been poisoning Atlantean waters and driving barbarian hordes farther south. Suddenly, a laser array protrudes from a patch of ice and blasts the ship out of the sky. They crash down close to the concealed entranceway into the Master's alien space ship.
Meanwhile, Vindicator and Sasquatch succeed in finding Aurora. However, the experience has traumatized her, and she has regressed into her Jeanne-Marie persona. Jeanne-Marie rejects her fellow Alphans and takes off into another corridor. Sasquatch feels that he might be able to reach Jeanne-Marie in his human guise, so he shape shifts back into the form of Walter Langkowski. He catches up to her and in an attempt to calm her down, recalls a secret past intimacy, but Jeanne-Marie grows enraged and backhands him across the face. Vindicator meanwhile, flies down an alternate route until he meets up with Northstar, who is only now reviving from an attack by the Master's ship.
The Sub-Mariner and the Invisible Girl eventually find an undersea entranceway into the Master's craft. Sue turns them both invisible and they find the Master of the World standing above the prostrate form of Marrina. The Master, as yet unaware of their presence, continues to tell Marrina of her own mysterious heritage.
The Master tells her that her species originates from a race of alien conquerors who abandoned their home world millennia ago. As their population expanded, they colonized new worlds, greedily consuming all of the planet's natural resources until it was time to move on again. Forty-thousand years ago, one of these alien hive ships malfunctioned and crashed on Earth in the North Pole. Drawing nutrients from the environment, the living ship grew, insinuating itself into the very fiber of the planet. It then issued forth a summoning beacon, designed to attract the planet's dominant life form. From there, it would genetically copy the life form's template in an effort to breed a new conqueror species readily adaptable to the planet's needs. Thousands of alien spores were launched from the ship, but to the Master's knowledge, only one egg survived intact all those years – Marrina's. Because her egg rested at the bottom of the sea for so long, the alien spore evolved and became amphibious. When the egg hatched, the life form inside genetically imprinted itself upon its handler, and thus Marrina took on a humanoid form.
Deciding that they had heard enough, the Sub-Mariner and Invisible Woman make themselves visible and descend into the Master's chambers. Recognizing that he could not hope to defeat the two heroes in addition to the wandering members of Alpha Flight, the Master elects upon a speedy retreat.
Vindicator meanwhile, flies throughout the vessel blasting as many instrument panels as he can find. The extensive damage begins to take its toll and the ship starts to buckle. He manages to regroup with the rest of his team, as well as Namor, Sue and Marrina and evacuate the ship.
The giant space vessel explodes, destroying a massive portion of the surrounding icy landscape. Sue protects everybody inside of an invisible forced field, and creates a raft for everyone to stand on. The Sub-Mariner invites Marrina to come back to Atlantis with him, so that they can research her alleged origins more conclusively. Marrina accepts and says goodbye to Alpha Flight.
Later, Vindicator stops off in Newfoundland to tell Dan Smallwood, Marrina's adoptive 'brother', that she is gone. Dan, who has nurtured a lifelong passion for the amphibious hero, is heartbroken.
Puck currently remains recuperating from his injuries at Ft. Albany Hospital in Ontario. (Alpha Flight Vol 1, #2 to just right before #5)
When James Hudson decided to create a super-human response team, he drafted several super-humans into a team he called the Flight. Reading a newspaper account in the year 1999 of how Reed Richards and three of his friends became the Fantastic Four inspired James Hudson to create a team of superhumanly powerful agents to go on missions for the Canadian government. Wolverine aided Hudson in the initial phases of the creation of the team, which would be called the Flight (the Alpha was added when the Canadian government organized the heroes into Alpha, Beta and Gamma Flights following the failure of the team on its first mission). Initially consisting of Wolverine, Stitch, Saint Elmo, Snowbird, Smart Alec, and Sean Bernard who became known as Groundhog after donning an early prototype of Hudson's super-suit. Walter Langkowski and Hudson acted as the support crew.
The Flight's first (and only documented) mission pitted them against Egghead (Elihas Starr) and several of his hired super-human henchmen (Solarr, Porcupine, Rhino, Swordsman (Jacques Duquesne), Power Man).
Egghead was planning on launching a nuclear missile into New York City from a location withing Ontario. The Flight was able to stop him, despite the fact that Logan could barely control himself and that Smart Alec snapped under the pressure. While the rest of the Flight battled Egghead and his supervillain allies, Smart Alec attempted to disarm the missile, but ultimately failed forcing Saint Elmo to sacrifice himself to destroy the missile. In order to save the Flight, Saint Elmo had to sacrifice his life to absorb the explosion. The failure greatly disheartened Groundhog, who left very soon after the mission.
