Villains

How do you design a security system to oversee a containment facility full of superpowered test subjects? The Halcyon Security Corporation solved this problem by handing it to their R&D team's fledgling A.I. The Halcyon Systems R1 was wired into every facet of the company's secret testing complex. Over the years, it was continually upgraded to deal with the ever more powerful and bizarre denizens of the facility.

During the reign of R42, an uprising overcame its safeguards and led to a mass escape, leaving the facility in ruins. Fortunately, Captain Lincoln Reager, director of the project, had been preparing for such an eventuality. Halcyon-R43 was already near completion, and this version of the A.I. was fully independent of the facility's walls, housed inside a nimble, superdense alloy chassis, and armed with an array of weaponry going all the way up to "extremely lethal". The robot was not intended to take no for an answer.

Under the blanket of an experimental urban pacification initiative targeting dangerous "abnormals", Halcyon deployed the R43 to the outskirts of Guadalajara. Ploughing through walls and doorways in tireless pursuit of its prey, "the Ram" had soon recovered almost all of Halcyon's former captives. With only one test subject unaccounted for, the Ram showed no signs of slowing down...

1929 promo: Catchwater Harbor, 1929. Admiral Samuel Winters was overseeing a secret amphibious weapons program in the manufacturing district. On the brink of being canceled due to years of failed tests, Winters had resorted to corporate espionage, theft, and whatever other means he could think of: anything to get an edge and a working prototype. One morning, Winters' most trusted agent brought him the impossible: a glowing disk-shaped device with electronics so advanced they seemed to be from the future. That evening, Winters filed a string of fabricated progress reports to keep his superiors distracted, while secretly shuffling his best scientists to a hidden factory. He was convinced that the device, and its power source, were the keys to building the weapon he desired. And if it was half as powerful as he hoped, he saw no reason to share it with the government...