Episode 254 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Prime Wardens Vol. 1 #171-173

I mean… I feel like, because of the power levels, that this would be less a Freedom Five thing and more a Prime Wardens thing. But overall, I think that’s either a Parse thing, a Soothsayer Carmichael thing, or an Expatriette thing.

RPG Wraith has d10 Investigation, d10 Deduction and Principle of the Detective, y’know. Think she’s qualified.

Can’t find an image in the Rook City Renegades Kickstarter right offhand, but isn’t her variant literally called Detective Wraith?

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Yep

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Okay, yeah, fair points, @Chief_Lackey_Rich and @Thunderbird. I suppose that I just don’t really think of the Wraith as a detective for some reason. Sure, she practices detection, but only under the larger umbrella of vigilantism/crime-fighting; not like NightMist, who’s actually a detective by profession.

Then again, Batman isn’t a detective by trade either, so I really don’t know where I’m going with this. I suppose that I may simply be trying to mentally differentiate the Wraith and Batman, as the former is inarguably the Sentinel Comics character that is most similar to a “real” comics character in my mind.

True, Expat is specialised in taking down powered peeps. Although I wonder how she’d fare trying to suss out the weaknesses of non-powered characters—say, Bunker or Mr. Fixer. Fairly well, I’d imagine.

And I suppose that Soothsayer C. does have the knowledge to do it, but I believe that he lacks the means—although he may be able to pull it off. Plus, he’s only really knowledgeable about things arcane in nature—he’d likely be at a complete loss trying to defeat, e.g., Captain Cosmic or Baron Blade.

If my memory serves me correctly, Miss Info did actually carry out a similar plot against the FF.

From WalkingTarget's notes of Episode #56:

This leads to a story where the heroes get a distress call from the old HQ (in the 10+ years since the Vengeful Five destroyed it it’s been rebuilt as a museum to the heroes). When the team arrives, they split up to cover more ground and the readers follow each in turn:

  • Tachyon - detail on her movement: she’s often moving so fast that it’s physically impossible to breath while doing so, which means that her movement includes very small interruptions, milliseconds long, during which she slows down to breathe - during her patrol of the building she turns a corner, slows down to breathe and gets a double-lungful of some gas that knocks her out (somebody planned for exactly the point at which she would have slowed down to breathe).
  • As Bunker is patrolling, the suit grinds to a halt. The internal monitors all go blank, then come back on with the Freedom Five logo in flames. Even the emergency escape hatch for the suit isn’t working and he’s trapped.
  • Wraith is sneaking down some access tunnel in the non-public parts of the museum when a laser grid comes online (she can see it with her infrared eyepiece). She reaches into a pouch to get some piece of gear that would let her deactivate this thing, but she pricks her finger on something in the pouch and she’s knocked out by the substance on the needle before she can even really register what’s happened.
  • Absolute Zero gets surprised by a trap door that drops him into a vat of water, which freezes instantly around him.
  • Legacy, walking through the Hall of Heroes (with animatronic representations of various major battles), has his Danger Sense activate as he’s passing the last exhibit - a Baron Blade bot has started laughing maniacally. When he realizes it’s just the animatronic display he’s relieved, but then the bot opens its hand to reveal that it’s holding some Regression Serum. As he’s being incapacitated by that, he’s hit by something heavy from behind and knocked out.
  • The heroes all wake up, still groggy, out in front of the building, confronted by a figure they haven’t seen before (see the Miss Information card “What Doesn’t Kill You…”). She monologues a bit, including a bit about how easy it would be to kill them right now, before dismissing them as not worth it right now, flicking her card at them, and walking off, back into the museum. As the heroes recover, they rush into the museum again to chase her, but find it operating normally again (no sign of the traps from earlier), with no sign of the newly revealed Miss Information.
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Well, according to Sentinels of Freedom (which I need to get back to, but that’s another story), she makes plans like that when she needs to calm down while Setback is… well, Setback. So she’s probably figured out a few ways for each of them. How many times has she probably redone the fight with Fixer, you suppose?

“Be efficient, be polite, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” Well… she has two of those.

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:grimacing::grimacing::grimacing:

Batman? AKA “World’s Greatest Detective”? Star of DC Comics? Formerly known as Detective Comics?

But yeah, that was a joke about “Stuntman/Batman can beat anyone… with enough prep time.”

I mean to say that it’s not his job. Yes, I do agree that he is a great detective, but it’s not his source of income. It’s an overly pedantic, hair-splitting distinction, I know.

Also, the answer to whether Batman can defeat someone isn’t how prepared he is, it’s whether the writer wants him to. : )

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I mean, that’s true of every fictional character ever. Even the ones who can break the Fourth Wall and directly threaten their creator with bodily harm to ensure they get their way are only able to do so with authorial permission, no matter what Guise or Deadpool may think. :slight_smile:

As for detectives, if we’re limiting it to people who actually work at it for a living, Ralph Dibny (who actually had a PI license at some points) and Detective Chimp both get to lord it over that Wayne dilettante. :slight_smile:

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