Villain incarceration and transportation

These days, the technology behind keeping supers imprisoned is pretty good. It wasn't always like that. In fact, "villains can escape from jail a week after capture" is such a persistent meme thanks to decades of poor understanding of super-biology and lack of experience.

Chemical restraints

The current state of the art in super incarceration is chemical restraint. These are drugs, either "generic" or tailored to an individual (or set of powers), that inhibit the use of one or more super-powers. Part of the goal of the Transhuman Capability Catalog was to track the specific mechanisms behind powers. Based on this information, companies like Persona and Pfizer are able to synthesize suppression drugs.

The use of these drugs has been evaluated for constitutionality in many of the circuit courts within the United States. No legal challenge has reached the Supreme Court as of yet, and it's doubtful that they would hear one - there's too much at stake to meddle with something that's working.

The actual administration of these drugs depends on the super. Some are ingested with food, others are injected, and others are delivered as an aerosol in the prisoner's cell. The drugs can take effect anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours after delivery, and could be effective for hours or days. The first and second generation of power suppressors are now off the market since it was proven that almost all supers would develop a tolerance and eventual immunity to their effects.

Occasionally a prison will experiment with attaching collars containing suppression drugs to their super-inmates. The goal is to create a system that maintained the suppression while also allowing the inmate to roam around the complex with less supervision.

Physical restraints

Supers who are unable to break out of a jail cell, one way or another, are pretty rare. That said, some do exist. Most prisons would prefer their existing cells to an expensive drug deal with Big Pharma, so there's a fair amount of competition for "easy" villains.

Prisoner transfers

When a villain needs to be moved - to another facility, or to stand trial, or something similar - it's a big deal. The cops keep the transfer route a secret, even from other departments, until almost the day of the transfer.

Here are a few ways that villain transfers have been detected and interfered with:

• Prison financial records indicated a cancellation of the power suppression drug order, along with a requisition for vehicles.
• Suppression drugs were replaced with a placebo by an insider.
• A prison placed orders for a tailored suppression drug despite not having the prisoner for which they were tailored.
• Guards or other police officers took a bribe to reveal the details of the route.

ACTION is pretty good about providing security for this work these days, so most prison-break scenarios for villains require a fair amount of inside information. Acquiring insider assets, keeping them paid, and getting actual useful information from them are all big challenges for villains who want to take care of their fellows. But if you do break another villain out of the slam, you can and should expect plenty of gratitude. The value of this cannot be overstated.

Powered armor and the scalability of "super-technology"

Astute readers have noticed that I claim we don't have super-technology. "But wait," they say. "What about armored heroes like Scrapper and Lawsuit, or villains like Gridlock?" So I'll talk about powered armor, and those heroes and villains specifically.

Scrapper

Scrapper's superpower is iron manipulation. He can mold it, shape it, cause it to flow like water, whatever. Apparently he's got unlimited amounts of the stuff, too. The armor does things that require large amounts of electricity. I did some research and courtesy of a friend up in the New York area, I got this:

Scrapper generates bioelectricity at Stage 4 levels. Suit uses induction to draw power & run systems. Suit is a modified Raytheon XOS 4 w/ battery packs removed & induction system replaced. Iron superstructure maintained by Scrapper's power & is not part of original Raytheon spec. Company rep claims XOS 4 is "on loan" for "field test". Sure.

So there's no magic here, just the usual hydraulics and superpowers we've come to expect. The suit isn't wearable by anyone else because Scrapper's powers are required to make it work.

Lawsuit

First, let me say this is the corniest hero name on record. Second, she's kind of the same deal. From my Los Angeles source:

Lawsuit is wearing a highly modified CYBERDYNE HAL X suit, built by a company in Japan. She has considerable electrical control powers and uses those to drive the suit's motors. Her machine symbiosis ability is on par with Dr. Link, formerly of the American All-Stars and now working with Persona advising its Icons team. Private sources who followed the money trail uncovered a Persona connection to CYBERDYNE, suggesting that Link himself might have had a hand in the design of the Lawsuit.

Lawsuit can't just shape iron, but she can interface with electronics mentally, so again, she's providing a good chunk of what a "super-suit" might need to work for regular people.

Gridlock

This is a matter of public record, but it hasn't been widely disseminated, so here goes. Gridlock has significant electromagnetic powers (he got his name by shutting down the LA electrical grid and I-5). He uses those to project open-air holograms and manipulate metal, and these days he prefers to assemble metal into big masses and hit people with it, dressing it up like a high-tech robot. Stories that he's a quadriplegic or quadruple amputee wearing a suit are rumors, nothing more.

Powered armor progress

For the mundanes out there who'd like to fly around in a super-suit, don't give up hope - but you aren't there yet. Companies like Raytheon and CYBERDYNE aren't alone. There's about a dozen people working on powered exoskeletons, mostly for military applications.

These companies have two things working in their favor. First, they can get durable supers to help test their inventions. Insurance for this sort of research is very favorable when nothing your machine does is physically capable of injuring its wearer. And second, they've been able to reverse-engineer the physiological adaptions of people like Brawl and try to incorporate them into their products.

They have one huge factor working against them: power. Supers generate their own energy, but a suit can't do the same. There's been discussions (on Wavelength, natch) about how super-blood will be kept in a container in the suit and harnessed for this purpose, but that's not realistic even if someone could make it work. Until someone creates a really efficient generator that can fit into a power suit, their applications and power will be limited.

Groups of Note: Persona

The Persona Corporation, formerly Transhuman Research Solutions, started life as one of the million or so companies that sprang up after the Weizmann Institute released its findings on superpowers. Everyone thought they had struck gold, and venture capital flowed like water. 95% of those companies went under, and the other 5% either consolidated or went totally private.

Founding

TRS was founded in the late '70s, a decade after the public emergence of superhumans. It was the first to replicate, even at its most basic form, the benefits of a superhuman biology. Although it could not give people super-powers, its line of human enhancement drugs, revitalizing agents, and medical processes have given it a decisive edge in the marketplace.

9/11 left the American All-Stars, the United States' national super-team, in a state of total demoralization. As the Iraq war got underway and more information came out about the attack, everyone tried to figure out what the hell happened. In theory, ACTION was supposed to coordinate, integrate, and distribute intelligence information, and the All-Stars felt that something had gone horribly wrong in this process. Days after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, the All-Stars announced they were disbanding.

The Icons

In 2003, TRS responded to the lack of a national team by announcing a contract with the government. It would recruit selected superhumans, form them into a team, see to their specialized needs, and so on. This team became known as the Icons, and they were meant to act as role models for unaffiliated superhumans who weren't sure how to use their unique skills. And the company announced a name change: it was now the Persona Corporation.

Since then, the Icons have been a model not only for American supers, but for other national teams around the world. Persona's supers have been selfless, loyal, and dedicated to their cause. A whole generation of young superhumans have grown up idolizing them.

Persona's two main sources of income are the licensing of its research and technology into superhuman powers, and the manufacture and sale of various pharmaceutical and biochemical products derived from that research.

Persona and Supervillains

The Icons don't normally fight supervillains directly. They're more of rescue organization, though they will step in when a fight gets out of hand. This is good for us, as they're well-financed, well-trained, and professional.

Most of the problem Persona represents is a morale or PR issue - they make superheroing look good, which promotes more superheroes. This is obviously not awesome for villainy. That said, more novice heroes vs. experienced villains can be a good thing - if we can get the upper hand and establish a mindset of villain superiority, we win the long game. The Icons haven't radically changed anything in the hero-villain power balance in the decade or more they've been a team, so it remains to be seen which way that balance will shift.