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All-Star Hero: The Story of Dirk Rogers

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1All-Star Hero: The Story of Dirk Rogers Empty All-Star Hero: The Story of Dirk Rogers 23rd December 2011, 16:27

Maeglin

Maeglin
Admin

These will just be a collection of backstory scenes of Dirk's life not covered by Daedalus and Icarus or the actual Project Angel issue line.

I will start each off with the date/Dirk's age.

This is not a cohesive storyline and will not have a plot. It will just be snapshots of his life that we won't have time to get into elsewhere, but may be referenced later.

Maeglin

Maeglin
Admin

((Pending approval from Ariel ((ArielButtercup changed some bits and approves now)) and to a lesser extent, Calvin. How's this for a first meeting?))

Jennifer Wilson

September 2013 (Age 10)


Summer holiday, no school and no bullies seemed so far away... a long distant memory. Jenny hated school, she wasn’t good in any subject and no one liked her anyway. The teacher thought she was lazy and the other kids… they made her the freak so why bother. Half the time she ditched school the moment she got off the bus. And even though her dad wasn’t happy about it, he sort of understood. In Jenny’s eyes her dad was the most amazing man every! He was the smartest, strongest and coolest dad ever lived. She did love her mom, but her mom made the rules expected her to go to school and to try to get her powers under control. Yes Jennifer Wilson has powers, she has the abilities of pyrokinesis, she can absorb heat and through that manipulate temperatures and she can create fire. Most of the times she had no control and once something is set on fire she panics easily and it all goes out of control. Jenny just started 5th grade and she still hated school. And just like before she was the target of the bullies, she knew and so did her dad that she could easily kick their butts or rather set them on fire but… that wasn’t the right way to go. It was lunch break, the worst time of the day. Normally Jenny would quickly grab some lunch and hide, it wasn’t even uncommon for her to eat on the girls toilet but recently the bullies found her there.
“Freak!”

“A freak who likes setting fire to things!”

“No wonder she doesn’t have any friends, she’s a freak!”

“I heard she killed her last friend!”

“Her parents don’t even like her!”

“Because she’s so freaky!”

“Monster!”

“Mutant!”

“Freak!”

Things hadn’t gotten physical yet, but Jenny was crouched down in a corner behind a trash can, covering her ears. When the first stone flew, it just missed her head by a fraction of an inch. Jenny got up and ran, skirted past another boy. Her plan was to hide under the seats of the foot fields, but even hiding there didn’t help. The boys had followed her and were jumping on the seats to scare her. “You are a freak of nature and should be in a cage so we can poke you with sticks!”

In the end the boys managed it they made her cry. “Why can’t you just let me be?”

More stones were flying.

And things were not going to get physical.

“Hey!” Dirk bellowed. He knew some of these kids, had played ball with them after school. “What do you guys think you're doing?”

The question was rhetorical. He was bigger even than some of the seventh graders, so his presence was enough for most of the other kids to lose their nerve.

But not all of them. “Get outta here, Dirk, this is none of your business. Just showing this freak what’s what.” The ringleader--a born and bred bully type--Dirk knew his name (Robbie) but did not consider him a friend--snarled. Robbie must have had three inches and thirty pounds on him, and came from a rough neighborhood.

Dirk grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. “Take a walk, Rob. Leave her alone.”

Robbie was clearly looking for a fight. “Oh, you gonna make me, Rogers?”

Dirk sighed. “If I have to.”

He didn’t even see the hit coming before it connected with his face, and suddenly the two were on the ground, rolling around hitting and scratching. All the kids around them were yelling and screaming animatedly: Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! but Dirk heard one voice above the rest.

A scream.

It was high-pitched, and loud, and sounded so scared.


Then Dirk realized that the seats above Jennifer had caught fire. The rest of the kids joined in the screaming and fled.

