#fob'n'phone

[howtohero]

Communicators

In any relationship you’re going to have you’ll quickly discover that communication is key. Without being able to communicate with your partner or the people around you you’ll never be able to grow close to them or gain an understanding of them and they will in turn be walled off from you. This is no different when you’re dealing with other superheroes. When you’re fighting or working alongside someone, especially in a high-pressure situation like an intergalactic gladiator arena or while trying to escape from the belly of a giant whale. In order to do that though you’re going to need to make sure you’ve all got the right kind of communication devices.

Communication technology has evolved a lot throughout the years of superherodom. In the far flung past the only way superheroes could communicate with each other across a crowded battlefield would be to shout really loudly. This was, naturally, not very useful especially when like 80% of the people superheroes were fighting were actually dinosaurs who were much louder than them. Many of them died. Again, communication is key folks. Make sure you write that down somewhere. 

As time progressed superheroes developed more and more sophisticated ways of keeping in contact with one another. There was the year everybody decided tying letters to bricks and chucking them at each other was a good idea. That was actually very effective at bringing down the crime rate. Nobody wanted to risk getting struck with an errant brick in the middle of a fight. Then we saw people writing notes in the ground. This wasn’t too great, people kept having to look down while fighting which is a great way to get yourself knocked on your butt. Not to mention the fact that all of these methods ignore the vast amounts of illiterate superheroes. Then finally the super-scientist Phone-Inventor-Man (real name unknown) decided to get off his butt and live up to his name by inventing the phone. Finally superheroes would be able to talk to each other and coordinate during a battle without having to do any pesky reading. The first superhero phones (I’m specifying superheroes here because to the localized weird factor field that surrounds all superheroes, superhero technology is always a couple of steps ahead of boring civilian technology.) were clunky and difficult to carry around to fights, though they made for useful bludgeons on more than one occasion. Due to their lack of overall portability though they were not very popular and many superheroes still fell to the perils of miscommunication (sitcom or otherwise). 

Eventually one brilliant superhero, Floatsam, the Footless Defender, had the idea to put his giant telephone in his shoe. You see, Floatsam had no feet, he didn’t need them, he could float (before you ask, no his name wasn’t Sam that would go against our codename rules) but he always wore shoes, to fit in with the other kids. He’d just tie the ends of his pant legs around his shoes to keep them in place. But it’s not like there was anything in the shoes. Which meant that was just free real estate. So Floatsam decided to put those shoes to use and carry around his phone there. This was, obviously, revolutionary. A phone in a shoe? Outrageous! Scientists around the world crunched the numbers and determined that this could revolutionize the entire communications industry. Soon they were putting phones in shoes. Like straight up combining the two. Absolutely insane, those madmen. Then if superheroes ever needed to communicate with one another in the heat of battle all they needed to do was remove their sweaty shoe and hold it up to their face. While hopping around so they don’t injure their bare foot. Truly this was the peak of communication technology. But there were even greater advances to come. 

With the rise of watches people realized that it could be possible to carry around things that used to be mounted to walls on your wrists. If it was good enough for clocks, surely it was good enough for phones. Who do clocks even think they are? Telling us what time it is. And so the first watch-phone was developed by the British branch of Armada, the global organization tasked with dealing with “the weird.” This watch-phone, known as the fob’n’phone (or hob’n’bone) instantly became standard for all superheroes. Unfortunately, the original fob wasn’t very good at being a phone. Instead it just emitted an ultra-sonic frequency that heroes with super-hearing could hear. It didn’t actually allow for any actual communication. It was really more of a beeper. A beeper for a very specific subset of the superhero community. So how did it become so widespread you may ask. Well, the UK Armada marketing team did a jolly good show of lying their britches off to superhero investors. For demonstrations they replaced the ultrasonic sound chip with a prerecorded message that made it appear as though the demonstrator was holding a conversation with some bloke on the other end. Pretty ingenious actually. By the time anybody realized they’d been had the watches were already everywhere. A lot of harm was caused by those guys. But at least guys like Ultrazounds and The ‘Earo felt very popular for a bit. 

