Eternal Patriot

PERSONAL

Gender: Male

Kit: Super

Location: Barter City, Maryland

AFFILIATION

Alignment: Hero

Team: Solo Heroes

VITAL STATS

Strength: supreme (rank 3)

Agility: standard (rank 1)

Mind: standard (rank 1)

Body: supreme (rank 3)

Spirit: (rank )

Charisma: (rank )

RECORD

Fame Points: 0

Personal Wins: 0

Personal Losses: 1

Team Wins: 0

Team Losses: 0

Tourney Wins: 0

Tourney Losses: 0

STATUS

Status: Active

DeoJusto

I saw the latest Talbot kid today. If I needed any further proof that leaving was the right decision, he was it. That said; he still managed to surprise me with some glimmer of the old Infinium’s true passion.

Most of the children they call agents at Pinkerton McKenna want to know how I won the battle against Übermensch. They want to know what it was like to run through turret fire on the beaches of Normandy, to liberate Berlin for American occupation. We as a nation are still obsessed with that war, and if people want to know where I was during it, I’m willing to tell them.

That said, every now and again I get asked about what Pinkerton-McKenna has done since the war. I usually don’t answer these questions, because the people that ask those questions do not want my answer. McKenna’s flying mascot is the company golden child, it’s her job to clear up everything labeled ‘PR bullshit’.

But the Talbot kid didn’t care about World War Two, and he didn’t care about the Post-Human Beta-Boom. He cared about Infinium and why I splintered off like Lucifer from Heaven. I felt like I owed it to his forefathers to make sure he at least knew the whole story before I ripped his little power-armor suit in two.

 

Despite what he was told, I did not cause the split, though I understand why it was told that way. To conspiracy theorists I cast a very believable villain. In the end it wasn’t up to me, it was inevitable.

Infinium couldn’t protect the world anymore, because there was no world, there were nations. A secret cabal of self-ordained defenders could not keep modern armies from marching to the First World War, and even if they could, there wasn’t much agreement that they should.

Silver Bullet, the second in a long line of diluted descendents from the Brass Man, felt that Germany was to blame. The Kaiser’s chosen super-soldier disagreed. Surprising, I know. Übermensch informed the Limey Brit that Germany had to act to protect Austria, and he informed him while keeping a fist around his throat. The phantom Vimes, ever the detective, pointed out that it was the fault of a single Serbian anarchist and that everything else was the result of bad alliances and empires that had been lusting for war for over a century.

But they were all wrong, no one was to blame, no one could have stopped the inevitable. America had to rise out of the ashes that was Europe, so first it had to burn. To me this is clear, the war was more than inevitable. For our nation it was necessary.

However the most Infinium could agree upon was total neutrality. There was a war going on, nations were bleeding, and the bravest thing they could think of was to stay at home smoking pipes. Another step in their slide to irrelevancy, and it worked about as well as you’d think. Meanwhile I was busy inhaling mustard gas, ready to die for my country.

 

Unstoppable Soldier

     Iron Will: supreme (rank 3)

 

But I didn’t die. Everyone else did, and if they didn’t, it was worse. But after the gas attack I still had my vision, so I kept fighting. After a mortar shell blasted the fourth trench I still had my legs, so I kept fighting. Everyone else was dead, the charge had failed, but I didn’t know what other choice I had.

The Eternal Patriot had not been born yet; I was aimless, untrained, unready. Luckily my lack of experience was matched by youthful stubbornness; they had killed my brothers and it was my duty to keep fighting till I died. But I couldn’t die, so I really only had the one choice.

Bullet was the one who found me face down in no-mans land. He said he found the German’s first, the ones I had met earlier. He stepped over their torn and cracked corpses to find where I had passed out from exhaustion.

I won’t glorify my role after my powers revealed themselves; Bullet called me the ‘Meat Shield’. But we won the war, so it doesn’t matter . But then again, we didn’t really, did we? We just created a long cease fire. I’d return to Germany in thirty years, but I wouldn’t be the same man who left it.

 

Tireless Enforcer

     Flight: superior (rank 2)

 

After the war, Infinium was pointless, or at the very least it was purposeless. There was no grand conspiracy to foil, no world crisis to repel, and across the globe colonial forces were still holding onto their conquests. In Europe, Socialism, Fascism, and Communism were beginning to creep into the minds of restless populations unwilling to accept what the war had supposedly settled. In America, our biggest problem was whiskey.

