I mentioned the class I dropped during the first week of this year’s schoolin’s, but I haven’t said anything about my other classes. Let’s do something about that. I’m taking a class that is about the history of Vampires.

I wouldn’t say I’m a big reader of vampire fiction. I’ve read Dracula, and I’ve read Salem’s Lot, and I’ve read the Tomb of Dracula comics, but that is probably about it. Still, it seems like an interesting enough topic. So here I am.

So far, I very much enjoy the class. The professor actually lectures! That may not seem like an exceptional thing, but far too many professors I have encountered try to have a dialogue with the class. They stop every five minutes to ask a question, or even just get them to finish a sentence. I get that they’re trying to draw things out of the students so that they have to actually think or whatever, but it always slows everything down. We get significantly more class when they don’t stop class every five minutes. I pay attention to the lectures, so the interminable nuisance. It’s nice to have something better for a change.

Still, though. There’s a lot of reading in this, and all of my classes. I made a real effort to keep up with all the readings this year, and with only three classes I thought I could do it, but I failed. I am already behind. To be truthful, it’s kinda disheartening. There’s plenty of ways, good and bad, that school makes me feel stupid, but none gets to me more than the repeated insistence that the more I read the quicker I should be able to read. I read a lot, but I am and always have been very slow at it. I shouldn’t take it so hard, after all, I skipped whole books I was supposed to read last year without hurting my grades, but it’s sad to me because I really did try and I really did fail.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve been failing to keep on top of Secret Government Robots again. This time, it is for a better reason: Kip and I are working on a pretty neat project (details will come in the future). I’m pretty excited about that, so pretty much any time I’ve had that was not already claimed by school, or work, or sleep, I’ve been spending on that. If I’ve now given up on trying to keep up on school readings, maybe I’ll have time to do that instead.

Dr. Gross

A brilliant scientist devoted to improving the human body, Dr. Gross’s experiments came to a tragic end when a simple accidental jab of a needle into her finger transferred a virus into her bloodstream. The virus took over her body and reworked her into a living, walking biomass. After some time, Gross’s mind reestablished control, though traumatized by the experience, and Gross took up her experiments again, this time hoping to find a way to reverse her condition. Unfortunately, doing super-science costs a lot of money, so she turned to crime to finance her experiments. Luckily, attempting to modify the human form in this way has given her a number of superhuman women to serve as her henchmen.

Rolling Chaos

Questa Simonson was homeless and perfectly willing to make some cash by signing up for strange experiments. Gross made her into Rolling Chaos, a cyborg who can transform into a compact vehicular form capable of dealing out immense damage. Being her first such experiment, Questa is Gross’s longest-serving and most loyal crook.

Distortia

One of Gross’s experiments resulted in a woman who now exists in a terrible state of flux. Bulging and pulsating seemingly at random, Distortia is frequently in constant pain, though that pain lessens when she focuses her power into other things, which inevitably tears them apart. Though she blames Gross for her fate, she stays with the team because of the hope that Gross will one day be able to reverse the condition.

Electrissa

Electrissa is the quiet one. With electric eel-style shock powers, and some aquatic mutations to go with it, she is a useful member of the team, but she doesn’t associate too closely with the others.

Ruinmaker

The woman now called Ruinmaker was the only of the Gross Girls who actively sought out Gross because she wanted superhuman powers. She got them. Ruinmaker is a deadly thing, strong and terrible, capable of healing extremely quickly. This kind of rapid cellular regeneration is of particular interest to Gross, who thinks it may be the key to finding her cure. Ruinmaker doesn’t really care. She just likes being the strongest.

In spite of the juvenile name, this is not a collection of characters I created in my youth (though there was a sketch of the one who became Rolling Chaos in my notes). I’m nearing the end of the Supervillain Sunday year and I wanted to use up a batch of the sketches that I didn’t have any particular idea, so I took a bunch and crammed them into this one team. Distortia, especially, was just a particularly poorly drawn sketch that I decided to go with anyway. But in the end, I used a bunch of sketches, and that is what is important.

Yorgok

Yorgok is a traveller from another dimension. A ten foot tall, monster-lookin’ guy, he wandered onto Earth one day through some kind of swirly portal that appeared in the air. Though his mission is purely one of exploration, he does not consider the living things on Earth to be his equal, so he treats us as we would treat ants. Armed with a super-powerful raygun, Yorgok goes about all manner of scientific surveys of the planet, happy to kill any humans who come too close.

I fully admit that the primary creative factor of this character is that I noticed that I hadn’t done a Super Sunday character that started with the letter Y. At the time of sketching, I didn’t feel like just making someone who was called “The Yellow Werewolf” or something easy like that, but apparently I was fine making up a gibberish name. Also, I am a fan of rayguns, so I threw one of those into the mix.

Seems like a cold-blooded alien scientist might be a good villain for a robot with a personality, like the Robotomaton.

The Verman

The Verman is a humanoid rat guy with a penchant for murder. As one might expect, he spends a lot of time hiding in sewers and other dark areas, only coming out to strike. The Verman seems to be of human-level intelligence, but makes no effort to communicate with humanity, so his origins and desires remain a mystery. He wears armor and uses weapons, but how he got them is unclear. The only thing anyone knows for sure about the Verman is this: he is dangerous.

The superhero Club Man was an exterminator in Ogretropolis, so he is perhaps the ideal opponent for this humanoid rat guy. A tough, but kinda dumb human versus tough, and unusually intelligent vermin.