DP 7 Issue Guide #9

Part 1:

Towards the end of April, we return to the Drafted members of the Paranormal Platoon, wherein they are currently engaging in sparring matches. They have been joined by Thomas Boyd, late of the Psi-Force, who has found himself here after his capture in California. Of course, having already been trained in combat by rogue CIA operative Derek Shiningstar, Boyd is more than a match for his opponent, Jeffrey Walters.

After Boyd defeated him, Sergeant Haldeman matched him up against the Pit Bull. As this second match took place, Jeffrey found himself hoping that he wouldn't be cut from the 'A' team, as he longed to go overseas to exact his revenge against whoever it was that caused the Pitt disaster. His friend David Landers wasn't so gung-ho about being sent out of the country however - heck, he didn't even want to be there!

Later, after the paranormals were done sparring, David found out that Randy O'Brien wasn't going to share the fate of the others. Since his powers seemed to have gone dormant upon entering Basic training, he was likely to finish his medical training on the Army's dime, the better to serve as a medic for the Platoon. After all, the man had considerable experience treating the injuries of paranormals, thanks to his work at the Clinic.

David, meanwhile, was summoned to the offices of Lt. Remsen, where he was to receive his regular dose of dream therapy. Entering David's mind with his Nightmask, Remsen found the man's dreamscape to be a corny fantasy paradise, and the princess in said paradise to be Stephanie Harrington. Since she remained so consistent in David's dreams, Lt. Remsen was forced to conclude that she was based on a real person.

That night, as the Platoon slept, the Psi-Force team infiltrated the base to rescue their friend, Thomas. This resulted in a brawl between the Platoon and the highly motivated, psionic paranormal outlaws. With much more practical fighting experience under their belt, the Psi-Force was successful in freeing their teammate, though they managed to do so with minimal injuries to the Drafted paranormals.

A few days later, David was summoned to the office of Major Zentner. As the Bloodhound, he'd met Stephanie before, and was berating himself for not thinking of recruiting her for her healing prowess. Having decided to rectify this error, thanks to Lt. Remsen's prodding, Zentner decided to pay her a visit - and figured that he'd bring David along as willing muscle, what with the man pining for her so - even to this very day...!

Part 2:

Elsewhere, in Langley, Maryland, the CIA is operating its own paranormal training program. Having utterly failed to retrieve the Psi-Force paranormals, it was instead concentrating on several former patients of the Clinic for Paranormal Research - in particular, three female patients who could not legally be Drafted into the service. These paranormals, Charlotte Beck, Lenore Fenzl and Merriam Sorensen, were currently sparring as well.

With her superior physical abilities, the training the CIA had given Lenore made her more than a match for the others, despite their useful paranormal powers. This greatly interested the CIA, who placed great value on Lenore and her potential. Their handler, Miss Dobish, told Lenore exactly that, and then asked Lenore for help in another matter. You see, something had gone amiss with a former operative of theirs, Jenny Swensen.

Taking Lenore to see Jenny, Miss Dobish showed Lenore just what had happened. After exposure to the Pitt-Juice for an extended duration, Swensen had begun to... change. At the limits of modern medical knowledge, the CIA wasn't sure how to treat the strange, metallic boils that had begun to spread across her body. Furthermore, Jenny was quickly growing resistant to all known sedatives and tranquilizers.

As such, they asked Lenore for her help. Since she'd helped Jeffrey in a similar manner in the past, Lenore was okay with this idea, particularly after Jenny began to grow hysterical about her condition. Knocking her out, Lenore pondered the situation, and found herself thinking of Stephanie - much as Major Zentner had, elsewhere. Thinking on this, Lenore decided to discuss it with the others.

Letting them know what had happened to Jenny, Lenore asked what they thought of getting Stephanie's help - assuming she'd recovered from her coma, that is. Charlotte wasn't too happy with the idea, what with her worrying that Stephanie would get an 'offer she couldn't refuse' like the others did. Of course, they'd been captured in an Army quarantined area at the time, and Stephanie hadn't actually committed any crimes...!

Part 3:

In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the D.D.Teens were causing a ruckus in Stephanie's basement. Scuzz and Mothball were brawling while the others - including Michael Crawley, also late of the Psi-Force - were trying to stop them... or egging them on. This caused Stephanie's dirtbag husband, Chuck, to come down the stairs and start screaming. Having had enough, he promptly threw the young paranormals out of his house.

Even if he worried about how Stephanie would react to this all the while, what with his 'condition' and all. Telling Stephanie what was going on and what he'd done, Chuck stormed off, leaving her to deal with the problem. Stephanie went to talk it out with the paranormal youths, and she told them she'd at least give them some cash for tickets... before she drove them to the nearby Greyhound bus station.

Meanwhile, Chuck was greeted by Major Zentner, who was there to try and recruit Stephanie into the Army. Chuck wasn't having any of that, literally needing her healing powers to live, and thus snuck out to warn her. Speeding to the bus station on his motorcycle, Chuck tried to run away with her before it was too late, but he'd been followed by Major Zentner. And of course his armed muscle, David.