The members of the Flight were:
Wolverine (then Weapon X)
Groundhog (retired)
Saint Elmo (deceased)
Smart Alec (member of Beta Flight)
Snowbird (Alpha Flight)
Stitch (whereabouts unknown)
Due to the failure of his first effort, Hudson revised his plans and created a tiered system for the Flight - Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.
The failure of the original Flight led to a massive reorganizing of procedure for the team. The standard procedure for recruits for Alpha Flight became that they would begin as members of a training team called Gamma Flight. Upon successfully completing their initial training, recruits would move into a transitional team, Beta Flight, to receive more advanced training. Those who proved to be successes in Beta Flight as well would finally join Alpha Flight, the team of agents who would participate in major missions.
Wolverine was tapped to lead the Alpha Flight team, but he declined and later left Department H completely to instead join the X-Men. Hudson finished developing an advanced super powered suit and lead the team as Guardian. Alpha Flight had eventually grew to six members: Hudson (as Guardian), Shaman, Sasquatch, Aurora, Northstar, and Snowbird. One of their first recorded missions, in 2005, was to attempt to recapture the expatriate Wolverine, although they allowed him to continue his membership with the X-Men.
Soon afterward, however, the entire Alpha, Beta. and Gamma Flight programs and Department H itself was disbanded by the Canadian government for financial reasons. However, when Canada was recently invaded by the Great Beast, Tundra, the six members of Alpha Flight banded together in late 2009 with Beta Flight members Puck and Marrina to defeat the Beast. The eight elected to continue acting as a team, although due to lack of a headquarters and central funding and organization, the majority of the members infrequently undertake the same mission as the various members lived in different parts of Canada.
Though Alpha Flight is not currently funded by the Canadian government, they maintain ties to the Canadian Ministry of Defense though their official liason Gary Cody.
The current roster of Alpha Flight is:
Vindicator / Guardian (James McDonald Hudson)
Shaman (Michael Twoyoungmen)
Sasquatch (Walter Langkowski)
Snowbird (Narya, "Anne Mackenzie")
Northstar (Jean-Paul Beaubier)
Aurora (Jean-Marie Beaubier)
Puck (Eugene Milton Judd)
Former Member:
Marrina (Marrina Smallwood, recently departed for Atlantis)
=====
Recent Events / Current Mission:
The members of Alpha Flight gathered at an old Canadian military proving ground near the Albany River. Vindicator runs them through a series of combat training exercises in order to hone their skills. Despite a few mishaps, and the inevitable brawl between Puck and Sasquatch, the team enjoys their time together and Mac feels confident that Alpha Flight could one day become as nationally recognized as the Avengers.
Shaman, ever acting the part of Vindicator's conscience, reminds him that while he wears the flag of Canada, perhaps he should also embody the country’s spirit. He compares him to his American counterpart, Captain America.
Suddenly, Puck notices that Marrina is acting strangely. He approaches her out of concern, but Marrina turns feral, lashing out at him with her razor-sharp claws. As Puck falls over, nearly disemboweled, Marrina dives into the river and swims away. Northstar and Aurora attempt to follow her, but she is already too far away.
Vindicator and Shaman rush Puck to the hospital. Shaman uses his Sarcee magic powders to stabilize his condition, but it is his skills as a surgeon that ultimately saves his life.
While Shaman labors to save Puck, Vindicator ruminates over the circumstances that brought Marrina into Alpha Flight's fold.
The rest of Alpha Flight gathers together aboard the Omni-Jet and begins tracking Marrina's path via the signal device located in her locket. She swims to the North Pole where she arrives at a frozen glacier facility. Rising up out of the water, Marrina finds herself in the presence of a costumed man who calls himself the Master.
Snowbird, having received a mystic communiqué from Shaman, flies across the Northern Territories, in search of her friends in Alpha Flight. She finds the crashed remains of the Omnijet, and uses her post-cognitive perception powers to replay the events that led to the ship's landing. In the vision, she sees a red laser beam originating from beyond the plains striking the ship and sending it down into the snow. Her friends survived the crash and left the ship, briskly walking northward. Snowbird begins following Sasquatch's footprints towards their destination.
Meanwhile, the rest of Alpha Flight has found an entranceway into the technologically advanced lair of the Master. In the hopes of expediting their search for the missing Alphan, Marrina, they split up into two teams. Vindicator and Sasquatch head off in one direction, while Northstar and Aurora fly down an alternate tunnel.
The teams get cut off from one another, and Aurora begins to grow scared. Northstar and she lock hands, generating a blinding glow of light, which illuminates the entire tunnel. As they explore further, large metal poles protrude from the walls. One of them strikes Northstar, rendering him unconscious. Aurora grows even more scared and slips into her meek Jeanne-Marie personality. Vindicator and Sasquatch manage to smash through several yards of thick wall in order to find them.
Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed Master of the World has captured Marrina and strapped her to a large torture device. He alludes to the fact that Marrina's heritage is alien in origin and that both of their destinies are intertwined with one another. While Marrina screams in torment, the Master amuses himself by relating his own origin.
The Master was once a member of a tribe of humans known as the Eshu that thrived in the Northern wastelands over 40,000 years ago. The Eshu maintained a strict code against the taking of human life, and discovered that the Master had in fact violated this stringent law.
Exiled from the community, he wandered south until he felt an instinctive need to turn course and head farther north. An unidentifiable summons drew him closer and closer to the North Pole until he discovered the ruins of an enormous space ship. Entering the vessel, the Master found himself at the whims of this seemingly living ship. The ship captured him and used his body for excessive experimentation. It slowly stripped away all of his biological matter for study, and then progressively replaced it with renewed tissue. The sheer pain and torture of the experience ultimately drew him insane, and he remained a prisoner of the ship’s controls for years. Eventually, he regained his sanity, and his consciousness evolved to the point, that he was able to wrest control of the ship and free himself.
The Master concludes his story and tells Marrina that the egg that birthed her originated with this ship, and that she belongs to a race of extra-terrestrials that came to Earth millennia ago. Before he begins his ultimate takeover of the world, the Master is determined to eliminate all traces of the original alien race.
Suddenly, the Sub-Mariner and the Invisible Girl appear in the doorway of the Master's torture chamber. Neither hero is prepared to allow the Master continue with his mad plans.
The Sub-Mariner and the Invisible Girl race towards the frozen North in the Fantastic Four's Fantasticar. Namor expresses concern that a great "evil" lies within the territory that has been poisoning Atlantean waters and driving barbarian hordes farther south. Suddenly, a laser array protrudes from a patch of ice and blasts the ship out of the sky. They crash down close to the concealed entranceway into the Master's alien space ship.
Meanwhile, Vindicator and Sasquatch succeed in finding Aurora. However, the experience has traumatized her, and she has regressed into her Jeanne-Marie persona. Jeanne-Marie rejects her fellow Alphans and takes off into another corridor. Sasquatch feels that he might be able to reach Jeanne-Marie in his human guise, so he shape shifts back into the form of Walter Langkowski. He catches up to her and in an attempt to calm her down, recalls a secret past intimacy, but Jeanne-Marie grows enraged and backhands him across the face. Vindicator meanwhile, flies down an alternate route until he meets up with Northstar, who is only now reviving from an attack by the Master's ship.
The Sub-Mariner and the Invisible Girl eventually find an undersea entranceway into the Master's craft. Sue turns them both invisible and they find the Master of the World standing above the prostrate form of Marrina. The Master, as yet unaware of their presence, continues to tell Marrina of her own mysterious heritage.
The Master tells her that her species originates from a race of alien conquerors who abandoned their home world millennia ago. As their population expanded, they colonized new worlds, greedily consuming all of the planet's natural resources until it was time to move on again. Forty-thousand years ago, one of these alien hive ships malfunctioned and crashed on Earth in the North Pole. Drawing nutrients from the environment, the living ship grew, insinuating itself into the very fiber of the planet. It then issued forth a summoning beacon, designed to attract the planet's dominant life form. From there, it would genetically copy the life form's template in an effort to breed a new conqueror species readily adaptable to the planet's needs. Thousands of alien spores were launched from the ship, but to the Master's knowledge, only one egg survived intact all those years – Marrina's. Because her egg rested at the bottom of the sea for so long, the alien spore evolved and became amphibious. When the egg hatched, the life form inside genetically imprinted itself upon its handler, and thus Marrina took on a humanoid form.
Deciding that they had heard enough, the Sub-Mariner and Invisible Woman make themselves visible and descend into the Master's chambers. Recognizing that he could not hope to defeat the two heroes in addition to the wandering members of Alpha Flight, the Master elects upon a speedy retreat.
Vindicator meanwhile, flies throughout the vessel blasting as many instrument panels as he can find. The extensive damage begins to take its toll and the ship starts to buckle. He manages to regroup with the rest of his team, as well as Namor, Sue and Marrina and evacuate the ship.
The giant space vessel explodes, destroying a massive portion of the surrounding icy landscape. Sue protects everybody inside of an invisible forced field, and creates a raft for everyone to stand on. The Sub-Mariner invites Marrina to come back to Atlantis with him, so that they can research her alleged origins more conclusively. Marrina accepts and says goodbye to Alpha Flight.
Later, Vindicator stops off in Newfoundland to tell Dan Smallwood, Marrina's adoptive 'brother', that she is gone. Dan, who has nurtured a lifelong passion for the amphibious hero, is heartbroken.
Puck currently remains recuperating from his injuries at Ft. Albany Hospital in Ontario. (Alpha Flight Vol 1, #2 to just right before #5)
