www.coinhat.com/justicebackers

($ $ $ $ * * * * * *) – ($4,344,823 dropped in $10,000,000 goal) – (26 days remain)

REMINDER – If ‘Justice Backers’ does not reach its $10,000,000 goal by October 6th of this year, the project will be canceled. Coinhat accepts all major credit cards as well as payments through Fundyfriend. Refunds are available up to 24 hours after pledge in most circumstances. Refunds may be offered for canceled, delayed, or altered projects on a case-by-case basis.

PROPOSAL

Justice Backers is a proposed initiative to create and maintain a team of specialized individuals to halt and prevent crime as well as provide disaster relief. In case you’re not catching our drift: SUPERHEROES. Since we will be operating outside of the known systems of the law, funding must come directly from the people we seek to protect.

The members of this team as well as those who provide funding will be referred to as backers, because that’s what you’re doing: offering your funds, your time, and your abilities as a way to support and protect the ideals of bravery, compassion, and above all else, justice. This is your chance to make a difference (and score some sweet backer loot while you’re at it). Check out our backer updates below to get all the specifics you could want.

ABOUT

Greetings, internet! My name is Eben Erenthall. I hope you like that name, because it might be the only one you get over the course of this project. While I promise to do my absolute best to keep you guys informed every step of the way, there’s just some information I can’t let get out if any of this is going to work. If I successfully recruit the other backers, most of their identities will be protected so that we can work without interference. So, I’m sorry if you see a (REDACTED) show up in place of a juicy detail every once in a while. Let me get things started by explaining why you can have my name and why I’m confident enough to stamp it on this Coinhat crowdfunding campaign.

I love dogs. I hate losing them. As a boy I had a cocker spaniel named C-span (get it?). I loved every minute of that dog’s life and every minute of my life while I was with him. He always whined like an affronted little British person every time he stepped in spilled water or juice. His bark was like the pop of a champagne cork. C-span was hit by a station wagon when he was six. I thought I’d never love again.

When I was seventeen we got a whitish Catahoula puppy. He was nearly deaf because of a genetic defect and was going to be euthanized when some do-gooders swooped in and rescued him. My dad bought him off his saviors, named him Garth because his favorite movie was Wayne’s World, and gave him to us. Training him was a nightmare. We put our sweat and tears into that dog and he went and died at the age of four from heart failure. At four! From then on I never had another dog of my own. I always visited my friends and played with theirs because I couldn’t bear the thought of another one dying under my roof, alone on some ratty round bathmat, while I slept.

About halfway through college I veered off course from my planned computer programming major and into a robotics program. I started playing with the idea of a robotic pet, like those gray plastic ones from the 90’s with their flashing red eyes, except mine would actually do something other than bark and waddle toward you. My project proposal was caught in some kind of tech-dragnet by a company called Mechanical Foundry Unlimited and they hired me straight out of school. Seriously. They grabbed the diploma out of my hand and framed it on my office wall before I could learn how to tie the tie that was part of the office dress code.

I spent more than a decade with them honing my craft. My dogs learned to walk. Run. Communicate. The best part was that I never had to put them down. Any time the bodies needed retooling, I always saved the software from each experiment. I’ve got ten kennels’ worth of buggy, but still very much functional, dog brains sitting in laptops all over my place. (I wasn’t supposed to save them because they were technically the property of MFU, but (REDACTED) ‘em.)

I built the units to initially serve as disaster relief. They had chemical and heat sensors in their snouts, powerful ears and eyes, and the jaw strength/precision to pull an unconscious person from a wrecked car without damaging their soft tissues. After that I streamlined their design and started filling them with all sorts of nooks and pockets to store various devices so they could be custom-built to handle different situations. Red robotic hounds riding on fire trucks, spraying extinguishing foam from their mouth. White ones that could deliver painkillers and bandages around field hospitals or even defibrillate someone with their front paws. I was building my dreams piece by piece.

Then corporate crossed me. Anybody who’s seen a movie with a robot that wasn’t that tube-armed flailing thing from Forbidden Planet knows what’s coming. I found out my project had been earmarked for the military. Some of the guys above me had even taken my units out for field tests without telling me. That’s how I found out. The dogs have a sort of pedometer that I checked regularly. Nobody walks my dogs but me. I threatened to resign. They told me to go ahead. Said the dogs belonged to them no matter what. I was madder than I’d ever been, but I didn’t have the courage to do anything about it. Until Nance put her hand on my shoulder.

