Justin Alphonse Gamble (Null-Time Zone)

Professor Gamble
Name	Justin Alphonse Gamble
Current Alias	Professor Gamble
Aliases	Sergius O'Shaughnessy; Sir Gamble
Affiliation and Relationships
Affiliation	Time Variance Authority, Penance Corps
Marital Status	Single
Physical Characteristics
Gender	Male
Hair	Red
Origin and Living Status
Origin	Human
Living Status	Alive
Reality	Unknown Reality
Personal Information
Identity	No Dual
Occupation	Time Traveler
Base of Operations	A TVA time machine
Creators and Appearances
Creators	Jo Duffy, Kerry Gammill
First	Power Man and Iron Fist #79 (December, 1981)
First	Power Man and Iron Fist #79 (December, 1981)

History

Professor Justin Alphonse Gamble was once an employee of the Time Variance Authority. However, when the Incinerators, robots that the T.V.A. had created to sweep, collect and incinerate the cosmic debris cluttering the time lanes, began to incinerate other things and the T.V.A. only responded by forming a committee to study the matter for a few centuries, Gamble disagreed with their decision. Feeling that direct action had to be taken against the Incinerators, Gamble resigned from the T.V.A., stole one of their Time Capsules and set out to stop the Incinerators himself.

Professor Gamble encountered and stopped the Incinerators many times. At one point, the robots started calling themselves "Dreadlox" for a while. During this period, the robots had at least one encounter with Gamble which he recorded in his diary.

At one point in the early 21st century, Professor Gamble arrived in New York City. Needing money, Gamble, using the pen name Sergius O'Shaughnessy, wrote a play entitled "The Day of the Dredlox" that was based on a chapter from his diary that involved the Dreadlox and whose protagonist was one Professor J.A. Gamble. The play starred Oscar-winning actor Bob Diamond in the lead role and was a Broadway hit. However, the Incinerators learned of the play and used it to their advantage when they came to New York by hiding amongst the "Dredlox" prop robots. Gamble became aware of the problem and travelled to the city, with his time capsule assuming the form of a small bookshop. While working on a device that could send them back to their own era, Gamble allowed Power Man (Luke Cage) and Iron Fist (Danny Rand), who were retreating from their own encounter with the Dredlox, to enter his shop. After assuring them that the shop was sealed against their pursuers, Gamble confirmed that the shop was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, introduced himself, and revealed that he had written the play in which he appeared as a fictional character. When the Dredlox were spotted carrying some captives, including Bob Diamond, Gamble revealed that the Dredlox had mistaken the actor who portrayed Professor Gamble in the play for him, and mentioned that they had no idea how he much had changed in the past ninety-five years. Once his device was completed, Power Man and Iron Fist broke through the wall of the Dredlox's headquarters and attacked, distracting the Incinerators enough that Diamond and the other captives were able to flee. As the battle continued and kept the Incinerators occupied, Gambe was able to sneak into the building to attach his Temporal Polarization Destabilizer to the Time Platform that the Dredlox had been trying to force "Gamble" to repair. Once activated, the "Dredlox" and their Time Platform were all banished back to their own time era, disappearing before the eyes of the two heroes, and leaving nothing behind. As the Heroes for Hire were congratulating Gamble, Diamond arrived with some police officers and asked his friends where the robots and the time machine had all gone. Luke suggested that he ask "the prof" but then found that Gamble was gone as well. Danny then pointed out that the bookshop was also gone without a trace.

At some point, Gamble encountered the Terminatrix and her agents, the Anachronauts. However, these beings had already met a future version of him and revealed to this younger Gamble some details about what had happened/would happen when his older self met their younger selves.

Gamble continued to battle the Incinerators who eventually developed a weapon they called the Time Incinerator that needed a powerful energy source to function. At one point, a miniaturized Incinerator carrying a miniaturized T.V.A Replicator was able to infiltrate Gamble's ship without being detected. Once inside, the Incinerator returned itself and the replicator to normal size and began replicating itself. Although only 13% of the duplicates were functional, there was soon a small army of them who were then able to capture Gamble and mind-probed him in search of a suitable power source. During the mind-probe, the Incinerators learned of the mystical Starstone meteorite that Merlin was destined to find during the time of Camelot and forge into the Ebony Blade. Realizing that they could use T.V.A. technology to harness the Starstone's mystic power to start a chain reaction that would cause the total destruction of time itself, the Incinerators used Gamble's ship to travel back in time to take it for themselves. Arriving just after the meteorite crashed to Earth, the Incinerators retrieved the Starstone and brought it inside the time capsule which had taken on the external appearance of a cottage. However, by interfering with the creation of the Ebony Blade, the Incinerators had caused a Time Anomaly that threatened Chronopolis, attracting the attention of the younger versions of Terminatrix and her Anachronauts who had traveled through a Temportal to Camelot to investigate and prevent the anomaly. After entering the time capsule to retrieve the Starstone, the Anachronauts soon found and freed the captive Gamble who explained the situation. Then, as the army of Incinerators attacked the Anachronauts, Gamble slipped away to find a bypass module. As the Anachronauts were being overwhelmed by ever-increasing numbers of replicated reinforcements, Gamble used the bypass module to reconfigure the interior of his time vessel so that all of the Incinerators were now outside his ship. With the tima anomaly now averted, the Anachronauts left and Gamble, to prevent any future interference, personally delivered the Starstone to Merlin in exchange for his copy of the Iron-Bound Book of Skelos. Gamble also asked Merlin if he had ever thought of making a sword.