But David melted upon seeing the crusty looks Stephanie was giving the two Army men... and he quickly bashed Zentner in the head while he gave Stephanie his sales pitch. Telling her how horrible the Army was, David told her to make a break for it - her and her family! Not waiting for the Major to wake up, Chuck began to drag Stephanie out of the bus station. This left David with the D.D.Teens, who questioned him about the military.

As he went to face the music for his actions, David asked Scuzz to look after Stephanie. Scuzz wasn't having any of that, but figured since she was abandoning her house, he and his gang could just squat there. As Stephanie and Chuck made it home to collect her kids though, they were greeted by yet another visitor. She was Lenore Fenzl, and had quite the offer for Stephanie to consider...!

Issue 24:
Enough!

After he helped Stephanie and her husband escape the Army's clutches, to instead wind up with the CIA, David was in hot water. Thinking to run once he'd thought things out, David broke the unconscious Major Zentner's nose to avoid being tracked by the man, and fled towards Canada. On the run for several weeks, David found out that he didn't do enough damage to Zentner, and was ultimately found by the man.

Arrested, David was bawled out by Sergeant Haldeman, who attempted to use his Weltschmertz power on him... only to run afoul of David's mental block and render himself comatose. Deciding at that point that he was more trouble than he was worth, the Army then threw David into the Black Hole, a deep pit made from reinforced concrete that the Paranormal Platoon used to 'deal' with unruly paranormal soldiers... and left him there.

After several weeks, David was beginning to become unhinged, and had begun beating against the walls... to no avail. He was cracking the Black Hole's surface slightly, but wasn't really doing much more than bloodying his knuckles each day. The only time he saw or heard anything was twice a day, when the grunts would throw him a bag of food. Other than that, he was left with his own thoughts... which always wandered back to Stephanie.

She, on the other hand, was happily adjusting to her new life as a CIA trainee. They were giving her all kinds of martial arts training to take advantage of her superior physical capabilities. And frankly, after her months of lying motionless in a coma, Stephanie was enjoying putting her body through its paces, and finding her absolute limits. But she could only train so long, and eventually Stephanie had to return home.

Back at Fort Benning, Lieutenant Remsen was interviewing a recently recovered Sergeant Haldeman, to figure out what had happened to him when he tried to give David the 'treatment'. Knocking the man out, Remsen entered his dreams to experience what the Sergeant had, and found that some strange, white cube was present in David's mind... a featureless object that completely deflected Haldeman's power.

Armed with this knowledge, Remsen was going to probe David's dreams as soon as he went to sleep. David, meanwhile, was talking to himself, when Randy's antibodies appeared before him. Or so he thought; in his state, it was hard to tell if they were really there or not. They quickly left him to his own devices once more, at which point David was overwhelmed with a soul-crushing despair.

Back at Camp Peary, Maryland, Stephanie was leaving for another day of work, which would begin with her using her healing abilities on the ailing Jennifer Swensen. She said goodbye to her husband, not knowing that he was going to see a private doctor for his lethal little 'problem', and made her way to the medical facility where Jenny was being treated. Of course, Jennifer had no intention of letting anyone touch her.

Thus, Stephanie had to fight it out with her to use her powers on the angry scientist - and when giving her the full dose of her healing prowess, Stephanie finalized the woman's transformation. The strange metallic 'boils' she'd been covered with were but a shell, masking the change her skin was undergoing. Jennifer had actually grown her own, organic steel armor thanks to her exposure to the Pitt-Juice!

At Fort Benning again, David was either dreaming or hallucinating, but either way his mind had constructed a fantasy of him being rescued by the Woodsman. When this went awry, Lieutenant Remsen's dream self was able to enter David's mind at long last, only to find the man laying in the same position both in his dream and in reality. This unnerved Remsen somewhat, though he got it together enough to question David.

Of course, David didn't know what the strange white cube Remsen was talking about was, and hadn't actually seen it before... at least until Remsen used his powers to reveal it. Flying towards the thing to investigate, Lieutenant Remsen touched the cube - only to be pulled into it! He tried to wake himself up, and as he did, his physical body actually faded from existence... faded without a trace!

At Camp Peary again, Stephanie was confronted by a CIA security operative, who let Stephanie know what her husband, Chuck, was up to; it would appear they had him followed as standard procedure. When she realized he'd gone to get A.I.D.S. testing (in an effort to see if being around her had improved his condition), Stephanie blew up. Confronting him, Stephanie learned that Chuck had had an affair on her while she was at the Clinic.

He said he did so because he was lonely, even though he insisted that she go there in the first place!

David was similarly having a bad day. He was now hallucinating that his 'dark' side had appeared before him, and was trying to talk him into killing himself, just like his brother had. At that point, David's brother also appeared, trying to talk him out of it. David's dark side ultimately won this argument however, pushing David into a sharpened bit of metal that pierced his digestive organs....!

Issue 25:
Outing

Early in June, 1988, Scuzz and his D.D.Teens are attempting to steal a full load of groceries from King's Supermarket in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Using their powers, they try to confound the hapless under-aged employees of the store, as they have done several times in the past few weeks while squatting in the abandoned Harrington home. Things didn't go according to plan however, and the D.D.Teens only narrowly got away.