Nance Pilton was a fellow researcher and designer about six years older than me. I’m not ashamed to say she whipped me when I needed whipping and made sure the work got done. She’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a mentor. While I was overhauling hounds she was busy machining mitts. That was her pet project: gauntlets that synched to a pair of hovering robotic hands. The hands were powered by tiny jet engines and could build up enough force to punch through slabs of concrete. She designed them to speed up construction work because they could replace any number of tools with their ability to mimic the actions of human hands. Her mitts got stolen away and put in the same folder with my dogs. I’d never seen her so angry. Normally she looks like a soccer mom, all boring brown hair and PG smiles without a hint of sass or sexuality. After the theft she looked like a hawk that was ready to claw its own guts out if better prey didn’t show up.

She didn’t suggest that we do something; she demanded it. I manned up. We were both ready to throw away everything if it meant getting our work back. So we did.

Our resignations were set to go through in a few days, but we still had access to company data. Nance threatened a grub-shaped guy who worked in warehousing until he told us where our prototypes were stored. We snuck into the secure storage around lunchtime in the hopes that everybody would be off banging on the uncooperative third floor vending machine or grimacing at the cafeteria’s limp brown salad bar. It was even more deserted than we’d hoped.

It wasn’t just our stuff in there. There were a hundred different projects covered in hazard stickers with paperwork in triplicate stapled on them wherever a staple could hold. It was difficult to even guess what half of them did. There were gun shells big enough to cut open and make grills out of. There was something that looked like the base of a lava lamp; it didn’t have any hazard stickers so I went ahead and turned it on. It created a strange little vortex of frosty air that cooled the room so much I could see Nance’s breath.

I could’ve stayed in that toy store all day if Nance didn’t call my name. I looked over and saw her standing beside five waist-high figures covered by a plastic sheet. She grabbed the sheet with both hands and whipped it away like she was revealing a sports car.

“Looking for these?” she said with a crazy grin. Sure enough, there stood my five dog prototypes. Shiny gunmetal gray. Thin but expressive eyes. Tapered elegant snouts that opened into speakers. Shoulders and spines lined with hinges and compartments for anything you could need. Legs like greyhounds, but a hundred times stronger. My pack.

I ran over, drooling and cooing, and switched them on. They have a default play mode, so they jumped about and whined excitedly, happy to see me, to see each other, to be alive. While I rolled around and kissed at them, Nance found her mitts and checked to make sure they were working. She punched a hole in the wall.

“Keep it down,” I said, suddenly afraid of drawing attention. Playing with dogs is harmless, but what she did was property damage.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll be out of here in two minutes. Just as soon as we get that loaded onto the jet.” She pointed at something. A humming metal hand the size of a Maine lobster pointed its segmented finger as well. I didn’t like what I saw.

“What? We can’t take that thing. It’s not ours,” I said. I was practically whimpering. That thing was bad news.

“We’re taking the jet,” she reasoned. “It doesn’t belong to us either.” The room we were in was way too big to just be used for storage. It was actually the back half of a company hangar that had been walled off. We knew that just on the other side of the plaster, there was another project waiting to be pulled around on a leash in front of the company and military executives: a new compact aircraft with advanced electronic stealth capabilities. Its file was just as easy to read as the ones for my dogs or her hands, as long as we still had clearance. The plan was to escape the building with our projects inside the jet. It was the only way we could think of that would get us out of there without risking pursuit. That thing her cold metal hand pointed to though… that wasn’t part of the plan.

“That thing’s a weapon,” I said. I stared at the creepy metal skeleton. It had plenty of hazard tags wrapped around the black metal bars that made up its ribcage. Its expressionless eyes were black for now but I knew, without even seeing it in action or reading about it in its file, that those eyes would be red when electricity knocked around inside them. It was like the Terminator had been hollowed out and been given a make-over by a committee of mad scientists with bondage fetishes. It looked like the kind of thing that, even when blasted to pieces by the hero, would still manage to trap some ignorant animal by the neck and slowly choke the life out of it.

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“Everything in here is a weapon,” Nance said and rolled her eyes. She stroked the cheek of the nightmare skeleton from six feet away with her machined mitt.

“Not my buddies!” I blathered into the faces of my dogs. They responded by raising their butts in the air and wagging their tails like car antennae. God I loved that. “I’m not taking that thing with me,” I said after I stood up. I knew its profile. It was a hostage-control robot. Built to wrap its hollow chest and limbs around somebody noncompliant and control their movements. That way if anybody tried to shoot at the robot they’d end up hitting their own trapped teammate or a civilian.

