BACKGROUND
The Challenger-Wildeman family are a combination of the Wold Newton Family (genealogy as discussed in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life by Philip José Farmer) and Green Ronin’s Threat Report 51; The Atom Family.
In M&M the current generation of the Atom Family consists of four siblings with superpowers. Their parents, Andrea Atom and Mentac (from the Farsider royal family) were lost, fighting in the Terminus Invasion. Their grandfather, Dr. Atom, exists as a disembodied intelligence inside a holographic computer matrix. Jack Wolf, Dr. Atom’s former ward, is the Atom siblings’ guardian and mentor.
In the Balance Universe there are six children and twins run in the family. Although all are Meta-human, something they have been very open about, their specific powers and abilities are not publicly known or shown. The Threat Report details the powers of the four oldest siblings.
FAMILY HISTORY & GENEALOGY
Maximus (Max) is the oldest at 19, Tesla (Tess) is 18, and the twins Victoria (Vicky) and Verne are 16 with the clones of their parents Andrea (Andi) and Sharik (Rikk) aged 6.
The world-famous Challenger-Wildeman Family is made up of adventurers and explorers who investigate strange phenomena and threats to the safety of the UK and the world.
The family currently consists of the six “grand-children” of Dr. Alexander Challenger-Wildeman, their friend and legal guardian Jack Wolfe, their protector Nani and their grandfather’s intellect, maintained within the computers of their headquarters and downloaded into the robotic Alex, atop the Romaine Wharf Building in London.
The history of this most unusual family officially begins with the Victorian adventurer Professor George Edward Challenger, his son Edward and his grandson Dr. Alexander Challenger, a renowned scientist and adventurer in the late 1940’s and 1950’s.
Dr. Challenger explored lost and hidden civilizations in various parts of the world. He often found dire threats to humanity — unbelievable wonders like the dinosaur-filled “Lost World” in South America, the undersea Protectorate of Lyonesse or first encounter in modern times with the Aerie.
Dr. Challenger and his allies also protected the world from threats it didn’t even know existed. During World War II, Dr. Challenger worked on occasion with the mystical superhero Albion as a scientific advisor.
After the war, he met and fell in love with Marie Vervaine, a daring French Nazi hunter. Their affair was a brief, passionate one, until Marie died fighting Nazi war criminals in South America. In revenge, Dr. Challenger destroyed the Fourth Reich Network responsible.
The heartbroken Dr. Challenger threw himself into his work, and this decade of furious activity and invention excluded nearly everyone save Anne Wildeman, a young brilliant scientist in her own right, who became his laboratory assistant, then partner, and eventually his wife. Anne said she had to pursue her husband “with relentless determination,” but in the end she got the brilliant but emotionally blocked scientist to realise what he had right in front of him.
Their daughter Andrea grew up with her mother’s beauty, analytical skills and tenacity and her father’s scientific brilliance and sense of adventure.
The Challenger-Wildeman’s later took in Jack Wolfe, the son of one of Alexander’s friends, an astronaut lost on an early orbital mission. Jack was just a year older than Andrea, and the two of them became close friends.
Anne Challenger-Wildeman subsequently succumbed to cancer, despite her husband’s valiant efforts to save her. Dr. Challenger-Wildeman continued to raise his daughter and foster son alone but too often buried himself in his research. He began to study robotics and computers more in-depth, building robotic playmates and nannies to help care for Andrea and Jack.
While attending Cambridge University Andrea saw the performance of a “mentalist” and escapologist named Scott Free, who debunked psychic research. When she also discovered Scott Free had actual psychic powers, she confronted him to find out his story. Scott Free explained he pretended to be a stage mentalist and debunker as a way for him to find con-artists as well as true paranormals who abused their abilities and bring them to justice. Andrea introduced Scott Free to her father and he began a long association with the Challenger-Wildeman Family.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the quartet of Dr. Challenger-Wildeman, Andrea, Scott Free, and Jack Wolfe explored strange phenomena and fought many menaces, about which the world never learned. Andrea became more and more attracted to the mysterious and aloof Scott Free, while Jack silently carried a torch for the lovely Andrea.
Dr. Challenger-Wildeman, of course, remained largely unaware of the romantic entanglements of his young protégés. Scott Free finally told the Challenger-Wildeman Family his real name was Sharik and he was an exiled Prince from Shroud Citadel, located inside Cruithne, Earth’s second moon.
They confronted Sharik’s mother, Lady Selene and Sharik’s twin brother Prince Mentac, and overthrew her despotic control of the underground city. An admirer of the ideals of democracy, Sharik elected to abdicate his throne and helped install a democratic government elected by the people.
