#main reason to like this AU: new opportunity for Bumby murder

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Houndsditch Heroes AU (AKA, I Make An AU For A Show I've Never Watched)

. . . @dont-offend-the-bees, I hope you know this is all your fault.

If you're wondering what on earth I'm going on about, said friend has gotten into the Netflix adaptation of The Umbrella Academy, meaning I've been seeing a lot of posts and gifsets and the like about it on my dash. If I were anyone else, I would simply be happy my friend had found a new show to enjoy and go about my day.

Since I'm me, I've instead come up with an AU idea based on the information I've picked up from the posts and a look on TV Tropes. *deep sigh* I don't know why I'm like this, seriously. Anyway, just to get it out of my brain, the pertinent points of what I'm calling the Houndsditch Heroes AU:

-->It's set in the modern day, in a world where super-powered people are just born randomly instead of being the result of a strange mass pregnancy/birth -- mostly because I want to stick with the canon/highly accepted fanon ages for the team, and that puts them in a range between 17 and 20

-->Bumby has the Sir Reginald Hargreeves role, having rounded up a team of super-powered kids and raised them to become the titular Houndsditch Heroes; as you might imagine, he is just as bad a father as Reginald was, but fortunately his children are dysfunctional in a way that still lets them work together

-->The Heroes include:

Marty McFly -- I'm still deciding if his power is being able to mind-control people through his music, or using sound to manipulate his environment psychokinetically; either way he's never without his guitar as a result

Emmett "Doc" Brown -- obviously we're using the teenage model from Telltale's The Game, though given he has Five's role, he's much older underneath. He's got the ability to teleport and time travel -- the latter having flung him into a post-apocalyptic future before the events of the story

Victoria Everglot -- unsure what her power is yet -- I'm tempted to make it something related to sewing. Maybe she can manipulate cloth? Or I could give her a variation on Allison’s power, only the trigger phrase is “Please, may I/you/they” since she’s quiet, polite type

Emily Cartwell -- I'm also figuring out her power, though "control over butterflies" amuses me. She's died shortly before the events of the story, having been tricked into running away with Barkis in a combination "He's my true love/I want to get away from my asshole adoptive father" move

Alice Liddell -- everyone thinks she's the "normal" of the group, and as a consequence she has developed her melee combat skills with knives and improvised weapons to keep up with her powered siblings. In truth, she's capable of creating fully visual, audible, and tactile illusions. Bumby has been suppressing her powers through a combination of medication and hypnosis sessions for YEARS

-->Victor Van Dort is an outsider to the group, who also believes he's normal -- his parents have got him on the same medication Alice is on to suppress his powers. Reason being, said powers are he can see ghosts and bring them into the real world in a corporeal, if rather zombie-like form, and he freaked them out by trying to adopt a skeletal dog when he was younger

-->The plot is kicked off when Emmett, after years spent in the post-apocalyptic future, time-ports back to the present in the Van Dort backyard, and ends up dragging Victor into his attempts to stop the apocalypse with his siblings

-->Emmett thinks Bumby is somehow the cause of the apocalypse he saw; however, it's actually Alice, discovering the truth about herself and Bumby's crimes against her and her family (he still raped Lizzie and killed her and the elder Liddells in this world; he covered it up and took Alice in to control her) and manifesting her rage as the Queen of Hearts to kill him. Unfortunately, the Queen refuses to be dismissed after she's served her purpose, and she ends up killing Alice's original personality and using her body to wreak havoc

-->Victor, upon getting his own powers back (he starts missing doses of the meds while on the adventure, and everyone realizes he can see the dead when he sees Emily hanging around the group), becomes the lynchpin to stopping the Queen's rampage by bringing back Lizzie, Arthur, and Lorina to cool Alice's rage and make the Queen weak enough to be defeated

-->The time cops trying to keep the apocalypse on-schedule because reasons are still a thing, and I've just had the thought that the Commission should instead be Aperture from Portal (run by Cave Johnson, of course), and the two tracking Emmett personally are GLaDOS and Wheatley -- but Wheatley, who has been having second thoughts about this whole business, ends up falling in love with bakery owner Chell and defects to the good guys' side

-->Victor suffers a fatal injury from the time cops during the final showdown and ends up in an entirely self-indulgent scene where he meets God -- aka me. I tell him everything's going to be okay and his powers actually include automatic resurrection from anything that isn't natural death from old age and send him back

-->I'm still contemplating whether Bumby should still be involved in the child trade like he was in A:MR; if he literally kidnapped some/ALL of the Heroes and has been using his hypnosis techniques to make them all forget; and if he's specifically given the power-suppressing medication to the Van Dorts and hypnotized Victor in the past because he realized someone with the power to talk to the dead could rat him out if he ever found the Liddells' spirits

*facepalm* We good now, brain? Can I go back to the AUs I'm SUPPOSED to be working on now?