POWERNAUT 2011!

All the links here can be found under http://www.eilertech.com/stories/ .

This strip's "Magic Land" is better known to some as the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime is Australian legend, but Westerners often recognize it as their own common land of dreams. In England it was called Faerie. Or at least part of it was.

It's worth mentioning the times humans went exploring in Magic Land. None of those were especially pleasant for humans.

• In 2005, every superhuman except me and the Powernaut was dragged through there. Leo was there, though he hadn't become a Pirate Vampire King yet. Since Leo was willing to volunteer for the current mission, he became an expert. (2005/journal_melon.htm)
• In 2006, Ellipsis actually took over there. Ellipsis likes to take over things. But he had help, to save a friend. I even helped. (2006/dreamtime.htm#evildied)
• In 2008, a coalition of superhumans explored there. Of course, they got dragged into a war, in which Ellipsis got kicked out of there. It was kind of like invading Asia. (2008/fantasywar.htm#prelude)
• Just this year (I think it was just yesterday), I made it across the Dreamtime to fight mages. Doctor Lithium got himself together after seven years stranded there, and made it out with me. (2011/endgame2.txt)

People's self-images are mutable in the Dreamtime. Evil mages look as much like wizards as they can. I suspect people who go there with the Powernaut will look like Saturday morning cartoons. I wonder what a four-dimensional Pentahedron will look like, now that the Powernaut has carried one there...?

All the links here can be found under http://www.eilertech.com/stories/ .

Leo is publicly known as Mark Simon. He is a superhuman with cat-like powers - and now vampire powers too. And he has about as much history as I have. Aww, shit.

• 1990: Mark Simon was experimented upon by the CoopTech corporation. He fought his way free with his new cat-like powers. Yada yada.
• 1991: Mark found patrons: Stephen and Julie Wolcott. He became one of Julie's bodyguards, and took the name Leo. He thereby got drawn into the Total Conversion battle squad which Julie operated for her husband Stephen Wolcott (Ellipsis). There he met Doctor Lithium and Crusher Joe Corrigan. While on Total Conversion, Leo briefly got a place on the New York Yankees roster. The one game in which he played, led to a prohibition on superhumans in major league sports. Leo then left Total Conversion to work as a trainer for the Yankees.
• 1997-1998: Leo was re-recruited to Total Conversion as they fought against the Last Army. Crusher Joe and Doctor Lithium were there also, as was Vara Hosea under the name Bokor. Total Conversion eventually dissolved when its leaders Stephen and Julie Wolcott were captured.
• 1999: Stephen and Julie Wolcott reappeared. (asabove.htm) Shortly thereafter, the Earth suffered a reboot-level crisis. (me1999.htm#hung) After the crisis, Leo stayed in seclusion. Rumors say, he was mutated during battles with the Last Army and had nine tails.
• 2003: Leo, now cured, briefly reunited with Stephen and Julie Wolcott for a celebrity baseball game. (november.htm) In the wake of that game, he married a supermodel.
• 2005: Leo was plagued by a vampire queen. To avoid vampires, he sold his marriage to the Devil - and then signed on with the British Army in Iraq! I worked with him there - and so did the Powernaut! (2005/occulator.htm#army)
• 2007: Leo took refuge from the world, alongside Crusher Joe on Crusher Island in Washington state. (2007/crusher.htm) Unfortunately, Crusher Island was then attacked by Lunar allies of the Russians. (2007/secretwings.htm#hung)
• 2008: Crusher Joe was drawn back into alliance with U.S. superhumans. Leo defected from him, and went on missions with militias against the U.S. Government. (2008/commentQ1.htm#oakland) Meanwhile Leo came under continuous harassment by invisible aliens known as Zarkonites. Eventually he tired, time-travelled back to 2005, married Rose the Vampire Queen, and became Leo the Vampire King! Leo and Rose then accepted sponsorship from a mysterious superhuman known as Eric X, and moved to the island realm of Tuvalu. There Leo would command pirates as Leo the Pirate Vampire King! (2008/assessment.htm#undersea)
• 2009: Leo, now Captain Mark Simon of the Tuvalu Defense Force, worked with U.S. Vice-President "Crusher" Joe Corrigan to negotiate a mutual assistance treaty. He also hired a mercenary to deal with his original experimenters, who were selling meat made from his clones. (2009/journal.htm#leo)

... Phew. I think the Powernaut would not stay awake if someone recited this history to him. But I love this stuff. In 2009 I said, based on sheer weirdness, the world needed to watch Leo. I was right.

