Taken from X-Force's official homepage (www.x-force.com), this week's Leader Letter (direct link: www.x-force.com/guysmith/leaderletter):
Hi, 'Forcers,
As many of you may know, this week hasn't been a good one for X-Force. We lost one of the founding members this week, and another member of our squad also died in the line of duty. If any of you haven't heard, you can go over to www.x-force.com/pastmembers to check it out for yourselves before you read on. As always, you can buy merchandise featuring these former members at reduced prices, via this website and the X-Force stores).
The first of this week's casualties is harder for me to discuss than usual – many of you will know who she was, and maybe even have hoped to be like her one day. Edie Sawyer – you knew her as U-Go Girl – died in the line of duty protecting the freedom of this planet from some angry aliens, who wanted to use an old space station to launch an invasion of the Earth. Without her sacrifice, I'm sure that we'd all be in much greater trouble than we are. Without her sacrifice, I think all of us would be running for our lives right now, instead of watching our TVs, eating our food, and generally going about our daily lives.
Now some of you may be thinking "He's only saying that because she was his girlfriend." Well, I was having a relationship with Edie – anybody who saw the article the two of us did in "Time" knew that we were a couple – but not many of you will have seen the private face of Edie Sawyer. We live together as a team, and we all get on each other's nerves sometimes – that's normal – but Edie had a way of bringing us all together with her desire to live life to the fullest. She used to tell me that life was too short to spend it bitching about little things, so I always tried to follow her example. Not that I can do as much as your average person (having super-sensitive skin kind of limits my leisure activities, as you might imagine), but Edie always made sure that we had a good time together.
One thing's for sure: without U-Go Girl, the X-Force will be a darker place.
The second of this week's casualties was one of our newer members, the Spike. People may remember the early conflicts the Spike had with existing 'Forcer Tike Alicar, AKA the Anarchist, as they tried to outdo each other in a war of words. Well, the Spike and the Anarchist seemed to have outgrown their arguments, and were beginning to work as part of the team, working together instead of outdoing each other – and nowhere was this more evident than when we were facing the aliens head-on. The Spike sacrificed his life to try and save Vivisector and Phat from our attackers. His efforts weren't entirely successful – as you know, Phat is still undergoing intensive physical therapy for his injuries, and Vivisector has been booked into a psychotherapy clinic for a few days so that he can get over seeing what the aliens did to the Spike.
Images of our last battle are, as usual, available in the Pictures Section – Doop has once again been kind enough to let us download footage from his camera and post it here on the official X-Force site. If you want to copy any pictures, then I've been asked to tell you that this is illegal unless you ask us first, and anybody who doesn't do this will be prosecuted. X-Force does have very powerful lawyers, so watch out! They're almost as scary as any supervillain we've had to face, let me assure you!
Anyway, in other news, you may have noticed that the X-Force theme restaurants and stores have been getting a bit of a make-over recently – but don't worry, this is just to tidy them up a bit and give them a new look. Our head honcho thought it was time we got rid of some bits and pieces, and made X-Force even more fun to visit! Don't worry about still getting all your favourite X-force toys and meals, either – they'll all still be on sale for as long as you want them! Speaking of which, this month's big special offers are as follows: we have a twice-life-size Doop plush doll (normally retailing for $12) reduced to half-price, an action figure set of me and U-Go Girl knocked down from $15 to $5.50, and some variety sets of bendable X-Forcers going for less than half-price, at $7.50. Anything else would be supervillainous!
Look out for updates on the newest members of X-Force in the next few days. Our owner is busy tracking them down from our training programme as I type this, guys, so before you know it, X-Force will be up to full-strength again. We've lost top members before, 'Forcers, and we've always come back. Remember, gang – you can't keep us down, because we're the best.
Till next time, 'Forcers,
Guy.