Secret Warriors
Context
The Secret Warriors were a new Marvel team of young superhumans, which appeared in 2009. That was during the Secret Invasion then Dark Reign era. The team was so named since the kids were Nick Fury’s secret weapons against these threats.
The book died in 2011, after being mostly used to advanced the meta-plot about the secret origin of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its most enduring enemies.
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Organization
Full Name:
Team White, Caterpillars.
Purpose:
To take down HYDRA and Leviathan; formerly to oppose Skrull invasion.
Modus Operandi:
Covert surveillance and operations against HYDRA and Leviathan.
Extent of operations:
Global.
Bases of Operations:
Various secret bases (see below).
Major Funding:
Nick Fury.
Known Enemies:
HYDRA, Leviathan.
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Known allies:
Howling Commandos, Avengers.
Membership
Number of active members:
5.
Number of reserve members:
0.
Organizational structure:
Nick Fury dictates their operations, with Quake (Daisy Johnson) as the squad leader.
Known current members:
Known former members:
Membership requirements:
Listed on Fury’s Caterpillar files. Powered individual unknown to the intelligence community at large.
History
Secret Invasion
Learning Skrulls had infiltrated numerous areas of society, and even S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury investigated. He then began preparing a response. He accessed the Caterpillar files, his private list of individuals whose powers weren’t known to the world at large, and sometimes not even by the individuals in question.
Fury recruited Daisy Johnson, who’d been decommissioned from S.H.I.E.L.D. following the illegal “secret war” mission which had forced him to leave the organization. Fury then had her recruit the members of the team she was to lead.
Their training period was cut shorter than he’d have liked. The Skrull invasion became public, open warfare breaking out on the streets of New York. Leading the group into battle, he rescued the Young Avengers and members of the Initiative, before retreating to their Homerun facility to plan.
Continuing hit and run attacks against the occupiers made limited progress. These required most of the team to take down a few Super-Skrulls. When the main battle broke out in Central Park, they joined the massed army of super-heroes and super-villains in ending the invasion.
As soon as the battle was won, Fury and his team departed. They abandoned the Homerun base they’d shared with the resistance in favour of the Cocoon facility.
Secret War
They broke into a former S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, since H.A.M.M.E.R. had replaced it. There, Fury found documentation proving S.H.I.E.L.D. was, and always had been, a subsidiary of HYDRA, which had its fingers far deeper into society than had previously been known.
HYDRA had also been affected by the Skrull invasion, though. And the time it took them to recover allowed Fury to make plans.
Revealing this to the team, he prepared them for the war to come. They confirmed it, and the extent of HYDRA’s control over the new security set up, by watching what everyone did, and manipulating events to show people’s allegiances.
The team’s first active mission was to secure the human resources of one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s psychic facilities, Red Worm. But HYDRA were already taking prisoners away when they arrived, and started executing those deemed unnecessary.
Despite identifying deadly HYDRA leaders in the form of Kraken and the Gorgon, Daisy led an attack to rescue their prisoners.
The fight didn’t go well, with Gorgon cutting Slingshot’s hands off. The team were forced to retreat. Fury decided to remove them from active duty until certain of their reliability.
Dark Reign, part 1
Left shorthanded by Slingshot’s injuries, Fury sent Daisy to recruit Eden Fesi. He was under the protection of his mentor, Gateway. Thus, Daisy learned Gateway had forbidden him to accept Fury’s previous recruitment offer. He allowed Eden to accept hers though, as she would look after him.
Fury then led the Howling Commandos, a private army of former S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who refused to stay on when H.A.M.M.E.R. replaced it. They raided a H.A.M.M.E.R. facility and stole a few Helicarriers. However, they were hit hard by a Hydra counter-attack.
Responding to an emergency alert, Daisy led her team to support the COmmandos. This turned the tide of battle and letting Fury’s forces escape with the Helicarriers. Following the battle, Fury admitted to Daisy that he hadn’t called her.
Dark Reign, part 2
While Fury was off directing his plans, Hellfire and Phobos intercepted an urgent call to him from the Black Widow, seeking help. Recruiting Eden, they attended the meeting, Phobos hiding inside a Nick Fury LMD. The incident proved to be a trap laid by Osborn, who had his Thunderbolts tracking Black Widow and Songbird.
Original list of caterpillars.
