Supporting Characters

The Trinity of Heroes have some friends, allies, and acquaintances who provide assistance or support.

Cat Gang

The so-called Cat Gang are a trio of homeless teenagers in Trinity City who all have similar superhuman abilities. The three are the only known survivors of illegal experiments conducted by the geneticist Dr. Joshua Stone on behalf of Apex Pharmaceuticals. The experiments involved splicing animal traits into humans in an effort to grant people animal-like abilities. To obtain human test subjects, agents for Stone would kidnap homeless people, usually teenagers, from the streets of Trinity City. The missing street kids came to the attention of the Trinity of Heroes, who were able to locate the secret lab where the experiments were being conducted. The heroes confronted some of Apex's superhuman agents, but managed to get past them and infiltrate the lab. The intrusion triggered a self-destruct mechanism and the lab was destroyed in an explosion, but the heroes were able to rescue the three teens they found inside, along with several test animals. The three teens were taken to hospital by the authorities who arrived on the scene to investigate the explosion.

When Alyson McGovern, Cathy Gilbert and Tommy Miller were released from the hospital, and after the police had stopped trying to pry information out of them as to why the three were found unconscious dressed only in hospital gowns near the site of an explosion that had destroyed a supposedly empty industrial space on the border of Silver Heights, the three were back on the street. Someone had provided medical insurance to cover their hospital stay, but ultimately the doctors had found nothing wrong other than mild dehydration and malnutrition and a few superficial cuts and bruises.

It was about a week later that the three learned that something had been done to them. All three could manifest animal-like powers, and would take on feline traits at the same time - their ears and eyes would become catlike, teeth became sharpened like a predator, fingernails became claws, and they grew a fine layer of fur. While in this form the three had superhuman strength and agility as well as heightened senses. At first scared, the three some discovered that they could switch back and forth between their “normal” bodies and the cat-like forms.

The three have since taken to using these powers to help survive on the streets, committing small crimes for food or spending money. More recently they have started using the powers to protect the other street people, especially teenage runaways and other vulnerable youth, especially in the impoverished neighborhood in the Forge they have taken as their territory. The Trinity of Heroes learned that the three had developed powers and they and the Cats have helped each other out from time to time, most notably when the heroes had tracked down Dr. Stone and the other Apex agents who had been responsible for the kidnapping and experiments performed on the teenagers.

The three members of the Cat Gang are:

Central Headquarters for Investigation of Extranormal Forces

The Central Headquarters for Investigation of Extranormal Forces (CHIEF) is a relatively new US government agency tasked with dealing with the increasing number of superhuman threats emerging after the Wave. The agency operates under the Department of Homeland Security and is in the process of establishing offices in American cities that have a significant superhuman presence, like Trinity City. These branch offices are headed by a Regional Director who controls teams of investigators as well as enforcement officers who are being trained and equipped to deal with superhuman threats. The Regional Director of the Trinity City branch is a woman named Kendra Nash, who often relies on her experienced advisor Charles Cutler. For now CHIEF are equipped with mostly conventional equipment while they away development and acquisition of more advanced technology specifically designed for dealing with superhuman threats. In Trinity City the CHIEF office has outsourced much of the scientific side of its investigation to Genesys Technologies.

Special Research Office

CHIEF is nominally a successor organization to the Special Research Office (SRO), a semi-secret agency which was established in the 1920s to investigate the paranormal. The SRO's heyday was during the 1930s and 1940s where it contested with Nazi occultists who were attempting to acquire supernatural artifacts and powers to aid the German war effort. The SRO continued to operate through the 1950s, 60s and 70s dealing with smaller oc-cult threats. Starting in the 1980s the agency was subjected to budget cuts, its secret status and the unusual nature of its purview making it difficult to obtain funding from Congress. The last vestiges of the SRO were eliminated during the post-9/11 shakeup in government agencies that led to the formation of Department of Homeland Security.

Charles Cutler

Charles is a retired civil servant who had served in the SRO starting in the 1960s, mentored by veteran SRO agent Ryan Driscoll, and was there in the 1970s when DARPANET caused Shub-Internet to be freed from its prison in the Pentagon. He became a pariah in government circles for his continuing efforts to deal with supernatural threats against the country, and was finally forced into retirement when the SRO was shut down for good in 2003. Even forced out, Cutler continued to try and keep tabs on Shub-Internet and other mystical phenomenon. When Londyn started researching Shub-Internet online it alerted Cutler, who came to Trinity City and made contact with her to share information that helped the Trinity of Heroes deal with the threat. Seeing an opportunity, Cutler made contact with CHIEF and offered his services, pointing out that the occult was still a threat and now fell under the agency's jurisdiction. He has been brought on as a contractor and is helping CHIEF build up their occult investigation capabilities. To that end Cutler has enlisted Telemachus Blackthorne, who he encoun-tered thanks to the latter's connection to Londyn and who he recognized as a member of the Blackthorne family (having encountered a Blackthorne in his early days with the SRO). Cutler will occasionally feed information to Londyn that he feels would be useful to the Trinity of Heroes, and the trio assume that he has likely deduced that she is the mysterious Twitch. If this is the case, however, it does not appear that Cutler has shared that information with CHIEF.

