Task Force X – Where Many Teams Have Gone Before

One of the problems with coming up with an idea for the theme(s) of the Suicide Squad is difficult. With so many teams, many ideas have already been done. The X-Statix have done the theme of characters dying in on a regular basis, the Society kill off their own characters at the drop of the hat, Villains United has a similar theme of throwing it’s characters away. There are tons of concealed teams, each with variations of the theme. For Task Force X, I’m going to try and blend a lot of previous ideas and bring them into a single theme.

First of all, the core of Task Force X are the people that never go into the field. Whether it be Amanda Waller or General Wade Eiling, the person pulling the strings is probably chilling out in the hidden area, unconcerned about their own safety, safe in the knowledge that danger is at arms length. Of course, they have gotten involved in certain missions, especially when they’ve found ways to be on the same level as the rest of the metahumans. General Eiling, taking control of the body of the Shaggy Man, was recently enlisted in Waller’s latest version of the team, and a machine allowing The Wall to take control of Chemo meant that both were involved in the front line fighting, although Amanda was safely inside a nearby ship remote controlling the walking meltdown that is Chemo. This theme could work sort of like an inverted version of the Hellfire Club [or Kang, or Hellboy, etc] where a single concealed character rules over the visible minions with an iron fist.

There are other characters, namely Deadshot, Rick Flag and Bronze Tiger, that are constant members of the team. In the case of the latter two, they work for the government directly, instead of being coerced into the group because of criminal activity and threats of bodily harm. With Floyd Lawton on the other hand, he seems to just be extemely lucky, or unlucky depending on the way that you look on it. Despite being put on tons of suicide missions, and a desire to die in a spectacular fashion, he has so far ‘failed’ to end up as one of the casualties of Task Force X. These characters that constantly return from missions will likely have abilities that aid them in doing so, such as powers of recovery, or avoiding stuns. Also, as the field commanders, they should be taking advantage of the bad things that would happen to the unfortunate saps that aren’t supposed to make it out. I’m thinking of some combination of the Morlocks benefitting from stunned characters (or perhaps a leader ability that gives other characters vengence powers, or some other “this happens when someone else is stunned” and a number of effects that benefit from KO’ing characters, perhaps even taking a page out of the Hellfire Club book by having Hellion effects that can combine two benefits off the same character being KO’d.

Anyway, I’m still working on Multiplex, one of the newer members of the Suicide Squad, whose duplication powers were being taken advantage of by Amanda Waller by providing staff for her facility until a real staff could be hired. It’s going to be Multiple Man-esque, so if Stu recovers from his murder, and I can get this bag off my face, I’ll hopefully have Multiplex up soon.