And now for the first team of mashup heroes, as they couldn’t still be called the Freedom Five (even though it ruins the alliteration)…
The Freedom Three
Shadow Patriot
Legacy + The Wraith
Maia Dana Parsons was the latest offspring of a superpowered family line that had protected the American people for generations. However, on one dark night before she had manifested her familial powers, Maia had been walking along the streets of Rookopolis City with her father and her boyfriend when a street gang jumped out from the shadows and attacked them. The gang used strange high-tech weapons to kill her father despite his superhuman capabilites. Her boyfriend was also killed in the struggle, but Maia managed to escape, albeit heavily wounded. After her hospitalisation and long recovery, Maia found that the trauma of that night had awakened her ancestral powers, but she also resolved that relying on her powers alone wouldn’t be enough. Her father had done that, and it had got him killed. So she dove into a rigorous training regimen to make herself into a better crimefighter. After years of her training, Maia Parsons finally felt ready to step into her family’s legacy and defend the innocent as the Shadow Patriot.
Shadow Patriot’s heritage grants her numerous superpowers, among them superhuman strength, speed, and toughness, as well as a special danger sense and the ability to fly. She uses these powers in conjunction with her training in martial arts, acrobatics, and forensic science, and the countless useful gadgets that she built herself for her crimefighting career. Maia Parsons always knows where she’s needed most in a fight, whether that’s leading from the front or striking from the shadows. She is able to fund her heroic efforts by discretely drawing tech from the company that she inherited from her parents, which she now runs.
Shadow Patriot has brown hair, and her costume consists of a purple and white leotard with a red lantern logo on the chest, a dark red utility belt, white bandages wrapped around her upper arms and legs and the lower half of her face, and indigo gloves, boots, and cape.
Notes: Deciding who to merge Legacy with was obviously an important choice. I could’ve gone with Tachyon, because she’s the only other Freedom Five member who doesn’t rely on tech for her powers, but ultimately I decided that merging the top two heroes of Sentinel Comics together made sense. And since both of their origins involved the death of a loved one (Wraith’s boyfriend and Legacy’s dad), I decided that it made sense to combine those two events into one, as well as making it the point of emotional trauma that awakens her powers.
Particle Beam
Bunker + Tachyon
After Meredith Emily Vance finished serving in her tour of duty, she resumed her scientific work as an employee of Eaken-Rubendall Laboratories. Not long after, she was contacted by her former Army superior and offered to work on the Personal Armament Exo-Chassis YS-1300T, a high-tech exo-suit that could do the work of an entire squadron of soldiers. Meredith agreed, and began work on the project. After some testing, it was also found that she was the only person that the Army had found who possessed the mental faculties needed to successfully pilot the suit. However, during one test for the suit, the failsafes for the Particle Yield Enhancing Wavelength (another one of Meredith’s projects) malfunctioned, and bathed her and the suit in tachyonic particles. Meredith found that both she and the suit had been changed by the accident: when she was hooked up to its systems, both her metabolism and the suit’s systems were sped up to extraordinary speeds. Shortly after the accident, Dr. Meredith Vance was approached by the heroic Shadow Patriot and offered the opportunity to put her newfound abilities to use as Particle Beam, thereby forming the superheroic Freedom Two.
Particle Beam’s suit hosts a variety of advanced weaponry and protective plating, and can dart about the battlefield at superhuman speeds. However, only Meredith Vance, who was caught in the same lab accident as the suit, is able to pilot it, as the experiment granted her the remarkably fast thought processes and reaction time needed to keep up with it, though those abilities are only active while she’s attached to the suit’s systems. Particle Beam’s speed and firepower are further complemented by her scientific and tactical genius.
Particle Beam’s supersuit is a sleek, tan and white full-body suit, with a white torso and legs and tan arms and helmet, and a glowing red circle on the chest and glowing red rings on her thighs and sides. The helmet includes red-tinted HUD goggles. Underneath the suit, she usually wears a simple white tank top and keeps her light brown hair up in a ponytail. When she runs while wearing the suit, red lightning crackles around her.
