Codename: Spitfire Issue Guide #5

Issue 12:
Ghost in the Machine

After their first mission went horribly wrong, Codename: Spitfire decided to take some time out to ensure the Mark 3 M.A.X. suit was up to snuff. They proceeded to repair and upgrade the armor slightly, adding a series of mission-specific attachments, and began to properly train Jennifer Swensen in the use of her M.A.X. armor in combat conditions - experience she lacks somewhat.

We join the Project staff in the midst of a training exercise, where the team is hitting her with a series of automated weaponry in order to gauge Jennifer's capabilities. Over time, we see Jennifer easily skating through the 'phase one' test, so Edmund Roth orders the team to launch the second part of the test. This consisted of assaulting Jennifer with a full brace of surface to air missiles.

While Jenny tried to sort out a solution to this threat, Roth had Anne Pollicino scatter the missiles, and home in on her from different directions. Due to her 'two dimensional thinking', Jennifer is easily hit by the dummy missiles, and winds up losing control of the M.A.X. armor as a result. Unable to level out in time, Jennifer crashed the armor hard into the ground below.

Later that day, Jennifer is back in the Project: Spitfire compound, reviewing her performance during the proving grounds' test earlier. Beating herself up over her lack of progress, Jennifer has something of a tiff with Jake Travest (again) before settling down to sulk proper. As she does, Jennifer looks at a photograph of her father, and flashes back to a memory of him from her childhood.

Asking her father, Karl Swensen, for a book on quantum physics as a youth, she discovered a letter for him from the Department of Defense. Enraged upon her asking about it, Karl seized and destroyed the letter, telling Jennifer there was no excuse for the use of violence, no matter the situation. While Jennifer meditated on that in relation to her current situation, she dropped the photo.

Imagine her surprise when she found a disc inside the broken frame.

Curious, Jennifer put the disc into a handy 5 1/4" drive, and fired it up. The monitor immediately came to life, greeting her and indicating that it was the Man-amplified Experiment Advisory Program. It stated that it was written by Karl Swensen to advise Jennifer in the development of M.A.X. technology in the event of his death. While she dug in to the program though, events were unfolding close by.

At a nearby Air Force base, a test pilot is bringing in a new prototype aircraft, the F19A Quicksilver fighter-bomber, in for a landing. Little did he know that heavily armed mercenaries had seized the air field, and menaced him upon his landing. Their leader, one Evan Reinger, killed the pilot and stole his craft - and after he took off, bombed the base and killed everyone on site!

Notified of this, Jennifer left her father's program running and ran to the Project: Spitfire situation room. Briefed on the situation, Jennifer mopes about her father's technology being used to kill, when she sees the results of Reinger's 'work'. Shaking off her doubts, she hops into the M.A.X. suit. Checking it and its special attachments out, Jennifer then takes off after Reinger.

Charged with the mission of stopping him from leaving the country if possible, and killing him if all else fails, Jennifer engaged Reinger in the F-19 when Karl's program seized control of the M.A.X suit. Jenny and company don't realize what's going on until it says something about violence never being justified. Jenny realizes that the program she left running is the cause of this, and has Anne remove its disc.

Jenny then makes short work of Reinger, taking down the F-19 prototype instead of allowing him to steal it away from the United States. Later that night, Jennifer quibbles with her father's seemingly intelligent advisory program, and lets it know that while he was a pacifist, she realizes that he was wrong about the use of violence against truly villainous sorts, and makes peace with inflicting it.

When necessary, at least.

Issue 13:
If Only I Had A Heart...

Deep in the jungles of Puerto Rojo, we find C.I.A. operative Celia Cliff on the run. She'd been working on the island undercover, but after finding her home ransacked, she fled into the jungle surrounding her assumed home. On the run for two days, Celia's efforts were ultimately for naught, for she was finally captured by her pursuer, a strange metal man of purple and orange hue, with an almost demonic face...

Later, in Arlington, Edmund Roth is briefing Jenny Swensen about the situation on Puerto Rojo. He lets her know that Saxon St. John, a radical cyberneticist, is working on the island. An associate of the Club, St. John has been experimenting on the locals mercilessly, and the government feared that his technology may be the equal of, if not slightly more powerful than, Jenny's own M.A.X. gear.

For this operation, Roth felt that a more subtle approach was necessary, and to this end he introduced Jenny to Willy Deere. This fellow was apparently working from Jenny's father's M.A.X. notes for quite some time (which makes one wonder why the C.I.A. needed her in the first place), and had produced a brand new suit of armor for her to use on this mission - it was smaller, but much less conspicuous.

Since Puerto Rojo fiercely inspects everything coming into their country, it was necessary to sneak Jenny into the place under the radar cover of a mundane commercial flight. Though tired from the extended flight, Jenny made her way towards the small hut Celia Cliff was using as her home / headquarters, and began to snoop around. Of course, the place had been bugged, so Jenny was walking into a trap!

As she began to inspect Agent Cliff's notes regarding St. John's work, Jenny was ambushed by one of the man's creations. The fellow in this garishly colored 'Synergy' suit gave her quite a thrashing, having caught her by surprise, but she was saved by a last-minute distraction of Deere's design. Flattening the Synergy suit and its occupant, Jenny pulled his helmet off and the two techies checked his gear out.

While Willy was fascinated, Jenny was mortified to find that the Synergy suits were actually cybernetic exoskeletons, physically hard-wired into their occupants' nervous systems! Jenny then tried to interrogate its operator, only to find he was mostly a blank slate. When St. John tried to recall him, Jenny just let the guy go, though he seemed almost surprised at the compassion she and Deere showed towards him.