“I’m bringing it. I’ll need to sell some of this stuff if I’m going to have enough money to hide from MFU and the government,” she said. “We don’t all have crazy uncles with property they bought under the table.” That was my plan, but I’ll get into that in a minute. I’m not quite sure why that hostage robot sent such a chill up my spine, but it did. I dug in my heels and refused. Nance looked at me like I was betraying her. Her hand curled into a fist. It wasn’t noticeable on her regular hands, but the machine ones creaked and groaned. We both suddenly realized that since we weren’t letting MFU boss us around, we weren’t going to let anybody else do it either.

We fought. She tried to knock me out with those rocketing fists of hers, but my dogs played defense. They leapt up and took each blow on their sides to protect me. I control them with a sort of forearm-mounted keyboard, so I was able to order two of them to get busy breaking down the wall so we could get to the jet while the other three fought Nance and her hands. She killed one. The bitch killed one. His name was Hotrod. I have copies of him, but that one blinked out when she grabbed its skull in one of her mitts and crushed it like a tin can.

The other dogs ripped apart one of her hands like a dead pigeon as revenge. Then I had them cover me while I made it to the jet. I couldn’t fly the thing, but one of my dogs, Topgun, had an intelligent interface that, in combination with the autopilot, would be enough to get me where I was going.

I realized the alarms were going off. I left Nance behind with her evil robot and one remaining mitt. I saw her flip me the bird with a big metal finger through the hole in the wall as the jet took off and smashed through the hangar doors. I assume they caught her shortly after that.

Nance didn’t have the right kind of plan. Me, I do. My dogs are meant to be used for good, even if I’m the only one who can use them that way. I had Topgun pilot the jet to (REDACTED): a property I inherited from my doomsday-planner uncle after the diabetes took him. He never wanted anyone knowing where it was, so he kept everything off the record. I think he might have even bought it with unmarked gold believe it or not.

It was while I was enjoying my first few days of solitude in my hideout that the plan started coming together. Eben Erenthall couldn’t go out anymore. He was a wanted man. I needed more helpers than just the ones I could build, or I’d be stuck lazing around in the dark eating canned food and watching reruns for the rest of my life. I needed people who had dreams of making the world a better place, who could admit their vision was bigger than a signed contract or an ass-kisser in a judge’s robe hammering out fates like he was stamping envelopes.

There are people like me everywhere. Some are willing to join. I’ve been communicating with them through the internet, using my new hero name: Alpha Dog. That’s how I want all you backers to think of me. I’m Alpha Dog: commander of the Justice Backers. The thing is, even outside the rules, justice is expensive. My dogs need repairs. I need transportation funds, groceries, and utilities for the new members if they’re going to come live here. I don’t even want to say how much it cost to get decent internet run all the way out here to (REDACTED).

This is where you guys come in. The initial goal of ten million is for the upfront costs, but after that we’ll need to do monthly fundraisers to stay in operation. All I can offer you is the chance to finance the world’s first true team of superheroes. In turn, we become accountable to you. We won’t be a brutish police force that knocks you over and shocks you until you forget what the word ‘resist’ means. We won’t be a military invading foreign countries to slurp up their oil or engage in cultural imperialism. We’ll be there to help. How much we can help is up to you.

There are actually a few material benefits I can offer you. If you back us for twenty bucks we can send you an official Justice Backers T-shirt so everyone knows you’re participating. If you back at the hundred dollar level, you’ll get access to the video diaries I’ll have every member make to chronicle our deeds and the inner workings of the project. If you back at the thousand dollar level, I can guarantee special collector’s statuettes of the members cast from high-quality resin, hand-painted, and signed by all of us.

If you back at the level of ten grand you will appear on our founder’s plaque inside the compound and receive a surprise visit from one of my robotic hounds for a few hours of fetch or whatever else you’d like to do.

If you back at the level of one hundred thousand, I’ll arrange a trip for you to come meet us, plus all the previously listed rewards.

What do you say internet? Are you ready for a form of justice that is directly accountable to you? Do you want to be a Justice Backer?

($$$$$$$$$$) – ($17,455,622 dropped in $10,000,000 goal) – (0 days remain)

JUSTICE PREVAILS! – (Quick Backer Update - more coming very soon!!)

