#021 Support Squad
Being a big-time fancy shmancy internationally renowned superhero is a lot of work. Way more work than being just your average casually-stroll-around-the-same-six-blocks-in-your-neighborhood-hoping-someone-commits-an-easily-stoppable-crime-in-your-line-of-sight superhero. But you know what they say: if you’ve got great powers you’re basically morally responsible to do lots of good stuff with them. (If someone has a catchier way of saying this please, send a telegram.) Now all this added responsibility can be overwhelming for just one measly super person. It is conceivable that you’ll need help in accomplishing your goals of ridding the entire world of crimes. (A real hero would work tirelessly to dismantle and rebuild the social and political systems that create an environment where people even need to commit crimes, but whatevers, we’ll start small.) Which mean you’re going to need to start putting together your own superhero support squad.
The members of your support squad are the people you can count on to help you foil crimes and keep people safe. They’re the trainers who help you master your powers. They’re the omni-disciplinary scientists and engineers who build you cool super-gear. They’re the guys at base who quickly google the supervillains you come up against and help you devise the best way to stop them on the fly. (They’re the literate folk who quickly read through this handy dandy guide in order to help you get through situations such as infiltrating ancient temples, filling out insurance claims for your jetpack choir, and asking other heroes out on team-up adventures.) They’re the mechanics who help upkeep your fleet of hat-themed vehicles. They’re the tailors who design dynamic and striking (and comfortable and chic) costumes. They’re the doctors and police officers and firefighters [and lawyers] who often provide key assistance. They’re the random teenagers who one time stumbled upon your hideout by accident and since you can’t just make them disappear or lock them in a cell or something you have to give them something to do so they don’t go off and tell everyone about your secret (they’re basically like the unpaid college interns of the superhero world). A hero is only as good as the people who assist him or her in the heat of a battle. So making sure you have a good superhero support squad is key.
Now, since the most effective support squad is made up of people who actually know who you are it’s important to gather people who you know you can trust. Go through your close friends and acquaintances and see which of them might be useful. A good way to determine a friend’s viability as a member of your support squad is to give them some sort of quiz or questionnaire (quizstionnaire) that covers the following areas.
1. How big is your thirst for justice? a. I have no thirst. b. I have some thirst. c. I have a moderate to severe thirst. d. UNQUENCHABLE!!!! 2. How often do you reveal the deep dark secrets of your friends to the press? a. About once a month. b. Basically every month which has 31 days. c. Leap years. d. I never have and never will not even for a million billion bazillion dollars. 3. Do you know how to build a freeze ray on a budget? a. No. b. Uh… what kind of quiz is this? c. I can build a freeze ray but it will be obscenely, prohibitively, aggressively expensive. d. Yes. 4. If given the opportunity would you gladly spend all your time helping a superhero fight crime? a. Yes, gladly. b. No, can I go now? c. All of the above. d. Wait that last one doesn’t make any sense.
If none of your friends perform well on that quiz, or you’re just friends with incompetent people with no useful skills, you should start befriending people who will actually be useful. Once you’ve assembled the people you want on your team you need to actually take the time to mold them into a functioning unit. That means it’s camping time. Take the new squad on a team-building outdoors retreat where you all can do trust falls and tell each other your deepest darkest secrets and do practice supervillain attack drills. Have one of your new squadders play the role of a random supervillain and have the rest of your squad come together to come up with an effective strategy to defeat them. Keep repeating this with different squadders portraying different supervillains until you’ve developed a workable, timely, supervillain response system that you can confidently implement in the field.
Now, once you’ve gotten yourself a support-squad you need to take extra precautions against bad guys who seek to hurt you. Keeping the identities of the people on your squad safe and secret is just as important as keeping your own identity safe and secret. Assign everyone codenames that you can use over comms when you’re fighting. Stuff like “Googler” or “McTypey Pants” or, hell, just call them by the wrong normal people names. Call your official superhero electrician Donald something like “Matt” or “Diana.” Really as long as you’re just not calling them by their real names you’re golden. Advise your team not to put “superhero support team member” on their social media profile or on their resumes as cool as that might be. Because that will get them kidnapped, tortured and possibly killed by supervillains. Tell them not to put down “Captain Thunder” or “Nightron” as references when applying for jobs. If they still do it anyway be sure to give them a terrible reference so they don’t get the job and they learn not to pull that kind of thing again. At the same time also make sure everyone on your team has some sort of device that can alert you immediately if they are in danger. If one of your squadmates gets captured, you need to make rescuing them your top priority. Drop everything else to save your bud. If you can’t have favorites when saving people what’s even the point. Also if -worse comes to worst- one of your squaddies does crack under pressure and gives up your secret identity or the location of your hideout or your favorite guilty pleasure film, don’t hold it against them. You should’ve been there to protect them. You can’t bring a person into your secret crusade against crime and then not save them when they’re kidnapped and endangered because of it. Also like you should move. Your base is definitely compromised. Also check to see if your dude hasn’t been Trojan-Horsed into some kind of mind-controlled lackey or living bomb. Supervillains loooove their mind-controlled lackeys and living bombs.
Once you’ve put together a quality superhero support squad you’ll no doubt find that you’re able to operate as a better and more effective superhero. People perform better when they know someone has their back and having other people to assist with the parts of city-protecting or world-saving or galaxy-defending that you might not be best equipped to handle can only help things. Sure they might get annoying sometimes. You might need to get a bigger hideout. You might not all agree on the same type of music. Karen is allergic to peanuts and insists that nobody puts anything with peanuts in the team fridge. And also someone keeps stealing Karen’s lunch from the team fridge. Probably as revenge for the peanut thing. Maybe you should just invest in two fridges for your hideout. One with peanuts and one for Karen because she’s making things difficult but at the same time you’ve never seen a better mutant toucan trainer than her and it’s not like you’re going to give up your mutant toucan sidekick. Lots of little annoying things that you may need to deal with. But overall having a support squad means you can save more people and be better at doing it, and really isn’t that the whole point.