Cuddlebug Explains Heroes and Villains(clones)

"Okay," Cuddlebug said as she once again stood at the head of a conference room in her 'scholarly' outfit, "Director Piggot said that my last lecture wasn't actually useful at the moment and threatened to doc part of my consultation pay until Weaver showed her the part of my contract that said she couldn't do that. Then she talked to the deputy director for a little bit." Cuddlebug shrugged. "Anyway, I've got something a little more useful."

Cuddlebug hit the clicker and the projector showed a drawn image of a man in red armor with a helmet and a purple cape never to a drawing of a man in silver armor but no cape. "One of the clones in the city was made from Magneto, the Master of Magnetism. Now, the clone, Eisenhardt, seems like a good guy, but... The real Magneto has gone from bad to good and back so many times that it's better to be safe than sorry. The real Magneto was a Holocaust survivor, he was kept at Auschwitz and was a child during the war. This strongly influenced him and when he learned that his powers were the result of being slightly different from normal humans he feared that mutants would be rounded up and genocided just like the jews, Romani, homosexuals, and disabled people in Nazi-controlled territories were."

Cuddlebug sighed. "Ironically, Magneto decided that the only way to prevent Mutant genocide would be for mutants to dominate baseline humanity: Magneto is the one who coined the name 'Homo Superior' and decided that mutants needed to take over the world and either marginalize or enslave baseline humanity. He himself has been compared to Hitler more than once. Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants—that's the actual name he picked for them, by the way, have probably done more harm than good in for the mutant cause ever since. Sometimes, Magneto tries to be a good guy, but he always falls back to mutant supremacist terrorism eventually. Apparently, he's bipolar or something. So you know, keep an eye on Eisenhardt."

"Magneto is an Alpha Level Mutant and may be an Omega Level Mutant with the ability to manipulate the energies of the Electromagnetic Spectrum up to an including the entire Earth's electromagnetic field. This allows him to fly, telekinetically manipulate most metals—even living organisms by playing with the iron in their blood cells—up to thousands of tons with control fine enough to rearrange iron at the molecular level. He can also conjure blasts of lightning, create force-fields, and he always knows which ways are north and south by sensing the earth's magnetic poles." Cuddlebug stopped for a minute. "Oh," she continued as if remembering something, "he's also resistant to telepathic attacks, and he's a super genius in areas of physics and genetics. The helmet that the real magneto uses has technology that boosts his resistance to telepathy but I don't know if the clone would have made a helmet that can do that yet."

Clockblocker raised a hand. "Uh, the guy with magnet powers is bipolar? I'm sorry, but that sounds like a terrible joke."

"I know, right?" Cuddlebugg agreed. "Anyway," She said with a click that changed the image to still frame of a girl with a long bushy tail. "We've met an evil clone of Squirrel Girl, who Weaver named Chitter because heroes naming villains is a thing here." Cuddlebug actually seemed a little confused by that. "The real Squirrel Girl... She has the tail of a squirrel and the proportionate physical abillities of a squirrel which means she's really strong and really fast. She also has retractable claws in her fingertips and retractable bone spike hidden behind her knuckles. They're meant for climbing but they're still very dangerous, and she can talk to squirrels. I have no idea how to beat her, you'll have to ask how Weaver beat Chitter."

Cuddlebug clicked onto the next slide, showing the boy who'd joined the Undersiders in a security camera image next to a drawing for a girl version of him with long hair and a wool cap with eyes drawn on it. "Bruiser is a boy version of Bruiser, who was one of the Runaways. I'll be honest, I don't know much about the Runaways beyond that Chase Stein was the leader and that he and a girl named Nico were among the teenage and young adult Heroes that Arcade kidnapped and locked in one of his murder worlds for a few months. I do know that Bruiser is a psychic whose psychokinesis takes the form of an aura that gives her... And him... Superhuman strength and toughness. She's been compared to the Incredible Hulk more than once and there's a video of her online picking up a five-hundred-foot tall demon thingy while on a caffeine high so I'm inclined to believe that."

Cuddlebug clicked onto an image from the Bank's security camera of Ashley herself trying to punch the Super Skrull's Thing fist with her own Thing fist. "I broke my arm doing that. It hurt like hell," she shared. "Anyway, Super Skrulls are Skrulls, a race of aliens with powerful shapeshifting abillities that have tried to invade my Earth several times but have always been foiled by the superhumans of my homeworld. To try and match them, the Skrulls studied superhumans and tried to replicate their abillities, creating the Super Skrulls. The original Super Skrulls were cyborgs, but the later generations use genetic engineering, magic, and the original origin when possible to more accurately recreate abillities. Since Bruiser recognized the Super Skull at the bank as a clone of the rogue one at the who was with the Runaways."