In the midst of the celebrations, he also finally admitted his feelings for Andrea, and they married a year later. Jack Wolfe elected to leave his foster-family, heartbroken over losing Andrea, and spent some time working as a mercenary in various parts of the world.
Dr. Challenger-Wildeman began his own battle with cancer. He kept the extent of his condition a secret, but Andrea discovered the truth some time later.
Andrea and Sharik had their first child six months after they were married, a boy they named Max. Three others followed: Tess, and the near identical fraternal twins; Vicky and Verne.
It was subsequently discovered that the young Challenger-Wildeman children were all mutants, whether because of their father’s unearthly heritage and psychic abilities, their mother’s various adventures, or their parents’ exposure to so many strange and unusual locales. Like most mutations, the exact cause remains unknown, but the Challenger-Wildeman kids each possess superhuman powers.
Helping raise the children is a dimension-hopping seven foot tall human variant of Homo Oblitus Gigantopithecus known only as Nani that had been rescued from the Canadian wilderness a few years before and subsequently elected to stay with the family.
Disaster struck London when Omega, the Lord of Terminus, invaded Earth in 2009. While Dr. Challenger-Wildeman worked to save the city and close the Terminus breach from this reality, Andrea and Sharik dove into the Terminus portal to try and keep Omega from emerging. They left the children in the care of the house robots on the lowest and only undamaged floor of the Challenger’s building at Romaine Wharf.
Andrea and Sharik failed to stop Omega’s emergence and appeared to be vaporised by the mad god’s power. Distracted during the crisis, Dr. Challenger-Wildeman helped the heroes defeat Omega and reseal the dimensional warp. Dr. Challenger-Wildeman’s health began to fail due to exhaustion from the invasion and grief over the loss of his daughter and son-in-law.
Refusing to leave his grandchildren alone in the world, he asked Jack Wolfe to become their legal guardian. As a final experiment, Alexander Challenger-Wildeman transferred his intellect and memories into a holographic computer system as his body finally gave out and died.
The decision was also taken by the family (though reluctantly by Jack) to come out publicly about the children’s genetic heritage in the hope that it would help others to better deal with mutants.
A few years ago, a signal was received from the Challenger Estate. When the Challenger-Wildeman family investigated they found a hidden room that was unknown to “Grandpa” and Uncle Jack – inside was a cloning facility which subsequently decanted two young children apparently aged three. The boy named himself Sharik (shortened by the others to Rikk) while the girl called herself Andi. The pod had apparently grown the children from genetic material obtained from Andrea and Sharik but had somehow enhanced Andi’s genetic structure making her a mutant (Sharik already had psychic powers) and the Gen5 monitoring system had educated them while they were developing in the pod.
The decision was taken by Jack and “Grandpa” to adopt the clones and raise them alongside their genetic offspring. Although the children know that Andi and Shari are technically clones of their parents, they treat them as their very annoying younger brother and sister.
“Uncle Jack” acts as the kids’ legal guardian and teacher, aided by a holographic representation of Dr. Challenger-Wildeman (affectionately known as “Grandpa” though Jack still insists on calling him Doctor).
Dr. Challenger-Wildeman can manifest his mind briefly inside the A.L.E.X. robot if he needs to act physically instead of manipulating things inside the computer, but this puts a strain on the android’s systems and the integrity of the doctor’s holographic matrix. The rest of the time A.L.E.X. runs on a pseudo-personality program.
The majority of the families’ income comes from Dr. Challenger-Wildeman’s patents and inventions which are paid directly to the Challenger-Wildeman Foundation who then pay all of the family expenses directly.
The Challenger-Wildeman siblings are still young, and prone to getting into the same sorts of trouble other young people manage to find. Still, despite their relative youth, they’ve been dealing with the unusual from childhood and know what they’re doing. In fact, it’s the everyday-life quandaries that are far more difficult for the Challenger-Wildeman’s, whether dating, asserting one’s independence, or simply making new friends outside of the superhuman community. They are also friends with the teams’ patron, the 13 year old emancipated Bethany Dalton who acted as the teams initial link to the family.
FAMILY PETS
Andi’s Miniature velociraptor ‘Guardian’ – Flossie
Rikk’s Anola (alien simian) – Cosmic
SHARIK’S FARSIDE
In M&M Farsiders are an offshoot of humanity living in Farside City on the far side of Earth’s Moon. Farsiders are a human offshoot settled there by the Preservers thousands of years ago.
In the Balance Universe Shroud Citadel is located inside Earth’s second ‘moon’ Cruithne, an Aten asteroid in orbit around the Sun in 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth. Cruithne is approximately 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) in diameter, and its closest approach to Earth is approximately thirty times the separation between Earth and the Moon. It has been synchronised with Earth’s orbit for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no danger of a collision with Earth for millions of years.