With Fury his captive, Osborn wasted no time shooting him in the head. Phobos, Hellfire and Eden escaped through one of Eden’s gateways, but Ares’ magic let Osborn’s forces follow them through the portal.
The security of the Inside Straight facility compromised (in addition to the Homerun facility where Osborn had ambushed them), an auto-destruct sequence was automatically activated. Thus, the team had to abandon it, escaping Osborn’s forces.
Fury manipulated Osborn not long after into helping uncover an active agent of Leviathan, a Russian agency long thought dormant.
Leviathan also caused problems for HYDRA’s plans, when one of their heads, Madame Hydra, proved to be a double agent. Or triple agent, since Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine had also worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., and Fury had only just learned of her true loyalties.
Waking the Beast
Recovering an artefact from HYDRA, Leviathan was able to wake its forces, including its leader, Orion, from suspended animation. They began hostilities with HYDRA.
Fury introduced Daisy to the leaders of the other two Caterpillar teams, Alexander Pierce, who led the black team, and Mikel Fury, who led the grey team.
The black team were a recon unit tasked with watching HYDRA. The grey team were an attack and response group tasked with the Leviathan problem. And Daisy’s white team acted as Fury’s personal hammer.
Preparing the teams to become more active against HYDRA and Leviathan, he told Daisy to send Druid home, since he was a weak link. Daisy resisted, saying she should decide things like that about her team. Fury agreed, then did it anyway when the members were dispatched by individual routes to their new base.
Druid hadn’t actually been dropped. Fury sent John Garrett to train him in secret, getting him into shape and helping him get a better handle on his powers.
Falling into Night
Fury took the white team with him to oppose Osborn’s siege of Asgard. They joined with the heroes Captain America had gathered together. Phobos was left behind after his father, Ares, was killed by Sentry after turning against Osborn. The team didn’t stick around after Osborn’s defeat.
The Howling Commandos, with Pierce’s black team, launched a major attack on Hell’s Heaven, a HYDRA base deep inside China.
The mission objective was successful, but their Helicarriers were ambushed by HYDRA on the way out of the country. Two Helicarriers were downed, and Gabriel Jones and Eric Koenig, along with most of their troops, were killed.
Dugan had been injured in the crash, and Jasper Sitwell left the battle to try getting him to safety. They were captured by Chinese forces. The pair was then taken into custody by the U.N., who questioned them to gain an understanding of the secret war going on between HYDRA and Leviathan.
Storming Gehenna
Events escalated, as Fury’s European command centre was destroyed, along with a few blocks of Paris. Their London base was then lost to a biological attack that claimed 12,000 civilians. An attempted ceasefire between HYDRA and Leviathan ended when Magadan, one of Leviathan’s leaders, was assassinated.
Leviathan destroyed HYDRA’s recruitment centre in Seattle in retaliation. However it had actually been John Garrett’s work under a false flag, at Fury’s command.
The devastation of the Seattle attack was severe. That prompted Fury to lead the white team in an attack on HYDRA’s principal base Gehenna. They teleported in with a bomb, intending a surgical attack, but HYDRA was ready for them. Eden was downed within seconds, preventing them escaping, and they had to fight their way out.
Phobos’ prophetic powers let him lead them out through a safe route. Yet he stayed behind to guard their passage, having seen his death facing the Gorgon in single combat. They fought, Phobos hoping to change his fate. He didn’t, dying at Gorgon’s hand.
While the others made for the surface, Fury and Hellfire held back HYDRA’s forces. Only Fury survived it, detonating the bomb behind him. The team were rescued by Garrett and Druid, who’d been set up as a contingency.
Fury considered Quake too distraught over the deaths of her team members, especially when he revealed to her that Hellfire had been a traitor. He deactivated the white team.
Night
HYDRA split into factions following the destruction of Gehenna. Gorgon, Hive, and the new Madame Hydra abandoned Baron Strucker and the Kraken.
Fury sent the grey team to strike a similar blow to the Hive’s main spawning base, but they were overwhelmed. They succeeded in destroying it, but at the cost of all their lives.
Visiting his son’s grave, Fury was surrounded by the Kraken and HYDRA troops, and taken prisoner. He awoke in a HYDRA base, tied to a chair, opposite the similarly constrained Strucker.
