Skirmish
By John Helmer
Art Design by Anthony Hoganson
Name: Sir Archibald Phillips
Location: Dover, England Group
Affiliation: The IMPERIALS
Powers: Superior intelligence, coupled with the ability to compute possible military outcomes a 1,000 times faster than a normal human, has made Archie the smartest human alive. History: Archibald Phillips was born to wealthy parents on a large estate outside Dover. He grew up admiring the shores of France, contemplating the distant country and its enticing green landscape. At the age of ten, his impatient father gave the young prodigy child to the boy’s uncle to raise because Archie’s superior intelligence had made him a target at the schools he attended; His was smarter than his parents, his teachers at school, and the physiologists that treated him. Once in his uncle’s care, Edward made sure young Archie had the best personal instructors money could buy. He was educated at Fairburn Castle, located just outside Dover, the land his uncle’s family had owned for generations. With superior private schooling, Archie became an expert at chess and soon won England’s national title. His success was short lived, though, because of his severe claustrophobia, he had to travel in the back of open air vehicles to all his chess matches and this kept him from competing in other markets. Though his local winning streak was unparalleled, his title would remain empty, at least in his mind, because he could not travel to Europe to compete internationally; he was paralyzed by the thought of riding in the confined space of an airplane or boat. When the Second World War engulfed all of Europe, Archie was forced to enlist at an officer’s school, a privilege he was afforded by his well-to-do parents. He scored the highest results ever recorded at the military academy, placing him at the rank of Captain before he had ever put on a uniform. His marks were brought to the attention of Winston Churchill and the British leader immediately realized his potential and transferred Archie to Bletchley Park with orders to decode the entire German secret messaging system: code name ULTRA. But before he could crack the Nazi code, he was transferred to a secret British science facility in the north and an experimental operation was performed to tap into his ability to think faster then any known computer. The operation was a success and he soon could absorb military formations and troop movements, matching those with the allied strengths to predict the probable outcome of battles. A portable computer was attached to a backpack so he could calculate strategies in the field. The results were staggering: battles were won by British troops because of his decisions alone. To increase his effectiveness, Archie was flown by Tiger Moths, open-air cockpit planes, to and from areas of conflict, and his quick thinking saved many allied lives. He was soon paired with the IMPERIALS, assisting the superhero commando group to victory after victory. His luck would run out, unfortunately, during the chaos at Dunkirk the Iron Devil, Nazi Germany’s most feared SS officer, ambushed a small contingent of IMPERIALS protecting the evacuation of important advanced radar equipment. The brutal Nazi fired a single shot between his eyes striking Archie, or as Winston Churchill had nicknamed him Skirmish because of his ability to predict a battle and get his men out safely. A mortally wounded Archie was carried away by IMPERIALS aboard a British destroyer and his lifeless body taken to a hospital in London. As luck would have it, he did not die, but the wound was so severe and the damage so catastrophic that the world’s smartest man was now a vegetable, unable to communicate, a drooling waste in a human shell. Churchill ordered that IV’s be inserted to give his emaciated body nutrients and an oxygen mask kept strapped tight across his mouth to help him breath. He was kept alive because his mind had too much data, too many calculations, and too many allied secrets to loose. His assistant, Lieutenant Harry Glouchesfield, created a way to access his mind with an electronic connecting wire, plugged into his brain and fashioned like a pair of headphones. Archie’s body has the ability to reset the bioelectronic energy needed to keep the data recorder powered so the information requested from the functioning sections of his mind can be stored long enough to be understood by his assistant.
Description: Archie is a drooling vegetable permanently affixed in a wheelchair. He has military nurses change his IV and his oxygen tank 24 hours a day to ensure his mind survives. The battle information accessed from his brain can accurately predict a requested outcome, but it takes his assistant Harry time to decipher a single event, much longer than before Archie’s accident. What was once the world’s smartest man is now the its most ineffective soldier and trapped within his brilliant mind is an incredible wealth of tactical knowledge encased in a useless, decrepit body.