Now he was done screwing around. He flipped Robbie over so that he was on top, and his eyes flashed, and he growled low: “Get out of here.” And then his eyes really did flash, an angry neon red, and Robbie practically wet his pants as he scrambled away.

Dirk was left alone with the rising wall of flame, and Jennifer. He struggled to his feet and ran over to her.

“It’s Jennifer, right? Come on, I’ve gotta get you--youch!” Dirk had grabbed her arm to pull her out from under the seats, but pulled it back immediately. She was burning hot! And that was when Dirk looked closer and realized that she was on fire. But she wasn’t burning. He jumped back.

But she was still screaming and crying. “I can’t stop it! I can’t make it stop! You have to go!”

Not an option.

Dirk set his jaw, and concentrated. He built a wall first. And then curved it around. And then he built a ceiling, and a floor. Until she was encased in a perfect bubble. The fire began to die as it lost oxygen.

But she was losing oxygen, too, and Dirk lost his nerve. The field flickered, like a bad TV reception.

“No, leave it up!” she screamed. “I’m gonna--gonna explode!”

That was even worse! “What? No!”

There were tears on her cheeks. He wondered distantly why they didn’t evaporate. “Just do it! Please!”

Dirk nodded. He could still feel the heat through the field, so he made it thicker. He wasn’t really sure how he was doing this, he just was. It felt like playing with fire, or something, in his own way, but he just had no other choice, she was scared, and she could get hurt, and-- She dropped to her knees, when she passed out but to even that stopped the fire

Finally the fire died as it ate up the oxygen available to it.

The second the last spark had gone, Dirk dropped the force field and rushed to her side, holding her up and apologizing profusely. But aside from breathing heavily she appeared unhurt. Nothing was burned on her. It took a moment for her to open her eyes again.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I’m so, so, so, so sorry. Are you okay? Should I call the nurse? 911? Your parents? Please be okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do!”

Jennifer looked up at him. Her eyes were different colors: one green, one brown. He thought that was neat.

And she grinned. “Thanks for saving me.”

“What? No, I almost killed--”

“I meant from the bullies. Well, and that. They get out of hand when I...sometimes.”

“Oh. Well--”

“So you’re a Super, too? You got that whole energy-field thing going on?”

“I guess so. What about you? You do fire?”

“Yup.”

“That’s cool. Your eyes are different colors.”

She laughed. “So are yours.”

Dirk reached up and touched the shiner on his eye, courtesy of Robbie’s pudgy fist, and laughed, hugging his new best friend.
School was still stupid in Jenny’s eyes, but the breaks got better, she was looking forward to lunch now. A week went by and Jenny started to hate the weekend, Amanda was smiling hearing all the anecdotes of Dirk while Mark’s jaw was set in his angry way. Jenny grinned and put her arms around her dad. “I still think you are the coolest boy in the world but you are too old to go to school with me. Can I bring Dirk home so you can meet him?”

“No. You can bring him here so I can tell him that if he dares to hurt I kill him and let his body disappear.” Mark growled, it made Jenny giggle. “That works too. He isn’t scared of my flame."

Maeglin

Maeglin
Admin

((Disclaimer: I know nothing about tarot cards or how they work. She's not doing a traditional reading, anyway.))

Jane Crawford
January 2020, Age 18


The first time he met Mrs. Crawford—the name quickly became distasteful to both of them, and she quickly offered he call her “Mom”—she read him.

Well, she was a telepath, so she could read anyone, really.

But her chief skill was in telepathy in the future.

She was a super, obviously. She was never registered as one and her power was hard to prove, so the PHMA left her alone.

She looked at Dirk queerly the first time she laid eyes on him, and said, “You’re going to marry my daughter.”

Dirk had gulped and Joan had tried to salvage the situation, but she only went on, still staring at him with that deep, probing stare, like he was a book in a language she had forgotten. Then, suddenly, the moment was past. She blinked, smiled, and offered them cookies and lemonade, asked him about school, his parents, whether he was planning to go to college, and what he liked to do for fun.