That night, Jenny and Willy hole up in Jorge's, a small restaurant on the coast of Puerto Rojo. They're debating their next plan of action when they are almost rousted by the local cops. When Jorge himself protects the duo from capture, they thank him, only to learn why he would risk his life on their behalf. It turns out that just about everyone around knows what St. John is up to, and fears his might!

Of course, Jorge hates St. John more than he fears him, for that villain abducted his twin brother for his experiments! This is why Jorge escorted them to the madman's fortress headquarters, though he fled once he saw that Jenny also had metallic 'skin' that she intended to use against St. John. Heedless of this, the two C.I.A. operatives then made their way into St. John's decrepit old headquarters, eventually finding his lab.

That's when they discovered Celia Cliff. It turns out she'd been wired into the 'next generation' of Synergy suit, which would be controlled by her brain... externally! This is of course when Saxon St. John decided to make his grand entrance, and claimed Jenny's new Mark 4 M.A.X. suit for his own. But he wanted to see it in action first - which is why he sicced two of his Synergy cyborgs on her!

Jenny defeated one, but was having trouble with the second, at least until she realized this was Jorge's brother, Enrique. She managed to get through his brainwashing by appealing to his humanity, thus defusing the fight... at least until St. John shot him in the head for his 'incompetence'. He then turned his gun on Jenny and Willy, but was waylaid by Celia, who used her control of a Synergy suit to kill the man.

After Celia's subsequent death, Willy inspects the dead inventor's computers, only to find his information was intact. Thinking he could get this to Roth to further the M.A.X. program, Jenny violently objected. Lasing the computer banks with her arm blaster, she destroyed the terrible information that St. John had collected - which technically was her mission there in the first place. Of course, Deere berated her for being so naive...

Post Series Summary:

After that last issue, Jenny Swensen next appeared as Spitfire in the Pitt, the story that dealt with the aftermath of Ken Connell's inadvertent obliteration of the city of Pittsburgh with the Star Brand. She was there to survey the damage done, and managed to save several individuals from the carnage that took place right after the city's demise.

However, this got her on the outs with the government, who had ordered her not to search for individual survivors, and instead look at the big picture to see what was going wrong with the area around Pittsburgh. She didn't care, however, after seeing all this death and destruction. She landed the M.A.X. suit once it was out of power, and tried to escape the Pitt area on foot.

While roaming about the decimated wastes, Jenny ran into several paranormals, the group known as D.P. 7 (who were also investigating the destruction of Pittsburgh). She stayed with this group for a time, starting to notice that her own body was undergoing some sort of change as a result of her being exposed to 'Pitt-juice', a sort of goop at the bottom of the Pitt.

Meanwhile, Project: Spitfire had managed to recover the Mark 3 suit from the wastes around the Pitt, and they put Jake Travest into the pilot seat. His first mission was to capture Wayne Tucker, a psionic paranormal in the group known as Psi-Force, who had eluded government capture for quite some time, and frankly, the C.I.A. was tired of this state of affairs.

Descending upon him in Vancouver, Travest captured Tucker and held him hostage against the return of Tryone Jessup, another Psi-Force paranormal who was recently spotted with the telepath. However, Travest didn't deal with Tucker's girlfriend, Lindsay Falmon, who called in the Medusa Web to help liberate Tucker by trashing Travest and the Mark 3 M.A.X. suit.

As she lost feeling in her skin, Jenny and most of D.P. 7 were captured by the U.S. military, and taken to be Drafted (or otherwise conscripted into government service). Over time, Jenny's change fully realized itself: her skin had transformed into some sort of steel-like shell, a natural sort of body armor that could protect her from injury.

After this change became apparent, Jenny became a sort of paranormal C.I.A. operative, working with them for a time until she and the others managed to escape to New York City, which had become a sort of paranormal mecca. She stayed there with most of D.P. 7 until the end of that title's run, where some of that group had their powers removed by a man with a Cure for paranormality.

On the other hand, Jake Travest wasn't doing so good; the Canadian authorities had locked him up after his blatantly destructive operation in their country against Psi-Force. He was eventually broken out by the Medusa Web however, who wanted to use him to get at the M.A.X. technology, and in his damaged mental state, they managed to dupe him into getting it for them.

They told him that they were working for Project: Spitfire, and as such, he led him to where the Canadians were storing the Mark 3 M.A.X. suit. After he got the suit's internal schematic out of the suit's remains, the Web agents blew the facility to smithereens, along with both the Mark 3 suit and Jake Travest, in order to prevent anybody from following their trail.

After all, they didn't need the suit when they had a complete schematic to rebuild it...

Though her former compatriot was dead, Jenny herself lived on for several years as a friend of the D.P.7 paranormals, and as the sidekick / possible girlfriend of Captain Manhattan, fighting crime and generally doing good deeds for the remaining residents of New York City, all but abandoned by non-paranormals in the aftermath of the Pitt debacle and the sooty years that followed.

In one such instance, Jenny Swensen was but one of many paranormals collected by Nightmask and led by Quasar against an invading army of extraplanar (to them) aliens, bent on stealing the power of the Star Brand. The mastermind behind this plot, the evil alien known only as Skeletron managed to swipe the Brand, but his machinations stranded Jenny's earth in a variant earthly plane.

How Jenny and her fellow paranormals have dealt with this state of affairs has yet to be seen...

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