Dayglo

Yvaine (Eve) Forest is lead singer of a Trinity City-based garage band called the Dayglo Assassins. She developed light-based powers less than a year ago, but has kept them secret. Londyn and Telemachus learned of her powers when Eve used them to help evacuate people from a burning theater during a blackout and reached out to the young woman afterward.

Dragon Princess

Kelly Hemmings was a second year History major at Trinity College when she was pulled into a dryer at the Laund-o-rama, the dryer having been turned into a consuming dimensional portal by the Black Adept's Cursed Chaos Coins. Kelly found herself in a fantasy-esque world where she was enslaved by the Trollgar. She freed herself and led a revolt by other slaves, and together they drive the Trollgar out of their fortress and took control of it. She later rescued a dragon, taming it and using it as a mount. Among the slave workers she freed was an armorer and he forged her armor and sword from discarded scales and a tail spike from her dragon. She remained leader of the freed slaves after they seized the Trollgar citadel, teaching them modern battle tactics, and giving them the key to developing gunpowder and explosives.

Hooded Sorceress and Adrenaline later found themselves in the same world Kelly had been trapped in when they were fleeing the Shamblers after being trapped in the In-Between spaces. After initially coming into conflict with Kelly due to a misunderstanding, the pair learned who Kelly was. Learning that this world was connected to the cursed dryer gave Hooded Sorceress the information she needed to conjure a portal back to Trinity. Though reluctant to leave her friends, and her dragon, Kelly opted to return to Trinity City with the two heroes, though she did keep her Dragon Armor and Sword.

Kelly now has to figure out how to reintegrate into her old life, having been missing for nearly two years.

Genesys Technologies

Genesys Technologies is a multi-disciplinary science and engineering Think-Tank based in the Silver Heights district of Trinity City. It is one of several such facilities established across the globe by tech billionaire Trevor Brand, aka Omni-Man of the Protectors, all tasked with pushing the edge of technology and knowledge in the wake of the changes wrought by the Wave and the alien invasion of One Week War. Genesys has dedicated centers of research for Biochemistry, Materials Science, Physics, and Computer Science; and has now added a cross-disciplinary center for study of superhuman phenomena. This new group often subcontracts its expertise to the Trinity City branch of CHIEF, serving as scientific and technical advisors to the agency and offering resources and facilities to assist with investigations. In fact a secure building on the Genesys campus in Silver Heights often serves as a temporary holding facility for super-powered suspects before they can be transferred to a federal facility equipped to deal with them.

Londyn St. Clair, aka Twitch, was brought on as an intern based on recommendations from her faculty advisors at Trinity College. While she initially started in the Computer Science division, she later came to the attention of Genesys' benefactor, Trevor Brand, who was always on the lookout for exceptionally talented individuals. When Brand discovered that Londyn was secretly Twitch he decided to leave her in place at Genesys but had her transferred to the Superhuman Research division. Telemachus Blackthorne, under his secret identity of Marcus Bowman, has also started interning at Genesys.

Employees of Genesys Technologies include:

Gwen Pryce

Gwen is the latest in a secret line of Celtic Druids that protect the Welsh residents of Trinity City. Gwen's ancestor came over with the original Welsh settlers of the region at the end of the 18th Century and set up a Sacred Grove near the original settlement, now the neighborhood of Pembroke. Her grandfather is the current High Druid of the Grove and the young 20-something Gwen is learning the family trade. Gwen and her grandfather helped the Trinity of Heroes when construction work disturbed the Sacred Grove and awoke an avatar of Cernunnos the Celtic Horned God.

Richard Adair

Richard Adair was born in 1878, the third son of a British Earl. After completing his studies at Oxford at the turn of the century, young Richard became an archaeologist and explorer. While Africa had been a focus of the Empire during the Victorian era, Richard turned his attention towards South America. Starting in 1908 he began his exploration in the Amazon Jungle in Brazil; seeking the truth behind legends he had learned snippets of. Adair's expedition found evidence and artifacts of an advanced ancient civilization, and among the items taken was one half of the key to the prison holding the Grey Man. Adair returned to England in triumph in 1910 and spent two years cataloging and writing up his remarkable discoveries. He was the toast of the explorers and scientific community in England and began planning a second expedition to track down the source of the Sky Warrior from the Grey Man legends. Unfortunately World War I put a stop to these efforts, and Adair's activities during the Great War are not well known.