Or so they thought. The employees of King's called the police as soon as things got freaky in their store, and the cops saw the stolen station wagon speeding away from the store as they responded to the call. Giving chase, they prompted Scuzz to drive increasingly more erratically as he tried to evade them and silence the panicky kids in the car, until he accidentally drove the speeding station wagon off the road.

Elsewhere, at the Major General Truscott Jr. Hospital on the grounds of Fort Benning, Randy was finishing his operation. It seems that David had been found in time after trying to kill himself in a delusional haze, and Randy was given the task of saving his life. Thanks to his considerable medical skills, particularly with oddball paranormal physiques, Randy had indeed done just that.

Of course he was happy to have saved David's life, but he was angry nonetheless. He couldn't figure out why David had tried to kill himself, even though the man had in fact done so before with pain killers - which prompted their first meeting, in fact. He almost began to blame himself for David's actions, before realizing that despite being David's friend, there wasn't anything he could've done to help him at all.

Back in Wisconsin, several ambulances had arrived at the scene of the crash that Scuzz had caused. They were busy pulling all of the dead and wounded D.D.Teens out of the wreckage, when poor Evan Huebner woke up in a daze. He tried to remember what had happened, when he realized that his Shadowman had left his body and protected him from the full force of the crash impact - likely saving his life in the process.

Mind you, he was still rather banged up as a result of the crash. Due to this, Evan's Shadowman scooped the wounded youth up and absorbed him into its body. Breaking the straps on the gurney holding him in place, the Shadowman decided to take Evan to the one person he knew would be able to help him: Randy O'Brien. Despite being away for so long, the Shadowman seemed to know exactly where he was, too...!

In Fort Benning, Randy was otherwise occupied. Having been called to an emergency meeting by the medical staff, Randy was introduced to the so-called Famileech. This horrifying creature, a conglomeration of a family of four that had been exposed to Pitt-Juice, had been shipped to Georgia from the Pitt area to better treat - or at least study - the horrific monstrosity of science.

To this end, Randy's supervisor gassed the beast and had Randy and another medic head into the Famileech's secured room to get tissue samples. As they did so, Randy took in the details of the monster, trying to figure out what had happened to the people it had absorbed - or likely consumed - as he couldn't find any hint of bone structure in the beast... only formless skin and muscle with pseudopods and hints of faces here and there.

The next morning, Randy was doing his rounds at the hospital when the Shadowman appeared, though he didn't even recognize it at first. He knew it was antibody-like, of course, but Evan had altered it such that Randy didn't know that it was his 'renegade' from back at the Clinic at all. Before he could question it proper, Randy saw him disgorge the wounded Evan, prompting Randy to promptly treat the poor kid.

As he did so, the Shadowman touched Randy, releasing its memories of the past. This made Randy realize which antibody he was dealing with - his own! Though he wanted to 'deal' with it once and for all, Randy had to take care of Evan first. He did so soon enough, only to be interrupted by a strange alarm that began to ring throughout the hospital. Investigating, Randy discovered that the Famileech had broken loose!

He and Evan's Shadowman went to fight it, but didn't do too well; the Shadowman tried to let Randy 'wear' him but he was just too heavy. Putting Randy down, the Shadowman then went after the Famileech directly, and was ripped apart in the process. Subsequently cornered, Randy began to think he was doomed - until his four antibodies suddenly ceased their dormancy and emerged from his body anew!

Thinking to try Evan's trick again, he pulled all four of his antibodies around himself, and their combined strength allowed them to fly with his weight inside. Furthermore, he seemed to have all of their strength, giving him both the immunity from the Famileech's deadly touch and the raw physical power he needed to subdue the monster. And Randy promptly did just that - all thanks to the idea his 'killer' antibody gave him!

Issue 25 (Backup Tale):
Night of the Mask

In their hidden base deep within the wilds of Wisconsin, the ESPeople are busily engaged in one of their endless role-playing sessions, their games allowing them to while away the time as they hide their abilities from the outside world. This session is interrupted when Walt, the Psi-Lord, suddenly convulses and passes out. Soon enough, smoke begins to pour out of his ears, which ultimately takes the shape of a man.

A man named Nightmask! Seeing the assembled ESPeople before him - minus the unconscious Psi-Lord - Keith Remsen tried to figure out what dream he'd wandered into. They subsequently tried to subdue him, but Keith put up quite a fight, at least until the Supernatural took the wind out of his sails. Probing his mind, Trancer realized what was going on, and figured out just why Keith wound up here - if not how.

A recovered Psi-Lord wasn't quite sure either, though he was sure the mental lock he'd installed in David's mind was the culprit. As they removed Keith's memories of them, the ESPeople momentarily pondered ending their seclusion, and taking a more active part in the world before it completely fell apart. They quickly discounted this idea, however, preferring to stay out in the boonies, where it was safe.

Keith, meanwhile, was left to wander the countryside, with no idea how he'd got there...!

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