He had almost forgotten her strangeness at their meeting when she turned and whispered something to Joan. Joan blushed and half-grinned, but then she frowned deeply.

“I don’t know, Mom, ask him.”

“Ask me what?” Dirk said, the bemused smile giving way to wariness.

Joan took his hand. “My Mom can…see things. Like, the future.”

Dirk nodded slowly.

“And the past, too, kinda. It’s her, you know,” she lowered her voice, as if she expected the floral wallpaper to be listening, “superpower.”

“You don’t have an inhibitor chip, Mrs. Crawford?”

She shook her head. The stare was back.

Joan blushed pink to her ears. “She says…she wants to read you.” There was something left unsaid in this, the reason why, and Dirk could pretty well guess what it was.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“You can’t—she can’t tell you to. You have to want to,” Joan corrected. Her wings fluttered in apprehension.

Dirk nodded. This seemed to be some sort of test—he knew in his heart that Joan was the one, and he would prove himself to her family any way he could. “I want to.”

She took him, alone, into a back room. It smelled strongly of about a million things Dirk couldn’t place: not unpleasant, but overpowering. It was dark. She motioned to a chair, which he stood at until she seated herself across from him.

She waited, staring at him for a long time, not saying anything, until he began to feel uncomfortable.

“Am I supposed to—”

“Shh,” she said, and he quieted immediately, trying not to avoid her eyes, though they bored into him with the weight of all of time.

There was a deck of cards on the table in front of him, and he jumped when he noticed it, because he was sure it hadn’t been there before and he hadn’t seen her move.

“Take a card,” she said.

Dirk began to suspect that this was sounding more like a magic trick, but he didn’t think it too loud, just in case.

He slid a card from the middle of the deck.

“Lay it down. Face up.”

He did. It looked like a Two to him.

She looked down, and exhaled hard, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time. “The Two of Cups,” she said. “Now another.”

He did.

“The Two of Pentacles. Another.”

He drew another.

“Two of Swords.” She sat up a little. “Another.”

He drew another, set it down so the four cards were in a row.

“Two of Wands,” she said, staring intently at the cards, her eyes flicking back up at him. “A man of twos. Are you a twin, Dirk?”

“No,” he said. “Well. Not…really.”

She sensed his apprehension, but didn’t pry further, perhaps not needing to. “A split, then.”

He nodded. “Yeah, more like that, I guess.”

Now she took the deck and set it in front of her. “Your life is ruled by twos, Dirk. Not duality, as it is with most, but actual pairs.” She drew four more cards and laid them sideways atop the four. “Death on the Two of Swords. Death and Rebirth—they will come to you in pairs. Not to you, but around you.”

She raised her eyebrows at the next card, and eyed him with borderline suspicion. “The Lovers on the Two of Cups.” She narrowed her eyes. “There is another besides Joan.”

“Um.” Now it was Dirk’s turn to blush. “No! I mean, well, not any more.”

Mrs. Crawford nodded, as if sensing what he left unsaid.

“Justice on the Two of Pentacles—two careers, perhaps, or even two lives.”

She pointed at the last crossed cards: “The High Priestess is also a two. On the Two of Wands she is two sets of two—and it speaks to what you will create. You may build something, be the originator. You may father children.” She nodded at that. “I see children. Boys and girls, in twos.”

Dirk nodded dumbly. This was so beyond weird.

She drew two more cards, placing them in front of him next to each other.

“The Wheel of Fortune. It is upside-down. You will struggle with control. But since you are a two, I drew another card: so you have the Star, right-side up, giving you hope. These will war in you, always, until the split is rendered whole.”



Dirk never forgot his first meeting with the woman who was to be his mother-in-law, and, really, more mother to him than his own. He quickly added more meetings, more memories, to this woman, who, when not seeing the future, was the kindest, wisest woman—except for Joan, of course—he could ever hope to know.

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