aberrantangels | This day in Trinity Universe history: return to the end of the beginning

1923
[Adventure!] (Maxwell Anderson) Mercer establishes the Æon Society for Gentlemen in Chicago. It serves as a worldwide coordinating office for Inspired adventurers and investigators of the paranormal, in furtherance of its larger goal — Mercer's drive to discover humanity's true potential, and to break down any obstacles in the way. Its seven charter members are Mercer himself, Primoris, Whitley Styles, Professor Dixon, Safari Jack, Crackshot (Annabelle Newfield), and Danger Ace.

I've already written a fair amount about Primoris, and some about Mercer as well, so I'll cover the other five here.

(The d20 edition of Adventure! lists Mercer first, but the others in more or less alphabetical order: thus Crackshot, Danger Ace, Dixon, Primoris, Whit [Styles] and Jack [Tallon]. For thematic purposes, I'll go with the order I used above, which I borrowed from the Storyteller System version.)

Whit was and is the essence of the Sidekick — the appendix of the Adventure! core rules likens him to Ikano Kato and John H. Watson. Before becoming Mercer's kid sidekick, he'’d spent ten years as a captive of the Thuggee, which culminated in him killing his biological father for the love of Kali. In 1918, Mercer went to India on the trail of his long-lost friend Roger Styles, arriving too late to save him but in time to turn Whit away from the Dark Mother's embrace. Mercer offered to help with Whit's legal battle against his father's business partner Uriah Stafford, but Whit refused, taking odd jobs from dockworker to detective. The Hammersmith Incident unlocked his psychic potential, making detection a much more lucrative career.

Benjamin Franklin Dixon (who preferred not to answer to those first two names) has rated a mention in these pages before, in the context of his ex-wife, Hephaestia "the Machinatrix" Geary-Wexler. I said that they were both lab assistants to Dr. Sir Calvin Hammersmith. I didn’t mention that Dixon turned the lab to aiding Britain’s defence effort in the Great War (he helped design the first tanks and develop remedies for mustard gas poisoning, among other things). I also didn’t mention that Dixon was the most utterly debauched scientist I’ve ever heard of, with an appetite for bootleg hooch and Cuban cigars in quantities that would cripple a lesser man.

Jake Stefokowski was about 18 when Æon was formed, six years older than he'd been when he lied about his age to fly with the Lafayette Escadrille. He could fly a plane like he was born with a throttle in his hand, and any landing he couldn’t walk away from, he’d stand a good chance of coming back from anyway.

Annabelle Lee Newfield was a circus brat, daughter of a contortionist and a beautiful acrobat. At 14, she was the youngest founding member of the Society (as well as the only female participant in that starting lineup). She could thread a needle with a bullet at a hundred yards, dodge that bullet after she fired it, and kill you with a runcible spoon the first time she ever picked one up.

Safari Jack Tallon, explorer of the wild places, was Max Mercer's boyhood hero. He had a heavy dose of White Man's Burden going on, but he acknowledged that the dark peoples of the world's dark places had things to teach Western civilization. After all, their "simple wisdom" (and wise herbal simples) were keeping him, in his 80s, as active as a man half his age or less.

So there you have it. Not quite the same pulp archetypes as Doc Brass and the Seven, but definitely pulpy and definitely archetypal.