Dr. Meredith Emily Vance is married to Maia Dana Parsons, also known as the superheroic Shadow Patriot. The two grew close after years of working together as members of the Freedom Three and spending time together in their base’s mechanical shop, as Meredith worked on her suit and Maia on her gadgets.
Notes: So after deciding to merge Wraith and Legacy, I thought that it made sense to finish off the original Freedom Four quartet by merging Bunker and Tachyon before throwing in any newcomers like AZ or Unity. As for her name: a tachyon is a particle, and Bunker’s all about guns, so a phrase that combined those things seemed logical. Also, by the way, Particle Beam’s suit is a person-sized suit that she actually wears, not a big ten-foot-tall thing that she pilots like the Bunker suit, mainly because the idea of a suit that huge running around at superspeed just seemed a bit too silly to me. The decision to make Particle Beam only have access to her superspeed while in the suit is both because I think it makes her powers more cohesive and because it retains Bunker’s status of not having access to powers full-time.
Of course, merging Wraith+Legacy and Bunker+Tachyon meant that Shadow Patriot and Particle Beam inherit Wraith and Bunker’s romantic relationship. But that then presented the problem of what to do with Emily Parsons and Dana Bertrand, the already existent romantic partners of Legacy and Tachyon? The solution I decided on was to merge Dana with Wraith+Legacy and Emily with Bunker+Tachyon, in order to retain those relationships. This explains the two characters’ middle names, if that was confusing to anyone, as well as the fact that they’re stated to be married, rather than just dating like Bunker and Wraith. Also, I guess that this means Shadow Patriot is also a part-time model and Particle Beam a part-time senator, somehow? 
Snow-Shaper
Absolute Zero + Unity
Things were going great for Devra Frost until her fiancee died in a tragic car crash and she spiralled into depression. After the tragedy, she lost the internship to Dr. Meredith Vance of Eaken-Rubendall Laboratories that she had gotten on the strength of her mechanical skills, and had to take a job as a janitor at the Pike Cryogenics Laboratory. However, not long after Devra began working there, she was caught in a cryonic explosion. Her mangled body was brought to Dr. Vance, who operated on it and managed to save her, but the explosion had left Devra’s body at absolute zero temperatures permanently. It also activated some latent technopathic powers that she had possessed since birth. Now requiring a temperature-controlled suit to operate out of her cryo-chamber, Devra Frost was offered the option to join the Freedom Two as Snow-Shaper to pay off the suit’s cost, making it the Freedom Three.
Snow-Shaper’s unique thermal situation allows her to freeze moisture in the air into ice, and her latent technopathic abilities let her manipulate any metallic materials. She combines these powers to create robotic golems composed out of equal parts metal and ice. She also uses her technopathic power to modify her suit on the fly, and when left with no other suitable materials, she can even rip parts off of it to transform into a bot. And if her icy robots fail her, she can fall back on simple blasts of cold.
Snow-Shaper’s cryo-suit is a flexible pink and black full-body suit, with a pink torso, gloves, and helmet, and black arms and legs. It has a glowing blue triangle symbol on the chest, a transparent blue faceplate, and blue apertures on the palms. Outside of the suit, Devra has pale blue skin and black hair, and wears a pink and white tank-top and pink bandana.
Devra Frost resumed her internship to Dr. Meredith Vance after joining the Freedom Three, though she often takes a more spontaneous approach to science than Dr. Vance would like. The two are also close personal friends, however, as they’ve bonded during the long hours when Particle Beam was working in her laboratory adjacent to Devra’s cryo-chamber.
Snow-Shaper’s relationship with Shadow Patriot is a bit more strained, as Devra often clashes with her leadership, disobeying orders and trying to do her own thing. However, Devra has learned to respect Maia over time for her leadership, conviction, and insight.
Notes: Having merged the four initial members of the Freedom Four together, it seemed logical to merge the remaining member of the Freedom Five with the team’s closest ally. Also, merging AZ+Unity is interesting to me because they both have a close connection to Tachyon, so that Snow-Shaper is both Particle Beam’s intern and close friend. And I decided to have the cryo-explosion awaken her Unity-powers instead of her having them earlier to make her transition into a hero more of a single event.
