Danger Asante & The Danger Squad

A member of the Lost Generation, Daniel Gerald "Danger" Asante spent his life on the edge, constantly looking for the next challenge, the next frontier, and, all too often, the next war. After serving as a pilot and spy for England during the First World War, Asante found himself unable to keep a normal job. Brilliant, athletic and experienced, his irreverent attitude and inability to not take risks quickly removed him from membership in the post-war British Intelligence Corp. His constant need for excitement and travel made normal careers equally uninviting.
    In 1921 he found a solution, and hung out his shingle as a consulting adventurer, taking his cue from Sherlock Holmes of the century before. Danger Asante would go anywhere, brave anything, and challenge anyone to see that his clients got what they had paid him for. He was careful to stay on good moral, if not always legal, ground—he was known to have pulled a few confidence scams and more than one outright robbery, but always in a good cause.
    He based his fees on the client's ability to pay, but regardless of his fees Asante would be broke again within a month at best, because his lifestyle was not one conducive to thrift. This worked to the benefit of the world at large, because Asante's only dependable source of income was from the Strand Magazine. Again taking a cue from Holmes, he produced serialized accounts of his adventures, which were later collected into novel forms. These accounts are by turns tense, bright, witty and exciting. Asante's memory and wit allowed him to reproduce entire conversations, including wonderful snatches of repartee which really make the books worth reading. Of course, it is difficult to tell which aspects of his cases are exaggerated, and which are pure balderdash. He was by all accounts a skilled, daring individual and a world traveler, but in his own words he fought extraterrestrial menaces and visited a lost land of dinosaurs, so his accounts must be taken with a grain of salt.
    In 1937 Asante was again faced by his only returning foe, the mad doctor of magnetism, Dr. Lorenzo Longfellow Lazarus. Lazarus had a device that could launch devastatingly precise thunderbolts anywhere in London, and was effectively holding the city for ransom. Knowing that he would be unable to defeat Lazarus alone, Asante recruited three other adventurers whom he had met within the last few years, banding them together into an organization that became known as the Danger Squad. Together, the four of them were able to foil Dr. Lazarus, and opted to remain together as a team.
    The Danger Squad remained together until 1953, surviving the death of Jann in 1944, the marriage of Dr. Templar and Miss Twilight in 1945, and the birth of their first child in 1952. During that time Asante continued publication of his adventures (with some details edited to protect the identities of his compatriots). Much of this detail can be corroborated by other sources, and it involved fighting Nazis in England and abroad. (Contrary to popular opinion, they never made a play for either the Arc of the Covenant or the Spear of Destiny. When questioned in later years, Dr. Templar admitted that Asante had once had his hands on the Maltese Falcon, but that was as far as it went.) It also included several more encounters with Dr. Lazarus, encounters with the killer thunder suit (now believed to be evidence of non-Plovian extraterrestrial life), and several brief partnerships with the vigilante Stormwolf.
    Shortly after the Danger Squad disbanded, Asante dropped off his final manuscript with the Strand, and told them that he would produce for them a cartographic analysis of the Lost World. He was never seen again, but was reported dead by Apollyon of the Host in 1981. The veracity of this report is unknown.

Jann
Jann met Asante in 1928 in Afghanistan (the Case of the Desert Dilemma), where the latter was impressed by the tribesman's great strength and charm. Jann was 1/4 faerie, the descendent of a minor Genie and an Afghan wise woman. Asante stayed in touch with Jann, eventually paying his way to the States. There Jann became Asante's strong right hand, and his natural talent for planning helped rein in the flamboyant adventurer's more dangerous excesses. Jann died in 1944, holding off Nazi forces so that the rest of the Danger Squad could escape with innocent civilians from a French town.

Dr. Templar
James Jones was the local doctor and coroner for a small town on the suburbs of London when he discovered a rakshasa in the sleepy community. The fiend's influence ran deep, forcing Jones to adopt the identity of Dr. Templar. In the course of the investigation he joined forces with Danger Asante (the Case of the Treacherous Tiger), and they killed the creature. While Jones wanted to go back to being a simple country doctor, Asante convinced him to be on call for similar cases. The pair worked together again (the Case of the Penthouse Poltergeist), and Dr. Templar agreed to join the Danger Squad full time after the Dr. Lazarus incident. Dr. Templar died in 1970 at the age of 67, killed by Greer, stopping the Unseelee prince from corrupting people under Templar's protection, including his daughter.

Miss Twilight
Miss Twilight first appeared when her professor stole aspects of her work for his own invisibility device and started terrorizing the university. The school hired Asante, and the precocious lady scientist became his partner for the case (the Case of the Blackboard Shadow). Afterwards, Sharon Grey refined it into a more advanced invisibility device and began a career as a crime-fighter, spying on the underworld and feeding information to a reporter at the London Tribune, where she later got a job as a science correspondent. Eventually Miss Twilight earned her doctorate, teaching until her death in 1980 at the age of 71, survived by her second child, a daughter, who later formed the new Danger Squad.

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