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Martin Champion was the leader of the first Atari Force.

Martin Champion was a former NASA astronaut who was instrumental in the rescue of workers on a moon colony that was presumably destroyed by one of the United States' enemies, precipitating the Five-Year War. Martin Champion was assigned to pilot the ship assembled by Dr. Lydia Perez, a ship that would deliver the oxygen tanks necessary for the colony to survive long enough for a rescue, within 72 hours. Lydia thought that Martin was an idiot for igniting the main thrusters at full power rather than waiting to get a trajectory from the navigation computer, but as she saw that he cared more about getting there to rescue the workers by any means possible, she developed a more favorable opinion about him and kissed him after he brought the spaceship down to land. Martin believed that it was the start of a beautiful friendship.

From there, however, as they returned to an Earth that was engaged in a world-wide shoot-out, both Martin and Lydia separated, going their own ways and then somehow ended up working for the Atari Institute when things cooled down. Martin worked on board Space Station One assembling solar panels that would provide the nations of Earth with an alternate energy source when he and his friend Dr. Lucas Orion received word from Perez, the Atari Institute's assistant director, to meet with her back on Earth. In her recent encounter with Martin Champion, she was all business and didn't reciprocate his warm friendly attitude towards her. She led Martin to a secret meeting room at the Atari Institute headquarters in Northcal where he learned that he along with Lydia were assigned to be part of the crew of the experimental spaceship Scanner One, outfitted with a Multiversal drive that would take them through various realities in order to find a new suitable home for Earth's residents. Martin Champion would be the team's commander, while Lydia was assigned to be the ship's pilot.

During their journeys through the Multiverse, as the Atari Force team went from one inhospitable world to another, dealing with an entity called the Dark Destroyer along the way, Lydia became frustrated to the point where she believed that they would never find a suitable planet anywhere in the Multiverse. Still having faith, Martin ordered the team for one last "breakout" before returning home, where they found a pristine new world, totally uninhabited and suitable to be Earth's new home. Yet the world was guarded by a federation of alien races who long ago joined together for peace, and the Atari Force must go to their homeworld to appeal for inclusion in order to resettle. Upon reaching that world, the Dark Destroyer manipulated the minds of the alien races into attacking the Atari Force against their own will. Martin along with the rest of the team defeated the Dark Destroyer and freed the aliens from his control, and soon Earth was given permission to relocate.

As the Atari Force team watched Scanner One become for a time Exodus One, taking Earth citizens in suspended animation to their new homeworld, Lydia finally shared with Martin the pain she kept for so long -- the reason for her non-reciprocation of Martin's feelings towards her -- weeping because her family, who have all died, cannot start all over. Martin empathized with her and told her that they must now live for tomorrow. She allowed herself to love again as the two of them embraced, waiting to join the passengers on Exodus One on their new homeworld.

A year or so later, Martin and Lydia were married, and she became pregnant with his son Christopher Champion. Lucas Orion attended the delivery of the baby on the day of his birth, but as she was about to deliver, a painful energy surge struck her body, killing her. Lydia had a feeling that the Dark Destroyer somehow survived and was killing her, but she died during the delivery, leaving Christopher without a mother and a broken-hearted Martin ready to kill his son and to avenge her death. This put a strain on the relationship that Martin and Christopher had with each other over the years as his son grew into young adulthood. It was years later that Lucas Orion realized that Martin actually blamed the Dark Destroyer for Lydia's death and not Christopher.

25 years later, Martin pulled together a new team consisting of his son Christopher, his other teammates' daughter Erin Bia O'Rourke-Singh (Dart), and his personal counselor Morphea to steal Scanner One and use it to trace the whereabouts of one of Martin's probes, which he believed was captured by the Dark Destroyer. During his first encounter with the new humanoid form of the Dark Destroyer, his son Martin was captured and nearly beaten to death by his enemy. Martin offered to surrender himself to the Dark Destroyer in exchange for Christopher's life, but as the Dark Destroyer pondered on how he would make Martin suffer, Dart and a stowaway passenger named Tukla Oly (Pakrat) took control of the engineering room of the Dark Destroyer's ship and threatened to blow it up if they didn't release him. The Dark Destroyer allowed Martin's team to depart, but before departing himself, he sent Dart's lover Blackjak secretly to infiltrate Scanner One and sabotage it, controlling him with an alien implant. Upon Martin's return to Scanner One, he helped Morphea track down Babe and Hukka, who attempted to join her on board the Dark Destroyer's ship in a shuttlecraft, and in the process of finding them allowed a small female warrior named Taz to join the team.

Blackjak's acts of sabotage eventually led the Atari Force team to a planet that was presumably in the New Earth universe where the Dark Destroyer has set up an anti-matter bomb with which he plans to destroy that universe and everything Martin Champion held so dear in it. It is during this encounter that the Dark Destroyer revealed himself to be a copy of Martin Champion, who escaped death yet again and not only killed Lydia Perez, but also entered into Martin's mind to discover his DNA coding and use it to create a new physical form for himself. With Dark Destroyer saying that he intended to travel to countless worlds and destroy them many times over, Martin finally released his anger on the Dark Destroyer and bested him in hand-to-hand combat, feeling avenged for the suffering his enemy had caused him. However, Dart was unable to stop the anti-matter bomb from detonating, and so he and the Atari Force team headed for Scanner One and departed from the universe, leaving the Dark Destroyer behind in the detonation of his own bomb.


Abilities

  • Science: Martin Champion is a brilliant scientist having earned degrees from Cal Tech, Princeton and M.I.T.
  • Aviation: Martin Champion is an expert pilot and astronaut.
  • Hand-to-Hand Combat (Advanced): Martin Champion is trained in hand-to-hand combat


Transportation


Martin Champion 2

Martin Champion

  • Martin Champion was born in 1974
  • During his years as an astronaut for NASA, Martin Champion made four lunar landings.
  • Martin Champion won three gold medals in the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Related

Footnotes


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