At one point, Professor Gamble posed for a picture inside a Penance Corps prison alongside Águila, Black Tiger, Crime-Buster, and Thunderbolt. This may (or may not) be evidence that Gamble once served on the board of directors of the Penance Corps.

While working at the T.V.A., Professor Gamble served as a training instructor for new agents but would sometimes exhibit an obsessive romantic interest in some of them. Eventually, Gamble became obsessed with agent Ali Ciad, claiming that he loved her. When Gamble constantly harassed her and wouldn't take no for an answer, Cid filed an official complaint with the T.V.A. but they didn't do anything even though it was known that he had a history of such behavior. Finally, Ali Ciad began time traveling to get away from him but Gamble was always able to find her. Gamble became embittered by her continued rejection and came to want to make her pay for breaking his heart.

Gamble began recruiting goons from throughout time to serve as a makeshift army, including some Incinerators. At one point, he recruited Deadpool to track Ali down. Gamble tricked Deadpool into helping by claiming that he was destined to become the most feared T.V.A. enforcer who would one day prevent the Incinerators from destroying the T.V.A. and annihilating humanity. Gamble further claimed that the Incinerators had realized that the only way they could defeat Deadpool was by preventing his birth and so they were hunting his mother to kill her. Gamble provided Deadpool with a Chrono-Temporal-Gateway-Opener that would open portals in time and that had a tracker set to his mother's unique bio-signature. Falling for the deception, Deadpool traveled to 1979 where he found "Mom" living with a street gang in the Bronx. However, the woman (Ciad) denied being his mother and Cable showed up because someone had been tearing apart the timestream. When Incinerators showed up, all three of them fled through time and ended up at a T.V.A. Chrono-station in the Western frontier during cowboy times. Once there, Ciad identified herself and explained the situation with Gamble and that his actions in recruiting his army were what was causing the corruption of the timeline. After realizing that Gamble had been tracking Ciad through her time travel device, a biotech implant embedded in her artificial left eye, Cable gave her the Chrono-Temporal-Gateway-Opener and sent her to the T.V.A. with a message from him while he and Deadpool took the eye and used it to lure Gamble into following them instead. In a final confrontation, Gamble and his crew of time-displaced warriors had Cable and Deadpool at their mercy when Ciad arrived with new firepower that the T.V.A. had given her in response to Cable's message. However, since Ciad had expected the duo to have done better against their enemies than they had, they were still outmatched until Deadpool's future self ("Futurepool") arrived and turned the tables. Once his goons were defeated, Ciad punched out Gamble and took him into custody, then Cable took him to the T.V.A. to make him pay for his misdeeds.

Attributes

Powers

• A brilliant mind, but no special powers. Claimed to be over 95 years old.

Paraphernalia

Transportation

• Possesses a time machine that changes its shape to fit in with whatever era it currently exists. It has so far been seen in the form of a small bookshop in New York City and a cottage near Camelot.

Notes

• Professor Gamble is nearly identical in concept to The Doctor of Earth-5556 and from the BBC series Doctor Who, given that both are renegade members of a time-travel bureaucracy, both stole a time machine which is bigger on the inside and can blend in with the era of its surroundings, and both wear eccentric, colorful clothing. Professor Gamble's nemeses are angry wheeled robots that cry "Incinerate!" (as opposed to the Daleks' signature "Exterminate!"). Additionally, Professor Gamble is depicted with deliberately British quirks such as offering his guests tea and chastising the robots about their manners.

• As Cable pointed out to Deadpool, the story that Gamble had told him about robots from the future trying to kill his mother before she could give birth to him was the plot of the movie The Terminator.

See Also

• 3 appearance(s) of Justin Alphonse Gamble (Null-Time Zone)
• 1 minor appearance(s) of Justin Alphonse Gamble (Null-Time Zone)
• 1 image(s) of Justin Alphonse Gamble (Null-Time Zone)
• 1 item(s) used/owned by Justin Alphonse Gamble (Null-Time Zone)

Links and References

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/jagamble.htm