Challengers to Come
Awesome art and upcoming stories
Let’s start by admiring this huge Challenger Foundation group shot for a moment…
If you’ve read the first Challenger Confidential story, Copper Knights and Granite Men (which is free to read right here on Substack), then you’ll recognize four or maybe five of the heroes pictured.
But we’ve got a bunch of Challenger stories in the pipeline, some finished, some near finished, and they’ll be free to read, too.
Before we get into some descriptions and quotes to whet your appetite, I should say that part of the reason Substack appealed to my husband and I as creators is that waiting until you have an entire book finished means we have a LOT written or in progress but we wait and wait to publish it because we need enough to fill a print book.
Some of you may have realized that we write a lot of short stories or chapters that can read as standalone stories. So far we have mostly shared what has been in our published books. But now we’ve reached the point with Challenger Confidential where we can share shorter adventures before they are collected for a book, or chapter by chapter as we polish a serial. There may be some changes when they are all wrapped up for publication in print, but hey, that could be a year or more from now, and you, dear reader, wisely want stories now.
So here’s the Challenger Foundation stories that will be coming up sooner rather than later.
Warning: Our working titles are what we refer to our stories as around the house, and may not be the final titles. Also, they are funny. Copper Knights and Granite Men was Marble Madness for months.
Allen in Wanderland - Fun fact: Not all narrators are reliable, and Amp may have withheld some details from Copper Knights and Granite Men. Were they events he didn’t know about, or did he shy away from revealing them because they would make him look bad? You decide. More importantly, Atomic Ranger is lost.
Allen Adams shifted backward in surprise.
He was standing in a field of wild but beautiful grass punctuated by blooms he'd never seen before. This fact immediately stood out, not because Allen had any great knowledge of flowers -- he could identify a large number of farm crops and great plains growth — but because the flowers were colors he'd never seen before.
Mazes and Monsters - Chemistra’s efforts to thaw her stone victims early are failing, but is that really a big deal? The petrifaction solution should wear off in about a year. That’s what she believed, until one of The Promethean’s associates uncovers a 2,000-year-old statue from a Roman catacomb that also seems to be a petrified man. Faced with her own hubris, Mary Jo finds herself digging, perhaps literally, through an ancient alchemist’s lair for answers.
Turning fifty people to stone was the worst thing that Mary Jo ever did, but as she stared at the broken leg of the tiny stone mouse, shorn jaggedly from its hip by a careless movement of her thumb, she didn’t feel that way. She stood with her mouth open in surprise and fright, her body frozen almost as solidly as the petrified rodent. Only her eyes moved, darting back and forth from the mouse to the display screen overhead, where she watched in false color the creature’s morphic field flashing erratically before finally guttering out like a candle at the end of its wick.
“I told you to be careful!” the Promethean snapped. “I warned you that the fossilized limbs are extremely brittle at the onset. Now we’ll have to petrify another. Go back and get-”
“No! This is horrible! If I kill another mouse, I’ll just—” Her words trailed off into inarticulate groanings of disgust and frustration.
“Pity,” he intoned. “Had you shown the same concern for human beings as for rodents, none of this would be necessary.”
The Cayman Islands Story - Chemistra and Bulwark have to team up.
Bulwark pressed his forehead and finger tips to the cockpit window of the circling aeronef and let out a low whistle at the palm tree-shaded bungalows overlooking the bay. The pale blue Caribbean waters were crystal clear, and he could see straight to the sandy bottom where rays and tall-finned angelfish played.
“So this is the high life,” he said appreciatively.
Chemistra spared a glance out the windscreen and then went back to frowning at the console. She folded her arms and sighed with disgust. “I wonder if everybody who lives down here is a low-life crook.”
Bulwark let out a mirthless chuckle. “You see that, O Mistress of Mayhem and Larceny? You’ve been doing it wrong. You don’t need to knock off museums and turn people to stone, you only need to marry some poor chump, get him to work himself to a nub for you, then wait for someone else to turn him into stone. Voila! It’s all yachts, coconut juice, and snorkeling after that!”
