#OH IM OBSESSED WITH THE CLAY SECTION

[ufonaut]

Are there things you cannot possibly explain? Are strange things happening to you? These four may be your last hope!

The Challengers of the Unknown section on the DC Comics website from July 1997.

Transcripts under the cut:

INTRO:

Step into The Light...

CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN

The scene: A jumbo jetliner crashes in the Rockies. In the aftermath, four lone survivors pull themselves from the wreckage and are instantly transfixed by a mysterious bright light bathing the disaster site. The light, growing brighter and brighter by the second, "sings" to them, envelops them, until it is all... until it is everything!

After the accident, race car driver Clay Brody, theoretical physicist Brenda Ruskin, game designer Kenn Kawa, and pilot Marlon Corbet go back to their lives - lives which now seem shallow and unreal. In the weeks that follow the strange occurrence, each is haunted by recurring dreams of the crash and its aftermath, blindly unaware of the changes that have taken place - altering their lives forever!

The four are unexpectedly reunited by Sands, an elderly gentleman with a very special power: the ability to recognize others who have also been touched by The Light. The mysterious benefactor makes them an intriguing offer: If they agree to band together to continue his work, he'll fund them, give them access to information he's gathered over the years, and help them develop their newfound powers. This could be the turning point.. the moment they've been waiting for: to seek the truth, explore the unexplainable... to challenge the unknown!

---

BRENDA RUSKIN:

Flamboyant in style, Ruskin is deeply passionate about her career and most other things in her life. Easily the smartest of the Challengers, she became one of the youngest theoretical physicist in history, working out the mysteries of quarks and dark matter, and her nerve and straightforwardness put her in demand on the lecture circuit. Her love life is less successful, and whereas Brody has no relationships, she has too many of them, with old boyfriends tending to pop up at the worst possible times. Her romances tend to be short-fused and burn out rapidly.

While she has no surviving family, she's ardent both in theorizing about the unknown and in placing those theories in the context of existing scientific knowledge, to make the unknown understandable, though she has a more liberal definition of understandable than most. Her innate empathy with technology seems somehow stronger since the incident that created the Challengers, but it doesn't unsettle her.

An only child pushed to excellence by parents at the expense of friends, Ruskin seeks companionship as much as knowledge from the Challengers. But the one she feels closest to is Kenn. Though she's serious about being friends with all of them; she's almost always at odds with Corbett, and finds Brody alternately arrogant and smothering, as if he can't believe she can take care of herself. Sparks of all kinds occasionally fly between her and all members of the group. She just loves the adventure and the sheer "unintellectuality" of the whole thing.

---

MARLON CORBETT:

Pilot, from Denver, CO. Marlon comes from a middle-class background with strong family values, including strong but not overbearing, traditional religious beliefs and a liberal political tradition. Though the urge that drove him to fly was to find something beyond all that.

Following a liberal arts college education, Corbett enlisted in the air force, and later became a civilian pilot. His family is large, supportive and tightly knit, he's probably the most eager of all the Challengers to dig into their mission, and easily the most lighthearted.

Of the four of them, Corbett has the most to lose by his involvement in the Challengers. His family and fiancee, (who's threatening to end their engagement), don't understand his involvement with "the occult" along with his willingness to abandon his job, and he's not even certain he understands it himself. The situation becomes a test of his family's strength.

Marlon has been troubled by unsettling dreams since the incident that created the Challengers. He disregards the feelings until he meets Sands and realizes they are all changed.

Because he has the strongest family life of the four of them, he is both the most supportive member of the group and apparently the most tenuous, since he has a life elsewhere. But he's tied to the group by the desire to be something more than what he has been, to not be just a member of his family or of a nondescript flight crew, but to stand out, to prove himself. the most easygoing of the group, he openly likes everyone, rising above their petty squabbles and frequently providing the viewpoint that lets the rest of the group rise above them, too.

His natural charm makes him a good front man for the group when they have to deal with the public or smooth the ruffled features of officials.

---

KENN KAWA:

The hardest to pigeonhole of all the Challengers, Kawa designs role-playing games for a living, and enjoys his skill at "playing" widely diverse characters. A firm believer in believing, his beliefs are equally mutable, tending toward wilder concepts; one week he'll espouse psychic surgery, the next primal scream therapy, the next Zen meditation. His family offers no clue to his true nature: his parents divorced, they and his sister are scattered across the globe, and he rarely sees them, though they exchange the usual birthday and holiday cards.

Unknown to anyone, he has an ex-wife and child, but prefers to keep them away from this part of his life. Kawa meanders through relationships with women, who tend to remain his friend rather than angry ex-lovers when he breaks up with them. But Kawa has constants: loyalty, an active practical imagination, an eye for details, a zest for new possibilities - and the ability to keep a secret.

Certain aspects of his fluid character are affecting his everyday life since the incident that created the Challengers, but he welcomes it, embracing anything new as a positive change in his being. Kawa enjoys periodically changing the direction of his life, so the Challengers come at the right time for him. There's little malicious about Kawa, but he delights in testing, seeing how far things can be pushed before he has to go a different way, and this is his chance to test reality. He "tests" his fellow Challengers as well, constantly challenging their preconceptions; he's the most open to the unknown of all of them. He particularly pushes Ruskin's buttons, triggered by her hot temper and her subtle claims to intellectual superiority, but underneath it all they enjoy each others company.

---

CLAY BRODY:

Race car driver, from Pikeville KY. Coming from a coal mining family, Brody is solid and dependable, but his childhood also left him with a taste for risk, and beating it. His father is dead, his mother and his three sisters have never left KY; and since a wild period in his teens when they wrote him off as bad, he hasn't dealt with any of them.

He's very methodological, believing only in what he can see, feel, plan or strategize. Even following his encounter with The Light, Brody resists acceptance of the paranormal and particularly of the spiritual, viewing everything with a skeptical, grounded eye. But, even he cannot deny that his experience during the incident that created the Challengers has changed him, and that change frightens him the more he understands it. Until he meets Sands, and learns the others have been similarly changed, he thinks he's going crazy.

While pleasant enough toward the others, and far from hostile, Brody is guarded around them, determined to find rational explanations for what they investigate, to ground the group in what he perceives as reality. In many ways, he's their anchor. He stays with the Challengers due to a secret need for a family he never really had, but learned behavior with his own family gets in the way. What the others mistake for occasional arrogance is actually shyness. He's rarely without black driving gloves, not really for his image, he wears them to guard himself from... something.