Doom Patrol

The Worlds Strangest Heroes

The Doom Patrol is an oddity amongst superhero teams. Although it has been around in one form or another for a long time, it has barely infringed on the public consciousness, and even the other teams tend to forget it exists -- or at least try to.

Amongst the superhero fraternity, the appearance of the Doom Patrol on the scene is generally something to be dreaded. It usually means the situation is weird and only going to get weirder, and the individual members have something of a reputation for being antisocial and hard to deal with. On the other hand there are times when a situation is just so weird people are happy to be able to leave it in the hands of the Doom Patrol, who specialize in dealing with the most bizarre of threats. For this reason there is an odd sort of respect for the Doom Patrol amongst the more experienced quarters of the superhero community; you might not like them much, but if a surrealist painting is trying to eat Paris they are probably the people you want to deal with it.

History

The Doom Patrol was founded by Niles Caulder, often referred to as 'The Chief' by members of the team, a highly eccentric scientific genius who unlike most scientific geniuses brings a significant knowledge of magic to the table too. His inventions are acknowledged as being generally well ahead of their time, but as eccentric as he is and prone to being unreliable and often shoddily constructed. Exactly how good a scientist he is remains a matter of debate amongst other scientists. He is responsible for some remarkable breakthroughs, but his lassez-faire attitude to scientific rigor (and often ethics) means his genius is not acknowledged as much as perhaps it should be.

The Doom Patrol was originally founded in 1995 with Larry Trainor, Rita Farr, Cliff Steele and Flex Mentallo on the roster. In this original incarnation it achieved little success. Ten years later Steve Dayton, one of the world's richest men, invented a psychic amplifier and became the superhero Mento. He took the Doom Patrol under his wing and reformed them as their field leader, with significantly more success.

Today

Doom Patrol works out of Doom Manor, a mansion house owned for many years by Niles Caulder outside Atlantic City in New Jersey. A sprawling and once grand but now rather run-down property, it has been home to some of the members of the team since long before the team actually became active, and acts to provide them with the privacy and isolation from crowds that most of the team favor. The basement of the manor has several sub-levels excavated over the years by Caulder, containing his many labs, store rooms of his inventions, equipment for the team and the team's operations room. The middle of the operations room is taken up by a pool which contains one of Caulder's most bizarre inventions, a liquid intelligence which operates as the team's main computer.

The team roster is fluid and it's never entirely clear who's on the team at any time. As well as the founding members and Dayton, the roster has included Crazy Jane, Celsius, Danny the Street, Casey Brinke, Terry None, Bumblebee, and Willoughby Kipling amongst others, though the existence of several of these is questionable (not existing does not necessarily preclude someone joining the Doom Patrol). Garfield Logan is the adopted son of Steve Dayton and Rita Farr, and though he was never officially a part of the team he went on several missions with them before joining the Titans. This connection means the Titans are often used by other superhero teams as an intermediary when it's necessary to deal with the Doom Patrol, as generally other people don't want to.

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Timeline

1932: Niles Caulder, a brilliant young scientist, loses his wife in a failed robbery. He becomes obsessed with death and starts researching possible paths to immortality. His obsession leaves him ostracized by the scientific community, but a mysterious benefactor provides him extraordinary funding. His research into immortality leads him to Willoughby Kipling, a 500 year old British sorcerer, who he befriends.

1937: Caulder follows rumors of a rare retrovirus capable of extraordinary genetic manipulation in Africa. With the help of Kipling, he performs a dangerous ritual to hyper-activate a sample. Upcoming Hollywood starlet Rita Farr is accidentally infected with the virus while on location for a new movie, and her body becomes unstable.

1938: Caulder perfects the immortality formula. He learns his mysterious benefactor is the German General Immortus who has been using various dangerous and limited longevity treatments for centuries, and needs something more stable to ensure his aims of being able to rule the world forever. Caulder confronts Immortus. The supplies of the virus are destroyed before Immortus can take any, Caulder is shot in the spine and paralysed from the waist down, Immortus vanishes.

1940: With war on the horizon, Caulder is tasked with using his knowledge of the strange to find ways to aid America. Alongside fellow genius Eric Morden and secret service agent Darren Jones, they set up the Bureau of Oddities to track metahuman potential in America. Rita Farr is an early recruit, but her powers are too unstable to take an active role during the war.

