9/4/2013 11:05:26 PM by
Ironwolfe
(Edited: 10/29/2013 9:33:27 AM)
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The first masked crime fighters appeared on Traynor Island--then still Heiwakoku--two years after the British Empire annexed it. Children of Samurai took up the blades and fought the invading empire. The first one captured was twenty year old Kanezaru, who had been robbing tax collectors and returning most of the money to the citizens of Heiwakoku. The half dozen soldiers who finally captured him beat him mercilessly before delivering him to prison. The next day he was stripped of everything but his mask, dragged to the public square and flogged until he passed out. He was woken with a bucketful of brine and forced to crawl to a makeshift gallows and hung as an example. His mask was never removed and his identity remains a mystery to this day. In 1962 the Kanezaru holiday was declared on February 9th in honor of him.
Kanezaru's body disappeared two days after he was hung. Legend said he was resurrected, but the simple truth is that his body was taken and given a proper burial. The following morning the bodies of the three men who had participated in his flogging were found where the gallows had been. Their heads were found in the same place the morning after that one.
Two men were arrested the next day and reportedly tortured into confessing to the crime. Their execution was private this time.
Kanezaru and his like may have arguably been rebels, but they were, in their hearts, fighting crimes against the people of Heiwakoku.
These rebels, or crime fighters, depending on your point of view, continued to pop up sporadically through 1920. What kept them down, many historians believe, was the British reaction to them beginning with Ghostmaster in 1712. They began executing an innocent citizen whenever one of them appeared. After Ghostmaster killed two soldiers who were assaulting a farmer's wife or interrogating her (depending on which story you care to believe), a prisoner was dressed in a costume similar to Ghostmaster's and publicly executed. Ghostmaster's taunt that he still lived resulted in a young man being, apparently, picked at random, arrested and executed wearing a Ghostmaster mask. The message became clear. The empire wouldn’t make the effort to find the rebels; they would simply execute someone handy. Ghostmaster seemed to retire after the second execution, but a diary found in 1981, if it is proved to be legitimate, reveals that he simply went underground. He continued to fight against oppression and tyranny, but was never caught.
In 1936 Red Raven became the first of Traynor Island's 20th Century costumed crimefighters. Dominic Sato was descended from French and Japanese grandparents and was owner of the Traynor Island Herald. It was in his autobiography, published posthumously, that he confessed to being Red Raven--a crimefighter who terrorized Traynor Island's criminal population along with the politicians and law enforcement officers who had embraced corruption as their lover. In 1963 Red Raven became a woman, as Sato's daughter took up the fight and allowed her father to retire. In 1982 the third Red Raven appeared, this time calling herself only Raven.
The TIPD reportedly caught up with her in 2002 and spent ten days interrogating her. The source (who claims that s/he was one of the officers involved in the interrogation) reported that Raven was asked only three questions, repeatedly, throughout the ten days: "Are you the Raven", "What is your real name", and "Would you like to go home now"? She was tortured, beaten and raped daily and allowed at most a single hour of uninterrupted sleep a night. The TIPD claims that Raven hung herself while in jail, but the source maintains that she escaped and is still alive, and may even be fighting crime again, on Traynor Island. Note that the TIPD has never produced her body
Songbird appeared in 1938, dressed in ancient Japanese armor, armed with two katanas that she was capable of wielding simultaneously but which she never used to take a life. She might wound, she might well incapacitate, but she never killed. The Songbird re-launched the campaign against corrupt politicians and exposed nine of them in her time. She gave birth to a daughter in 1955 (rumor, or perhaps legend, has it that the father was from another world or another dimension) and seemed to retire. Five years later she was back, however, and when she died (peacefully, it would seem, in 2001 at age eighty, revealed in death as Serika Shigota) she was given an Island funeral and enshrined.
The Songbird's daughter, Samiko Shigota, led the life of a schoolteacher as far as we know, and died in 1993, two years after giving birth to Sakita Shigota. (More on Sakita in another blog.)
The next crimefighters to appear on the island were Kazumi and Hiroshi Endo: Dynamo and Powerhouse. A year after the brothers began fighting crime on Traynor Island they had acquired three teammates: two men who called themselves Major Force and Gold Monkey, and a woman who called herself Dreamward. Like Dynamo and Powerhouse, they were fighters, not 'super' heroes: they had no special abilities; just a desire to help fight injustice.
During the following year a group of criminals calling themselves Doomwatch appeared. Four men: John Smith, Rottweiler, Crew and the Mangler, two women: Salome and, commanding the group from behind the scenes, Jayde. Two years after Kazumi and Hiroshi Endo became Dynamo and Powerhouse, Doomwatch trapped Hiroshi and beat him to death. They left his body on the steps of the Hall of Government.
