Every day for the next two weeks Rob continued his training. After the first week, Rob had completed training with Turbo to his satisfaction. After that he began spending more time with Brick and his progress continued at a faster pace.
Halfway through the second week, after a particularly tiring sparing match, Brick had decided that Rob had learned all he could from him (in record time) and said that he could begin training with The Wraith in long range weapon use and energy projection.
On his first day Rob was instructed to select a long range weapon and found a rather mundane looking hand gun that seemed to be of Engineer's design. He discovered rather quickly that it was powered the same way as his blades; all he had to do was focus his energy into the grip and pull the trigger. The projectiles were blue like his blades and seemed to be made of the same energy. They did not carry as much force as a traditional bullet, but they pierced soft and hard materials better than one, and thus could still do some serious damage. The fact that the gun had unlimited ammo was also a clear bonus.
The Wraith and Rob trained with the gun; but also in energy projection. After using a variety of meditation techniques to "allow his energy to flow", Rob found that if he concentrated hard enough and was in an excited state he could produce balls of blue energy of the same substance as his blades and bullets using his bare hands. The energy balls were hard to handle, but they carried a great deal of power and could be useful for getting out of a tight spot.
So it was after another week of training that Rob was finally deemed "field ready" by Giovanni. Coincidentally, he was assigned to Nurse Sweet as her "field agent in-training" until he proved himself capable of handling assignments on his own. Rob was sure that he would advance quickly through this rank as well.
But there was a problem....there were no field missions for him to go on.
Giovanni informed Rob after he was declared field ready that they would be taking a "wait and see" attitude for the time being and would just be keeping surveillance on Trapjaw's movements. This of course meant that Rob couldn't really do anything and he spent most of his time honing his skills for when he was actually needed.
What little time Rob did not spend on extra training, he spent with Nurse Sweet. After the second time the two had slept together, a budding relationship began to grow. Rob was finally able to see beneath her hard exterior, and began to enjoy the person she really was.
More and more often the two of them could be seen cuddling on the couch in the living room or, in contrast, sparing in the Training Room. There was rarely a moment where the two were apart. The closer they got to each other, the less Rob thought of leaving The Corps and the more he started to embrace his new life.
It was during the weeks following the completion of his training that Rob learned more about Nurse Sweet and The Corps:
The Corps was founded in the early 1970s in response to a new and growing threat.
Crime rates were at an all-time high across the nation, and conventional police forces could not keep up with it. Fortunately, a young man named Giovanni Vespucci formulated a plan. In college he had studied archeology. After a mysterious expedition in Siberia he developed the amazing ability to manipulate matter around him. After this discovery, Giovanni sought out other people with extraordinary talents. He believed that if properly trained these people could benefit humanity.
After he left college, Giovanni gathered some of the people he had sought out together and revealed his plans to them. Out of the sixteen people he managed to find, four decided to give his plan a shot.
The original members of Giovanni's group were given code names and called The Wraith, Engineer, Top-Shot, and Slade. They were considered the founding members of what came to be known as The Corps. The group started out assisting law enforcement in Giovanni's home town of Highfield, Texas. The locals weren't too keen on allowing some 'weirdos' to control there already minimal crime rate. Of course, their attitudes changed when the crime rate dropped to 0% in Highfield in three months. Even traffic violations seemed to disappear.
The Corps was a small town success story that managed to reach the desk of Wes Wise, the then current Mayor of Dallas, Texas. He managed to get a measure passed in the city that allowed the use of "specialized" law enforcement. It was under the official title of "The Dallas Corps of Special Law Enforcement" that The Corps got their current title.
Wise managed to get The Corps a sizable budget which Engineer utilized to design and build weapons and utilities specially designed for the Corps' members; as well as a few specialized vehicles. By then The Corps had added even more members and its future was looking bright.
Dallas' crime rate dropped exponentially and cities across the nation demanded their own branches of The Corps. Giovanni responded by spreading members throughout the nation in major cities. America's war on crime seemed to be coming to a close until The Corps itself managed to undo everything it had accomplished...
In the early 1980s members of The Corps began to view their abilities as a way to get rich or gain power. They used violence and manipulation to achieve these goals and Giovanni was unable to stop the cancer spreading through his beloved group.
A civil war broke out among the members of The Corps. Battle lines were drawn and The Corps was split between those who supported helping humanity and those who supported exploiting the 'normals'.
From then on, the needs of law enforcement were set aside, and the remaining members loyal to Giovanni struggled to put down the growing threat the rebel members were creating. In 1986 The Corps finally seemed to have the upper hand, and was about to make their final move in crushing the super villains when everything fell apart.
Slade, a founding member of The Corps, had been secretly supporting the villains, and sabotaged Giovanni's final plan. A trap was laid and a vast number of Corps members were killed including Top-Shot, another founding member.
Outraged, Giovanni took matters into his own hands and in an astonishing display of his powers managed to carry out his plan and crush the villains and defeat Slade. The effort crippled him however, and he always walked with a limp and tired easily from then on.
The aftermath of the civil war was detrimental to The Corps that Giovanni had worked so hard to create and save. Public opinion towards them had turned 180 degrees, and they were viewed as a menace to society. The widespread destruction the battles between The Corps and the villains caused had a key role in creating this switch in the publics' eye, as did the steady rise of regular crime while The Corps was distracted.
In response, their funding was cut, and they were deemed vigilantes and punishable by law if caught carrying out any more law enforcement. Giovanni was too drained from the civil war to fight these measures, and he moved The Corps out of the cities. Most of the members returned to normal lives, but those who refused to leave moved into Giovanni's family estate and a bunker was built underneath to house their equipment and train any new members who came along.
A few years after the collapse of The Corps, Engineer began to go insane and left, only to be collected by Trapjaw and Sydney soon after.
By the time Rob was rescued by Nurse Sweet, the only two founding members of The Corps remaining were Giovanni and The Wraith. They had continued their search for extraordinary people, knowing that villains still existed throughout the nation. In secret, The Corps carried out small scale missions to reign in any remaining villains. This was usually relatively easy to accomplish, but Giovanni knew that it took only one very ambitious person to tip the balances and plunge the world back into chaos.
Nurse Sweet was the last member before Rob to be initiated into The Corps. She was working as a nurse in the burn unit of a large hospital when things went horribly wrong.
While Nurse Sweet was changing the bandages on a patient, the dressings she was applying suddenly burst into flames. Soon the entire bed, including the patient, was engulfed in fire. As hard as she tried, Nurse Sweet was unable to stop the fire and by the time the fire department arrived the entire unit had burned to the ground.
Horrified at the tragedy and wracked by survivor's guilt, Nurse Sweet became a different person. She became unable to form meaningful relationships with anyone and she became withdrawn and emotionally affectless.
Two years after the incident at the hospital, a bar she was visiting burned to the ground. A year after that, a motel she was staying at.
It was after this third instance that The Corps found her. With their help, she discovered that she had the ability to manipulate fire. At first she was consumed with overwhelming guilt, knowing that all three fires had been her doing. But with Giovanni's guidance as well as support from the other members of the Corps she was able to overcome these feelings and learn how to control her power.