1945: With the end of the war and the relative lack of success of the Bureau of Oddities compared to the Super Soldier and Defenders projects, the Bureau loses relevancy and focus. Caulder, struck by the 'Outsider' plight of so many they had recruited argues to refocus on aiding metahumans to integrate. Jones, worried by the dangers Metahumans represent, argues the opposite, that the bureau should monitor and control. Morden focuses on attempting to secure Nazi secrets relating to oddities. Morden's main success is the recover of the Delirium Box, an obviously powerful reality-warping artifact. He becomes obsessed with attempting to uncover its secrets, but no way to control it is discovered.

1948: Morden and Caulder track Heinrich von Fuchs, a Nazi scientist working on technology to activate metahuman potential, to Paraguay. They lead a bureau team to track him down and procure his equipment. Von Fuchs persuades Morden to let him go in exchange for making him a metahuman. At first it seems to work very well, but something goes wrong and Morden explodes, destroying Von Fuch's facility. Caulder barely escapes with his life. Later research leads Caulder to learn that the Delirium Box had already changed Morden in peculiar ways, and activating his metahuman potential caused him to break local reality and simply cease to exist.

1949: With Morden gone and Caulder discredited after the Paraguay debacle, Jones is given total control of the Bureau. He renames it the Bureau of Normalcy, its new focus to monitor and capture metahumans and oddities that are considered to dangerously weird to be allowed their freedom. Appalled, Caulder quits the bureau.

1964: USAF test pilot Larry Trainor flies his X-15 through a mysterious cloud of radiation in the upper atmosphere. Somehow he survives the resulting crash, despite his body being burned beyond recognition. Now himself dangerously radioactive and apparently possessed by some trans-dimensional entity, he is transferred to the Bureau of Normalcy.

1969: Caulder infiltrates the Bureau of Normalcy and frees a number of the inmates, persuading them that just because they are weird doesn't make them bad or dangerous people. Amongst those he rescues are Rita Farr, Larry Trainor, and Flex Mentallo, a man who had learned strange powers from a pamphlet he'd ordered in the back of a comic book promising to teach people the "Secrets of Muscle Mystery".

1984: Race-car driver Cliff Steele supposedly dies in a car accident. However his body was recovered by Niles Caulder, and his brain implanted into a robot body. Caulder explains this as a simple act of altruism, but Caulder is once more studying the secrets of immortality.

1995: The Robotman project is finally completed, and Cliff Steele reawakens. The original Doom Patrol is founded, but is too dysfunctional to get very far.

2003: Caulder aids researchers Mark and Mary Logan with a cure for their son Garfield Logan, who has been infected with a rare tropical virus, whilst once more searching sources of the retrovirus in Africa. The cure grants Garfield the ability to take the form of any animal.

2005: Steve Dayton, scientific genius and the world's eighth richest man, commissions Caulder to help him construct a psychic amplifier. He meets Rita Farr, and in an effort to impress her, suggests they reform the Doom Patrol. With Dayton's funding Caulder heads up the team, consisting of Farr, Dayton, Trainor, Steele and Mentallo. The Doom Patrol is born.

2006:: Eric Morden reappears. He explains to Caulder that he had spent the previous 58 years in a place he terms 'White Space', where nothing -- including himself -- exists. He claims to have put himself back together by simply refusing to believe in his own non-existence, and that it is his own powers of self-delusion that allow him to exist again. He claims that this is the ultimate form of existence, and appeals to Caulder to employ the Doom Patrol to help him recover the Delirium Box. With this, he explains, he can cause everyone else to no longer exist too. Caulder refuses to help.

2007: Now calling himself Mr. Nobody, Morden assembles his own team, a twisted mirror-image of the Doom Patrol he calls The Brotherhood of Dada.

2012: Garfield Logan, now orphaned, spends time with the Doom Patrol, and is adopted by Steve Dayton and Rita Farr. Dayton however refuses to allow Gar to become a full member of the team. The Doom Patrol is surprisingly useful during the Alien Alliance invasion.

2013: Caulder's latest recruit is Kay Challis, a woman suffering from dissociative identity disorder, who had been affected by the Gene Bomb at the end of the Alien Alliance Invasion. Pursuing a theory that metagenic powers far exceed biological potential and thus must be a trigger rather than a cause of superpowers, Caulder explores the effects the gene bomb has on her. He eventually finds a way to unlock the potential for each of her 64 identities to develop their own metahuman expression.

2018: The Doom Patrol meet Danny the Street, who becomes both an occasional member and a secondary headquarters for the team.