Two more crime-fighting companions joined Dynamo after the death of Powerhouse: Blue Rose: reputedly the descendant of one of the original Ronin who founded Heiwakoku; and Ursa Major: a Russian immigrant and the first real "super" hero in Dynamo's unnamed group. His real name was Stanislav Gvorich and his skin was highly resilient to damage. He wasn't impervious, but attacking him with a knife was more often than not futile, a rare bullet at close range--within three feet--could penetrate his flesh, but beyond that, the further away from him it started, the less chance there was of it inflicting any serious damage. (And while it is illegal for non-military and non-law enforecment on Traynor Island to own guns or bullets, it isn't unheard of.) Although his wife had died (and there is rumor that he murdered her for cheating on him), Stanislav Gvorich did bring his ten year old son, Vladimir, with him to Traynor: (And more on Vladimir in another blog)
It would take seven years to bring the entire Doomwatch group (with the exception of Jayde) to justice, and the journey was not without a death toll and changes to Dynamo's team. Major Force was the next, after Powerhouse, to die. Two years after Powerhouse's death, three days after the anniversary, Major Force was found crucified on a tree three hundred feet from the Hiroshima-Nagasaki shrine. He was naked, his spine was severed, and he had been emasculated.
Force, who was revealed to be wrestling manager Harold Bennet, was replaced by the men who called themselves Cowboy and Prime Justice. Cowboy remained with the group until Jack Diamond's 'purge night' (more on that, you got it, in another blog), and Justice simply disappeared after two years. Retired or murdered, no one knows.
Following Force/Bennet's death, Dreamward seems to have disappeared. There are plenty of rumors as to what happened to her. 1) She was Bennet's lover and committed suicide, cutting her throat and letting herself fall into the Pacific Ocean following his death. Bennet, however, was married and his wife is "95 percent certain" she was his only love. 2) She turned to crime and joined Doomwatch as Brit Bitch, stayed with them a year, then left Traynor for parts unknown. Salome, The Mangler and Crew have all denied that. Per Crew, "Brit Bitch was a bad-guy groupie who signed on with Doomwatch to fuck bad guys. Rottweiler gave her an ass full of dick juice when she got to him and she took off the next day. Don't know what her real name was. Don't care." 3) Doomwatch caught her, tortured her and buried her on four of the islets. Doomwatch member Crew is the only source of this rumor, and given that the group made public spectacles of Powerhouse and Major Force's dead bodies, it is doubtful they would have hidden Dreamward’s; 4) she retired as a crime-fighter and entered politics as Senator January Mills, who served two terms, then left Traynor with around thirty million Traynor Gold Dollars, some earned, some embezzled. 5) She retired from crimefighting and is now owner of the BD/SM club known as Chainz; 6) she left the island and is fighting crime in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US as Liberty Belle.
When Doomwatch was finally taken down, Dynamo's team comprised Cowboy, Gold Monkey, Blue Rose, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor (Ursa Major's twenty-year old son Vladimir Gvorich, who would later change his crimefighting name to Red Star), Demonstar (who would, a year later, join Jack Diamond and change her fighting name to Mayhem), and 15-year-old Volt, Sesha Endo, Dynamo's niece. (More on Volt in another blog, but a couple of items now: Kazumi Endo spent eight years training her before he felt she was ready for the streets; he protected her, taking her on missions he was sure would be less dangerous and staying by her side even on those missions.)
Four years after Doomwatch was defeated and imprisoned, Greg "Brute" Jensen joined the team and quickly became Dynamo's right-hand man. Gold Monkey died a year later, victim of an allergic reaction to prescription medication. Blue Rose left the team within months of Gold Monkey's death. Some thought it was because she was involved with him. Others--including an ex-member of the group who shall remain nameless--point to Dynamo himself as the reason she left. Dynamo's wife, Kimiko had been kidnapped and butchered a year before. Her body had been left on Kazumi Endo's doorstep in a box, a jade dildo lodged in her vagina. (That calling card belonged to Jayde, Kimiko's sister Jariko, who loved Kazumi Endo.) The sources maintain that Dynamo began to turn to Blue Rose, to try to woo her as a replacement for Kimiko and that she eventually simply walked away.
Gemfyre joined the team about a month before Blue Rose left and quickly rose to the interrogation specialist of the team. Ursa Major left only months after Blue Rose did. He reportedly went back to Russia but attempts to locate him have so far been fruitless. Vladimir Gvorich changed his team name from Ursa Minor to Red Star after his father left. And the last to join the team, a year before Jack Diamond's 'purge night', that destroyed it, was the Songbird's granddaughter, Sakita Shigota, aka Cyclone.
As of this writing, Gemfyre has returned to Traynor Island with the intent to form a new team of crimefighters. It's a daunting task. Volt is not an option; Cowboy and Red Star are reportedly dead and Cyclone has apparently run away.
Enough for now. I'll get to the individual heroes of Traynor Island later.
Jared Ironwolfe
4 September 2013