The current Powernaut surfaced in 2005. (Powernaut 2005, 2009) The National Security Agency researched his background really hard then. But it mostly just got confused.

• Nobody's sure how far back Powernauts go. For all we know, there was a caveman Powernaut. The earliest mention of them was a Powernaut 1912 comic strip. (someday to be published on this web site) In 1912 the Powernaut was not especially powerful, but he was adventurous enough.
• There was a World War 2 comic strip about the Powernaut fighting Hitler. (Powernaut 1941 and 1944) We know some of that was just made up; for instance, we can't verify the Galatea or Doc Nostalgia stories. But inspired by the strip, Allied agents infiltrated Axis-occupied France in Powernaut outfits to mobilize the French Resistance. The strip survived into the 1960s. (Powernaut 1954, 1962, 1966)
• There was a 1950's Teen Powernaut comic. That was just embarrassing. (Powernaut 1955) There were some actors who portrayed the Teen Powernaut, of course. The most successful one of those now regularly debates an actor of the Partridge Family on cable TV.
• In 1968, one Phil Hanover was inspired by comics (and maybe drugs) to call himself Powernaut. (Powernaut the Discussion Board) Underground comics in turn published his adventures, into the mid-1980s. (Powernaut 1968, 1969, 1976, 1979, 1985) I personally think at least his 1969 adventure may have been real... Among his many weird claims, he once said he was the 1950s Teen Powernaut grown up! This seems unlikely based just on facial structure, but we can't entirely rule that out.
• In 1992, a masked Powernaut surfaced - during Vice-President Dan Quayle's Superhuman Control Initiative against Ellipsis. There's reason to believe this Powernaut was real, and vague evidence he operated for twelve years. (Powernaut 1987, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999) But the U.S. Goverment has clamped down on all details of this Powernaut, before or since the Plan SCIence incident.

... Welcome to my world. I'd welcome you to the Powernaut's world, but I can't quite keep track of it from here.

The Powernauts have different origin stories, but they have this in common: No one's quite sure where their powers come from. Sometimes people aren't even sure where the Powernauts themselves came from.

• The most common origin involves someone named Paul Poderr being charged with energy, either by accident or pure love of life (or whatever). In my world, there was no real Paul Poderr, except *maybe* in the 1990s. Believe me, we've looked.
• As for the powers... well, weird powers in my world mostly come from weird science or weird magic. We have to accept that the Powernauts do not fall into the science category. That leaves magic.

So the present-day Powernaut probably has some sort of magic powers. And he has no secret ID. So maybe he *is* a magic being! His associate Karl Scribner jokingly admits to having *wished* the Powernaut into existence as a hero, during a time of rampant wish-fulfillment on Earth. That would make the Powernaut an avatar, an incarnation of heroism. (Powernaut 2005) And he's heavily into public relations (as witness his Power Patrol) - which does nothing to decrease his magic levels.

Where does magic go when it's done? Either it dissipates, or it goes somewhere - maybe back where it came from, maybe somewhere else. Maybe old Powernauts do that too - which means they could be summoned again. Maybe their "spirits" even ride along with the current one.

If you can believe some of the old stories, you could on rare occasions see two Powernauts together - if the world were about to end. (Powernaut 1985, for instance.) If someone were to put multiple Powernauts plus a conduit of public support plus some source of hyper-energy (say, a Pentahedron) together in the magic realms, it would probably wipe the magic realms clean of many other things. And people would *at best* have lots of dreams about things exploding.

All the links here can be found under http://www.eilertech.com/stories/ .

It's probably time to mention Mary Mystery's mystic sponsors. (2009/mary_mystery.htm) The full list is Salome, Herodias, Athaliah, Jezebel, Asherah, and the Medium of Endor (once called the Witch of Endor). It is a full list of Bible women - *evil* Bible women. The first four were mother-daughter teams, and skilled politicians of their days, especially at manipulating men - though this power worked best against kings, not warriors. The other two are a witch and a goddess; they might be nasty to deal with in a superhero fight.