Idyllville Mysteries #3
"The Day The Strongman Died"
1936 was the year Walt Harding joined the circus, and 1938 is when he started performing as the Strongman. A short time after that, the Everlasting Girl and the Fleet-Footed Lad joined his show, and their performances were really off to the races.
But he had been building up to it for a long time before that. 26 years of a long time, in fact, an entire childhood, especially after moving away from his home in the Hinterlands to pursue his dream of meeting Charles Armstrong, the Strongest Man in the World, once he got to Idyllville.
He had grown up idolizing the Strongman Program, a system Charles invented that would supposedly transform anyone into a strongman just like Charles, or better, and got his wish by the year 1936, when he was taken on as an apprentice by Charles himself.
The Strongest Man was also known as the Human Cannonball, and it wasn't because he got himself into a cannon and launched himself at walls for sport.
Walt Harding loved his shows. Instead of launching himself as the cannonball, Charles would launch a cannonball at himself and catch it with his chest, "proving" the success of the Strongman Program and his superiority as the Strongest Man in the World.
It was all smoke and mirrors, of course. A rubber ball, a fake cannon, and a padded chest made-up to look like his own. Everything had been carefully planned with Charles, even the ins and outs of the Program that Walt had been trying to perfect and improve in his own time.
In 1938, it wasn't fake.
No one knew what happened after that. Some said it was sabotage. Some said Walt had done it to earn his spot as the new Strongman. There was no evidence either way, and the Peace Force didn't seem to care about investigating to find out, so it was left a mystery.
But that year, that fateful day, the cannonball was real, the cannon actually fired, and Charles Armstrong was no longer alive.
He would turn up in Grimstead later. A city no one knew about, it was thought that his sister, Gertrude Armstrong, stole the funeral grail containing his immortal soul and absconded to a different place with it. There was only one way his ghost would come to haunt a lowly, out-of-the-way graveyard like that owned by Gallo Belgrave, after all.
As for his reputation in Idyllville, that role was filled by his apprentice, Walt, who had spent the last few years actually working on himself and training using a legitimate variation of the Strongman Program. He decided after that never to do any fake tricks or false performances like Charles had done, but to be as legitimate and upfront as possible.
He would be the Strongman, for better or worse, and he would bring honor to the title the way Charles had failed to do.
So, from 1938, the world — and Idyllville — had its new protector.
That same year, the Everlasting Girl and the Fleet-Footed Lad would join his side, and shortly thereafter, they'd face their first threats together as the accidental-protectors of the Idyllville Circus and Idyll Island itself.
Mostly, he was just content to have finally, truly existed.
He disappeared in 1966, and the world was at a loss for it.
There was no real mystery about it. Most did speculate what happened, but no one was able to find him, and the common theory was that he'd quietly retired as the Idols were getting older and many other heroes had sprung up around Inglenook by then.
The truth was simpler, and something that Anastasia Durante — now in her role as the Everlasting Girl — was unfortunately familiar with, being the same thing that had taken her from her home in 1980 and dropped her in 1936, after all.
Despite that, the world moved on — and many struggled to find meaning in a world without him after that.
The Fleet-Footed Lad, once Walt's closest friend and apprentice in the circus, retired only a while after the disappearance. The Everlasting Girl did too, in her own way, but Fleetfoot's retirement came as a surprise, given how active and passionate he still seemed about being with the Idols.
As for the other Idols, they went their own ways. Captain Mytho and Azurov the Amazing had already moved on to the city of Freeport, the White Bat was in Quagmire Prison for his unfortunate breakdown and attack against the Royal Protector known as Mother Mancer, the Fin was with the Tidal Guard, Emerald Flash moved between Idyllville and Cape Crown, and Chromagon was nowhere to be seen.
There never had been a single, consistent membership roster behind the Idols; no one line-up to point to and say, "This is who they were. This is what they stood for." But there were always those trying to revive the name, even after the unfortunate fading lights of the 60s came and went.
Despite all that, the Idols had a good run in Inglenook and Idyllville was better for them having been there. It might have been different if the Strongman hadn't stood for what he did, but it wasn't, and the world of Inglenook was never the same.
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