Bootlegging was treason, and it’s not hard to see why. An organized attempt to undercut the laws of the United States is a direct attempt to undercut the authority of the democracy that enacted those laws. If only the rest of Infinium understood that, then I could have simplified their punishment to the level a traitor deserves. Fortunately that’s where Jim McKenna and the Pinkerton army made themselves useful.

I met James McKenna when we were both 31, and I saw him die forty years ago when we were both 78. On both occasions he stank of tobacco ash, and was wearing the same sun-cracked Stetson. When we first met he handed me a smoke and said he had a solution to my bootlegger problem; we became friends soon after he proved his word.

The Pinkertons had worked with us before on occasion. They saved Lincoln’s life more than once, and had assisted with the little show he put on at Ford’s Theater. However Infinium broke ties with them over the Homestead problem, so Jim and I had to work together under ‘semi-official’ means. Within nine-months of our first hello, sixty bootleggers, racketeers, and pimps were dead. Some died of bullet wounds, others were found splattered on the pavement after a long fall. Officially the Pinkerton agents were the only ones with a license to kill, so Jim got very good at telling the press that after a long chase some guys just jump. Hell, some times he could even do it with a straight face.

In this time, things got better for us. We started setting out to intentionally find post-humans who could be useful as agents, offering them more money than God, then handing them a badge. Things sort of worked from there. But that’s also where the old order started to take notice.

 

Relentless Crusader

     Super Speed: standard (rank 1)

 

Their fancy little sect was founded to safeguard humanity's right to continuous growth, momentum and progression. That meant protecting this nation’s unique destiny as the world power; they just weren’t ready to see it that way.

Vimes came to talk to me about the possibility that I might be crossing the line. I had recently begun to take on more than the usual amount of government assignments through Jim’s old friend of a friend. He had a lot of those, but J. Edgar was the best friend of a friend you could have. I was still hunting down bad guys, but merely taking orders from the Bureau and Jim McKenna.

Still, after the troubles during the war, the old guard was wary of making ties with a single national government. But I wasn’t working for one of the new communist or fascist psychopaths that they had allowed to flourish in the Old World. I was working for the only beacon of human progress that still existed in our time. They had no right to accuse me of forgetting our mission.

Soon after his warning, Vimes implored me to send Pinkerton McKenna’s Post-Human regiment to assist with the growing conflict in Spain. I didn’t have to, the Agency was another ‘semi-official’ part of Infinium, but I agreed anyway. I thought that we would be there to stabilize the region. However, Vimes neglected to mention that my true purpose was to reign in the crazd old kraut. Übermench had been sent in by Germany to prop up that Spanish disgrace, and they needed someone who could take his punishment. Nobody talks bad about the Meat Sheild when they need him.

But I did more than withstand him, I almost killed him; I should have too. We utterly demolished La Paloma Plaza in Madrid. He was stronger, maybe tougher even, but I wasn’t the same unready infantryman who he had met over a decade before. It was hard but after awhile he just couldn’t keep up and lost his edge. The Talbot of that generation stopped me just before I could impale the aging bastard on the spire of the Cathedral Almudena.

And that’s where the split really happened. It was before the War, before things got real bad. But it was the right decision; like the one previous, that war had to happen. We shouldn’t have been trying to stand in its way, and we shouldn’t have been fighting for peace. The perpetual motion of humanity is only possible in a world that represents the best it has to offer. Nazi Germany could not be broken down by a cloak and dagger society hidden in shadows. It had to be conquered by the only nation able to single-handedly lift the mantle of responsibility.

The Old Infinium continued in the shadows, while the outcasts, myself included, were annexed as an extension of the Pinkerton National Detective agency.

 

Eternal Patriot

     Regeneration: superior (rank 2)

 

And then it goes on and on in a story that even that Talbot kid knows. The Old Infinium worked in the background, making failed assassination attempts on the Führer and preventing his occult monstrosities from entering our world. Meanwhile the US Marines charged Normandy beach alongside the Pinkerton Agency’s post-human regiment and their newest icon, the Eternal Patriot. Mensch got killed, I left him to rest in peace under 30 tons of collapsed Nazi bunker.

Since then I have fought in conflicts on every continent, against Nationalists, Communists, Fundamentalists, and every other kind of ‘ists’. The Pinkertons, now rightfully known as The Pinkerton-McKenna Security Agency, are the largest employer of super-powered individuals in this country. People don’t always like what we do, but they’re glad someone does it.

Things have changed. I consider us to be the spiritual successor to Infinium, if not the acknowledged one. We fight for the cause of the perpetual motion of humanity, an ideal that is impossible without the United States of America, because that is America. And as long as I’m still here, I will continue to keep fighting for it. And I’ll always be here.