I’m stunned. I don’t know how to thank all of you. Your donations have transformed me from Eben into Alpha Dog! You’ve transformed my hideout into our new command center (codename: Backer Barn)!

Where do I even start… there’s so much work to do. I’ll be busy in the coming weeks arranging all the rewards and the team’s travel before we really get things started… I figure the least I can do is finally reveal some of the heroes to the people who generously funded their future. Nobody’s here yet. It’s still just little old me and the dogs (who are enjoying some sweet new upgrades courtesy of you backers), but the team will be arriving soon. It’s not set in stone how many members we’re actually getting (there are a lot of fakers to wade through), but it looks like once we start we’ll have eight to ten heroes on the payroll. I’ll tell you a little bit about the ones who are definitely confirmed!

Impala – She’s the only other one who can show her real name, because many of you probably already know it: Omara Toso! If you’re not familiar, she’s the thirty-eight year old athlete from Ethiopia who took more gold medals than she could carry two Olympics ago, but they were all rescinded when they decided her natural abilities didn’t make for fair competition. She has a triple-muscling mutation in her legs and thighs. Basically, she’s lady Hercules from the waist down. She can jump thirty feet in the air or deliver a kick that can fell trees! And now she works for you guys! Impala will be joining me as co-commander of the Justice Backers to make sure someone other than me is accountable for the wellbeing of the team and all your hard-earned money!

Golden Boy – He’s twenty, blonde, and the sight of him would probably make a few of our lady backers melt. Golden Boy was born as the result of in vitro fertilization. Somehow, it’s still a mystery, the embryos his parents were originally going to have implanted got swapped with some from an unknown source. The result was a glorious chiseled specimen with super strength, reduced vulnerability, and the strange talent for picking up any skill he observes. This guy can learn to fly a helicopter just by sitting in it! He could beat the Williams sisters at tennis without ever having picked up a racket before. Just being around him makes me feel pathetic, but how could I start a hero team without him?

Archive – She’s twenty-six, Italian, probably smarter than me, and was born with the most amazing eyes. They don’t look very special, just kind of blue, but you’ll never believe what they can do. We’re talking X-ray vision. That’s not all though! Her mind knows how to interpret the electrically-coded information she sees. That means she can peer into your mind, see the synapses firing, and give a pretty accurate assessment of what you were thinking. She can do it with computers too, reading data off of them that isn’t even visible. Add to that a photographic memory and… her girlfriend is a hero too!

Wallflower – She’s twenty-four, Korean, and in a relationship with Archive. How crazy is it that two heroes met up and fell in love just in time to join the Justice Backers? Now she’s very shy for a couple of reasons. In addition to being born with her powers, she was born without a voice. Her eyes also appear empty, like milky white marbles, but Archive tells me that’s just a side effect of her abilities. Wallflower projects a psychic field that tricks your brain into thinking it can’t see her! So while a security camera has no trouble spotting her, she can hide from humans and animals at will. She can also stick to walls! Sounds like she’ll be perfect for listening in on scheming criminals.

Pawn – He’s twenty-five, thin, and the color of vanilla ice cream! Pawn was just a normal kid until he was hiking alone one day and fell into what he describes as an ‘unknown-to-science massive squirming lichen’. When he came out his physiology was radically changed! You see when Pawn is struck with a significant amount of force he explodes into a fine white powder. After a while the powder comes back together, restores his shape, and he’s ready to fight again! As far as he knows he’s unkillable! That’ll help make the Justice Backers unbeatable.

Monkey Girl – She’s nineteen, Portuguese, and the last member I’m ready to confirm at the moment. The poor girl was the subject of gene-splicing experiments in her native country. She was kept in a cage for more than two years with a few other… unfortunate souls. Once she busted herself out and heard about our efforts she contacted me as quickly as she could. Her audition tape was certainly something. Science has changed her so she now has the flexibility and agility of an ape, not to mention their hand-like feet and a prehensile tail. Just don’t ask her if she likes bananas; I made that mistake already. Her favorite food is honeydew melon, and don’t you forget it! Though English is her second language, she’s close to mastering it. She’ll have plenty of practice talking to you guys in her video diaries. Don’t forget to get to that hundred dollar tier so you can see those!

That’s the starting lineup boys and girls. Like I said, I’m pretty sure there will be more to come. Keep an eye on your E-mail and our campaign page for the official start date. I won’t start the next fundraiser until everyone’s moved in and we’re ready for action.