Archive for November 27th, 2011

G. Brett Williams #26 – The Bastard Sons: Incendiary

The Bastard Sons are a super-powered group comprised of the illegitimate children of prominent superheroes (and one villain).  The group, made up of four members, only learned of their lineage when their powers developed as part of their coming of age.   The group was formed by Incendiary, the illegitimate son of Bertrand Blaze, England’s fire controlling hero better known as The Brazen Blazer.  The Brazen Blazer was something of a celebrity in his home country and took every chance he could to use that celebrity to woo the women of Albion.  Not every woman he slept with ended up carrying a child, but a few did, and of those few, one of them gave birth to his superpowered heir.  Superhero genetics are a tricky business.  The gene present in certain people that grants powers has to be “switched on” by some sort of event.  Sometimes that gene can lay dormant, never finding the specific set of circumstances needed to ignite it.  Other times, as with all newborns, a set of recessive genes can come to the forefront leaving the more dominant genes, like the super gene, dormant.  Of the three illegitimate children Bertrand Blaze fathered, only Franklin Tosh, later known as Incendiary, received powers.

When Franklin was fourteen years old, his mother threw him a birthday party.  One of the party guests was a fourteen year old girl from Franklin’s school by the name of Penny Entwhistle.  Franklin had a rather large crush on Miss Penny, a feeling which she happened to return.  As the party went on, Franklin and Penny escaped to his bedroom for a bit of privacy.  Franklin had her down to just her knickers and Penny had her hand on his bathing suit area when his mother burst into the room and found them.  Penny grabbed her clothes and ran out, sobbing, with Ms. Tosh shouting a great many things about defiling her son and telling her parents and the like after the poor young creature as she darted from the room.  Franklin was so embarrassed and angry at his mother that, as she turned to remonstrate the boy’s behavior, his gene kicked in and suddenly the bed he had previously been making it to second base upon was going up in flames.

The next few years were awkward for young Franklin.  With the emergence of his powers, his mother’s long term suspicions about his parental lineage were confirmed.  Franklin’s mother demanded paternity tests from Bertrand and eventually ended up taking the man to court for child support, damages (part of her house had burnt up after all) and what her lawyers dubbed, “the emotional hardship inherent to raising a superpowered teenager.”  It was widely thought that raising a superpowered teenager was more difficult than raising the regular old garden variety teenager.  Raging hormones is one thing, but raging hormones that cause raging fires, well that’s quite another.  In the end, Bertrand’s PR team thought it best to settle the matter out of court for an undisclosed sum and get on with the business of helping old ladies cross the street and rescuing cats from trees.  Anything that would help him repair his damaged image.  The amount of money was enough for Franklin and his mother to live in comfort.

Franklin went away to university at the age of eighteen, eager to remove himself from the life of flaunting her money and dating younger men that his mother had begun since winning her paternity suit, or, as she referred to it, “the day you finally paid off, boy.”  To tell the truth, in the time since winning that settlement, Franklin’s mother had paid little attention to the young man at all.  So when she was shuffled off this mortal coil in a fatal and logic-defying jet ski accident with one of the aforementioned younger men, Franklin wasn’t terribly shaken up.  I mean sure, it was a bummer to lose his mum, but it’s not like she’d ever been all that loving toward him anyway.  And there was the problem of that time she messed up his one chance to touch Penny Entwhistles breasts.  Penny had been so mortified by the experience that she never spoke to Franklin again.  So he was sad his mother was gone, but not that sad.  The one nice thing his mother had done though was to take out a life insurance policy on herself for Franklin, in case something such as a random act of jet ski tomfoolery were to ever steal away her life.  The life insurance, plus the money he inherited from the settlement, left Franklin with a sizable chunk of change.  He immediately got a financial planner and made some shrewd investments that quickly turned his large amounts of money into obscene amounts of money.  And with that money young Franklin Tosh did exactly what any superpowered son of a superhero would do…

He decided to fight crime.