Bandar Naga
Issue One: Blood Money

The top half of the cover is minimalist, black and white. A silhouette of a city skyline looms, tall pillars of darkness pricked through with light. Ranged below them, arrayed in defiant poses, are the heroes. They are bright, picked out in shining colours, contrasting with the monochromatic grandeur of the skyline. The eye is instinctively drawn to them, with their distinctive costumes and contrasting logos. Yet, despite all that, the skyline still fills the page, looming above the young heroes.

You turn the cover, the first page rendered in almost monochromatic tones. A tall thin man, his face like a stone, is standing in a room, briefcase held in one hand. Opposite him are three women, who watch the room with colourless smiles. The central one carries a thin document in one hand, the outer two assault rifles. The three are otherwise identical, dressed in conservative black business suits. A new panel shows a close up of their eyes, perfectly ordinary and brown. Then they blink, and for a moment darkness fills up the eye sockets, leaking out in tendrils of smoke on the air. The leader smiles the smile that the shark makes as it circles the drowning man, and her eyes are once again perfectly brown.

“Do you accept our offer, Charlie Li?”

The words hang like smoke in the air, the man’s eyes narrowing. He is the wolf to their shark, the wall to their blade. Then he exhales, and asks the question that hangs so obviously in the air.

“You know what I will do with those weapons?”

Silence hangs in the moment, while the two bodyguards move slightly. The barrels of the guns glow red, decorated with what looks like Chinese characters, but probably aren’t. Then the woman laughs abruptly, and the panel cuts back to to Charlie’s face. His eyes widen slightly, looking at the thing that used to be a woman, off panel behind the reader. The voice is raspy, made by something that was clearly never human to begin with. It sounds amused in all the wrong ways.

“We never said we were weirds, Charlie Li. The weapons will not be our problem.”

The man looks at three women who stand calmly, watching him, still waiting. He abruptly pulls a pen from his pocket, and walks with jerky movements to a table. They hand him the document, and he signs it messily, still shaken. The smile on her face is now the smile of the sated shark, sinking back under the water. A panel shows Charlie leaving the office, hand reaching inside his jacket and curling around the gun hidden there. His face is drawn down, with the look of a man who believed himself to be the apex predator of the jungle, and now sees that he has a rival for that role. The last image on the page is a close up of the document that sits on the table, voices in the background.

“We start deliveries tomorrow. Never let it be said that Trinity failed to provide.”

Later that Day


The Bandar Naga central library is not a place many people choose to go. It’s primary function is to serve as archives for those public records that are not classified. Very few, except historians and the occasional confused tourist pass through the metal detectors, don white gloves, and inspect the records of the state.

Which is what makes it all the more surprising, then, when the distinctive sound of an energy weapon being discharged cuts through the usual rumble of early morning traffic. Almost immediately, the searing whine of a fire alarm follows, punctuated with what is definitively gunfire. The polished wooden doors of the lobby have been blown off their hinges, a curl of smoke rising from some point inside the building. A trio of black SUV’s lurk, idling, on the footpath, with several figures in kevlar and red fatigues standing guard.

The sound of sporadic gunfire continues from deeper inside the building, undercut with the feral hum of a plasma weapon.

Why were you in or near the library at this time of the morning? What do you do about this robbery?