"That means," Cuddlebug began, "that they like to switch between being a boy and a girl and have the powers of the Fantastic Four but can only use one power at a time," she continued. "That means flight, invisible forcefields that can be shaped into anything and used as a second way of flying, turning invisible, pyrokinesis, superhuman strength and toughness, and being able to stretch almost infinitely. But only one at a time."

She clicked again to show the image of the hunter who'd been working with Chitter. "Kraven the Hunter is an old Russian nobleman who gets off on hunting dangerous animals, including the most dangerous game of all..."

"Man?" Literally everyone else in the room asked at once in a bored tone.

"No," Cuddlebug replied, "Spider-Man. Kraven puts a lot of value in the idea of totems and spirit animals and stuff like that and is very much an old school 'respect your prey, respect the animals, don't over-hunt because these are majestic creatures, and above all hunt by your own skills and accept the risk of the game' type hunter. Spiders are scary and pound for pound are some of the deadliest and most successful hunters in the world." Cuddlebug waved her hand for emphasis. "Name a kind of predator and there's at least one kind of spider that hunts that way. Kraven figured that a man with extreme superhuman physical attributes modeled on a spider would be a worthy adversary and that if he beat Spider-Man that would prove that he was the best hunter in the world. It became an obsession."

"Kraven's powers are mostly physical and include low levels of superhuman strength, toughness, speed, healing, and stamina as well as improved longevity and a really good sense of smell, but those are dependent on a bunch of potions and serums made from jungle herbs from all over the world so I don't know how much of that would have carried to his clone. He's also an expert at hand to hand combat, simple melee weapons like knives and spears, and archaic hunting weapons. He's also pretty good with rifles, but he very rarely uses them unless he's like, hunting dinosaurs or he's trying to tranq something and bring it back alive."

Cuddlebug clicked onto her last slide. It showed a CCTV still of a man with an incredibly pale blue-grey, almost white, skin and jet black hair that shined blue in the light. He had red eyes, a fanged mouth, pointed ears, and a flat, batlike nose.

"I actually saw this guy, fighting a man I later learned was named Skidmark, in my first couple of nights in town when I was trying to figure out what was going on and where I was... I could have gotten involved. I probably should have gotten involved. I think I could have taken him and I found out later that he killed that Skidmark guy..."

Cuddlebug stopped and looked at the floor for a bit. She was roused from her guilt by inaction by Shadow Stalker scoffing. "Don't feel bad. Skidmark was a low-class drug dealer who got high on his own supply. He was basically living garbage."

"But he was still a person, right?" Cuddlebug replied. "Someone had to have loved him. He had a mom once, right?"

"You can't possibly be that ignorant," Shadow Stalker dismissed. "Someone like him isn't even human."

"...You know," Cuddlebug said as she slowly cocked her head from one side to another, "I really don't like it when people arbitrarily decide that someone isn't a person and that they deserve to die because they arbitrarily aren't people." She slowly cocked her head back the other way. "I mean, you've got a lot of nerve saying something like that around a mutant. Please don't do it again. Mister Snuggles really wants me to give brain-eating a try," Cuddlebug said in a deeper, more echoey voice through an overly large mouth full of fangs, "and right now I'm really tempted to do it once just to make him shut up about it."

Shadow Stalker mumbled for a moment. Armsmaster scribbled something about getting Cuddlebug counseling down into his notes. The tension was too great for anyone else to say or do anything at the time.

Cuddlebug went through the motions of a deep breath and returned to normal. "Anyway, this guy who the PRT calls Nosferatu is cloned from Michael Morbius the Living Vampire. He's an expert hematologist who came down with a rare blood illness and the experimental treatments that cured him also mutated him, giving him superhuman strength and toughness, enhanced speed, fangs and claws, psychic powers that let him mesmerize people and levitate, and a healing factor but also made his eyes ultra light-sensitive, removed most of the pigment from his skin so he burns easy, and altered his biology so he needs to feed on fresh human blood. He's also psychologically dependant on human blood. He's made serums that can take care of his biological need to feed but they don't always work on the psychological aspect, as well as temporary cures for his condition." Cuddlebug sighed. "When he does feed on human blood, he usually tries to feed non-lethally and only on bad guys, but he can't always get the blood out without killing them and sometimes he makes mistakes about who's good and who's bad. If this was the real Morbius, I'd say try to recruit him with offers of resources to make his serums and research a cure for his vampirism or access to fresh human blood guilt-free when he can't go on a serum alone, because the real Morbius is mostly a good guy in a bad sitch, but with the evil Squirrel Girl clone I can't be sure that the clone isn't as evil as a real vampire."

"I don't have a slide for Jorogumo. I don't know anything about who she was cloned from, but since she's captured and in that asylum now I don't think I need to mention anything and that's all the people who people we know about around here were cloned from. If there are no questions I'd kind of like to go take a nap now."

Cuddlebug clicked one last time, and as before the last slide simply said The End