The next major communications innovation (communinnovation) came when a group of Canadian special forces soldiers came across a wendigo in the Nova Scotian wilderness. The wendigo baked them cookies, as one does when a group of heavily armed men show up at their cave, and gave them shelter for the night. When the group awoke they each discovered that they’d manifested incredible powers during the night. They then did the only sensible thing that they could. They abandoned their mission and joined forces with the wendigo, whose name by the way, was MacFarlane, to protect the Canadian wilderness from villains or whatever. They kept all their army gear, because it was neat and because they weren’t in the mood to walk back to base to return it, meaning that they were able to use military-grade walkie-talkies to communicate with one another in the field. Believe or not, AWOL (A Wendigo Offered us Love)  was the first superhero group to ever think to use walkie-talkies for internal communications but they were far from the last. Walkie-talkies quickly became the de-facto superhero communications device. This even improved inter-superhero team relations. Superhero teams could tune into each other’s walkie-talkies channels when working together, meaning superheroes from different teams were free to team-up without worrying about being able to talk to one another. But the walkie-talkie method was not without its drawbacks. Just as it was easy for superheroes to jump on each other’s channels, so to was it easy for supervillains to listen in on superhero conversations. All they needed to do was buy the same kind of walkie-talkie as the heroes were using and fiddle with it until they found the channel they were looking for. This actually wasn’t as big of a problem as you’d think though. Supervillains have some kind of compulsive need to gloat so as soon as they found the right channel they’d shout “I have you fools now! You should’ve known that you couldn’t hide from me, The Listener, for long! MWUHAHAHAHAHA” so everybody would just rolls their eyes and switch channels. <I’m going to be honest here, when I took this job I thought I would be privy to a lot more superhero communications but you guys don’t really get a lot of mail do you.> Hush you! The other downside though was that walkie-talkies are very hands-on communications devices, you need to hold down buttons, you need to play with dials, that’s exactly the kind of stuff you don’t have time for when you’re fighting a sentient meteor shower. 

For a long time this issue boggled and befuddled and perplexed the world’s leading super-scientists. Could a handsfree communications device really be feasible? Was such a thing really possible without making you look like a big business jerk? It wasn’t until an entirely new superpower was discovered that the solution became clear. In 1984 Jaquan “JT” Thomas became the first recorded superhuman with the ability the OPG has dubbed “telephonesis.” As the OPG describes it “Telephonesis: The power to quite-literally have a telephone in your head. Telephonetiks can send or receive calls, place people on hold, and even record messages all from the phone in their head. Combat potential: Ah jeez I don’t know, you know not all these powers need to be used to fight people right? Maybe we should put more boxes on these forms. Prank calls are pretty aggressive right? You could definitely prank call people with this power.” That’s right folks, handsfree communications was possible. Sure, Thomas declined to let scientists poke around in his head to discover how but sometimes just knowing something is possible is enough to light a fire under those super-scientists. Within like five-seven years they’d done it. Communicators you didn’t have to touch or hold or anything! They could go right in your ear and you could be in constant contact with your support-squad, mission control, your teammates, even other heroes if you guys linked up your comms. 

From then on communicators came in all shapes and sizes. Some heroes chose to model them after their logos. Some had them woven or wired into their masks or helmets or some other part of their costumes. Someone even got functional wrist-communicators out there. Certain teams chose to forego physical communicators entirely in favor of having their telepath link everyone’s minds psychically. This type of communication requires a deep bond and a large amount of trust between members of the team (and a telepath) but it can be one of the most effective forms of communication between team members. 

If you can’t communicate in the field you’re far more likely to make mistakes. One person can’t be expected to be able to take stock of everything, especially in the heat of a battle. So being able to talk to or just listen to other people around you or the folks watching your six from back home can greatly reduce the risks inherent in fighting living swarms and brightly-clad-extremely-loud reverse ninjas. So get walking, get talking, and open up those lines of communications!