The Real History of S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA, part 1
In 1961, eleven men were gathered at the Pieta facility in Italy, by the man calling himself Aries (actually Leonardo Da Vinci). The men were Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, John Garrett, Baron Strucker, Jake Fury, Cornelius Van Lunt, Daniel Whitehall, Vasili Dassiev, Viktor Uvarov, Thomas Davidson, and Shoji Soma.
They were the most prominent spymasters of the time, from various, opposing, factions.
Aries offered them the technology to further their respective aims, if they did something for him. He dispatched them in teams to retrieve powerful technologies long buried or hidden.
An alien power source and a large collection of augmentation/rejuvenation chambers were recovered. However, Nick Fury’s team claimed to have found nothing at the site to which they were dispatched.
Using the alien power source, the chambers allowed not simply a life-support system to keep someone in stasis for centuries, but the capacity to super-charge them, enhancing their abilities.
As soon as it was in a working condition, Dassiev and Uvarov betrayed the others. They called in their troops and taking the technology for themselves. They planned to use it to put the covert Russian organization, Leviathan, ahead of their competitors.
The Real History of S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA, part 2
Strucker and Soma led Soma’s Hand assassins in an attack on a Leviathan facility. It took place a month later, when the chambers were about to be used. Uvarov was seriously wounded by Strucker, and Dassiev barely got him into a chamber in time to keep him alive.
Strucker and Soma took the alien power source, leaving the Leviathan operatives in the chambers stuck in stasis and transformed into non-human forms. The alien power source was what Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine would later steal from HYDRA, enabling the wakening of the Leviathan forces.
Nick Fury’s team on the initial hunt, which included Jake Fury and Thomas Davidson, had actually discovered an object. One which provided the technology which would later allow the creation of Life Model Decoys . They kept it to themselves. The technology had a flaw which left the duplicates mentally unstable.
Planning for the dissolution of the group, they created a duplicate of Davidson, whom Fury manipulated into defecting to HYDRA. Strucker used him to create their systems based on that used for the Pieta Protocols, before executing him to keep them secret. This allowed the real Professor (Davidson) to monitor their systems at will.
See our Taurus (Cornelius van Lunt) profile for additional notes.
Endgame
Facing Strucker for the last time, Fury was released when Kraken was revealed as his brother, Jake. The Jake who’d died had been a Decoy. He had killed the original Kraken (Daniel Whitehall) and taken his place, manipulating HYDRA from within. It was also he who alerted Leviathan to the location of the alien power source.
After revealing HYDRA had really been working for him all along, Fury executed Strucker.
Not long after that, Leviathan also suffered a catastrophic setback. The Professor’s familiarity with their system had allowed him to access it and raise the power levels used. Thus, when they were reactivated by the recovered alien power source, they were stronger than they should have been, but burned out quicker.
All the Leviathan troops died, leaving only Orion and de la Fontaine.
The Contessa gave herself up to US authorities not long after, so Fury knew where to find her.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was reformed, under UN control. Fury had no interest in returning to it. Instead he had Daisy, his prize pupil, installed as its new Director. The surviving members of the Caterpillar teams were absorbed into the new S.H.I.E.L.D., and Fury went to break his girl out of jail.
Game Stats — DC Heroes RPG
Tell me more about the game stats
Equipment:
Most of the team wore a uniform similar to that worn by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, just without any identifying insignias.
UNIFORM [BODY 08, Flame Immunity: 03, Radio Communications: 05, Skin Armor: 02, Limitation: Skin Armor only vs. piercing and edged attacks].
Safehouses:
Fury had a number of safehouses around the world, secure facilities known only to him, which he used as bases for his Caterpillar teams. They basically operate as Expansive HQs, with a range of facilities, including training and medical areas, and even LMDoctors.
The Inside Straight facility was an LMD replication facility, which fielded an army of Nick Fury LMDs when attacked.
Previous stats:
While Osborn was in charge of US security, the team had the Mistrust Drawback.
Appendix — maps
The first issue of Secret Warriors had a number of maps and data tables that could be very useful in a campaign featuring S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA and/or Leviathan. These maps were published in 2008.
This issue had more background material than what is reproduced here (and is available digitally from Marvel.com ).
Source of Character: Marvel Comics (mainly the Secret Warriors series).
Helper(s): Uniform stats taken from Nick Fury entry.
Writeup completed on the 17th of September, 2012.