After the war ended Adair resumed his planning, but renewed scrutiny on his claims from the first expedition called into doubt many of his conclusions. Especially damning was what some identified as obviously forged artifacts that could not possibly be from the time period indicated. Spiritualists leapt to the defense of Adair, but this brought the stigma of occult societies to the work and further led to its dismissal. No longer able to continue his work in England, Adair relocated to the United States in 1924, where he began pursuing his research again. His efforts brought him to Trinity where he was apparently following up some of the legends. Adair lost all of his money in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and, attempting to earn a meagre salary, he took a teaching position at Trinity College, but his reputation eventually caught up with him and he was let go in 1932. Records are sketchy, but Adair was believed to have died in poverty in the mid-1930s. In reality Adair continued to try and find proof that his theories were not a hoax. His efforts led him to discover the old mining tunnels under the city, from which he hoped to find access to the area under the Mounds.

One group that were still paying attention to Adair and his efforts were the Nazi occultists of the Thule Society. The US government became aware of this attention and Adair was placed under the protection of the Special Research Office (SRO), a semi-secret government agency that dealt with unusual phenomena, in 1936. That same year Adair found his way into the Temple under the Mounds but unfortunately the Nazis, with Arsène Krieger (aka Dr. Arsenic) leading them, had tracked him down there. In the confrontation one of the booby traps was tripped, trapping both Adair and the Nazis in the ruins. The enraged Nazis shot Adair when they realized they were trapped and had no way out.

Adair's corpse remained there along with the trapped Nazis until the present day, when the Cult of the Grey Man located the Temple. The Cultists ran afoul of magical protection the SRO had given to Adair and that was still shielding his body, so they left it in place. When the Trinity of Heroes arrived in pursuit of the Cultists the Hooded Sorceress attempted to summon Adair's spirit to question him, but the spell appeared to fail, perhaps due to the same magical protection that had thwarted the Cultists. In reality the summoning had worked, but Adair's spirit had been ensnared by magical wards set up in ancient times to keep things from entering or leaving the Temple. When a later archaeological expedition disrupted these wards his spirit was released. Adair's ghost is now bound to the Hooded Sorceress and he has appointed himself as her conscience, aiming to help prevent her from succumbing to the temptation of using dark magics.

Teen Trinity

Teen Trinity are a trio of teenagers who gained superhuman powers after exposure to the Jumpstart mutagen created by Dr. Simeon Webb. The three friends, Brendan, Claire, and Julie kept their newfound powers hidden until circumstances forced them to use them in public. The three were waiting in line to get into the Trinity City Comic-Con when a news helicopter lost control and was threatening to crash into the crowd. The three worked together to stop the helicopter from crashing, saving the passengers and crew as well as those on the ground. The three had been cosplaying as the Trinity of Heroes, so to protect their real identities Brendan declared that they were a new hero team called Teen Trinity, inspired by the Trinity of Heroes. The actual Trinity were also in attendance at the convention and tracked down the teenagers. After initially trying to dissuade the three, the Heroes later reluctantly gave their blessing and have offered to support the fledgling team.

The members of Teen Trinity are:

Telemachus Blackthorne

Telemachus is a member of the Blackthorne Family of dark magicians, son of the current head of the Family and cousin to Electra and Iphigenia (aka Hooded Sorceress). Though the youngest member of main branch of the Blackthorne Family, Telemachus is the eldest male of his generation which marks him as heir apparent to head the family one day. Telemachus has a scholarly nature, a result of his eldest cousin Electra encouraging him to spend time in the family library as an effort to, in her eyes, weaken him. This bookish nature later led to Telemachus striking up a friendship with Londyn St. Clair (aka Twitch), a teammate of his cousin Iphigenia (now going by the name Jen) when the sixteen year-old accompanied the family to Trinity City in an attempt to bring Iphigenia back into the fold.

Telemachus and Londyn stayed in covert contact, though Jen soon learned of the ongoing connection and was less than thrilled. Telemachus even found ways to visit Trinity City for short periods without alerting his father and Electra. During one of these visits he was recruited into CHIEF by elderly ex-occult investigator Charles Cutler, who is building out the organization's mystical resources and figured having a Blackthorne would be helpful. This has given Telemachus more reasons to spend time in Trinity City and with Londyn, and he has gone so far as to create a secret identity for himself as a student named Marcus Bowman who is studying at Trinity College and serving as an intern at Genesys Technologies. From his time with Londyn and his own discoveries, Telemachus has decided that the Blackthorne Family needs to be stopped; but with his eighteenth birthday approaching he knows he has little time to come up with a plan to save his soul, stop his cousin Jen from being sacrificed, and take down the Family.