Sic Pereant Omnes
If you happened to read our fantasy comic Incorrigible IMPS, you may recall that those characters were originally Ascension Epoch characters from the glorious state of New Jersey. Well, they will finally be appearing in their own modern Ascension Epoch story that ties into Copper Knights.
And you just might see some of Signalman’s Lenses in the modern day.
Glass shattered and timbers groaned somewhere within the old farm house, products of the same thrashing that knocked loose chinks of mortar from the 18th century stone walls. Always it was followed by that terrible, maddening cry -- part gargle, part howl, and part curse -- reverberating through the ground, resonating with more than ear drums. It was getting more frequent, now. Something--the beast, the house, or the sanity of the people outside--was going to give.
“It doesn’t sound like it’s working,” said the vampire, his tone as bloodless as his face.
Suddenly, his moon-pale skin flashed red as an iris of flame blossomed around the hands of the woman beside him. She was petite, lithe, with a mouth both delicate and disdainful, her eyes too cold, the high-boned symmetry of her cheeks too perfect to look wholly human. She shrugged.
“OK then, I guess I’ll burn the place down!”
From Magonia with Love
When three airships are found adrift with the bodies of their crew and passengers fused into the bulkheads, the Challenger Foundation and the ABC must join forces to confront a threat From Beyond!. Former teammates Ephemera and Meteora will have to battle assassins, gremlins, weather wizards, and a host of other Horrors of the Heights, even as they struggle to keep from killing each other. And the new and untested Skyman will have to prove he’s worthy of his heroic legacy by thwarting a diabolical alliance between the English secret service and the aerial invaders of Magonia.
From Magonia, with Love is an action-packed mashup of superheroes, super-spies, and eldritch horrors unlike any you’ve seen before. Ready your laser watch and fire up the Tillinghast resonator, because it’s Ian Fleming meets Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft in the skies above southern England!
“Oh, I’m the sort of person to notice things,” said Ephemera. She withdrew a slender glass and metal cylinder from her purse and set it to her lips. It was so big and fancy looking that Danica, baffled, thought it was some kind of small woodwind. It was only after she exhaled a cloud of water vapor that Danica realized it was a nebulizer. “In fact, you might even say I’m the sort of person that notices everything.”
Tamara Mosley was a first class snoop and a sneak, and what’s more, she was unrepentant about it. Whether she had always been that way or whether it was a result of her ability to turn herself intangible and invisible, Danica couldn’t say; she hadn’t known her before the accident with the Tillinghast Resonator. Tamara wasn’t the sort to spread rumors or blackmail you—not exactly—but she made sure to let you know that she knew. Back when Danica was still Meteora, Tamara seemed to know everything that went on at the Challenger Foundation, and it wasn’t just because she was the Promethean’s umpteenth-great niece.
“So what did you notice, Tam… excuse me, Miss Valentine.”
Through the haze of vapor, Ephemera’s green eyes stared into hers, and all hint of frivolity disappeared from her face. “There are two men on this airship who are planning to kill you and your partner, and they plan to do it tonight.”
Danica rolled her eyes, mistaking the grave look for deadpan snark. “That’s very droll.”
Tamara furrowed her brows in irritation. She leaned forward and whispered. “I mean it. Two men, English, tall, dark-haired, one early to mid-30s, the other one early ’40s, probably secret service. The older one has bad teeth and an ugly mole on his ass, but you probably won’t get a chance to see that.” She leaned back and smiled again, tossing her hair inanely. “And please, call me Cytheria.”
And last (so far as we are revealing!) for now but certainly not least, we have a Challenger-adjacent comic book well into the works. It’s about halfway pencilled and inked, and we’ll be releasing it in installments.
It will feature the retired superhero, The Sentinel, a super soldier augmented by none other than The Promethean himself. A classic home invasion story, except that this is the Ascension Epoch, so you know it’s going to be weird and action-packed.
Most importantly, subscribe so you don’t miss these awesome adventures when they are released!
And if you haven’t read Copper Knights and Granite Men, dig in already so that you’re ready for more Challenger goodness when it arrives!
