CODEX OMNIVERSA

Remember Hypertime?

Remember that all versions of history exist as branching “rivers” in Hypertime. When events cause a timeline to shift and new branches are created, histories can be forgotten, yet vague memories can bleed through to other timelines and histories.

An example of this phenomenon is a secondary team known as the Seven Soldiers of Victory (or Law’s Legionnaires.) In fact, it’s not as much a fixed team as it is a constant recurring narrative across realities. Add overlapping eyewitness accounts, legends, and myths, and events are real, but unstable.

During World War II, a group of seven heroes were brought together to combat a strange and poorly understood threat. This is one such story of their origin…

Seven Soldiers of Victory

When the cruel and cunning villain, the Hand, is told by his doctor that he has less than a month to live…

He gathers five other criminals, each to conduct a robbery, then places an ad in the newspaper challenging some of Earth’s champions to participate in the greatest criminal chase in history!

Of course, each hero foils the plans of the five villains; however…

As you would expect, the heroes survive the Hand’s traps and, while trying to electrocute them, he is killed himself. Ironically, he had just learned that a famous surgeon had discovered a way of treating cases like his… he could have been cured!

This version of the Seven Soldiers included the Crimson Avenger, Shining Knight, Star-Spangled Kid, Stripesy, Vigilante, and…

Green Arrow & Speedy

In this version of the legend, a plane crashed on Lost Mesa, a mountain of stone far away from civilization. Young Roy Harper and his father’s Native American servant, Quoag, survived; however, his father was killed. They were stranded for years, but Roy was happy. He put on weight and muscle, and learned to hunt with bow and arrow.

Meanwhile, Oliver Queen had used ten years of his adult life to assemble the finest collection of Native American lore the world has ever seen. There was little about Native American life he hadn’t mastered, including archery. But when his collection was destroyed in a fire during an attempted robbery, the only solution to his despair was to escape…

…to Lost Mesa, where he discovered the same thugs had beaten him there by an hour. Roy misunderstood Oliver for one of them, but they soon teamed-up to confront them. During the scuffle, Quoag was shot.

They discovered a cave full of gold and the bad guys were crushed under a statue. Oliver and Roy couldn’t help what happened, but it paid for Quoag’s murder.

They took names from comments the thugs made during their fight:

Watch out for the big guy! He shoots a mean green arrow!

Boy, that kid is really speedy!

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