Cruithne was the site of a secret Ancients base from which they organised their slave raids on Terra and genetic experimentation on humans and other sub-races. When the Ancient’s fled, they left several consignments of humans, sub-races and mutates behind – sufficient for a viable colony to develop. When the Ancients left, the humans survived thanks to the bases’ AI Guardian, force shielding, teaching machines and atmospheric /food generators through to the present day but were forced by the City’s AI to limit their population so as to not exceed available resources.
ZANDAR CHALLENGER
The South American ‘Lost World’ plateau with its migrating dinosaurs and tribes of hominids was first discovered by Professor George E. Challenger on a near inaccessible Venezuelan Tepui (subsequently named after his companion Professor Summerlee). The Plateau turned out to be linked by a randomly switching one-way teleportation gate between the planet Zorandar and Earth.
Professor Challenger’s second expedition (with his son Edward) in the 1920s revisited the Tepui and this time they accidentally crossed over to Zorandar, trapping them there. That’s when they discovered that aliens had apparently visited the Earth millennia before had transferred dinosaur (and other now extinct creatures) to this reserve world, a planet where Smilodons existed alongside T. Rex.
The discovery of tribes of humans and previously thought extinct hominids on Zorandar convinced the expedition that two-way travel between the two worlds was possible and they eventually discovered the City of the Koram and the Gateway of the Gods.
Whilst travelling through the lands of the Forgotten People, Edward had a relationship with their Goddess-Princess Kiddagakaish Nedaakh who subsequently gave birth to a son subsequently named Alexander Challenger.
As a result of this ‘desecration’ of her divinity, Edward and his father were exiled from Zorandar; Edward took his baby son, Alexander with him when he returned to Earth having arrived at another gate on Earth that came out amongst the Aerie.
Unknown to Edward, Kidda had actually given birth to twins – the boy (Alexander Challenger), was given to his father (tradition was that male offspring of the Forgotten were abandoned to die in the jungle), he was never told that she had also had also given birth to a twin daughter, Dwaakh, keeping the girl-child secret until he had left Zorandar. Dwaakh was raised by her mother to be a warrior princess of the People.
Back on Earth when his father Edward enlisted and subsequently died in the Spanish Civil War, he was raised by his grandfather Professor George Challenger and his wife Jessie who he considered his “real” mother.
Back on Zorandar, when Dwaakh was twenty she was captured and raped by the Warlord. She subsequently escaped and hid in the jungle where she led the rebels in their guerrilla war against the Warlord’s Empire. Hiding the fact from her mothers’ tribe that she had survived, she secretly gave birth to a son that she abandoned in a cave before attempting to return to the City, only to be ambushed and killed by the warlord’s soldiers enroute.
The abandoned child was found by a tribe of Sasquatch (later identified as being Homo Oblitus or ‘Forgotten Man’) who raised him. However, when he was about ten the Warlord’s men found the tribe and exterminated them, leaving him again alone to look after himself.
He found his grandfather’s camp near the waterfall and a journal about their journey. Having taught himself to read he subsequently named himself Zandar. He does not know that he is related to Kidda, though the Challenger-Wildeman family are aware he is kin due to DNA tests they managed to carry out when they met him.
Kidda is still alive and living in the City of the Forgotten People. Kidda does not appear to age and still looks to be in her early 20s. Kidda has met her great-grandchildren but has only shown an interest in her great-granddaughters, ignoring her great-grandsons. She cannot understand why the females show any loyalty to inferior males.
OTHER SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE
JANET HILDA WILDEMAN – Maternal great-grandmother and Wiccan Grand Priestess. Lives at Wilde Rose House – in the countryside near the market town of Camside.
JAYNE MASON (social worker) is a shy person who, although she has a crush on Jack, is seriously worried about Jack’s guardianship of the four younger children in particular and feels that Jack puts the children at significant risk and fails to protect them properly. She has tried to take the family to court on at least two occasions to have the children taken into care for their own protection. This has failed because of the family’s legal skills and because there is no doubting Jack’s total devotion to all of the children and their affection to him in return. In the end, Jack arranged for himself and his family to have diplomatic immunity (and dual nationality from the sunken kingdom of Lyonesse) thus rendering any further legal action impossible in future, but Jack did agree to allow Ms Mason to continue to monitor the children to ensure their safety, education and wellbeing.
Jack is completely unaware that Ms Mason is interested in him and treats her as a necessary nuisance in the family’s life.
BILL, ANGELA AND TERRY (security guards) they each provide security on the public entrance to Romaine Wharf on a 12 hour rota. Although there are others who also provide holiday cover, these three are the regular staff and have developed a personal loyalty towards their employers, the Challenger-Wildeman family and will do everything within their powers to ensure the family is not inconvenienced or harassed.
