super-powers Report on Superpowered Humans 1900 - 2015 (Rated: Classified)

[CardiMuscleman]

Whilst conducting this report, I came across a report from the Times of London from 1949 and after being intrigued by it made a request to the government of South Africa to see if they could shed any light on it. The reply I got back convinced me that I should also include Phill Britton in this report.

Phill Britton was part of the post Second World War expeditions (after the liberation of Africa from the Germans) to make sure that they had indeed been defeated. He was under the authority of Professor Beauclerc working out of the University of Paris's natural history department (incidentally the same department that Professor Arronax was working out of when he discovered Captain Nemo in the late 19th century). According to a report from the Professor, Phill had left the safety of the camp to stretch his legs when he was suddenly set upon by this animal

That is a sabre toothed cat (which was supposed to have become exctinct about elevent thousand years ago), however what happened the Professor could not explain. When he found the pair about thirty minutes later, the sabre toothed cat was dead and Phill was alive, but very much unconscious. Thankfully, Phill was deemed to have only suffered a bite wound to the arm and would heal given time, but as the professor turned to deal with the question of the cat, he was informed that a lion had invaded the camp. What happened next I shall let the professor explain:

"Britton suddenly woke up and declared "Leave that lion to me, I am it's master" and walked out into the middle of the camp to confront the lion. He grabbed hold of it's mane and grappled with it for a good five minutes before punching it on the nose. The lion suddenly turned tail and fled with Britton standing tall seemingly none the worse of his experience"

The professor came to the conclusion that somehow the sabre toothed cat had passed on it's strength to Phill making him a half human, half tiger hybrid. Phill rather liked the idea of this and announced that he would stay in the jungle and defend other expeditions from the jungle as Tiger Man

[CardiMuscleman]

When I was asked to compile this report, I was under the impression that it was being done as a forerunner of a viability study. However, during my investigations I found evidence that this line of enquiry has been looked at before. The first such line of enquiry was in 1980 when BIFTA (the British Institute for Technological Advancement) were asked to create a method of making people, for the sake of argument, invulnerable. Their answer came in the form of a soluble substance that could be ingested by people. From what I can tell the initial reaction was a cross between disbelief and being forced to leave the room with laughter ringing in their ears, however one people was exposed to the substance.

That person was Walter Smith, a general dogsbody who worked at the Institute as the odd job man. Walter was by his own admission a little slow on the general uptake, and was the butt of more than one joke, but he liked working there dolling out cups of tea and clearing up messes. One day, however, he got a note picked to his locker saying that he was to report to Sector Six (the department dealing with the research aforementioned) and when he did, the door was locked behind him and he got soaked to the skin in what looked like water. He managed to get out of there but had caught a doozy of a cold as he gave an almighty sneeze.

But my word, what an effect that sneeze had on him. He literally transformed from a short (5ft 3), fat (220lbs) teenager into a literal Adonis of a man (6ft 2, 250lbs of lean muscle) and ran (according to a scientist who befriended him a few moments later) 100m in six seconds when the world record for the 100m was 9.9 seconds. Sadly, these changes only lasted five minutes, but happened whenever Walter sneezed and so the next time he did, the scientist was ready and came up with the following conclusions namely he could run at 65 mph, jump high and long enough to clear a train, and was so strong that even at full pelt a stone wall offered no resistance to him.

It turned out that the spray that had drenched Walter continued an experimental steroid developed by a researcher whose ideas had been ignored but now proved he wanted to have them all to himself and that meant kidnapping Walter and blackmailing him into doing his dirty work, but he was eventually rumbled and forty eight hours later, Walter was "cured" of his condition.

But, compared to the MACH project, that was nothing!

[CardiMuscleman]

The MACH Project (which stood for Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower) was a project devised in the early 1980's that was influence of the eastern practice of acupuncture but taken to the ultimate degree.

The idea behind the project was that following the implanting of printed circuit boards directly into the brain of a man, it was possible to use acupuncture to activate those circuits and therefore have, in effect, a battle computer working out what the person should do next and with how much force and effort. An example would be, an agent is in the field and finds himself threatened with a gun. The computer would then say "Right, the best option is to disable that gun, therefore muscles, increase production of muscle tissue by 200% for the next five minutes" thus giving the person superhuman strength.

At least that was the theory, but it came with a great deal of trial and error and in the case of prototype (dubbed MACH Zero) it soon became clear that not everyone was suited for it. After the process he became literally unstoppable, and in the end he was locked up in a secure facility somewhere in Wales. But did that stop them, of course not, and so MACH One was born and just like Mach Zero was capable of the impossible (120 mph top speed, a strength level of 21 tons and being able to swim at 50 knots). But as with Mach Zero things started to go wrong, as not only could he not remember any of his past life prior to the enchancement, but he found himself in effect being blackmailed (If he didn't do any missions for the British Intelligence Services, he would be denied access to the recharges that kept him sane). Things came to a head in 1981 when, order to capture and imprison an alien in order to steal the technology, he rebelled and killed his superior officer resulting in himself being gunned down and killed at the age of 32.