HOUSEBOTS – Gen4 Pseudo-Intelligent (PI) Robots designed by C-W Tech.
The Gen4 Pseudo-intelligence allows the ‘bots to learn tasks, undertake independent action and to develop unique personalities consistent with their programming. Each ‘bot carries a full sensory suite including recording and analysis equipment stored in the ‘head’ unit, the primary CPU is located in the chest. The unit stands 1m in normal pose but can extend itself upright to 1m 80 and is extremely stable, standing on two digitigrades legs and are able to negotiate stairs with ease.
There are variouis different manipulator limbs on the chest complete with a number of additional analysis tools and secure data connections.
The Doctor’s (and Al’s) personal assistants are referred to as Moe, Larry and Curly.
Their General Research ‘bots used throughout the Nucleus are designated Groucho, Chico and Harpo.
The housebots designed to look after the children and maintain the Cube are designated Huey, Dewey and Louie.
Additional ‘bots work in the Crucible research labs at Romaine Wharf and outside are Alf (Alpha2), Betty (Beta2), Gammy (Gamma2) and Del-boy (Delta2) and the Epsilon designated robots designed for research work at the Artefact Research Centre are referred to as Newton, Einstein, Hawking, Schrödinger, Curie and Payne.
THE CHALLENGER-WILDEMAN OFFICIAL NEWSFEED, FAMILY BLOGS & INTERNET RADIO STATION
To reduce unwanted attention from Paparazzi, The decision was made to release edited highlights of their adventures (gathered from their accompanying video drones and vid-cams built into their costumes) to the media by their own news company (though Max and Tes’ still aren’t comfortable about being in the news).
As well as providing additional income this allows AL to be able to negotiate with news organisations by offering them access to the material in return for not buying or printing stories about the children’s personal lives that hasn’t been edited and agreed by AL first. Most papers and TV channels have agreed to the deal so the majority of press stories about the family are about their adventures, though the Daily Mail and the Sun have elected to not sign up to the deal and still try and run personal stories on the family (though unauthorised pictures have become rare since Tesla developed an anti-photo field which has been fitted into their suits) though the family has never forgiven the Sun for running a countdown calendar until Tesla became “legal” on her sixteenth birthday! The Sun’s editor was punched out by Jack over that incident.
There are also a series of official blogs each supposedly written by each of the older children themselves but usually ghost-written and edited by AL. There is also a children’s website.
He also runs an internet radio for “fun” (branded as Radio Argos) which has a large audience both for its wonderful blend of music and its debate shows on superheroes and mysterious events around the world all run by various of AL’s persona’s (which has resulted in a number of adventures to discover the truth behind the more mysterious reports).
FAMILY BUSINESSES
CHALLENGER-WILDEMAN FOUNDATION
Registered charity, funded by the various family businesses which support mutant integration and inter-racial co-operation between races as well as funding the families’ adventures. It also acts as the governing trust overseeing Claremont Academy.
CHALLENGER-WILDEMAN TECHNOLOGIES (C-W Tech)
Specialising in building custom-built technology such as non-lethal weaponry, shielding technology for buildings, psychic shields as well as pseudo-AI and Gen5 computer systems to the superhero community.
CHALLENGER NEWS SYNDICATE
Specialising in stories, photos and video feeds of superheroes in general and the adventures of the Challenger-Wildeman family in particular.
ARC (Artefact Research Centre)
Pure research facility set up by Doctor Challenger-Wildeman to research and monitor the unusual including charting and monitoring spatial gates and paratime anomalies as well as researching and securely storing powerful artefacts. ARC is used by a number of agencies around the world to carry out independent research and testing.
METAMORPHIC MOLECULES (marketed as Morph Garments)
Dr. Challenger-Wildeman invented metamorphic molecules in the 1980s to serve the needs of the growing superhuman population. They provided the basis for an adaptive fabric, able to stand up to a wearer’s superpowers. The patent on metamorphic molecules has earned Dr. Challenger-Wildeman a fortune, as has outsourcing manufacturing custom-designed costumes from the material. Most superhero costumes are made from metamorphic molecules.
(This alone costs no equipment points: it’s an assumed capability of costumes in the setting.)
Members of the Challenger-Wildeman Family each have their own metamorphic molecule bodysuits. The suits can be programmed to reshape themselves as required by the wearer. There are also receiver circuits embedded in the suits, allowing them to use any part of a suit’s surface (usually the forearm sleeve) as a display screen for two-way communication.
HIDALGO TRADING Ltd.
Worldwide trading company specialising in the unusual and exotic (many sourced from alien worlds or parallel worlds though not traded as such) as well as acting as the distribution arm of C-W Tech.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 